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Summary: Obligatory reading for anyone who cares about history...
Review: For everyone left in the world who is spellbound by the precision and scale of architectural feats of wonder fashioned centuries ago by enigmatic people, Heaven's Mirror is the pot of gold at the end of the reading rainbow. Not only is this marvellous book packed with breathtaking photography of such sites as Giza, Angkor Wat, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Sacsayhuaman and many more, but the accompanying text and diagrams eloquently lay out a theory whose ramifications shake the fundamental assumptions of human history.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.
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Summary: The most beautiful photography in years in any book
Review: Graham Hancock has written one of the best books on the theory of ancient lost civilizations. Lands and peoples that existed before the deluge and their clues that this could all happen again. Magnificently written and complemented with Santha's keen photographic eye. I am a photographer and drool at every shot. Concepts that make for interesting mind candy. If you ever get a chance to see Graham at a book signing--GO!! His lecture and slide presentataion will astound you and make you want more.
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Summary: Flight of Fancy.
Review: Graham Hancock is a talented writer. Indeed he should be, having written for The Economist for many years. It is unfortunate that he has wasted his talent on such a project. His ideas are beyond reason. "Heaven's Mirror" is of the ilk of "Chariot of the God's" by Eric von Daniken. This type of fiction is damaging. It is damaging to the work anthropologists and archaeologists do to try and understand our forebearers. These books convince millions of readers that space aliens and hyper diffusion are actuallities in the course of human history. Selective use of the facts is an old trick which unfortunately still seems to be effective, judging from the other reviews of this book. If one is interested in the cosmological significance of Angkor a much better and scholarly book to read would be Eleanor Mannikka's "Angkor Wat time, space and Kingship."
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Summary: Masterpiece on Ancient Civilizations & their Ancient Links
Review: Graham Hancocks' magnum opus, that incorporates all the knowledge/information of his previous works with new evidence for a global link to past civilizations (Beautifully photographed also). This book will also inspire you spiritually also, and I recommend the following books: Sri Chinmoy (Commentaries the Vedas,Upanishads..) Peter Tompkins (The Secret Life of Nature)
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Summary: Bring A Calculator.
Review: Hancock's basic premise is that an ancient civilization built monuments around the world that are astronomically aligned to the year 10,500BC (thus backdating human history several thousand years.) And somehow these monuments are linked to the search for immortality. Hancock and his wife travel around the world and try to tie a lot of historical sites together with magic numbers (72 being the most prevalent but any even number being almost as good.) The problem I had was that the linking of the monuments to stars degrades as the book moves along. The link is clear in Egypt, possibly present in Mexico, requires squinting in Cambodia, and then devolves to a lot of "as ifs" and "rough alignments". The pictures in the book are pretty even if they don't always offer the clearest view of the idea the book is trying to convey. Most of the diagrams involving star alignments are oversimplified and practically useless. This book barely advances the ideas put forth in "Fingerprints of the Gods". It mainly takes the format of "Message of the Sphinx" and applies it to other mysterious places around the earth.
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Summary: A theory that deserves attention
Review: Heaven's Mirror proceeds in a logical fashion that will not fail to persuade. We clearly do not know as much about our ancient past as we think. We must acknowledge that so many of our roots are hidden in mystery.
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Summary: Just some nit-picking.
Review: I always find Hancock fascinating but several years back, in a face to face meeting, I specifically pointed out to him that one of his 'quotes' attributed to me left the wrong impression. Now I find that it is particularly this 'quote' he has singled out to use in this later book. This kind of scholarship is, to me, distressing. In Death of Gods in Ancient Egypt, Penguin Books 1992(available now only as e-matter from Fatbrain.com) I did not say that the numbers that other cultures put in their writings, (numbers that appear to transmit information about precession and the length of time for an Eternal Return), were to be found in the written texts of the ancient Egyptians. What I did point out was that at a much later date, when precessional knowledge was available(due to Hipparchus), Plutarch, after spending time with the priests of Egypt, would seem to have included oblique references to these numbers in his story of Isis and Osiris.(His accounting of the story of these two important gods is the first complete telling of the important tale, since the Egyptian texts seemed to treat it as a mysterious given.) END
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Summary: This illustrated hypothesis provides a mind-blowing read!
Review: I am still reading this fascinating book, backed by its superb photos, having attended a talk by Hancock, where we also met Santha. What a pleasure, and not the heavy sort of read one might expect in dealing with a subject as weighty as this, i.e. how far back can we trace our civilisation, using the signs possibly left for us by the survivors of the last ice-age 13 thousand years ago? What with the millennium bearing down upon us, I am tempted to take up the suggestion that Hancock made in his talk (which was at U.C.T., Cape Town, November 1998, in a packed lecture theatre), being: "Go to Egypt - head out into the desert, for the night, and find a sighting of a bright star above the apex of one of the pyramids, and WATCH it move! You will feel clearly that we are on a turning planet..." Also: "The Sphinx faces East, and at the right time will face exactly due East again," - possibly on 1st January 2000, as the Age of Aquarius begins? I would love to be in Egypt for the beginning of the new millennium, and would love to be in the company of other Hancock-followers, so to speak, enjoying the same experience! How about it!? Meanwhile, beg, borrow or steal a copy of this book, and do your pre-travel reading. What a pleasure!
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Summary: Interesting to the layman
Review: I find it difficult to believe that common mythology can prove more than occasional contact, though the implications of said contact is quite intriguing. I find, still, a lot more speculation than the evidence warrants, and the comments in the book about Gnosticism and closed-mindedness out of place and unhelpful. One, when reading this, cannot help but feel that Hancock believes the myths he is studying, and I find the links he makes to be tenuous at best. Still, Hancock's evidence, if generously coloured in this book by fantasy, is worth investigating, though I am no geologist / anthropologist.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting to the layman
Review: I find it difficult to believe that common mythology can prove more than occasional contact, though the implications of said contact is quite intriguing. I find, still, a lot more speculation than the evidence warrants, and the comments in the book about Gnosticism and closed-mindedness out of place and unhelpful. One, when reading this, cannot help but feel that Hancock believes the myths he is studying, and I find the links he makes to be tenuous at best. Still, Hancock's evidence, if generously coloured in this book by fantasy, is worth investigating, though I am no geologist / anthropologist.
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