Page 438 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock
P. 438
Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS
yourself. Provided, that is, you are a person who asks questions. And, if
you are, then the minute you start asking questions about the pyramids
you begin to stumble into a whole series of answers which lead you to
other questions, and then more answers until finally you initiate yourself
...’
‘Sow the seed ...’
‘Yes. They were sowing the seed. Believe me, they were magicians, and
they knew the power of ideas ... They knew how to set ideas growing and
developing in people’s minds. And if you start with such ideas, and follow
the process of reasoning like I did, you arrive at things like Orion, and
10,450 BC. In short, this is a process that works on its own. When it
enters, when it settles into the subconscious, it is a self-willing
conversion. Once it’s there you can’t even resist it ...’
‘You’re talking as though this Giza cult, whatever it was—revolving
around precession, and geometry, and the pyramids, and the Pyramid
Texts—you’re talking as though it still exists.’
‘In a sense it does still exist,’ Robert replied. ‘Even if the driver is no
longer at the wheel, the Giza necropolis is still a machine that was
designed to provoke questions.’ He paused and pointed up to the summit
of the Great Pyramid where Santha and I had climbed, at dead of night,
nine months previously. ‘Look at its power,’ he continued. ‘Five thousand
years on it still gets you. It involves you whether you like it or not ... It
forces you into a process of thinking ... forces you to learn. The minute
you ask a question about it you’ve asked a question about engineering,
you’ve asked a question about geometry, you’ve asked a question about
astronomy. So it forces you to learn about engineering and geometry and
astronomy, and gradually you begin to realize how sophisticated it is,
how incredibly clever and skilful and knowledgeable its builders must
have been, which forces you to ask questions about mankind, about
human history, eventually about yourself too. You want to find out. This
is the power of the thing.’
The second signature
As Robert, Santha and I sat out on the Giza plateau that cold December
morning at the end of 1993, we watched the winter sun, now very close
to solstice, rising over the right shoulder of the Sphinx, almost as far
south of east as it would travel on its yearly journey before turning north
again.
The Sphinx was an equinoctial marker, with its gaze directed precisely
at the point of sunrise on the vernal equinox. Was it, too, part of the Giza
‘grand plan’?
I reminded myself that in any epoch, and at any period of history or
prehistory, the Sphinx’s due east gaze would always have been sighted
on the equinoctial rising of the sun, at both the vernal and the autumnal
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