Heaven's Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization

In ***Heaven's Mirror***, author Graham Hancock continues the quest begun in his international best-seller ***Fingerprints of the Gods***: to rediscover the hidden legacy of mankind and to reveal that "ancient" cultures were, in fact, the heirs to a far older forgotten civilization and the inheritors of its archaic, mystical wisdom. Working with photographer Santha Faiia, Hancock traces a network of sacred sites around the globe on a spectacular voyage of discovery that takes us from the pyramids and temples of ancient Egypt to the enigmatic statues of Easter Island, from the haunting ruins of pre-Columbian America to the splendors of Angkor Wat. It is a journey through myth, magic, and astounding archaeological revelations that forces us to rethink the cultures of our lost ancestors and the origins of civilization. The first fully illustrated book by Graham Hancock, Heaven's Mirror is a stunning and illuminating tour of the spirituality of the ancients--a search for a secret recorded in the very foundations of the holiest sites of antiquity. **Amazon.com Review** ***It could be true!*** That's the enthusiasm that author and scholar-mystic **Graham Hancock** counts on--in himself and in his readers--as he lays down his theories of an ancient (Atlantean, perhaps?) civilization that disseminated a sophisticated religion of ground-sky dualism and a "science" of immortality. Hancock's previous work, including the popular and controversial **Fingerprints of the Gods**, has drawn criticism for its leaps of faith and allegedly pseudoscientific conclusions, but Heaven's Mirror proves at least a little more substantial. His chief thesis is that numerous ancient sites and monuments--the pyramids of Mexico and Egypt, the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the monuments of Yonaguni in the Pacific, and the megaliths of Peru and Bolivia--are situated in such a way, geodetically, that they point towards some separate and uniform influence, some lost civilization or "invisible college" of astronomer-priests. And that civilization, as evidenced in the mathematics and architecture of the sites, points towards some gnosis, or body of knowledge, that would allow humanity to transcend the trap of mortality, a ***worldview in which the knowledge-giving serpent of Eden is not a villain but a hero.*** 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