Page 254 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Other figures and combinations of figures also emerge, for example:

36, the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete a
precessional shift of half a degree along the ecliptic;

4320, the number of years required for the equinoctial sun to complete
a precessional shift of 60 degrees (i.e., two zodiacal constellations).

These, Sellers believes, constitute the basic ingredients of a precessional
code which appears again and again, with eerie persistence, in ancient
myths and sacred architecture. In common with much esoteric
numerology, it is a code in which it is permissible to shift decimal points
to left or right at will and to make use of almost any conceivable
combinations, permutations, multiplications, divisions and fractions of
the essential numbers (all of which relate precisely to the rate of
precession of the equinoxes).
The pre-eminent number in the code is 72. To this is frequently added
36, making 108, and it is permissible to multiply 108 by 100 to get
10,800 or to divide it by 2 to get 54, which may then be multiplied by 10
and expressed as 540 (or as 54,000. or as 540,000, or as 5,400,000, and
so on). Also highly significant is 2160 (the number of years required for
the equinoctial point to transit one zodiacal constellation), which is
sometimes multiplied by 10 and by factors often (to give 216,000,
2,160,000, and so on) and sometimes by 2 to give 4320, or 43,200, or
432,000, or 4,320,000, ad infinition.

Better than Hipparchus

If Sellers is correct in her hypothesis that the calculus needed to produce
these numbers was deliberately encoded into the Osiris myth to convey
precessional information to initiates, we are confronted by an intriguing
anomaly. If they are indeed about precession, the numbers are out of
place in time. The science they contain is too advanced for them to have
been calculated by any known civilization of antiquity.
Let us not forget that they occur in a myth which is present at the very
dawn of writing in Egypt (indeed elements of the Osiris story are to be
found in the Pyramid Texts dating back to around 2450 BC, in a context
which suggests that they were exceedingly old even then ). Hipparchus,
8
the so-called discoverer of precession lived in the second century BC. He
proposed a value of 45 or 46 seconds of arc for one year of precessional
motion. These figures yield a one-degree shift along the ecliptic in 80
years (at 45 arc seconds per annum), and in 78.26 years (at 46 arc

8 Ibid., pp. 125-6ff; see also The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts.

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