Preserved for us in myths and legends, in folk traditions and in certain very ancient monuments,
the testimony of our otherwise lost and forgotten ancestors appears to be trying
to tell us that a hideous calamity has descended upon mankind from time to time,
that on each occasion it has afflicted us suddenly, without warning and without mercy,
like a thief in the night, and that it will certainly recur at some point in the future.
Should it do so – unless we are well prepared physically and spiritually, unless we behave
towards one another with love and respect rather than hatred and scorn, unless we make positive
rather than negative choices – the testimony of the ancients warns that we will be obliged
to begin again like orphaned children in complete ignorance of our true heritage. In this context,
as we near the end of the first quarter of the turbulent twenty-first century, let me share the
following extract from my book Fingerprints of the Gods, published in 1995: Walking in the last
days Hopi Reservation, May 1994: Across the high plains of Arizona, for days and days and days,
a desolate wind had been blowing. As we drove across those plains towards the tiny village of
Shungopovi, I went over in my mind all I had seen and done in the previous five years: my travels,
my research, the false starts and dead-ends I had encountered, the lucky breaks, the moments
when everything had come together, the moments when everything seemed about to fall apart.
I had travelled a long road to get here, I realized – far longer than the 300-mile
freeway that had whisked us up into these austere badlands from Phoenix,
the state capital. Nor did I expect to return with any great degree of enlightenment.
Nevertheless, I had made this journey because the science of prophecy is still believed to be alive
among the Hopi: Pueblo Indians, distantly related to the Aztecs of Mexico, whose numbers have been
reduced by attrition and misery to barely 10,000. The Hopi believe that we are walking in the last
days, with a geological sword of Damocles hanging over us. According to their myths:
"The first world was destroyed, as a punishment for human misdemeanours, by an all-consuming
fire that came from above and below. The second world ended when the terrestrial globe toppled
from its axis and everything was covered with ice. The third world ended in a universal flood.
The present world is the fourth. Its fate will depend on whether or not its inhabitants behave
in accordance with the Creator’s plans." I had come to Arizona to see whether the Hopi thought
we were behaving in accordance with the Creator’s plans…The end of the world. The desolate wind,
blowing across the high plains, shook and rattled the sides of the trailer-home we sat in. Beside me
was my wife Santha, who’d been everywhere with me, sharing the risks and the adventures, sharing the
highs and the lows. Sitting across from us was our friend Ed Ponist, a medical-surgical nurse from
Lansing, Michigan. A few years previously Ed had worked on the Hopi reservation for a while, and it
was thanks to his contacts that we were now here. On my right was Paul Sifki, a ninety-six-year-old
Hopi elder of the Spider clan, and a leading spokesman of the traditions of his people. Beside
him was his grand-daughter Melza Sifki, a handsome middle-aged woman who had offered to translate.
‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that the Hopi believe the end of the world
is coming. Is this true?’ Paul Sifki was a small, wizened man, nut-brown in colour,
dressed in jeans and a cambric shirt. Throughout our conversation he never once looked at me,
but gazed intently ahead, as though he were searching for a familiar face in a distant crowd.
Melza put my question to him and a moment later translated her grandfather’s reply:
‘He says, “why do you want to know”?’
I explained that there were many reasons. The most important was that I felt a sense of urgency:
‘My research has convinced me,’ I said, ‘that there was an advanced civilization – long,
long ago – that was destroyed in a terrible cataclysm. I fear
that our own civilization may be destroyed by a similar cataclysm …’
There followed a long exchange in Hopi, then this translation:
‘My grandfather said that when he was a child, in the 1900s, there was a star that
exploded – a star that had been up there in the sky for a long while … And he went to his
own grandfather and asked him to explain the meaning of this sign. His grandfather replied:
“This is the way our world will end – engulfed in flames … If people do not change their ways
then the spirit that takes care of the world will become so frustrated with us that he
will punish the world with flames and it will end just like that star ended.” That was what
his grandfather said to him – that the earth would explode just like that exploding star …’
‘So,’ I summarised, ‘the feeling is that this world will end in
fire … And having viewed the world for the past ninety years, does your
grandfather believe that the behaviour of mankind has improved or worsened?’
‘He says it has not improved,’ Melza replied. ‘We’re getting worse.’
‘So in his opinion, then, the end is coming?’
‘He said that the signs are already there to be seen … He said that nowadays nothing
but the wind blows and that all we do is have a weapon pointed at one another. That
shows how far apart we have drifted and how we feel towards each other now. There
are no values any more – none at all – and people live any way they want,
without morals or laws. These are the signs that the time has come …’
Melza paused in her translation, then added on her own account: ‘This terrible wind. It
dries things out. It brings no moisture. The way we see it, this kind of climate
is a consequence of how we’re living today – not just us, but your people as well.’
I noticed that her eyes had filled with tears while she was talking. ‘I have a cornfield,’ she
continued, ‘that’s really dry. And I look up into the sky and try to pray for rain,
but there is no rain, no clouds even… When we’re like this we don’t even know who we are.’
There was a long moment of silence and the wind rocked the trailer,
blowing hard and steady across the mesa as evening fell around us. I said quietly, ‘Please ask your
grandfather if he thinks that anything can now be done for the Hopi and for the rest of mankind?’
‘The only thing he knows,’ Melza replied when she had heard his answer, ‘is that so long as
the Hopi do not abandon their traditions they may be able to help themselves and
to help others. They have to hold on to what they believed in the past. They have to preserve their
memories. These are the most important things … But my grandfather wants to tell you also,
and for you to understand, that this earth is the work of an intelligent being,
a spirit – a creative and intelligent spirit that has designed everything to be the way
it is. My grandfather says that nothing is here just by chance, that nothing happens by
accident – whether good or bad – and that there is a reason for everything that takes place …’
When human beings from around the globe, and from many different cultures, share a
powerful and overwhelming intuition that a cataclysm is approaching,
we are within our rights to ignore them. And when the voices of our distant ancestors,
descending to us through myths and sacred architecture, speak to us of the physical
obliteration of a great civilization in remote antiquity (and tell us that our
own civilization is in jeopardy), we are entitled, if we wish, to stop our ears …
So it was, the Bible says, in the antediluvian world: ‘For in those days, before the Flood,
people were eating, drinking, taking wives, taking husbands, right up to the moment that Noah went
into the Ark, and they suspected nothing till the flood came and swept all away.’
In the same manner it has been prophesied that the next global destruction will fall upon us
suddenly ‘at an hour we do not suspect, like lightning striking in the east and flashing
far into the west … The sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars
will fall from the sky and the powers of heaven will be shaken … Then of two men in the fields,
one is taken, one left; and of two women at the millstone grinding, one is taken, one left …’
What has happened before can happen again. What has been done before can be done again.
And perhaps there is, indeed, nothing new under the sun …
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