Episode 113 – Graham Hancock on The Origins of Antiquity, Ancient Monoliths around the World and MORE!

research I like to get out in the field roll my sleeves up if I need to go scuba diving for seven years I’ll do that as I did from my book underworld and in this case I needed to go and take psychedelics in the Amazon jungle course it took me to the Pyramids of Giza and I found myself one one morning standing in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza this gigantic structure looming above me 480 feet high you know 13 acre footprint 6

million tons of incredibly precisely engineered stone and I just thought wow you know what the hell is this and with my non-fiction works for which I’m best known I’ve also written a number of novels really in the fantasy adventure genre which combined my interests in altered states of consciousness and in historical mystery look at what they do look at what they actually do look at the burnings at the stake looking at look at the stoning to death of of women

look at the the behavior that is encouraged look at the division to hatred the fear a suspicion that multipliers around the world connected to these three religions and you might begin to wonder whether the Gnostics aren’t in fact right and whether we’ve been misled by some demonic force for the last 2,000 years that has cleverly more than 2000 years this is the God of Abraham we’re talking about here that has cleverly convinced us that it is God

when in fact it’s a it’s a demon and how more effectively could a demon operate than that what’s up folks Xavier katana here you are listening to the human experience podcast we’re gonna try something a little bit different we’re going to dig into the treasure chest the archives and we’re gonna play a gem one of our earlier episodes that you may or may not have heard yet and the episode that we have chosen to do this with is mr. Granville if you don’t

know who Graham Hancock is you are about to find out as someone once told me the true test of anything is time and this episode ladies and gentlemen is timeless you are really going to enjoy this one this is one of our favorite favorite episodes please get to us on Twitter at the human XP we post some of the most amazing content you have ever seen thank you so much for listening ladies and gentlemen here is mr. grant Hancock

the human experience is examining the antiquity of civilization as we welcome my guest mr. Graham Hancock mr. Hancock it is truly an honor sir welcome to hxp thanks good to be with you mr. Hancock you are the John Luke Picard of archaeology and the Graham Hancock of psychedelics and consciousness exploration but for the people that may not know that already can you very briefly introduce who you are and what you do please okay well I am Graham

Hancock I am a writer I’ve been writing books for many many many years I used to be a journalist I was involved in current affairs for a long time but back in the 1980s I stumbled across an archaeological mystery while reporting on current events in Ethiopia and that mystery concerned the Ark of the Covenant which as in Raiders of the Lost Ark which Ethiopia claims to possess and a scholars at the time dismissed the whole Ethiopian claim to possess the ark but I

kept coming across pieces of information that lent support to it and gradually I got drawn into an investigation of this mystery which were decidedly had nothing to do with current affairs and was all to do with the ancient past and that ended up in 1992 with my first book of historical mystery called the sign and the seal a quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant and by then I was disenchanted with the present and intrigued by the

past and by the untold stories of the past and I went on to write what is probably my best known book a book called fingerprints of the guards was published in 1995 and much to my surprise it was a huge worldwide sensation and it sold me of copies I hadn’t expected this to happen at all and it resulted in a ferocious academic backlash how dare this journalist claim that there might be a forgotten episode in human history how dare he suggests that there might

have been a lost civilization more than 12,000 years ago historians and archaeologists were outraged I think not so much that I had written the book but that the book had been a success and had attracted public attention so I had to deal with that backlash which was as unexpected as the success of the book itself but it taught me a thing or two about this game and about how ferocious academics are independent defending their turf and in how difficult it is to

propose effectively a new paradigm in any area of of science Maureen and I was proposing a new paradigm about the past and following on from that I did write a series of further books exploring and elaborating on the lost civilization issue in the early 2000s I became interested in the mysteries of consciousness and particularly shamanism and and the the fundamental mystery of the book that became supernatural meetings with the ancient teachers of

mankind which was published in 2005 the fundamental mystery was incredible similarities in rock and cave art going back tens of thousands of years all around the world amongst cultures that were not supposed to have been in contact with one another and as I investigated the matter it became clear that I was looking at shamanistic art that this was the work of ancient shamans shamanism the essence of shamanism is the trance state altered

deeply altered states of consciousness and in these deeply altered states of consciousness shamans in remote antiquity were experiencing visions which they depicted on the cave walls and I I then realized that I could get out of my armchair I hate armchair research I like to get out in the field roll my sleeves up if I need to go scuba diving for seven years I’ll do that as I did from my book underworld and in this case I needed to go and take

psychedelics in the Amazon jungle and so I went down to the Amazon jungle and had my first eleven experiences with ayahuasca the vine of souls the sacred brew of the Amazon and I immediately understood exactly where those Upper Paleolithic artists were coming from because I was seeing the kind of things that they depicted and and then the mystery just got deeper and deeper it be I began to wonder whether whether these visions these experiences were just you

know quote-unquote hallucinations or whether there was something much more substantial to them some really deep mystery of human consciousness here and the possibility that we might be retuning the receiver wavelength of the brain and encountering other levels of reality and the intelligence conscious entities that that inhabit them and so this has been a parallel interest of mine for many years since 2005 and then last but not least

since I do regard myself fundamentally as a writer in in tandem with my non-fiction works for which I’m best known I’ve also written a number of novels really in the fantasy adventure genre which combined my interests in altered states of consciousness and in historical mystery yeah yeah do you think that something has been guiding this process for you and perhaps maybe this is a mission that you’re on no I I don’t I don’t feel I’m guided I feel

that I I feel that I have a natural curiosity and I have the opportunity because some of my books have been successful to choose to investigate the areas in which my curiosity sends me I don’t feel I’m on a mission I I feel it’s it’s it’s it’s my job to raise questions to look at alternative of you seriously not in a not in a in a flimsy you you know naive kind of way but but thoroughly and in-depth and to consider whether these alternative points of view

have merit we live in a society that’s actually it appears to be very free and open but in fact in many ways it’s very structured and controlled there is a there is a kind of mind control that operates in our society and that mind control is based around certain paradigms of what reality is what the past is what the human purpose is and I think I my my job I don’t see it as a mission but my job is to is to offer a coherently argued thoroughly documented

alternative point of view and if that helps to shake other people up and and get people thinking then it means I’m doing my my job well yeah you know when I started this podcast about a year ago I wrote down three names or so that would be in the realm of dream guests for me and you were at the top of that list so if I sit to say I’m pretty happy to have you here so let’s back up a little bit let’s rewind the first time that you were in Egypt that was for

writing sign in the seal right yes yes it was I needed to go to Egypt see the story of the sign and the seal which was the quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant began for me in Ethiopia which as I told you was a country that I was initially traveling in as a as a journalist as a current affairs reporter it began for me there but with Ethiopian claimed to possess the Ark and the specific claim that the Ark of the Covenant rests in the little sanctuary

chapel beside the Cathedral of Saint Mary of Zion in Axum in Tigre province in northern Ethiopia once I began to investigate this thoroughly it became necessary to go to two other countries as well as Ethier it became necessary to go to Israel of course since the Ark of the Covenant you know ended up and finally disappeared from the Temple of Solomon in Israel and it became necessary to go to Egypt why because the Ark of the Covenant cannot

be separated from the figure of Moses the Old Testament a figure of Moses and Moses as we know was according to the Bible at any rate was reared in the household of the Pharaoh in Egypt that Pharaoh was probably ramses ii and and therefore i needed to understand the egyptian background to moses and whether that had had any effect on the mysteries of the Ark of the Covenant and that’s what first took me to Egypt and took me to places in Egypt for example the

Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt where you can see processions of priests carrying ark like objects on their shoulders it took me to the island of elephant tena near aswan further south in Egypt where at one point there was a fully fledged Jewish temple and this is a mystery because it was ran in parallel to the temple of Solomon it wasn’t later than the Temple of Solomon and and of course it took me to the Pyramids of Giza and

and I found myself one one morning standing in front of the Great Pyramid of Giza this gigantic structure looming above me 480 feet high you know 13 acre footprint 6 million tons of incredibly precisely engineered stone and and I just thought wow you know what the hell is this and and when I started to you know my curiosity was was tickled and I began to say well what are academics saying about this and I felt that what they were saying about it was just

incredibly dismissive and stupid and didn’t do justice to the power and that and the majesty and the difficulty of this thing I mean creating something like that is not easy and they were you know they were saying this is what one of the very first gigantic structures ever created in Egypt so where was the background to it where did they where did these guys learn to do this and that’s really what set me off on the the track of

considering the possibility that there might have been a lost civilization that we might be seeing a legacy of high wisdom and knowledge preserved in Egypt and manifested in the pyramids so I mean this is by no means an easy topic to tackle the origins of civilization and perhaps this this myth but your your theories start with this flood myth and it’s highly centric around your work and you’ve researched many aspects of these

historic floods they’re masking effects of hiding these civilizations what was the result of that research and locating these underwater or civilizations well okay I mean if if you beginning to consider the possibility of a lost civilization before history began you have to consider the agency by which that civilization became lost and that inevitably puts you in evitable puts you in cataclysmic territory you you you don’t a civilization doesn’t simply

disappear something has to happen to it and and I began to look at at the there’s a lot of information anyway even in ancient Egypt for example which points back to a remote period thousands of years earlier and that’s how I found myself looking at the Ice Age which set in 125,000 years ago and reached its maximum extent about 21,000 years ago it’s difficult for people to dated to conceive of how different the world was you had ice caps that were two miles

deep covering almost the whole of the northern half of North America stretching as far south as New York State and and covering most of northern Europe mountain high ice caps in areas that are densely populated and productive today they’re they were completely uninhabited at the time they were ice deserts and there was two miles of ice sitting on top of the land sea level as a result was massively lower sea level was four hundred feet lower and it is today why

because all the water in those ice caps had evaporated up out of the oceans fallen and rain and as as rain and frozen as as ice the global climate was very different than from the climate we have today so so the world looked very different and huge areas that are now under water because when all that ice melted the water went back into the oceans and sea levels rose by 400 feet huge areas that are now under water were above water then and would furthermore

the coastal areas have been the most desirable lands on earth and it seemed to me absurd that archeology was forming a picture of the human past without really taking account of the ten million square miles of land about the size of Europe and China added together that were flooded at the end of the Ice Age it did and furthermore the meltdown of the Ice Age was cataclysmic there was a slow process between about twenty one thousand and twelve thousand years ago

twelve thousand eight hundred twelve thousand nine hundred years ago and then we have a we have a series of cataclysmic events that occur and there’s a particular window between twelve thousand eight hundred and eleven thousand six hundred years ago when the earth just goes into a kind of paroxysm of extinction level event really and this was not being taken into account by historians at all they all felt that this was prior to the story of human

civilization that all human civilizations had begun to emerge after that and and I was contemplating the possibility that as all the legends and myths of the world suggest that there was an episode of high civilization before that and that therefore it it had been wiped from human memory during those cataclysms around 12,000 years ago so this ultimately took me on seven years of scuba diving expeditions looking at structures an underwater down

to a hundred and twenty feet underwater we need to go deeper but a hundred and twenty feet is about as far as you can go with normal scuba gear otherwise you’d have to get into technical diving I never did that I became pretty good scuba diving but I never went below 120 feet in in depth with mixed gases and technical diving equipment and so on but but again it was it was a matter of putting myself into the subject taking taking the risks and going to see

whether there was indeed anything mysterious underwater and you can be absolutely sure there is there is a great deal of mysterious structures under water and often local fishing communities and local divers know about them so I had local people in India in Japan in the Bahamas in the Mediterranean in the Pacific who helped me find the structures that I was looking for what did you what did you find out there um well off the northwest

coast of India there’s two huge cities underwater in the Gulf of Cambay at a depth of 40 meters at more than 120 feet southeast coast of india Mahabalipuram and kandahar again down 100 to 110 feet underwater enormous man-made structures Japan Yonaguni a whole area of structures cut from solid rock which will last above water more than 12,000 years ago further north in Japan off Okinawa giant stone circles 110 feet under water off of karamja particularly

an island called akka Jima in the mid Pacific in Micronesia you have a mysterious structure above water called nan Madol but if you go underwater there you find that it continues down and it just goes all the way down to the bottom of the bay and then there are huge columns some standing some fall and none of this has been taken account of by archeology we found structures in Malta Malta is famous for its megalithic monuments there are huge megalithic

temples and I think those temples which archaeology likes to date to five or six thousand years ago are in fact much older because we found are there such structures underwater in areas that were last above water more than 12,000 years ago there’s a famous phenomenon in Malta called the cart ruts of course they’re not cart ruts but there are parallel we like grooves cut into the rock of the island of Malta and these sometimes just

stop at the edge of cliffs but if you then go underwater there you find that they continue on the other side they continue underwater and again they go down to the maximum depth that we were able to dive as scuba divers and probably a good deal beyond that so it’s really all over the world this is this phenomenon and eventually I wrote a book about it called underworld flooded kingdoms of the Ice Age that was published in 2002 you’ve talked about a

numeric code that coincides with the longitudinal axis and the number of lost civilizations around the world and this code seems to be scattered through religious myth and lore where does this code come from and was it pointing to well there there is a phenomenon as an astronomical phenomenon actually called the precession of the equinoxes there’s something else that my research has forced me to do because the ancients did it is to come to terms with astronomy

and to begin to understand the apparent motions of the of the heavens what the theory is this may not be the causative agent but the theory is that there is a wobble on the axis of the earth it’s rather like if you set a top spinning and leave it to spin for a while the spin will begin to decay and the top begins to wobble can you envisage that and that the the top part of the top begins to transcriber a circle in its own right it seems that

the earth does this and the theory is that it’s caused by the opposite gravitational pulls of the Sun and the moon on the earth there may be a whole other explanation for it but in a sense that doesn’t matter what matters is the observation and the observation because the earth is the viewing platform from which we observe the Stars changes in the orientation of the viewing platform will result in changes in the rising and setting times of stars

at particular times of year and indeed in the orientations of the stars in the sky it’s not the stars that are moving it’s the earth that’s moving but it gives the illusion of the stars moving of course all the stars are moving as well they have their own proper motion but they’re so distant from us that those movements are really unfold over periods of hundreds of thousands or millions of years precession the the wobble on the Earth’s axis creates

changes in the star field in the observed star field in in a much shorter time but in every 72 years you complete a one degree shift and when you multiply this by three the 360 degrees in a full circle you get twenty five thousand nine hundred and twenty years this is the that what is what the ancients called the great year the the period in which the star patterns revert to their starting point so you’ve got a grand cycle of change in the heavens that

operates at a very specific rate which is one degree every 72 years now that’s quite hard to observe one degree is about the width of your finger held up to the horizon so you know you really need many human lifetimes and accurate records to be kept to really notice this and to realize that some kind of process is going on and then to go further from that and to be able to predict how the star field will look thousands of years

in the future or how it looked as of years in the past you need a lot more observation you need science actually and and this is the puzzle because the numbers related to the pre-sesh what’s called the precession of the equinoxes based on the number 72 a whole sequence of numbers for example 72 plus 36 is a hundred and eight half of 108 is 54 72 times 30 gives you two thousand one hundred and sixty it takes two thousand one hundred

and sixty for the Sun on the equinoxes to pass through one complete sign of the zodiac the 12 constellations of the zodiac I in a belt around the path of the Sun and and all these numbers based on the heart the heartbeat of the system is the number 72 all these numbers crop up in very ancient myths from all around the world and the myths themselves frequently described in symbolic terms a process that is unmistakably precession this

this phenomenon that we call precession and a really fantastic study was done of this by two really top-grade scholars Georgia Toussaint Indiana who was the professor of the history of science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology through into the 1960s and hearth of on desh and who was a professor of the history of science at Frankfurt University the book is called Hamlet’s mill and it finally came to the conclusion that what they described as

some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization thousands and thousands of years in the past had scientifically observed and recorded the precession had felt that it was important for some reason and had devised stories that would be passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation which incorporated accurate scientific knowledge of this phenomenon and and they made the point that it really didn’t matter whether the storyteller

knew what he or she was passing on so long as they told the story true and repeated the sequence of numbers that was within the story then the information would be passed on until such a time as another civilization could arise which would be able to decode this information and that’s why it’s interesting that the same sequence of numbers that we find in ancient myths appears in ancient monuments for example 2160 years is the time it takes for the

equinoxes sun to precess through one house of the zodiac two houses of the zodiac is four thousand three hundred and twenty years multiply four thousand three hundred and twenty by 10 and you get forty three thousand 200 so we have to ask ourselves whether it’s a coincidence or whether there’s something extraordinary going on that the Great Pyramid is a scale model of a hemisphere of the earth on the scale of one to 43,200 in other words if you take

the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by forty three thousand two hundred you get the polar radius of the earth you get a printout an exact precise scientific printout of a key dimension of our planet which was not supposed to even be known until relatively recent times and if you measure the base perimeter of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by the same number forty-three thousand two hundred which is one of those numbers found in

ancient myth all around the world you get the equatorial circumference of the earth it appears that the Great Pyramid one of the things it is is a scale model of a northern hemisphere of the earth on a scale of one to forty two thousand two hundred and therefore if that’s so and I believe it is then it’s telling us absolutely that we are looking at the work of a high civilization so so the I’m glad you brought it back to the pyramids because the Robert Bauval

discovery was incredibly important in Egypt the Giza pyramids line up with Ryan and they line up with a Ryan although that does happen it’s a very Roberto Val’s discovery the Orion correlation theory is is I believe one of the most important discoveries in the study of ancient Egypt that has ever been made it’s it’s it’s almost as valuable as the Rosetta Stone and the deciphering of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs because suddenly we can

begin to understand what is going on first of all it’s important to know that the constellation of Orion mattered to the ancient Egyptians this was not just any random constellation when the ancient Egyptians looked at the constellation of Orion which they called Saru they envisaged it as the celestial figure of their deity Osiris and there’s a whole raft of Mythology about Osiris who is a bringer of civilization to Egypt in a

remote period that they call Zep tepi the first time thousands of years in the in the past and and Osiris the whole mythology of Osiris becomes linked to the to the story of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs so that each pharaoh on his death became identified with Osiris Orion with the constellation of Orion in the sky and and therefore if if we’re saying as Robert does that the Egyptian pyramids have an intimate connection with the constellation of Orion this

actually makes perfect sense because the constellation of Orion was the single most important constellation in the ancient Egyptian sky secondly the relationship is complicated there are four narrow shafts that cut up through the body of the Great Pyramid to from the King’s Chamber and to from the Queen’s Chamber and the two one from the King’s Chamber the southern shaft from the King’s Chamber targets the lowest of the three stars of the belt of Orion and

the southern shaft of the Queen’s Chamber targets the star Sirius which the ancient Egyptians associated with the goddess Isis the consort of Osiris but the interesting thing is that that targeting of those stars once we can we can look at ancient skies now with modern computer programs we can see exactly how they looked exactly the height and declension of each of the stars in the sky at any period in the past we wish and that alignment of the

shafts of the Great Pyramid with Sirius and with the stars of Orion’s belt is very firmly set in the epoch of around 2500 BC which is exactly the e-book that Egyptologists say the pyramids were built so it’s intriguing but that in itself does not rewrite history but there’s a second observation that Robert made and that Robert and I went on to refine together in a book called the of the Sphinx which which is different and this is that when you look at the

pattern of the three pyramids on the ground and their relationship to north and south they are actually imaging on the ground in three dimensions the three belt stars of the constellation of Orion not as they looked in 2500 BC and as they looked in 10500 BC twelve and a half thousand years ago right back in that cataclysmic episode when the ice age was melting down and then the the project that we went on to explore together concerns the Great Sphinx of

Giza which stands very close to the Great Pyramid the Great Sphinx is oriented perfectly Jew East it’s in the shape of a lion with a human head we think that the human head was a result of a recurving in historical times of what had once been a layer nine head and the Great Sphinx looks at the constellation of Leo the Lion its own celestial counterpart the resemblance is uncanny again in that remote epoch of 10,500 BC at the spring equinox when the

Sun rises perfectly juist in line with the gaze of the Sphinx so two messages appear to being to be being sent by the Giza Monument one monuments one speaks of the epoch of 2500 BC which is interesting but not controversial and the other speaks of the epoch an epoch much earlier 8,000 years earlier 10500 BC twelve and a half thousand years ago and we think this is the epoch that the ancient Egyptians called Zep tepi the first time and and so we have a

nuanced site here there is much about the sited Giza that can reliably and consistently be attributed to the Pharaohs of historical Egypt but there are structures on that site we think the base the base platforms of the three pyramids over which the pyramids were later built and completed we think the megalithic temples at Giza the so-called valley and mortuary temples and of course we think the Great Sphinx and here Robert shox work on the geology of

the Sphinx and on the weathering patterns of the Sphinx which show that it was exposed to thousands of years of heavy rainfall comes into play that these factors suggest to us that some of the monuments on the Giza Plateau not only commemorate a date that is 12 and a half thousand years in the past but actually were created there and if they were created then then a history really has a problem because that is not supposed at that time twelve and a half

thousand years ago our ancestors are supposed to have been simple hunter-gatherers without the competence or the will or the motivation to create gigantic megalithic architectural structures and and when these two ideas are brought together the the idea of the precipitation induced weathering of the Sphinx that was put forward by John Anthony West initially and then by professor Robert Schoch at Boston University and the idea of the stellar

alignments of the as above so below pattern that is being replicated by the monuments on the ground which also speaks of a remotely but when these two ideas are brought together you begin to you begin to sense that something about Giza is fantastically old and deeply deeply mysterious and this troubled Egyptologists a lot they didn’t like it because it was a well argued thoroughly presented a group of theories and they they sought to dismiss it and they said

you know how could that how could the Sphinx possibly be twelve and a half thousand years old our ancestors were hunter-gatherers then you notice the kind of circular logic that they go into they take their reference frame as though it’s a fact and then use it to throw away any contradictory evidence how could the Sphinx possibly be twelve and a half thousand years old there’s no other large scale monument any anywhere in the world that that’s that is that old and

and that’s why the much more recent discovery of a gigantic megalithic site in Turkey called gobekli tepe which was deliberately buried by whichever mysterious people made it that sealed like a time capsule and left untouched for more than 10,000 years that’s why the discovery of Gobekli Tepe is so important because the of that site is absolutely reliable it has been done by the German archaeological Institute there is no question of the intrusion of later

organic materials you can’t date stone you can only date organic materials with carpeting that site is definitively in the range of 12,000 years old it’s 7,000 years older than Stonehenge and the whole site so far only a tiny fraction of it has been excavated the rest has been imaged by ground-penetrating radar the whole site is about 50 times larger than Stonehenge it’s astonishingly sophisticated it is 12,000 years old and now the argument about the Sphinx has to

be taken up again Egyptology cannot dismiss it because there are other sites now in the world there’s another one in Indonesia that I’ve done a couple of research visits to called good and Padang which again looks like it’s 12,000 or more years old and I think we are poised on the edge of a paradigm shift where more and more new evidence comes into play which cannot be explained by the previous theory of history and which requires a new theory

of history requires us to recognize the possibility that there has actually been a lost civilization that its disappearance is connected to the cataclysms at the end of the last ice age that there were survivors and that they sought to pass down their knowledge to the future and that’s why I’ve just spent the last three years researching and writing a completely new book called magicians of the gods which is the sequel to fingerprints of the gods it’s

not a revised edition of fingerprints of the gods it’s a completely new book 500 pages long filled with new information from front to back because what’s happened in the last 20 years and fingerprints was published 20 years ago is that just a mass of exciting new information as emerged much of which is not yet in the public domain and in magicians of the gods I seek to put this in the public domain and there is some information on magician’s of the gods on

my website if you go to WWE my anchor dot-com you’ll see from the opening page and immediate link to magicians of the gods it’s being published in Britain on the 10th of September in America the publication date is presently listed as February 2016 but I’m optimistic that the publishers will bring that forward to November and that book is already available for pre-order on amazon.com and my feeling is that you know Robert Schoch and and Robert Bauval are also

working on a book looking specifically at the Sphinx and I think that what what is happening is that the whole group of us who worked in this field 20 years ago and who were radically attacked for considering this extraordinary possibility that we are now reaching a point where our the case that we may which was ridiculed at the time is being vindicated by my new evidence so I think it’s a very exciting moment I think it raises questions over everything that we

imagine human civilization to be about when we acknowledge that either through misinformation misdirection the history of our species has been either hidden from us through stupidity or you know whatever it is it can you say that this is some level of spiritual warfare well I have to consider that possibility because of my other interests which are my interests in shamanism and an altered states of consciousness which have have

convinced me that reality is much more complicated than you know our five senses might lead us to believe that we are immersed in an invisible reality and that reality has an impact and an influence upon us whether we like it or not this is the whole essence of shamanism the notion of a spirit world which which influences and impacts the human race and shamans are those amongst us who seek to be proactive about this and to and to enter into the realm of

spirits and negotiate with spirits on their own on their own terms and just as there is good and evil in the material realm in the physical world the you know you and I live our daily lives in the whole framework of shamanism we’ll also tell you that there is good and evil in the in the spiritual realm and that that there are dark and negative entities out there whose sole purpose is to delude and mislead the human race and moving away from from

shamanism if you go back to the ancient system called Gnosticism you will find that the same idea prevails there now the Gnosticism was stamped out by the Christian Church in the early centuries of the Christian era horrendous persecutions were unleashed upon those who called themselves Gnostics who believed in a revealed knowledge that that came through visionary experience the Gnostics absolutely made use of psychedelic mushrooms in their

investigations of the nature of of reality but enough of the Gnostic material has survived thanks largely to a library of Gnostic texts in fact they’re referred to you can buy you can buy the Gnostic texts on Amazon it’s called the NAG Hammadi library edited by James n M Robinson then the NAG Hammadi texts at the time of the persecution of the Gnostics a group of Gnostics who lived in southern Egypt near the temple of dendara took the decision to bury an

entire library of their texts in pottery jars in the sand and they remained hidden there from the fourth century AD until 1945 when they were found by chance and they’ve since since been translated and I would urge anybody who’s interested in the mysteries of existence to go and get the NAG Hammadi library James and Robinson Edition the full translation of the Gnostic texts and it’s an utter revelation they turn everything upside down I mean from the

Gnostic point of view we had been deluded for the last 2,000 years the entity that we have been taught to worshippers as God Christians Muslims Jews the the God of Abraham we all supposedly are taught to worship the same entity with call him different names from the Gnostic point of view this entity this creature is not a God at all he’s a he’s a demon he’s the the he’s a pretender he’s an impostor he’s persuaded us to believe that he is

God and to worship Him he’s got a huge overblown ego he’s extremely jealous he persuades human beings constantly to harm and hurt one another his whole purpose is to keep us in darkness and prevent us from realizing the divine spark within us so you know this is a profoundly revolutionary system of ideas and you can understand why the Christians particularly in the form of the Roman Catholic Church were so vigorous in their persecution of the Gnostics and

sought to stamp them out because once you really start to think about Gnostic ideas because what the Gnostics are saying don’t look at what these guys say you know Christianity Judaism Islam they all talk the talk of peace and love look at what they do look at what they actually do look at the burnings at a stake looking at look at the stoning to death of of women look at the the behavior that is encouraged look at the division the hatred the fear a suspicion

that multipliers around the world connected to these three religions and you might begin to wonder whether the Gnostics aren’t in fact right and whether we’ve been misled by some demonic force for the last two thousand years that has cleverly more than two thousand years this is the God of Abraham we’re talking about here that has cleverly convinced us that it is God when in fact it’s a it’s a demon and how more effectively could a demon operate

than that and this is not me saying this this is the whole essence of Gnosticism and of the revelation of Gnosticism and it’s really worth looking into now I’m not saying whether they’re right or wrong I leave that up to two others to decide each of us in our own way looking at the story of the world but the notion that there might be dark spiritual forces at work there the Gnostics envisage evil angels that call archons witch mingle amongst men

and mislead us into all manner of crimes and actions that are hostile to the nature of the soul they even look like human beings they might be some of our politicians actually and you know it’s a framework of analysis of the human condition that certainly is worth considering and taking seriously given the state of the world that we find ourselves in today yeah Wow mr. Hancock truly an honor to speak with you but I mean what do you

feel a shift in our in consciousness or of this paradigm within a culture that subsist with materialism television drunkenness what would a shift in consciousness look like how how can we recognize that this is occurring often when you’re in the middle of something is difficult to see it but I would say we’re in the middle of a shift in consciousness right now I think it’s happening all around the world the old paradigm of which the

historical paradigm is a part is still very powerful but it isn’t any longer it doesn’t any longer have a monopoly there is such a spread of information now the the Internet has had an unforeseen consequences people are able to communicate with one another directly without going through the the medium of the big media you know we can be in direct contact with one another we can form communities of ideas in increasingly notions that we are we are

taught to honor and revere such as patriotism seem to become absurd but patriotism is indeed the last refuge of the scoundrel after all why should we feel especially loyal to a fellow human being just because they happen to be born under the same bloody government or on the same piece of land as us what’s so special about that an accident of birth why should we why should we pin our loyalty on that why are we not willing to recognize that we are all

members of the human family that we owe that patriotic loyalty to the whole human race not to just a tiny segmented you know sectored part of it this this idea is coming with the internet because communities of ideas are forming around the world regardless of the color of your skin or the religion into which you were born or the political system into which by accident you were born or the land on which biased and you were born

the old paradigm says those things are really important that new paradigm says what’s important is the ideas we share and our common and our shared humanity that we are actually all brothers and sisters and that we will not be divided by these these malicious malign notions that limit our humanity and that limit the capacity of love so the old paradigm operates on fear it seeks to make people fearful and suspicious of one another

and it uses knee-jerk mechanisms like patriotism or this is your religion why should anybody actually accept a religion just because they happen to be born into it you know if there is a God he gave us a brain why don’t we use it you know why do we just this our parents told us that something is so and we just have to we just accept that as though it’s so we don’t ask any questions about it I think the new paradigm is asking a

lot of questions and people are all around the world developing a new kind of spirituality which is much more individualistic but at the same time respects and honors the spirituality of others so I think we are in the middle of a dramatic shift in consciousness and I think two three hundred years from now when historians look back on this epoch that we are privileged to live through they will realize that it was a moment of incredible importance in the story of

the human race it’s not certain what the outcome is going to be the old negative forces are still very powerful but the light is growing amongst humanity and we are waking up all around the world and we are refusing to put up with that bullshit any longer that has been stuffed into our ears and down our throats for centuries the Internet’s playing a huge role in this and psychedelics are also playing a huge role in it and that’s why psychedelics

are illegal and in psychedelics are really not dangerous they can be misused of course and I’m not advocating that the irresponsible use of psychedelics but but by comparison with pharmaceutical drugs the number of deaths caused by psychedelics is tiny miniscule almost unmeasurable you know whereas the the antidepressants and and and indeed acetaminophen you know pet painkiller kills thousands of people every every year even in tiny

Britain 3,000 people a year are killed by a set of mean ofin that’s not illegal you know but but alcohol glorified by our society widely available advertised promoted kills thousands of people every year not just cirrhosis of the liver but considered the road accidents so the arguments that you know we are being protected from ourselves by our governments who tell us that we may not take psychedelics and if they do they will send us to prison and ruin our

lives is absurd hypocritical argument it’s it’s a crazy argument the real reason that psychedelics are are so demonized in Western society is because somebody up there in the power structures know that these ancient natural allies of humanity lead us to ask deep searching questions about the kind of society we live in and that controlling powers the dominated powers that run our societies do not want us asking questions about anything they

don’t want us asking questions about the nature of reality they don’t want us asking questions about spirituality they don’t want us asking questions about materialism they just want us to go on mindlessly like robots uncomplaining robots producing and consuming producing and consuming feeding the machine instead of realizing our humanity and that’s what’s that’s what’s changing that’s where the great hope lies in the future and it’s up to us the choices the

choice is ours we actually don’t have to put up with that shit any longer you know we can make change but it takes it takes courage and and and and it takes a sharing of information love it man love it we are we’re running out of time here miss Hancock I have one more question for you if and you answered a bunch of my questions was scrolling through health and would love it if you could go back 20 years and tell your younger self one

thing what would it be um don’t be afraid you know don’t be don’t be afraid don’t let don’t let fear govern your decisions that would be that would be one important thing and another important thing is to remember that love is the opposite of fear and but that’s that is what we are really here to do we’re here to to give and to share love and and that means considering the needs of other people and and considering them carefully not being totally out for

oneself but but looking to be a nurturing and positive influence on others in our immediate circle I I think these are the most important messages send away fear and manifest love and the world will become a better place mr. Hancock sir thank you so much for being here where can people find your work your book pre-order it where can they get that Amazon well yeah I mean it’s it’s it’s up for the new book is that for pre-order on amazon.com and Amazon

UK but the access the quickest access to that is through my website which is Graham Hancock dot-com and then I’m also so go to that and you’ll see immediately a link to the some information about the new book magicians of the Gods but I’m also quite active on on Facebook I find I find Facebook a very important and effective means to communicate with like-minded individuals I have two Facebook pages I have a personal page which has got 5,000 friends and about

30,000 followers but my author page is really the most effective and there that’s got I don’t know two hundred and twenty-two thousand followers that’s how likes that’s how to recognize it’s great I can’t remember how it is but actually there’s a link to it on the front page of my website and I actually post the same information on both my Facebook pages and I communicate quite actively on those pages and I’ve found it a very very

an effective way to share ideas we will make sure that people get to your book and your Facebook page sir any any final comments here any last bit of information we got a few minutes well I think I just think the most important thing is to you know is to keep an open mind it’s a very mysterious matter to be alive at all you know we’re we’re taught to just like take it for granted like but again this is when I speak of materialism I’m not

only speaking of the economic side that it teaches us to produce and consume and seeks to persuade us that that’s all there is to life there’s a much deeper aspect of materialism and this is the notion that there is nothing more to reality than the material realm you know if you can’t weigh it measure it and touch it then it doesn’t exist this is this is the idea of many you know really intelligent scientists are absolutely committed to the notion of materialism

such scientists for example Richard Dawkins the author of the book called The God Delusion and also the book called The Selfish Gene Dawkins will tell you straight face that there is no such thing as life after death and many people are inclined to believe him they think Oh God well he’s a highly qualified scientist so he must know that about these things he must be right but actually what does he know you know has he died and and conducted

experiments and then come back no he hasn’t this is not a fact this is not a scientific fact that there’s no life after death this is a this is a reference frame it’s a it’s it’s actually a religious belief because it’s not based on any evidence whatsoever and and you know many scientists will tell you there’s no such thing as spirit the horrible idea of materialist science is that consciousness is what they call an epiphenomenon of brain activity that

consciousness is a kind of accident and we have these big brains they’ve evolved to enable us to survive in the jungle of human competition and as an accidental byproduct of that we’ve got this thing called consciousness and again it’s important to be clear that is not a fact consciousness is the greatest mystery of science we don’t know we know that there’s a connection between consciousness and the brain but the exact nature of the connection

between consciousness and the brain is not at all clear and it may be that the ancients were right that consciousness is fundamental to the universe and that it is essentially non-physical in character but that in our realm at our level of existence consciousness manifests in physical entities so so the the in a sense the relationship of the consciousness to the brain is more like the relationship of the you know the TV signal to the TV set but the you can

destroy the TV set but the TV signal is still is still there this I think this notion that consciousness is primary and that the realm of matter comes second that we are spirits we are souls having a human experience which is a very ancient idea I think that idea is going to turn out to be correct and the modern scientific idea that matter is everything and that consciousness is just an accidental byproduct of matter will turn out to be very foolish and

wrong and again I think people all around the world are waking up to this as well it’s a incredible gift to be born in a human body to have the experiences that we can have as human beings and I think that this world I described it so often as a theater of experience it’s a place where we come to learn and to grow and to develop and and anything that doesn’t serve that process and the whole structure of Western society right now does not serve that

process is Majerus and wrong we we need to understand that we’ve been given an incredible opportunity to live in a human body and to make the choices the fine choices between right and wrong between good and evil that all of us have to make every day sometimes at very small levels sometimes at very high levels and that we’re here to learn from making those choices and that we are the product of our choices let’s not allow ourselves to be deluded into the belief

that we are just an accidental combination of molecules and that’s all there is to us yes our bodies are a combination of molecules but the consciousness that’s embedded in those bodies is greatest mystery of science and it’s never been explained mr. Hancock it’s truly a pleasure to know you sir thank you so much for being here this is the human experience thank you guys for listening we will be back next week