Clow Christopher Cudahy - Awakening the planetary mind: beyond the trauma of the past to a new era of creativity

This book is dedicated to Matthew Clow (November 15, 1968June 26, 1998) and his generation.

AWAKENING THE PLANETARY MIND

Compulsive, compelling, and authoritative. An important addition to our understanding of ancient catastrophes and their impact on human consciousness. Essential reading for the alternative prehistorian.

Andrew Collins, author of Gateway to Atlantis and From the Ashes of Angels

Between lines of text exists an unseen world. Barbara Hand Clow, with her inimitable ability, peered into this world with laserlike vision and has thrust it before us in a way that cannot be ignored. As an engineer who is grounded in three-dimensional reality, Awakening the Planetary Mind reads between my lines with insight and clarity.

Christopher Dunn, author of The Giza Power Plant

It takes a mind versed in interdisciplinary studies to fully understand, integrate, reassemble, and then accurately teach this complex subject. Barbara has that kind of mind. And her detective work is conveyed admirably.

Freddy Silva, researcher, photographer, and author of Common Wealth

In Awakening the Planetary Mind, Barbara Hand Clow, with a perceptive voice, invites us to explore the unknown crevices of the past through her uncommon spiritual eye.

Rand Flem-Ath, author of When the Sky Fell

I find this book mind-expanding, provocative, and offering an important contribution to our self-understanding as a species, especially as we face important decisions in these critical times.

Matthew Fox, author of Original Blessing

Grandmother Sky (Barbara Hand Clow) has captured the essence of Mother Earth as a living energy within the Universal Circle in Awakening the Planetary Mind. The book reveals some universal dynamics that help us understand our connection to the past here on Turtle Island. We can truly learn from the past that we have the ability to change and to begin again.

J. T. Garrett, Ed.D., M.P.H., member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee from North Carolina and author of The Cherokee Herbal and Meditations with the Cherokee

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I honor my Celtic/Cherokee grandfather, Gilbert Hand, for his teachings and wisdom, which are bearing fruit fifty years later. He instructed me in the oral tradition of ancient civilizations by guiding me through the mythological, archaeological, and geological sources when I was age five through seventeen. His Cherokee mother passed the Cherokee Records to him, and then he passed these teachings to me. Grandfather Hand was also a thirty-second-degree Mason, and I will never know which of his teachings are Cherokee or Masonic, or both. Thank you, Grandmother Mabel Austen Hand, for the songs and stories of the Celtic people.

Thank you, J. T. Garrett, Hunbatz Men, Alberto Ruiz Buenfil, Don Alejandro Oxlac, White Eagle Tree, Heyoka Merrifield, Abdel Hakim, Frank Aon, Sam Kaai, and Felicitas Goodman for knowing the medicine and sharing it so graciously with me.

My greatest joy while writing this book was working with the illustrator, Christopher Cudahy Clow, who is my third son. Thank you, Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, for the first exhibit of these illustrations for his senior project in May 1999. The edge of joy has also been the edge of sorrow: In 1998 my second son (Chriss older brother), Matthew Clow, drowned in Lower Red Rock Lake near Dillon, Montana. Chris encouraged me to keep writing, and his artwork also helped him with his sorrow. Chris, the illustrations are beautiful!

Thank you, D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, for writing Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 BC, and for your assistance with this book; and J. B. Delair, I am deeply honored by your foreword. Thank you, anonymous donor, for the illustrations, since your generosity enabled Chris to do more than we had originally planned. I also am very grateful for the work of Anne Dillon and Jeanie Levitan at Bear & Company, for their careful and meticulous attention to detail, as well as the wonderful work done by copy editor Judy Stein. And thank you to Peri Swan, whose cover design I love, and to the books designer, Priscilla Baker.

Thank you, Gerry Clow, for all your editorial work. You really helped me clarify my thoughts, and I am still writing because you always help me.

FOREWORD

The past three decades have seen a spate of books on the subject of world catastrophes. Of variable quality, these books have ranged from considerations of the believedly traumatic termination of the reign of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous times about 63 million years ago, to that which evidently brought the so-called Pleistocene Ice Age to an abrupt close approximately 11,500 years ago, when, in the opinion of some, the legendary island of Atlantis was cataclysmically swallowed by the sea.

These studies have focused chiefly on the physical evidence for the one-time reality of those events, on the mechanisms that apparently caused their irruption, and on some of the multifarious long-term aftereffects they unleashed.

Very significantly, the presence in the Pleistocene calamitys dossier of an impressively varied mass of ancient, globally scattered, human eyewitness accounts of the event (now preserved as traditions and legends), complementing the associated field evidence, is a factor understandably absent from the file on the far older Cretaceous catastrophe. Such legends and traditions, of course, are themselves very much a part of catastrophism in its wider sense. The resultant Pleistocene mosaic is thus an especially fertile one for in-depth scholarly investigation.

It is, therefore, somewhat curious that comparatively few writers have dealt to any extent with the now deeply etched psychological scars and subsequent social reactions (phobias) generated by early humanitys en bloc experience of the disaster 11,500 years agothat is, until now, through the visionary writing of Barbara Hand Clow.

For those already familiar with this authors previous writings, it will be superfluous to emphasize her breadth of scholarship or facility in expressing succinctly otherwise naturally complex data. But for those to whom Clow will be a new author, Awakening the Planetary Mind should prove a most enlightening read, offering coherent explanations of many vexed aspects of humankinds past beliefs and social behavioral patterns, and how that has in turn led to the stultifying conservatism and orthodoxy sadly all too commonly still with us.

Using the latest findings of Earth science, of prehistorians, and of what may now best be termed new wave archaeology, Awakening the Planetary Mind traces the evolution of human psychology during the past 15,000 years or so, and concentrates on how that has been modified by the horrendous benchmark event that, around 11,500 years ago, cut short an older benign terrestrial regime, disrupted much of the adjacent solar system, and ushered in the harsher and more disturbed one of present (Holocene) times.

The marauding cosmic agencies responsible for such dire devastation are now identifiable with reasonable accuracy and are still graphically remembered as the hydras, griffins, dragons, and Medusas, the world-encircling serpents and vast monsters of popular mythology (the aforementioned traditions and legends); they actually symbolized cosmic phenomena.