Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization
by Graham Hancock

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Book Reviews of Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization

Book Review: Obligatory reading for anyone who cares about history...
Summary: 5 Stars

Graham Hancock is proposing that the unimaginable amount of effort that went into megalithic structures around the world was NOT merely the result of ego-driven monarchs erecting tombs for themselves and monuments for their gods. For if you stand at these sites (as Hancock and Faiia did) at crucial times during the year (solstices and equinoxes) you can easily see that entire groundplans are oriented with the sun, moon and stars. In fact, Hancock prodigiously documents that many of these sites are exact replicas of constellations known to be of great significance to the civilizations that built them. Further, many sites mirror their respective constellations not as they looked when the sites were built, but in the epoch of 10,500 BC. This in turn requires knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, the apparent shift of the constellations through the sky caused by the wobbling of the earth on its axis. This process takes almost 26,000 years to complete and takes 72 years to shift just one degree.

It just so happens that not only are these ancient megalithic sites exact replicas of constellations in a common, vastly distant epoch, but the sites themselves are separated in relation to each other by units of measurement that also proclaim precessional knowledge. For example, Giza, Egypt (whose three famous pyramids have apexes that reproduce the pattern of stars formed in Orion's belt (Orion was literally thought of as Osiris to the ancient Egyptians) and whose infamous Sphinx faces directly east and would have faced its "reflection" in the constellation Leo just before dawn in 10,500 BC) is located 72 degrees of longitude from Angkor Wat in Cambodia (a site which, seen from above, depicts the constellation of Draco, also in the sky to the north in the epic of 10,500 BC). 72 years, you'll remember, is the amount of time the sky takes to precess one degree.

I hope the foregoing will encourage you to read this book from cover to cover. The above example is really just a tiny piece of the massive amount of evidence contained in this incredibly important book. Graham Hancock deserves praise for being bold enough to continue the controversial search for the truth he began in Fingerprints of the Gods. His attention to quantifiable detail, referral to original sources of scholarly study via endnotes and use of mouthwatering photography and clear diagrams make Heaven's Mirror a huge pleasure to read. What he's suggesting flies in the face of conventional notions about the technological sophistication of the ancients, but then, so do the very edifices that they've cleverly designed to last until now. Far from trying to shroud these ancient sites with an air of mystery, Hancock is trying to unravel some of their secrets by using hard science combined with a knowledge of religious syntax to get at the real significance of the message left by the builders. It now seems that there was indeed a strong reason for making sites that could not be destroyed by the gradual or even the sudden ravages of history.

I won't spoil the message part for you, but suffice to say that if Hancock is correct in his hypotheses, modern civilization could learn some things of great relevance from the ancients.

Summary of Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization

Whatever you think of Hancock's ideas and theoretical musings in archaeo-astronomy, Heaven's Mirror is a gorgeous book, thanks to the photography of Santha Faiia. Lush, evocative photos of the monoliths on Easter Island and temples deep in the Cambodian jungle are enough to set the mind to introspective wandering--maybe, just maybe, Hancock's got it right after all. --Paul Hughes

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