everywhere with me, sharing the risks and the adventures, sharing the
highs and the lows. Sitting across from us was our friend Ed Ponist, a
medical-surgical nurse from Lansing, Michigan. A few years previously Ed
had worked on the reservation for a while, and it was thanks to his
contacts that we were now here. On my right was Paul Sifki, a ninety-sixyear-old Hopi elder of the Spider clan, and a leading spokesman of the
traditions of his people. Beside him was his grand-daughter Melza Sifki, a
handsome middle-aged woman who had offered to translate.
‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that the Hopi believe the end of the world is
coming. Is this true?’
Paul Sifki was a small, wizened man, nut-brown in colour, dressed in
jeans and a cambric shirt. Throughout our conversation he never once
looked at me, but gazed intently ahead, as though he were searching for
a familiar face in a distant crowd.
Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her
grandfather’s reply: ‘He says, “why do you want to know”?’
I explained that there were many reasons. The most important was that
I felt a sense of urgency: ‘My research has convinced me that there was
an advanced civilization—long, long ago—that was destroyed in a terrible
cataclysm. I fear that our own civilization may be destroyed by a similar
cataclysm ...’
36 Community Profile: Hopi Indian Reservation, Arizona Department of Commerce.
37 Breaking the Maya Code, p. 275.
38 Book of the Hopi.
39 World Mythology, p. 26.
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There followed a long exchange in Hopi, then this translation: ‘He said
that when he was a child, in the 1900s, there was a star that exploded—a
star that had been up there in the sky for a long while ... And he went to
his grandfather and asked him to explain the meaning of this sign. His
grandfather replied: “This is the way our own world will end—engulfed in
flames ... If people do not change their ways then the spirit that takes
care of the world will become so frustrated with us that he will punish the
world with flames and it will end just like that star ended.” That was what
his grandfather said to him—that the earth would explode just like that
exploding star ...’
‘So the feeling is that this world will end in fire ... And having viewed
the world for the past ninety years, does he believe that the behaviour of
mankind has improved or worsened?’
‘He says it has not improved. We’re getting worse.’
‘So in his opinion, then, the end is coming?’
‘He said that the signs are already there to be seen ... He said that
nowadays nothing but the wind blows and that all we do is have a
weapon pointed at one another. That shows how far apart we have drifted
and how we feel towards each other now. There are no values any more—
none at all—and people live any way they want, without morals or laws.
These are the signs that the time has come ...’
Melza paused in her translation, then added on her own account: ‘This
terrible wind. It dries things out. It brings no moisture. The way we see it,
this kind of climate is a consequence of how we’re living today—not just
us, but your people as well.’
I noticed that her eyes had filled with tears while she was talking. ‘I
have a cornfield,’ she continued, ‘that’s really dry. And I look up into the
sky and try to pray for rain, but there is no rain, no clouds even ... When
we’re like this we don’t even know who we are.’
There was a long moment of silence and the wind rocked the trailer,
blowing hard and steady across the mesa as evening fell around us.
I said quietly, ‘Please ask your grandfather if he thinks that anything
can now be done for the Hopi and for the rest of mankind?’
‘The only thing he knows,’ Melza replied when she had heard his
answer, ‘is that so long as the Hopi do not abandon their traditions they
may be able to help themselves and to help others. They have to hold on
to what they believed in the past. They have to preserve their memories.
These are the most important things ... But my grandfather wants to tell
you also, and for you to understand, that this earth is the work of an
intelligent being, a spirit—a creative and intelligent spirit that has
designed everything to be the way it is. My grandfather says that nothing
is here just by chance, that nothing happens by accident—whether good
or bad—and that there is a reason for everything that takes place ...’
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Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
At the millstone grinding
When human beings from around the globe, and from many different
cultures, share a powerful and overwhelming intuition that a cataclysm is
approaching, we are within our rights to ignore them. And when the
voices of our distant ancestors, descending to us through myths and
sacred architecture, speak to us of the physical obliteration of a great
civilization in remote antiquity (and tell us that our own civilization is in
jeopardy), we are entitled, if we wish, to stop our ears ...
So it was, the Bible says, in the antediluvian world: ‘For in those days,
before the Flood, people were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking
husbands, right up to the moment that Noah went into the Ark, and they
suspected nothing till the flood came and swept all away.’40
In the same manner it has been prophesied that the next global
destruction will fall upon us suddenly ‘at an hour we do not suspect, like
lightning striking in the east and flashing far into the west ... The sun will
be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will fall from the
sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken ... Then of two men in the
fields, one is taken, one left; and of two women at the millstone grinding,
one is taken, one left ...’41
What has happened before can happen again. What has been done
before can be done again.
And perhaps there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun ...
40 Matthew, 24: 38-39.
41 Matthew, 24: 27-41.
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