Page 475 - Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock
P. 475

Graham Hancock – FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS



                     I suspect, if the situation were bad enough after the cataclysm, that
                   many of the civilizers would fail, or meet with only limited success. But let
                   us suppose that one small group had the skill and dedication sufficient to
                   create a lasting and stable beach-head, perhaps in a region which had
                   suffered relatively little damage in the disaster. Then let us suppose that
                   some other unexpected disaster were to occur—an aftershock or series of
                   aftershocks from the original catastrophe perhaps—and the beach-head
                   was almost totally annihilated.
                     What might happen next? What might be salvaged from this wreckage
                   of a wisdom cult which had itself been salvaged from a greater wreck?



                   Transmitting the essence

                   If the circumstances were right it seems possible that the essence of the
                   cult might survive, carried forward by a nucleus of determined men and
                   women. I suspect, too, with the proper motivation and indoctrination
                   techniques, plus a means of recruiting new members from among the
                   half-savage local inhabitants, that such a cult might perpetuate itself
                   almost indefinitely. This could happen, however, only if its members (like
                   the Jews awaiting the Messiah) were prepared to bide their time, for
                   thousands and thousands of years, until they felt confident that the
                   moment had come to declare themselves.
                     If they did that, and if their sacred objective were indeed to preserve
                   and transmit knowledge to some evolved future civilization, it is easy to
                   imagine how the cult members might be described in terms similar to
                   those used for the Egyptian wisdom god Thoth who was said to have

                      succeeded in understanding the mysteries of the heavens [and to have] revealed
                      them by inscribing  them in sacred books  which he  then hid here on earth,
                      intending that they should be searched for by future generations but found only
                      by the fully worthy ...
                                           22
                   What might the mysterious ‘books of Thoth’ have been? Is it necessary to
                   suppose that all the information they were purported to contain should
                   have been transmitted in book form?
                     Is it not worth wondering, for example, whether Professors de
                   Santillana and von Dechend might have earned their place among the
                   ‘fully worthy’ when they decoded the advanced scientific language
                   embedded in the great universal myths of precession? In so doing, is it
                   not possible that they might have stumbled upon one of the metaphorical
                   ‘books’ of Thoth and read the ancient science inscribed upon its pages?
                     Likewise, what about Posnansky’s  discoveries at Tiahuanaco, and
                   Hapgood’s maps? What about the new understanding that is dawning
                   concerning the geological antiquity of the Sphinx at Giza? What about the
                   questions raised by the gigantic blocks used in the construction of the

                   22  The Egyptian Hermes, p. 33.


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