Status
2022
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Three Rivers Press (1999), Edition: 1st, 352 pages
Description
On an odyssey stretching from the pyramids of ancient Egypt to South American ruins, from Easter Island to Angkor Wat, the authors put forward compelling evidence to suggest that cultures we term ancient were in fact the heirs to an older lost civilization, and the inheritors of its archaic wisdom.
Media reviews
NBD / Biblion
Populair wetenschappelijke verhandeling van nog bestaande grootse mysterieuze bouwwerken uit ons verleden, die een gedetailleerde kennis van de sterrenkunde veronderstellen. Teruggrijpend op het religieuze erfgoed van de bevolking, betoogt de auteur dat deze monumenten ontworpen lijken om de
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verbinding tussen hemel en aarde te bewaren. De religieuze ideeën in dit boek, zijn 'gnostisch' van aard; zij stammen uit de 'geheime kennis' en geven op toegankelijke wijze een bijzondere spirituele diepgang aan de tekst. Beschreven worden bouwwerken in Mexico, Egypte, Cambodja, op eilanden in de Grote Oceaan, in Peru en Bolivia, die alle eenzelfde oude spirituele les behelzen. Vervolgens is er een korte toekomstvisie vanuit de sterrenkunde en het boek besluit met een uitgebreid, naar hoofdstuk ingedeeld notenapparaat (vnl. bronverwijzingen) en een register. De vele prachtige kleurenfoto's van zijn vrouw Santha Faiia en de prettige lay-out ondersteunen de goed leesbare tekst.
(Biblion recensie, I. Maassen.) Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member DirtPriest
This was the last of Hancock's books that I was able to get my hands on. They all cover the theory that there were unknown or forgotten cultures and civilizations before recorded history which were destroyed at some time in the remote past, either by strife or, more likely, a massive and global
That was a bit of table setting for the hypothesis of Heaven's Mirror. The argument is that there was (is?) some sort of relic religious belief from prehistory that somehow survived and carried on some specific ideas about the immortality of the soul through knowledge of the motions of the stars. The data is carried along in mythic stories about various gods and whatnot, but there is a common theme of numbers to the initiated, which relate to the Precession of the Equinoxes. This is a very slow backwards (apparent) movement of the stars relative to the sun's annual journey from its observational northern and southern maximums, at the tiny rate of 1 degree every 72 years. These few specific numbers pop up all over the globe in myths, and are detailed in Hamlet's Mill. These myths are eerily similar considering the wide time and distances between the people who used them.
In ancient Egypt their creation myth was that the Benben stone was created out of primordial nothingness concurrently with the Bennu bird, which is the same thing as the more familiar Phoenix, just under an older name. The world was created from the egg of this Bennu bird and this egg was regarded as a sacred ideal, much like the holy grail. On Easter Island, they had a tradition of swimming to a nearby island to recover a sacred physical egg and presenting it to their master. This combined with other similarities, like the phrase 'ra' referring to the sun as a godlike deity, points a finger towards some kind of unknown connection to ancient Egypt, or at least a common reference point in the past.
There are even more of these 'coincidences' between Egypt and Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia. For starters, the name Angkor itself may be a clue. It is pronounced 'Ankh-Hor', which could mean it it refers to Horus of Egypt, as in 'Horus Lives'. The legendary pre-Pharaonic leaders of Egypt were called the Shemsu-Hor (Followers of Horus). There are about 3000 years difference between the building of the pyramids in Egypt and the building of Angkor Wat, but both are purported to have been built over older sites. Both also closely mimic specific regions of the sky on the ground and at a specific time. The Giza monuments are (controversially) a mimic of the constellation Orion, which was clearly associated with, in fact 'was', Osiris, Isis being the star Sirius trailing behind. On the spring equinox, traditionally the start of the solar year, in the distant time of 10500 BC, Orion would have been due south, the Nile river would have intersected the Milky way just east of Orion. The Sphinx would have pointed directly at Leo as the sun rose directly under its paws. This is clearly diagrammed and explained in The Message of the Sphinx for anyone interested.
Now, is it a coincidence that the temple complex of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom exactly mimic the constellation Draco on this exact date? Every one of the temples has an analogue in the sky, including a few of the brighter stars nearby the Constellation. There is even a temple, the most mysterious and strangest of them all (according to several accounts by visitors going back well over a hundred years) which represents the ecliptic north pole. This is basically the center point that the procession revolves around. By the way, the apparent pole in the starry sky at night moves with this process and currently matches up with the Polaris in the little dipper but within in a few hundred years that star will noticeably 'revolve' around this point. Anyway, Angkor Wat is filled to overflowing with serpent imagery (Draco, remember) and myths about 'churning the milky sea' and whatnot, which almost indisputably refer to this precession. The site is aligned just off center east to west so that the vernal equinox sun rises directly over the big central tower in the picture above. (The sun moves in an arc and doesn't move straight up.) And on and on.
Back to the numbers in conclusion. There seems to be a consensus that Giza, being the oldest of several ancient and mysterious sites, was used as a 'zero meridian' by this long lost culture and almost every major monolithic site is a multiple of 54 or 72 degrees from Giza (and each other) not 70 or 45 or 60 but 72 and 54. Any variance from this can be easily attributed to the building being done on the nearest available site. Easter Island is the farthest off of the pattern but it is within 2 degrees and is the only inhabitable land for 2000 miles. I'll put this link here for anyone interested. It goes in to some detail about this geodetic pattern. This pattern is global and includes the pyramids of South America, which have associated myths about the Feathered Serpent and the Viracocha, allegedly Caucasian people who came from the sea in primitive times and civilize the continent, giving them the skills of stone masonry, astronomy, agriculture and their amazing calendar which runs out on December 23, 2012. Honestly, it just starts over. You can make one out of three gears.
The conclusion is that there once existed, and may still exist, a 'cult' that firmly believes that the future is written in the stars and they have built sacred sires on a global scale to announce their beliefs, on one level for the unwashed masses and a much higher level for the initiated. This argument can be extended to the Freemason inspired layouts of Paris and Washington DC, but that is a tangent I will pass on today. Now, the Egyptians had an epithet 'As Above, So Below.' They went to great lengths to achieve this symmetry on the ground, as did several other peoples around the globe. Why? Frankly, how? The precision of these giant stone complexes is astounding. The Great Pyramid of Giza is more precisely aligned to true north than the Greenwich Observatory which marks the 0 degree meridian on modern maps. And most of these places used stones bigger than cars, some of them approaching old trains in size, literally hundreds of tons. The mind, it boggles.
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natural disaster. The end of the Ice Age around about 15000 to 10000 BC would fit the bill nicely. Hancock explains in great detail about this in his most informative book 83516::Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization, showing how, using sound geologic principles, there were several major meltdowns over a short period, followed by lengthy centuries of calm. An example is a glacial meltwater lake in the US slowly growing behind an ice dam. When the ice dam retaining the water finally gave way it created a literal mountain of water that flowed to the Pacific Ocean in a wide torrent from north of Vancouver to somewhere in Oregon. The estimated tidal waves would have devastated most of the Pacific Basin and, not coincidentally, coincided with a major tapering off of the Jomon culture in prehistoric Japan.That was a bit of table setting for the hypothesis of Heaven's Mirror. The argument is that there was (is?) some sort of relic religious belief from prehistory that somehow survived and carried on some specific ideas about the immortality of the soul through knowledge of the motions of the stars. The data is carried along in mythic stories about various gods and whatnot, but there is a common theme of numbers to the initiated, which relate to the Precession of the Equinoxes. This is a very slow backwards (apparent) movement of the stars relative to the sun's annual journey from its observational northern and southern maximums, at the tiny rate of 1 degree every 72 years. These few specific numbers pop up all over the globe in myths, and are detailed in Hamlet's Mill. These myths are eerily similar considering the wide time and distances between the people who used them.
In ancient Egypt their creation myth was that the Benben stone was created out of primordial nothingness concurrently with the Bennu bird, which is the same thing as the more familiar Phoenix, just under an older name. The world was created from the egg of this Bennu bird and this egg was regarded as a sacred ideal, much like the holy grail. On Easter Island, they had a tradition of swimming to a nearby island to recover a sacred physical egg and presenting it to their master. This combined with other similarities, like the phrase 'ra' referring to the sun as a godlike deity, points a finger towards some kind of unknown connection to ancient Egypt, or at least a common reference point in the past.
There are even more of these 'coincidences' between Egypt and Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom in Cambodia. For starters, the name Angkor itself may be a clue. It is pronounced 'Ankh-Hor', which could mean it it refers to Horus of Egypt, as in 'Horus Lives'. The legendary pre-Pharaonic leaders of Egypt were called the Shemsu-Hor (Followers of Horus). There are about 3000 years difference between the building of the pyramids in Egypt and the building of Angkor Wat, but both are purported to have been built over older sites. Both also closely mimic specific regions of the sky on the ground and at a specific time. The Giza monuments are (controversially) a mimic of the constellation Orion, which was clearly associated with, in fact 'was', Osiris, Isis being the star Sirius trailing behind. On the spring equinox, traditionally the start of the solar year, in the distant time of 10500 BC, Orion would have been due south, the Nile river would have intersected the Milky way just east of Orion. The Sphinx would have pointed directly at Leo as the sun rose directly under its paws. This is clearly diagrammed and explained in The Message of the Sphinx for anyone interested.
Now, is it a coincidence that the temple complex of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom exactly mimic the constellation Draco on this exact date? Every one of the temples has an analogue in the sky, including a few of the brighter stars nearby the Constellation. There is even a temple, the most mysterious and strangest of them all (according to several accounts by visitors going back well over a hundred years) which represents the ecliptic north pole. This is basically the center point that the procession revolves around. By the way, the apparent pole in the starry sky at night moves with this process and currently matches up with the Polaris in the little dipper but within in a few hundred years that star will noticeably 'revolve' around this point. Anyway, Angkor Wat is filled to overflowing with serpent imagery (Draco, remember) and myths about 'churning the milky sea' and whatnot, which almost indisputably refer to this precession. The site is aligned just off center east to west so that the vernal equinox sun rises directly over the big central tower in the picture above. (The sun moves in an arc and doesn't move straight up.) And on and on.
Back to the numbers in conclusion. There seems to be a consensus that Giza, being the oldest of several ancient and mysterious sites, was used as a 'zero meridian' by this long lost culture and almost every major monolithic site is a multiple of 54 or 72 degrees from Giza (and each other) not 70 or 45 or 60 but 72 and 54. Any variance from this can be easily attributed to the building being done on the nearest available site. Easter Island is the farthest off of the pattern but it is within 2 degrees and is the only inhabitable land for 2000 miles. I'll put this link here for anyone interested. It goes in to some detail about this geodetic pattern. This pattern is global and includes the pyramids of South America, which have associated myths about the Feathered Serpent and the Viracocha, allegedly Caucasian people who came from the sea in primitive times and civilize the continent, giving them the skills of stone masonry, astronomy, agriculture and their amazing calendar which runs out on December 23, 2012. Honestly, it just starts over. You can make one out of three gears.
The conclusion is that there once existed, and may still exist, a 'cult' that firmly believes that the future is written in the stars and they have built sacred sires on a global scale to announce their beliefs, on one level for the unwashed masses and a much higher level for the initiated. This argument can be extended to the Freemason inspired layouts of Paris and Washington DC, but that is a tangent I will pass on today. Now, the Egyptians had an epithet 'As Above, So Below.' They went to great lengths to achieve this symmetry on the ground, as did several other peoples around the globe. Why? Frankly, how? The precision of these giant stone complexes is astounding. The Great Pyramid of Giza is more precisely aligned to true north than the Greenwich Observatory which marks the 0 degree meridian on modern maps. And most of these places used stones bigger than cars, some of them approaching old trains in size, literally hundreds of tons. The mind, it boggles.
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LibraryThing member Turnstone
A brilliant history of prehistory!
Of the high Civilization before Egypt and all the other ancient "high tech" civilizations.
Destroyed by the floods caused by the melting ice at the end of the last ise age.
Of the high Civilization before Egypt and all the other ancient "high tech" civilizations.
Destroyed by the floods caused by the melting ice at the end of the last ise age.
LibraryThing member paperloverevolution
With photos, so you can play along at home: pile of rocks? Or ZOMG LOST CIVILIZATION?! You decide!
LibraryThing member JohnJohnsonII
This is so much more of a plausible theory than ancient astronauts.
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1998-09-29
Physical description
10.23 inches
ISBN
0609804774 / 9780609804773
Other editions
Heaven's mirror : quest for the lost civilization by Graham Hancock (Paper Book)
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