Geez Louise, two in a row! Once again, Powerful Joe Rogan regales us listeners with one kickass podcast episode; this time with none other than Graham Hancock, the explorer of deep mysteries and lost worlds, who came to the JRE studio for a wide-range discussion about altered states of consciousness, the benefits of psychedelics both for their healing qualities and as tools to expand one’s concept of Reality, along with the kind of research into ancient civilizations he’s most famous for ever since he published his seminal book Fingerprints of the Gods nearly 20 years ago.
A lot of things have happened in those 20 years, incidentally. Not only is archeoastronomy being taken a much more predominant role –thanks in part to the availability of computer software which can simulate the exact position of the constellations as they were in the night sky thousands of years ago– but we keep digging up more amazing discoveries which have forced historians to push back the dawn of civilization ever further. For Graham, the discovery of Göbekli Tepe felt like a personal vindication to his theories which are still considered as ‘pseudoscience’ by orthodox archeologists –although with Göbekli Tepe we actually need to talk about a RE-discovery, for the existence of the Turkish megalithic site was known since the 1950s, but it was originally dismissed by American scholars because its columns were ‘too finely carved’; it was only until the (recently deceased) German archeologist Klaus Schmidt decided to take a second look to those columns in 1994, that it was finally ascertained they predated the megaliths in Stonehenge by at least 6000 years.
Indeed, one of the main topics in Joe’s chat with Hancock was the issue of being in either the right or the wrong side of history. Copernicus and Galileo, with their theories about the nature of our planet and our solar system, are now universally acknowledged to be in the right side of history, whereas the Holy Inquisition and the cardinals who put Galileo into house arrest –and condemned Giordano Bruno to a fiery execution– are perceived in our age as reactionaries who stood in the way of progress. The same will no doubt be said of those who demanded TED to put down both Hancock’s & Rupert Sheldrake’s TEDx presentations a year ago, just as surely as future generations will also view the government agencies & international interests seeking to perpetuate the war on drugs, as the XXth century equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition: For standing in the way of every adult’s sovereign right to explore its own consciousness through the tools that have been at our disposal for thousands of years –Entheogens.
But perhaps with this & other needless wars there have been other forces at play, which has in fact been the subject of Graham’s fictional novel War God, the 1st in a trilogy of books dealing with a subject near & dear to my heart: The Spanish conquest of Mexico. If you read the novel already –for which I wrote a review for The Grail last July– you’d already know Graham explored the potential influence of ‘supernatural’ entities in the unfolding of that crucial moment in history; this year War God’s sequel Return of the Plumed Serpent will be released, and Hancock’s readers will find out how the demon/demiurge revered by the Aztecs as their god Huitzilopochtli played with both emperor Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés to prompt the fall of the Aztec reign, and the enslavement of millions of natives. Could it be that the same demon filling Cortés’ head with dreams of glory and riches in the XVIth century, has been also whispering in the ear of modern leaders, in order to maintain an endless river of blood to sate its thirst?
And yet, if there are dark entities seeking the suffering of men, couldn’t there also be forces of light seeking to guide us and show us a way out of the darkness? Graham’s personal experiences with the Ayahuasca brew have convinced him that this is the case; who knows? maybe those guides are also responsible for the modern resurgence of psychedelics in our present times, as well as how contemporary technologies like the world wide web, are empowering the masses into seeing beyond the web of lies that our governments have spun around our eyes for far too many years.
So be sure to listen to this latest episode of the Joe Rogan’s Experience with one of TDG’s favorite authors, and pre-order War God: Return of the Plumed Serpent to learn more about Graham Hancock’s gnostic vision of the world. BTW if you send him an e-mail to wargoddedications@gmail.com with confirmation of the pre-ordering before October 9th, he will send you a special bookplate with his signature to your designated postal address which you’ll be able to stick in your copy. This he’ll do after he returns from his trip around the United States with American catastrophist Randall Carlson –the last leg of his research for the upcoming book Magicians of the Gods— which will culminate at the Paradigm Symposium in Minneapolis, where he’ll meet with his friends & colleagues Robert Bauval & John Anthony West.
I will be there in Minnesota this October, where I’ll have the tremendous pleasure to extend my personal gratitude to one of the most illustrious explorers of our time.
