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An Interview With
Graham
Hancock

By Ed
Conroy

"He
has come here from the land of the living, he has got rid of the
dust that was on him, he has filled his body with magic, he has
mastered the land with what he knew..."
- Spell 35, Coffin Texts

For the past
twelve years, Graham Hancock has been bent on mastering the
mysteries of northern Africa, encompassing Ethiopia and Egypt in his
quest for knowledge of both the Ark of the Covenant and, most
recently, the monuments of the Giza plateau. Nor, for that matter,
is he a stranger to the pyramids of Mexico and Central America, or
the Andes' strange ruins and landscapes.

Through the
process of writing and promoting two massive books - The
Sign and the Seal: The Search for the Lost Ark of the
Covenant and most recently Fingerprints of the
Gods: Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilizations - Hancock has
emerged as a leading figure in the heightening international debate
over the antiquity of civilization and the degree of astronomical
knowledge extant in the world prior to the second millennium
BC.

Hancock's
search for the Ark, of course, might tempt a writer to cast him as a
thinking person's Indiana Jones. In reality, his work has more in
common in both style and significance with that of Henry Lincoln,
Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (authors of Holy Blood,
Holy Grail) than, say, the books of Erich Von
Daniken.

At a time
when many people speak lightly of "paradigm shifts" in basic
knowledge, Graham Hancock is laying the groundwork for a new
generation of scholarship. In the course of his research, Hancock
(together with his professional photographer wife Santha Faia) has
visited the relevant sites, vividly describing both the scenes he
has encountered and his personal impressions of them. Nor does he
shrink from providing the reader with exhaustively documented
information gleaned from the world's best libraries in order to
provide color, detail and texture in the complex pictures he
paints.

The
Manchester Guardian, in reviewing The Sign and the
Seal, said it would probably be "as popular as the 'Raider'
films," describing the book as "an intellectual whodunit with whom
we can all identify."

In person,
Graham Hancock has little of Hollywood about him, and his books,
while having been #1 bestsellers in England, have no doubt been
bought by many fewer people than have seen the "Raiders" films. That
is not to say, however, that he is lacking in charisma, or in the
chutzpa required to take on the skeptics-in-waiting from the
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the
Paranormal. A tall, lanky, slightly balding and highly personable
man in his late forties, Hancock is occupying a bully pulpit in the
battle for what he see is nothing less than the truth about
mankind's prehistory.

While
informed, rational discourse on these matters has long tended to be
restricted to papers in scholarly journals, Hancock, responding to
marketplace demand, is taking this debate directly to the public at
large. In the process, he revels in challenging the orthodoxies of
contemporary academic consensus. His particular target is the
received view, particularly strong among Egyptologists, that an
advanced civilization dating to at least 10,500 BC - and
characterized by an initiatic wisdom tradition based upon deep
knowledge of observational astronomy - is categorically
impossible.

Hancock
has, in fact, become an eloquent advocate for the possibility of
such an advanced civilization and its wisdom tradition. Yet he has
not come to hold such a position overnight. Prior to undertaking his
quest for the Ark, Hancock became familiar with his terrain through
serving as East Africa correspondent for the London
Economist. In 1989, Atlantic Monthly Press published his
Lords of Poverty, an expose of corruption in the
international aid establishment, for which he received an H.L.
Mencken Prize (honorable mention). In The Sign and the
Seal, he details the business he developed writing
coffee-table books on countries such as Ethiopia under commissions
from the governments of African dictators. He also candidly
describes how, after a long conversation on the shores of Lake
Tanganyika with his wife-to-be Santha, he dropped that business
entirely to dedicate himself wholly to his quest for the
Ark.

Simply put,
that quest led him to the Great Pyramid, and, as a result of a
pivotal personal experience in the King's Chamber, to a study of all
of the monuments of the Giza plateau in relationship to both the
stars themselves and, most importantly, the ancient Egyptians'
search for immortality. As a guide, he immersed himself in ancient
star lore and related myths, aided by the groundbreaking study
Hamlet's Mill: An Essay on Myth and the Frame of Time
by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von
Dechend.

In a
nutshell, the arguments Hancock advances in his 600-page
Fingerprints of the Gods may be summarized as
follows:

It is now possible to consider new
evidence pointing to the existence of a highly advanced, seafaring
civilization prior to 10,500 BC, representatives of which
influenced the cultures of Egypt, Central and South America, among
others.

In order to understand the true
significance of the Atlantis myth, Hancock urges reconsideration
of the hypothesis of the late professor Charles Hapgood
(cautiously endorsed by Einstein) that the entire lithosphere of
the earth undergoes dramatic shifts, causing whole areas of land
once in temperate zones to be thrust into the polar regions, such
as, for example, what is now Antarctica. Utilizing evidence drawn
from the Piri Reis map and other similar artifacts from
Renaissance map-makers, Hancock cites the work of Rand and Rose
Flem-Ath (When the Sky Fell: In Search of
Atlantis) positing that continent as the home of the
great antedeluvian civilization.

Hancock examines deluge myths from
around the globe, analyses their similarities and differences, and
asserts that they have more in common than is recognized by
academia. They especially share metaphors that refer to the
phenomenon of the precession of the equinoxes as harbingers of
cataclysmic changes in both society and nature.

He asserts that, as a result of the
influence of this early high civilization, a deep sense of
connection with certain stars and star-systems lay at the heart of
Egyptian civilisation. That sensibility took form as a set of
funerary rites intended to send the souls of pharaohs into eternal
life among the stars, most notably in the constellation Orion,
long associated with the god-king Osiris.

Lastly, Hancock cautiously suggests
that the possibility exists the globe could experience another
shift of the lithosphere within the next 30 to 50 years, due to
the state of ice build-up at the poles and gravitational pressures
from an upcoming planetary alignment. Hancock insists that the
public has a right to know the true history of the world and that
we must objectively assess the possibility of a global cataclysm
such as those which have occurred in centuries long past.

Hancock
realizes, of course, that his identification with propositions such
as those listed above might encourage some readers to improperly
associate him with advocates for a "pole shift" and those authors
who find metaphysical significance in every detail of the Great
Pyramid's features. Yet Hancock remains an empiricist, writing about
what he has personally investigated. In fact, Hancock now finds
himself in direct collaboration with Robert Bauval as co-author of
their new work Keeper of Genesis, that will expand
on the information in both Fingerprints of the Gods
and The Orion Mystery.

Based on an
analysis of data obtained from over twenty years of active research,
Bauval is advancing the proposition that all of the monuments of the
Giza Plateau were built in such a fashion as to directly mimic the
positions of the major stars of the constellations Leo, Taurus and
Orion, ten and a half centuries before Christ. And, from their
analysis of the principal ancient Egyptian funerary texts, both
Bauval and Hancock posit that this entire complex of monuments is
directly connected to the Pharaonic funerary cult of immortality.
According to their interpretation of the texts, the rituals of that
cult were specifically intended to facilitate the transit of
initiate-pharaohs' souls into the heavenly realm of Osiris, which
the ancient Egyptians believed to be located in the region of the
constellation Orion. Moreover, asserts Bauval, the funerary cult
involved a dimension of time travel back to 10,500 BC, regarded by
the ancient Egyptians as the "First Time," when gods such as Isis
and Osiris were believed to have walked the land of
Khem.

From the
purely academic point of view, such information could well be
regarded as simply more indication of the highly advanced fantasy
lives of the pharaohs and their priests. Yet, as both Bauval and
Hancock emphasize, ancient Egyptian religion was inseparable from
Egyptian astronomy, engineering and mathematics. Nor was it separate
from 'technology' as in the case of the pyramids and the Ark. At the
present time of material limits and millennial anxiety, these ideas
may suggest how humanity could be liberated from time itself through
conscious survival after death.

At the very
least, Hancock's work, like Bauval's, has the potential to explode
the paradigm of social Darwinism - the belief in slow, progressive
development of civilization - now prevailing in archaeology and
Egyptology. The public at large is eager for solid information on
how to jump-start the collective process of remembering and
reconstructing our species' once and future relationship with the
stars.

ED
CONROY: Your quest for the Ark has taken you to the
pyramids, and from there, to the stars. How would you characterize
what you've learned on that journey?

GRAHAM HANCOCK: What we're dealing with here
is an extraordinarily ancient wisdom tradition, a science of
initiation and a science of immortality. I think it's like a
hologram. When you bump into any bit of it, it's possible to see the
whole.

By chance,
or so it seemed by chance at the time, I bumped into the Ark of the
Covenant in 1983, and subsequently pursued a quest to learn more
about it to see if its last resting place might not be in Ethiopia.
Because the Ark is an offshoot and a product of that ancient
science, and because the transmission of that science to the future
is holographic in its form, it was inevitable that I would bump into
the rest of it.

The Ark is
a doorway into a wider quest, and I could have come at it from
another direction, from the pyramid. Either way it would have also
led to the Ark. They're all the same thing. The science that built
the pyramids, the science that created the Ark of the covenant, is a
legacy of knowledge handed down from a very remote period by a
civilization that we've lost all traces of. All that's left is this
knowledge and wisdom, and various means and methods have been used
to transmit that knowledge.

CONROY: In The Sign and the
Seal and Fingerprints of the Gods you
alluded to the possibility that Moses' Ark was only one of many
similar strange boxes in Egypt.

HANCOCK: It's become more and more clear to
me that there was a leakage of this science from Egypt into Israel.
If one looks at the traditions concerning the construction of the
Temple of Solomon, and at certain objects such as the Shamir, the
stone or serpent that cut rocks, again you find yourself confronted
by a glimpse of this hologram. It draws you
in.

CONROY: What was the experience, though,
which personally "drew you in" to the
hologram?

HANCOCK: It was my travels in Ethiopia in
1983, which took me to Axum, which is where the Ethiopians believe
that the true Ark resides. It was my encounter with the guardian of
the Ark, and what he said to me that planted this seed in my mind.
At that time I knew very little about the Ark other than what I had
seen in the Indiana Jones movie. I had to go through certain other
processes. I needed to go through other processes of learning and
discovery and also personal change as an individual before I was
ready to let that seed that was planted in 1983 grow.

CONROY: Now, a dozen years later, you've
expanded your scope tremendously to deal with the relationship
between this ancient wisdom tradition and the starry cosmos itself.
What influence took you in that direction?

HANCOCK: The arguments I found in
Hamlet's Mill served as another entry point into
the hologram, because once you start picking up those numbers from
those myths, if you follow the trail it will eventually lead you to
the Great Pyramid.

CONROY: Both de Santillana and von Dechend
identify the precessional change of the equinoxes with an ancient
body of myths in which the periodic "breaking of the mill" of heaven
is characterized as a time of "floods" and other cataclysms. In
Fingerprints, you also write of this cosmic process as a harbinger
of actual physical floods. Is this your interpretation or
theirs?

HANCOCK: This is my interpretation working
with theirs. Santillana and Von Dechend have cracked an ancient
code, and other people are now working on that ancient code. They
realized, and I think they were the first people to realize this,
that an entire corpus of ancient myths had been specifically created
to transmit and convey hard astronomical information. These myths
are in fact a technical terminology dressed up in the language of a
story, and once you begin to realize what the terms mean, these
stories suddenly make sense.

Now all of
the stories in this body of myth that they refer to, and it is a
world-wide body of myth that is found in all cultures that are not
supposed to have had any contact in antiquity, have dealt with the
phenomenon of the precessional movement of the stars, which is
caused by a wobble on the axis of the earth. It's a perceived
phenomenon, it's not the stars that are moving - it's the earth that
moves, with that phenomenon having given us numbers which accurately
convey the rate of precessional motion, as accurately as modern
science can do today.

These myths
all direct themselves toward a cataclysm, frequently a flood,
although other metaphors are also employed. There are two things at
work here. Once you begin to plug into this ancient astronomical
language, you begin to realize that "flood" is a technical term for
the swallowing up or drowning of particular groups of stars at the
moment that they were expected to appear as a result of the
precessional motion of the earth. The flood was an astronomical
metaphor, in that sense, but there's something very important to
this. By the way the English word disaster is interesting. Ast is
one of the ancient Egyptian words for "star," and a dis-aster is
literally a separation or a breaking apart of the stars, and this is
precisely what these myths speak of.

They create
a metaphor for the phenomenon of precession, where as a result of
the precessional motion of the earth, stars do not appear at their
appointed address in the sky at their appointed time. They drift or
slip, and they appear to be swallowed up by the waters of heaven. In
this sense, the ancient astronomical language, while speaking of
floods and disasters, is actually describing and memorializing
astronomical events, but it's not as simple as that. There is an
extremely clear indication in the myths that terrestrial disasters
are also connected to this astronomical phenomenon.

This is not
an issue that Santillana and von Dechend went into. They confined
themselves, and I think they did a brilliant job, to the first step
in decoding this ancient astronomical language, a language that was
designed to resist time, a language that was designed on the vehicle
of myth to travel eternally through time. They did that, but they
didn't take the next step and draw out the very powerful indication
in the myths that it isn't just the swallowing up of the stars by
the phenomenon of precession, but rather that this celestial
phenomenon, from time to time, at irregular intervals, appears to
have a terrestrial effect.

Now one
gets into the concept expressed in the Hermetic "as above, so
below," and the implication that I draw from the myths and document
in Fingerprints of the Gods, is that what these myths are saying is
that they are not just distributing this astronomical information
for the fun of it, it's not just some perverse desire to transmit
astronomical notation from thousands of years ago to the distant
future. There's a purpose behind it.

CONROY: And what was that
purpose?

HANCOCK: The purpose appears to me to convey
a warning that this phenomenon of precession which causes these
astronomical disasters also causes very real, terrestrial disasters
- but not every time the mill breaks. The "breaking of the mill" is
the notion of the equinoctial point of sunrise on the spring equinox
gradually slipping through each of the 12 zodiacal constellations,
and the mill breaks when the vernal point slips completely out of
one constellation and into the next. When it does so, the background
constellations against which the sun rises at the summer and winter
solstices, and at the autumn equinox also change. All the
coordinates on the mill change when the mill flips.

What comes
down from antiquity is a sense that this moment of change, this
moment when the mill is about to slip from one constellation into
the next, is a moment of danger - but not always the case that this
moment of danger results in an earthly disaster. There appear to be
other trigger factors involved. What the myths indicate in as plain
language as can be imagined is that we need to be very awake and
very aware in these times of danger when the mill is about to slip.
And we live in one of those times now.

CONROY: The structure of
Fingerprints of the Gods takes the reader from
consideration of the great monuments of the New World into a
meditation on equinoctial precession. From there you jump into Egypt
with your introduction to the astronomical alignments of the Great
Pyramid and analysis of the pharaonic funerary cult of the Pyramid
Texts, which are all about immortality in the stars. It's a lot of
material, but it appears that you're heading into implicitly saying
that the state priesthood of ancient Egypt intended to find a way to
preserve human consciousness among the stars
themselves.

HANCOCK: I have reached the point where I am
convinced that they actually did it. I believe that they did it. You
have here a remarkable science for want of a better word, and this
like all sciences had many objectives, but its primary objective was
the obtaining, the securing of immortality of consciousness.

Now the
issue at the moment in my mind is unresolved as to exactly the
function of the stars in this. What comes to me out of my studies of
the ancient texts is a notion that would be familiar to the Gnostics
and indeed is in the closely related Hermetic texts, which is that
immortality of the soul is not something that can be achieved by
faith. Salvation is not to be achieved through faith alone - this is
the contrary of the orthodox Christian message. The Gnostics said
that salvation is to be attained through knowledge.

It appears
from the Egyptian funerary texts and also from The Tibetan
Book of the Dead and other ancients surveys of the
afterworld, or whatever we want to call it, that at the moment of
death the soul faces confusion, terror. The purpose of these ancient
initiations and the knowledge associated with them, in my opinion,
was to assure that the soul of the deceased would not be confused at
the moment of death, but would be highly oriented and aware and
awake, and ready to deal with the challenges ahead.

I think
what was involved with this was a process of reflecting and refining
the mind all the way through life. It seems pretty clear to me that
by obliging initiates to involve themselves deeply in the study of
the mysteries of the stars, they had created a mechanism for forcing
the mind to go to work. To grasp and understand the perceived
motions of the stars, both on a daily basis and on the long-term
precessional basis, the whole operation of the solar system and the
universe, requires an extraordinary operation of the will and
intellect, and I wonder whether the stars were a kind of teaching
board in this system, designed to bring the mind of each initiate to
an extremely high level of development.

So one's
objective in life is manifold, but crucially important within that
objective is the constant acquisition and mastering of knowledge and
experience, and a life spent not accumulating knowledge and
experience is a life wasted, over which hangs the possibility of
extinction. Certainly the ancient Egyptian texts make that perfectly
clear, that the possibility of extinction isn't only connected to
the failure to use the gift of life to acquire knowledge, it's also
connected to behavior of a certain kind, how we lead our lives, and
in this sense there's a great concordance with the Christian message
- there's a moral issue. And the moral issue seems to be very simple
in karmic terms, that if you do harm, and you do badly, you pay a
price. If you pursue the initiate's quest then that very quest would
rule out the tendency to do evil.

Again and
again I come back to this emphasis in the texts on the acquisition
of knowledge, which cannot be poured into your ear, it is something
that you as the initiate have to work at, you have to study it, and
that involves overcoming challenges and difficulties and working
your own way around them, and that is what this ancient quest for
immortality is all about. All the clues and guidelines on the quest
still exist for people who are open to this possibility.

The
necessity to acquire knowledge and experience is very important in
these ancient texts. I don't think we should ignore it.

CONROY: How is this conclusion related to
your studies of the monuments on the Giza plateau?

HANCOCK: The book, as you rightly point out,
dwells heavily on Egypt, because preserved in Egypt are more pieces
of the puzzle than anywhere else in the world. They were very
clever. Preserved in Egypt are monuments that no reversion to
barbarism could destroy - even the barbarism of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, even Howard Vyse with his dynamite, even the
Muslim caliph who tried to dismantle the third pyramid at Menkaure.
They couldn't do it.

I think
there is a sense in which the great pyramids are, to use a modern
analogy, the hardware, passed down to us from an unknown antiquity.
I'm not claiming that they were built 12,500 years ago - to me, it's
just as good that they were built with knowledge that originated
then. It's the knowledge that lives, and at certain times, it
attaches itself to certain vehicles, sometimes to myths, and in this
case, to monuments capable of lasting virtually forever.

Ancient
Egypt is of vital importance because a bit of the software came down
to us, too. In these extraordinary funerary texts, such as
The Book of the Dead, which is better described as
The Book of the Coming Forth by Day, The Book of Two Ways,
The Coffin Texts, The Book of Gates. I am now certain that
encoded in these texts is all the information we need, in
combination with a study of the monuments and a study of the ancient
skies, which we can now do with computers, to read a very clear and
unmistakable message from a lost civilization.

In a way,
attaching this to the cult of immortality was very clever, because
we all want to live forever.

CONROY: In The Orion
Mystery, though, Robert Bauval says we've been using the
wrong program to decipher the software.

HANCOCK: We've absolutely been using the
wrong program to decipher the software. This has been the whole
problem. The software has been attempted to be deciphered in terms
of preconceived notions about primitive cults, and in terms of
artifacts dug out of the ground. But the key, all along, that was
needed to make the software run, the password, if you will, is the
sky. That's where nobody looked, nobody looked at all before people
like Santillana and von Dechend, and more recently and crucially,
Robert Bauval.

CONROY: Both you and Robert point out what
you regard as the importance of the Great Pyramid's two so-called
"ventilation" shafts, with the southern shaft from the King's
chamber pointing to the belt of Orion, and the southern shaft of the
Queen's chamber pointing to Sirius at the time of the Great
Pyramid's supposed construction, or 2,000 BC. And, since
Gantenbrink's little video-equipped robot, Upuat, discovered a
limestone door with metal hinges toward the end of the southern
shaft of the Queen's Chamber, those shafts have become all the more
intriguing.

HANCOCK: One cannot be in any doubt about
the astronomical function of the Great Pyramid because of those
shafts.

CONROY: The interpretive possibilities
inherent in the information that you have compiled are vast. Where
do you go with this material?

HANCOCK: I'd like to say Robert Bauval has
made the most crucial single breakthrough in this area of research
that has ever been made. Robert is the person who looked up at the
sky and saw that this was the frame of reference with which the
Egyptians were working. This is a complex multi-layered message, but
he put the first stage of that down, and he and I are now working on
a new book which is entitled Keeper of Genesis, and
it is our attempt to take the decoding of this scientific message to
its logical conclusion, as far as it can be taken. I think that what
we're looking at is an anti-cipher, a deliberate attempt to convey a
message to the future, and all that is required to convey that
message is to be literate in astronomy, to have ability to
conceptualize ancient skies, not the skies as they look today, but
ancient skies, which now anybody can do with a PC. Then you can
rather rapidly begin to read this message.

CONROY: How so?

HANCOCK: In The Orion
Mystery, Robert put down the first of those things that
proclaim themselves very loudly. The pattern of the three pyramids
on the ground mimics not the patterns of the three stars in the
epoch of 2,500 BC at which the shafts point to the stars, but the
pattern of the three pyramids on the ground at a much earlier date -
10,500 BC. What you find is a massive monument on this scale with
shafts pointing to specific stars at a specific date, say 2,500 BC,
4,500 years before the present, and you find that the pattern of
those pyramids on the ground mimics the pattern of the stars in
Orion's belt in 10,500 BC, then obviously an enormous question mark
is raised and you start to wonder what is going on.

In
Fingerprints of the Gods, I showed that the Great
Sphinx is also one of those loudly self-proclaimed things that
points to the Age of Leo, a point of 10,500 BC. Robert and I have
since gone on and looked further and found that every aspect of the
Giza monuments, not just the Sphinx and the three great pyramids but
the satellite pyramids - those that lie off the south face of the
Menkaure, and the causeways - and all the large temples all fit into
a gigantic diagram of the sky in 10,500 BC. It includes specifically
the constellation of Orion, the constellation of Leo, and that of
Taurus, and the group of stars between the horns of the bull that
are called the Hyades. Here we also find ourselves in the pyramids
of Dashour, somewhat to the south of Giza. All of these monuments
signify a moment some 12,500 years before our present time.

It's rather
like receiving a radio message from outer space. When the SETI
people scanned the sky they looked for anomalies, they looked for a
signal that stands out by its differences which raises a question
"what does this mean?" I think that's what we have here in the
monuments of Giza, a beacon that says "Look further, find out what
this was all about."

CONROY: So it would appear that the ancient
builders took the Hermetic maxim "As above, so below"
literally.

HANCOCK: Or rather that the Hermetic maxim
was derived from their own practice of science. There is a huge
question mark here which sets the mind on a course. Once you're
confronted with this anomalistic situation, if you're of a certain
frame of mind, you're impelled to investigate it further. I don't
think that was accidental. I think it was a designed effect of these
monuments, that they were specifically designed to create this
questioning function in human beings. They are one of the ways of
ensuring that this ancient process of initiation continues, even if
the direct line of transmission from human being to human being by
oral transmission breaks down, it can be resumed again through these
monuments.

CONROY: What has been the reception to
Fingerprints and The Orion Mystery
among the Egyptological community?

HANCOCK: The answers from the Egyptological
community has been to ignore both books. The reason for this is that
the vast majority of Egyptologists do not have even the most basic
grounding in astronomy. I will quote you from Dr. Alexander Pogo of
the Palomar Observatory. He is quoted by Santillana and von Dechen.
"I give up quoting examples of the obstinate belief among our
Egyptologists of the immobility of the heavenly pole." In other
words, as Dr. Pogo was pointed out, the Egyptologists don't have a
bloody clue about precession. They don't even know that the pole
star changes with the epochs. They are not even on the field, never
mind at first base, and this is an extraordinary betrayal of the
high culture of ancient Egypt, because Egyptian high culture and
wisdom were connected to the study of the stars. If we seek hard,
physical proof of this, many Egyptologists will tell you - and it's
knee-jerk response, because they have not studied it, they have just
heard it from certain professors - they will tell you that the
ancient Egyptians knew nothing of astronomy. This is a matter that
can be disproved by a single monument. It can be disproved by the
Great Pyramid of Egypt.

The Great
Pyramid could not have been built other than by master astronomers.
The precision of the alignments of the Great Pyramid are in
themselves are proof that this monument was created by master
astronomers. The alignment to due north is within three-sixtieths of
a degree off due north, three arc minutes off due north, and could
only have been done with astronomy. Any engineer will tell you
that.

It was,
furthermore, a very refined and precise observational astronomy, of
the kind that takes an enormously long period of time to develop.
The Greenwich Observatory is nine-sixtieths of a degree off true
north, so we have a building in the modern world which is less well
aligned to due north than the Great Pyramid. Both buildings were
aligned with astronomy so it is clear that the ancient Egyptians
were master astronomers.

The point
that I am making about the Egyptological establishment is that they
have consistently failed to recognize this, and they have not taken
into account the astronomical factor in their understanding of
ancient Egypt. I don't see any sign of interest of change, but I
don't expect to... They will go to their graves believing that the
ancient Egyptians knew nothing about astronomy. You can tell them
and show them evidence that the ancient Egyptians were masters of
astronomy and they still will not see it. It's something strange
about the human mind. We get locked into particular world views and
mindsets, and once we get locked into a world view it is the hardest
thing on earth to change it. I think it is harder than moving a
mountain to change a scientists world view.

CONROY: This situation, of course, affects
the way we as a culture think about wisdom traditions. It appears
that such Egyptologists are quick to apply the term "Pyramidiot" to
anyone who disagrees with them.

HANCOCK: They apply the term "pyramidiot" to
anyone who suggests that the pyramids are in any way mysterious or
extraordinary, whether one suggests that from the point of view of
engineering or astronomy, orthodox Egyptologists will call you a
"pyramidiot." These are orthodox Egyptologists, I would add, who
know nothing about engineering or astronomy, so one has to wonder
who the idiots really are.

I think
that the cause of human knowledge - I want to say this very strongly
- has been betrayed by Egyptologists for the past 150 years. I think
that they've set back the possibility of a momentous discovery about
ourselves because of their narrow-minded and ignorant focus on one
dimension of a truly multi-dimensional culture.

CONROY: What one dimension is
that?

HANCOCK: The dimension that they are focused
on is the stuff they can dig out of the ground. If you can't dig it
out of the ground, it wasn't there. That's their attitude, and they
don't seem to realize that what survived into the future in terms of
material artifacts in the ground may not give a representative
impression of the overall culture. They have to open their minds to
other non-material artifacts that have survived, such as these
extraordinary texts, which have been passed down to us. They have to
stand in front of the three great pyramids and consider the
possibility that they aren't tombs, that they may be something else.
Until they do that, they won't see further than the dust of their
feet.

____________________________________________________________________
An edited version of the above
appeared in GNOSIS No. 38. Ed Conroy is the author of Report
on Communion, an investigation of Whitley Strieber and his
visitor experiences (William Morrow/Avon).
For further
information see http://www.gnosismagazine.com/

The above article appeared in
New Dawn No. 37
(July-August
1996)

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