The Cygnus Mystery provides compelling evidence that …

- The veneration of Cygnus as a bird associated with cosmic life and death goes back 17,000 years to when the constellation occupied pole position in the northen night sky

- Cygnus is at the root of all the world's religions

- The origins of astronomy, literature, ancient cosmologies, even transoceanic sea voyages all occurred some 17,000 years ago

- Cosmic rays from a binary star known as Cygnus X-3 helped accelerate human evolution during the last Ice Age

- Traces the very DNA of life from shamanic art in Paleolithic caves to the foundations of the Great Pyramid, from psychedelic journeys in the Peruvian Amazon to Francis Crick's discovery of the double helix

- Reveals that our ancestors knew what science is now telling us - that life on Earth originated among the stars, a fact known and accepted by our ancestors

ii. The Direction of Heaven

iii. The Circle of Cygnus

iv. On the Wolf Trail

v. Maya Cosmogenesis

vi. Pathway to the Gods

vii. The Winged Serpent

viii. Goddess of the Swan

ix. The Waters of Life

x. Swan Knights and Swan Maidens

xi. The Key to Ascension

xii. In Search of Sokar

xiii. The Road to Rostau

xiv. The Well of Souls

xv. The Swan-Goose of Eternity

xvi. The First Astronomers

xvii. The Point of Creation

xviii. The Secret of Life

xix. Cosmic Swansong

xx. Children of the Swan

xxi. The True God Star.

Postscript - Montgomery's 'Cygnus Event'

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Jeremy Narby, anthropologist and author of The Cosmic Serpent and Intelligence in Nature

This is not a book about life's origins in the Darwinian sense. It is about the origins of life much deeper in our history and consciousness - about our earliest ancestors' awareness that life, death, and evolution were connected directly to a cosmic source.

As early as Palaeolithic times, the stars of Cygnus - the ultimate expression of a widespread belief in the bird as a symbol of the soul - were seen as the gateway to heaven. Shamanic journeys, Native American funeral rites, the alignments of prehistoric standing stones, all pointed the way to this sky-world, accessed via the Milky Way or an imagined cosmic axis. This belief shaped cosmologies around the world; influenced sacred architecture from Avebury in Britain to the temples of Mexico, Peru, and India; and lie behind all major religions to this day.

In The Cygnus Mystery, Andrew Collins traces this astronomic lore back to 15,000 B.C., when Deneb, the brightest star in Cygnus, was the Pole Star. At that time, our Paleolithic ancestors practiced their religious rituals in caves deep in the earth - caves whose bird-imagery art, anthropologists have found, was the creation of shamans under the influence of hallucinogens that let them travel in visions outside this world. And in that same era, humanity underwent a change in physical and neurological makeup so fast it seemed to occur virtually overnight.

What caused this sudden leap forward? The Cygnus Mystery proposes that it was a dramatic rise in cosmic rays reaching Earth - and provides evidence that the rays, which left subatomic traces in those same deep caves, emanated from a binary star system known as Cygnus X-3. These findings, Collins explains, challenged the certainties of the scientific establishment - until, in 2005, a U.S. think tank went public with its own conviction that a binary system producing powerful jets of cosmic rays triggered a rapid acceleration in human evolution during the last Ice Age.

Using archeoastronomy, astrophysics, and a dynamic understanding of spiritual wisdom, this groundbreaking work takes us to the heart of an ancient mystery and the front lines of a battle over the force that changed humanity's course.