The Cygnus Mystery: Unlocking the Ancient Secret Of Life’s Origins in the Cosmos

by Andrew Collins

USA Version April 1, 2007: go to www.unknowncountry.com

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

As the US version of this book was just released, we are reissing a new review. In May 2004, this noted British science writer and historian, Andrew Collins, author of such widely acclaimed classics as From the Ashes of Angels (1996) and Gods of Eden (1998), was visiting ancient megalithic complexes dating from the Neolithic Period in southeastern Turkey. One of the sites, known as Gobekli Tepe, called “the oldest temple in the world,” had been dated by archeologists to 9500 B.C. He and his wife Sue also visited Harran, an ancient city that from as early as 2000 B.C., had been recognized as a leading center of trade and commerce between the East and the West, and had once been the home of the Old Testament patriarch Abraham. During their visit, their attention was largely riveted to a very tall stone tower that had been used for astronomical purposes by a people called Sabians, who had lived in this city for thousands of years. Andrew explains that a deep knowledge of astronomy was important to the Sabian sky-religion, and that in medieval times a number of noted astronomers assigned to the court of the Caliph in Baghdad originally came from Harran. The Collins’s also got to visit a site recently discovered in 1997, that Andrew had not yet heard of, called Karahan Tepe. It too would become a very important part of Andrew’s quest. Andrew and Sue visited a number of interesting sites while in Turkey.

After returning to England, Andrew couldn’t shake the memory of Harran’s huge astronomical tower. He wondered if the Sabians of that fabled city had inherited religious practices and knowledge that had been a significant part of the nearby Neolithic sites that they had visited. He dove into exhaustive research in an effort to find answers. Soon he realized that not only were the early Neolithic sites of southeast Turkey often aligned in north-south orientations, with a main focus on the north, but that in the religious practices of the Sabians they held regular religious festivals in honor of the “Mystery of the North,” where they said “the great god” was located, a source of light and power, and the abode of the dead. During prayer their attention was to be focused in the direction of the northern celestial pole.

Andrew was turning up all sorts of tantalizing clues, but then he hit a bit of a speed bump in the middle of the road and wondered if maybe he was headed down the wrong track. He found that there was no Pole Star when the earliest Neolithic sites of Gobekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe were being constructed. Remember that earth’s axial wobble, with it’s approximate 25,770 year cycle of circular rotation, causes various stars to come in and out of the pole position. While today the Pole Star is Polaris, of Ursa Minor, back around 2800 B.C. it was Thuban, of the Draco constellation.

To make a long story short, Andrew began to suspect that Cygnus, the celestial swan of heaven, was the likely candidate. After all, at that time the stars of Cygnus would have been in a circumpolar rotation in the northern sky. But this would only be the beginning of his discoveries and startling inferences. In a couple of months, Andrew and his wife would be in the United States and Doctors Greg and Lora Little, who had both authored books dealing with Native American spirituality and Indian Mounds, would take them through Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee to learn first-hand about the incredible and ancient mound-building sites of the Hopewell culture. It was in Ohio, at Newark’s massive Great Circle, a site that remarkably resembled very closely the huge megalithic site of Avebury, in Wiltshire, England, that Andrew would begin to put together some important pieces of this complex cosmic jigsaw puzzle. Again he continued taking extensive field notes and conducted exhaustive research, and incredibly, piece by piece, a mind-boggling new picture of human history on this planet began to emerge. Soon after his field investigations and research in the United States, Andrew began to also study the Olmec and Mayan cultures of ancient Mexico and the Inca’s of Peru, and realized that the links between Cygnus, tales of a cosmic creation and the transmigration of the soul were to be found throughout the Americas, and could easily have been brought from Eurasia back during Late Palaeolithic times, via oceanic voyagers. Dr. Bruce Bradley, an expert with the Smithsonian Institute in prehistoric flint-knapping discovered that North America’s famous Clovis points, as well as those found at a site in Cactus Hill, Virginia, were virtually the same bifaced point style and were created by the same flint-knapping techniques as those of the Solutrean peoples of southwestern France and of Spain and Portugal back some 20,000 to 17,000 years ago. Dr. Bradley speculated that the West Europeans had brought this knowledge to North America with them back during the Last Ice Age, around 15,000 B.C., using animal skin-covered skiffs to navigate the melting ice fields of the Atlantic in a manner similar to how the indigenous Inuit of Alaska are known to have traversed such waters.

But in addition to these remarkable traces of advanced astronomical science, and other forms of knowledge of an advanced and scientific character, a very profound insight into an interrelated cosmic connection with human evolution unexpectedly emerged! For in this truly thought-provoking and remarkable book, Andrew Collins proposes that back around 15,000 B.C. a dramatic rise in subatomic particles reaching earth from the binary star system of Cygnus X-3 may have caused early humans to have undergone dramatic genetic changes! Suddenly all over the world there appeared magico-religious symbolism, and the belief in a cosmic axis, in association with a “bird of creation”, that again Andrew connects with Cygnus. While the earliest known European cave art dates back to around 32,500 to 30,000 BP, in the region of Ardeche in southeast France, European cave art remained at the same level of sophistication until the period known as the Early Magdalenian (17,000-15,000 BP) when a very dramatic increase of interest and activity in the deepest regions of cave complexes occurred, and primarily in France and Spain.

With a scholarly knack, an intellectual curiosity, and an obsessive drive to get to the bottom of the proverbial truth, Andrew Collins’s tireless and determined search takes in a comprehensive global perspective that leaves virtually no stone unturned. In the beginning of his book, Andrew whets our curiosity with the first three pages of chapter one by describing a series of remarkable ancient sites, creatively infusing life into imagined spiritual practices and ceremonies that likely reflect quite accurately events that had gone on thousands of years ago in such diverse places known today as southeast Turkey, Avebury, England, Newark, Ohio, and the Giza plateau of Egypt. Then he brings us into our own so-called modern era and describes how famous scientist Francis Crick experienced a powerful revelation about the structure of DNA after ingesting LSD back in 1953, how Swiss born anthropologist Jeremy Narby was introduced to his own powerful revelatory experience about the spirit world and DNA by Peruvian shamans who introduced him to a powerful hallucinogenic plant mixture known as ayahuasca, and how all of these seemingly isolated events and activities across a vast landscape of time and space may in fact be deeply interconnected, and how reading this incredible book and coming to understand all of this may forever change how you perceive the world and the universe around you, and your belief system in what happens to the soul after death.

I highly recommend this book. It is filled with so much highly significant information and insights, with wonderful illustrations and photographs. It’s difficult to do it justice in a single review. There is so much ground to cover.

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The Cygnus Mystery—Featuring science writer Andrew Collins

Narrated by Dr. Greg Little

ATA—Memphis Archetypal Productions • Forgotten History Series #5

2006, DVD 51 minutes, USA $19.95

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

This video presentation featuring Andrew Collins, the author of The Cygnus Mystery, gives a thought-provoking and dazzling introduction into the scientific and historical evidence and the theoretical insights that comprise the very core of this scholarly British author’s revelatory findings. The DVD is now available in the US via Whitley Strieber's website. His challenging premise is that the Cygnus star constellation, whose distance from our earth is approximately 30,000 light years, has acted as a previously unidentified spark of evolution in our human development. He describes how earth is in the path of Cygnus’s “cosmic gun barrel” and likely caused significant genetic mutations in our DNA thousands of years ago, causing changes in our bodily and mental development, and that various scientists have predicted that such a thing was possible, including the well-known American astronomer Carl Sagan back in 1973. He shows how Cygnus’s cosmic rays may have caused sudden and significant leaps in human evolution some 30,000 and 17,000 years ago, and proceeds to trace its historical development. His evidence consists of a comprehensive collection and scholarly grasp of information from the ancient world. He shows how ancient sites the world over were aligned with Cygnus, which shamanic traditions perceived as a portal into the sky world. Cygnus was associated with a “Celestial Bird”—often a swan—a symbol of transformation of the soul, and of the core mystery surrounding life and death. It was seen as the origin and final destination of the “River of Souls.”

The video is a wonderful introductory presentation for those unfamiliar with Andrew Collins’s evidence and theories, and a stunning and dazzling review of his data and a great companion to his book as well. The special effects are impressive and truly awe inspiring, for it is as if you’re transported into the command center of a spacecraft with Andrew Collins in the control room, explaining the significance of major ancient megalithic sites around the world like Avebury, Callanish, Newgrange, Newark, Cusco, Cairo, Harran, Gobekli Tepe, and many, many more, with many wonderful photos and video clips from the archives of both the Little’s and the Collins’s. Also beautiful NASA photographic images of the heavens and simulations of the Cygnus star constellation and the cosmic jets that shot out from it—one of which aims directly at earth.

In a mere 51 minutes, you’ll feel like you’ve been transported across deep space and around the vast Milky Way galaxy, through incredible and deeply important historical periods of time, from the Big Bang that started it all, to the insights and profound knowledge acquired by shamans, to the latest and most startling discoveries and theories of our modern scientists. The video imagery is often breathtakingly beautiful, and the evidence presented will forever change your view of our world and its place in the cosmos.

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Worlds Before Our Own

by Brad Steiger

Anomalist Books • 5150 Broadway #108 • San Antonio, TX 78209

Website: www.anomalistbooks.com

Forward Copyright 2007 • 224 pages, $14.00 • ISBN: 1-933665-19-X

Reviewed by Brent Raynes

Once again, the most prolific and popular author we know, the legendary Brad Steiger has had another one of his greatest and most worthy classics reprinted. Originally published back in 1978, by G.P.Putnam’s Sons, Worlds Before Our Own was a pioneering exploration of ancient global civilizations and so-called “erratics”—“man-made” artifacts that turned up in unexpected places like primordial geological strata. Such data certainly suggested a radical departure from the time tables of human evolution accepted by our mainstream scientists, breaking radical new ground. In his 2007 Foreword, Brad recalls just how radical it became! One reviewer even called for Brad’s book to be burned! The initial book reviews, Brad noted, “were the most scathing that I have ever received.” Brad had led the pack some fifteen years before Michael Cremo’s Forbidden Archaeology and others, and in a sense he was kind of like Barbara Mandrel in that song where she was country when country wasn’t cool!

But gradually attitudes have, over the years, been shifting toward a more open-minded and positive consideration of such things, of such evidence, and though originally published nearly three decades ago, Worlds Before Our Own is still a very thought-provoking book written by one of the best qualified investigative writers to tackle such exciting and challenging historical controversies and reported “erratics.”