The
Tripping Link-
Graham Hancock and the Origin of Man
By Preston Peet
Originally Published in High Times Magazine, September,
2006
Posted at DrugWar.com August 16, 2006
photo by Santha Faiia
"One very plausible, and for me very persuasive,
explanation, in the school of Huxley,
James and Hoffman,"
writes controversial, internationally best selling author Graham
Hancock in his new book, Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient
Teachers of Mankind (Century, 2005, The
Disinformation Company, 2006), "is that there do indeed
exist 'separate, freestanding realities'-or 'parallel dimensions'
of the kind quantum physics predicts-that vibrate at a different
frequency to our own and thus are invisible to us except when
we approach them in altered states of consciousness."
Hancock, who currently lives in Bath, England, spent time as a
correspondent in Africa before writing his first bestseller, The
Sign and the Seal, about the Arc of the Covenant possibly
being in Ethiopia. In Fingerprints
of the Gods, his best selling book so far, Hancock postulated
that there may have been an advanced civilization wiped out around
10,000 years ago, examining in detail evidence from maps, ancient
legends and enigmatic ruins. Hancock further explored this idea
in works including, but not limited to, Underworld,
where he dove on a variety of sites around the world in search
of sunken cities and ruins; and Heaven's
Mirror, an oversized coffee table book of gorgeous photographs
of ancient South American, Egyptian and Cambodian cities that
show signs of mysterious astronomical alignments and advanced
technological knowledge seemingly beyond what's attributed to
the civilizations [alleged to have] originally built these cities.
These pursuits lead him to the basic question: When did human
beings actually begin behaving as modern humans do? What jump
started human beings onto the road to civilization and all its
trappings?
In Supernatural, Hancock supposes that 50,000 years ago, the human
beings who made the first cave paintings, developed the first
religions and learned the secrets of the plant world were genuinely
taught by "beings" encountered while under the influence
of hallucinogenic [or entheogenic] substances as ibogaine, ayahuasca,
mushrooms, DMT and more.
Drawing upon both his own theories and those of other researchers,
Hancock makes the case that sacred plants were the catalyst for
gnosis and creativity in pre-historic humans. Hancock is curious
how archaeologists and researchers today, who've never tried these
drugs but call themselves professionals in the field, tell us
authoritatively what others are experiencing while under the influence,
and whether others' visions are "real" or not.
"In Britain my sense is the majority of people probably don't
want to think about this kind of material at all-especially since
it involves the taboo subject of drugs," Hancock says. "But
the US is different. Although there are deeply reactionary tendencies
in the US there is also the other half of America which goes its
own way and thinks its own thoughts and feels strongly about individual
freedom."
Hancock believes the War on Some Drugs and Users is not only evil
but that it is cutting us off from valuable knowledge, that we
are learning nothing new from what the planet supplied us as learning
tools.
"Yes I completely agree with you about the sinister Orwellian
evil of the War on Drugs," Hancock tells me. "It is
a madness that has seized our societies. The more I see these
kinds of maneuverings going on, the more I realize how deeply
public opinion is manipulated and how the very
use of language (Orwell again!) is designed to shape our perceptions
of drugs, the more depressed, frustrated and unhappy I feel. By
language I mean, for example, the constant coupling of the words
drug and abuse. By getting into the linguistic structures of the
brain, such 'ab'use of language actually stops large numbers of
people from ever thinking rationally about the subject at all.
We are sleep-walking into the abyss of 'consciousness crimes.'"
There are still many mysteries still unexplored in both our inner
spaces and our ancient past-and despite the fact most entheogenic
explorations of our inner spaces have been outlawed by current
prohibition policies, Supernatural is an educational and entertaining
voyage of exploration into both. I highly recommend Hancock's
latest book to anyone interested in what launched human beings
on the path of "intelligence" all those years ago. Not
only is this a controversial subject, but the dangers of partaking
in these entheogenic voyages of learning that Hancock describes
our ancestors taking (not to mention himself) run extremely high
in this day and age due to prohibition. No one will not be able
to definitely answer whether or not these plant teachers truly
have more to tell us until we, as a society, deal with these plants
and the resultant vision states they induce without threat of
criminal sanctions.
