Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind [Paperback]

Graham Hancock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2006

Less than fifty thousand years ago mankind had no art, no religion, no sophisticated symbolism, no innovative thinking. Then, in a dramatic and electrifying change, described by scientists as "the greatest riddle in human history," all the skills and qualities that we value most highly in ourselves appeared already fully formed, as though bestowed on us by hidden powers.

In Supernatural Graham Hancock sets out to investigate this mysterious "before-and-after moment" and to discover the truth about the influences that gave birth to the modern human mind. His quest takes him on a detective journey from the stunningly beautiful painted caves of prehistoric France, Spain, and Italy to rock shelters in the mountains of South Africa, where he finds extraordinary Stone Age art. He uncovers clues that lead him to the depths of the Amazon rainforest to drink the powerful hallucinogen Ayahuasca with shamans, whose paintings contain images of "supernatural beings" identical to the animal-human hybrids depicted in prehistoric caves. Hallucinogens such as mescaline also produce visionary encounters with exactly the same beings. Scientists at the cutting edge of consciousness research have begun to consider the possibility that such hallucinations may be real perceptions of other "dimensions." Could the "supernaturals" first depicted in the painted caves be the ancient teachers of mankind? Could it be that human evolution is not just the "meaningless" process that Darwin identified, but something more purposive and intelligent that we have barely begun to understand?

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Graham Hancock is no stranger to controversy. The former journalist, whose books have sold five million copies in the past 10 years, has repeatedly dared to challenge scientific shibboleths, taking a run at entrenched thinking in archaeology, geology and astronomy."
-The Globe and Mail

About the Author

Graham Hancock is the author of the international bestsellers The Sign and The Seal, Fingerprints of the Gods, and Heaven's Mirror. His books have sold more than five million copies.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Disinformation Books; Revised edition (September 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932857842
• ISBN-13: 978-1932857849
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,530 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #1 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Controversial Knowledge

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

340 of 349 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Super Supernatural October 28, 2006

By JAMES AGNEW

Format:Paperback

Graham Hancock, the author of Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind could never be accused of pussyfooting around the revelations of his research, and he certainly postulates the heck out of the place of consciousness altering agents in the shamanic origins of religion and consciousness itself. It's a brilliant, breakthrough book which comes close to being the unified field theory of, if not all of the supernatural, at least of all encounters between humans and supernatural beings.

Hancock begins with a description of his own visionary experiences with the hallucinogen Ibogaine, which he took, with a logical vigor that escapes most academics, in order to truly gauge its effect, and therefore the validity of his theories. He follows this with a (perhaps too) meticulous examination of the cave paintings that represent the beginnings of human art, concentrating on their bizarre and seemingly inexplicable nature, at once representative and fantastic, a contradiction that the bonehead academics have (naturally) been totally unable to puzzle out in over a hundred years of trying.

But just when I thought the book was going to be one of those tedious Fortean catalogues of weird stuff, Hancock brought forth his first thesis, based on David Lewis-Williams's The Mind in the Cave. Lewis-Williams's idea is simple - that the enigmatic cave paintings were produced by shamans in a trance state and are representations of the shamanic experience.... It's an audacious, elegant solution - the psychotropic distortions and patterns match that of drug users and there's no doubt that many shamanistic cultures, such as the prototypical Siberian and the still extant South American, exhibit a heavy use of mushrooms and other hallucinogens to achieve shamanic journeys and transformations. Hancock also examines the rock art of a tribe in South Africa whose paintings were similar to cave art and whose imagery was explicated by the last survivors of that tribe.

This theory seems almost self-evident, so naturally it remains controversial in the academic world. Perhaps as a reaction to the sixties, the academic establishment now rejects all the fruits of dream, drug and trance as hallucination, and tries to efface the very clear fingerprints of sense altering agents in our culture and civilization. It should come as now surprise, then, that several stalwart defenders of the empty status quo have stepped forward to advance their careers by attacking Lewis-Williams theories with various sophistries. Hancock handily refutes them, exposing them as deeply misguided if not purposefully dishonest. It's a deft explanation for the general reader of a difficult theory in the manner of Colin Wilson, but the start of the book is just a stepping stone for Hancock, who moves on to his own conceptual breakthroughs.

The genesis of Hancock's insight, like many of the crucial insights of modernity, came while he was under the influence. During his Ibogaine trip he saw a large headed, bug eyes "alien" figure, and recognized several similar creatures in cave paintings. One of the major techniques of modernity is juxtaposition, and Hancock placed the shamanic model next to contemporary accounts of alien abduction and concluded "Shamanic experiences of spirits and modern experiences of aliens are essentially a single phenomenon." There are startling similarities - transformations, journeys into the sky, ritualistic, invasive body manipulations and encounters with powerful, mystifying, alien entities. But what in heaven's name do these creatures want with us? As I said in Snakes in Caves, the purpose of the whole Alien project may be some kind of vast breeding experiment, and shamans were certainly familiar with intercourse with various interstellar entities and even the production of human/alien hybrids.

Hancock then further links the shamans of the stone age to the abductees of today by brining in theories advanced by Jacques Vallee in his book Passport to Mangonia. Vallee compared the fairy lore of medieval times with UFO data and found similarities there as well, with more abductions to unearthly realms, time distortions, encounters with superhuman "others," and, of course, "reproductive contact." Hancock then draws a single breathtaking, unbroken line of human/supernatural contact from the dawn of humanity to the present, the nature of the contact basically the same, but understood in accordance with the prevailing conceptual world view.

Where do these "others" come from? Parallel universes will be, I believe the overriding theory of the twenty-first century, and it's certainly easy to see, as many have postulated, the often inexplicable aliens emanating from other vibrations rather than other planets, but Hancock introduces an even more audacious theory. Like a lot of archaic/psychedelic thought it originated with the late, great Terence McKenna who, confronted with the prevalence of helix imagery during his trips, postulated that his drug of choice, DMT (an ingredient in many shamanistic substances), makes "information stored in the neural-genetic material available to consciousness." In other words all that "junk" information contained in DNA, which resembles a language and has inexplicably been preserved for millennia, is in fact a message that the superior beings who created it imbedded in advance of the time we would be able to understand it (kind of like the monoliths in 2001). Francis Crick, one of the discoverers of DNA (who was, by the way, under the influence of LSD when he first visualized the double helix shape of DNA - something they sure didn't tell us in high school when we reverently studied The Double Helix) even came to believe that DNA itself was the result of an alien seeding project.

Hancock presents these ideas as more speculative than the rest of the book, as indeed they are, and in his final chapter gives a quick overview of the shamanic origin of all religions and the essentially psychedelic nature of shamanism, tracing the use of hallucinogens in such landmarks of ancient spirituality as the mysteries of Eleuis and the Soma of the Vedas.

All in all, it's an impressive, enthralling book which gains force as it continues, firmly grounded in scholarship, yet able to utilize the fruits of personal experience and experimentation. Hancock presents a unified theory for almost every encounter between humans and supernatural beings (although, in the "spirit" of the season I must say that, despite the fact that departed ancestors play a role, Hancock does not grapple with the localized phenomena of ghosts). Supernatural is a brilliant work, the capstone of Hancock's career, one that has (of course) been ignored by mainstream media and science, despite being much more interesting and valuable than timid but more ballyhooed works like William J. Broad's The Oracle.

Hancock is no freewheelin' hippy, but a rather rigorous enquiring mind of the old English school, but he's not afraid to go where Wisdom beckons, and the book's final scene shows him recumbent in the midst of nature, about to gobble a handful of magic mushrooms, the results of the journey to be recorded, I can only hope, in his next volume. Read more ›

235 of 241 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Investigative Reporting on the Archeology Beat: Toward a New Understanding of the Nature of Man September 19, 2006

By J. Chasin VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

This is a book that casts an extremely broad intellectual net, but Hancock quite ably holds it all together and offers some compelling and though-provoking insights into the nature of spirituality, cognitive evolution of mankind, and, yes, the supernatural.

Most of Hancock's work is in a field I'd call archeological investigative journalism-- perhaps an arcane field, but he is the best there is at it. In Sign and the Seal he went looking for the Ark of the Covenant (not unlike Indiana Jones); in Fingerprints of the Gods he went looking for Atlantis.

Here, he begins by investigating cave paintings, the earliest known artwork left to us by early man. Beings very much like modern day humans had lived for tens of thousands of years, but suddenly, about 25,000 years ago, they began making cave paintings. Hancock asks the two obvious questions: WHY did they suddenly start painting, and WHAT were they depicting?

In brief, Hancock makes a compelling case that the trigger of the act of cave painting was the experiencing of shamanic visions-- essentially the first, core, religious experience-- resulting from the ingestion of hallucinogenic herbs and plants. And too, he makes a compelling case that the content of these early paintings is quite simply the "visions" one sees in such an altered state. He demonstrates that the same plants and psychoactive substances have generated a remarkably consistent set of imagistic responses in humans across time and culture and setting, and shows how the icons and symbols of cave paintings are indeed replications and renderings of these visions (for instance, the part-man, part-animal creatures that dominate cave paintings and indeed Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Native American mythology....)

From there, Hancock traces the accounts through the ages of people who have claimed encounters with supposedly mythical creatures such as little green fairies, up through aliens and UFOs, and again notes the remarkable similarity across time and setting in the accounts. Indeed he shows how this sort of collective human experience with the "other world" has slowly evolved over time, and that the construct (e.g., aliens after World War II) that humans apply to the other-worldly visitors is culturally driven, but that the broader experience itself transcends culture. He also loops in the empirical work modern scientists have done, giving human subjects a high dosage of a psychoactive drug in lab settings and documenting their descriptions of experiences.

Hancock goes on to note that, while these drugs reliably trigger a core set of hallucinations in human subjects, some small percentage of people-- tagged by one study as 2%-- have these experiences without the benefit of the drugs. These are the people who, in recent times, have stories of being abducted by UFOs, and who in medieval times were abducted by fairies.

Of course, Hancock does not point to this as proof that aliens have been abducting humans. Rather, he demonstrates that the ability and tendency to experience of these visions, waking dreams, hallucinations, is a part of our DNA, part of what makes us human. If this is true, it suggests that humans are different from other species in part because we have a genetic predisposition to commune with what can only be described as the "supernatural."

Note that you do not have to believe in the existence of some parallel nether realm in order to buy into the premise of this book. All you have to believe is the idea that it is possible to empirically observe and describe and categorize the nature of hallucinations people have been having through the ages, and in laboratory settings.

What most interested me about this book-- besides the way Hancock hits so many topics of interest to me and ties them together into new knowledge-- is that if you read without prejudice, you will see how science and the supernatural re-mingle in Hancock's world view. He looks at the same set of phenomena in three ways-- subjectively (as one who has experimented with psychoactive substances like Ayuhuasca); spiritually (the construct of the religious observer); and scientifically (the construct of the empiricist.) Each construct uses different languages, but each describes, accommodates, accepts, "knows" the same set of phenomena. The implication is that science and religion are not so much diametrically opposed, as they are akin to the 5 blind men describing the elephant. Each knows there's an elephant in the room. It is only in the description, not the actual perception, that differences emerge. Read more ›

108 of 112 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Magisterial work and riveting read January 4, 2007

By Pieter Uys HALL OF FAMETOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Paperback

This fascinating book by alternative historian Graham Hancock investigates the origins of consciousness with reference to the work of David Lewis-Williams and his theory of the neuropsychological origins of cave art. It also goes further in proposing that those worlds and entities encountered in shamanic visions are not mere hallucinations but very real and that altered states are the means to gain entry to them.

Part One: The Visions, includes the author's experiences with the African hallucinogenic plant Iboga, looks at the cave of Pech Merle and then examines the theory of David Lewis-Williams. It also includes a section on Hancock's use of the South American plant ayahuasca.

Part Two explores the cave art of Upper Paleolithic Europe, with a closer look at the half-human half-animal representations that are so widespread. These "therianthropic" designs also occur in the rock art of Southern Africa and elsewhere. Hancock examines recurring themes in this ancient art, like that of the Wounded Man. He also discusses other aspects of this art, like the dots, starbursts, nets, ladders and windowpane-like geometrical figures. He closely examines the similarities and the differences between the art of ancient Europe and that of Africa. For example, the European art is found in dark subterranean caves while in Africa it is most often found in open rock shelters.

Chapter Six looks at the history of the academic study of rock art and concludes that it led nowhere until the theory of Lewis-Williams came along. Hancock demolishes the criticisms leveled at the work of Lewis-Williams and exposes the smear campaign waged against the South African academic.... Among other interesting topics, he considers the 19th century notebooks of Bleek and Lloyd on the mythology of the San. These valuable documents provide clues to the religion of the San and the trance or altered state experience.

Part Three: The Beings, starts with discussions of the experiences and work of William James, Aldous Huxley, Albert Hoffman and Rick Strassman. It also looks at the UFO abduction experience and compares it with the shamanic exploration of other-worlds, with supernatural myths and folkloric traditions like that of fairies and elves. There really are fascinating correspondences between fairy lore, the UFO abduction experience and certain hallucinatory states.

Part Four: The Codes, looks at the structural similarities and connections and the common themes like therianthropic transformations, small robot-like humanoids, the breeding of hybrid infants, the idea of the Wounded Healer, etc. Hancock is convinced that the mind is a receiver and not simply a generator of consciousness. In this section he relates his impressions after smoking DMT, and then goes into a deeper exploration of the work of Dr Rick Strassman who is famous for his work with this substance. The passages on DNA are particularly gripping, especially the idea that our DNA might contain specific information on our origins and future. Hancock also discusses the work of other researchers like Jeremy Narby, Terrence McKenna, Benny Shanon and Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA.

Part Five: The Religions, examines the belief in supernatural entities in all the world's major religions. He points out how "Father Christmas" and St Sebastian are ancient shamanic figures, the first for his red and white clothes which resemble the colours of the Amanita Muscaria mushroom and the second for being a therianthrope with a dog's head. Dreams and visions are then investigated, including those of Joan of Arc and Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes. Also the vision of Ezekiel, the mysteries of Eleusis and the role of Soma in Vedic religion. Hancock concludes this section with similar themes in the religion and mythology of ancient Egypt and the Maya.

Part Six: The Mysteries, returns to the work of Lewis-Williams and the fact that the ancient cave art is the oldest surviving evidence of the belief in spirit worlds and supernatural beings that exist at the heart of all religions. He disagrees strongly with Lewis-Williams about the reality of these realms and beings. He observes that people have consistently reported the same pattern of experiences from every part of the globe and from all cultures. Hancock believes that these alternative realms are very real and that we may gain access to them via the trance state, whether it is brought about by ingestion of substances, trance dances, fasting or other practices that cause a change in consciousness.

There are many black and white illustrations and paintings throughout the book and a set of colour plates that includes, amongst others, the paintings of Peruvian shaman Pablo Amaringo plus photographs of San rock art from Southern Africa. The three appendices are: Critics and Criticisms of David Lewis-Williams' Neuropsychological Theory of Rock and Cave Art; Psilocybe Semilanceata: a Hallucinogenic Mushroom Native To Europe by Professor Roy Watling; and an illuminating interview with Dr Rick Strassman. The book concludes with bibliographic references arranged by chapter, and an index.

Supernatural deals with so many thought-provoking matters that the interested reader might want more information and/or other perspectives on various aspects of the study. The following books may be helpful: DMT: The Spirit Molecule by Rick Strassman, Stone Age Soundtracks by Paul Devereux, Huston Smith's Cleansing The Doors Of Perception: The Religious Significance of Entheogenic Plants and Chemicals, William James' Varieties Of Religious Experience, Chaos, Creativity and Cosmic Consciousness by Abraham, McKenna and Sheldrake, White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader by John Miller, Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers by Schultes, Hofmann and Ratsch, Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy by Clark Heinrich, The Cave of Altamira by Pedro Ramos and The Mind In The Cave by David Lewis-Williams. Read more ›