Magicians of the Gods
This weeks book was part of a binge shop I did last year…I did another binge shop recently, but this was not part of that, but I did buy it at the same time I bought Fingerprints of the Gods, making this weeks book of the week another Graham Hancock book, Magicians of the Gods. Sort of fitting, I started the year with Fingerprints, makes sense I’d end with Magicians of the Gods.
Magicians of the Gods is billed as a sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods and in many ways, it is, as Hancock expands on and repeats several of his hypothesis from Fingerprints, to include new information that further supports his original hypothesis, and to account for new information that Hancock was not aware when Fingerprints was originally published in 1996.
Information like the importance of Gobekli Tepe in modern day Turkey. Now, Gobekli Tepe was originally identified in like 1964, but the archaeologists of the time did not recognize how significant this find was. It would not be until 1994, when German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt was basically looking for a project on which he could make a name for himself, and stumbled up on this earlier, entirely unstudied find, that Gobekli Tepe took off.
What is Gobekli Tepe? If you haven’t heard of it, it is a megalithic, underground megalopolis, possibly necropolis, that was buried 11,600 years ago, at approximately 9,600 BC. Now isn’t that interesting. It was BURIED 11600 years ago. Which means it was built well before then. How can they possibly know it was buried that long ago? Carbon dating.
Now, Carbon dating gets a lot of play in shows about archaeology, but here’s the thing. Stone can’t be carbon dated. Only organic material can be carbon dated. So, when you carbon date, you are only getting an approximation of when that organic material last saw the light of day. And there is always the possibility of cross contamination, which is why there are plus/minus values to carbon dating. And if a site has been left open to the elements for the entire time, then forget it! The only hope of dating then is through geological erosion, and those theories also have problems, which I’ll get back to in a minute. But with Gobekli Tepe, when they started digging it out, they found organic material, that was last in the open in 9600 B.C. So why is Schmidt so certain the makers of this site buried it deliberately, and that it wasn’t the result of other catastrophe?
Other catastrophe would have taken out the massive pillars, for one. For another, no bodies, no remnants of living. No broken pottery lying around. If it had been buried as the result of say an earthquake, they’d be finding the bodies of the inhabitants of the city. Or at least the bones. But they’ve found nothing. It is a completely empty ancient city, the inhabitants just packed up, moved out, and buried what was left. So Gobekli Tepe raises a lot of questions, but no real answers. It’s clearly man made. But why was it abandoned. And if we were all hunter gatherers until 10000 years ago, who made it?
Which brings us to the next new piece of information Hancock goes into—The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. This is a big one. The last ice age was just ending. Earth was starting to heat up again around 13,000 years ago or so when something brought a sudden abrupt end to the warming. The Younger Dryas Impact hypothesis posits that the cause of the sudden cooling is that a comet hit the North American Ice sheet, causing a massive flood. This sudden influx of ice cold water into the oceans of the world, caused massive temperature drop in the oceans, causing the ice sheets and overall cooling to return for several thousand years. Approximately 2,000 years after the first impact, a second comet hit earth, this time landing in the ocean. This reversed the cooling, causing global warming.
The Younger Dryas theory actively supports an earlier hypothesis floated by geologist J Harlen Bretz in 1928. Bretz was a PhD in geology, he genuinely knew what he was talking about, and was shunned by the rest of the geologists for voicing where the science took him, which was catastrophe, specifically, that a catastrophic flood had created the Scablands of Washington state. Except geologists then and now despise the idea of catastrophic flooding. Too biblical to be scientific, is the rough explanation. Which concept I’ll come back to in a bit.
So even though all the science is literally right before their eyes that the Scablands was the result of a monumental massive flood, it did not fit the prevailing opinion that all geological change can only be the result of gradual erosion. Which is really interesting because all those geologists seemed to forget the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, which were centered roughly in Missouri, but were felt as far away as Louisville, KY, 190 miles away, and temporarily caused the Mississippi River to run BACKWARDS. But even that catastrophe would not have been big enough to cause the Scablands.
The biggest push back that Bretz received to his theory was lack of mechanism. If catastrophic flooding happened, what caused the catastrophe? And he didn’t really have an answer. Like he genuinely didn’t know what could have caused it. He believed it was the Spokane Ice Sheet, now called the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, that had suddenly melted, possibly due to volcanic activity….but there was no evidence of volcanic activity, which there certainly would have been. So he was sure the ice sheet had suddenly melted, resulting in this flooding, but could not explain how or why. But the damage to the Scablands fit a sudden catastrophe better than gradual erosion, so he stuck to his guns on his theory. This was in 1928 he made his proposal, and all through the 20th century up until like the late 1970’s, the date is in the book, when the rest of geologists came around to Bretz’s way of thinking, and he sort of met them halfway by agreeing that a failure of the natural dams at Glacial Lake Missoula COULD HAVE caused some of the damage to the Scablands, in a massive flood.
But over time, the established geological school of thought, that of gradual damage, again took control of the theory, and it went from being one failure of the natural dams to several over centuries until I believe current thought is hundreds of small failures over millennia caused the lake to drain and the Scablands erosion is explained by this gradualist school of thought, and Bretz is neatly shuffled into the sidelines of history.
Until 2007, when a team of scientists led by Richard Firestone, the other’s names are in the book, floated the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis. Which of course is receiving pushback from the gradualist school of thought, which keeps trying to declare the hypothesis dead. Except that every time an independent team of scientists sets out to repeat the experiment, they keep confirming the results. The only ones who are unable to repeat the results, seem to be using flawed methodology, which is what Firestone repeatedly points to in his rebuttal of their rebuttal.
So there is quite a bit of evidence, like hard science evidence, to support the Younger Dryas event happened. And it does explain the Scablands, because if a comet hit the Cordilleran Ice Sheet, it would instantly melt an enormous chunk of that sheet, causing massive catastrophic flooding, before being swept away into the ocean, along with all the water it had just created. That ice cold water would then cause the temperature in the oceans to drop, bringing about a return of the ice age that had just ended. Along with massive flooding everywhere.
Which brings us to the third really new point in the book, Gunung Padang, in Indonesia. There is some evidence that this may be the oldest known pyramid. Again, geologists have done an impressive amount of research, including pulling core samples from the pyramid that shows carbon dating…again, from a closed room if you will…of about 11000 years ago. Now, the problem here, is purely political. The lead scientist who has been leading the charge on exploring Gunung Padang and it’s possible historical significance is Danny Natawidjaja. Unfortunately, he is not in political favor and NOT in charge of the archaeological department in Indonesia. Orthodox archaeology, which does fear any pushback to the established status quo, very much fears any change to that quo. As an outsider, I’m like, hey…if you’re so sure it’s just a mountain and not man made, then what’s the harm of digging to find out? I mean, make sure you’re not going to cause any landslides with a misplaced pickax, but let em dig. If you’re right, then the whole world will know it. And therein lies the problem. IF. Because if you’re WRONG, then the whole world will know you were deliberately blocking progress and knowledge for your own ego. Which creates very bad optics indeed.
Hancock uses this book as an opportunity explore many more mysteries, all of which absolutely support his belief that there was, around 12,000 years ago, a massive cataclysm that wiped out most of humanity, especially humanity that had become soft from city living and was no longer able to live off the land, leaving hunter gatherers, who ARE able to live off the land, as the sole survivors. Hancock believes Gobekli Tepe was built by some of these giant thinkers, and most likely the reason for the abandonment is that the city had served its purpose. It was built to give them someplace to weather out the storm of the Younger Dryas Ice Age. And when the second comet hit, reversing the overall cool down, the city was no longer needed. And so it was abandoned.
But one more thing to come out of Gobekli Tepe. Hancock believes the creators of Gobleki Tepe were well aware of precession if the equinox. Precession is the movement of the stars around earth, basically taking around 26000 years to move through all 12 sectors of the sky. That is the short short, not science-y version, of precession. And that Gobleki Tepe was left as a bit of a warning that certain phases of the precession could bring more comets. Not gonna lie….I look at what a shit show humanity has become, and I’m ready for a little sky fire to just wipe us out, and let the hunter-gatherer’s start again. I mean, we haven’t exactly made the most out of everything to actually make humanity better. We’re actually regressing and becoming shittier to each other, as time goes on, and we all know, if calamity strikes, we’ll be climbing over each other to be the man on top. Because as a society, we no longer know how to cooperate for each others survival.
I think Hancock has compiled an impressive amount of evidence to support his belief that we are NOT the first humans to master high science, which includes advanced architecture and advanced astronomy. I think I said during my review of Fingerprints of the Gods, that I thought the scientists were incredibly foolish for ignoring the oral traditions of people. This is the reason geologists push back against the idea of massive flooding on a biblical scale. Except, and here’s the thing. And I know I mentioned this before. Oral tradition is a lot older than written tradition. Because we learn to speak before we learn to read. And something like 94% of human history occurred BEFORE written history. As far as we know. There are, in fact, several language stones that have not been translated, from civilizations far older than Egypt. India comes to mind. Unfortunately for us, there is no Rosetta stone to help us translate Linear A, rongorongo, Indus Valley, Linear Elamite, Cretan Hieroglyphs, Etruscan, or Olmec. All of these civilizations are quite old, and RongoRongo is discussed in this book, the language on Easter Island, next to the Maoi carved heads.
So it’s entirely possible that Hancock is exactly right, we just can’t read the stories telling us that, because the language is now dead. Which makes the oral tradition even stronger. Because those stories survive, where a written record is wiped out with the floods.
This book provided interesting food for thought, and was a refinement of Hancocks other works, but to me it was a bit disjointed. Fingerprints was an easier read. Magicians just provides further detail.
