Archive 2904

Posted By: Benton Rooks FEB 9, 2016
It is becoming increasingly more difficult for the Western mind to ignore transdisciplinary investigations to (potentially) reveal the greater invisible reality of metaphysics, or to hide the fact that maybe there really are true hallucinations, as the great Terence McKenna once put it.
Although the deity mother ayahuasca is mentioned directly in Graham Hancock’s new book Magicians of the God only once, the intense persistence and wisdom of the plant medicine is felt throughout.
Magicians contains a cogent elucidation of everything from divination, astronomy, the war on consciousness, and the wisdom of the elder magi, to the most strange archeological and geological discoveries currently known. The text is satisfyingly bibliophile grade dense and riddled with footnotes in the best way possible, a veritable alchemical feast for the mind. [1]
With Magicians, Graham joins a host of other grand rollicking meta-alternative history/archeology adventures encapsulated in other tomes like Jocelyn Godwin’s thoroughly underrated Atlantis and the Cycles of Time: Prophecies, Traditions, and Occult Revelations and Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. In the field of alternative history or forbidden archeology, he is also decidedly more conservative then some of his peers. This is a good thing.
There is a convincing argument here that hard science need not necessarily be directly at odds with the spirit world. Along with Jeremy Narby, Hancock also asserts that there is a great deal of inherent value in ‘myths speaking to science’. [2]
The basic philosophy of Magicians can be distilled into four central arguments:
1. There was an Atlantean (or even pre-Atlantean) civilization that Hancock deems as being generally wise and whom (after the destruction of their own civilization by a comet) taught the early post-Ice Age civilizations nearly everything they know in order to transition them from nomadic hunter gather societies to full fledged civilizations with advanced agricultural systems and knowledge of the calendar/astrology and possibly advanced consciousness altering techniques.
The evidence for the destruction of Atlantis can be found in unusual geological formations such as nanodiamonds, which “…are microscopic diamonds that form under rate conditions of great shock, pressure and heat, and are recognized as being among the characteristic fingerprints…of powerful impacts by comets or asteroids.” This is speculated to have happened around 10,800 BC.
In addition to this, distinct similarities and cross comparison in newer archeological discoveries like Gobekli Tepe (in addition to the much less discussed Kavahan Tepe at the same site) the terraces at Gunung Pang, Tugu Gede and Flores Bada Valley in Indonesia, Tiahuanoco and Cuzco in South America, and Easter Island are included for comparison. Classic sites like the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Sphinx, and Machu Picchu’s centerpiece at Pisac are discussed in light of new data.
These ancient findings indicate the potential that these later cultures were instructed to build these sites by the ancients.
Said ancients could be Gods/interdimensional beings, who taught the exact same principles to various cultures regardless of the distance or time between them, and who may have been the overlords of Atlantis.
For some reason, archeological specialists and those entrenched in academia sometimes resist the comparison of these sites to one another, and often debate with each other on the origin dates of each, especially when it comes to Plato’s theories on Atlantis— which is not always taken seriously as a verifiable civilization by certain archeologists in the field, despite a great deal of physical evidence that may suggest otherwise.
2. One of the ways that civilizations like Sumer, Babylon, and Egypt may have been in contact with the elder Atlateans is through trance states (entheogenically induced or otherwise). The idea that people can communicate with the dead through a variety of consciousness altering techniques that transcended the mind-brain complex was widely accepted in the past, but is not always considered to be possible today.
3. Deep reading of ancient texts and world mythology indicates that devastation to the Earth’s geological core can be brought on by the spirits or Gods through both extreme weather in order to teach humans valuable (albeit sometimes distinctly mysterious) lessons. Apparently, this happens when humans forget their debt to the Gods and act generally foolishly or destructively on a mass scale. [3]
4. Because there were extinction threatening cataclysmic events in the past (i.e. Atlantis), it is plausible there may be some more of these events in the future. Although the exact date is uncertain, Hancock proposes rough estimates around 2030, citing both the Mayan calendar and Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe for evidence.
The only reason Graham claims this as alternative history is because it is currently in direct contrast to what is taught in the education system the world over. Why? Likely because it disrupts the idea of perfectly neat and linear historical evolution; the central arrogance of the West certainly seems to be that we are somehow the greatest civilization that has ever existed.
Pop culture mirrors these occult suspicions in a somewhat unsettling and inverted way in the original Indiana Jones trilogy, particularly with Temple of Doom, and more recently in the video game Uncharted. Graham does still seem to be the closest thing we have to a real life Indy.
Magicians also differs from the classic Fingerprints in that it incorporates elements of conversations with other researchers in a more direct way, one highlight being self studied catastrophic geologist Randall Carlson, who is lively animated in intense exchanges. These sorts of dialogue are appreciated for the newcomer to alternative archeological discovery, as it opens up further avenues of research to consider in an already vast and extremely fast moving field. It also proves Hancock isn’t alone in his grounded, albeit somewhat paranormal oriented suspicions.
Another highlight is a brief commentary on the Watchers and the mystery of the Nephelim from the fabled apocryphal Book of Enoch:
“…there are good angels, ‘the Holy Angels who watch’—among them Uriel, Raphael, Raguel, Michael, Saraquel, Gabriel and Remiel.And it’s these good Watcher angels who appear to Enoch in a dream and give him that message of death and destruction to take to the bad Watcher angels on Mount Hermon. He tells us specifically where he received this dream:
‘I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon … I fell asleep and behold a dream came to me and visions fell down upon me and I saw visions of chastisement and a voice came bidding me to tell it to the sons of heaven and reprimand them. And when I awakened I came unto them…’
As I read these passages, set before the Flood, when the people of Lebanon and ancient Turkey were still at the hunter-gatherer stage of development, it seems more and more obvious to me that Enoch is a shamanic figure. And like all shamans, everywhere, in all times and places, he sets great store by visions—which in his case come in the form of dreams received ‘in sleep.’” (p. 424)
While Graham does not claim to understand every facet of the mystery of who exactly are said ancient Magicians (which seems to have already frustrated certain readers), he is simply pointing out there are at least 500+ pages of evidence that can be gleaned in careful cross examination between various academic disciplines. I suspect these findings will also inform the last installment in the excellent War God trilogy.
Theories regarding cultural or historical devolution over time is well known and supported by a host of ancient texts, the most obvious in India’s Vedic scriptures. The Vedas indicate that the universe devolves cyclically from the idyllic union with the gods in the golden age, to the materialistic shackles of the iron age (the illusion and enchantment of matter itself) that we are now supposed to be firmly entrapped in. That’s not to affirm gnostic dualism, no doubt there have to still be ways to pierce the non-dualistic mind-brain veil and contact the spirit world, but it is likely that this was accomplished somewhat easier in the past. [4]
Fortunately though, for those who are not convinced by myth and philosophy alone, there is an overwhelming amount of concrete material evidence—gathered all in one place—found in the archeological and geological records for a wiser and older civilization than has been previously recognized.
So far one of the repeat central criticisms that has been leveled at Magicians (at least from the Amazon reviews so far) is a so-called dismissal of Zachariah Sitchin, but on previous social media posts Graham seems to have remained open to the implication of Nibiru, although questioning the specific time frame predictions and the overall potential impact of the now infamous planet X theory. In other words, he doesn’t know for sure what is up with it definitively, but will be keeping an open mind to the possibility of its potential existence and spiritual/physical influence.
Thankfully there is nothing about Magicians (or any of Hancock’s previous works) that strikes one as starry eyed or naive. As a post-internet text, it is in every way a more scholarly rigorous book than Fingerprints of the Gods, and Underworld, which were already formidable tomes. A must read.
——
[1] It’s worth noting that the whole 2012 prediction thing was popularized by McKenna but potentially misunderstood as being negative rather than positive. Time wave zero is complex and probably not fully understood even by it’s supposed diviner.
After first hand experience of ayahuasca in the context of anthropological field work with the tribe of the Ashaninca in the Amazon, Jeremy Narby has also systematically deconstructed the inherent bias latent in Western anthropological discourse in both Cosmic Serpent and Intelligence in Nature.
[2] Dean Radin’s excellent Supernormal is a testament to this argument.
[3] Magicians of the Gods p. 115
[4] The intersection of metaphysics and pop culture has also been treated at length in all of John David Ebert’s books.
[5] The idea of the four ages is not exclusive to India alone. See Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Metaphysics.