Benjamin Roos -- A review of The Book of Ancient Revelations by Hugh Fox, published by EcceNovo Editions, Victoria, B.C., 2004, $17.95. (ISBN 0973164891)

The Book of Ancient Revelations

Some years ago, while in the Louvre in Paris, Professor Fox saw a similarity between a drawing on a Greek pot depicting Hercules killing a merman and a drawing of the same scene on an ancient pot of the Mochica Indians from Peru. Both dated to around 300 B.C. There wasn't supposed to be any connection, but when Fox began to look at more Mochica pots, lo and behold, he began to see Phoenician writing all over them. No one had noticed the Phoenician writing on Mochica pots before.

Slowly he realized that all the drawings on all the hundred and hundreds of surviving Mochica pots from Peru depicted Hercules mythology, and he flew over to Cádiz, Spain, where the most important Phoenician Hercules temple was, and met the professor who was excavating the temple itself, now under water. They exchanged ideas and books and the Spaniard was not at all surprised that Fox had found Phoenician writing and Hercules mythology all over Peruvian pots: "The Romans were utterly annihilating the Phoenicians and they could travel anywhere, no problem. Why not Peru?" Some years earlier Fox had proven that there was another Phoenician colony in Mexico, a discovery he discusses in his The Gods of the Cataclysm (Harper's Magazine Press, 1976).

He became interested in ancient alphabets (he fluently reads ancient Hebrew, but had never delved into other ancient scripts before) and one day, he saw some more writing on a pot at Tiawanaku, Bolivia. This time it was Sumerian, dating from some time around 3,000 B.C., and it read TI-A-NAKU, which Fox immediately linked up with the ANAKU mentioned in the Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh. Anaku is the land across the ocean where the "apples of immortality" grew.

Fox immediately linked this idea with the Germanic myths about the Home of the Gods, Valhalla, where the goddess Freya grows apples that keep the gods immortal, and slowly he began to realize that Tiawanaku, Bolivia was the Home of the Gods in all ancient Old World mythology. Next, Fox placed a map of all the mythical homes of the gods in Hindu mythology over South America and slowly realized that not only was Tiawanaku the universal Home of the Gods (Mount Meru in Hindu myth), but that all the sacred sites in ancient Old World mythology corresponded to now ruined sites in South America. The home of Yama, the god of the underworld, for instance, was Chavin de Huantar in Peru, the source for our ideas and images of the devil.

What makes The Book of Ancient Revelations different from all of Fox's other books on these matters, is that it takes the ancient religions of the ancient misnamed "New" World, and treats them not as dead archaeology, but as living ideas that still make sense today and that we can use (perhaps need to use) in our lives today. The ancients, Fox realized, were totally in tune with the cosmos, all their myths relating to the movements of the sun and moon, stars, and earth through the heavens. Ancient humans, consequently, were part and parcel of the universe they lived in, a reality we certainly have lost in modern times.

This is a book that could be the beginning of cosmic and personal sanity for anyone who reads it.