Graham Hancock Reads Thoth’s Prophecy from the Hermetic Texts – The Rebirth of the Cosmos

There will come a time when it will have been in vain that Egyptians have honoured the Godhead with heartfelt piety and service, and all our holy worship will be fruitless and ineffectual. The gods will return from earth to heaven, Egypt will be forsaken, and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate, bereft of the presence of its deities. We live at a crossroads, there's no doubt, we all feel it, we all know it. I don't think it's the first time that mankind has stood at such a crossroads, but here we are now facing it and hopefully dealing with it. I'm going to close with a reading from the Hermetica, from the Hermetic texts. Hermes was the Greek version of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, the Romans knew him as Mercury, and in a dialogue, the Hermetica, many of them are dialogues between Thoth Hermes and various pupils of his, and in one called the Asclepius, a lament is presented, and it's like a prophecy, it's a bit like the Mayan prophecy. Egypt seems to stand as a metaphor for the whole world in this, and to my mind, for the world in our time, this lament, this prophecy is speaking directly to us. So it's Hermes speaking and he's saying to Asclepius this, do you know Asclepius that Egypt is an image of heaven, or to speak more exactly, in Egypt all the operations of the powers which rule and work in heaven are present in the earth below. In fact it should be said that the whole cosmos dwells in this our land as in a sanctuary, and yet since it is fitting that wise men should have knowledge of all events before they come to pass, you must not be left in ignorance of what I will now tell you. There will come a time when it will have been in vain that Egyptians have honored the godhead with heartfelt piety and service, and all our holy worship will be fruitless and ineffectual. The gods will return from earth to heaven, Egypt will be forsaken, and the land which was once the home of religion will be left desolate, bereft of the presence of its deities. Oh Egypt, Egypt, of thy religion nothing will remain but an empty tale which thine own children in time to come will not believe. Nothing will be left but graven words, and only the stones will tell of thy piety. And in that day men will be weary of life, and they will cease to think the universe worthy of reverent wonder and worship. They will no longer love this world around us, this incomparable work of God, this glorious structure which he has built, this sum of good made up of many diverse forms, this instrument whereby the will of God operates in that which he has made, ungrudgingly favoring man's welfare, this combination and accumulation of all the manifold things that call forth the veneration, praise, and love of the beholder. Darkness will be preferred to light, and death will be thought more profitable than life. No one will raise his eyes to heaven, the pious will be deemed insane, the impious wise, the madman will be thought a brave man, and the wicked will be esteemed as good. As for the soul, and the belief that it is immortal by nature, or may hope to attain to immortality, as I have taught you, all this they will mock, and even persuade themselves that it is false. No word of reverence or piety, no utterance worthy of heaven, will be heard or believed. And so the gods will depart from mankind, a grievous thing, and only evil angels will remain, who will mingle with men, and drive the poor wretches into all manner of reckless crime, into wars, and robberies, and frauds, and all things hostile to the nature of the soul. Then will the earth tremble, and the sea bear no ships, heaven will not support the stars in their orbits, all voices of the gods will be forced into silence, the fruits of the earth will rot, the soil will turn barren, and the very air will sicken with sullen stagnation, all things will be disordered and awry, all good will disappear. But when all this has befallen Asclepius, then God, the creator of all things, will look on that which has come to pass, and will stop the disorder by the counterforce of his will, which is the good. He will call back to the right path those who have gone astray, he will cleanse the world of evil, washing it away with floods, burning it out with the fiercest fire, and expelling it with war and pestilence. And thus he will bring back his world to its former aspect, so that the cosmos will once more be deemed worthy of worship and wondering reverence, and God, the maker and maintainer of the mighty fabric, will be adored by the men of that day with continuous songs of praise and blessing. Such is the new birth of the cosmos, it is a making again of all things good, a holy and awe-inspiring restoration of all nature, and it is wrought inside the process of time by the eternal will of the creator. I don't know whether we're going to face some terrible global catastrophe and whatnot. I certainly hope not. I hope it will not come down to misery and horror, awful, awful things, there's enough of that in the world already. But I do remember what all the ancient texts say, there isn't a single flood myth, there isn't a single story of the destruction of past civilizations that don't implicate humanity in the story somewhere. Our own behavior, what we do, is part of what we're bringing down on the world right now. What we are manifesting in the world, that is what is coming towards us. We are the authors of this thing, and we can change the story if we want to change it. I firmly believe that. Are we looking at the traces of a forgotten episode in human history? I think so. I think that's what's going on here. And because we've forgotten it, because we are a species with amnesia, because we are so much a mystery to ourselves, perhaps it's because of that that we're so lost and so troubled today, so haunted by the sense of something missing, something that we need to know about ourselves. For the ancient Egyptians, the essential mystery of human existence concerned our spiritual essence, that we are participating in this theater of experience that we call life and the world in an immense endeavor aimed at the perfection of the soul. I've talked with shamans in the Amazon, and when I've asked them, what do you think is the problem with the world? What's the problem with the West? They say it's very simple. You've severed your connection with spirit. You've cut the link, and you have to restore that link if you're going to move forward from here. You can't move forward from the place you're in if you don't restore the connection to spirit. And that seems to me the most fundamental task that all of us now face. Not these exterior trappings of power that have brought such horror and misery to the world. This is the moment of crossroads that we stand at. None of us can effect changes on a macro level. It's impossible to do so. But we can make changes on a micro level. We can make changes in our own lives. We can make changes in our immediate surroundings. Changes for the better. Changes driven by love. So overwhelming is the notion of global destruction. No, I can't stop that, but I can stop what I'm doing to contribute to it. And if we all do that, then I believe a huge change in consciousness will come, and the world can move on, and we can look forward to a future for our children and our children's children, and once again bring this bright, beautiful, jeweled garden of a planet, bring it back to the place it should be in our lives.