The Book of Truth

Thomas O. Mills, as a youth, went with his mother to live on the Hopi reservation in Northeastern Arizona, where he listened closely to Hopi storytellers and pondered the stories’ meanings. He also befriended author Frank Waters, who in 1963 had written The Book of the Hopi with his Hopi informant Oswald White Bear Fredericks. Their book included the Hopi Creation Story, and thoroughly explored the Hopi ceremonial cycle and its cosmic implications. Mills listened, read and began to draw his own original and provocative conclusions. In his book, he seeks to track, from clues within the story, actual events and history that may be buried within it, and how this could relate to our future.

Mills analyzes the Hopis’ story of the “ant people” with whom they sheltered underground during a worldwide flood, and of their migration across the ocean to their present location, and examines other clues such as the astronomy-based timings of ceremonials and placement of the villages, geological history, shifts in position of the poles, and more. He postulates that the Hopis’ history and religion is related to the early Egyptian civilization. Looking at the architectural layout of the pyramids “through Hopi eyes,” he finds reflections of their forms and angles in Hopi design elements. Were the pyramids, rather than being tombs (where, Mills says, no Pharaohs were ever found), actually placed as ballast in an attempt to stabilize the delicate balance of the earth in its rotation? Mills suggests that the Egyptians were aware that periodic cataclysms had caused the earth to “roll over,” and that Egyptian murals depicting planetary movement through the zodiac point to the time of danger. In Mills’s view, they are a warning to future generations, similar to one found in the Hopi Creation Story. Based on a rotation disruption cycle of 25,920 years, the 5th such event is due in the near future.

This book, drawing together a variety of ideas that are usually considered separately, makes stimulating reading and is good material for classroom discussions on history, race, Hopi culture, astronomy and “myth.” Today’s Hopis may find it intriguing. Mills’s intuitive vision should spur scientists to look more closely into what we like to call “myths” or “stories” for their possible basis in historical fact. And today, as we worry about climate change, our melting polar ice caps, the earth’s delicate balance, and what it means for the future, shouldn’t we also be figuring out whether modern technology can prevent the earth’s next rotational shake-up, and how we plan to survive it?

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