Graham Hancock | Ancient Civlizations

good afternoon folks it's good good to see you all here and it's good to be here and if I collapse on stage from a heart attack don't be too surprised because I got in at midnight last night with hours of jet lag and I'm feeling a bit floaty at the moment but I'll do my best I'll do my best to keep it to keep it all together the ancient texts from many different cultures say that it's an incredible privilege to be born in a precious human body and to live on this beautiful gem this garden this delight of a planet what a gift we were all given when we were given the opportunity to incarnate here now on this planet at this time we we live at a crossroads there's no doubt we all feel it we all know it there's something coming down the track and we have to figure out how we're going to respond to that how we're going to turn it into an opportunity for growth rather than an opportunity for destruction I don't think it's the first time that mankind has stood at such a crossroads but here we are now facing it and hopefully dealing with it a precious opportunity which should not be wasted today I'm going to I'm going to talk about some traces of perhaps a lost civilization and these will look primarily at scientific traces and also at spiritual traces of that civilization all around the world I believe we are a species with amnesia I think we have forgotten our roots and our origins I think we are quite lost in many ways and we live in a society that that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost a society that invests in creating unconsciousness which invests in keeping people asleep so that we're just passive consumers or producers and not really asking any of the questions and I found for me the study of the past and the mysteries of the past has been a liberating process in terms of looking at the present this is the world of course as as it looks today we're very concerned about such issues as global warming climate change coming earth changes which which many have in have intuited but if you go back 20 1,000 years you will find that the world looked very different there were gigantic ice caps covering the major land masses the ice over North America this huge ice cap was actually two miles deep can you imagine that two miles of ice sitting on top of New York City well I don't know that's that's that's how it was saving come closer I mean just an extraordinary thing nobody could could live there any any traces of whatever was underneath it were ground to dust by the weight of that ice Europe the same story a gigantic ice cap bigger than Antarctica covering the whole of northern Europe just an extraordinarily different world this is our world today with its familiar contours and outlines and this is the world at the end of the last at not the end but at the last glacial maximum twenty one thousand three hundred years ago there was no Red Sea there was no Arabian Gulf the Indian coastline was greatly extended sri lanka joined on to the tip Southeast Asia was a whole continent that is now underwater just reduced to the Malaysian Peninsula and the Indonesian islands altogether ten million square miles of land were above water then that are underwater now and ten million square miles of land that's the whole of Europe and China added together in terms terms of area so this was a very serious change that took place in the earth when we went from that to this and it was a change which unfolded over a period of about ten thousand years but some times it was extremely cataclysmic it wasn't just a slow drip drip drip of the ice sheets what would happen on top of those two mile high ice caps is that you would get a gradual accumulation of meltwater in gracyk glacial lakes on top of the ice caps and this would perhaps accumulate for four or five thousand years before the boundaries surrounding it broke and the huge explosion of water poured down off the ice caps reaching speeds of a thousand kilometers an hour coming down tearing over the land destroying the landscape rushing into the the raising sea level 30 foot 40 foot rise in sea level over night happened twice during the last ice age we can imagine what a thirty or forty foot rise in sea level would do to our civilization today if it were to happen overnight I believe it would bring it instantly to an end now we have traditions myths stories from all around the world of of an all destroying global flood and the tendency of academics is to say that these stories are just what happened was there was some little local flood and the people in that area imaginatively elaborated it into a global flood I don't think I need such an explanation when I know that there were global floods at the end of the last ice age when the whole world was flooded again and again and again and I do believe that the flood myths from all around the world amongst which of course I include the story of Atlantis are a memory of real events recorded in myth and tradition it's rather interesting that Plato who is the earliest surviving source for the story of Atlantis tells us that he got it from his relative Solon who in turn got it from the ancient Egyptians and that they spoke of a time nine thousand years before the time of so long that's 9600 BC or eleven thousand six hundred years before the present when the wonderful civilization of Atlantis was destroyed in a single terrible day and a night by flooding and earthquakes academics think that Plato made it all up but if Plato made it all up it's extraordinary that he chose that date and that time around 12,000 years ago because that was absolutely at the peak of the meltdown of the last ice age when there was indeed global flooding the story is all over the world in India it's the stir aurilla manu the indian noah rescued from the from the flood by vishnu in greece it's the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha the same thing a couple who regenerate mankind surviving the flood writing it out in a box that rides along the waves the Maya too had this story of the end of the last world age and the whole Mayan concept of cyclicals I'm and what goes around comes around fits in with this very very strongly here's the story of Noah from the Bible and if you want to find the origins of the story of Noah you need to go to Sumer the land that is now Iraq where the Epic of Gilgamesh almost five thousand years old tells essentially the same story that is told in the Bible of a warning one man warned the gods are angry with mankind they're going to send a flood you must save what you can it's the story of Gilgamesh the story the story of the Gilgamesh epic interestingly enough if you go to the Arabian Gulf where the Gilgamesh epic comes from and you look at the situation at the end of the at the the last ice age this was the Arabian Gulf at the last glacial maximum this is not see this is a river this is the combined streams of the Tigris and the Euphrates running through the otherwise completely dry arabian gulf which formed a kind of Garden of Eden it was a one of the most wonderful places to live on earth at that time when most of the rest of the world was extremely arid and very inhospitable and then around 12,000 years ago very very quickly the whole Arabian Gulf became flooded so I think that if we see a flood story from that talking of a global flood it's pretty easy to understand where it came from it came from what happened it's a memory it's not myth Australia that's how it was at the last glacial maximum 21,000 years ago with that gigantic tip of Southeast Asia nearby that's how it is today and again the Aborigines of Australia who've been in Australia for fifty thousand years have myths and traditions of global floods a great flood serpent which ate up the land is put into symbolic language but again it's a memory of what happened at the end of the Ice Age now one of the things when I first began to explore these mysteries 20 20 plus years ago now one of the first things that struck me was the what I call the mystery of the maps that there are certain maps that have come down to us from antiquity which show the world not as it looks today but as it looked during the last ice age and whenever you look into the story of these maps you find that they were copied from older source maps typically between the 13th and 17th centuries so the maps that we look at are relatively recent they date from the 13th to the 17th centuries but when you find their origins you find that the map makers drew on many source maps which are no longer available to us and and these ancient maps seem to record the world as it looked twenty fifteen thousand years ago this was the level of map making technology in the seventh century in Spain and indeed in the 13th century these are called pio maps because of the shape they're quite pretty but you definitely would not want to navigate by them okay they're really bad for navigation actually East is up on these maps this would be Jerusalem center of the world this is the Mediterranean here's Spain here's North Africa and as I say pretty but but useless however that maps from 1283 and round about that time end of the 13th century flooded into Europe a whole new set of maps and nobody really knows where they came from ptolemies maps we know of ptolemy of course but he himself 2,000 years ago was drawing on earlier source maps when he created his maps and those maps disappeared during the dark ages they were preserved in monasteries and they came to the attention of Mariners at the end of the 13th century they're not as good as modern maps but they're very good and you can navigate by them another mysterious group of maps appeared at that time and these are the so-called portal lands the portal and cartographic tradition this is the piece on chart from 1280 it's the earliest surviving example that's Italy there you're coming into Spain and North Africa here and the Holy Land there what's remarkable about these maps is that they incorporate incredibly precise latitudes and longitudes now latitude is a relatively easy thing to do simply by measuring the height of the Sun or stars above the horizon but the pole star above the horizon specifically but longitude requires technology it requires a chronometer that can maintain accurate time as the Earth spins and our civilization was not able to do longitude until the late 18th century and that's why many Mariners before that the longitude problem was cracked would end up bumping into coastlines that they didn't expect to be there because they've done their calculations wrong but weirdly in these older maps highly accurate choose how do we explain that other than as a heritage from an earlier mapmaking tradition Charles Hapgood his work on the maps of the ancient sea Kings is really the best source on this on this material and he's suggesting that the portal and tradition came through a predecessor of ptolemy marinus of Tyre perhaps through ptolemy stored in the Library of Alexandria when the Library of Alexandria was burned down some of those maps went to Constantinople Crusaders went into Constantinople and took away some of those maps and reintroduced them to the world that's roughly the suggestion here I think everybody's heard of the piri Reis map which is a portal and map and here we see South America's East Coast to be compared there the west coast of Africa and down here at the very southern tip of South America a continuous landmass that appears to be Antarctica on a map dating from 1513 and it's really a puzzle if you find Antarctica on maps from the 16th century because our civilization didn't discover Antarctica until the early 19th century here's Antarctica as it looks today and here's Antarctica as it looked around the year 1800 in this map from Russia which shows no Antarctica at all and it's not there because we haven't discovered it in 1800 we didn't discover it until 1818 yeah if you go back to the 1600s and the 1500s Antarctica is all over ancient maps there it is in this beautiful work of erroneous Phineas a rather accurate depiction of the continent of Antarctica and here again a map by merket or the favorite everybody's headed the Mercator projection a great map maker here again Antarctica present in that map both of those maps the erroneous Phineas map and the Mercator map drew on earlier source maps now lost to us is it possible that those earlier source maps may go back to an earlier civilization one that had the technology to explore the entire globe to map it mathematically in a way that that we can recognize today as highly sophisticated because that's what these maps seem to show here's one of those Ptolemaic maps not quite so good as the portal ends but still pretty good and interesting really to to look at Southeast Asia and how Southeast Asia is represented in this huge land mass here and to compare that with well there's Southeast Asia today there it is on that map and here's how it looked twenty one thousand three hundred years ago and I find a really remarkable similarity between what the geologists now tell us Southeast Asia looked like twenty-one thousand years ago and what it looks like on this map even with the tip of the Australian landmass coming into the image right there another Ptolemaic map from 1513 off the British Isles and off the island of Ireland is a little island here can you see it this little island is called hai Brazil lots of people believed in the existence of hai Brazil I know personally have two expeditions that were sent out from Bristol which is a town very near where I live to look for hi Brazil but they couldn't find it because they didn't need a ship to find it they needed a time machine you have to go back thirteen thousand years to find hi Brazil and that's where it was the geology shows us quite clearly with lower sea levels at that time this landmass was exposed around thirteen thousand years ago the map the landmass that is shown on that map and let's go back to the piri Reis map again on it right up here there's an island which doesn't exist not today anyway and on that island there's these curious stones side by side you see them there that Island is in exactly the place where Bimini is today and underwater of Bimini is the famous Bimini Road I think that that's what's shown on this image here how it looked before it was flooded at the end of the Ice Age now if we are looking at the faint fingerprints and traces of a lost civilization that explored and mapped the world more than 13,000 years ago what other traces are there well I wrote a whole book about this called fingerprints of the gods so you'll find it all in there I want to I want to concentrate on on the spiritual side of things because there is a there is an astonishing spiritual continuity all around the world and I'm going to speak of it today with specific focus to ancient Egypt but also with with a secondary focus on Cambodia again the piri Reis map it actually turns out to be drawn on a very modern projection which is an azimuthal equidistant projection and it's based on Cairo where Giza is where the Pyramids of Giza are so this seems a good opportunity to go to Giza and here we find the majestic the incredible the mysterious Great Sphinx speaking to us in riddles down the ages this beautiful and majestic monument and the pyramids themselves my wife's antha took all of these photographs she and I have been privileged to visit visit Egypt times beyond counting there is something truly magical and mysterious about that site it is it is a very special place on the world it isn't the only special place but it is extraordinarily special and it touches it touches the soul and it touches something deep in us and I believe that that's because it was designed to do that the three Great Pyramids of Giza standing there in the desert like three stars brought down to earth now one thing about the Great Pyramid you can tell immediately even though you might not know anything else is that astronomy was involved in creating it the Great Pyramid is stunningly accurately aligned to true north south east and west it's actually within three sixtieths of a single degree of true north and that is that is an incredible accurate alignment especially when you're dealing with a monument with a footprint of 13 acres it would be very hard to do it today we probably could do it but it would be difficult and the architect would want to know why I mean why do you want to do that you we can build you this an amazing huge monument but must it really be within three sixtieth of a single degree of True North that's making the problem really really huge so it tells us not only where astronomers involved to get that letter of accuracy but also that it was important to them it really mattered to them to be precise to be on the on the button in that way and a second thing which just will not go away at Giza no matter how angry the archaeologists become no matter how they swarm out of their nest and leap all over anybody who dares to criticize the existing paradigm what will not go away is the hint of much greater antiquity surrounding the entire Giza complex that's what won't go away and that's what I want to look into a little bit just now this is from the temple of seti the first in Abydos and we see the pharaoh seti showing his young son Rama sees the second a list of all the kings of Egypt who'd ruled before them and that list goes back through the historical Pharaoh's who we know about back to round about the date that we would call 3,000 BC when the Egyptian civilization is supposed to have begun but it doesn't stop there it keeps on going back it goes back thousands and thousands and thousands of years before that until the time of the gods the time that the ancient Egyptians called Zep tepi the first time when the gods brought civilization to Egypt that's what the pharaoh is showing his son a connection to the gods going back thousands of years into the past and from the tomb of Seti the first again we see this idea it goes right the way back to the god Osiris he is showing the way to the future Horus kings of Egypt how they should live how they should create a kingdom how it should be in harmony between Earth and heaven everything goes back to the first time to the time of the Gods to the time of Osiris sorry temple of horus at edfu Horus is the son of Osiris in the traditions of the ancient Egyptians at this temple of Horus there our whole walls covered with texts those texts are known as the ed foo building texts and this is what they look like and they're very mysterious many people many archaeologists will tell you that there is no flood tradition in Egypt this is absolute nonsense they clearly have not read the editor building texts because the ed foo building texts speak of a homeland of the primeval ones they say it was an island they say it's where the gods lived they say there was a great flood there which utterly destroyed it and that those gods who survived came to Egypt settled in Egypt and started to re-establish what they had had before they built what were called primeval mounds all over Egypt which were to be the sites of all future temples and religious structures in Egypt is it possible that some of the monuments of ancient Egypt are actually much older than the Egyptologists tell us here is the asari on in Abydos named after the god Osiris and it's a very curious structure gigantic blocks of stone 100 ton weights are very common in the asari arm and weirdly it's close to a hundred feet lower than the nearby temple of seti the first now Egyptology gypped ologists to tribute this monument to SETI the first but it was it actually appears to have been built at a much earlier phase it's just so much it's just so much lower down it's like there's been the accumulation of silt on top of it and then thousands of years later SETI the first came along and built his temple and then when the archaeologists excavated that they said well that's by SETI the first this is nearby ah it must be by SETI the first there's no good evidence connecting it to SETI the first at all the Great Sphinx of Giza I'm not going to go into detail into Robert shox and John Anthony West's extraordinary work on the rainfall erosion of the Sphinx but it has thrown a real spanner in the works of Egyptology of the Egyptologists are still very upset about it you know how dare a geologist suggests that the Sphinx actually might be thousands of years older then it's supposed to be because that is what shocked and West are suggesting that these erosion patterns in the trench surrounding the Sphinx which we would have seen on the body of the Sphinx too if it had not been restored again and again down the ages that this erosion pattern can only be caused by exposure to thousands of years of heavy heavy rainfall and no such rainfall fell in Egypt in 2500 BC when the Sphinx is supposed to have been built you have to go back to the end of the last ice age to find that massive precipitation that could have caused this level of weathering in Egypt and these extraordinary temples that stand in front of the Sphinx were created from the limestone that was quarried out around the body of the Sphinx to create the body therefore they are as old as the Sphinx if the Sphinx is 12,000 years old then so are these temples and these temples like mighty memorials of a forgotten past are really hard to explain there are blocks of stone again in the range of a hundred tons in these temples and they just have been built up as though it's an easy thing to do as though it's easy to manipulate hundred ton blocks of stone now the three great pyramids standing above the modern city of Cairo that atmosphere of strangeness and a mystery cannot be escaped let's take a quick flight around the great pyramids of keys and we're looking from the east side here over the village of Nazareth our Nazareth Imam the great pyramid pyramid of Katherine supposedly the Pyramid of Menkaure will come round again swinging around to the west side now this is the North Face of the Great Pyramid second pyramid the third pyramid can you see the Sphinx by the way this is the Sphinx down here Fink's is 270 feet long and 80 feet high but it's dwarfed by the pyramids it almost disappears from view and here's the valley of the nile off to the east so let's just come in closer and closer to these amazing monuments the top of the Great Pyramid 480 feet above the ground a flattened area on top of the Great Pyramid there and there I am on top of the Great Pyramid now I'm not showing this picture for well that's how it that's how I used to look in those days a sweet bird of youth how quickly does she fly we climbed up the southwest face there the southwest corner and actually I've climbed the Great Pyramid five times three of the climbs were legal and two were illegal this was one of the illegal climbs and on one of the climbs when I had more time because I was up there legally and the police weren't going to arrest me Santa and I we spent some time looking around at the graffiti on top of the Great Pyramid it's astonishing there's graffiti going back hundreds of years up there even merket or that mapmaker he left his graffiti up there loads of people had been climbing the Great Pyramid and leaving their graffiti including I found that this was an astonishing moment for me one step down just behind me there is a piece of graffiti that says P Hancock April 5th 1916 hmm my grandfather was called Philip Hancock ha he was in Egypt in 1960 after we got down off the pyramid I called my dad he was still alive been and asked him to look at my grandfather's diary What did he say for the date of April 5th 1916 one single line climbed the Great Pyramid today it was an extraordinary moment for me and there's something about this place it's like flying on a magic carpet above the city of Cairo it's just it's such a privilege such a gift to be able to to go there I don't want to bore you with statistics it's just 13.1 acres it weighs 6 million tons it's got 2.3 million blocks of stone it's 481 feet high it just is the most amazing thing you know it's just you you you can look at it and just kind of miss it and then you look at it closely and you begin to realize you're looking at something that's utterly impossible I just want to take you on a quick journey around some of the interior of the Great Pyramid and I think we'll start we'll start down here in the so-called subterranean chamber which is 600 feet vertically beneath the apex of the pyramid and about a hundred feet beneath the base and it's carved out of solid rock they went 300 feet a sloped corridor sloping an angle of 26 degrees you have to go 300 feet down it and then you reach this chamber at the bottom so they had to make that chamber they had to cut down through the rock 300 feet it's about three feet six inches high and the same wide so you're going to go down like this all the way down and you get to the bottom and here's this rock hewn chamber deep deep underground and here's a couple of likely lads in the rock hewn chamber that's me and my friend Robert Bauval the author of the Orion mystery just to give you a sense of the size of the room now coming out of the sub tray chamber let's go back up this passageway which leads to it there it is cut from solid rock as as I described and then you come to this Junction here and you go up the so called ascending corridor and along a horizontal passage that leads you to the so-called Queen's Chamber we don't know what the builders of these pyramids called these chambers all these names are modern attributions let's just take a quick look inside the Queen's Chamber the statistics are there there's these curious little shafts in the walls of the Queen's Chamber up until the 1870s this shaft was not visible it was covered by a block of stone when they completed the chamber they closed it but a British Freemason called Wayman Dixon could notice that there were shafts in the chamber above the King's Chamber wondered if there might be shafts in the Queen's Chamber and he went around tapping the walls and he found these hollow points cut out the stone and sure enough there's these shafts and my friend Robert Bauval has established the astronomical connections of these shafts that the Queen's Chamber shafts point the southern shaft this one points to Sirius and the northern shaft points to beta Ursa Minor very curious thing especially since these shafts actually do not exit on the outside of the pyramid the ones from the King's Chamber do that these ones don't and back in 1993 a German robotics engineer Rudolph Ganton brink said the little robot up that shaft and 165 feet up the shaft the robot came to this door with two metal handles Rudolph Ganton brake was immediately banned from doing any further work in Egypt and was sent away the project was taken over by the Egyptian government some years later as aji Zahi Hawass sent another robot up the shaft with a mission to drill through that door and find out what was on the other side duh there we go there's the drill there's the door there's the hole that they made you know what they found on the other side a space in another door it's like an invitation search me the pyramid is saying search me but I'm not going to make it easy for you you're really going to have to figure this thing out we still don't know what's at the end of that shot okay so we're going to come out of the Queen's Chamber back along the horizontal corridor now we're looking at the Grand Gallery 153 feet long 28 feet high this is called the Korbel vault each level protrudes slightly over the level below it and narrows up towards the ceiling well these blocks weigh about 70 tons each their later angle of 26 degrees you can't get a sheet of paper between the joints they're unbelievably precise it's like being compared to opticians work on a scale of acres an astonishing feat of construction the work of giants really at the top of the ground gallery you have an entrance to the King's Chamber this is the King's Chamber here and above the King's Chamber not known until the early 19th century are one two three four five more chambers and getting into those chambers is really fun I'll come to that in a moment but let's let's first of all go into the King's Chamber and this is this is what the King's Chamber looks like there those are those shafts again this is the northern shaft of southern shafts on this side one pointing to Orion's belt and the other again pointing to one of the circumpolar stars it's a beautiful geometric room it's made of granite blocks Great Pyramid is a limestone monument these granite blocks were brought about five hundred miles from Aswan they were lifted to a height of hundreds of feet above the ground and put it into position in this extraordinary chamber in the heart of the pyramid there is a sarcophagus in it I and my colleagues believe that this is not a sarcophagus that ever contained the body of the pharaoh Khufu or of any Pharaoh we think that it was involved in in some kind of process some kind of initiation I'm going to talk about that a little bit but because there is a sarcophagus in it immediately the assumption has been made but this must have been the burial chamber of Khufu let's look at this setup again here the King's Chamber and the so-called relieving chambers up above it rather similar to the JED pillar the symbolic backbone of a cyrus which is a symbol of resurrection and rebirth in the ancient Egyptian religion it seems that they were creating a symbol of resurrection of rebirth within the within the Great Pyramid to get into those rooms here's what you do you put a ladder 30 feet high up against this wall and you lean it up against that side there and there's a little hole just a bit wider than me which fortunately a rope now hangs out of and you grab hold of that rope hole your body into it pull yourself through and then you get into a narrow tunnel and that leads you into the first eventually into the all five of these chambers and I'll just take you to the top chamber that's that one up there and again these extraordinary huge blocks of stone these are in the range of a hundred tons each which form the floor of of this chamber and indeed all the other chambers again have these gigantic blocks of stone which which which are almost impossible to move really but there they are more graffiti inside sister Mt Martin 6th of February 1915 oh there's me with one of my kids Leila again just to show you the size and the and the scale of the thing we'll go back to the pyramids here is the only evidence that Egyptologists are able to cite which connects the Great Pyramid to the pharaoh Khufu and that is a cartouche which appears to say the name Khufu that is found in that very top most relieving chamber that I that I showed you it's round about over here somewhere and there are no other inscriptions whatsoever inside the Great Pyramid not one but this this graffiti as its referred to is supposed to be what's called a quarry mark that was put on the blocks by the gangs of construction workers who were quarrying out the blocks that would be built into the Great Pyramid and they said this is Khufu's block or something something like that it's not very convincing evidence that the pyramid was built by Khufu or for Khufu there is a there is a hint of doubt over the authenticity of the cartouche itself could it have been forged by how advise who founded in the early 19th century but one thing's for sure if Khufu was the Builder of the pyramid he had a pretty small ego for such a big monument this is the only statue of Khufu that's ever survived it's about 2 inches high and you know you would have thought he'd have put his name all over this thing instead of just on some bit of graffiti up in a block in a chamber that nobody is ever going to see but he didn't it's absolutely bare there are no texts nothing in there that tells you what's going on however if you go down to Sakura about 15 miles south of giza you will come to a group of pyramids dating from the 5th and 6th dynasties not the 4th dynasty which this one supposedly days - and those pyramids are filled with texts now I just showing this overlay actually I'm going to come into giveaways aren't the secret she did this by accident because Salford we were at Giza Santa took a shot of the pyramids of giza then we went down to Saqqara and we went into the Pyramid of Una's and Santha took a photograph of the Pyramid of Una's and we got this double exposure where the the Pyramid of Una's is overlaid on the on the Giza pyramids and here are the so-called Pyramid Texts the star covered ceiling of the pyramid and the Pyramid Texts on the walls and these Pyramid Texts are the earliest surviving recensions of what we now know as the books of the Dead the ancient Egyptian books of the dead and they concern the mystery of life and death and what it is we're doing on this planet they're very deep they're very profound and they are it seems to me that they were putting in writing their what the Great Pyramid does in architecture alone the Great Pyramid does it entirely symbolically in architecture in the later pyramids they expressed it in texts and all of these texts whether it's the the Pyramid Texts which are the oldest surviving the coffin texts because they're written inside the lids of coffins the book of what is in the do art which you'll find painted on the walls of many of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings and and the books of the Dead which word papyrus scrolls that were placed with the deceased inside the coffin all of these seek to prepare us for the journey that the ancient Egyptians believed that we will face that we will confront on our own deaths and the ancient Egyptians regarded the issue of life and death as extremely important our civilization kind of avoids the subject of death really we we're not we don't want to know about death and we try to shove it away to the margins and not think about it and least of all to prepare ourselves psychologically and spiritually for that moment that will come to us all the ancient Egyptians put their best minds to work for 3,000 years on considering the mystery of death and what we may or may not confront when we die and when it comes to these matters I would rather listen to the ancient Egyptians than any bloody modern scientist because the modern scientists are just pygmies you know they're infants they're children they may be able to weigh measure and count brilliantly but they know nothing of matters of the Spirit we need to turn to civilizations like ancient Egypt the ancient Maya and to surviving shamanistic cultures around the world to understand really the mysteries of life and death so let's have a little bit of a look at the Egyptian story these are the souls of pay and neck n they're a mysterious Brotherhood that was entrusted with transmitting the religion of Osiris to the future so important was it that it had to be preserved and and passed down from generation to generation Osiris was the first King he lived in the legendary first time he was the civilizer he brought civilization to Egypt and he was murdered by his antagonist set and seventy-two conspirators and his body was hacked to pieces and reassembled and revivified through the magic of Isis the goddess Isis and here we see that what happens next is Osiris is brought back to life so that he can inseminate Isis she hovers over him in the form of a bird of a kite and receives his seed and produces their son Horus who continues the divine the divine line and here we see Horus performing the rituals that bring about the resurrection of his father in the in the heavens Horus comes to you o king that he may do for you what he did for his fatherís iris so that you may live as those in the sky live that you may be more extant than those who exist on earth raise yourself because of your strength may you ascend to the sky may the sky give birth to you like a Ryan may you have power in your body and may you protect yourself from your foe that's from the Pyramid Texts and again this image from the tomb of Seti the first Osiris writing on his bird of stars showing the way to the future Pharaohs of Egypt nobody disputes that when the ancient Egyptians looked at the constellation of Orion they saw it as the figure of Osiris in the sky this is not a controversial statement Orion ruled over the celestial afterlife kingdom of the Duat and the Duat had very specific astronomical coordinates roughly between the constellation of Orion and Leo and divided by the Great River the Milky Way which the ancient Egyptians called the winding waterway and again all of this is laid out in the books a lot of this is the work of Robert Bauval he and I worked together on the message of the Sphinx when you look at the layout of the pyramids on the ground of course everybody in this room is familiar with the Orion correlation theory Robert Bauval extraordinary discovery which is really revolutionized our understanding of Egypt you find that the three pyramids are representing the three stars of Orion's belt the Nile is just right for the Milky Way I'm not suggesting that the ancient Egyptians built the Nile I'm suggesting that Giza was put where it was because the Nile was there and it happened to reflect a celestial item that they wanted to draw down and then we have this lion bodied monument and constellation of Leo which I'm going to speak about a bit a bit layer a little bit later so Osiris ruled in the first time and we shouldn't be surprised that the astronomical layout contains hints of very ancient origins and I'll come back to those in a moment I want to talk about the journey through the dew out this strange parallel realm which is at once a place in the heavens and also a kind of underworld with narrow corridors and ways and strange chambers that you find yourselves in and and and monsters and demons and you have to be prepared for every challenge that you will face there in fact that was what your life was for it was to prepare you for that moment when you make the journey through the afterlife realm sometimes the god Anubis would act as your psychopomp as your guide leading you through the afterlife the texts make it clear that there was a great secret in the fifth division of the Duat which is referred to as the land of so car and of Rostow and it's not an accident that Rostow was one of the ancient names of giza in fact in this image from the book of what is in the Duat we see a pyramid we see a sphinx and we see a hidden chamber with this curious figure three headed serpent here a winged serpent very familiar from this part of the world go back inside those chambers and corridors there's the Grand Gallery of the Great Pyramid here's an image from the book of what is in the Duat a boat a huge boat is buried on the south side of the Great Pyramid we find boats used in the navigation of the Duat the narrow corridors and passageways strange chambers here with star gods seated and the King's Chamber what I'm suggesting is that the Great Pyramid was your journey through the Duat in stone it was a place where you prepared for that journey and I think that this room probably has something to do with this scene and this is called the judgment scene and it takes place in the fifth Division of the Duat in the whole of mart-mart is the goddess of cosmic harmony of truth of justice and she is symbolized by this feather and here we see the deceased in this case one of the the mag Pharaoh's because this is from Deir el-medina the West Bank it looks or being ushered into the Hall of Mart which is also called the judgment hall of a cyrus and here in the background we see a set of scales and there are the scales here is the god Thoth writing on a tablet this monster is called amat the eater of the dead he is part crocodile part hippo and part hyena and here is Osiris sitting in judgment the weighing of the heart is the central aspect of this sea and what we see here weighed against the feather of truth of harmony of Justice is this symbol representing the heart of the deceased you would not want your heart to weigh heavy with sin you would not want that to happen because then you might have to face the eater of the Dead and you definitely don't want to do that it's as if your whole life is weighed up in this moment these figures here are the monks the 42 Assessors and the judgment hall of Osiris they ask you questions did you kill did you steal actually all the Ten Commandments are there and another 30 as well and you're supposed to be able to answer all of them no I didn't do that there's supposed to be say you're supposed to be to be able to answer in the in the negative but there's a so this is moral behavior but there's a sense that the the judgment of moral behavior in the ancient Egyptian judgment scene is only part of the story as though it's necessary to lead a good life but not sufficient it's not alone enough just to lead a good life it's as though these texts these ideas are recognizing what I said at the beginning that that comes down to us from many ancient today that it's a precious gift to be born in a human body and the question that's being asked of you there not only is did you behave morally and decently towards your fellow humans but also did you did you use that opportunity you were given an opportunity did you use it well did you live did you really live that life that you were given or did you waste it away that's the second aspect of the of the judgment scene and the more difficult and the more complex one so both records the verdict if your heart outweighed the feather if your life was lived inflicting misery and cruelty and pain on others if it was if your spiritual potential was utterly fretted away and wasted this is what you would face annihilation never to be born again never to come back your story is over it's rubbed out from the book of life if you've lived your life right then something wonderful is being proposed that's the life of millions of years and I just want to read a passage from the non Manley Ellis translation of the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead I stand before the Masters who witnessed the creation who were with rah that morning the Sun rolled into being who were with Osiris in the grave as he gathered himself together and burst from the tomb white with heat a light and shining God hail Thoth architect of truth give me words of power that I may recall my years and weave together my history hail Thoth architect of truth give me words of power that I may form the characters of my own evolution I stand before the Masters who witnessed the generation who were the authors of their own forms who rolled into being who walked the dark circuitous passageways of their own who saw with their own eyes their destinies and the shapes of things to come I stand before the Masters who witnessed the working of magic who were with Isis the evening she became the swallow and her lamentations filled the air who were with her as she shook down her black hair and veiled the gods transformation in secret who witnessed the conception of the divine child though his coming was yet unrevealed hail Thoth architect of truth give me words of power that when I speak the life of a man I may give his story meaning I stand before the Masters who know the histories of the dead who decide what tales to hear again who judged the books of lives as either full or empty who are themselves authors of truth and they are Isis and Osiris the divine intelligences and when the story is written and the end is good and the soul of a man is perfected with a shout they lift him into heaven hail Thoth architect of truth give me words of power that I may complete my story and begin life anew I stand before the Masters who witnessed the transformation of the body of a man into the body and spirit who were witnesses to the resurrection when the corpse of Osiris entered the mountain and the soul of a cyrus walked out shining he gathered his heel and his leg he gathered his arms and his backbones he gathered dreams crackling inside the dark cave of his skull he knitted himself together in secret he came forth from death a shining thing is a face white with heat perhaps these monuments formed a sacred landscape in which the afterlife journey was prepared to the ultimate goal of joining Osiris in the sky winning the life of millions of years it's part of an ancient spiritual system and what it's celebrated and nurtured above all else was the gift of life and yes the ancient Egyptians sought immortal life but they did not take it for granted here is Thoth writing the name of Rama sees the second on the tree of life the life of millions of years if you ask the ancient Egyptians where this religion came from they tell you it came from the gods in Zep tepi the first time when the gods came to Egypt and here's the great that's the second pyramid on the equinox on the spring equinox you can see the shadows like an Oman shadow running absolutely due west clues as to when the first time might have been are actually contained in the monuments themselves and they require us to understand a little bit about a complicated astronomical phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes it's accepted that the ancient Egyptians had pretty good observational astronomy but most mainstream astronomers today would absolutely reject the notion that the ancient Egyptians had any knowledge at all of the precession of the equinoxes certainly astronomy in ancient Egypt was a spiritual rather than a scientific pursuit there's no doubt about that I mean the second shrine of Tutankhamun is particularly interesting in this respect you can see these initiates connected through the through the third eye to a star in the sky somehow as though that the study of the heavens is part of our fulfilling ourselves as as individuals on this on this planet but precession of the equinoxes know the the scholars say they they couldn't possibly have known that it's a process that we think is caused by the pull of the Sun and the moon on the earth it causes the earth to wobble like a top which is slowing down and that wobble takes 26,000 years actually twenty-five thousand nine hundred and twenty years to complete one great cycle and it unfolds at the rate of one degree every 72 years each of the twelve constellations of the zodiac gets 30 degrees along the ecliptic the path of the Sun and the precession runs in the opposite direction to the normal direction of the zodiac it goes it goes backwards it's processing backwards and you have roughly 2,000 160 years in each House of the zodiac and these are thought to define the age so this is why we say we live in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius because in our time the Sun is moving out of Pisces on the spring equinox and moving into Aquarius it isn't quite there yet we're not in the Age of Aquarius we're perhaps not even on the cusp another hundred two hundred years and we'll be much closer to the beginning of the Age of Aquarius than we then we are today also from the second shrine of Tutankhamun this rather mysterious image mahem they envelop her the serpent of cyclic all time he who hides the hours I think this is one of many references to the secret knowledge of procession in ancient Egypt and the Sphinx is part of the way that we can reveal this a marker on the clock of time the Great Sphinx it looks perfectly due east it's aligned absolutely perfectly to due east and Santa took this photograph from the back of the Sphinx looking in the direction of the gaze of the Sphinx and this photograph at dawn on the spring equinox from the back of the Sphinx and there you can see the proof the Great Sphinx gazes directly at the Rising Sun on the spring equinox summer solstice the Sun is way over here winter solstice it's way over here spring Equinix dead in line with the gaze of the Sphinx and I'll just take another moment to do another short reading about the ancient Egyptian concept of the Sun men praise thee in thy name raah and they swear by thee for thou art lord over there thou hearest with thine eyes and thou seest with thine sorry now here is with thine ears and thou seest with thine eyes millions of years have gone over the world I cannot tell the number of those through which thou hast passed that us pass over and dost travel through untold spaces requiring millions and hundreds of thousands of years to pass over that passes through them in peace and they're serious thy way across the watery abyss to the place which thou lovest this they are doest in one little moment of time and then that us sink down and dost make an end of ours astonishingly sophisticated notion of the big numbers and distances involved in the in the Sun so the Sun gazes the Sphinx gazes at the Rising Sun dawn on the spring equinox and it does that every year in all times what changes is the stellar background against which that sunrise is occurring that's what's changed by the precession of the equinoxes and processional drift occurring at the rate of one degree every 72 years 30 degrees gives you two thousand one hundred and sixty years the whole process twelve houses of the zodiac takes you twenty five thousand nine hundred and twenty years and using the science of precession looking at the monuments of Giza I can tell you that this diagram on the ground the Sphinx and the three great pyramids Maps the sky not as it looked in 2500 BC but as it looked in 10500 BC twelve and a half thousand years ago when the constellation of Leo has the Sun on the spring equinox and the Great Sphinx gazed at her celestial counterpart in the heavens the Milky Way and the Nile the three stars of Orion's belt in the pyramid very strange this does it tell us that the ancient Egyptians knew that date and wanted to memorialize it in stone or does it suggest actually that some of these monuments may actually go back to that very ancient time long long long before the Pharaohs of Egypt I'm going to move a little quickly but the work on precession of the equinoxes the fundamental work is Hamlet's mill by Giorgio de Santa jana and hearth of auditioned it's a tough read they were Georgia descent Indiana was a professor of history of science at MIT but what they document in that book is global world wide knowledge of precession of the equinoxes recorded in myth a series of numbers that keep coming up again and again and again all over the world in every part of the world which only can arise from procession and santillana and vanish and hit it in the little paragraph right in the middle of the book they traced it back to some almost unbelievable ancestor civilization of remote antiquity 72 is the heartbeat of the cycle some numbers 72 divided by 2 is 36 72 plus 36 is 108 half 108 is 54 all these are what I call the processional numbers which are derived from and related to the process of procession of the equinoxes and you find them in myths in Viking myths in in Indian traditions the story of Osiris and his 72 assailants the number of stanzas in the Rig Veda is just all over the world in myth everywhere the story of precession of the equinoxes in numbers now the Great Pyramid Egyptologists know this but they say it's a coincidence is a mathematical scale model of the northern hemisphere of the earth it's quite simple if you take the base perimeter measurement of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by a specific number and that number is 43,200 you get the equatorial circumference of the earth and if you take the height of the Great Pyramid and multiply it by the same number you get the polar radius of the earth as I say Egypt I'll just know this but they say it's a coincidence actually if it were any other number than 43,200 I might have to accept it could be a coincidence but 43,200 is one of those processional numbers it's one of those numbers that is derived from the sequence that evolves from one degree every 72 years 72 times thirty equals two thousand one hundred and sixty that's one house of the zodiac 2160 by 20 gives you forty three thousand two hundred let's jump to Angkor in Cambodia turns out that from Giza to Angkor is exactly 72 degrees of longitude weird that another one of those processional numbers and makes me think of whole worldwide project establishing sacred sites at certain positions of longitude around the globe and creating them for a very specific reason and I think Ankara and Giza are intimately connected although they seem to stem from very different periods of history and core what by the way ank means life to the Horus in the ancient Egyptian language that's another one of those coincidences according to the scholars here's the Angkor Wat temple look at this amazing axis running all the way through it actually just disappears we're slightly off the screen here but it disappears right over the horizon miles and miles always an east-west axis rather pyramidal form of all of the temples in Angkor and here's what happens on the spring equinox at Angkor stand on that causeway look at the central tower stand in the middle and you'll see that it starts to rise and then it slowly slides up the tower nears the top of the tower and then bingo the whole place just lights up like a fairy tale Kingdom it's a it's an amazing experience and you suddenly realize that this Monument this temple was built to connect sky and ground at that moment at that exact moment it comes alive that's what it's that's what it's all about it's an equinoctial marker just like the Great Sphinx there are 72 major temples at Angkor there are curious pyramidal Hills in the background at Angkor there are these amazing structures this bridge over to Angkor Thom fifty four figures on each side of the bridge another processional number fifty-four plus 54 equals 108 108 is 72 plus half of 72 36 the churning of the Milky ocean a relief at Angkor that's the same thing that's represented in sculpture here it's represented in a relief here you see the serpent Vasuki gods on one side demons on the other actually these are the demons these are the gods they're pulling on bouzouki the serpent like he's some huge piece of rope he's wrapped around mount Mandara and that it's a churning process and they're whipping up the milky ocean and they're churning Amrita the elixir of immortality the very same gift that is sought by the ancient Egyptians that's what's produced by this churning of the Milky ocean if you trace the major temples of Angkor you find that they to represent a constellation on the ground and that is the constellation of Draco in the northern sky and to cut a long story short the only time that the correlation works perfectly is in 10500 BC exactly the same time that the correlation that Giza works perfectly I'm not saying the temples of Angkor were built in 10,500 BC they certainly weren't they date from about 1100 AD but archaeologists are finding that there's layers and layers of construction underneath the temples that we see today as though they're reincarnation of earlier temples so we have enigmatic ancient sites and religious ideas widely distributed around the world extraordinary similarities pointing back to a remote date 12,000 years ago we've got ancient maps that seem to document the meltdown of the last ice age are we looking at the traces of a forgotten episode in human history I think so I think that's that's what's going on here and because we've forgotten it because we are a species with amnesia because we are so much a mystery to ourselves perhaps it's because of that that we're so lasted so troubled today so haunted by the sense of something missing something that we need to know about ourselves for the ancient Egyptians the essential mystery of human existence concerned our spiritual essence that we are participating in this theater of experience that we call life in the world in an immense endeavor aimed at the perfection of the soul that's what we're here to do virtually identical ideas were explored in Angkor well in the modern world sad to say few such mysteries concern us this is it you know our culture today we we have a thing about consciousness okay our our culture it admires it venerates it almost worships one single state of consciousness and that is the alert problem-solving state of consciousness that's useful for science and business and commerce and war and such things and then we allow ourselves some downtime with absolute drunkenness and stupidity and abandoned that's also accepted by our civilization but any other kind of state of consciousness is absolutely no no and not allowed and not encouraged at all it's as though is that though the world is is is conspiring to trivialize life to trivialize us to bring everything down to the absolute lowest possible level of Hedden ism and consumption with nothing else at all being projected as as worthwhile I took talked with shamans in the Amazon with whom I've many times drunk the mysterious brew ayahuasca and when I've asked them what what you think's the problem with the world what was the problem with the West they say it's very simple you've severed your connection with spirit you've cut the link and you have to restore that link if you're going to move forward from here you can't you can't move forward from the place you're in if you don't restore the connection to spirit and that seems to me the most the most fundamental task that all of us now now face not these exterior trappings of power that have brought such horror and misery to the world what's happening in the Amazon is I mean it's just it's just beyond belief it beggars it beggars belief it's it almost makes you it almost makes you suspect that some kind of demonic forces at work in the world that we would that we would take literally the lungs of the planet and just hack them to pieces that we cut down old-growth rainforest the most the most extraordinary resource of biodiversity on the planet a hundred and fifty five thousand different species of plants and trees and replace them with soya bean farms you know soya bean farms which will only be functional for 10 years because rainforest soils are not very fertile they're there they're there they're made fertile by the constant fall of leaves soybean farms to feed cattle so we can eat hamburgers what a bad deal we're getting you know from from from this whole thing it's very very crazy I did it back of an envelope calculation six months expenditure in Iraq at its height would have solved the problem of the Amazon forever but we can't make that choice you know we can't we can't say to the people of the Amazon we recognize that you have an incredibly precious and irreplaceable resource we would like to take away your economic problems please just look after that resource for us we can't we seem incapable of doing that we can spend that kind of money on wars but we can't spend it on on saving them were the most majestic natural resource on the on the planet I'm going to close with a reading from the hermetica from the hermetic texts Hermes was the Greek version of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth the Romans knew him as mercury and in a dialogue the hermetica many of them are dialogues between both Hermes and various pupils of his and in one called the Asclepius a lament is presented and it's like a prophecy it's a bit like the Mayan Prophecy Egypt seems to stand as a metaphor for the whole world in this and to my mind for the world in our time this lament this prophecy is speaking directly to us so it's Hermes speaking and he's saying to Asclepius this do you know Asclepius that Egypt is an image of heaven or to speak more exactly in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven are present in the earth below in fact it should be said that the whole cosmos dwells in this our land as in a sanctuary and yet since it is fitting that wise men should have knowledge of all events before they come to pass you must not be left in ignorance of what I will now tell you there will come a time when it will have been in vain that Egyptians have honored the Godhead with heartfelt piety and service and all our holy worship will be fruitless and ineffectual the gods will return from Earth to heaven Egypt will be forsaken and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate bereft of the presence of its deities Oh Egypt Egypt of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tail which thine own children in time to come will not believe nothing will be left but graven words and only the stones will tell a by piety and in that day men will be weary of life and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and worship they will no longer love this world around us this incomparable work of God this glorious structure which he has built this sum of good made up of many diverse forms this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which he has made ungrudgingly favoring man's welfare this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that call forth the veneration praise and love of the beholder darkness will be preferred to light and death will be fought more profitable than life no one will raise his eyes to heaven the pious will be deemed insane the impious wise the madman will be thought a brave man and the wicked will be esteemed as good as for the soul and the belief that it is immortal by Nature or may hope to attain to immortality as I have taught you all this they will mock and even persuade themselves that it is false no word of reverence or piety no utterance worthy of heaven will be heard or believed and so the gods will depart from mankind a grievous thing and only evil angels will remain who will mingle with men and drive the poor wretches into all manner of reckless crime into Wars and robberies and frauds and all things hostile to the nature of the soul then will the earth tremble and the sea bare no ships heaven will not support the Stars in their orbits all voices of the gods will be forced into silence the fruits of the earth will rot the soil will turn barren and the very air will sicken with sullen stagnation all things will be disordered and awry all good will disappear but when all this has befallen Asclepius then God the creator of all things will look on that which has come to pass and we'll stop the disorder by the counter force of his will which is the good he will call back to the right path those who have gone astray he will cleanse the world of evil washing it away with floods burning it out with the fiercest fire of expelling it with war and pestilence and thus he will bring back his world to its former aspect so that the cosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wandering reverent reverence and God the maker and maintainer of the mighty fabric will be adored by the men of that day with continuous songs of praise and blessing such is the new birth of the cosmos it is a making again of all things good a holy and all inspiring restoration of all nature and it is wrought inside the process of time by the eternal will of the Creator I don't know whether we're going to face some terrible global catastrophe in 2012 or not I certainly hope not I hope it will not come down to misery and horror awful awful things there's enough of that in the world already but I do remember what all the ancient texts say there isn't a single flood myth there isn't a single story of the destruction of past civilizations that don't implicate humanity in the story somewhere our own behavior what we do is part of what we're bringing down on the world right now we are what we are but we are manifesting in the world that is what is coming towards us we are the authors of this thing and we can change the story if we want to change it I firmly believe that this is the moment of crossroads that we stand that none of us can affect changes on a macro level it's impossible to do so but we can make changes on a micro level we can make changes in our own lives we can make changes in our immediate surroundings changes for the better changes driven by love by and by hope I'm a deeply flawed human being I have tremendous tremendously bad habits and lots of bad aspects to my personality over the last decade decade or so I've come to look at some of those things objectively been very much helped by ayahuasca the the brew that I mentioned from the Amazon in in doing this I'm working hard to change my life to try to try to be a more nourishing person to people around me I'm not saying that I'm succeeding I fail every day but I'm still trying to do that and that's really all I can say when we confront something so huge and so so overwhelming is the notion of global destruction no I can't stop that but I can stop what I'm doing to contribute to it and if we all do that then I believe a huge change in consciousness will come and the world can move on and we can look forward to a future for our children and our children's children and once again bring this bright beautiful jewel garden of a planet bring it back to the place it should be in our lives thank you ladies

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Keywords: Graham Hancock 2012, fingerprints of the gods, lost civilization, presenting, prophets conference, tipping point, 2012, mayan calendar, end of the world

Id: X4k8pdJ2so4

Length: 85min 11sec (5111 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 11 2010