Page 463 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

currents account for the fact. We may conclude that the best theory to account for
an ice age is that the area concerned was at the pole. We thus account for the
Indian and African ice sheets, though the areas once occupied by them are now in
the tropics. We account for all ice sheets of continental size in the same way.
30
The logic is close to inescapable. Either we accept that the Antarctic ice
cap is the first continent-sized ice sheet ever to have been situated at a
pole—which seems improbable—or we are obliged to suppose that earth-
crust displacement, or a similar mechanism, must have been at work.

Memories of the polar dawn?

Our ancestors may have preserved in their most ancient traditions
memories of a displacement. We saw some of these memories in Part IV:
cataclysm myths that appear to be eyewitness accounts of the series of
geological disasters which accompanied the end of the last Ice-Age in the
northern hemisphere. There are other myths too, which may have come
31
down to us from that epoch between 15,000 and 10,000 BC. Among these
are several which speak of lands of the gods and of former paradises, all
of which are described as being in the south (for example, the Ta-Neteru
of the Egyptians) and many of which seem to have experienced polar
conditions.
The great Indian epic, Mahabaratha, speaks of Mount Meru, the land of
the gods:
At Meru the sun and moon go round from left to right every day, and so do all the
stars ... The mountain by its lusture, so overcomes the darkness of night, that the
night can hardly be distinguished from the day. ... The day and night are together
equal to a year to the residents of the place ...
32
Similarly, as the reader will recall from Chapter Twenty-five, Airyana
Vaejo, the mythical paradise and former homeland of the Avestic Aryans
of Iran, seems to have been rendered uninhabitable by the sudden onset
of glaciation. In later years it was spoken of as a place in which: ‘the
stars, the moon and the sun are only once a year seen to rise and set, and
a year seems only as a day.’
33
In the Surya Siddhanta, an ancient Indian text, we read, ‘The gods
behold the sun, after it has once arisen, for half a year.’ The seventh
34
Mandala of the Rigveda contains a number of ‘Dawn’ hymns. One of
these (VII, 76) says that the dawn has raised its banner on the horizon
with its usual splendour and reports in Verse 3 that a period of several
days elapsed between the first appearance of the dawn and the rising of

30 Ibid., p. 58.
31 See Part IV.
The Mahabaratha, cited in The Arctic Home in the Vedas, pp. 64-5.
32
33 Ibid., pp. 66-7.
34 Cited in Paradise Found: The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole, p. 199.

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