Graham Hancock Claims Ancient Secret Society “Is Involved in Making Civilizations”

​In a new interview with Randall Carlson, Graham Hancock claimed that “secret societies” survived the Great Flood, maintain the traditions of the antediluvian world, and continue to influence civilization today. “The mysteries in our past that remain to be exposed do concern secret societies,” Hancock said. “They do concern a behind-the-scenes organization that is somehow involved in making civilizations.” Carlson and Hancock agree that “someone” had “foreknowledge” of the Flood and therefore took precautions to save knowledge.

Graham Hancock reveals that a secret society of elites knows the truth about an ancient flood that wiped out civilization.

But they don’t just know the truth.

They survived the flood.

They’ve controlled civilization for thousands of years.

And they’re preparing to control… pic.twitter.com/KDDxzRlxQt

— Holden Culotta (@Holden_Culotta) January 19, 2026

​This claim harks back to the conspiratorial books Hancock wrote with Robert Bauval about Freemasonry as the governing force in world history several decades ago, and it appears Hancock is looking to revive the claims. Unfortunately, the evidence he provided was pretty poor quality.
 
Hancock and Carlson refer to the Atrahasis flood myth from Mesopotamia (though they wrongly call the Akkadian tale “Sumerian” and confuse it for Berossus’ story of Xisuthrus saving knowledge before the Flood, a later adaptation), the story of Enoch making pillars to preserve knowledge from before the Flood, and the story of Atlantis.
 
The trouble with this is that the two treat these as three completely independent memories of the end of the Ice Age when they are in fact reflexes of the same original Near Eastern flood myth. Berossus’s flood story is a late Babylonian adaptation of the Sumerian tale of Ziusudra (known as a flood hero from the Eridu Genesis), who was adapted into Akkadian as Atrahasis in the oldest surviving epic accounts of the Flood. (The late Akkadian version that renames him Utnapishtim even leaves in the name “Atrahasis” in a few places by mistake!) The exact details aren’t as important as knowing that there were many different versions of the Flood story in circulation by the time of Plato and the Biblical authors.
 
Enoch’s pillars of wisdom, first recorded by Flavius Josephus more than a thousand years after the Atrahasis, are a later addition to the Noachian flood story, itself a Hebrew adaptation of the older Near Eastern flood myth. Enoch’s pillars were likely inspired by the tablets of wisdom Xisuthrus buried before the Flood. The Atlantis story, as Plato makes clear in the final written lines of the incomplete Critias, was partly modeled on Greek translations of the Near Eastern flood myth, obvious from Zeus’s wrath and Atlantis, which is almost identical to that of the Mesopotamian gods in the Atrahasis and Yahweh in Genesis.
 
In short, we cannot take them as three independent stories.
 
For Hancock, the important part is what came later, for Babylonian legend (which he conflates with Sumerian) claims that a group of advisors, the fish-headed Seven Sages, rose from the sea to explain how to develop civilization. “There are so many traditions,” he said, “for example, from ancient Sumer, which speak of the role of these particular advisors who seem to be part of a secretive group which is there to guide and advise societies over very, very long periods of time.”
 
However, the story we have from Berossus, persevered in George Syncellus (Chronicle, p. 28) and Eusebius (Chronicle 5.8), actually states that these advisors, led by Oannes, came to the land that would be Babylon (not Sumer) at the dawn of civilization and help civilize the first city before the Flood. Then the Flood wiped out everyone but Xisuthrus and his family who, having buried the knowledge Oannes and the others provided, dug it up and taught it anew to the progeny who repopulated Babylon. “And Babylon was thus inhabited again.”
 
In other words, they are not a secret society that survived the Flood. (The Uruk King List gives the names of presumably real human scholars who carried on the tradition of the sages after the supposed Flood, though these are not considered the be the same as the mythical demigods from before the Flood; presumably Hancock wants to abandon centuries of scholarship to claim they are direct inheritors of a real antediluvian tradition.)
 
Nevertheless, Hancock believes that there is a “post-diluvian” world living in the shadow of some lost antediluvian greatness. “That’s what I think we’re living in. We’re living in the times that followed. And that’s what the ancient Sumerians also believed, that we’re living in the post-diluvian era. This is ultimately the same story that Plato is telling us in the Atlantis tradition as well.”
 
Of course, Plato said no such thing. The waters that sank Atlantis did nothing to the rest of the world. Athens, for instance, survives unscathed in Plato’s tale, and the Egyptians explicitly state in the Timaeus that their country never experienced any such deluge. His Atlantis flood is decidedly local.
 
None of that matters to Hancock, so long as he can spin a story that seems vaguely plausible to audiences that know little of the original source texts.