Page 243 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

familiar theme of catastrophe with the quite separate theme of
precession. On the one hand we have an earthly disaster on a scale that
seems to dwarf even the flood of Noah. On the other we hear that
ominous changes are taking place in the heavens and that the stars,
which have come adrift in the sky, are ‘dropping into the void.’
3
Such celestial imagery, repeated again and again with only relatively
minor variations in myths from many different parts of the world, belongs
to a category earmarked in Hamlet’s Mill as ‘not mere storytelling of the
kind that comes naturally’. Moreover the Norse traditions that speak of
4
the monstrous wolf Fenrir, and of the shaking of Yggdrasil, go on to
report the final apocalypse in which the forces of Valhalla issue forth on
the side of ‘order’ to participate in the terrible last battle of the gods—a
battle that will end in apocalyptic destruction:

500 doors and 40 there are
I ween, in Valhalla’s walls;
800 fighters through each door fare,
When to war with the Wolf they go.
5

With a lightness of touch that is almost subliminal, this verse has
encouraged us to count Valhalla’s fighters, thus momentarily obliging us
to focus our attention on their total number (540 x 800 = 432,000). This
total, as we shall see in Chapter Thirty-one is mathematically linked to the
phenomenon of precession. It is, unlikely to have found its way into
Norse mythology by accident, especially in a context that has previously
specified a ‘derangement of the heavens’ severe enough to have caused
the stars to come adrift from their stations in the sky.
To understand what is going on here it is essential to grasp the basic
imagery of the ancient ‘message’ that Santillana and von Dechend claim
to have stumbled upon. This imagery transforms the luminous dome of
the celestial sphere into a vast and intricate piece of machinery. And, like
a millwheel, like a churn, like a whirlpool, like a quern, this machine turns
and turns and turns endlessly (its motions being calibrated all the time by
the sun, which rises first in one constellation of the zodiac, then in
another, and so on all the year round).
The four key points of the year are the spring and summer equinoxes
and the winter and summer solstices. At each point, naturally, the sun is

3 The reader will recall from Chapter Twenty-five how Yggdrasil, the world tree itself, was
not destroyed and how the progenitors of future humanity managed to shelter within its
trunk until a new earth emerged from the ruins of the old. How likely is it to be pure
coincidence that exactly the same strategy was adopted by survivors of the universal
deluge as described in certain Central American myths? Such links and crossovers in
myth between the themes of precession and global catastrophe are extremely common.
4 Hamlet’s Mill, p. 7.
Grimnismol 23, the Poetic Edda, p. 93, cited in Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, p. 199;
5
Hamlet’s Mill, p. 162; Elsa Brita Titchenell, The Masks of Odin, Theosophical University
Press, Pasadena, 1988, p. 168.

241