Graham Hancock- shamans, fairies, aliens, saints and DNA

[Beekeeper]

The book starts with Hancock sampling psychotropic plants that have long been used in shamanist practice. (This is for purely educational purposes, of course ).) He begins by relating his experience with the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga, containing the hallucinogenic chemical ibogaine. Hancock tells us this is administered by a reputable healer and with a doctor present. It leads to a pretty intense series of hallucinations and an OBE that affect Hancock quite profoundly,

I hadn't expected ibogaine to make a difference, but it did. From the moment I woke up with my strength recovered I knew that it had flipped a sort of switch in me because I was no longer able to see anything in the same negative, nihilistic way as I had done before, (p.13)

It also leaves him “violently ill and unable to walk” for a further 12 hours after the visions conclude.

After this introduction, he launches into some of the history of cave art, presenting David Lewis-Williams' neuropsychological theory. While the human brain has been anatomically the same for 200000 years, it is only about 30000 years ago that humans begin to paint the caves. This theory states that it was the newly discovered ability to access altered states through psychotropic plants and other methods such as dancing, drumming, sensory deprivation and physical trauma that altered humankind dramatically, resulting in the development of religion and culture, as reflected in cave art. Prehistoric cave art, according to this theory, depicts the experiences of shamans while hallucinating.

Hancock now relates the experience he has had, prior to his experience with ibogaine, of drinking the sacred ayahuasca -the “vine of the dead”- in the Peruvian Amazon. (There are coloured prints of ayahuasca vision-inspired artworks at the centre of the book. If you’re interested, try http://www.pabloamaringo.com/ They are quite beautiful.) Before he does so, however, he points out the unlikelihood of the Indians discovering the properties of this plant. Of the 80000 plants they can choose from they find not only a bush with hallucinogenic leaves but also how to combine it with a vine that inactivates an enzyme in the digestive tract that would block the hallucinogenic effect.

So, he attends his first ceremony conducted by a shaman in the jungle. His hallucination begins with “entoptic phenomena”/ “phosphenes” or “form constants:” technical terms for the patterns, often geometric, that appear before the real hallucinations/visions begin. As a chant begins, he finds that the phosphenes he sees (that form into the flank of a giant serpent and the eye of a peacock’s display feather) begin to beat in time to the chant and he feels as though he is rising. He is nauseous and there’s a chance he’ll evacuate his bowels. Then, he comes down, feeling he has only “stood at the doors of perception” and resolves to drink more of the horrible brew.

In this second experience, the opening images are overlaid with large snakes. This is a universal experience for ayahuasca users. These snakes, he tells us, often resolve into the double helix of DNA. He begins to vomit and sweat, finding himself on his hands and knees. When he returns to the circle, he suddenly encounters two beings of white light only three or four feet tall. They have heart- shaped faces on big domed foreheads and seem to be trying to communicate with him when he is again overwhelmed by bout of vomiting. He continues in this way, relating other ayahuasca experiences and beginning to hint at his belief that these are not mere hallucinations, in the sense that Science uses the word, but glimpses into spiritual dimensions. He elaborates on that later.

Of interest is that he encounters the classic grey aliens in further experiences of ayahuasca,

…then suddenly I find myself looking, at very close range, into a shockingly “alien” face, grey in colour, with a wide domed forehead and narrow pointed chin – heart shaped like the faces of the “light-beings”….But this creature doesn’t look friendly. Its eyes are multi-segmented like those of flies….since aliens and ETs have never been interests of mine, I’m really puzzled to experience such an hallucination….A short while later… a beautiful Egyptian goddess appears. (pp68-69)

What’s frightening is something that would be easy to interpret as an abduction experience – the feeling that if I allow the vision to continue I’m going to be taken up by those metal ships. They rotate and pulse with light from beneath, seeming to rise through a tube or funnel in the universe. I distinctly don’t want to be taken and open my eyes to stop what I’m seeing. But the strangeness persists. I’m back in the real world but just out of sight I can feel serpents, dragons, demonic aliens and spaceships whirling all around. (pp71-72)

He goes on to describe the alien as different to the serpents and dragons, as a huge insect with humanoid features. He also describes other insect creatures, less intelligent worker beings, that are present as well.

In his final ayahuasca vision, Hancock encounters a therianthrope, that is an animal-human hybrid, in this case a man crocodile being. Again this is typical of the sort of entity encountered by the Indian shamans. Hancock later sees many of the things he experienced in his visions in Pablo Amaringo’s paintings of his ayahuasca visions.

[CFTraveler]

In his 2012 book, Daniel Pinchbeck talks about this book, and goes to many of the places Hancock went (may have even gone together, I already forgot). What he wrote about it sounded very interesting. I can't wait to read it.
In his descriptions of both Iboga and Ayahuasca, he characterizes them as possessed of a specific personality and character, Iboga as a male presence (and very earthly), and Ayahuasca as a portal for more complicated presences (which jibes very well with the et visions).

[journyman161]

Graham Hancock writes well but more importantly from my PoV, he actually goes to check things out. the man is a 'Doer' & not someone to sit in a room & read what others have done. He makes no claims he can't back up with solid evidence & doesn't rely on others to do either his thinking or his exploration.

From ideas about the pyramids & sphinx & where they came from, through to the measurement systems used to build Giza, Stonehenge & Teotihuacan (sp?) & the disocvery & mapping of relics under seas that have been around to more than 10,000 years, he shows his discontent in leaving little odd things sticking out of current theories.

He has explored in depth the ruins of the world & been involved in some fairly amazing discoveries and/or interpretations of what is out there. As an engineer he has the kind of mind that thinks there must be real reasons for why something exists & he goes out of his way to try to find them.

I'm also looking forward to reading Supernatural - it's on my Amazon Wish List.

[Beekeeper]

It may well have, Leyla. I think you will find it interesting!

[Beekeeper]

Soon, Leyla. I'm up to my eyeballs in senior marking.

[Beekeeper]

Part 2: The Caves.

This section is largely given over to describing particular groups of cave art dating from the Upper Palaeolithic. Such art can be found in Europe, Africa, Australia, the Americas, Asia and the Middle East. The oldest is dated between 32000 and possibly more than 36500 years old.

Hancock is interested in applying David Lewis-Williams’ neuropsychological theory to the explain commonalities in the cave art as a predisposition of the human brain to produce similar hallucinations in the trance state. He creates a persuasive argument.

Over the course of many experiments a very curious fact has become apparent. At some stages of the visionary experience subjects in laboratory tests report seeing displays of specific kinds of abstract geometrical patterns. What is interesting is the evidence that such patterns are universal and culture-free. P202.

He discusses the prevalence of therianthropy, that is, the representation of human beings with animal attributes such as a bison-man depicted straddling a lion-woman in Chauvet, France, or lion-men in Holenstein-Stadel, Germany. Insect men are also commonly shown, with the praying mantis particularly favoured in the rock art of the extinct San in Southern Africa. Chimera, that is creatures that combine a number of animals, are also in abundance, such as the “Sorcerer” of Trois Freres: an owl, wolf, stag, horse, lion, human composite. Therianthropy, according to research by Paul Tacon and Christopher Chippendale, is the only universal in cave art.

Further similarities in cave art include the depiction of “wounded men” figures being pierced by shafts as they transform into animals. Figures also seem to float in space. Additionally, geometrical shapes such as lines, dots, zigzags, ladders, grids and spirals are often present in cave art, either alone or incorporated into other images. Another typical aspect is the treatment of the rock face as a dynamic element when creating the artwork, for example,

In Cougnac the remarkable panel … featuring a large red ibex and two figures of wounded men – repeatedly integrates ancient calcite “draperies” into the painting. Thus, the legs of the ibex are each formed by vertical flows of calcite. P147

In the Hall of Bulls, for example, a natural ridge forms the back, head and ears of a small image of a bear…. P146.

The same sort of illusion… where we see the forequarters of an aurochs emerging out of the hollow in the rock as though it is about to draw the rest of its body forth from the darkness beneath. P147

In order to refute other theories about why certain figures were depicted on the cave wall, Hancock notes evidence that the animals hunted were not always the animals depicted in African and European caves and also that the caves where the paintings occurred were rarely ever lived in but were instead sacred caves that were difficult to access.

In the case of the San he also provides ethnographic evidence, what he calls the “Rosetta Stone”: interviews with San elders in the 1870s, before their race were completely annihilated, conducted by Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd. These interviews confirmed that the paintings depicted shamanistic journeys, “…it is the special burden and responsibility of the shaman that he is able to leave his body here on earth, send his spirit to the otherworld to contact and negotiate with the beings there, and then return to his body and resume his normal life.” (p211) According to the San informants, the therianthropes and chimera depicted in their cave art are shamans transforming into the animal forms that they adopted to journey into the spirit world. The formations of human figures, depict their shamanic dances. The bleeding from the nose often depicted in their figures (human and animal) is a representation of the physical reality: their dance would result in a bleeding nose for the dehydrated shamans. Also, valid information is said to be brought into the world as a result of shamanistic journeys and used to the benefit of the San people and people of other races with whom they share their knowledge.

Hancock now proposes an answer to the riddle of the “wounded men.” He discusses “somatic hallucinations", including attenuation or foreshortening of the body and limbs, the possession of extra limbs and digits (an effect known as polymelia), and – significantly – painful pricking and stabbing sensations.” (p327) The electrical current you feel when you project is one such “hallucination.” He relates the common shamanistic experience of being mutilated, even fully disassembled, and having organs removed or devices such as crystals implanted by spiritual beings.

Hancock then speculates on why people chose the caves. He offers a few theories. One is that the cave itself could have been inductive to trance via sensory deprivation. Another is that people who had tranced and reached altered states naturally (about 2% of the population he tells us later in the book) had sought the caves because they were suggestive of the trance state, “concrete symbols of passage into another world, or a descent to the underworld.” (p343)

Under the subheading “Scientific sacrilege” Hancock is now very direct. He differs to David Lewis-Williams in that he does not believe these experiences are hallucinations in the scientific sense of the world but are in fact interactions with other planes and their inhabitants.

Could it be, as the shamans in the Amazon repeatedly assert, that the plants really do open up a channel of communication to supernatural realms and teachers …. And isn’t it logical to conclude, since evolution has bestowed these peculiar and distinctive abilities on the human race, that contact with the supernatural must have offered some profound, adaptive advantage to our ancestors and could, conceivably, continue to do so today? (p344)

He goes on to challenge science,

… since science does not yet have the faintest idea what hallucinations are, or how they are caused, or why our brains should have evolved in such a way that certain plants can induce them. It is a more or less automatic assumption for I would guess 99 out of 100 people in the technologically advanced countries today that hallucinations are simply “wanderings of the mind”, foolish tricks of the brain chemistry to which it would be mad to attribute any objective reality. Yet the truth is that science has never proved this to be the case, and indeed has not yet progressed very far in understanding the neurological basis of day-to-day perception, let alone what is involved in occasioning the fantastic mental imagery that is characteristic of hallucination. (p346)

I’ve deliberately left material out of this summary of Part 2. This part of the book is lengthy and, I must admit, I found it tedious at times, especially when Hancock goes into some of the history of anthropology, particularly the hegemony of certain scholars, and the classification of entopic phenomena. There is a dramatic encounter with bees that I have omitted too but I’ll leave that to anyone who really wants to read the book to discover. I mention it because Hancock seems to share the belief that bees are messengers of the gods.

[Beekeeper]

Part 3: The Beings

Graham Hancock begins this part by restating his feeling that the drugs opened the door to another reality, “My intuition was that I had been afforded glimpses however brief and however distorted by my own cultural preconditioning, of beings that are absolutely real in some modality not yet understood by science, that exist around us and with us, that even seem to be aware of us and take an active interest in us, but vibrate at a frequency beyond the range of our senses and instruments and thus generally remain completely invisible to us,” (p354) (italics are Hancock’s). He goes on to identify and quote people from the past such as William James, Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman (who first synthesised LSD) and Rick Strassman (American psychiatrist) who also adhere to this view.

He discusses the Roper polls which asked questions on “unusual personal experiences” rather than direct experience of UFOs. They were commissioned by Dr John Mack, History Professor David Jacobs, Psychiatric Therapist John Carpenter, Sociology Professor Ron Westrum and author Budd Hopkins. The questions were based on the commonly reported experiences that UFO abductees could remember without hypnosis.

These interviews showed:
• One in five Americans woke up paralysed with the sense of a strange figure present in the room
• one in eight adults had experienced unexplained lost time;
• one in ten, flying through the air;
• one in twelve, unusual lights or balls of light in a room;
• one in twelve, puzzling scars.

2% of the nearly 6000 respondents fell into the category of answering yes to at least 4 of the 5 experiences. (What would the percentage be on this site, I wonder).

Hancock identifies his stance on UFOs on page 364 as,

Now, as I write these words after completing my research, my lack of belief in physical, extraterrestrial explanations for UFOs and aliens, and my intuition that they must be visionary phenomena, has hardened into something close to certainty.

He continues now by drawing parallels between the experiences of shamans and alien abductees:

Needles, Surgery and Pain

Abducted shamans and alien abductees tell of painful and incomprehensible surgical procedures that often leave behind permanent physical scars and sometimes even mysterious implants in the abductees’ bodies (p365) Hancock relates many examples. Here are a some:

From UFO abductees:
Betty Aho’s right eye was removed and a tiny device was implanted deep within her head- with additional devices implanted in her spine and heels…Crystals were used as surgical instruments in the excruciatingly painful operation that Carlos experienced…..

From the shamanic enthnographies
They cut his head open, take out his brains, wash and restore them to give him a clear mind to penetrate the mysteries…They insert gold dust into his eyes (Dyak, Borneo)… The Cobeno shaman introduces rock crystals into the novice’s head; these eat out his brains and eyes, then take the place of those organs and become his strength… (South America)

This also includes the inspection of spines and the counting of bones. The rib bone seems particularly important.

More on this part soon.

[Wrong Eye]

… since science does not yet have the faintest idea what hallucinations are, or how they are caused, or why our brains should have evolved in such a way that certain plants can induce them. It is a more or less automatic assumption for I would guess 99 out of 100 people in the technologically advanced countries today that hallucinations are simply “wanderings of the mind”, foolish tricks of the brain chemistry to which it would be mad to attribute any objective reality. Yet the truth is that science has never proved this to be the case, and indeed has not yet progressed very far in understanding the neurological basis of day-to-day perception, let alone what is involved in occasioning the fantastic mental imagery that is characteristic of hallucination. (p346)

I’ve deliberately left material out of this summary of Part 2. This part of the book is lengthy and, I must admit, I found it tedious at times, especially when Hancock goes into some of the history of anthropology, particularlythe hegemony of certain scholars, and the classification of entopic phenomena. There is a dramatic encounter with bees that I have omitted too but I’ll leave that to anyone who really wants to read the book to discover. I mention it because Hancock seems to share the belief that bees are messengers of the gods.

Unfortunately, I've had hallucinations without any substance. I have since learned that some hallucinations have more to them, and that they are probably still the constructs of my own mind.

It scares me when "precognition" comes in the form of a hallucination, my precognition has very scary aspects to it anyway, but largely I believe now they are and always have been the product of an imbalance in my perception abilities and an overactive imagination and creativity side- or too much caffiene combined with that. There is ample evidence for this in my past. Including the fact that I have and had a huge amount of control!

I believe emotions are not caused by brain chemistry, as well, just that the imbalance in brain chemistry is a symptom, not a cause of the problem.

That's my two cents anyway.

[Beekeeper]

I'm happy if people are reading this and it makes them think, so your 2 cent's worth is welcome, Wrong eye.

Here's more:

Why should spirits in one part of the world and at one period of history, and aliens in another part of the world at another period of history, both abduct men and women, insert mysterious objects into their heads, stick lances or massive needles into their necks, implant crystals into their bodies, count their bones, take out their eyes and brains, etc, etc? On reflection, I could see how ludicrous it was to imagine that people from such different cultural backgrounds as shamans and UFO abductees could have independently invented what were essentially the same utterly bizarre entities and the same utterly inexplicable medical/surgical procedures. (p374)

Floating, lights and threads or ropes:

There are parallels between alien abductees and shamans in their statements about floating or flying to awaiting entities:

The UFO abductees:

They glided me into that thing…I couldn’t resist them, I just floated… (Charles Hickson) (p382)

I’m inside a beam of light. I’m going up, and there’s a hole above me, and it’s dark, but there’s light all around it. It’s like a blue light…a blue beam of light come down to the ground, and then it was almost like going through a tunnel… (Nona) (p382)

The thread or string seemed to be bathed in a light that was everywhere and as the beings were telling him ‘not to be afraid’ Arthur was ‘just going along it, standing erect’, pulled as if by an unseen force. The string seemed to go into the craft, ‘like a phone line or something’. (p383)

The shamans:

He saw the roof of his hut open above his head and felt himself carried off to the sky, where he met a multitude of spirits… (Basuto shaman, South Africa). (p384)

The rope can take anyone away who comes to the dance (Mabolele Shikwe)

When I go to the rope, it makes me float up to the sky. Sometimes I travel to another place the instant I go toward it. At other times you simply walk along it. (Kalahari named Cgunta Elae) (p385)

Shamans also commonly relate seeing contraptions in the sky, describing them as wells or boats or flying shields and describing the star people they meet:

I follow the thread of wells… the thread of the wells of metal. (San) (p386)

[Beekeeper]

Caves and Sea

Not all shamanic journeys are sky-bound. Shamans are frequently transported to caves that sometimes are lined with crystals or calcite and often illuminated by diffuse light. Underwater locations occur too. Interestingly, the first UFO report involved a UFO that plunged into the sea and entered crystalline caverns. Hancock cites a few similar reports.

Transformation

Hancock is surprised to discover that aliens “frequently present themselves in the form of animals or with hybrid animal and alien characteristics ” (p391)

Another type of transformation is also common to the shaman and alien abductee’s experience and that is the sense of being taught. Even abductees, “despite their frequent feelings of confusion and trauma…regard their encounters with aliens as learning experiences…..”(p401)

That’s one of the ways we learn new songs, dances, and more knowledge about how to heal others. They show us what plants to use for a certain sickness or how to treat a specific person. (p402)

Shamans and abductees are sometimes shown books that even illiterate people are able to read.

Hancock believes that the UFO abductees are spontaneous trancers, like the shamans that don’t need psychotropic aids and other techniques, and declares that it’s likely that 2% of every human population is comprised such people. After again speculating on the possibility that these worlds and spirits are real, he asks the question, “What do they want?