Page 239 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

the convulsive scale the myths so eloquently describe.
3 The Ice Age and its tumultuous demise were global phenomena. It is
therefore perhaps not surprising that the cataclysm traditions of many
different cultures, widely scattered around the globe, should be
characterized by a high degree of uniformity and convergence.
4 What is surprising, however, is that the myths not only describe
shared experiences but that they do so in what appears to be a shared
symbolic language. The same ‘literary motifs’ keep cropping up again
and again, the same stylistic ‘props’, the same recognizable
characters, and the same plots.
According to Professor de Santillana, this type of uniformity suggests
a guiding hand at work. In Hamlet’s Mill, a seminal and original thesis
on ancient myth written in collaboration with Hertha von Dechend
(professor of the History of Science at Frankfurt University) he argues
that:
universality is in itself a test when coupled with a firm design. When something
found, say, in China, turns up also in Babylonian astrological texts, then it must be
assumed to be relevant if it reveals a complex of uncommon images which nobody
could claim had risen independently by spontaneous generation. Take the origin
of music. Orpheus and his harrowing death may be a poetic creation born in more
than one instance in diverse places. But when characters who do not play the lyre
but blow pipes get themselves flayed alive for various absurd reasons, and their
identical end is rehearsed on several continents, then we feel we have got hold of
something, for such stories cannot be linked by internal sequence. And when the
Pied Piper turns up both in the German myth of Hamelin and in Mexico long
before Columbus, and is linked in both places to certain attributes like the colour
red, it can hardly be a coincidence ... Likewise, when one finds numbers like 108,
or 9 x 13 reappearing under several multiples in the Vedas, in the temples of
Angkor, in Babylon, in Heraclitus’ dark utterances, and also in the Norse Valhalla,
it is not accident ...
4
Connecting the great universal myths of cataclysm, is it possible that
such coincidences that cannot be coincidences, and accidents that cannot
be accidents, could denote the global influence of an ancient, though as
yet unidentified, guiding hand? If so, could it be that same hand, during
and after the last Ice Age, which drew the series of highly accurate and
technically advanced world maps reviewed in Part I? And might not that
same hand have left its ghostly fingerprints on another body of universal
myths? those concerning the death and resurrection of gods, and great
trees around which the earth and heavens turn, and whirlpools, and
churns, and drills, and other similar revolving, grinding contrivances?
According to Santillana and von Dechend, all such images refer to
celestial events and do so, furthermore, in the refined technical language
5
of an archaic but ‘immensely sophisticated’ astronomical and
mathematical science: ‘This language ignores local beliefs and cults. It
6

Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.
4
5 Ibid.; Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt.
6 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 65.

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