Graham Hancock

There is no pole star. That's one of the obvious results of the wobble on the Earth's axis. The other one is that there are 12 well-known constellations in our time, the 12 constellations of the zodiac, that lie along what is referred to as the path of the sun. The we're seeing what's in direct line with the Sun in our view. And the zodiacal constellations all lie along the path of the Sun.

So at different times of the year, the Sun will rise against the background of a particular zodiacal constellation. Today we live in the age of Pisces, and it's definitely not an accident that the early Christians used the fish as their symbol. This is another area where I differ from archaeology. I think the constellations of the zodiac were recognized as such much earlier than we suppose.

Anyway, to get to the point, the key marker of the year, certainly in the northern hemisphere, was the spring equinox. The question was, what constellation is rising behind the sun? What constellation is housing the sun at dawn on the spring equinox? Right now, it's Pisces. In another 150 years or so, it'll be Aquarius. We do live in the dawning of the age of Aquarius.

Back in the time of the late ancient Egyptians, it was Aries, going back to the time of Ramesses or before. Before that, it was Taurus, and so on and so forth. It's backwards through the zodiac until 12,500 years ago, you come to the age of Leo, when the constellation of Leo houses the sun on the spring equinox. Now, this process unfolds very, very, very, very slowly.

The whole cycle, and it is a cycle, it repeats itself roughly every 26,000 years. Put a more exact figure on it, 25,920 years. That may be a convention. Some scholars would say it was a bit less than that, a bit more, but you're talking fractions. It's in that area, 25,920 years.

And to observe it, you really need more than one human lifetime because it unfolds very, very slowly at a rate of one degree every 72 years. And the parallel that I often give is hold your finger up to the horizon, the distant horizon. The movement in one lifetime in a period of 72 years is about the width of your finger. It's not impossible to notice in a lifetime, but it's difficult.

You've got to pass it on. And what seems to have happened is that some ancient culture, the culture that Santidhyana and Vandeshan call some almost unbelievable ancestor culture, worked out the entire process of procession, and selected the key numbers of procession, of which the most important number, the governing number, is the number 72. But we also have numbers related to the number 72.

72 plus 36 is 108. 108 divided by 2 is 54. These numbers are also found in mythology all around the world. There were 72 conspirators who were involved in killing the god Osiris in ancient Egypt and nailing him up in a wooden coffer and dumping him in the Nile. There are 432,000 in the Rig Vesa. 432,000 is a multiple of 72.

And at Angkor in Cambodia, for example, you have the bridge to Angkor Thom. And on that bridge, you have figures on both sides, sculpted figures, which are holding the body of a serpent. That serpent is Vazuki. And what they're doing is they're churning the milky ocean. It's the same metaphor of churning and turning that's defined in the story of Hamlet's Mill, of Amloddy's Mill.

There are 54 on each side. 54 plus 54 is 108. 108 is 72 plus 36. It's a precessional number, according to the work that Santillana and Van Deschen did. And the fascination with this number system and its discovery all around the world.

is one of the puzzles that intrigue me and suggest to me that we are looking at ancestral knowledge that was passed down and probably was passed down from a specific single common source at one time, but then was spread out very widely around the world.

There's no light pollution.

It was an ever-present reality, and it was bright, and it was brilliant, and it was full of lights. It's inconceivable that the ancients would not have paid attention to it.

It was an overwhelming presence, and that's one of the reasons why I'm really confident that the constellations that we now recognize as the constellations of the zodiac were recognized much earlier, because it's hard to miss... when you pay attention to the sky, that the sun, over the course of the solar year, is month by month rising against the background of different constellations.

And then there's a much longer process, the process of precession, which takes that journey backwards, and where we have a period of 2,160 years for each sign of the zodiac. I think it would have been hard for the ancients to have missed that. They might not have identified the constellations in exactly the same way we do today. That may well be a Babylonian or Greek constellation,

convention, but that the constellations were there, I think was very clear, and that they were special constellations, unlike other ones higher up in the sky, which were not on the path of the sun, that people paid attention to.

Yeah. Let's not underestimate oral traditions. Oral traditions, that's something we've lost in our culture today. One of the things that happens with the written word is that you gradually lose your memory. Actually, there's a nice story from ancient Egypt about the god Thoth, the god of wisdom, who is very proud of himself because he has invented writing.

Look at this gift, he says to a mythical pharaoh of that time. Look at the gift that I am giving humanity. Writing, this is a wonderful thing. It'll enable you to preserve so much that you would otherwise lose. And the pharaoh in this story replies to him, no, you have not given us a wonderful gift. You have destroyed the art of memory. We will forget everything.

Words will roam free around the world, not accompanied by any wise advice to set them into context. And actually, that's a very interesting point. And we do know that cultures that still do have oral traditions are able to preserve information for very long periods of time. One thing I think is clear in any time, in any period of history, is human beings love stories. We love great stories.

And one way to preserve information is to encode it, embed it in a great story. And So carefully done that actually it doesn't matter whether the storyteller knows that they're passing on that information or not. The story itself is the vehicle. And as long as it's repeated faithfully, the information contained within it will be passed on.