Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith - Hardcover

Graham Hancock; Robert Bauval

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385257783 ISBN 13: 9780385257787

Publisher: Doubleday, 2004

Synopsis

Talisman : Sacred Cities, Secret Faith

About this title

About the Author:

Graham Hancock is the author and co-author of a number of bestselling investigations of historical mysteries, including The Sign and the Seal, The Message of the Sphinx, Heaven’s Mirror, The Mars Mystery, and Underworld. His books have been translated into twenty languages and have sold more than four million copies around the world.

Robert Bauval is the celebrated author of The Orion Mystery and co-author (with Graham Hancock) of The Secret of the Sphinx, The Mars Mystery, and Keeper of Genesis. His contributions to the fields of Egyptology and archaeology have been widely acclaimed.

From Publishers Weekly:

This sprawling conspiracy theory traces the influence of ancient Egyptian and gnostic ideologies concerning a dualistic, Manichean cosmos prefiguring the earthly order, knowable only through secret, magical lore from medieval Catharism to the French vogue for pharaonic monuments and deities, the astrologically suggestive layouts of Paris and Washington, and the Statue of Liberty (the "Isis of New York"). The conventional explanation for the historical recurrence of gnostic themes and Egyptian iconography—that people peruse old texts and art works and adapt their ideas and symbols to new purposes—strikes Hancock and Bauval (coauthors of Keeper of Genesis) as inadequate. They discern the millennia-long plot of a shadowy gnostic "Organization" working through usual suspects like the Freemasons, whose hidden hand they see influencing everything from the French Revolution to the founding of Israel. The authors draw eye-glazing webs of connections between historical coincidences—some intriguing, others tenuous and forced—to insinuate a "not altogether impossible" master plan. But their proposed conspiracy never gels. Its guiding philosophies, Christian gnosticism and pagan occultism, don't really mesh, and its agenda seems no more coherent than a perennial opposition to the alleged intolerance and obscurantism of the Catholic Church. The book's crude anticlericalism and conviction that culture propagates by conspiratorial, not intellectual, processes make it a distortion of the gnostic mindset.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0385257783
• ISBN 13: 9780385257787
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 576