Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind
By Graham Hancock
Published by Arrow Books, 2006

Even the late Timothy Leary might have difficulty finding the truth in this hefty (yet lite!) psychedelic Origin of the Species. My review for The Nation, published this month.

One seemingly serious online reviewer has called this “one of the best books I have ever read”. Even the Guardian thinks it’s a “fascinating psychedelic detective story”. Still another reader, on a book-seller’s site, insists “it throws more lite on” its subject.

Well, “lite” is right.

Graham Hancock, who’s been thoroughly denounced by mainstream archaeologists over his theories on mankind’s early years, wilfully begs for more with this tiresomely repetitive 800-page meander that basically says this:

At some magical moment around 50,000 years ago, we underwent “a dramatic and electrifying change” – we got religion and art from supernatural beings, quite likely extraterrestrial.

Erich von Daniken, right? “Chariots of the Gods”? Wait, there’s more.

The magic came from mushrooms. That’s how we were able to see these helpful visitors. And they implanted the wisdom of the stars in our DNA, a sort of “intelligent design” package to keep us looking forward and upward.

Aldous Huxley, right? “Doors of Perception”? Well, Huxley is here, as is von Daniken, but so are, crucially, Francis Crick and David Lewis-Williams, both sound scientific minds, not mere writers. Crick, who won the Nobel for unlocking DNA’s code, admitted he was tripping on LSD when he first saw the spiral (a fact not revealed until after his death).

Paleoanthropologist Lewis-Williams is the one who first forged a link between drug-gobbling shamans and prehistoric cave art. Hancock goes to meet him and twists his arm to try some of the drugs himself so he can see what the shamans were seeing (including DNA spirals), so that he can understand these visions are “real”. The scientist refuses outright.

Not Hancock. He repeatedly takes us along on trips booked with both chemical and organic travel agencies. These and endlessly revisited accounts by other drug “researchers” account for a good quarter of the book, and at every turn their visions are compared with what’s on the walls of the famously painted caves in Europe, Africa and Australia. The book is packed with illustrations from the walls, mostly line drawings, but the name Rorschach shadows Hancock’s interpretations.

Another large chunk of “Supernatural” is a tirade against modern archaeology’s refusal to open its mind to the hidden significance of the cave art first uncovered in France a century ago.

Hancock, his own mind unleashed by the hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca in the Amazon jungle, climbs back into the hole where he’d been hunting for a lost civilisation, and promptly spots the origin of art, innovative thinking and possibly language. These appeared 50 millennia ago, “suddenly, already fully formed, as though bestowed on us by hidden powers”, he says.

And, just as suddenly, the true nature of the cave paintings’ strange human-animal hybrids, symbols and patterns is revealed to Hancock, along with the knowledge that our fairy and UFO (and abduction) lore came from other “dimensions”. Francis Crick, he writes, became convinced that the DNA molecule “did not evolve naturally upon this planet but was sent here in bacteria [‘panspermia’] by an alien civilisation”.

Graham Hancock made his reputation, such as it is, with the bestselling books “The Sign of the Seal” and “Fingerprints of the Gods”, both of them New Age cavorts through ancient mysteries, stone megaliths and astrological indicators that mankind sprang from some galactic mother culture.

Academia shakes its head, but of course that’s to be expected, Hancock says, from people whose primary concern is retaining their seats of power in the ivory tower. They not only won’t risk a break with the norm by dabbling in iconoclasm, they lend their voices to the chorus of chastisement that dubs him a pseudoarchaeologist.

Dan Brown, right? “The Da Vinci Code”?

In 1999 Hancock accused the BBC of giving his theories short shrift and took it to court, where all but one of his complaints was tossed in the bin. On his website, he reprehensibly magnifies the minuscule surviving complaint and, crowing like a champion, doesn’t even mention the rest. This is snatching victory from the jaws of truth, and proof that he’s not to be trusted.

As for “Supernatural”, another bestseller, no doubt, but in truth, much like his court case, it offers perhaps a hundred pages of flickering theory and 700 pages of rot.

There is value in hallucinogens, and careful, thorough study of their effects and other “trance” inducements used by shamans is welcome, but Hancock is merely rifling through other people’s luggage here and fashioning a colourful suit of odds and ends that trippers can hang a hat on.

Instead of casting light on the mystery of cave art, he’s come up with pop art. But, although packaged as something fundamentally important, it’s no Warhol, no Leonardo and not even a decent Timothy Leary.