image: Wikimedia commons (link).
The preceding post discussed George Orwell's powerful depiction of the fact that control over the narrative of history is an extremely important weapon in the arsenal of those who seek to exercise a form of tyrannical mind control over others.
This can be demonstrated to be taking place regarding certain important events in the recent past -- evidenced quite plainly in the reprehensible termination of the teaching career of tenured Professor James Tracy at Florida Atlantic University for his efforts to examine and discuss evidence that undermines the official narrative of certain traumatic events portrayed in the news media in the United States.
However, as that previous post mentions, a parallel can also be drawn to the control over the narrative of humanity's ancient past. Those who have had the temerity over the past hundred or hundred or so years to have discussed the abundant evidence which seems to call into question the conventional outline of the ancient past can attest to the often withering scorn and other forms of social and professional approbation that is unfailingly leveled at any dissenting voices who call into question the official narrative.
And yet, just as in Orwell's masterful 1984, there are many who (like Winston in the novel) have personally seen evidence which completely upends the conventional narrative, and who realize that something is seriously amiss with the official storyline.
The volume of evidence has continued to mount over the past few decades, to the point that it is threatening to collapse the entire edifice upon which the conventional outline of human history has been built.
For instance, as discussed in Graham Hancock's latest work, Magicians of the Gods (which ties together many facets spanning the arc of his many previous explorations and books up to this point), the ancient site often referred to by its Turkish name of Gobekli Tepe has been dated to around 11,600 years before present, based on readings of the material used to fill in around the massive and precisely-planed stone pillars (over two hundred of which appear to have been buried at the massive site, many of them in the range of twenty tons of rock), which means that the pillars themselves are at least that old but may in fact be even older (20).
Many of these massive and precisely-worked megaliths feature beautiful and graceful artistic relief renderings of stylized animals, many or all of which may represent astronomical constellations (a point Graham Hancock makes in his book). Furthermore, archaeologists studying the site (which has only been under excavation since the late 1990s) admit that, based on their analysis, the finest stonework and artistic work appears to be found on the oldest of the stones, a puzzling piece of information according to the conventional theories of ancient human history.
In fact, conventional views of history are tremendously undermined by the discoveries at Gobekli Tepe. The development of such high and sophisticated skill at stone working, at such a remote period, threatens to completely upend the official narrative which continues to be so confidently taught in schools beginning at the very earliest grades and going through undergraduate and graduate college and university courses (and reinforced by numerous additional "history channel"-style videos and shows for the benefit of those who are no longer exposed to history classes in classroom environments).
It is simply not easy to accumulate the extremely advanced technological, artistic, and engineering skill sets required to erect twenty-ton stone pillars on such a massive scale, and the undeniable evidence showing such abilities at a date that is as far back (or, indeed, much further back) in time from ancient Egypt than ancient Egypt is far back in time from us in the year 2016 is simply a devastating shock to the conventional timeline that proposes very "primitive" subsistence-style wandering in the millennia prior to the first-known civilizations (which themselves appear to have simply "materialized out of nowhere," already possessing incredible engineering and artistic skills, as John Anthony West documents in his essential Serpent in the Sky).
Further, as Graham Hancock also points out in this latest book in his corpus of research and analysis, many of the massive pillars at Gobekli Tepe feature human arms along their sides, with long-fingered hands folded in such a way that the fingertips almost touch -- in a manner which is irrefutably reminiscent of the exact same artistic details on many of the enormous moai of Rapa Nui (Easter Island).
You can see the arms (but not the hands -- those are hidden by the "cow tail" grass near the ground-level, and by the soil itself) along the side of one megalith from Gobekli Tepe in the Wikimedia image here (there are better photographs in Graham Hancock's book). You can see the same stylized arms with nearly-touching fingers in many images of moai available on the web, such as the two shown below (there are even better ones in the book Easter Island: the Mystery Solved by Thor Heyerdahl -- an excellent book and well worth owning, although much as I admire Thor Heyerdahl I must argue that the "mystery" of Rapa Nui is by no means completely "solved" at this point).
The long-fingered hands, depicted at exactly the same angle and position on the body as the stylized arms on some of the megaliths at Gobekli Tepe, can be seen at the left side of the image above -- and in even better detail in some of the images in the latest Graham Hancock book and in the Thor Heyerdahl book linked above.
The best images from the Thor Heyerdahl book showing the long-fingered hands are of moai statues which for centuries were buried up to their necks (as indeed many of the great moai remain to this day, buried to their necks). The fact that Gobekli Tepe was deliberately buried, and that a great number of the moai of Easter Island appear to have been buried, is itself extremely singular and striking. And, just think how much effort and time it would have taken people to completely and deliberately bury all the huge stone pillars of Gobekli Tepe -- and how they could have done that if they were living on subsistence hunter-gathering methods (which they obviously were not, based on the extremely high sophistication of their stone working and monument-building technologies).
Then, ask yourself how the conventional paradigm of human history can explain the incredible similarities found between the great T-stones of Gobekli Tepe, and the mysterious silent moai of Easter Island.
The answer is that the conventional paradigm cannot account for this similarity at all, whatsoever. It can only either ignore the similarities, or argue that they "just happened" to pop up independently, without any common influence, in complete isolation from one another. The conventional theory argues the same thing for the amazing mathematical similarities between some of the pyramids found in Central America and the pyramids of Giza in Egypt, for example -- and the list could go on and on.
But, as compelling as all the above archaeological evidence must be acknowledged to be, I believe there is a completely additional category of extremely compelling, verifiable, objective data which also provides undeniable and conclusive evidence: the ancient myths and stories of humanity, found around the world and amply documented (some of it with documentation stretching back for centuries, if not millennia).
When we begin to understand the system of celestial metaphor which I (and others before me, stretching back at least to Plato, even though he said it in a "veiled" way) argue can be shown to be operating at the foundation of the myths, it provides us with another extremely powerful set of evidence which completely undermines the "isolationist" theories of human history which are continually and without any room for disagreement or debate drilled into the heads of students -- and (through a more-subtle program of "history" shows and basic assumptions underlying "news" broadcasts) the heads of adults who have finished formal academic instruction.
When we can find evidence in myths of a celestial metaphor with details on a level of specificity that are as unique and unlikely to be mere "coincidence" as the "long, extended, nearly-touching fingers" found on the Gobekli Tepe stones and the Rapa Nui moai, and we find it operating in the myths of the Pacific Islands as well as in the myths of ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, then we can say that such evidence forms yet another parallel field of data which, alongside the data arising from continued archaeological discoveries, argues for a complete reassessment of the "official narrative" of humanity's ancient past.
And, I can assure you, there is abundant evidence of just this level of specificity to be found in the myths of the different cultures of our incredible planet, including the "incomplete baptism" myth (based on the exact-same constellations and some rather "obscure" metaphorical interpretations of those constellations) which is found in the myths of ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and the myths of Polynesia, for example. And that is just one example -- there are nearly unlimited other examples which are equally compelling (I'll discuss the "incomplete baptism" analysis in a later post).
The picture that begins to emerge of the very distant past is one that is very different from the picture we have been shown by the purveyors of the conventional narrative (most of whom, it must be said, undoubtedly believe the official story which they are propagating).
And yet, as George Orwell argued so powerfully (and so rightly), the control of the past is absolutely a weapon of control over the present, and the future, and a weapon which is coveted by those wishing to exert illegitimate control over the thoughts and actions of others, sometimes for violent ends.
It may be that no such nefarious motives are behind the erroneous narrative of ancient human history that has been pushed so consistently and stubbornly by those in control of academia and the media for the past several decades (or centuries) -- but whether or not such motives are present, it is absolutely in our best interest to try to learn the real story about humanity's ancient history. It is not at all simply an "academic" debate, any more than the question of what really happened during significant events in recent history is merely an "academic" debate.
Happily for us, we live during a time when extremely exciting new evidence seems to be surfacing almost every day, and during which large numbers of people are waking up to the problems in the official story.
I believe that the study of the world-wide system of celestial allegory which forms the foundation for the world's myths constitutes an extremely important field of evidence, alongside the archaeological and other evidence that continues to point towards a different view of humanity's ancient past.
image: Wikimedia commons (link).