Magicians of the Gods Quotes

“If ever a society could be said to meet all the mythological criteria of the next lost civilization – a society that ticks all the boxes – is it not obvious that it is our own? Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter is all there is – that there is no such thing as spirit, that we are just accidents of chemistry and biology – all these things, and many more, in mythological terms at least, do not look good for us.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: Evidence for an Ancient Apocalypse

“No, the problem at Göbekli Tepe is the pristine, sudden appearance, like Athena springing full-grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, of what appears to be an already seasoned civilization so accomplished that it “invents” both agriculture and monumental architecture at the apparent moment of its birth.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Everything we’ve been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong,” says Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“if evidence supports established theories then that evidence will be accepted. But if evidence undermines established theories, then that evidence must be rejected.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: Evidence for an Ancient Apocalypse

“Consider this account from the Ojibwa, a Native American people: The star with the long, wide tail is going to destroy the world some day when it comes low again. That’s the comet called Long-Tailed Heavenly Climbing Star. It came down here once, thousands of years ago. Just like the sun. It had radiation and burning heat in its tail. The comet burned everything to the ground. There wasn’t a thing left. Indian people were here before that happened, living on the earth. But things were wrong; a lot of people had abandoned the spiritual path. The holy spirit warned them a long time before the comet came. Medicine men told everyone to prepare. Things were wrong with nature on the earth … Then that comet went through here. It had a long, wide tail and it burned up everything. It flew so low the tail scorched the earth … The comet made a different world. After that survival was hard work. The weather was colder than before”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“At six thousand or more years older than the stone circles of Stonehenge, the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang, mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Thabit ibn Qurra (AD 836-901, and also born in Harran), would have had little patience with loaded terms like "star idolatry" which seek to place the "paganism" of the Sabians on a lower level than the deadly, and often bigoted, narrow-minded and unscientific clerical monotheism of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Thabit was well aware that, underlying the ancient Sabian practices misunderstood by these young religions as "star idolatry," were indeed exact sciences of great benefit to mankind, and thus he wrote: 'Who else have civilized the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbors and rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“to be clear that in signalling the decades around 2012 as the end of a great cycle, the Maya were not speaking of the end of the world, as such, but rather of the end of an age – ‘a time of great transformation and world rebirth’16 – that would be followed by the beginning of a new great cycle or world age. This, in the Mayan scheme of things, is the turbulent and dangerous time of transition we live in today. It is therefore strange, and indeed somewhat eerie, to find the solar and astronomical coordinates of the exact same 80-year window between 1960 and 2040 prophesied by the Maya to mark a turning point in human history, carved in high relief on a 12,000-year-old pillar in Göbekli Tepe in far-off Turkey.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: Evidence for an Ancient Apocalypse

“The same solution--that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass--would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script. It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community. Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies of copies of much older lost originals, were collected in the nineteenth century and have found their way into a number of museums around the world. None remain on Easter Island itself and even in the period when they were collected no native Easter Islanders were able to read them.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Archaeology is a deeply conservative discipline and I have found that archaeologists, no matter where they are working, have a horror of questioning anything their predecessors and peers have already announced to be true. They run a very real risk of jeopardizing their careers if they do. In consequence they focus--perhaps to a large extent subconsciously--on evidence and arguments that don't upset the applecart. There might be room for some tinkering around the edges, some refinement of orthodox ideas, but God forbid that anything should be discovered that might seriously undermine the established paradigm.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“What would have made [seeing Göbekli Tepe from Harran] easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here--a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians. After telling us that there were "powerful images in this temple," the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314-394), describes the tower, noting that "from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran."
[...]
A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned. Current excavations by Harran University and the Sanliurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city's pre-Islamic period.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“After weaning the indigenous people's of Egypt: 'from their miserable and barbarous manners, [Osiris] taught them how to till the earth, and how to sow and reap crops, he formulated a code of laws for them, and made them worship the gods and perform service to them. He then left Egypt and traveled over the rest of the world teaching the various nations to do what his own subjects were doing. He forced no man to carry out his instructions, but by means of gentle persuasion and an appeal to their reason, he succeeded in inducing them to practice what he preached.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Berossos compiled his History from the temple archives of Babylon (reputed to have contained "public records" that had been preserved for "over 150,000 years"). He has passed on to us a description of Oannes as a "monster," or a "creature." However, what Berossos has to say is surely more suggestive of a man wearing some sort of fish-costume--in short, some sort of disguise. The monster, Berossos tells us: "had the whole body of a fish, but underneath and attached to the head of the fish there was another head, human, and joined to the tail of the fish, feet like those of a man, and it had a human voice ... At the end of the day, this monster, Oannes, went back to the sea and spent the night. It was amphibious, able to live both on land and in the sea ... Later, other monsters similar to Oannes appeared."
Bearing in mind that the curious containers carried by Oannes and the Apkallu sages are also depicted on one of the megalithic pillars at Göbekli Tepe (and [...] as far afield as ancient Mexico as well), what are we to make of all this? The mystery deepends when we follow the Mesopotamian traditions further. In summary, Oannes and the brotherhood of Apkallu sages are depicted as tutoring mankind for many thousands of years. It is during this long passage of time that the five antediluvian cities arise, the centers of a great civilization, and that kingship is "lowered from heaven." Prior to the first appearance of Oannes, Berossos says, the people of Mesopotamia 'lived in a lawless manner, like the beasts of a field.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“We are used to things starting out small and simple and then progressing--evolving--to become ever more complex and sophisticated, so this is naturally what we expect to find on archaeological sites. It upsets our carefully structured ideas of how civilizations should behave, how they should mature and develop, when we are confronted by a case like Göbekli Tepe that starts out perfect at the beginning and then slowly devolves until it is just a pale shadow of its former self.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“It concerns the growing body of evidence that 12,800 years ago a giant comet traveling on an orbit that took it through the inner solar system broke up into multiple fragments, and that many of these fragments, some more than a mile (2.4 kilometers) in diameter, hit the earth. It is believed that North America was the epicenter of the resulting cataclysm with several of the largest impacts on the North American ice cap causing floods and tidal waves and throwing a vast cloud of dust into the upper atmosphere that enshrouded the earth, preventing the sun’s rays from reaching the surface and thus initiating the sudden, mysterious global deep freeze that geologists call the Younger Dryas. We will go into the evidence for all this, and how it relates to “Bretz’s flood”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“The view of Professor Robert Schoch Schoch is a renowned figure, indeed notorious, for the case he’s made, based on strict geological evidence, that the Great Sphinx of Giza bears the unmistakable erosion patterns of thousands of years of heavy rainfall.6 This means it has to be much older than 2500 BC (the orthodox date, when Egypt received no more rain than it does today) and must originally have been carved around the end of the Ice Age when the Nile valley was subjected to a long period of intense precipitation.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Oannes was a civilizing hero revered by all the ancient cultures of Mesopotamia. He was said to have appeared there in the remotest antiquity and to have taught the’ inhabitants: the skills necessary for writing and for doing mathematics and for all sorts of knowledge: how to build cities, found temples … make laws … determine borders and divide land, also how to plant seeds and then to harvest their fruits and vegetables. In short [he] taught men all those things conducive to a civilized life.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“The two earliest surviving written versions of this global flood “myth” can be seen today at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“it is particularly striking that no less than thirty-five genera of mammals (with each genus consisting of several species) became extinct in North America between 12,900 and 11,600 years ago, i.e. precisely during the mysterious Younger Dryas cold”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Ideas without precedent,” he was to write later: are generally looked on with disfavor and men are shocked if their conceptions of an orderly world are challenged. A hypothesis earnestly defended begets emotional reaction which may cloud the protagonist’s view, but if such hypotheses outrage prevailing modes of thought the view of antagonists may also become fogged.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Integral to it is the parallel assumption of gradualism, namely that “the present is the key to the past” and that the rate of change observable today is an accurate guide to rates of change that prevailed in the past.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“the principle known as “uniformitarianism.” This is the assumption that existing processes, acting as at present, are sufficient to account for all geological changes.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Afortunadamente, se trata de una vía con poco tráfico, de modo que aunque tienes que cruzar la autopista dos veces al año por lo general no te tropiezas con nada. No obstante, lo que hace que algunos cruces sean más peligrosos que otros es el hecho de que los grandes camiones y otro tráfico pesado tienen tendencia a reunirse en ciertos lugares. En efecto, lo que Clube y Napier han hecho con sus cálculos, trazando hacia atrás las órbitas de objetos conocidos de la «autopista» de las Táuridas, es lanzar un aviso de que ahora, y durante las décadas siguientes, nuestros cruces conllevan un riesgo muy superior de una serie de colisiones con algún «trafico pesado» muy amenazador. Las evidencias de que una serie de colisiones semejantes tuvieron lugar hace entre 12.800 y 11.600 años y de que la causa fue la fragmentación del meteorito gigante que dio lugar a todos los objetos de las Táuridas deben, cuando menos, hacer que nos concentremos en el problema. Ya no”
― Graham Hancock, Los magos de los dioses (Historia)

“Our pollution and neglect of the majestic garden of the earth, our rape of its resources, our abuse of the oceans and the rainforests, our fear, hatred and suspicion of one another multiplied by a hundred bitter regional and sectarian conflicts, our consistent track record of standing by and doing nothing while millions suffer, our ignorant, narrow-minded racism, our exclusivist religions, our forgetfulness that we are all brothers and sisters, our bellicose chauvinism, the dreadful cruelties that we indulge in, in the name of nation, or faith, or simple greed, our obsessive, competitive, ego-driven production and consumption of material goods and the growing conviction of many, fuelled by the triumphs of materialist science, that matter”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: Evidence for an Ancient Apocalypse

“As to a night visit, and my plan to see the stars with the megaliths around me … What a joke! The roof has cut Göbekli Tepe off entirely from the cosmos. It feels almost like a deliberate, calculated act of disempowerment – as though someone amongst the powers that be suddenly woke up and realised how dangerous this ancient place has become to the established order of things and how subversive it potentially is to the system of mind control, very much including control of the past, that keeps modern society in order.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: Evidence for an Ancient Apocalypse

“Archaeology is too much constrained by a rigid reference frame of what is possible and what is not, and tends to ignore, sidestep, or ridicule evidence that challenged that reference frame.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“Egyptologic”—i.e. that special form of reasoning, with a built-in double standard, deployed only by Egyptologists.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“As very often in our discipline, old and seemingly certain statements rest forever without further verification,”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization

“from conditions that are calculated to have been warmer and wetter than today’s 13,000 years ago,70 to conditions that were colder and drier than those at the last glacial maximum just a few hundred years later.”
― Graham Hancock, Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization