SPECIES WITH AMNESIA From Graham Hancock “Species With Amnesia”

"From the last ice age of 21 000 years ago , (a blink ago) you will find ice caps two miles deep sitting on top of North America and North Europe. All the water frozen on these ice caps had to come from somewhere and where it came from was the worlds' oceans. With the ice age the levels of the worlds' oceans were 400 feet lower than they are today. While they melted, the water went back into the ocean and the sea level rose. If you go back to the last ice age 21 000 years ago, the world was quite different. For example the red sea was all dried up. Australia was a much vaster continent and South East Asia was a giant continent. All of the coastlines of the world were extended much further than they are today. 27 M square kilometres went under the ocean when the sea levels rose. That's equivalent to the size of Europe and China together. Although the meltdown did take place over 10 000 years, there were within it, 3 or 4 major episodes of flooding where you could in some cases get a 30 foot rise in sea level. You have to consider what a 30 foot rise in sea level would do to our civilization today. Consider what this did to our ancestors and what effects it may have had on them. I don't believe that it is an accident that there are more than 2000 flood myths all around the world (recording) memories of a gigantic global flood that almost wiped out mankind.

"Archaeologists and historians are not very impressed with flood myths. They believe these were little local events which were then elaborated by our superstitious ancestors. I find that completely unnecessary. There was gigantic flooding during the 10 000 years after the ice age. The world legacy of flood myths is of that age.

"The flood myth is found in India where we have the Indian figure Manu who is preserved by the god Vishnu to repopulate the planet. In Greece it is the story of Deucalian and Pyrrah : who ride out the flood in a huge box and repatriate the earth to re-establish civilization. The ancient Maya spoke about cyclical destructions and rebirths of the earth. And then we have Noah's story from the Bible. It is well accepted by scholars that Noah's story simply narrated the ascension of an earlier story that came from Mesopotamian Utnapishtim – the Mesopotamian Noah, the land we call Iraq. That story is the epic of Gilgamesh and therefore it is interesting to look at what happened in the Arabian Gulf, the region from where the epic of Gilgamesh comes at the end of the ice age.

“One of these memories of flood myths was preserved by Plato 428 – 348 BC. That is the myth of Atlantis . He said he got it from his family line that had visited Egypt and had been told of the existence of high civilization in antiquity that had been destroyed by a flood accompanied by tremendous earthquakes and volcanic activities. And this civilization Plato said was globally distributed although focused on an island which he appeared to locate in the Atlantic. He said in a single day and night it was utterly obliterated. Mankind was forced to begin again like children with no memory of what went before: a species with amnesia.

MAPWORK From Antoine Gigal ‘Pyramids of Mauritius and Sicily' Antoine shows the Chinese map of Zheng He from 1405

“Zheng He's fleet of 200 ships sailed across the ocean as far as Paraguay and East Africa. He was a Muslim of the Ming dynasty and had 20 000 sailors in all. And his boat is very different to Christopher Columbus's very small boat!

From Graham Hancock “Species With Amnesia” "During the crusades, something happened, a whole archive of older maps were released into general circulation and began to be copied. At the same time the maps of Claudius Ptolemy who taught at the library of Alexandria, were preserved in monasteries and became the basis of the Ptolemaic cartographic tradition reawakened in the year 1295.

"The other category of maps that appeared at that time were the so called Portolan maps. They are incredibly accurate in terms of latitude and longitude, which our civilization didn't crack until the end of the 18th century. Before that ships were constantly sailing into coastlines. These maps which began to enter into circulation in the 1300's probably from Constantinople, seeded from the library of Alexandria contained spot on latitudes and longitudes. Very often you found that these maps focus on the Mediterranean as that was a great interest at the time. They were fragments of much larger world maps. Charles Hapgood in his fantastic book Maps of the ancient sea kings traces the Portolan cartographic tradition to a predecessor of these: through the library of Alexandria, Constantinople, and the crusaders and to the European mariners.

"The source maps were often world maps and one of them was the Piri Reis map. It survived. And in the hand writing on the map, the mapmaker Admiral Piri Reis, a Turkish admiral tells us he bases this map on more than 100 other maps. This is a very controversial map but what is striking about it is the continent of South America drives on to its tip and joins Antarctica as it looked before the last ice age, much more extensive than it is today. On maps from the beginning of the 19th century, Antarctica is not there because our civilization discovered Antarctica in 1818. So naturally a map from 1805 didn't have Antarctica on it. The puzzling thing is maps much older than this one do have Antarctica on it… Interestingly enough the Piri Reis map is centred in Giza . It is a quite sophisticated equidistant projection." GH

"Oronteus Finaeus 1532 and the great Mercator did draw Antarctica. It is larger but the shape is correct. How did Finaeus and Mercator know that? The answer is from other maps. They were mapping the world in ancient times. " GH

Graham Hancock showed these maps and other maps including Isiclore Mappe Mundi Spain 7th C & Hereforrd Mappe Mundi 1283

"If you go into many details of these maps for example the Ptolemaic (Ptolemy AD 90 – 168) map from 1513, an island lies off the West Coast of Ireland and this island is labelled High Brazil and I know of a couple of expeditions set out from Bristol to look for High Brazil but they couldn't find it. What you actually need to find that island is a time machine. We can do that with geological studies. Studies of sea level rises which show us that until approximately 12 000 years ago, an island in the exact location does exist where it is shown to exist on this map. The maps show a vastly extended SE Asia." GH

THE MISPLACED ISLANDS OF JAPAN AND THAILAND From Graham Hancock “Species With Amnesia”

"The Portolan map of 1424 show Japan as it was during the last age, they were one island. What's intriguing on this map of the South Atlantic is an inlet represented exactly where it existed 12400 years ago. It is showing Japan as it was 12400 years ago.

Slides of his photographs taken from a series of dives in this location included :

"An enormous underwater wall complete with battlements lies beneath the sea. And when you get up close you can rule out any possibility of a freak of nature. You can see the construction blocks they used to put the wall together. At the most South Western of the Japanese islands, Yonaguni we will find a whole complex of stone structures underwater . We have put in 200 – 300 dives and I want to show you what we saw there.

“On the West side of the systems of monuments there is a carved roadway between two parallel walls. There are beautifully curved roadways. To the East, there is a tunnel. I swim through that tunnel. Inside are two giant megalithic blocks placed on top of each other. At the end of the tunnel you are looking at these parallel megaliths slotted into the side of a rocky outcrop. Here we have a huge rocky outcrop running away from these two parallel rocks. The most famous part of Yonaguni is the stepped terraces going to the pyramid which faces due south. It was cut out of the solid rock much in the way the great Sphinx was cut out of solid rock . There are gutters running alongside the pathway. Looking further West and North there is a huge underwater face . It is a face like the Olmec have in Mexico. Here you see 2 eyes, a nose, a mouth and I will take you around this very eerie and spooky place to dive. It is a very large structure. The two eyes have pupils carved into them. There is something almost terrifying about it, particularly in stormy conditions. The head is separated completely from the bedrock to expose a back of the head. It is set on top of a platform. The platform is part of a large ceremonial area with another one of those beautiful pathways. It is not well known, but Japan is a country littered with megalithic monuments, some of which we know nothing about. Exactly the same technique of stone cutting is found (on land as) underwater, at a depth. This means it has been underwater for at least 12000 years. Further North is Okinawa and West of the main island is a group of islands called the Kerema and off of them is AKIJUMA at a depth of 110 feet. It is an amazing complex of stone circles. Some are quite small and others are cut down into the bedrock. It is on an epic scale. It is a very different place to dive. Sometimes the currents are ferocious and we have to wait 5 or 6 days above it before diving. As we get closer we see the central upright and the surrounding uprights all of bedrock. Beautiful symmetry, the inner curve matches the outer curve of the central upright.” GH

PIRI REIS From Chariots of the Gods by Erik Von Daeniken, Harold Reinl film : “Istanbul the city on the golden horn. Here stands the palace of Topkapi. A curious set of maps are kept here. Which were found in the Orient by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis during the 18 th C. The oldest of these maps dates back to the 1 st C AD. They are most likely a copy of earlier maps. The ships and ornamentation of animals is of a later date. Here is one of them. Let us imagine ourselves astronauts in a space capsule in an orbit high above Cairo we would see the earth in this configuration. The most amazing thing about the maps of Piri Reis is they show exactly what we would see from only one point in space. High above Cairo. We can only conclude that these ancient charts represent what was seen by someone from a great distance from earth itself.”

STAR MAP : (From Beyond Prophecies & Predictions , Moira Timms) http://philologos.org

"If a star map is superimposed over the Earth with the pole star placed over the terrestrial North Pole, we have a celestial clock making one revolution daily. The noon point of that map (like Greenwich) is the Great Pyramid of Giza . Thousands of years ago, Egypt was known as the Land of Khem. The Khema were a group of seven major stars (in the constellation of Taurus), known today as the Pleiades. If the map is placed with the Khema over the Land of Khem (Egypt)-specifically, directly over the apex of the Great Pyramid- then Taurus falls over the Taurus Mountains of southern Turkey; Ursa Major, the Great Bear, rambles over Russia; the head of Draco the Dragon coils up over China; Orion (the warrior) over Iran/Iraq; Aries the Ram over Rome, and Capricorn (identified with the god Pan) falls over Panama, Panuco, and Mayapan (the old name of the Yucatan). Aquila the Eagle spans the United States. The analogies are obvious, and quite impressive. This is one of the clearest examples of the law of 'As Above, So Below.'"

GIZA From Graham Hancock “Species With Amnesia”

"Of all the places I have been privileged to visit I would say Giza has most touched my heart. These are truly magical monuments and if you allow them to speak to you they have so much to say. You get a sense of invention between sky and ground . It is indeed star maps being called down to earth. The great pyramid of Giza is aligned to N S E W with stunning accuracy. This is astonishing precision. It is so precise we can be sure the people who made it were familiar with navigation. As Antoine rightly said Egyptologists do not want to believe anything ancient Egyptians said.

"Robert Bauval the author of the Orion messenger has recognised the connection between the 3 ancient pyramids and the stars of Orion. It makes perfect sense in the Egyptians text to bring down the perfection of the heavens to the earth. As above so below: to copy what is seen in the skies to the ground.

"I made 5 visits to the great pyramid, 3 of which were illegal and 2 legal. There is graffiti on top of the pyramid of Mercator 1657, … … and P Hancock 5/04/1916. My grandfather Phillip was a chaplain in Egypt in the world war. On that day in Phillips diary it said ‘climbed great pyramid today.'

"I have the feeling that whoever made the pyramids is inviting us to explore them. We have to use our ingenuity, intuition and intelligence if we are going to explore and understand this monument. The pyramid was 6 M tonnes, there were 150 000 blocks. The South West corner is the safest slope to go up. The angle is 52°.” GH

Subterranean chamber

"The subterranean chamber lies 100ft vertically beneath the base of the great pyramid and is approached through the assembly chamber, a corridor of 300ft which slopes down at an angle of 26 ° to reach the subterranean chamber which is carved out of bedrock. The subterranean chamber has very specific features because that is how the builders wanted it to look . I think it is deeply ancient and prehistoric. If you have a colleague stand 300ft above and sing with a good singing voice you will hear her in the subterranean chamber. The corridor is almost perfectly straight with no deviation at all and carved out of bedrock.”

Queens chamber

"(It is) called ‘Queens chamber' because nobody knows what its function was. It has two little shafts in the North and South wall. If you came here before 1872 you would not have seen a shaft here. The last five inches of stone had been left in place by the builders. A British free mason called Waynman Dixon went tapping on the walls of the Queens chamber and found two hole points. He knocked away the five inches of stone and found it lead into a shaft that ascended into the body of the Pyramid and a similar one on the North side.

"Friend and colleague Robert Bauval has shown that during the pyramid age the Southern Shaft of this chamber points at Sirius . The North side of the chamber points at an important star. And then there are two more shafts in the Kings Chamber up above and point to one of the three stars in Orion.

“The German Robotics centre in 1993 sent a robotic camera up one of these shafts as they are too small for a human being. 165 feet up this robot came to a door locked with two handles. And at this point Rudolf Gantenbrink's work was abruptly stopped by Hawass. Hawass took over the project and commissioned University of Singapore to make another robot. It was designed to drill a hole through the door and find out what was at the other side of it. What they found behind the door was a gap of 3 feet and then another door and now they are thinking how to get through that door and see perhaps if there's a chamber on the other side of it.”

The grand gallery

"Coming out of the Queens chamber we can go up (to) the grand gallery a majestic cavity within the great pyramid. Perfectly positioned stones at an angle of 26 ° you cannot get a piece of paper in the cracks in-between. And at the top is the entrance of the chamber to the king's chamber. Above it are 5 other chambers which were rediscovered in the 19th C by Howard Vyse, a British explorer who went around with explosives. He blew a great gash into the South Side of the pyramid.”

Kings chamber

“The king's chamber is an incredible geometrical construction that consists of 100 granite blocks all of which were brought from Aswan 500 miles to the South. The sarcophagus is the only reason for anyone to have believed it was a tomb. Of course it was not a tomb. The ceiling has 9, 50 tonne granite blocks in it.”

top chamber

"If we go into the top chamber there is modern graffiti and ancient graffiti which is the only thing that Egyptologists have to attribute this monument to Khufu. There is a suggestion that this graffiti may even be fraud. There is ancient graffiti in that chamber which is genuine. Howard Vyse was desperate for a discovery. He said ‘I have found and discovered that this is the pyramid of Khufu' and he got a lot of money. Khufu was not a man of big ego and did not scribe his name anywhere else.

"In the book of what is in Duat we read that the hidden circle of Duat is in the body of the Nut, the sky, whoever shall make an exact copy of these forms shall know it and shall be a spirit of the temple of earth. That shall be an objective of the ancient Egyptians. To become well equipped spirit , was to have some knowledge of the afterlife realm before we venture there. That whole scheme looks like a huge device transforming men into god's who will navigate the Duat of Osiris.

"It was a strange parallel universe a kind of underworld through which the soul would travel after death sometimes guided by the cycle of Anubis, the guide of the souls where all kinds of masters would be encountered. Questions would be asked that you would need to know the answers to. The afterlife can be a terrifying journey where you must account for everything you have done in your life.

"It is no accident that the ancient name of Giza is the land of Rostau because we have a fifth division of the divine which clearly features a pyramid, a sphinx and a chamber system. If we look at the paintings of the Duat many of the features of the great pyramid are represented there. Boats were indeed used during the navigation of the Duat. There are many parallels here.

"There is a similarity between the djed pillar, the symbol of the resurrection of Osiris, and the design of the chamber system.”

" The king's chamber served the function of a judgement hall where Osiris was convicted. The deceased pharaoh is ushered into the judgement hall of Osiris, also the hall of Ma'at. The important objective is your heart should not be heavy with sin. You should account for your life in such a way that when you come to this place you should be able to answer the questions to justify the life (you have lead). There are 42 assassins in the judgement of Osiris each one of them asks the deceased a question. All of the Ten Commandments are there and others as well. In the judgement scene it is necessary to have lived a moral and true life .

"Amemt is the eater of the dead, part hippo, part crocodile, and part lion. He will consign your soul forever to oblivion: Never to live again and never to return and never to have a full opportunity to grow and develop. Ma'at is the goddess of truth and cosmic justice , her symbol is the feather, we see it marked on her head. A part of the deceased is weighed against the feather of Ma'at.”

" You were given an incredible opportunity to be born in a human body with this incredible brain and ability to grow and develop and create. What did you do? Did you use it well? Did you waste it? Meditation, love, ethics, none of these alone can bring about enlightenment without wisdom. The ultimate objective was that the whole divine was preparing for this moment and ones' ultimate destiny was to become a star in the sky and to live life millions of years and share light creation throughout the universe .

"I am suggesting the monuments of Giza are a sacred symbol of the afterlife journey . Preparations can be made for the afterlife experience. The ancient system celebrated and nurtured human life. And it did not take it for granted. Here is a sort of eternal life. The ancient Egyptians say this religious system came down in the time of the gods, Zep Tepi.

"If you go to pyramids of the 5th and 6th century in Saqqara you will find an enormous amount of texts scribed on walls. ‘Pyramid texts' should be regarded, as the software to the hardware that we see at ‘the great pyramids of Giza'. They are very great beautiful libraries carved into the walls. The pyramid texts are the oldest texts we have. The pyramid texts talk of a brotherhood ‘Nekin' that was responsible for preserving the religion of Osiris .”

"Davis's translation of the book of the dead is poetic. She captures the spirit of the Egyptian in no other way a translation I know of has."

“'I stand before the masters who witness creation, who were with ( Khepera ) that morning the sun rose into being and were with Osiris in the grave as he gathered himself together and burst into white heat a light and shining growth.

Hail Thoth architect of truth, give me words of power of thy name to call the years and weave together my history . Hail Thoth architect of truth, give me words of power of thy name so I may form the characters of my own evolution .

I stand before the masters who witness the generation who were the authors of their own forms , who brought them to being. Who walked the dark circuitous passageways of their own becoming. Who saw with their own minds their best deeds and the shape of things to come. I stand before the masters who witness the working of magic, who worked with Isis ... . Who were with her as she shook down her black hair and unveiled the god's transformations...

Hail Thoth architect of truth, give me words of power of thy name so I may give his story meaning. I stand before the masters who know the history prepared and decide what tales to give them… Who are themselves authors of the truth and they are Isis, Osiris and divine incarnation. And when this story is written and the end is good, the soul of man is perfected with a shout.

Hail Thoth architect of truth, give me words of power of thy name that I may complete my story and begin life anew. I stand before the masters who witnessed the transformations of the body of man into the body of the spirit , who witnessed the resurrection of the corpse of Osiris into the mountain and the soul of Osiris, walking, all held shining. He gathered his people and men and armies and backbones. He bid himself together in secret. He came forth from death, his face white with heat.'”

“ Osiris was the divine King of Egypt who ruled in the first time. He was measured by his rival ‘Set' and 72 conspirators. His body was hacked into pieces and he was put back together by his consort ISIS. They conceived the divine child Horus.

“Each pharaoh associated himself in life with Osiris. Osiris became lord of the dead, master of eternity, immortality and he is showing the way to the Horus Kings . All Egyptian Pharaohs are contained in the Sirian system . When they saw Orion in the skies, what they saw was the figure of Osiris. He ruled over a kingdom in the sky roughly between the constellations of Orion and Leo and divided by the milky-way - which the Ancient Egyptians called the binding water way.

From Graham Hancock “Species With Amnesia” “ Precessions of the equinoxes are thought to be caused by the pull of the sun and the moon around the planet . This causes an actual wobble on the axis. Almost like a top that slows down from spinning. The extended North Pole of the earth transcribes a huge circle in the heavens over a vast period of time. It is estimated that our North Pole points at Belarus our cold star. But there have been other periods it has pointed at empty space or other stars. This phenomenon unfolds at the rate of 1 ° per every 72 years. It also affects the background of stars at which the sun is meant to rise. As a result of the precession, back in the time of Christ, the sun was rising in the constellation Pisces. In a couple of hundred years the sun will be rising in the constellation of Aquarius on the spring equinox. That is why we live in the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, It takes 2600 years to go through each sign of the zodiac. The great year takes 25 920 years to unfold.

"This history of precession is brilliantly explored in Professor George Santiyani's book Hamlets Mill of Massachusetts Institute of technology. What they showed is the sequence of numbers related to the precessions of the equinoxes, is preserved all over the world, going back to the remotest history. They trace its homage back to some unbelievable ancient civilization in remote antiquity. 72 is the heartbeat of that cycle. There is a whole range of numbers you can derive from it. 72 /2 is 36, 72 + 36 is 108, / 2 is 54, 216, 43200 (72 x 60) etc. Precessional numbers are found in traditions all over the world, Mayan calendar, and pyramids of Giza. The height of the pyramid x 43200 is the radius of the earth. The base of the pyramid x 43200 is the equatorial circumference of the earth. The dimensions of the earth are encoded in the great pyramid by 43200. This is a deliberate intention.

"If you reset the prime Meridian to Giza a number of relationships which have been hidden become evident. Angkor Wat is 72 ° E. Angkor Wat means ‘life to Horus' in Egyptian and there we find more pyramidal structures. On the spring equinox the sun sits right on-top of the central tower. Many monuments do this.

"There are 72 major temples at Angkor. If you look down on the entire Angkor complex, something interesting emerges. The principle temples have appeared to map out on the ground the constellation Drako . They do so only perfectly in 10500BC. We have a curious 3 dimensional game going on here. Where Leo is rising in the E, Aquarius is setting in the West where the constellation of Orion is at its lowest point in its processional journey, Drako is in its highest point. Today we find everything has turned around the other way. There is a deliberate connection.”

The Sphinx

"The great sphinx plays a key role in defining this process at Giza. The great sphinx is perfectly aligned to the rising sun on Spring Equinox and that is what the sphinx is there to do: to bring together heaven and earth at that precise moment . This procession does not change the rising part of the sun but the stellar background.

"There was a time when Leo housed the sun on the spring equinox and that time was around 10500 BC . At that time you get precise correlation between the 3 stars of Orion's belt and the great pyramids of Giza; and precise correlation between the milky-way and the Nile.

“If we go to the temple of Horus at Edfu you will find in the walls a massive volume of building texts. They have star maps that were copied from an original text that had comets (coming) down from heaven. It was much later copied. The building texts talk of a gigantic flood that destroyed the homeland of the gods . The survivor of this flood came to Egypt and made it the place to restart civilization. They established prime evil mines all over Egypt which were to be the sites of all future temples and pyramids. We are looking at a culture that has had 3000 years of monuments.”

MAYAN CALENDAR : From Graham Hancock “Species With Amnesia” "The Mayan calendar predicts a great change 21/12/2012. I do believe that the Mayan calendar is a cyclic instrument and each cycle runs for approximately 5100 years and the end of one cycle is the beginning of another. The notion is that a new destiny lies ahead for humanity. We don't have to go into darkness; we can brighten our own story. I believe it is possible for a great change in consciousness . We are poised on the edge of this and we are seeing the beginnings of it today with small groups of free thinkers getting together and refusing to tow the party line. Change is coming. This is a time of trial. The matter is in our hands. We stand at the edge of an abyss. We can change. It is a shortage of love that is bringing humanity down. That is what we have to put back. What all of us can do is participate in changing what we are and to be more positive." GH

“Asclepius contains a passage for the men. (It is from a) group of texts attributed to the god Hermes who the Greeks thought created Egyptian wisdom. Asclepius is a pupil of Hermes and Hermes is the teacher.

“He says: ‘Did you know that Egypt was an image of heaven. Or to speak precisely of all the powers that work in heaven present on the earth below. The whole cosmos was in this our land as a sanctuary. 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 am about to tell you. There will come a time when it will be in vain that Egyptians honoured a path of service and all our ambition will be fruitless and ineffectual. Egypt will be forsaken and the land will be left desolate, bereft in the presence of the deities. Oh Egypt of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale which your own children in time to come will not believe. Nothing will be left but only the stones from the temple and in that man will be weary of it and they will cease to think it is worthy. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable memorious structure, whereby the will of God operates in that which He has made, ungrudgingly favouring men's welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things called for in veneration, praise and love. Darkness will be preferred to light and death thought of more profitable than life. No-one will raise his life to the heavens. The pious will be deemed insane, the wise will be thought of as brave and the wicked worthy. Whereas the soul, the belief is, it is immortal and with nature open to obtain immortality. All this thy will mock. So the gods will be apart from mankind. And only evil angels will mingle with mankind, and drive the poor wretches into all memories of reckless crime, wars, robberies, frauds and all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then it will be tranquil and the seas bare no ships. Heaven will not support the stars of the organs; all voices of God will be forced into silence. The fruits will rot, the soul will turn barren. All hope will disappear. And then God the creator of all things will look at that which has come to pass and will stop this world and call back mankind and cleanse people washing away with floods, expelling wars and pestilence. So the cosmos once more will be worthy of reverence. And God maker and maintainer of the mighty fabric will be adored with continuous songs of praise and mercy: Rebirth of the cosmos of all things good, holy and an awe inspiring restitution of nature, inside the process of time by the eternal will of the creator.'”

… * … * … * … * … * … * GRAHAM HANCOCK transcribed at : struhuru@gmail.com

Graham Hancock's second presentation at Megalithomania 2011 SA was TITLED, Elves, Angels, Aliens & Ayahausca: Parallel realms and The Mysteries of The Vine of The Dead, with the following words.”

“I am going to be talking about Ayahuasca, the vine of the soul that is used by Shamans to enter the spirit world. During the research for my last non fiction book Supernatural, I was given a series of visions by Ayahuasca. I did five sessions with Ayahuasca in Brazil, I was told to go away and write that story and that story was my first novel Entangled and it concerns two young women. One from 44 000 years ago in the past, her name is Lea and one living today in modern Los Angeles, her name is Leonie and they are brought together by supernatural forces to do battle with evil who travels through time and who seeks to divert humanity from our inherent goodness... and henceforth evil. It is a book about the battle of good against evil and about time travel.”

“They believe in the Amazon, when the spirit leaves the body you are free to move. Time may not be an arrow. It may even be possible for us to change the past as we do change the future. All these ideas and concepts came to me in the work that I did with Ayahuasca. I am not going to talk about the novel tonight but I am going to talk about the research background behind the novel which is laid out in depth in the book Supernatural. I personally hope some of my readers will come with me on this journey into fiction. I feel my path for how many years I have left is to explore extraordinary ideas in the realm of fiction. It has allowed me to turn to a place of freedom in my writing that I last had when I wrote Fingerprints of the Gods. After that I found that the work became more and more defensive because of the academics. It is nice to be free again.”

“Many have found my new work on altered states of consciousness disturbing. Altered states of consciousness are a different subject in our society. I want to emphasize at this point that I am not here to advocate drugs. I am here to advocate adult responsibility. And one of the things I object to about Western governments is that they are more and more stepping into the role of adult responsibility. We need to take responsibility for our own lives. It is important to understand these visionary plants are extremely serious business. They have no business in use for recreation. If they are used for recreation the consequences can be disastrous. These plants have to be treated with respect. They are part of an ancient sacred ceremony. It is important to have the guidance of someone who knows what they are doing and that is what the shaman is, a person who is deeply versed in altered states of consciousness. If we are going to work with these plants successfully in the West we are going to have to create a Western form of shamanism.”

“To gain altered states of consciousness (one) eats narcotic or ‘magic' mushrooms and in their hallucinations visit the world of the spirits where they get answers to questions posed to them. It is a powerful psychedelic. Magic mushrooms have been popular amongst the youth in the west for a quite a while. Although magic mushrooms were always used in Europe there use was forgotten up until 1957 when Gordon Wasson heard of a mushroom plant in Mexico. He went to Mexico where he met Mariah Sabina, a shaman who used psilocybin mushrooms to enter a deep trance state and do her work in the realms of the spirits. She gave the mushrooms to Gordon Wasson and he had a series of extraordinary life changing experiences. He reported in Life magazine May 13th 1957 of these mushrooms that caused strange visions. Due to that magazine article the explosion of interest in magic mushrooms in the West occurred. “

Graham shows slides of the magic mushroom

“It is not an accident that the colours are the same as Christmas. The Father Christmas story is an ancient shamanic experience. This mushroom is not efficient if consumed directly. What they notice in Siberia was reindeer eating these mushrooms and if they collected the urine of the reindeer and then drank the urine after they had eaten the mushroom then they would enter a trance like state. Through passing through the filter of the body, the impurities are removed from the mushroom and the psychedelic elements remain. Indeed shamans urinate in bowls which members of the tribe then drink. Potency remains strong even when passing through seven human bodies. When the shamans leave their bodies they find themselves flying through the sky on supernatural reindeer. And they return through a chimney-hole to a modern state of consciousness. “

“In Central Africa the plant that enables men to see the dead is ibokwe. I need to add here that I have always felt as a researcher that it is difficult to write about something if I don't experience it myself. I can't sit in an armchair. I have naturally worked with all of these visionary plants. Ibokwe I will not be working with again which made me so ill for 48 hours I virtually could not move. I had to be carried wherever I had to go. I felt my body had been torn apart and slowly as the effects wore off began to be reassembled. I did have one powerful visionary encounter during that experience and that was with the spirit of my recently deceased father. It was greatly important to me it allowed me to get closure having not been with my father the moment that he died. I beat myself up for a long time because of that. This encounter with my dad under the influence of ibokwe was enormously healing for me. Often when we lose a relative we do not have closure. It is part of a widespread religion in central Africa, in fact the president of Gabon is a member of the tribe that uses ibokwe. “

“The essence of shamanism is altered states of consciousness. In these trance states shamans report encounters with entities which are construed as spirits and the shamans themselves report transforming into animals as they enter the spirit world. This word Shaman is borrowed from a particular culture with the word saman. Shaman comes from saman meaning 'one who knows'. Shamans had ritual functioning's and entered trance states and communicated with spirits and they came back with healing remedies for members of their tribes. Many tribal cultures around the world had similar ritual functioning's. (There) discoveries (were) of the future, transporting souls back and forth from the underworld and managing them there. (They made) sacrifice to spirits, including those of ‘animal masters' and initiated new shamans. Their purpose was entry into the trance state.”

“In the Amazon it is Ayahuasca which means the vine of souls and the vine of the dead. Its use throughout the Amazon basin was extremely ancient as it was used by more than 70 different religious cultures and we have archaeological evidence of its use going back more than 4000 years. Although Ayahuasca contains the medical drug tryptamine which is highly illegal in all Western countries throughout the world; throughout South America the use of Ayahuasca is totally legal. (It is) not only legal but protected as a cultural treasure by all governments in that region. They hold the view that this is an ancient ceremonial rite of human beings and resisted efforts from the US to make it illegal. From the jungles it has found its way into cities where it has taken the form of churches, like the Santa Maria church of Brazil which mixes shamanism with Christianity and treats ayahuasca as their sacrament. More and more Westerners are travelling to South America to drink ayahuasca with shamans there in an environment that is free of fear and legal persecution and where they are in good hands. These are very serious plants.”

“There is a bush in the Amazon that contains the pure form of DMT. It is brewed into a tea and drunk. It is taken together with the ayahuasca vine. In the Amazon they say ayahuasca is an intelligent spirit she has chosen to work with the leaf of the other plant in order to reach us. This plant has an inhibitor which allows the DMT to be induced by us, producing a four hour journey. And it is not called a purge in the Amazon for good reason, it is a powerful purgative, you will have diarrhoea and vomiting and all this will unfold in a fairly common setting, sitting in a circle. I had to go behind a tree. I was very embarrassed. And that was the first thing the ayahuasca taught me is that the body is the least important part of myself. The most important part of myself is my consciousness. And what is happening on the level of consciousness with ayahuasca is truly extraordinary. “

“The universe consists of multiple dimensions. And I think it is more likely that we are dealing with an inter-dimensional rather than an inter-galactic phenomenon. These experiences become accessible through altered states of consciousness.”

“Rick Strassman the Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Mexico, used DMT on volunteers in 1990. Everyone in this room has DMT in their bodies. We are all illegal. It is produced in the pineal gland, which is known as the third eye. In animals the third eye does possess a lens and a retina. In human beings it does not, it is sunk deep into the brain. It is producing DMT to allow us to see a wider and expanded reality. A sixth sense if you like. The experiences of Rick Strassmans' volunteers were similar to the experiences of UFO abductees. They reported piercings, surgery, space stations, it was as though their consciousness was being abducted. This work was done in the 1950's before a single report of UFO abductions. This proves something else was going on. This leads us to ask what exactly is going on here? By the way Rick Strassman does not believe these experiences are non-real. He believes these experiences are real. And what is happening with UFO abductees is that they are overproducing DMT in the pineal gland, entering a trance state, having these experiences and then coming back. “

"Aldous Huxley saw the brain as a reducing valve largely to cut out most of reality so that we are able to function in the physical world. Albert Hoffman, the inventor of LSD, came up with the useful notion that the brain may not be a generator of consciousness, it may be a receiver of consciousness and by that altering the brainwaves will allow us to see more than we usually do."

"Rick Strassman uses the same analogy. There are all sorts of other channels broadcasting to us all the time. And if you alter the receiver wave maker of the brain which DMT does than we can see into those other realities which are not accessible using our normal consciousness. There is a reality outside us and it is freestanding. If we simply change our brains we can comprehend and interact with them. Quite often hallucinating subjects are wired up to MIR scans and areas of the brain light up. There is even evidence to suggest that experience in altered states of consciousness gave us language. Francis Greck the discoverer of the double helix admitted privately before he died that he had been under the influence of LSD when he first saw the double helix. Likewise they would never have invented the Apple computer if it hadn't had been for LSD. There is a lot of evidence to suggest that these experiences are not brain candy, they are utterly transformative. “

Graham shows the slides :THERIANTHROPE'S

“Therianthrope's are very popular in modern culture today.”

“This is Anthony Hopkins made up as the wolf man. This is batman here. Creatures that are part animal and part human in form, the technical term for these creatures is Therianthrope's: From the Greek Therio which means part beast, and Anthropods which means man."

"Here is a Japanese snake woman, a mermaid and a lion man. There are very familiar images in popular culture today. Let's see how far back such images go. I think everyone is familiar with the story of Theseus slaying the Minotaur from ancient Greece. The Minotaur has a human body and the head of the bull."

"Of course the deities of ancient Egypt are all Therianthropic in form, part animal, and part human. Thoth for example is part bird part human. The guiding soul and Libris is part jackal part human. The Sphinx of course is a lion and a man or a dog and a man. Here we see from one of the tombs on the West Bank the deceased confronting an old soul and the soul is depicted as a human headed bird with the same features as the deceased. Such imagery is incredibly ancient. “

“The very oldest piece of art has the body of a human being and the head of some kind of bull. Chauvet cave in France is 33 000 years old we see a bison man with the head and shoulders of a bison and the hind legs of a human being. And there is more to the picture than I have shown you. Here is the bison man. He is straddling a large female human figure and interestingly that female human figure is headless. However her right arm is captured by the artist in a moment of transformation into the head of a lion, like these lions down here. In fact there are very similar images continue to appear in caves in Southern Europe."

"Needless to say such things are not seen in everyday life. We need to ask ourselves since these are the oldest works of art known to mankind what was the original inspiration behind such ideas. So, let's not waste time by trying to argue that these are the depictions of humans dressed up in skin. This is not what is going on here. This is the depiction of shape shifting. This is the depiction of transformation and the ancient artist has caught that transformation as it occurred."

"The images I am showing you come almost entirely from Southern Europe and from South Africa. We were able to do a guided trip around the Cedarburg and Drakensburg to the co-ordinates where the majestic rock art of the san is to be found. One of the mysteries of rock art is its transpersonal qualities and the fact that cultures that were not in contact with one another again and again depict almost identical imagery and identical themes. They may be separated by tens of thousands of miles and tens of thousands of years but the imagery is eerily the same. Here in the Cedarburg what we see on the zigzags is humans captured in transformation into antelopes: Another one of those shape shifting images."

"I particularly love this amazing art from the Drakensburg, thought to be 8000 years old, which depicts two Therianthrope's side by side. Human body's with heads of Elands. There is more to it. If you look at the figure on the left it looks as if he has two feathers from his back as if he is about to sprout wings. And this figure has two serpents wrapped around his body. And that's the body of the serpents wrapped around his other body. A very extraordinary set of ideas are contained in this South African image. What is it that we are dealing with here?"

"It is an incredible privilege to go into the painted caves of Southern Europe. There are more than 300 closed to the public of these incredibly transformative sacred places reserved exclusively for archaeologists. I think of them as underground cathedrals. The moment you enter into one of these caves you hear the water dripping down the walls. There is a coolness in the air, a hush descends. It's an extraordinary privilege to be in these places. Our ancestors did not live in these caves they used them as sacred places. Some kind of communion with spirit realms was going on. There are lots of recognisable animals painted around the walls but some of them are a little strange like this one over here that the archaeologist chooses to call the unicorn even though it has two horns. Then look at this stag with these incredibly elaborate antlers. Something else we need to explain about this art is: down here is a geometrical pattern, this rectangle appears in front of the stag. If we need to explain the rock art we need to explain all elements of it including these geometrical patterns."

"Here is the dancing women from the Cedarburg. What are interesting are the zigzag lines overlaying these figures, they are part of the original work of art. There are very similar kinds of patterns in the Altamira cave in Spain where a row of dots runs down the wall. There are more geometrical patterns. This is thought to be close to 30 000 years old. Everywhere you go, handprints appear on the wall. It is true of rock art all around the world. Sometimes the artist applies the paint with their hand slapped against the wall, sometimes they place their hand against the wall and stick paint around it. The more of these sites I visited, the more an eerie impression began to adorn on me that the cave wall was a headway separating the art from the other realm. And those hands were coming through the wall from the other side. That idea of coming through the wall is seen in ancient Spain where the artists tweaked a little bit of paint on the rock face so you see this strange face pushing through the rock wall. Overlooking them all, everywhere you go are these Therianthropic beings shifting shape, changing their appearance. “

“Regarding this issue of cave rock arts and its specific characteristics and universal characteristics, I want to pay tribute to the capacity of a major South African scholar and that is Professor David Lewis Williams of the Witwatersrand University Rock Art research Institute. When David first proposed his neuropsychological theory of rock art, he was attacked. Archaeologists hate new ideas. But David's work is so incredibly well documented and researched with such enormous dedication and skill that gradually over the last twenty years he has won over all his colleagues. His neurological theory of rock art is now universally accepted. This is an art of visions. It is an art of altered states of consciousness. Specifically it is an art of Shamanism. Shamans entered trance states, experienced visions which when they then returned to a normal state of consciousness depicted it on the cave walls. I would highly recommend you look at some of David's very fine books, particularly Mind Cave which is a work of genius. A lot of scientific evidence of this work is drawn from scientific studies of altered states of consciousness that were done with volunteers and very secretly the use of hallucinogenic drugs and other techniques such as the bombardment with electromagnetic fields to induce the necessary altered state of consciousness to have these experiences. In the various states of trance often scintillating patterns and geometric patterns and zigzag lines and star maps are seen, spirals and grids are seen. And then moving deeper into trance these techniques can be construed in different forms and then there is the sense of passing through a vortex and emerging on the other side of the vortex into a seamlessly parallel universe. And that parallel universe is frequently inhabited by intelligent entities. And the volunteers of course communicated with them telepathically. “

“In a mescaline study in the 1960's, the volunteer drew a man in a modern business suit with the head of a fox. It is very similar in concept to those images of Therianthrope's in the caves tens of thousands of years ago. Again with the scientific studies it is possible to draw up a chart of the patterns that everybody sees and reports of these altered states. These patterns are called entoptic phenomenon. “

“Peyote is an active ingredient in Mescaline. Peyote is used by shamans and other native American groups. It's not only visual plants. In the case of the Bushmen who also did not use drugs it is the trance plants where the shamans of the Kalahari bushmen will dance for hours, 24 hours around a fire, becoming intensely dehydrated. At certain points their spirits leave their bodies and rise up into the heavens where they communicate with the spirits and come back with intervention that is valuable to their tribe.”

“Although the San of South Africa is an extinct culture back in the late 1900's they were approached by photographers who asked them what the rock art was about. They told them it was work about shamans. They travelled out of body into the spirit world and they returned and documented what they had seen on rock walls. And the same goes for the people of the Coso of the California great basin. The same universal images appearing in their art tell us without a shadow of a doubt that it is an art of altered states of consciousness and an art of shamans. “

“Martina Hoffman is the American artist who works a lot with ayahuasca. She has depicted an experience from the ayahuasca vine. The ayahuasca vine is an intelligence, a spirit, sometimes in the human form, sometimes a jaguar and very often a serpent. She will work with you, she will show you aspects of your life, she will show you the damage you did to other people and give you the opportunity to fix that pain. Martina Hoffman is depicting the only attitude one can take to ayahuasca and that is an attitude of complete surrender. I found myself in floods of tears during the ayahuasca session as I see the pain that I have caused to others, inadvertently or thoughtlessly. It takes years to overcome a lifetime of bad habits. I am working on overcoming my many bad habits. It is an important part of my life's work to make myself into a better human being. The other thing that happens with ayahuasca is these encounters with non-physical intelligence and the sense of entry into an enchanted realm.”

“Here is the work of Pablo Amaringo a shaman who passed away last year and his work sums up beautifully the ayahuasca experience. There is a sense of an organic jungle realm. Sometimes you may experience yourself lifted up into the sky and carried off into that enchanted realm. Sometimes you might be carried underground into an underworld of spirits. Sometimes the shaman will be carried beneath the water and taken to an enchanted city everyone in the Amazon knows lies beneath the water or river. You won't have this encounter by scuba-diving. The only way to find it is by drinking ayahuasca. There are astonishing universals in the experiences of people all around the world who drink ayahuasca. Everyone sees serpents during ayahuasca visions. These serpents may be very small or very large and sometimes are in front of you with their jaws open. What the shamans say is do not fear. Throw yourself into that open mouth. Go towards that experience. The other experience is to see Therianthrope's. From Pablo's art (we see): A crocodile headed man, a bird headed man and from Martina Hoffman's art this amazing Therianthropic image.”

“The experience is one of boundaries breaking down of the connection to a wider universe and to a wider realm. In this painting of an Amazonian shaman from 1986 we see a flying saucer. What is that doing there? I asked Pablo about his flying saucers. These are not about ET's, these are beings entering and leaving the spirit world. When a shaman speaks about the spirit world I think this is not very far away from when quantum physicists speak about parallel universes and parallel worlds.”

“If you want chapter and verse on it the best (is from) David Chandler - a professor of psychology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is one of the leading world experts on ayahuasca. He has drunk ayahuasca more than 400 times. He has interviewed hundreds and hundreds of drinkers of ayahuasca. He has compared the trance they have experienced very usefully and he has demonstrated astonishing universals to come out from people who have never compared notes. They are all looking into the same realms and meeting the same entities. Psychedelic mushrooms were used in Europe. Psilocybin, pictured in the painted caves of Europe and exposed in Scientist magazine 6th March 2011.”

“So what are these ET abductions? We know a lot about ET abductions from the work of various scientists such as John Mack at Harvard University. Harvard tried to sack him when he researched human abduction by UFO's. John was persecuted for taking seriously UFO abduction and almost lost his job. He was cast into the academic wilderness. But he continued to do the work and as a result we have thousands of hours of recordings with people who believed they were abducted by UFO's which we can use for cross-cultural comparison. Many thought they first encountered the alien in the form of an animal or in the form of a ferianthrope. John summed up “the aliens appear to be consummate shape shifters, often appearing to the abductees as animals, an owl, wolves, eagle's racoons and deer's are some of the creatures the abductees are seen as initially".

The sense of being taken up in to the sky is seen in San rock art. Sometimes it is a matter of floating up into the sky, often it is a matter of climbing up a rope or light. This is reported again and again by shamans and UFO abductees: the sense of being carried into an underworld. It is a very common experience amongst shamans and UFO abductees. Betsy said a UFO took her into a crystalline palace, and Carlos into a cave lined with stalagmites and stalactites. The universal experience of shamanism is known as the shamanic ordeal when the shaman experiences himself pierced cut to pieces by the spirits and very often the spirits will play up bizarre surgical procedures on the body. They will insert objects into his skin or into his brain."

"And if you want chapter and verse on this read Mircea Eliade, 'The Jester at Work : Shamanism' which reports hundreds of examples of these experiences. The experience of surgery and painful piercings and implants being put into the body is very common amongst UFO abductees as well. Shamans very frequently report having sex with the spirits. I do know a shaman in the Amazon whose wife has left him. UFO abductees do also report sex with the beings they construe as aliens. Maria Sabina was given a book by a spirit, it helped with these secrets from the world where everything is known. But she was not allowed to bring the book back. It remains in the sky: Same with Betty Hill. In 1961, the aliens gave her a book and she couldn't bring it back.”

“Fairies and elves began to become ridiculous and disappeared from Western culture just at the time UFO sightings began in the 1940's and 50's. These fairies and elves have an astonishing commonality with aliens and spirits. You did not want to come close to the fairy dance because you could be drawn into it and suddenly find yourself in another world; a bit similar to the phenomenon of missing time reported by UFO abductees. Fairies have powers of flight, they use flying vehicles, they appear in caves and fairies very frequently appear in animal and Therianthropic form.”

“Human beings can't see anything without interpretation. Interpretation of perception is built in from the get go. What we are looking at here is the same phenomenon that human beings have been experiencing for at least 35 000 years using different cultural spectacles. There are things that look like the greys and flying saucers on the walls of ancient caves. The UFO abductee problem is much more complicated than physical aliens coming here and crossing inter-stellar space in high tech vehicles.”

* * * notes

Graham sites many examples of writings on this subject :

“The Antipodes of the mind by Benny Shanon; Dr David Jacobs, Budd Hopkins, William Blake and Dr Stephen Szara's work on DMT in the mid 50's. Szara asked, What is reality? He used acid to let his imagination run free."

‘QUENCHED CONSCIOUSNESS' is a term used in the documentary D'autres Mondes (Other Worlds), and is preferred to altered states of consciousness.'

In Lianne Cox's recent film entitled ‘!Gubi' she explores the life of a living Bushman elder (!Gubi) and his community. !Gubi is the lion shaman and the bushmen are a living example of One-ism.

The Buddhist Yogi's are able to access the state of ‘quenched consciousness' through meditations.

… * … * … * … * … * … * GRAHAM HANCOCK transcribed at : struhuru@gmail.com