Via Graham Hancock: Has my position on the possibility of an impending global cataclysm, that I considered in Fingerprints of the Gods, changed in the years since? This is a question I’m often asked so I thought I would take this opportunity to address it here. First, if you have a couple of minutes, listen to this commentary I gave in a lecture in July 2010 that was themed on what might, or might not happen on 21 December 2012. Someone (MCKMN) has kindly set it to music on Soundcloud, and it rather clearly gives my position as I stated it two and a half years in advance of the Mayan calendar end-date: https://soundcloud/mckmn/2012-tipping-point-drop-the-pain-feat-graham-hancock I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods in 1993 and 1994 and published it in the Spring of 1995. Although the subtitle of the US edition was ‘The Evidence for Earth’s Lost Civilisation’ – which accurately reflects the central content of the book, the subtitle of the UK edition was “A Quest for the Beginning and the End.” This was because one element emerging from my research in the early 90’s was a very strong feeling that a message, indeed a warning, had been passed down from the distant past describing a cataclysm that had occurred before – and destroyed a great civilisation of prehistoric antiquity – and that might occur again, perhaps in our time. I specifically considered the possibility that the Mayan calendar could be “a computer for calculating the end of the world.” I still think this may be the case. But two things have happened since the early 1990’s that have affected my public position on these matters. First, I have a much better idea what this agent of cyclical destruction might be – a long period comet (see the final paragraphs of this article that I recently published on my website for example: grahamhancock/forum/HancockG9-Mystery-Lost-Civilization.php). Nor is a comet-impact scenario necessarily inconsistent with the scenario of earth-crust displacement that I focussed on in Fingerprints of the Gods (see here for example: grahamhancock/forum/BarbieroF1.php?p=1). To cut a very long story very short indeed, I suspect that a large comet, a bit like Shoemaker-Levy 9 was torn into fragments by the gravity of Jupiter and that parts of it went on to strike the earth around 12,980 years ago, causing a global catastrophe that wiped out almost all traces of a former high civilisation and ushered in the thousand-year deep-freeze called the Younger Dryas. I suspect that parts of that comet – its debris stream -- are still in orbit and that this may be one of the possibilities that the Mayan calendar was drawing our attention to with its focus on 21 December 2012. Interestingly there is a lot going on at the moment that suggests the earth might be involved with the orbit of a fragmented long period comet in the general epoch of 2012 if not on the exact date specified. The second development since the early 1990’s that affected my thinking was the growing doom-and-gloom lobby that sought to exploit public fears around the Mayan calendar and the 21 December 2012 “end-date”. I took a deliberate decision not to participate in that lobby as it rose to its climax in the build-up to 2012, not to produce yet another “2012 book” (a project, incidentally, that I was offered large sums of money to undertake and turned down) and not to seek in any other way to gain commercially from the widening “catastrophe hysteria”. Roland Emmerich was “inspired in part” by Fingerprints in his movie 2012 but I was edged out of any kind of editorial control over that project, indeed kept completely out of the loop, largely because I wanted him to tell a completely different story than the one he ended up telling. In the end the only single element he took from Fingerprints, which so far as I know hadn’t been presented elsewhere before, is the connection I made there between Earth Crust displacement and the Mayan calendar. During 2005 onwards, in the run-up to 2012, I was several times interviewed by Coast to Coast and others on the basic scenario I expressed in Fingerprints and I always said words to the effect of “these days I am not going around wearing a sandwich-board predicting ‘the end of the world is nigh’; nonetheless the Maya inherited an ancient calendrical tradition based on precise astronomy and I don’t think we’d be wise to entirely discount their suggestions of global cataclysm (in the Dresden Codex and elsewhere).” Pressed harder on that point I sometimes made reference to the early forms of the long-period comet idea outlined above and the notion that with long-period comets “what goes around comes around”. But that was as far as I took it and otherwise I tried to focus on and draw public attention to more positive aspects of the ideas around the Mayan calendar, namely that while it speaks of the end of one age of the earth it also speaks of the beginning of another and that it is legitimate to see in this a prediction of a rebirth of human consciousness after a long period of darkness. For several years before 2012 my focus was much more on this than on the gloom and doom that I absolutely did not want to feed, and I developed a line of argument around the 5,126 year span of the last cycle of the Long Count and how it coincides so precisely with big cities, big states, big centralised religions, big centralised corporations etc and how all these big dominator entities do, indeed, appear to be coming to the end of their useful life and how a new form of consciousness does, indeed, appear to be being birthed. All this being said, I am still struck as powerfully today as I was when I wrote Fingerprints by the sense of a warning from the remote past to our present time, and I have a much better idea now of what that warning may concern (the return of the fragments of a long-period comet). But I have avoided capitalising on hysteria and fears around the end of the world, I have sought to focus on the positive rather than the negative, and while I do have substantially more to say about the original scenario that I set out in Fingerprints – not so much a revision but rather a development and extension – I feel that the proper place for me to say it is in the sequel to Fingerprints that I am working on now. Image – Fragmenting comet Shoemaker Levy 9 just before it hit Jupiter in 1994. Photo by NASA, Wikimedia Commons
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 21:54:05 +0000
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