Page 471 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

The occasion of this was because he saw in his sleep that the whole earth was
turned over, with the inhabitants of it lying upon their faces and the stars falling
down and striking one another with a terrible noise ... And he awaked with great
feare, and assembled the chief priests of all the provinces of Egypt ... He related
the whole matter to them and they took the altitude of the stars, and made their
prognostication, and they foretold of a deluge. The king said, will it come to our
country? They answered yes, and will destroy it. And there remained a certain
number of years to come, and he commanded in the mean space to build the
Pyramids ... And he engraved in these Pyramids all things that were told by wise
men, as also all profound sciences—the science of Astrology, and of Arithmeticke,
and of Geometry, and of Physicke. All this may be interpreted by him that knowes
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their characters and language ...
Taken at face value, the message of both of these myths seems crystal
clear: certain mysterious structures scattered around the world were built
to preserve and transmit the knowledge of an advanced civilization of
remote antiquity which was destroyed by a terrifying upheaval.
Could this be so? And what are we to make of other strange traditions
that have come to us from the dark vault of prehistory?
What are we to make, for example, of the Popol Vuh, which speaks in
veiled language about a great secret of the human past: a long-forgotten
golden age when everything was possible—a magical time of scientific
progress and enlightenment when the ‘First Men’ (who were ‘endowed
with intelligence’) not only ‘measured the round face of the earth’ but
‘examined the four points of the arch of the sky’.
As the reader will recall, the gods became jealous at the rapid progress
made by these upstart humans who had ‘succeeded in seeing, succeeded
in knowing, all that there is in the world.’ Divine retribution quickly
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followed: ‘The Heart of Heaven blew mist into their eyes ... In this way all
the wisdom and all the knowledge of the First Men [together with their
memory of their] origin and their beginning, were destroyed.’
15
The secret of what happened was never entirely forgotten because a
record of those distant First Times was preserved, until the coming of the
Spaniards, in the sacred texts of the original Popol Vuh. The abuses of
the conquest made it necessary for that primordial document to be
concealed from all but the most highly-initiated sages and replaced with a
watered-down substitute written ‘under the law of Christianity’: ‘No
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longer can be seen the book of Popol Vuh which the kings had in olden
times ... The original book, written long ago, existed—but now its sight is
hidden to the searcher and to the thinker ...’
17
On the other side of the world, among the myths and traditions of the
Indian subcontinent, there are further tantalizing suggestions of hidden
secrets. In the Puranic version of the universal flood story, shortly before

13 John Greaves, Pyramidographia, cited in Serpent in the Sky, p. 230.
14 Popol Vuh, p. 168.
Ibid., p. 169.
15
16 Ibid., p. 79.
17 Ibid., p. 79-80.

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