Joe Rogan | The Mysteries of Serpent Mound w/Graham Hancock

I guess this is kind of my pet phrase. We are a species with amnesia. It's my favorite phrase of yours. We have forgotten so much more about ourselves than we remember. And what the process of history and archaeology should really be about is a process of remembering. We shouldn't be imposing our ideas of what we should have been on the past. We should allow the past to speak for itself. And when it does so, it speaks eloquently. One of the sites that we visited and explored for America before was Serpent Mound in Ohio. I don't know if you've ever been there, Jameer. I know. I've heard of it, though. It is an amazing... Jamie's from Ohio. You ever be there? Yeah, Jamie and I were talking about it earlier. There's Serpent Mound. There's an aerial view of Serpent Mound. Oh, that is crazy. But here's the thing. You see the head end of Serpent Mound there? So Santa and I went there at the summer solstice in 2017. We were there on June 21, 2017. And my wife, Santa, is a photographer, and we acquired a drone for this specific purpose. And she flew the drone up 400 feet above Serpent Mound, and we sat it up there watching the sunset. And what happens on the summer solstice, and you can only see it perfectly with a drone. There's pictures of it in the book here. What happens on summer solstice? You can see it from ground level, but you get up 400 feet. You really get it. The head of that serpent is pointing directly at a niche in the distant hills through which the sun sets on the summer solstice, on the longest day of the year. So it's a sky-ground alignment, a perfection that is taking place there. It's a beautiful thing to see, to watch that sun majestically sinking down into the horizon. And see this awesome figure of the serpent gazing directly at it with its jaws open, almost as though it's about to swallow the sun. And then we remember that there are other sites around the world which are also aligned to key moments of the solar year, aligned to the winter solstice, for example, the Temple of Karnak in Upper Egypt. That kilometer-long axis targets exactly the rising point of the sun on the winter solstice. One of the interesting things about Serpent Mound, and I urge anybody listening to this, go visit Serpent Mound and especially go there on the summer solstice, because that's the moment, that's the marriage of heaven and earth. That's when sky and ground unite in majesty at that place. But one of the mysteries of Serpent Mound concerns, how old is this mound really? How far back does it go? And there have been arguments that there are a group of archaeologists who would like it to be just a thousand years old, and they attribute it to a culture called the Fort Ancient Culture. There's another group of archaeologists, in my view, who've done much more thorough work, who attribute it to the Adina culture. The thing about which goes back to 2,300 years ago or so, there's evidence for an earlier construction enterprise. It looks like the site has been continuously reconstructed and remodeled, as we would do with any sacred site. If it begins to wear down, you remodel it, and then you get later organic material being introduced to the site that may give you the impression that the site is only that old. What's intriguing about Serpent Mound is it stands on a natural ridge, and that natural ridge, and this is entirely an accident of heaven and earth, that natural ridge, the head end of it, if you like, is naturally oriented to the summer solstice sunset. humanity, a long time ago, noticed that natural orientation, and they decided to monumentalize it. Here was a place where earth whispered to sky. The earth, in her own nature, looked directly at the place on the horizon where the sun was setting. This was a highly significant place. This place mattered. So they then created Serpent Mound on top of it. They memorialized it. They turned it into a special, special place that human beings had had a hand in making to honor the marriage of heaven and earth. What I found researching this book is that Serpent Mound is not alone in that respect. A lot of people are puzzled by Stonehenge in England. Stonehenge is built on Salisbury Plain, and there are two kinds of big megaliths at Stonehenge. One of them are called Sarsens, and the other are called the Bluestones. The Bluestones, we know for sure, were brought a long way. They were brought from Wales to Stonehenge, a distance of about 150 miles. The Sarsens are found in abundance on a place called the Marlborough Downs, which is about 20 miles from Stonehenge. But until very recently, it was thought there were no Sarsens on Salisbury Plain at all. An archaeologist couldn't understand why Stonehenge wasn't built on the Marlborough Downs, where the big Sarsens stones, the 20- to 30-ton megaliths, were available locally and didn't have to be brought there. Very recent research, 2018 research, has provided the answer that two of those Sarsens were naturally in position all the time at Stonehenge, and they are Sarsenstone 16 and the Heelstone. And if you stand behind Sarsenstone 16 and look at the Heelstone at dawn on the summer solstice, you see the sun rising in direct alignment with the view. And the Heelstone is like the site on the barrel of a rifle targeting the sun, and that was there naturally. Earth was speaking to sky. The ancients saw that. They decided this was sacred. They went to huge lengths to bring the Sarsens, the rest of the Sarsens, from the Marlborough Downs to create the big stone circle at Stonehenge and then to put the blue stones inside it. But initially, what they were celebrating was a natural union of heaven and earth, and that brings us to the notion of as above, so below, that we are connected to the cosmos, that it is part of our heritage. We in modern cities forget the cosmos exists. We have all kinds of tech that can look at astronomy, astronomy programs. We can all do that, but actually looking at the stars is something that's very difficult for people who live in cities to do. We're cut off from the cosmos. We're cut off from the notion that it is sacred, that it matters to the human creature. What the ancients seem to have done is to realize how vital that connection is and to memorialize it and to celebrate it and to draw our attention to the intimate connection between ground and sky. Yeah, light pollution sort of fuels our infantile existence in a lot of ways, right? Because it doesn't constantly remind us that we're a part of this great thing.