Supernatural: Meetings With the Ancient Teachers of Mankind by Graham Hancock

Author:Graham Hancock [Hancock, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781932857405
Amazon: 1932857400
Goodreads: 53324
Published: 2009-04-16T18:53:47+00:00

Top, drawing by modern UFO abductee: ‘When I turn the lights out at night, this has been the show for the past week. I can see it with my eyes closed as well as open.’ (Mack, 1995, 308). Centre left and right, prehistoric

‘meanders’ – finger tracings on clay in the caves of Hornos de la Pena (Spain) and Gargas (France). Bottom, prehistoric ‘meanders’ on the ceiling of the cave of Altamira in Spain (Breuil, 1952).

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And let’s not forget the case of Carlos Diaz (see Chapter Six), who saw a UFO “made of millions of small dots of light” floating over his head. He was baffled to find, when he tried to touch the object, that his “hand went through the yellow light …”67 In the next moments, the reader will recall, Carlos found that both he and the craft had been transported “inside a cave that was lined with stalactites” and decorated with “works of art.”68

Back to the caves

Hallucinating an entoptic UFO inside a painted cave, Carlos brings us back, quite appropriately, to the riddle with which we began this book, described by David Lewis-Williams as “the greatest riddle of archaeology – how we became human and in the process began to make art and to practice what we call a religion.”69 Indeed, the combination of entoptic phenomena with fully iconic figures was an important clue leading Lewis-Williams to formulate his neuropsychological theory in the first place, and to propose hallucinations seen in altered states of consciousness as the most likely inspiration for the extraordinary hidden art of the deep, dark caves of Upper Paleolithic Europe.

“Owl-Man,” the “Sorcerer,” “Lion-Man,” “Bison-Man,” “Aurochs-Man” – the supreme images of the caves are unmistakably those of supernatural beings, of “spirits.” Our ancestors depicted them as therianthropes and fully transformed animals, because this is exactly how they encountered them in their visions, and how they continue to be construed and depicted to this day by the shamans of surviving hunter-gatherer cultures all around the world. In more complex and sophisticated societies, the same entities are sometimes no longer thought of as spirits. Even in the guise of fairies and aliens, however, two of their most recent manifestations in the West, we’ve seen in earlier chapters that they are still shape-shifters and that they frequently appear in therianthropic and animal form.

I’ve made the case that what we are dealing with here are not multiple, different, very strange phenomena, but a single very strange phenomenon, truly Protean in its character, that has been construed in 263

different ways by different cultures at different times, that cannot be pinned down anywhere in the material world, but that nevertheless behaves exactly as though it possesses an independent freestanding reality of its own. It is remarkable that this phenomenon has been so long-lived and that it has maintained its integrity and hidden consistency across the transformation that we have documented from spirits through fairies into aliens. It would be truly extraordinary, however, if it were found to have been at work

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