Fingerprints of the Gods--Quick Review
It has been a painfully long time since I publicly shared a thoughtful analysis of something I read. I read a lot. I spent so many years analyzing everything and I think I was ready to take a little time off from the brainiac approach to literature and just enjoy the pleasure of it.
Well, the literary brainiac is ready for a comeback, and I’m going to start with Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods.
The deepest part of the human psyche is made for story. Everything about the way we view the world is processed through the structure of story. Math equations, scientific experiments, computer code…all story. It is our most basic building block and we are built to express and receive information in the form of story.
Every culture in the world, no matter when it began or when it ended or how it has evolved, has a creation myth. Every major culture in this current era of existence has an original Cinderella story, a Hamlet story, and a hero’s journey myth.
In Fingerprints of the Gods, Hancock takes our connection to story to the level of the stars. Starting with a map that shows the landmass of Antarctica from a time before it was covered in ice (about 6000 years ago), before any recognized human civilization that was known to have the complexity and the resources to travel the oceans with accuracy and to create a map with the same level of accuracy, Hancock takes us through the major monuments of South America and Egypt that speak of a connection to a common origin of intelligence.
The content of the book is astounding. Considering all the evidence, some of which is in the form of ancient stories and scripts and some of which is in the form of giant architectural phenomena in the form of pyramids and temples, Hancock connects us to the cultures that existed before our last ice age. These cultures still remain, speaking to us in stories that use the precessional language of the stars.
I love the content of the book. I was able to apply and connect a lot of my literary knowledge from my own degree to the map that Hancock builds in this manuscript. Hancock also explains everything logically, citing his own sources thoroughly. It is clear from the writing that Hancock, above all, wants this to be accessible and understandable by those of us who don’t have degrees in archaeology or geology. I also appreciate how direct that author is about his belief in a far more ancient origin of human culture that we have previously believed and how open he is about letting the reader draw his or her own conclusion regarding the evidence in the text.
At the my own conclusion of the book, I am left with a sense of being as insignificant as the author looks standing next to a cut stone the size of a double-decker bus in the Osireion in Abydos. At the same time, I am also left with a sense of how deeply we are all connected, not just in our current situation on this planet, but to our ancestors and their ancestors through all of time.
We are more ancient than we want to believe. We are from and we will return to the stars.
Christine