Graham Hancock on Revising Archaeology

In this recent interview, Graham Hancock discusses findings at sites like Göbekli Tepe and Gunung Padang and how they challenge the prevailing archaeological narrative. He also discusses evidence that meteor debris may have caused a global cataclysm, one that could account for Plato's story of the lost civilization known as Atlantis. It's a good interview and worthwhile overview of his new book Magicians of the Gods.

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Graham Hancock on Dreams and Awakening

Graham Hancock's agile and inquisitive mind is on full display here, demonstrating, once again, why his many books have inspired so much interest and controversy. This interview covers a lot of territory, focusing almost entirely on his more recent work and interests.

Hancock has spoken many times of the importance of states of consciousness other than the "alert, problem solving state." Here he talks about how hard it is for "dreamers" in western civilization. I can strongly relate to his stories of criticism by teachers for being a dreamer. My introduction to this academic assault on the imagination started in the first grade, when I was struck daily with a ruler for "daydreaming." Hancock refers to dreams of horn and dreams of ivory. This metaphor traces to book 19, lines 560-69, of the Odyssey, in which Penelope questions her dream of Odysseus's return.

Stranger, dreams verily are baffling and unclear of meaning, and in no wise do they find fulfillment in all things for men. For two are the gates of shadowy dreams, and one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those dreams that pass through the gate of sawn ivory deceive men, bringing words that find no fulfillment. But those that come forth through the gate of polished horn bring true issues to pass, when any mortal sees them. But in my case it was not from thence, methinks, that my strange dream came.

The image is powerful. It suggests that all dreams are of the same substance, but that the false, illusory dream is cut off from its original state. The horn is a solid expression of a vortex. As I wrote here, the horn of plenty, cornucopia in Greek, is a symbol of manifestation into the material world. It seems to me that dreams of horn are soulful dreams, connected to our spiritual origin.

In Which Michael Shermer Finds the Time

As I noted here, Rupert Sheldrake challenged professional skeptic Michael Shermer to a debate in 2003. He accepted. And now, a mere twelve years later, that debate will take place.

Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine, who was caught giving critiques of  Sheldrake's work without reading it, agreed to debate Sheldrake... if only he could find the time.

In March 2003, Dr Sheldrake challenged Shermer to a debate, which he accepted, and several times and venues were suggested, but all were rejected by Shermer. As of 2009, the debate has still not taken place.

Well, better late than never. The dialogue, hosted by TheBestSchools.org, commenced on May Day with opening statements from both thinkers.

Rapid Pole Shift in Our Lifetime?

As I mentioned here, pole shift appears to be underway. It also appears to be happening far more rapidly than has long been predicted by the establishment. In this episode of Dreamland, Linda Moulten Howe interviews UC Berkeley's Dr. Paul Renne about geological data that dramatically accelerates the predicted timeline. Renne worked with an international team of geologists to analyze volcanic ash sediments in a lake bed in Italy. They were able to track the shifting patterns that preceded the last pole shift, the Brunhes-Mutuyama event, and have determined it was quite rapid, probably under a hundred years.

The authors, including Berkeley graduate student Courtney Sprain and her supervisor Professor Paul Renne, are not the first to suggest the last flip was unusually fast, but Sprain says the evidence they have found in the Suilmona Basin, east of Rome, is very clear. “The paleomagnetic data are very well done. This is one of the best records we have so far of what happens during a reversal and how quickly these reversals can happen,” says Sprain.

Volcanoes upwind of the basin, including Sabatini and Vesuvius, erupted frequently during the reversal, and the changing magnetic field can be seen in the sediments laid down. Argon-argon isotopic dating allowed Sprain and Renne to date the ash layers far more precisely than has been done before.

“What’s incredible is that you go from reverse polarity to a field that is normal with essentially nothing in between, which means it had to have happened very quickly, probably in less than 100 years,” said Renne. “We don’t know whether the next reversal will occur as suddenly as this one did, but we also don’t know that it won’t.

We are left with a lot of unknowns. Geophysicists still don't understand why this happens, how frequently it happens, or how varied the effects are. What is clearer is that past events have caused enough thinning of the earth's magnetosphere to allow serious damage from solar and cosmic radiation. This may, in fact, have caused the extinction of the Neanderthals.

A complete write-up of this interview can be found here on Howe's website.

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Graham Hancock on Ancient Magicians

The sequel to one of my favorite books of all time Fingerprints of the Gods appears to be on track for its publication later this year. As Hancock explains, this lecture is already a little out of date because his research is moving at a pace. It is, however, extremely compelling. The correlations between the ancient catastrophe myths and the archaeological evidence really coming into focus. I highly recommend laying aside some time to hear about these Magicians of the Gods.

Hancock also mentions a very strange Ayahuasca experience. I mentioned this in an earlier post but I hadn't realized that he'd collected all those Facebook posts and placed them here on his site.

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William Henry on Cave Paintings in India

A few years ago, I asked if religion could survive first contact. Answer: It probably already has done, if we include indigenous medicine practices reaching all the way back into prehistory. The recent discovery of alien looking beings depicted in ancient stone art in India has rekindled debate over just what indigenous peoples have been painting on stone walls. According to archaeologist JR Bhagat, these ancient paintings accord with local legends about something that sounds an awful lot alien contact and abduction.

There are several beliefs among locals in these villages. While few worship the paintings, others narrate stories they have heard from ancestors about "rohela people" — the small sized ones — who used to land from sky in a round shaped flying object and take away one or two persons of village who never returned.

Many not human-looking beings and things that look like flying saucers have been discovered in cave paintings and these have given rise to questions about alien contact. But are these beings from other planets or other dimensions or, perhaps, both? Graham Hancock addressed this most recent discovery on his Facebook page the other day:

Aliens from other planets coming here in high-tech space ships? Or visitors from other dimensions? http://bit.ly/1oWXhn4. A few years ago when I asked Amazonian shaman Pablo Amaringo what the flying saucers were that he saw in his Ayahuasca visions, and painted in his extraordinary art (http://bit.ly/1oKnVfW), he told me they were vehicles for entering and leaving the spirit world. When a shaman speaks of the spirit world he's not far from the quantum idea of a parallel universe. I think the UFO and "aliens" mystery documented in rock and cave art all over the world may be MUCH more mysterious and intriguing than many believe. In my opinion these phenomena are real, but precisely WHAT they are remains to be established.

Graham Hancock Sums It Up

This interview is brief but, as ever, Graham Hancock shows the elegant fluency with his material that make all his talks and interviews compelling. This is a very worthwhile summary of his research into a possible lost civilization, sometimes referred to as Atlantis. They also discuss TED's war on consciousness, the whole sad, sorry saga of which can be found here.

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The Ruins of TED

A friend of mine posted a video lecture the other day by another casualty of TED's war on "pseudoscience." Above is the TEDx talk that was removed from TED's platform after its super secret science board had a go -- or perhaps it was just another Reddit feeding frenzy.

I'm not terribly surprised that they disappeared Jim Vieira's talk. It's on unacknowledged ancient monuments in New England and disputed reports of the skeletal remains of a race of giants. It's pretty outre stuff, slightly more so than the Graham Hancock and Rupert Sheldrake talks that were deleted. Not so much more controversial that it should be treated so differently. And it was treated very differently.

I've searched the entire TED site and found no official reference to Jim Vieira or his talk. All I was able to turn up was the original announcement of that TEDx event, a complaint about the deletion, and a comment about it in the discussion thread about the Hancock and Sheldrake deletions.

During the fracas over Hancock's and Sheldrake's talks, we heard repeatedly from Chris Anderson and his various acolytes that it wasn't "censorship" and how dare anyone call it that. How could it be censorship when the videos had been reposted in an unembeddable format, padded with shaming text from TED, and offered with a time limited discussion to amuse the hoi polloi? As Anderson explained it to Hancock:

In informing us that they are about to delete our talks from the TEDx Youtube channel, TED also state in their letter: “The talks won’t simply disappear from the web. Instead, we propose to feature them in a new section of TED.com that allows for debate, in which talks are carefully framed to highlight both their provocative ideas and the problems with their arguments.”

Ooh, a "new section." But, of course, there was nothing new about it. The videos were posted on the site blog, which dates back to September of 2005. Next they moved the "debate" to TED Conversations where it was well and truly hidden. This message board isn't new either and it was definitely in existence when they deleted Vieira's talk. I know this because a member posted his query about its removal on TED Conversations.

This "naughty corner," as Sheldrake termed it, was invented for no purpose other than containing the damage of deleting authors whose following was every bit as prepared to attack TED's choices as the New Atheist scientism brigade that got the videos deleted.

I think the only thing that bothers me more than the censorious nature of TED -- its suppression of ideas that don't flatter the establishment or its well-heeled donors -- is Anderson's bald-faced bullshitting.

It's very obvious what happened. TED realized that Hancock wasn't going to back down and that he could bring the weight of a very energized fan base. Jim Vieira had, only a few short months before, accepted his deletion with a sense of resignation and clearly couldn't marshal the same kind of numbers in his defense.

Jim Vieira posted this on his Facebook after being notified of the deletion:

Censorship is alive and well. I have just been told that my TEDX talk will be taken down. At over 116,000 views it is the most watched TEDX video in the world in the last month. I imagine pressure from Anthropologists and Archaeologists led to the decision. the same professionals who have studied texts and scientific journals that have been censored of these giant skeleton reports. Alex Hrdlicka was named the Smithsonian's first curator of the Division of Physical Anthropology in 1910, before Hrdlicka's reign there were no denials of giant skeleton reports. Hrdlicka and associates purged further reports from the historical records but could not erase the thousands of accounts in the Smithsonian's own Ethnology reports, town histories, Scientific American, American Antiquarian, New York Times headlines etc... so he explained that those accounts were made by scientists not understanding human anatomy. Beyond that the fact that many of these accounts reported anatomic anomalies like double rows of teeth was never addressed. Hrdlicka believed no race existed in America before 4000 years ago and called Louis Leaky a heretic to his face. Hdrickla was a pre-Nazi eugenist who was quoted in the Science News letter V13 #353 1928 pg.21 as saying "the greatest danger before the American people today is the blending of the negro tenth of the population into the superior blood of the white race." In 1927 he endorsed a comparison of African babies with young apes. In 1937 he published findings in his American Journal of Physical Anthropology to "prove that the negro is phylogenetically a closer approach to primitive man than the white race." He viewed Native Americans and African Americans inferior to whites based on cranial measurement. Not one of my historical and documented quotes was cited as in error but nevertheless my video will be censored. I have a host of radio interviews in the next few weeks including Coast to Coast AM where I am sure this will be a hot topic. I urge others to pass this post along and contact TEDX to convey your disgust. I am working with the crew from GCTV to do an hour and a half video on this subject that won't be censored so stay tuned. Thanks for the support

Vieira never got the chance to directly challenge TED in its "new section." The video was deleted permanently, not reposted in any "naughty corner." The only place their reasons have been outlined is in this letter from the TEDx affiliate who'd invited him to speak. If you look at the comments, it got no response until the Hancock and Sheldrake fiasco. And then a number of their points were capably disputed by commenters. But open disputes are something TED would like to avoid because the next thing you know they have to cross out their entire argument with nothing to replace it.

It just shows what kind of contempt TED has for anyone outside of the establishment. They don't want to debate the ideas -- just ridicule, trivialize, and marginalize them. To debate them would assign them too much validity. But mostly, they can't debate them. Given every opportunity to have a real debate with Hancock and Sheldrake, they ran away. They didn't even politely and directly decline. They avoided and sidestepped.

It's very clear that when TED censors TEDx speakers, they prefer to do so quietly. Any public response from them is entirely reactive. If you're popular enough, they'll even invent whole "new sections" that are nothing but Potemkin villages propped up on sections that have existed as long as their website. And if you're as wealthy as Nick Hanauer and can afford a PR campaign, you can even shame them into posting the offending video on their main platform. But if you're a little guy, a stone mason armed with nothing but some very intriguing questions about obscured archaeological history, down the memory hole you go.

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Broken Things

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Some years ago, I found myself living in an area that, let's say, would not have been my first choice. Dog owner. Sometimes you have to take what you can get. It wasn't a bad little place but I was never comfortable there. And I started to have health problems. Allergies that I thought were under control worsened dramatically. I was just uncomfortable. The place, the entire area, simply felt... wrong. One evening, as I was coming off the highway and driving into the neighborhood, I had the distinct sense of moving through a membrane into a much darker, heavier energy, and the thought that came to me unbidden was "Indian burial ground." Suddenly, I was certain of it. I had been living on top of an Indian burial ground and that was why it had always felt so dreary, so dissonant, so corrupted.

Several years later, after I'd long been out of there -- I'd only been able to stand it briefly -- I was doing readings in new age bookshop. One of my clients there, I learned, had lived in the same neighborhood. She had also found it to be an unhappy, uncomfortable time. I mentioned my theory to her -- that I was convinced it was on an Indian burial ground. A few weeks later I received a note from here in the mail. It contained a newspaper clipping. There was some new construction in that area and they'd turned up a number of artifacts that seemed to indicate that they were digging on an Indian burial ground.

Some things you just shouldn't do.

So I was very saddened to hear that it's open season on ancient Mayan pyramids in Belize.

A construction company has essentially destroyed one of Belize's largest Mayan pyramids with backhoes and bulldozers to extract crushed rock for a road-building project, authorities announced on Monday.

The head of the Belize Institute of Archaeology, Jaime Awe, said the destruction at the Nohmul complex in northern Belize was detected late last week. The ceremonial center dates back at least 2,300 years and is the most important site in northern Belize, near the border with Mexico.

"It's a feeling of Incredible disbelief because of the ignorance and the insensitivity ... they were using this for road fill," Awe said. "It's like being punched in the stomach, it's just so horrendous."

Indeed.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like they can do much to prevent this kind of desecration in Belize. Even though the law technically protects pre-Hispanic ruins like this one, they lack the funding and infrastructure for enforcement. This is not the first time a Belizean ruin has been desecrated and it probably won't be the last. Similar destruction is occurring in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras.

I was reminded recently of the desecration of one of my most beloved sites: Teotihuacan. Many were sickened when Wal-Mart decided to build a store on an outer edge of the ancient complex. For me, it was particularly painful because of my time there -- a time when I experienced a kind of rebirth. Teotihuacan is magical, otherworldly. And Wal-Mart is evil.

In December, the New York Times revealed the massive bribery scheme that allowed Wal-Mart to build on protected land. In a recent blog post, archaeologist Dr. Donna Yates expounded on the damage allowed by Wal-Mart's alleged $24 million "investment."

We archaeologists often find our discipline difficult to explain to outsiders, specifically outsiders with an unyielding eye for unnuanced commercial development. Just because the core of Teotihuacán is massive and visible, doesn’t mean that the archaeology stops at the edge of the temple. Rather it extends, under the ground, in all directions, hidden from view but waiting to be exposed and studied. Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it is not there.

. . .

It is this periphery, these outer zones of sites, that are most at risk for destruction from development. It is difficult to convince planning authorities to protect this kind of past simply because people cannot believe what they cannot directly see. Even worse, it is in these areas that the average people lived: the people who built the massive pyramids, not the people who lived in them. The archaeology of real life, of workers, of farmers, of craftspeople, of the everyday is the hardest to preserve. It gets paved over and destroyed.

. . .

I share in the outrage surrounding the allegations of corruption involved in this scandal, however I urge readers to not lose sight of what we may have lost. Luis Gálvez, a leader of the workers’ union of the state National Institute of Anthropology and History, has stated that the Walmart at Teotihuacan is an “offence against Mexico”. I would contend that it is more than that. It is an offence against our shared cultural heritage. Everyone who visits the site, everyone who climbs the Temple of the Sun to look out over the Valley of Mexico and imagine the vast ancient city, painted bright colours and sparkling in the Central American sun will either have to pretend not to see the Walmart or ask themselves why it is there.

Indeed a number of artifacts were turned up by Wal-Mart's construction crew.

They found the remains of a wall dating to approximately 1300 and enough clay pottery to fill several sacks. Then they found an altar, a plaza and nine graves. Once again, construction was temporarily halted so their findings could be cataloged, photographed and analyzed.

The ensuing firestorm resulting from that find was not enough to keep Wal-Mart from greasing the wheels of "progress."

Elsewhere in the complex, Teotihuacan is still slowly revealing its mysteries to more patient archaeologists.

Hundreds of mysterious spheres lie beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, an ancient six-level step pyramid just 30 miles from Mexico City.

The enigmatic spheres were found during an archaeological dig using a camera-equipped robot at one of the most important buildings in the pre-Hispanic city of Teotihuacan.

Clearly there is much still be discovered through the painstaking process of archaeological examination that doesn't destroy the integrity of such ancient marvels. Yet, I'm not convinced that even archaeologists approach these sites in the right spirit. I have more than once had the experience of walking through museums and encountering angry spirits around items that they don't seem to want displayed.

After having communed with the spirits at Teotihuacan -- spirits who demanded offerings and placed conditions before we could even step onto some of the structures -- I am left heartsick at the lack of respect paid by a retailer already well known for cannibalizing communities. And I can't help thinking there will be a price to pay for helping itself to to this one.

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Fingerprints of the Gods: The Sequel?

Graham Hancock has posted some details on a forthcoming sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods. The post on Facebook appears to be open to the public. Fingerprints was the first of Hancock's books I ever read. As I wrote here, it was put into my hands as if by magic and started a love affair with his work that has spanned more than a decade. So I am thrilled at the prospect of a newly updated version.

I thought I’d share two of the developments, one in the field of archaeology, one in the field of geology, that persuaded me some years ago that it was time to begin work on a sequel to “Fingerprints of the Gods”. Please note, however, that what I’m going to outline in this short post is only a very small part of the much wider range of accumulated evidence I’ll present in the sequel – powerful new discoveries and new understandings in many different fields that have come to light slowly, piece by piece during the past two decades. Taken together, I believe these new findings provide overwhelming support for the thesis I put forward nearly twenty years ago in “Fingerprints” of a titanic global cataclysm in the window between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, around the end of the last Ice Age, that wiped out and destroyed almost all traces of a great global civilisation of prehistoric antiquity. I’m already well ahead with the research and I aim to complete writing of the book by December 2014 and to publish in the autumn of 2015.

Emerging from mainstream science – which has so often ridiculed and dismissed my work – the first piece of evidence that made me realise there was a new story to be told was proof that north America was struck by several pieces of a giant fragmenting comet 12,900 years ago (i.e. 10,900 BC), causing an extinction-level event all around the planet, radically changing global climate and initiating the sudden and hitherto unexplained thousand-year deep-freeze right at the end of the Ice Age that geologists call the Younger Dryas.

The second early clue was the discovery in Turkey of an extraordinary 12,000-year old megalithic site called Gobekli Tepe, which is on the scale of Stonehenge but 7,000 years older than any of the other great stone circles known to history anywhere else in the world. Furthermore the best megalithic work at Gobekli Tepi is the oldest and the site was deliberately buried 10,000 years ago only to be rediscovered, and to have its importance and mysterious nature recognised long after the publication of “Fingerprints of the Gods”.

According to orthodox history, the period of 12,000 years ago (10,000 BC) is the "upper palaeolithic", i.e. before "the neolithic", and our ancestors then are only supposed to have been hunter gatherers, and incapable of large-scale stone-cutting and engineering works. Yet the scale and perfection of the 12,000-year old megaliths at Gobekli Tepe speak of a civilisation that had already accumulated -- by that date -- thousands of years of experience of working with and setting up large blocks of stone weighing in the range of 10 to 20 tons each with one piece thought to weigh 50 tons. The site appears literally out of nowhere but even the most sceptical mainstream archaeologists (who recognise its importance but have kept very quiet about its implications for the stories we tell ourselves about the origin of civilisation) now admit that there must be a very long and so-far unrevealed background to the wonders of Gobekli Tepe. That background upsets all established models of the time-line of history and directly supports the thesis of a great civilisation, lost to history between 13,000 and 12,000 years ago, that I controversially put before the public in 1995 with “Fingerprints of the Gods”.

For a little more background on Gobekli Tepe and a few observations on how it speaks to Hancock's previous work, see here. Also, posted above is a Coast to Coast interview with Hancock in which he discusses lost civilizations and cataclysms that form the underpinnings for Fingerprints.

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William Henry on the Judgement Day Device

I noticed this article about the Muslim view of the apocalypse The Huffington Post and it reminded me that I've been meaning to listen to two recent interviews with William Henry. From the article:

Muslim and Christian views of the Apocalypse are remarkably similar, albeit with a different ending.

. . .

Contemporary Muslim apocalyptists have even borrowed from their Christian counterparts, such as Hal Lindsay, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to discern the dates of the Antichrist's arrival, said David Cook, an expert on Islamic eschatology and associate professor at Rice University.

. . .

Some Muslims don't like the idea of Jesus playing the messianic hero, and have thus assigned a larger role to the Mahdi, said Cook. That belief is strong among Shiites, particularly the "Twelvers" in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has often spoke of the Mahdi's return.

William Henry's research adds an important piece to the puzzle of apocalyptic prophecies: the Ark of the Covenant. Henry believes that all the players are seeking the ark, in hopes of harnessing its mythical power. Above is posted his recent interview on Red Ice Radio and his interview on Awake in the Dream can found here.

The whole thing is a study in the dangers of literalism. Supplemental reading and listening can be found here and here.

"And when he was demanded of the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God should come, he answered them and said, The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you." ~ Luke 17:20-21

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Must See Graham Hancock Lecture

Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous, presentation by Graham Hancock. I've read nearly all of Hancock's books and listened to countless interviews, and yet, there were delicious surprises in this lecture for me.

Needless to say, I totally agree with Hancock's take-down of Richard Dawkins. Dawkins uses his Oxford credentials to lend credibility to totally unscientific arguments. I tire of saying this but you cannot prove a negative; you can only fail to prove a positive.  But I think I've made my own views on this dogmatic, proselytizing atheist clear here, here, and here.

Hancock also gives a wonderful overview of the Gnostic beliefs in Sophia's error and how this resulted in the Demiurge and the Archons. He also explores the use of shamanic tools to free the mind from archontic manipulation.

He also spends a good bit of time on the correlations between alien abductions, shamanic experiences, and faerie lore. This is a theory that he also lays out well in Supernatural. Another lecture on the subject can be found here.

Of course his discussion of Egypt and the Giza pyramids is thorough and beautiful. That's to be expected.

This is a fairly long presentation and worth every minute of it. I was riveted.

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William Henry on Capitol Symbolism

I love William Henry's take on the Capitol Building in DC and have posted on it several times. I just found this older Coast to Coast interview on the topic. It's excellent. In it, he diplomatically dispenses with the more paranoid readings of all the occult and Masonic symbolism and draws parallels to ancient Egypt. The more research on this I do, the more convinced I am that the philosophical underpinnings of the American revolution are about freedom in a much more esoteric sense than we've been taught in history class. It's about freeing our consciousness. It's evident in the richly layered symbolism of our America's iconic structures.

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Cave Art for Children?

No one ever went broke catering to the innate shamanic consciousness of children. For example: Where the Wild Things Are... and a very large percentage of children's books. That one just happens to be my favorite. It has everything: a journey into non-ordinary reality, communication with strange creatures, therianthropy (aka. shapeshifting), use of a boat over strange water. All common features of a shamanic journey.

Sometimes when I'm watching cartoons with my daughter I'm just brought up short by the commercials. Usually it's because of the pandering, manipulative, sugar-pimping marketing. But the GlowCrazy™ Doodle Dome™ I want for myself. If only they made it a little bigger.

Some of this alludes so directly to the mysteries of prehistoric cave art, I have a hard time believing it's not deliberate. Starting at 0:14 on the counter is a sequence on drawing aliens from outer space... kind of like the famous images that appear on cave walls in Kimberley, Australia.

Kimberley, Australia

Around 0:20 on the counter is a child drawing on the shadow of his own hand. I can't help but be reminded of Graham Hancock's description in Supernatural of how the hand paintings evoked the feeling of someone touching the permeable membrane between this world and another reality. Those hand images abound in cave art. And, as in the commercial, they appear to have been done by painting around actual hands.

Cueva de la Manos (Cave of the Hands), Santa Cruz, Argentina

This ad literally encourages children to go into a sensory deprivation chamber and draw spaceships, aliens, serpents, stars, and their own hands. I love it.

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An Ancient Mystery Tops an Ancient Mystery in Syria

Wars are real archaeology blockers. Sometimes I think it's by design -- a deliberate attempt at some level of consciousness to keep humanity from its own secrets. The latest distraction from discovery is in Syria. This one involves something they're calling "Syria's Stonehenge" and there is much to recommend it as a site of interest.

Fifty miles north of Damascus is an ancient monastery, which is a fascinating site all on its own. But in 2009, archaeologist Robert Mason of the Royal Ontario Museum discovered remnants of a much older monument nearby.

The monastery itself, also called the Monastery of Saint Moses the Abyssinian, was built in the late 4th or early 5th century, he said, and contains several frescoes from the 11th and 12th century depicting Christian saints and Judgment Day. He told the audience at Harvard that he believes it was originally a Roman watchtower, partially destroyed by an earthquake and rebuilt.

But the desert puzzle is much older.

Bits of tools Mason found nearby suggest the mystery he discovered in the desert is much older than the monastery. It may date to the Neolithic Period or early Bronze Age, 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, the Gazette said.

So, Mason found ancient masonry tools. He also found remnants of stone circles, lines, and some evidence of tombs. If, indeed, this is a prehistoric sacred site, it speaks to that mysterious habit the ancients had of building sacred sites on top of sacred sites, as if the location on the earth itself holds some deeper significance.

But for now, as the military conflagration in Syria grows, we'll just have to take a wait and see attitude.

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The Solstice and the Serpent

Well here's something I did not know.

This morning, while scanning the news for fun Summer Solstice events, I noticed this item on the Mother Nature Network. Apparently, the famed serpent mound in Ohio is aligned to the sun on this day. How marvelous. That puts this ancient curiosity amongst sacred sites all over the world as aligned to key astronomical events. I don't know that this will ever make Ohio Bush Creek a destination on par with Stonehenge (see above) but I actually find this slightly more fascinating.

Sunrise with a snake: Twenty miles south of Bainbridge, Ohio, a mysterious mound rises from the Earth. A bird's-eye view would reveal that this mound is in fact man-made, and that it is in the shape of a giant serpent.

On the summer solstice, the sun rises directly over the head of this serpent, which was likely created by the so-called Fort Ancient culture that thrived nearby between A.D. 1000 and 1550. The Serpent Mound park is open during daylight hours, so solstice-seekers can stroll around the ancient snake and imagine the early astronomers that must have overseen its construction.

I've never seen the serpent mound. Ohio is big state and I grew up on the other end of it. But it's always tickled me pink that this vestige of ancient wisdom appears in such an unlikely place.

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To Wikipedia!

In 1987 Clark and Marjorie Hardman published their finding that the oval-to-head area of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset.^[9][10] William F. Romain has suggested an array of lunar alignments based on the curves in the effigy's body. Fletcher and Cameron argued convincingly for the Serpent Mound's coils being aligned to the two solstice and two equinox events each year. If the Serpent Mound were designed to sight both solar and lunar arrays, it would be significant as the consolidation of astronomical knowledge into a single symbol. The head of the serpent is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the coils also may point to the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise.^[11]

. . .

The Serpent Mound may have been designed in accord with the pattern of stars composing the constellation Draco. The star pattern of the constellation Draco fits with fair precision to the Serpent Mound, with the ancient Pole Star, Thuban (α Draconis), at its geographical center within the first of seven coils from the head. The fact that the body of Serpent Mound follows the pattern of Draco may support various theses. Putnam's 1865 refurbishment of the earthwork could have been correctly accomplished in that a comparison of Romain's or Fletcher and Cameron's maps from the 1980s show how the margins of the Serpent align with great accuracy to a large portion of Draco. Some researchers date the earthwork to around 5,000 years ago, based on the position of Draco, through the backward motion of precessionary circle of the ecliptic when Thuban was the Pole Star. Alignment of the effigy to the Pole Star at that position also shows how true north may have been found. This was not known until 1987 because lodestone and modern compasses give incorrect readings at the site.^[13]

If it is, in fact, patterned on Draco, that could make it one of heaven's all-important mirrors. Such a theory is apparently advanced in Ross Hamilton's Mystery of the Serpent Mound. Huh. Whadda you know? Where have I been?

And now it is the time Summer Solstice when we dance.

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Fingerprints of the Neanderthals

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As discussed, a recent discovery attributes what is possibly the world's oldest art not to Homo sapiens but to Neanderthals.With results of the finished study now published in Science, comes a more thorough reassessment of Neanderthals and their place in prehistory.

Several times in the past 10 years scientists have had to rewrite the textbooks on Neanderthals, the latest species of human to go extinct. Once the archetype for primitive, uncivilised behaviour, the species, illuminated through fossil excavations and lately analysis of their genome, has emerged as being not too dissimilar from our own.

Contrary to their dim-witted image Neanderthals have been found to have used tools, to have worn jewellery, and, lastly, to have interbred with our Homo sapiens ancestors to such an extent that 4% of every modern European's genome is traceable to Neanderthal origins.

In my lifetime, Neanderthals have gone from being an early stage in human evolution, to a totally separate species, to a coexisting subspecies that interbred with Homo sapiens. This is what I mean when I say that good science -- and the past itself -- is self-revising. Many of our assumptions about Neanderthals merit reexamination. It is now clear that they were not the stupid distant cousins of proto-humans. They appear to have been at least as intelligent and creative as our direct forebears. And it may well be that even some of the cave art that has been attributed to Paleolithic humans was actually the creation of Neanderthals.

[Joao] Zilhao and his colleagues turned to a different method: uranium-thorium dating. As anyone who has seen a stalactite knows, caves are always undergoing slow change. The same processes that create stalactites and stalagmites leave thin deposits of the mineral calcite over some cave paintings. This calcite contains miniscule amounts of radioactive uranium, which decays to thorium over time.

. . .

Because the calcite came after the paintings, this sets a minimum age for the art. What researchers don't know is how long the initial calcite deposit took, so the paintings could be anywhere from hundreds to thousands of years older than the minimum dates.

The researchers took samples from 11 Spanish caves, including famed spots like Altamira with its painted herds of bison. At Altamira, they found an image of a red horse that dates back at least 22,000 years and a clublike image that is at least 35,600 years old. The club symbol has been painted over with the famous colorful bison herd, which dates to around 18,000 years ago. In other words, Altamira was a popular spot for artists for a very long time. [Images: Altamira & Other Amazing Caves]

At another cave, El Castillo in northern Spain, the researchers found primitive art of mind-boggling age. This cave contained the 40,800-year-old red disk. It also sported a hand stencil, created by an artist spitting red pigment over his or her hand to leave a handprint, that dates back more than 37,300 years.

More exact dating continues to be a problem and there is still much debate about the significance of the findings. But the one thing that is increasingly clear is that Graham Hancock's fictional accounting in of early human and Neanderthal relations in Entangled is being proved by non-fictional research.

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Zombie Apocalpyse: An Archetypal Journey

Article first published as Zombie Apocalpyse: An Archetypal Journey on Blogcritics.

A spate of cannibalistic attacks has raised public fears to such an extent that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had to address concerns with assurances that the "CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms)." It doesn't help that almost exactly one year ago they put out Zombie Apocalypse guidelines, in a strange and darkly prescient attempt to engage the public through humor.

Zombie Apocalypse: It's a funny phrase, evoking the more colloquial meaning of the word apocalypse - which is to say, a gruesome battle, ending the world as we know it. But that is not what the word actually means. Apocalypse comes from the Greek apokálypsis and means something more along the lines of "the big reveal" or "lifting of the veil." In that sense, a Zombie Apocalypse is an oxymoron. Zombies are all about ignorance.

Zombies tend to spike in the public imagination when we are struggling against some fear of authoritarian control. They reflect a collective anxiety about being reduced to mindless automatons, animated only by base impulses to eat... and shop. In the Dawn of the Dead movies they spend a lot of time at the mall, glazed over with their need to consume, the same in undeath as in life.

The zombie is one of our most ancient archetypes, at least as old as literature itself, making its first appearance in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Most famously, the fickle goddess Ishtar, spurned by Gilgamesh, threatens to raise the dead. This is the first known description of a Zombie Apocalypse and it goes back to the dawn of civilization.

Father give me the Bull of Heaven,
So he can kill Gilgamesh in his dwelling.
If you do not give me the Bull of Heaven,
I will knock down the Gates of the Netherworld,
I will smash the door posts, and leave the doors flat down,
and will let the dead go up to eat the living!
And the dead will outnumber the living!

But more to the point, the central struggle of Gilgamesh is his quest for immortality. Gilgamesh seems baffled that people die and that he will also. He is part god but he cannot enter the abode of the gods, the "land of the living." And when he loses his beloved friend Enkidu, in some recovered versions of the story, a ghoulish scene unfolds. Gilgamesh, tormented by grief, stays with the dead body for a week, until it is so corrupted and crawling with worms he has no choice but to return it to the earth and commission a statue instead.

The upshot of this ancient horror story is Gilgamesh's eventual discovery of the truth of life and death. His ancestor, Utnapishtim, the Sumerian precursor to Noah, was granted passage to the realm of the gods, but to mankind they dealt death and kept eternal life only for themselves. So death as we know it was created by capricious gods for the human survivors of the deluge.

The zombie archetype would seem to be a natural expression of a human race grappling with its own mortality. Like Gilgamesh we long for the immortality of the gods but fear that for us it would mean a gruesome undeath.

I would posit, though, that the symbolism is far broader than our fear of ourselves and our loved ones being consigned to living death, reduced to our motor impulses. It's a reminder that we already are in a kind of living death, consuming endlessly, numbly wandering shopping malls, dying from the moment of birth. Gilgamesh, for instance, begins as a bored monarch, engaged in mindless, purposeless violence. So the gods give him a companion and together they begin their quest to find meaning in a nonsensical existence. Taken in that light, the zombie archetype is a wake-up call, challenging us to undertake the hero's journey and courageously look death in the eye.

Or perhaps some revelation is at hand challenging us to open the eye - calling upon us to remember a time before the flood. As the worst specters of our imagining burst from our nightmares onto the streets of Louisiana, Connecticut, Florida... I mean, dear God. The precipitating incident involved a naked man carrying a Bible. If that isn't a case of life imitating art, I don't know what is. When we manifest archetypes on that scale in the reflective world, it's always about something. The question - and the quest - is how we make meaning of it.

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Past and Portents in Graham Hancock's Mexico

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Well, this could explain all the piercing tones I've been getting in my head for the past couple of weeks. (Of course the supermoon hasn't helped this weekend. I mean these pics are pretty but, oh, my head.)

North America's second-tallest volcano recently rumbled to life, putting authorities on edge. Big eruptions of Mexico's massive Popocatepetl volcano are "few and far between," as one geologist says. Yet even without any dramatic fireworks, 17,800-foot (5,425-meter) "Popo" has the power to wreak havoc.

. . .

Popocatepetl lies about 40 miles (70 kilometers) southeast of Mexico City. The mountain reawakened in December 1994 after five decades of silence. Yet in the nearly 20 years since, the volcano has rarely exhibited the kind of vigorous activity that began the week of April 12.

Minor earthquakes have rocked the mountain, it has spewed out plumes of gas and ash, and multiple explosions have shot glowing rocks from the summit. [ Images of Popocatepetl in action.]

The mountain has the potential to erupt magnificently once every 2,000 or 3,000 years. "It has big eruptions, but they are so few and far between," Sheridan said. "But they have been pretty big. So that is the scary part."

I have a particular affection for the Mexico City area and tend to be sort of dialed in to earth changes there. It is an area rich in history. One of the most transformative experiences of my life involved a trip to Mexico City. And I owe at least a little of that to Graham Hancock. I was reminded of that yesterday morning when I stumbled on this lecture he did some years ago.

Fingerprints of the Gods, which he discusses here in some depth, was the first of Hancock's books I read, and it began a love affair with his writing. But the way I came to read that book was somewhat peculiar.

The book had belonged to a friend of mine. I noticed it on her bookshelf where it looked a little out of place. I borrowed it and had begun to read it when she and I had a huge falling out and I had to the give it back. I had fully intended to get the book for myself but I hadn't yet got 'round to it when, some months later, an opportunity to travel to Mexico City came up. It's a long and complicated story but suffice it to say it wound up with me going there to do a Flower of Life teacher training with Drunvalo Melchizedek.

When it came time for me to make my travel arrangements, it occurred to me that I should probably do at least a little research about the area first. I stopped by the Montclair Book Center to pick up a Fodor's. There, thoroughly misplaced in the travel section, sort of shoved in awkwardly on its side, was Fingerprints of the Gods. I picked it up and started to leaf through it. And there it was. Teotihuacan. Now, geography has never been my long suit and I really hadn't grasped until that moment that the ancient site was spitting distance from Mexico City. I really knew very little about it except that Hancock had included it as a site of some importance in advancing his theory of an ancient, lost civilization. But in the split second it took me to put those few pieces together I resolved that one way or another I was going to get there during my trip.

It occurred to me that Drunvalo might take us there as part of the seminar but I wasn't going to leave that to chance. I built an extra day into my trip so I could go there alone if needs be. As it turns out, he did not take us to Teotihuacan. Although he did take us to Cuicuilco, a round pyramid that isn't nearly as well known, and that was also an amazing experience. But the opportunity to go to Teotihuacan fell into my hands as if by magic. There was a gentleman in the class who was a professional tour guide. He graciously extended an offer to anyone who wanted to go there on the Monday following the seminar which, as luck would have it, was the day I had left open for just that purpose.

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Hancock goes into some detail in this presentation on the relevance of Teotihuacan to his theory of a lost civilization. I had read everything he had to say about Latin America, with its ziggurats and plumed serpents, before I got there. Even so, I was unprepared for the intensity of this "place where men become gods."

I spent that day doing rituals with the small group of travelers and our wonderful guide. We came to realize the entire experience was one long ritual and we were not the one's directing it. Mostly, our job was to listen and do as we were told. Teotihuacan is inhabited by wise spirits of ancient origin. 

The conspiracy of events that put me in Mexico City at that particular time with those particular people is something I could only marvel at. And the process of transformation that was initiated in me at that time is something I'm still sorting out.

One of the things that struck me as I was listening to Hancock explain his research is just how impermanent it all is. I still marvel at the hubris with which so many people disregard doomsday theories. I'm not saying that I think 2012 signals such a doomsday and I think if anything is clear about the Mayan long count calendar, it's that, for all the theories, no one really understands it. It remains a tantalizing mystery. But something is happening and the energy shifts we've been experiencing are fairly amazing. So are the earth changes.

Hancock touches briefly on Charles Hapgood's theory of crustal displacement and the possibility that we may have had previous pole shifts. Whether any of that is tied into the vestiges of a lost civilization and the out of place artifacts Hancock has spent years researching is hard to say. Even harder to say is whether it will happen again. But to pretend that civilization ending cataclysms are silly wives tales is arrogant. The people of Pompeii were apparently enjoying life as usual when they found themselves engulfed by the sudden, massive eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. We certainly know more about volcanoes now than those ancient Romans did but we are no more immune to a grandiosity that convinces us that we know enough.

I was reading the other day about some new theories on the volcano that is Yellowstone. Something many Americans don't realize is that Yellowstone is actually a "supervolcano" and a full scale eruption would be devastating. The new study I was reading up on found that it might not "wipe out half of the United States, covering the rest in 3 feet of ash and pushing the world into hundreds of years of nuclear winter, challenging human civilization to a game of death and survival." So that's... kind of... good news. The bad news? It's much more active than previously believed and even a lesser eruption would be inconceivably disastrous.

My point is simply this. As tempting as it is to think that we know all we need to about the potential for sudden, radical change on this planet, history has shown over and over that we don't. And the clues are there to a prehistory of which we know nothing with any certainty. Embrace the mystery. That's all I'm saying.

A side note: I love Jungian synchronicities. As I write this I notice that the movie Matilda has come on ABC Family. It's one I've watched over and over. But the first time I ever saw it was when I was taking my red-eye flight back from Mexico City, after a full day of tromping up and down those divine temple monuments. On the nearly empty plane, I stretched out over several seats and drifted in and out of sleep, surfacing just long enough to ask myself questions like: Is that little girl making things fly around the room? This movie is about a telekinesis? Maybe I should be paying more attention? Zzzzzzzz...

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Robert Schoch and William Henry on the Sun

Excellent discussion this week on William Henry's Revelations about the sun cycle and just how bad it could get. Robert Schoch is the geologist who researched the weather patterning on the Sphinx and back-dated its construction to some time before recorded history. His work has been extensively cited by Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval, and John Anthony West, who sought out his expertise to evaluate the claims of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. Schoch has since turned his attention to Gobekli Tepe, the oldest known temple which was fairly recently discovered in Turkey. (See here)

In this interview he discusses geological, archaeological, and mythological evidence of a civilization ending solar catastrophe in the ancient past. He describes an event that would have dwarfed the 1859 Carrington Event that saw northern lights as far south as Hawaii and set telegraph stations on fire. He is not alone in positing that this may be what the Mayan calendar warns. It also bears mentioning, I think, that one of the Time Monks' most consistent predictions is the meme "sun disease."

Schoch and Henry also discuss the possibility that the weird noise phenomenon, discussed here and here, may be associated with the unusual radiation coming from the the sun. Schoch explains the interrelationship between electromagnetic radiation and sound. We already know that the radiation bursts from the sun can be translated into sound -- like all energy, really -- so it's an interesting theory. There is a very metallic ring to what was recorded here. So this is one of the most substantive suggestions I've heard yet on this issue. 

Schoch is a sober researcher and a scholar so this is a very even-handed discussion. His book on the topic is here and more information can be found at RobertSchoch.com.

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