A Consciousness-Expanding Talk With Graham Hancock, Insomniac’s Dave Ralph, and Paul van Dyk
Think Different. Nearly 20 years ago, this phrase became the ideological cornerstone of one of the biggest brands on the planet, and the calling card for one of the most intriguing and complex minds in the universe. It encouraged people to break new ground and create new technologies that would change the future of our industrialized world. It inspired forward progress in a generation of new minds.
But what about going backward? What’s the reward in applying those contrarian principles to beliefs that have been ingrained in our minds since we were small children? Hopefully, if you dig deep enough, the reward is a greater understanding of the nature of human existence.
After serving as a contributing writer to British publications like The Guardian, The Times and The Independent, Graham Hancock spent the early 1980s in Ethiopia as a correspondent for The Economist. But it was a deep fascination with ancient mysteries and lost civilizations that led to his investigative journey into humanity’s deep, dark past. In 1995, Hancock published his groundbreaking Fingerprints of the Gods, a book whose questions and hypotheses about established archeological “facts” caused violent ripples throughout the scientific and historic communities
Two decades and a dozen or so books later, Fingerprints feels more like fact than fiction, as evidence continues to pile up that bolsters his once-belittled theories that humans have been here a lot longer than history would have us believe. His newest book, Magicians of the Gods, picks up where Fingerprints left off, challenging the status quo with new discoveries and theories.
Both Paul van Dyk and Insomniac’s own Dave Ralph discovered Hancock in the ‘90s and were so influenced by his work that they’ve confessed to manipulating tours to visit some of the places he has written about in his books. Finally, just before Christmas last year, Ralph connected with Hancock and invited him to Insomniac HQ—with Paul van Dyk on the conference line from Berlin—for an open discussion on all things ancient and mysterious.
People treat history—especially Americans, and especially during these sociopolitical times—as a very sacred thing. Here you come as a contrarian to what people already hold so dear, and you’ve been doing it for a long time. What’s it like to have a career as an agitator, someone who’s continually telling people things they don’t want to hear?
Graham Hancock: It’s a good question, and I’ve come to realize that actually, what I am involved in—by accident, it was not by design—is an ideological struggle over the past of humanity. We are brought up to believe that history is a set of facts, and often when history is badly taught, it’s taught as facts to be memorized. This king ruled from such a such a time, and so on.
But the opposite is true. The further back you go into the past, the thinner the evidence on which history rests is based, and what you realize is that history is, in fact, a story. It’s perhaps not an accident that it’s in the word: his-story. It’s often a story that’s been told by males. It’s a narrative, and the narrative rests on flimsier and flimsier foundations the further back you go, and it becomes not an exercise in the manifestation of facts, but a projection of your own view of how the universe should be; it’s an ideological position that gets adopted.
This is what I feel is the problem with the whole work of history and archeology at the moment. It’s locked into a particular view, and that view is that we started out as these primitive cavemen and we gradually evolved until we created a sophisticated technological society. And here we are at the apex of the human story, and boy, are we so proud of ourselves.
[Laughs] How convenient is that?
Graham Hancock: Yes, how convenient is that? Like it was all about us. The fact is, there are huge missing pieces and huge gaps in the historical record and anomalies that cannot be explained. My project, as I’ve gradually come to realize it, is to provide a thoroughly argued, well-documented, reasonable alternative case—an alternative story to allow people not to buy into the established narrative hook, line and sinker, but to consider the possibility that the established position might actually be wrong. I’ve tried to do that in a thorough and detailed way, because I’ve realized that in an ideological struggle, if your arguments are weak, they are going to get destroyed. [Laughs]
Paul van Dyk: People estimate the planet came to life 4.6 billion years ago? There’s so much space for other things that may or may not have happened—mysterious things, like Pumapunku.
Graham Hancock: The view has been that the earliest anatomically modern human remains date back about 295,000 years, but let’s just say the number is 300,000 years. It’s really weird that we waited 295,000 years to establish the first civilization, you know? [Laughs] It tends to suggest that something is missing from the picture. There’s so much space, and there’s so much time. I was having a chat with an old friend of ours, named Whitley Strieber, who’s known for his alien books. His best known is a book called Communion, which was made into a film. I was asking him last night about what he felt, because he does have these very powerful encounters with beings—physical encounters—and I absolutely believe what he’s telling me, because I value him as an individual. I was asking him what these things are, and he believes that it’s a diversion to suggest that [aliens] came from other planets. He thinks they’re an old, very wise form of life that has existed on this planet perhaps for billions of years, long before humanity, and hence we are their property. That’s how Whitley puts it. They own us. They’re not from elsewhere; they’re from here. And if they did come from elsewhere, they came here a very long time ago.
Dave Ralph: The time frame is so vast.
Graham Hancock: The earth is constantly remaking itself, whether it’s cosmic impacts or movements of the earth’s crust. The earth is sweeping itself clean down the ages. A whole layer is erased and wiped away.
Paul van Dyk: If a massive comet would have hit the earth at some point, everything that existed would have become extinct, but it also would have put another layer of soil and dust a few hundred meters on top of it. We can’t make holes that deep in order to see if there are structures, and when we use radio waves, we often find that there are strange structures under the earth’s crust that we can’t explain.
“The question of who we are and where we came from—what our true story is—is intimately connected to our future and what we will become. Those who have been entrusted with interpreting our past to us are doing so in a manner that affects the way we make our future.”
Paul and Dave, you’re DJs, electronic music enthusiasts, and lovers of repetitive beats. I find it fascinating that people who are influenced by dance music also, pound for pound, have always been more clued in to alternate theories of reality or altered states of consciousness. I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that the same guy that exposed me to electronic music in college also lent me his copies of The Celestine Prophecy and Behold a Pale Horse.
Dave Ralph: I think it’s open-mindedness.
Graham Hancock: That’s an interesting point, as well. I suspect that this goes back very deep into the human story. Music is a central part of what makes us human. I’m a really bad dancer. My wife, Santha, is a really excellent dancer, and often my role on the dancefloor is to get out of the way. [Laughs] But I can see that when you really drift into that, it pulls you into an altered state of consciousness, where possibilities exist that you may have never considered before.
Santha Hancock: Various tribes and ethnic groups in Africa, their lives revolve around music.
Graham Hancock: And the dance process itself seems to unlock something in the mind that allows [it] to open.
Paul van Dyk: I think one of the reasons electronic musicians are open to think in different ways is because this is exactly what we did and how this music was created. These days, it is a bit of a different agenda with all these young DJs storming on the stage, but Dave and I come from a time where we had to create our sounds and think differently. We had to think out of the box and be open-minded.
You mentioned The Celestine Prophecy. I remember I was thinking a lot about this book and how things are and how things work and could work, even to the point where sometimes I stared at a tree and wondered if there was really anything there. It comes with the art form that we’re involved in. At the end of the ‘80s and the beginning of the ‘90s, we were the complete douchebags. [Laughs] We were the ones that did everything completely different. It was not an accepted kind of music whatsoever. It was the noise of some freaks, but we obviously proved them wrong.
Graham Hancock: And then there’s the question of those who are out there doing the dancing: the audience. What you have is an incredibly flexible, open-minded group of people. I’m aware of this, traveling around the world. I’m aware of a definite current of awakening in the young population today. And when I say young—because I’m already 65 years old—I would put that anywhere between 20 and 40. There is an awakening going on, and that is very much linked to dance. The same individuals that are into that are also into many areas of inquiry. In a sense, those of us who are reaching out to that group have certain responsibilities.
Dave Ralph: Some of the most memorable times for me, going back to the mid-’90s and being in Ibiza, was going to a place called Benirrás Beach. They would do a full-moon party, and there was no invite. You didn’t know unless you knew, and you would get there and everyone was making their own music. There’d be fires and drums and people with guitars, and there were pockets of things going on. It was complete chaos, but it was beautiful. [Laughs]
Graham Hancock: This is what humanity needs more of: beautiful chaos. We need less dull, grey, “iron in the soul” order.
Paul van Dyk: And people asking questions. The more the authorities lie about those things now, the more we question—especially what happened in the past.
Graham Hancock: Twenty years ago, the argument from authority was enough to dismiss an alternative case. “Professor X or Doctor Y said this cannot be so,” and the majority said, “Okay, Professor X or Doctor Y must be right.” That has completely changed. Now, authority is so contaminated with the proven lies and the proven deceptions of the public mind that we don’t trust any authority anymore. It’s no longer an advantage to be a so-called “authority” in a field. It immediately raises questions, and we realize that these so-called authorities have agendas. They may be conscious or they may be unconscious agendas, but the agendas are there. The question of who we are and where we came from—what our true story is—is intimately connected to our future and what we will become. That’s why I say this is an ideological struggle, because those who have been entrusted with interpreting our past to us are doing so in a manner that affects the way we make our future.
Dave Ralph: You’ve had many struggles with authority over time. What has been the most frustrating point for you in the last 20 years? What’s been the point where you just couldn’t get beyond it?
Graham Hancock: There’s been no point I couldn’t get beyond. There’s been a point where I’ve been very discouraged by it, where I’ve found myself to be the victim of deliberate deception to misrepresent my work to the public. It has been very depressing, and it has set me back; but what I’ve realized is that if you feel strongly enough about what you’re doing, you just have to hang in there. Sometimes it happens, in your own lifetime, that by hanging in there, other information will come forward that vindicates you. This has happened many times in the history of science. I have a feeling it’s happening over our history now. I think that the evidence that’s coming out is fundamentally changing the picture of the origins of civilization.
Paul van Dyk: Obviously, religion also plays into it. The world is almost manipulated by those religions—this idea that somebody came and somebody did it. I don’t personally believe in that.
Graham Hancock: Nor do I.
Paul van Dyk: It is about the universe, and the universe itself provides so many answers. How many billions of people believe in the fact that there was a single individual who created the universe?
Graham Hancock: And that belief is based on nothing. It’s based only on what they’ve been told as children, which they have failed to engage the faculties of their own minds to question. They simply accept it, and it becomes so identified with their personality that any attack upon the idea is taken as an existential threat. The three monotheistic faiths—Christianity, Judaism and Islam—have been responsible for so much of the misery on this planet down the ages. So much of the pain and agony and agitation that is dividing us from one another today rests in the struggle mainly between Christianity and Islam. It’s a very unfortunate and ugly situation.
I think the true spirituality, if you want to get to it, is manifested through shamanism. It’s the ancient cultures. They didn’t have to say there was one bearded guy sitting on a cloud that created mankind, because they see the entire universe as enchanted—that everything is filled with magic, and we are part of that magic. We’re an antenna of that magical realm deposited on the physical plane, and this to me is a beautiful idea; that it’s possible to have spirituality—to sense that the universe is filled with intelligence and life—without buying into the patriarchal, creator-God, father-figure monopoly that we’ve had shoved down our throats for so long.
Every once in a while, something will poke its head out of the pop-culture pond that makes me rub my chin and think, “Okay, that’s interesting.” Movies like Prometheus or Dune come to mind. Has there been anything lately that you’ve seen that’s made you think, “Well, that person seems to be on to something?”
Graham Hancock: Unfortunately, there’s so much shit coming out of Hollywood right now. [Laughs] The movie I was happiest with in the recent past in terms of where I’m at has gotta be Avatar. It touched on many issues. I think whoever made it must have been in the ayahuasca realm—that sense of reverence for nature and the horrible, consuming, destructive force of a technological society taking that over. There was a message both from the past and from the future there.
You mentioned a keyword there: reverence. I don’t think many these days have a reverence for anything, let alone a higher state of consciousness or the path to achieving it.
Graham Hancock: There’s a history to this process. Science as we have it now gave itself shape and formed in opposition to deeply superstitious and irrational behavior. One of the great things about the Enlightenment was that it was the first time that the big established religions were seriously questioned. Science manifested itself by questioning that old order, but as the years have gone by, I think what science has done is thrown out the baby with the bath water. They’ve said that everything can be reduced to matter. There is nothing else. There is no meaning and no significance to life. We’re just meat robots that go about our business of producing and consuming.
Part of that problem is a state of consciousness that is valued by the scientific community that I call the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness. This is an incredibly useful state of consciousness—very valuable. When I get on an airplane, I absolutely want the pilot to be in an alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, and I would like him to stay in that state of consciousness throughout the flight. After that, what he does with his head is his own business. The problem is, our society has taken that state of consciousness and deified it so it’s regarded as the only state of consciousness that has any value—except that we’re allowed to go blitz ourselves out on alcohol as a holiday from that state of consciousness, in the end, to make ourselves more productive.
Other consciousness-altering drugs are approved, like anti-depressants or Ritalin. These are approved in our society because they serve the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness. But psychedelics are demonized in our society because they allow the possibility of a whole different state of consciousness that leads to questioning and pulls apart the established order. That’s why these substances are demonized in our society—because somebody somewhere sees that they have the potential to undermine the entire structure upon which huge amounts of money have been built.
And then we enter into the Matrix.
Graham Hancock: [Laughs] And then we enter the Matrix! As we were talking and I mentioned Avatar, I was thinking the other movie that I would bring up is The Matrix. I just think they didn’t go far enough—that this was some kind of alien conspiracy to enslave the human race. But what we’re not considering is that we may all be players in a virtual reality game—a game where nobody ever tells us what the rules are. So, how do you win? In cultures that believe in reincarnation, the deal is that you drink the waters of forgetfulness; you forget your past life so you enter your new life completely unaware of the nature of the game you’re playing, and that’s the only way you can learn from the game. If you knew the rules and the stakes, you’d play the game differently. That’s what ascended masters are. That’s what the Bodhisattva is—the reincarnated individual who comes back into life with full knowledge of the game and can play his part in helping to move others along the path.
Before we go, tell us a bit about the new book and this next journey you’re taking us on.
Graham Hancock: The book is called Magicians of the Gods, and it is the sequel to Fingerprints of the Gods, which was published in 1995. In those 20 years, there have been major developments that affect our understanding of the origins of civilization, and there are really two sides to this.
One is the discovery of archeological sites that absolutely cannot be explained by the existing model of history—the most prominent of those being Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which was created 11,600 years ago, which is at least 6,000 years before any other known megalithic structure anywhere on the planet on a gigantic scale. The inhabitants of that area were hunter-gatherers, and it’s inconceivable that groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers woke up one morning equipped with all the design skills, quarrying skills, stone-cutting skills, and the organization of labor force specialists to put together a site like Göbekli Tepe.
Meanwhile, at the same time 11,600 years ago—which, by the way, is the date that Plato gives for the submergence of Atlantis—we also see agriculture magically spreading in Turkey. Archeologists are trying to say this is an especially inspired [group of] hunter-gatherers? No, I think it’s a transfer of technology. I think there’s obvious evidence of a group of people who had these skills who settled in that area and shared it with the hunter-gatherers. There are a number of sites like this that I document at length in Magicians of the Gods.
The other crucial development is that we now have firm scientific evidence of the nature of the cataclysm and the exact timing that brought an end to the lost civilization. Many members of the public are not aware that 12,800 years ago, the earth was hit by several fragments of a large comet, and those impacts were focused on what was then the North American icecap. This was the Ice Age, with ice almost two miles deep covering North America as far as north of Minnesota. This caused a global climate disaster: a flood of icy water entering the Atlantic Ocean and interrupting the Gulf Stream, a huge plunge in temperatures, and massive animal extinction.
Then there was a second series of impacts 11,600 years ago, which were accompanied by further global flooding. It’s exactly at that moment—after this fully documented extinction level event, which we have only discovered in the last eight or nine years—that we get this strange emergence of inexplicable archeological sites around the world. I think that cataclysm wiped away a crucial part of our story, and we’re left with hints and clues that—if only we look at them with an open mind—would make complete sense. We’re dealing with lost civilizations, and that’s what Magicians of the Gods is all about.
Purchase your copy of Magicians of the Gods here.
