Eminent Aquarians #1: Graham Hancock

In considering examples of how the Age of Aquarius is increasingly entrenching itself, the esoteric archaeologist Graham Hancock is a good place to start. He is a classic example of a disruptive individual who is pitched against a complacent Piscean hierarchy, as he himself delineates in the above podcast with good old Joe Rogan, himself an intensely Aquarian figure. Hancock is disruptive because he has, over several decades and numerous best-selling books, articulated a compelling narrative of human society, in which he posits that the first technologically sophisticated civilisation existed over ten thousand years ago in South and Central America, and that this was prematurely destroyed by the debris from a passing comet. As such, pace Hancock, the cradle of civilisation as we know it was not in Mesopotamia, but in the Americas, and the civilisations of the Middle East were seeded by the survivors of the prior American ur-civilisation, who had scattered themselves around the world with what little they could salvage from their ruined cities.

Hancock cites various similarities between indigenous American and Middle Eastern artifacts to bolster his case that these were not separate civilisations, but merely temporally divergent manifestations of the same civilisation. However, the established archaeological paradigm is that human civilisation in the Americas cannot be older than 2500 years, and Hancock alleges that instead of the archaeological profession being open to refutation on this point, it instead tends to marginalise anybody who contradicts it. As such, despite being in publishing terms a raging success, he is in professional terms something of a persona non grata. His Wikipedia biography accuses him of being a proponent of "pseudohistory" and "pseudoarcheology", the prefix pseudo being one of the classic signifiers by which rationalist-atheist "sceptics" stigmatise anybody they consider beyond the pale.

For anyone outside the hot and sexy world of archaeology, this kind of labelling might seem a bit infantile, but is Hancock really deceitful? In the interview with Rogan he appears to be sane, rational and engaging, and if he is a liar then he must be an amazing one because he keeps it up fluently without contradicting himself for almost three hours. A similar objection pertains to any assertion that he is simply delusional, because if he is so he displays remarkable internal consistency in his delusions. It could be argued that he has followed his line of argument purely because it is highly lucrative, but a counter to that would be that he started his career as a respectable establishment insider (he is a former journalist with The Economist), so there can be little doubt that he could have easily become extremely wealthy without compromising his respectability. Now he might just be wrong, and in fairness some of his speculations, such as that the giant stone roofs of the chambers within the Egyptian pyramids were lifted into place by telekinesis, are too much even for someone as woowoo-friendly as me.

Hancock's plight is similar to that of the evolutionary biologist Rupert Sheldrake, who has spent similar decades touting his theory of morphic resonance to the indifference or even antipathy of his more mainstream colleagues. Like Sheldrake, Hancock harks to Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and its theory that science advances by paradigm shifts, as once-dominant theories increasingly fail to explain new evidence or data. They also invoke Max Planck's aphorism that "science progresses one funeral at a time" as doughty defenders of the status quo yield to new ideas by cocking their toes. In fact, both men are holding onto false hopes in these notions, as they misunderstand their real historical role, and why it is so disruptive. The Aquarian ideas that they proffer are dangerous not because they might upend existing paradigms, but because they undermine the Piscean hierarchies that govern their respective fields. Hancock is subversive because he recognises that only a tiny fraction of the record of human habitation on the planet has so far been exhumed, so that our understanding of human history is liable to become repeatedly overturned every time a virgin area of the planet is excavated. In turn, this will convert archaeology from being a sober, orderly, structured discipline into a wild world of constant turmoil, in which no hierarchy of expertise can be steadily maintained. However, unbeknown to themselves, his Piscean foes can only be defeated by him, as he embodies the Aquarian forces that will come to dominate not just their world, but our own too.