Graham Hancock's Books and the Question of Consciousness After Death
Three of Graham Hancock's books, Supernatural: Meetings with Mankind's Ancient Teachers, The Master Game, and Entangled: The Eater of Souls, circle back to the same question: what becomes of us once we die? Hancock pushes back against the view associated with the evolutionary biologist and writer Richard Dawkins, who holds that we should live fully precisely because death leaves nothing behind. Hancock's answer is to interrogate the science that such a position leans on. He finds no proof underneath the reductionist, atheistic framing, and he treats it as a narrow anti-religious assumption, no firmer than many of the irrational beliefs held in the name of religion.
Our legal line between life and death, Hancock points out, is drawn at the total end of brain function, confirmed by the absence of brain wave activity on an electroencephalogram. That test records the electrical activity of the brain through small flat metal discs, the electrodes, fixed to the scalp. His counterargument is that we are not reducible to our brains, nor even entirely to our bodies. Consciousness, in his account, is what actually rules our being. He calls it our truest self, describes us as sparks of light, and argues that this self carries on past the state we label as dead.
Materialistic Reductionism, the school Dawkins belongs to, treats everything as matter and therefore denies that consciousness extends past the brain. Hancock summarizes how these scientists see it: consciousness as a byproduct of electrical impulses, shaped by Darwinian survival, switching off at the moment medicine calls death. If that picture holds, then we are matter and nothing more, which drains the whole business of meaning. Hancock prefers a different analogy. He compares the brain to a television set, a device that receives and transmits consciousness rather than producing it.
He does not pretend to know exactly what waits for us. What he is willing to say is that any afterlife at all depends on consciousness showing up first in a temporal body. That opens room for reincarnation and for spiritual planes, the very possibilities that other sciences reduce to plain material decay.
The ancient Egyptians interest him because they poured their attention into the truth of what comes after dying, and into honoring it. His research traces how the fifth dynasty pyramids began carrying hieroglyphs now called the Pyramid Texts, the oldest of their kind and the root of what we know as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Similar writing appears inside coffins and on papyrus scrolls, each one a map for the dead person's passage into the next world. According to these texts the passage was no gentle one; the realm the Egyptians named the Duat held riddles, ordeals, and trials no living person had faced.
Hancock reads the dense Egyptian texts as symbolic and as something that can teach us about ourselves. The way a person had lived, the texts imply, determined the challenges that person would meet in the Duat. He connects this to ideas about an order of consciousness and to Robert Bauval's work on the three stars of Orion's Belt mirroring the layout of the Giza pyramids. Giza itself he describes as the Duat brought down to the ground. Inside the chambers, the hieroglyphic drawings carry reverence and honor for the life beyond.
Within the great pyramid at Giza, Hancock draws attention to images of the goddess Maat in the Judgement Halls of Osiris. The feather in her headdress, he says, stands for a cosmic justice, a truth, an order that outlasts the body. These threads of Egyptian myth and practice support his conviction that altered states of consciousness can reach other realms, and that the body is only a channel through which consciousness moves and then keeps going.