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This weeks feature
Great leap forward
Over the past ten years, Graham Hancock's investigations into the earth's prehistory have enthralled readers of books like 'The Sign and The Seal' and 'Fingerprints of the Gods'. TV viewers have also followed him via two series for Channel 4, 'Quest For The Lost Civilisation' and 'Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age'. In his latest book, 'Supernatural', Graham delves right back to the dawn of what we know as mankind, and sets out to examine that point, about 40,000 years ago, when man was transformed from a barely sentient ape into a fully-functioning human being.
This leap can be witnessed in the magnificent cave paintings of central and southern France and the rock shelters of Southern Africa. He believes the art there is rich in symbolism and suggestive of another world, a spiritual dimension. |
Delving into the past. |
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What is also striking, Graham claims, is that the images in this primitive art, though found in different parts of the world, are strikingly similar. "Academics now accept that is because tribal priests - the shamans - were entering altered states of consciousness, often through the use of plant hallucinogens, and sometimes through techniques such as rhythmic dancing," he adds. "In these states, because human neurology is the same all over the world, they were seeing pretty much the same thing, and it was these images they chose to depict on the walls of their caves."
In other words, he believes, it was primitive man's free use of hallucinogenics that speeded up the process of evolution. This is a radical enough idea in itself, you might think, but Graham takes the argument one stage further and suggests that what they were seeing was not some kind of communal hallucination, but may well have been another plane of existence altogether - perhaps what we now call 'God'. "I think the academics are right, and have found the source of religious ideas in the first great art in the world," Graham says, "but I don't think they have come to terms with what they have found, which has devastating implications of our idea of what reality is.
"Academics, especially if they think of themselves as scientists, tend to reduce everything to chemical processes, so they think they have proved that religion originated in disturbed brain chemistry - the visions were nothing more than hallucinations. I think what they may have proved, however, is that in certain states of consciousness, we have access to other realms of reality."
It's a challenging theory, but what stops it from being laughed out of court is the depth of scholarship. You can take or leave Graham's argument, but you'll learn a lot along the way, and there's not much more you can ask from a book, especially one as beautifully written and constructed as this one.
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| Supernatural
by Graham Hancock (Century, £18.99, ISBN 1844136817). |
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