America Before

by Graham Hancock

  As a last resort I was put into an induced coma, intubated on a ventilator. My condition settled over the next 48 hours and eventually the doctors were able to withdraw the tube and start me breathing for myself again. It was the evening of Wednesday, August 16, when I began to return to some form of consciousness, baffled to see that Sean and Shanti, two of my grown-up children, had flown from Los Angeles and New York to be with Santha at my bedside, together with Leila and Gabrielle, two more of our grown-up children, who live in London. For quite some time I couldn’t understand what had happened, why I’d been fitted with a catheter, why my brain was so foggy.

  Little by little consciousness increased. I was moved to the neurology ward and on Thursday night, August 17, much to my relief, the catheter was removed. All day Friday the 18th I remained in the neurology ward, very wobbly but able to totter to the toilet with the aid of a stick. By Friday night I was feeling much better. Finally, on Saturday, I was discharged and came home.

  Tests carried out established pretty clearly (although there is still some mystery over what exactly is going on) that the epileptic seizures were not caused by blood clots deriving from my atrial fibrillation, but rather by long-term overuse of a migraine medication called sumatriptan, delivered by injection; I was taking up to a dozen of these shots a month and had been doing so for more than 20 years. Turns out having migraines is itself a risk factor for epilepsy, and research has established a link between triptans (especially when overused) and seizures. It’s almost certain it was the sumatriptan that had brought me to death’s door, and it is now obvious that I must simply suffer the hideous and mind-numbing pain of my migraines or end up comatose or dead. As I write this in 2018 I’m still on massive daily doses of the anticonvulsant medication levetiracetam. As long as I keep on taking it there’s a good chance the condition won’t recur.

  OUT OF BODY

  THE 48 HOURS OF INDUCED coma, though utterly harrowing for Santha, for our children, and for myself, raised interesting questions. Where was “I” during these missing 48 hours? I do remember the ventilator tube being stuffed down my throat and the powerful sense that I was being invaded and asphyxiated. But what happened after that?

  A few confused recollections return from time to time to haunt me, but they’re so muddled and fragmentary I can’t put them into place. I don’t think they’re memories of near-death experiences because—after all—I wasn’t dead. It was simply that my consciousness had been switched by medication to standby mode and the more I look back on it the more I realize that I was just absent, just gone, during those 48 hours. If I try to visualize that strange interlude what I see and what I feel is … darkness.

  Claustrophobic, enclosed, thick darkness.

  It wasn’t like that the last time I “died,” which was in May 1968, pretty much exactly 49 years earlier, following a massive electric shock.

  I was seventeen then and still living at home with my parents. I’m an only child. One of my siblings, a boy, was carried to term but born dead a couple of years before I was conceived. My two other siblings, first a girl—Susan—and then a boy—Jimmy—each lived for nearly a year before they died. When my parents went away to their holiday cottage that weekend in May 1968 I was home alone. Naturally, I seized the opportunity to throw a party on Saturday night.

  The house was semidetached with a small garden off a quiet, close-packed street, not an ideal location for 300 rowdy teenagers, loud music, and public drunkenness. It turned into an all-night event. The last stragglers didn’t leave until the early afternoon on Sunday and visits from irate neighbors left me in no doubt how fortunate I was that the police had not been called. Certainly my parents would be informed about what had happened when they returned that evening.

  In a state of some anxiety I spent the afternoon cleaning up. The house had been trashed so it took me hours to make it presentable, but by nightfall I was left only with the kitchen. I didn’t expect my parents back until late. There was still time. So I rolled up my sleeves and started in on the huge pile of dishes, cups, glasses, and empty bottles littered around the sink. A lot of water had been spilled on the floor. I would find a mop and deal with that as soon as the dishes were done.

  I was barefoot, hands and arms wet, and standing in the water around the base of the sink, when it occurred to me to check whether the refrigerator was properly plugged in. I’m quite obsessive and often push the back of a plug to make sure it is securely in its socket. The plug was close, I knew exactly where it was—having done this many times before—and without looking I reached for it.

  What I didn’t realize was that the back of the plug had been smashed off during the night and the live terminals were exposed. When I touched them with my wet hand while standing in a pool of water there was a tremendous BANG, a huge searing jolt lashed through my body, and I was thrown across the kitchen, hitting the wall behind me and slumping down to the floor.

  I knew I was slumped on the floor because I saw my body clearly but from a completely new perspective. I was no longer “in” that body! I was up around the light, hovering like a bird, looking down on myself.

  “Hmm,” I remember thinking, “how interesting.” My body lying there below me seemed a heavy, cumbersome thing now. Quite unnecessary, really. It was no great loss to be rid of it, and I liked the feeling of lightness and freedom.

  “What happens next?” I wondered.

  But then just as suddenly as I’d left my flesh, with just as little choice in the matter, I was within it again, stirring, groaning, coming back to consciousness on the floor.

  I was okay. Just fine, in fact! I’d had a nasty electric shock, that was all.

  I was young and strong then, and quite soon I was back on my feet. I finished the dishes, mopped the kitchen floor, and did a final check of the whole house. Finally, around 10 pm, with my parents still not returned, I took Rusty, my Irish terrier, for a walk. The moon was full and huge in the sky, dimming the stars with its cold, clear light and casting eerie shadows on the ground. Although I don’t remember the exact date in May 1968 on which I was electrocuted, a quick internet search confirms it could only have been the night of Sunday, May 12, when the moon was indeed full.

  My migraines began quite soon after that and have continued ever since. I think there’s a pattern where they occur more frequently around the time of the full moon than at other times of the month, but I’ve never bothered to keep a detailed record that would confirm or refute that theory. I could just as easily be imagining the connection.

  One thing my near-death experience in 1968 and my experiences of seizure and induced coma in 2017 have taught me, however—one thing I’m sure of—is that the borderline between life and death is filmy, fragile, and as permeable as a breath of air.

  We feel firmly fixed in our lives but any of us may cross over at any time.

  Sometimes, very rarely, we come back.

  But when we don’t? What happens then? Is that the end of us, or is it possible—as every religion in the world asserts—that some part of us, some immaterial essence, survives the grave?

  A faction of scientists (Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are notable members), scoff at the very suggestion that there might be anything more to us than our material, mortal parts—and they could be right. It may really be the case that there is no transcendent meaning in the universe, no purpose to the human experience, no such thing as the soul, and therefore no possibility of any kind of “life after death.” It’s important to be clear, though, that such ideas are not proven, evidence-based, scientific “facts” arising from experiments and empirical research. On the contrary, they are unproven assumptions and as such, even if voiced by eminent figures like Dawkins and Dennett, they’re of no greater or lesser value than the unproven assumptions that underlie all religions.

  Regardless of one’s own opinions on such matters, moreover, there is one undeniable fact on which I think everyone can agree, and this is that ancient civilizations, just like our
own, had religions and that these religions, just like our own, concerned themselves very deeply with the problem of death.

  REALM OF THE DEAD

  I WAS RAISED IN A Christian family, and being by nature rebellious I committed myself to atheism at around age fifteen.

  After that, I think can safely say that I took no interest in spiritual matters whatsoever until I encountered the Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead in my early forties. I was ready for it then, in a way I wouldn’t have been in my twenties or thirties, and I was so intrigued by its contents that over a period of years I also delved extensively, with growing fascination, into the more ancient Pyramid Texts and the less well known Coffin Texts, Book of Gates, Book of What Is in the Netherworld, and Book of the Breaths of Life.

  I’ll refer to these texts in what follows sometimes by their specific titles and sometimes, collectively, as the “books of the dead” or as the “funerary texts.” They are the surviving treasures of an ancient and profound inquiry into the mysterious nature of reality. I first began to describe what I drew from them in Fingerprints of the Gods, published in 1995, and then had the opportunity to go into greater detail in two subsequent books, Message of the Sphinx (titled Keeper of Genesis in the United Kingdom), published in 1996, and Heaven’s Mirror, published in 1998.

  An enigma that I explore in all those books, but in the greatest detail in Heaven’s Mirror, is that traces of the same spiritual concepts and symbolism that enlighten the Egyptian texts are found all around the world among cultures that we can be certain were never in direct contact. Straightforward diffusion from one to the other is therefore not the answer, and “coincidence” doesn’t even begin to account for the level of detail in the similarities. The best explanation, in my view, is that we’re looking at a legacy, shared worldwide, passed down from a single, remotely ancient source.

  There are many aspects to this legacy, but I believe its hallmark, as the reader knows by now, is a system of ideas in which geometry, astronomy, and the fate of the soul are all strangely entangled. The geometrical and astronomical memes by which the system replicates itself across cultures and epochs are plentifully represented in the circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles, and in the solstitial, equinoctial, and lunar alignments, of the great mounds and geoglyphs of the Amazon and the Mississippi River basins.

  But what about the fate of the soul?

  For the entire span of more than 3,000 years that it endured, this question was the preeminent focus of the astonishing high civilization of ancient Egypt and of the remarkable religion that seems to have been born fully formed with it in the Nile Valley in the late fourth millennium BC. Within that religion, expressed in the books of the dead, certain key symbols and ideas stand out, involving most prominently the constellation of Orion, the Milky Way, and the notion, intimately connected to beliefs about both, that the soul must make a perilous postmortem journey on which it will face challenges and ordeals and be judged on the choices that it made during life.

  The constellation Orion, on the west bank of the Milky Way, was seen in ancient Egypt as the celestial image of the god Osiris, Lord of the Realm of the Dead. A narrow shaft cut though the body of the Great Pyramid targets Zeta Orionis, the lowest of the three stars of Orion’s belt. IMAGE: ROBERT BAUVAL.

  Seemingly with the intention of preparing its initiates for this afterlife journey, as Robert Bauval and I showed in our coauthored book Message of the Sphinx, the funerary texts also called for the construction of large-scale geometrical and astronomically aligned structures that were to “copy” or imitate on the ground a region of the sky known as the Duat—the ancient Egyptian name, often translated as “Netherworld,” for the realm of the dead.1

  The ruler of this Duat realm was the god Osiris, Lord of the Dead, whose figure in the sky was the majestic constellation that the ancient Egyptians called Sahu, and that we know as Orion.2 It is therefore not surprising, as a manifestation of this “as above so below” cosmology, that the three great pyramids of Egypt’s Giza necropolis are laid out on the ground in the form of the three stars of the belt of Orion. This correlation was first discovered and put on the public record by my dear friend Robert Bauval in his ground-breaking 1994 book The Orion Mystery.3 As early as the mid-1960s, however, Egyptologist Alexander Badawy and astronomer Virginia Trimble had recognized that a mysterious narrow shaft constructed at an angle of about 45 degrees through the body of the Great Pyramid would have pointed at the belt of Orion at meridian transit some 4,500 years ago.4 With the use of accurate inclinometer data provided by a robotic exploration in 1992, Robert Bauval was able to refine Badawy and Trimble’s work and to confirm that in the Pyramid Age, circa 2450 BC, the shaft had been precisely targeted on Zeta Orionis, the first of the three stars of Orion’s belt, counterpart in the sky of the Great Pyramid on the ground.5

  This, too, makes perfect sense from the perspective of ancient Egyptian beliefs. An invocation often repeated in the Pyramid Texts states of the deceased pharaoh:

  O King, you are this great star, the companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion, who navigates the Netherworld with Osiris. … O King, navigate and arrive.6

  Since the shaft emanates from the so-called King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, within meters of an empty granite sarcophagus, it’s therefore difficult to disagree with what is now the prevailing scholarly opinion concerning its purpose—namely that it must have been designed to serve as a portal, a “star-shaft,” through which the soul of the deceased could ascend to Orion and thence begin its navigation of the Duat.7

  ANCIENT EGYPT IN ALABAMA?

  FOLLOWING MY FIRST BOUT OF seizures in New Mexico in May 2017, Santha and I flew to New Orleans and enjoyed a few days of rest, recreation, and good Cajun food in one of the most laid-back cities in the world while I recovered my strength. Then we were on the road again, driving north to explore the mound-builder sites of the Lower Mississippi Valley, heading ultimately for Serpent Mound in Ohio on the summer solstice.

  We stopped first about 4 hours north of New Orleans at the incredible geometrical and astronomical earthworks of Poverty Point, described in chapter 20.

  We then went on to visit Emerald Mound, also in Louisiana, and the Winterville Mounds in Mississippi, and on the fourth day of our journey reached Moundville in Alabama.

  Here, in addition to the geometry and astronomy I’d come to expect, I found myself plunged most unexpectedly into an ancient Egyptian déjà vu moment after we’d climbed to the top of Mound B. A good vantage point for Santha’s photography, this mound is pyramidal in form, 18 meters high, and dominates the whole rather spectacular site that extends southward from the Black Warrior River. The expansive grand plaza lay at our feet, edged by more than twenty mounds laid out, somewhat like Watson Brake, in the pattern of a great ellipse. At the center of the plaza, presently the focus of Santha’s camera, stood a large rectangular platform mound—Mound A—and while she photographed it I stepped aside to read the official archaeological marker.

  Much of what it had to say was standard stuff about the building of the site, most of which apparently had been completed over a period of about 100 years in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There was some predictable speculation that religion must have been used to coerce, cajole, or convince the population to do all that work. But then suddenly things got interesting. “At Moundville,” I read,

  an excellent example of a powerful religious image was the hand and eye motif. Moundville’s “Rattlesnake Disk,” pictured on this noticeboard, offers us the best-known version, although numerous variations occur in pottery, copper, stone and shell artifacts.

  Stories passed down among various tribes tell of the dead entering the afterlife through an opening marked by a great warrior’s hand in the sky. One account describes that hand as the constellation we know as Orion with Orion’s belt as the wrist, its fingers pointing downwards. A faint cluster of stars in the center of the palm is a portal to the path of souls or path to the
land of the dead. Researchers speculate that the hand and eye represent this constellation.8

  I was nonplussed. I try to prepare thoroughly, but it looked like I’d missed something important in my background reading before starting out on this trip. The connection of the constellation of Orion to the land of the dead was a fundamental aspect of the ancient Egyptian religion and it felt weirdly like coming home—that comfortable intimacy of familiar territory—to find it here in a Native North American religion.

  Moundville: Rattlesnake Disk with “Hand-and-Eye” symbol. PHOTO: COURTESY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA MUSEUMS, TUSCALOOSA, ALABAMA.

  But I should have known about this!

  The Rattlesnake Disk was in the museum we’d passed through briefly on our way into the site, intending to see the exhibits properly at the end of our visit.

  Now suddenly it was top priority, so 10 minutes later we were standing in front of its display case.

  It’s a mysterious, complex image on a disk of dark gray sandstone, 32 centimeters (just over 12 inches) in diameter. Seventeen notches, creating a coglike effect, are chiseled at equal distances around the perimeter of the disk. Next, intaglio, come two intertwined rattlesnakes, their long tongues flicking forward, their bodies knotted together. Curiously, these serpents have horns. An oval enclosure formed by their coils frames a human hand with what indeed appears to be an eye engraved at its center.

  “The hand and eye,” I read in the accompanying description:

  is a prominent Moundville motif and is thought to represent a part of the constellation that we identify as Orion. As a group the knotted serpents and the hand and eye are believed to be a representation of the night sky. The serpents are the ropes that join the earth and sky. In the palm of the hand is the portal or doorway through which the spirits of the dead can ascend the path of souls … a road or ribbon of light, the Milky Way, stretching out before the traveling souls. This river of light … deposits the souls, after a series of trials, into the realm of the dead. Families from all over the Moundville chiefdom brought and buried their dead here because they believed that Moundville was the appropriate place for the spirit to start its journey along the path of souls. Thus over time Moundville became, in the minds of its people, not only the symbolic gateway to the realm of the dead but also the materialized image of that sacred domain on earth.9