Page 360 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

lioness thirstily lapped up and then fell asleep. When she awoke, she was
no longer interested in pursuing the destruction, and peace descended
upon the devastated world.
25
Meanwhile Ra had resolved to ‘draw away’ from what was left of his
creation: ‘As I live my heart is weary of staying with Mankind. I have gone
on killing them [almost] to the very last one, so the [insignificant]
remnant is not my affair ...’
26
The Sun God then rose into the sky on the back of the sky-goddess Nut
who (for the purposes of the precessional metaphor about to be
delivered) had transformed herself into a cow. Before very long—in a
close analogy to the ‘shaft-tree’ that ‘shivered’ on Amlodhi’s wildly
gyrating mill—the cow grew ‘dizzy and began to shake and to tremble
because she was so high above the earth.’ When she complained to Ra
27
about this precarious state of affairs he commanded, ‘Let my son Shu be
put beneath Nut to keep guard for me over the heavenly supports—which
exist in the twilight. Put her above your head and keep her there.’ As
28
soon as Shu had taken his place beneath the cow and had stabilized her
body, ‘the heavens above and the earth beneath came into being’. At the
same moment, ‘the four legs of the cow’, as Egyptologist Wallis Budge
commented in his classic study The Gods of the Egyptians, ‘became the
four props of heaven at the four cardinal points’.
29
Like most scholars, Budge understandably assumed that the ‘cardinal
points’ referred to in this Ancient Egyptian tradition had strictly terrestrial
connotations and that ‘heaven’ represented nothing more than the sky
above our heads. He took it for granted that the point of the metaphor
was for us to envisage the cow’s four legs as positioned at the four points
of the compass—north, south, east and west. He also thought—and even
today few Egyptologists would disagree with him—that the simple-
minded priests of Heliopolis had actually believed that the sky had four
corners which were supported on four legs and that Shu, ‘the skybearer
par excellence’, had stood immobile like a pillar at the centre of the
whole edifice.
30
Reinterpreted in the light of Santillana’s and von Dechend’s findings,
however, Shu and the four legs of the celestial cow look much more like
the components of an archaic scientific symbol depicting the frame of a
precessional world age—the polar axis (Shu) and the colures (the four
legs or ‘props’ marking the equinoctial and solstitial cardinal points in
the annual round of the sun).
Moreover, it is tempting to speculate which world age was being

25 Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, p. 181-5.
26 Ibid., p. 184.
27 Ibid., p. 185.
The Gods of the Egyptians, volume II, p. 94.
28
29 Ibid., p. 92-4.
30 Ibid., p. 93.

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