Joe Rogan | Memes are Cultural Objects w/Graham Hancock

But lost civilization and passed down. I deploy a concept in this book that I actually got from Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is the author of the book called The Selfish Gene. And he's not one of my favorite people because he's a materialist reductionist and he doesn't believe in spirit or any mystery in life that we're just accidents of chemistry and biology. We also has no psychedelic experience. And he said, no, I did challenge him at a public event to go have a dozen sessions of ayahuasca and still... I just take acid once. Oh, just once. It would be enough. But he has an excellent out because... And sadly, he's had a stroke. So he has a good excuse for not doing that. But he's a clever man. And one of his concepts that he's introduced into human culture is the concept of the meme. We're all, I think, familiar with that word. Genes are physical reproductive mechanisms. They reproduce themselves down the generations. They replicate, they multiply, they're passed on from one individual to another. Memes are cultural objects, cultural ideas that are passed on and replicate and reproduce themselves. And what I see right across the Americas and right across the old world as well is a set of memes that involve the sky, that involve the ground, that involve geometry, that involve notions of life after death. And I think the only way to explain these is that they have been inherited from an earlier culture that was in some way connected with the ancestors of all of these cultures. I think that's what we're looking at in the Amazon. We're looking at a meme which was deliberately created. Once you mobilize a population to start creating huge geometrical structures, you are also facilitating many other possibilities that an organized population allows. I think that's what happened at Gobekli Tepe. I think that's why they created the megalithic site there, to mobilize the local population of hunter-gatherers, to give them a project to do, to engage them, and in the process of engaging them, to teach them the skills of agriculture, which are fundamental to any concept of civilization. And it's weird the way agriculture just suddenly appears in Gobekli Tepe. And there's huge agricultural mysteries in the Amazon as well. May I share a couple of those mysteries with you? Before you do that though, can you pull up that image from Gobekli Tepe of pillar, was it pillar 43? Pillar 43 in enclosure D. I would like to see that guy holding that bag. That is really fascinating. The bags are in a row along the top of the pillar. It's pillar 43 in enclosure D at Gobekli Tepe. Is there an image of that online that's available? Okay, here we go. Yeah, there's the bags. Yeah, so there's the bags in a row along the top. It's the same sort of square-shaped bag with a curved handle that you find on the earliest image of the feather serpent and that you find... No, you have to go above that, Jamie. Just a little bit higher up the pillar. Those bags right at the top there. It's odd that this symbol crops up in many different cultures and tends to be associated with some kind of... What's the mainstream interpretation of those bags? There is no mainstream interpretation of those bags. That's my interpretation of those bags, which I freely confess. That's how I read them. I'm intrigued by the anomaly that the similar bag and turns up in the hands of the Quetzal Coatl figure and turns up in Mesopotamia repeatedly in the hands of the individual so-called the Apkalu, the magicians of the gods, the bringers of civilization. And the plume serpent, Quetzalcoatl, it's an Aztec god, right? Quetzalcoatl is an Aztec god, but the Aztecs acquired him from earlier cultures. The very fact that an image of the plume serpent is given such priority in Olmec culture tells us that that system of ideas was present during Olmec times, which takes us back at least to 1500 BC, probably quite a bit earlier than that. Whereas the Aztecs are 1500 AD, so there's 3,000 years between the Aztecs and the Olmecs, and that same system of ideas is running through all of those cultures. And the Mayans had a name for it as well? Kukul Khan. What do you think that plume serpent was? I think it's very clear from the accounts that have survived that what he's associated with are two things in particular. One of them, he's a god of peace. He's not a war god. And the other thing that he's primarily about is giving the gifts of civilization. This is what you human beings need to know in order to move on to the next level. That is the function and the role of Quetzalcoatl. And there are very similar, we could refer to them as civilizing heroes who are found in other cultures and other locations. Osiris in Egypt plays that role as a bringer of civilization. There's hardly a culture in the ancient world that doesn't remember a time far back in remote prehistory when some kind of supernaturals or advanced human beings, and I prefer the latter, that some kind of advanced human beings were involved in a project to disseminate civilization. I mentioned the Tucano in the Amazon who are big drinkers of Ayahuasca. The Tucano have a fascinating origin myth. They say that their origin myth states specifically that their ancestors were brought to the Amazon. They were brought to the Amazon by a group of supernaturals who included the daughter of the son and an individual called the helmsman who steered the serpent canoe in which this settlement mission in the Amazon was performed. What these so-called supernaturals did was they brought the ancestors of Tucano to the Amazon and they showed them the best places to settle, the best places where they might find hunting, the best places where they might create a village, the best places for agriculture. And then they left, but they left them behind one gift, and that gift was Ayahuasca. That's the story of the origin myth of the Tucano. And it sounds to me rather like the other side of the story of that DNA signal in the Amazon that a group of people were deliberately settled in the Amazon by human beings who they chose to regard as supernaturals. That's what makes sense of it to me.