Page 228 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

The New York Times, from which the above report is taken, does not
attempt to clarify matters further. Its writers are probably unaware of just
how much they sound like Berosus, the Chaldean historian, astronomer
and seer of the third century BC, who made a deep study of the omens he
believed would presage the final destruction of the world. He concluded,
‘I Berosus, interpreter of Bellus, affirm that all the earth inherits will be
consigned to flame when the five planets assemble in Cancer, so
arranged in one row that a straight line may pass through their spheres.’
9
A conjunction of five planets that can be expected to have profound
gravitational effects will take place on 5 May in the year 2000 when
Neptune, Uranus, Venus, Mercury and Mars will align with earth on the
other side of the sun, setting up a sort of cosmic tug-of-war. Let us also
10
note that modern astrologers who have charted the Mayan date for the
end of the Fifth Sun calculate that there will be a most peculiar
arrangement of planets at that time, indeed an arrangement so peculiar
that ‘it can only occur once in 45,200 years ... From this extraordinary
pattern we might well expect an extraordinary effect.’
11
No one in his or her right mind would rush to accept such a
proposition. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that multiple influences,
many of which we do not fully understand, appear to be at work within
our solar system. Among these influences, that of our own satellite, the
moon, is particularly strong. Earthquakes, for example, occur more often
when the moon is full or when the earth is between the sun and the
moon; when the moon is new or between the sun and the earth; when the
moon crosses the meridian of the affected locality; and when the moon is
closest to the earth on its orbit. Indeed, when the moon reaches this
12
latter point (technically referred to as its ‘perigree’), its gravitational
attraction increases by about six per cent. This happens once every
twenty-seven and one-third days. The tidal pull that it exerts on these
occasions affects not only the great movements of our oceans but those
of the reservoirs of hot magma penned within the earth’s thin crust
(which has been described as resembling ‘a paper bag filled with honey
or molasses swinging along at a rate of more than 1000 miles an hour in
equatorial rotation, and more than 66,000 miles an hour in orbit’ ).
13

The wobble of a deformed planet

All this circular motion, of course, generates immense centrifugal forces
and these, as Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated in the seventeenth century,

9 Berossus, Fragments.
10 Skyglobe 3.6.
11 Roberta S. Sklower, ‘Predicting Planetary Positions’, appendix to Frank Waters, Mexico
Mystique, Sage Books, Chicago, 1975, p. 285ff.
12 Earth in Upheaval, p. 138.
13 Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, p. 49.

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