Page 468 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

Chapter 52

Like a Thief in the Night

There are certain structures in the world, certain ideas, certain intellectual
treasures, that are truly mysterious. I am beginning to suspect that the
human race may have placed itself in grave jeopardy by failing to
consider [the implications of these mysteries.
We have the ability, unique in the animal kingdom, to learn from the
experiences of our predecessors. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for
example, two generations have grown to adulthood in awareness of the
horrific destruction that nuclear weapons unleash. Our children will be
aware of this too, without experiencing it directly, and they will pass it on
to their children. Theoretically, therefore, the knowledge of what atom
bombs do has become part of the permanent historical legacy of
mankind, whether we choose to benefit from that legacy or not is up to
us. Nevertheless the knowledge is there, should we wish to use it,
because it has been preserved and transmitted in written records, in film
archives, in allegorical paintings, in war memorials, and so on.
Not all testimony from the past is accorded the same stature as the
records of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the contrary, like the Canonical
Bible, the body of knowledge that we call ‘History’ is an edited cultural
artefact from which much has been left out. In particular, references to
human experiences prior to the invention of writing around 5000 years
ago have been omitted in their entirety and myth has become a synonym
for delusion.
Suppose it is not delusion?
Suppose that a tremendous cataclysm were to overtake the earth today,
obliterating the achievements of our civilization and wiping out almost all
of us. Suppose, to paraphrase Plato, that we were forced by this
cataclysm ‘to begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what
had happened in early times’. Under such circumstances, ten or twelve
1
thousand years from now (with all written records and film archives long
since destroyed) what testimony might our descendants still preserve
concerning the events at the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
August 1945 of the Christian era?
It is easy to imagine how they might speak in mystical terms of
explosions that gave off a ‘terrible glare of light’ and ‘immense heat’.
2
Nor would we be too surprised to find that they might have formulated a
‘mythical’ account something like this:

1 Plato, Timaeus and Critias, Penguin Classics, 1977, p. 36.
2 The Bhagavata Purana, Motilal Banardass, Delhi, 1986, Part I, pp. 59, 95.

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