Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization

by Graham Hancock

What is remarkable about all this is the way that the mill (which continues to serve as an allegory for cosmic processes) stubbornly keeps on resurfacing, all over the world, even where the context has been jumbled or lost. Indeed, in Santillana and von Dechend’s argument, it doesn’t really matter if the context is lost. ‘The particular merit of mythical terminology,’ they say, ‘is that it can be used as a vehicle for handing down solid knowledge independently from the degree of insight of the people who do the actual telling of stories, fables, etc.’29 What matters, in other words, is that certain central imagery should survive and continue to be passed on in retellings, however far these may drift from the original storyline. An example of such drift (coupled with the retention of essential imagery and information) is found among the Cherokees, whose name for the Milky Way (our own galaxy) is ‘Where the Dog Ran’. In ancient times, according to Cherokee tradition, the ‘people in the South had a corn mill’, from which meal was stolen again and again. In due course the owners discovered the thief, a dog, who ‘ran off howling to his home in the North, with the meal dropping from his mouth as he ran, and leaving behind a white trail where now we see the Milky Way, which the Cherokee call to this day … “Where the Dog Ran”.’