Pendragon
Camelot, Grail Line, Del Acqs
Uther and Ygraine. Color plate from "King Arthur and his Knights", illus. by Frank Godwin (1889 ~ 1959)
Avalon King Arthur: "Merlin and Arthur," by Willian O’Connor.- 'The Marriage Of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere' by John Henry Frederick Bacon.
Guinever; Morgana
Joseph of Aramathea
Grail Line
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 5, Number 6 (October-November 1998); Sir Laurence Gardner
The true Grail bloodline originated with the Anunnaki gods in southern Sumeria at least 6,000 years ago and was sustained by ingestion of an alchemical substance called ‘Star Fire’.
Bloodline of the Holy Grail is essentially concerned with the Messianic Bloodline as it has descended through the family of Jesus Christ down to the present day. It is also concerned with comparing the New Testament Gospels with the first-hand historical accounts of the era, as related in both the Roman and Jewish archives. In this regard, it details how the eventual Christian High Church corrupted and manipulated the early records to suit its own political agenda.
Despite the contrived doctrine that Jesus was born of a virgin and was the ‘one and only’ son of God (definitions that did not feature in the original pre-Roman texts), the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke actually give details of Jesus’ descendant lineage from David of Israel and the Kings of Judah. What was so special about this Bloodline in the first place?
Given that the dynastic succession from Jesus has been expressly prominent in sovereign and political affairs through 2,000 years – with the family constantly supporting constitutional democracy against control by the Church establishment – its status rests upon the fact that Jesus was a lineal descendant of King David.
But, what was it that made the line of David so important, and so different from any other? It was this very question which set me on the trail for my next book, Genesis of the Grail Kings, which tells the story of the Messianic line from the very beginning.
The Bible explains that the Bloodline story began with Adam and Eve, from whose third son, Seth, evolved a line which progressed through Methuselah and Noah, and eventually to Abraham who became the Great Patriarch of the Hebrew nation. It then relates that Abraham brought his family westwards out of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) to the land of Canaan (or Palestine), from where some of his descendants moved into Egypt. After a few generations they moved back into Canaan where, in time, the eventual David of Bethlehem became King of the newly defined Kingdom of Israel.
If viewed as it is presented in the scriptures, this is a fascinating saga; but there is nothing anywhere to indicate why the ancestral line of David and his heirs was in any way special. In fact, quite the reverse is the case. His ancestors are portrayed as a succession of wandering territory- seekers who are seen to be of no particular significance until the time of King David. Their biblical history bears no comparison to, say, the contemporary Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Their significance, we are told, comes from the fact that (from the time of Abraham) they were designated as ‘God’s chosen people’. But even this leaves us wondering, because, according to the scriptures, their God led them through nothing but a succession of famines, wars and general hardship – and, on the face of it, these early Hebrews do not appear to have been too bright!
We are faced, therefore, with a couple of possibilities. Either David was not of this Abraham succession at all, and was simply grafted into the list by later writers. Or maybe we have been presented with a very corrupted version of the family’s early history – a version that was specifically designed to uphold the emergent Jewish faith, rather than to represent historical fact.
In consideration of this, I was reminded of precisely what I had found with the New Testament. The Gospel texts that have been in the public domain for centuries bear little relation to the first-hand accounts of the era. The New Testament, as we know it, was compiled by the 4th-century bishops to support the newly contrived Christian belief. But, what if the Jewish scribes had previously done exactly the same thing?
Clearly, I had to get back to the more ancient writings in order to find any anomalies. The problem was that, even if this were possible, the earliest Hebrew writings (which were rehashed many centuries later) were themselves only written between the 6th and the 1st centuries BC, so they were not likely to be that authentic in their telling of history from
thousands of years before. Indeed, it was plain that this would be the case, because when these books were first written their express purpose was to convey a history which upheld the principles of the Jewish faith – a faith that did not emerge until well into the ancestral story.
Given that the first group of these books was written while the Jews were held captive in Mesopotamian Babylon in the 6th century BC, it is apparent that Babylon was where the original records were then held. In fact, from the time of Adam, through some 19 said generations down to Abraham, the whole of Old Testament patriarchal history was Mesopotamian. More specifically, the history was from Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, where the ancient Sumerians did indeed refer to the grasslands of the Euphrates delta as the Eden.
When researching for Bloodline of the Holy Grail, I found that good sources for some background information were the various Gospels and texts that were not selected for inclusion in the canonical New Testament. Perhaps, I thought, the same might apply to the Old Testament. The books of Enoch and Jubilees, for example, were among those not
included.
A further book, to which attention is specifically drawn in the Old Testament books of Joshua and Samuel, is the Book of Jasher. But despite its apparent importance to the Hebrew writers, it was not included in the final selection.
Two other works are also cited in the Bible. The Book of Numbers draws our attention to the Book of The Wars of Jehovah. And in the Book of Isaiah we are directed towards the Book of the Lord.
What are these books? Where are these books? They are all mentioned in the Bible (which means they all pre-date the Old Testament), and they are all cited as being important. So, why did the editors see fit to exclude them when the selection was made?
In pursuing an answer to this question and in studying the substance of the Old Testament prior to its corruption, one fact which becomes increasingly clear is that in English-language Bibles the definition ‘Lord’ is used in a general context, but in earlier texts a positive distinction is drawn between ‘Jehovah’ and ‘the Lord’.
It has often been wondered why the biblical God of the Hebrews led them through trials and tribulations, floods and disasters, when (from time to time) he appears to have performed with a quite contrary and merciful personality. The answer is that, although now seemingly embraced as ‘the One God’ by the Jewish and Christian churches, there was originally a distinct difference between the figures of Jehovah and the Lord. They were, in fact, quite separate deities. The god referred to as ‘Jehovah’ was traditionally a storm god, a god of wrath and vengeance, whereas the god referred to as ‘the Lord’ was a god of fertility and wisdom.
So, what was the name given to the Lord in the early writings? It was, quite simply, the prevailing Hebrew word for ‘Lord’, and the word was ‘Adon’. As for the apparent personal name of Jehovah, this was not used in the early days, and even the Bible tells that the God of Abraham was called ‘El Shaddai’, which means ‘Lofty Mountain’.
The apparent name ‘Jehovah’ came from the original Hebrew stem YHWH, which meant ‘I am that I am’ – said to be a statement made by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, hundreds of years after the time of Abraham. ‘Jehovah’ was therefore not a name at all, and early texts refer simply to ‘El Shaddai’ and to his opposing counterpart, ‘Adon’.
To the Canaanites, these gods were respectively called ‘El Elyon’ and ‘Baal’ – which meant precisely the same things (‘Lofty Mountain’ and ‘Lord’).
In our modern Bibles, the definitions ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ are used and intermixed throughout, as if they were one and the same character, but originally they were not. One was a vengeful god (a people-hater), and the other was a social god (a people-supporter), and they each had wives, sons and daughters.
The old writings tell us that throughout the patriarchal era the Israelites endeavoured to support Adon, the Lord, but at every turn El Shaddai (the storm god, Jehovah) retaliated with floods, tempests, famines and destruction. Even at the very last (around 600 BC), the Bible explains that Jerusalem was overthrown at Jehovah’s bidding and tens of thousands of Jews were taken into Babylonian captivity simply because their King (a descendant of King David) had erected altars in veneration of Baal, the Adon.
It was during the course of this captivity that the Israelites weakened and finally conceded. They decided to succumb to the ‘God of Wrath’, and developed a new religion out of sheer fear of his retribution. It was at this time that the name of Jehovah first appeared – and this was only 500 years before the time of Jesus.
Subsequently, the Christian Church took Jehovah on board as well, calling him simply ‘God’ – and all the hitherto social concepts of the Adon were totally discarded. The two religions were henceforth both faiths of fear. Even today, their followers are classified as ‘God-fearing’.
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us knowing that within an overall pantheon of gods and goddesses (many of whom are actually named in the Bible), there were two predominant and opposing gods. In different cultures they have been known as ‘El Elyon’ and ‘Baal’; ‘El Shaddai’ and ‘Adon’; ‘Arhiman’ and ‘Mazda’; ‘Jehovah’ and ‘Lord’; ‘God’ and ‘Father’. But these styles are all titular; they are not personal names.
So who precisely were they? To find the answer we have to look no further than where these gods were actually operative, and the old Canaanite texts (discovered in Syria in the 1920s) tell us that their courts were in the Tigris-Euphrates valley in Mesopotamia, in the Sumerian Eden delta of the Persian Gulf.
But what did the ancient Sumerians call these two gods? What were their personal names? We can trace the Sumerian written records back to about 3700 BC, and they tell us that the gods in question were brothers. In Sumer, the storm god who eventually became known as Jehovah was called ‘Enlil’ or ‘Ilu-kur-gal’ (meaning ‘Ruler of the Mountain’), and his
brother, who became Adon, the Lord, was called ‘Enki’. This name is really important to our story because ‘Enki’ means ‘Archetype’.
The texts inform us that it was Enlil who brought the Flood; it was Enlil who destroyed Ur and Babylon, and it was Enlil who constantly opposed the education and enlightenment of humankind. Indeed, the early Syrian texts tell us that it was Enlil who obliterated the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Dead Sea – not because they were dens of wickedness, as we are taught, but because they were great centres of wisdom and learning.
It was Enki, on the other hand, who, despite the wrath of his brother, granted the Sumerians access to the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. It was Enki who set up the escape strategy during the Flood, and it was Enki who passed over the time-honoured Tables of Destiny – the tables of scientific law which became the bedrock of the early mystery schools in Egypt.
Many books talk about the hermetic school of Tuthmosis III of Egypt, who reigned about 1450 BC. But it is not generally known that the school he originally inherited was the Royal Court of the Dragon. This had been founded by the priests of Mendes in about 2200 BC and was subsequently ratified by the 12th dynasty Queen Sobeknefru.
This sovereign and priestly Order passed from Egypt to the Kings of Jerusalem; to the Black Sea Princes of Scythia and into the Balkans – notably to the Royal House of Hungary, whose King Sigismund reconstituted the Court just 600 years ago. Today it exists as the Imperial and Royal Court of the Dragon Sovereignty, and after some 4,000 years it is the oldest sovereign Court in the world.
But what were the earliest aims and ambitions of the Order back in Pharaonic times? They were to perpetuate and advance the alchemical strength of the Royal Bloodline from Lord Enki, the Archetype.
The kings of the early succession (who reigned in Sumer and Egypt before becoming Kings of Israel) were anointed upon coronation with the fat of the Dragon (the sacred crocodile). This noble beast was referred to in Egypt as the Messeh (from which derived the Hebrew verb ‘to anoint’), and the kings of this dynastic succession were always referred to as ‘Dragons’, or ‘Messiahs’ (meaning ‘Anointed Ones’).
In times of battle, when the armies of different kingdoms were conjoined, an overall leader was chosen and he was called the ‘Great Dragon’ (the ‘King of Kings’) – or, as we better know the name in its old Celtic form, the ‘Pendragon’.
One of the interesting items from the archives of the Dragon Court is the origin of the word ‘kingship’. It derives from the very earliest of Sumerian culture, wherein ‘kingship’ was identical with ‘kinship’ – and ‘kin’ means ‘blood relative’. In its original form, ‘kinship’ was ‘kainship’. And the first King of the Messianic Dragon succession was the biblical Cain
(Kain), head of the Sumerian House of Kish.
On recognising this, one can immediately see the first anomaly in the traditional Genesis story, for the historical line to David and Jesus was not from Adam and Eve’s son Seth at all. It was from Eve’s son Cain, whose recorded successors (although given little space in the Old Testament) were the first great Kings (or Kains) of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Two more important features then come to light when reading the Bible again with this knowledge in mind. We all tend to think of Cain as being the first son of Adam and Eve, but he was not. Even the Book of Genesis tells us that he was not, and it confirms how Eve told Adam that Cain’s father was the Lord. Who was ‘the Lord’? The Lord was Adon, and Adon was Enki. Even outside the Bible, the writings of the Hebrew Talmud and Midrash make it quite plain that Cain was not the son of Adam.
So what else have we been wrongly taught about this particular aspect of history? The Book of Genesis (in its English-translated form) tells us that Cain was ‘a tiller of the ground’. But this is not what the original texts say at all. What they say is that Cain had ‘dominion over the Earth’ – which is a rather different matter when considering his kingly status.
In fact, the Bible translators appear to have had a constant problem with the word ‘Earth’, often translating it to ‘ground’, ‘clay’ or ‘dust’. But the early texts actually referred to ‘The Earth’. Even in the case of Adam and Eve, the translators got it wrong. The Bible says: ‘Male and female he created them, and he called their name Adam.’ The older writings use the
more complete word ‘Adama’, which means ‘of the Earth’. But this did not mean they were made of dirt; it means that they were ‘of The Earth’ – or, as the Anchor Hebrew Bible explains in absolutely precise terms, they were ‘Earthlings’.
There is a lot to be said about the story of Adam and Eve and of how they were the result of clinical cloning. Writers such as Zechariah Sitchin have written at some length in this regard, and my new book delves far more deeply into the subject. I shall not dwell upon this particular aspect now because I want to move more directly into the alchemy of the Messianic Bloodline of the Earthly Dragon Kings. What I will say is that the Sumerian records state that around 6,000 years ago, Adam and Eve (known then as ‘Atabba’ and ‘Ava’, and jointly as the ‘Adama’) were purpose-bred for kingship at the House of Shimti by Enki and his sister-wife Nin-khursag. In Sumerian, the word Shi-im-ti meant ‘breath-wind-life’.
Adam was certainly not the first man on Earth, but he was the first of the alchemically devised kingly succession. Nin-khursag was called ‘Lady of the Embryo’ or ‘Lady of Life’, and she was the surrogate mother for Atabba and Ava who were created from human ova fertilised by the Lord Enki.
It was because of Nin-khursag’s title, Lady of Life, that Ava was later given the same title by the Hebrews. Indeed, the name Ava (or Eve) was subsequently said to mean ‘Life’. And there is an interesting parallel here, because in Sumerian the distinction ‘Lady of Life’ was Nin-tî (Nin meaning ‘Lady’, and tî meaning ‘Life’). However, another Sumerian word, ti (with the longer pronunciation, ‘tee’), meant ‘rib’; and it was by virtue of the Hebrews’ misunderstanding of the two words, tî and ti, that Eve also became incorrectly associated with Adam’s rib.
Both Enki and Nin-khursag (along with their brother Enlil, the later Jehovah) belonged to a pantheon of gods and goddesses referred to as the Anunnaki, meaning ‘Heaven came to Earth’. In fact, the Grand Assembly of the Anunnaki (later called the ‘Court of the Elohim’) is mentioned in Psalm 82 wherein Jehovah makes his bid for supreme power over the other gods.
According to the Dragon tradition, the importance of Cain was that he was directly produced by Enki and Ava, so his blood was three-quarters Anunnaki. His half-brothers Hevel and Satanael (better known as Abel and Seth) were less than half Anunnaki, being the offspring of Atabba and Ava (Adam and Eve).
Cain’s Anunnaki blood was so advanced that it was said that his brother Abel’s blood was ‘Earthbound’ by comparison. Cain, it was said in the scriptures, ‘rose far above Abel’, so that his brother’s blood was swallowed into the ground. But this original description was thoroughly mistranslated for our modern Bible, and we are now told that ‘Cain rose
up against Abel and spilled his blood upon the ground’. This is not the same thing at all.
We can now progress our story by considering the oldest Grant of Arms in sovereign history – a Grant of Arms which denoted the Messianic Dragon Bloodline for all time. The Sumerians referred to this insignia as the Gra-al. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? From biblical history, however, we know it better as the ‘Mark of Cain’.
This ‘Mark’ is portrayed to us by the Church as if it were some form of curse. But, knowing what we now know, the Bible does not actually say this. What it says is that, having got into an argument with Jehovah over a matter of sovereign observance, Cain feared for his life. We are then informed that the Lord placed a mark upon Cain, swearing sevenfold
vengeance against his enemies.
No one has ever really understood why Jehovah should decide to protect Cain when it was he who held the grievance against him. But the fact is that Jehovah did not make this decision. Cain’s protector was not Jehovah. As stated, the ‘Mark’ was settled upon Cain by the Lord – and the Lord (the Adon) was Cain’s own Father, Enki.
Few people ever think to enquire about the supposed enemies of Cain as defined in Genesis. Who could they possibly have been? Where would they have come from? According to the Bible, only Adam and Eve, with their sons Cain and Abel, existed – and Cain had apparently killed Abel. If we are to accept the text as it stands, there was no one around to be his enemy!
So, what was this Sumerian Gra-al which the Bible calls ‘the Mark of Cain’? It was an emblem dignified as the ‘Cup of the Waters’ or the Rosi- Crucis (the ‘Dew Cup’), and it was identified in all records (including those of Egypt and Phoenicia and in the Hebrew annals) as being an upright, centred red cross within a circle. Throughout the ages it was developed and embellished, but it has always remained essentially the same and is recognised as being the original symbol of the Holy Grail.
Another anomaly is presented soon afterwards in Genesis when we are told that Cain found himself a wife. Who on Earth were her parents if Adam and Eve were the only couple alive? Without confronting this anomaly at all, Genesis then proceeds to list for us the names of Cain’s descendants!
It becomes clear from all of this that some very important information has been edited from the Old Testament narrative. Clearly there were plenty of other people around at the time and it is not difficult to find their stories outside the Bible. Quite apart from the Sumerian annals, even old Hebrew and early Christian texts give us far more information in this regard.
In order to further enhance the succession from Cain, he was married to his half-sister – a pure-bred Anunnaki princess, Luluwa. Her father was Enki and her mother was Lilith, a granddaughter of Enlil. Although not giving the name of Cain’s wife, the Bible does name their younger son Enoch, while the Sumerian records cite his elder son and kingly successor, Atûn, who is perhaps better known as King Etana of Kish.
Etana was said to have ‘walked with the gods’, and to have been fed from the ‘Plant of Birth’ (or the ‘Tree of Life’, as it is called in Genesis). Henceforth, the kings of the line were designated as being the twigs of the Tree – and the ancient word for ‘twig’ was klone (clone). In later times this ‘Plant’ or ‘Tree’ was redefined as a ‘Vine’, and so the Gra-al, the Vine and the Messianic Bloodline became conjoined as one in the literature of subsequent ages.
By virtue of their contrived breeding, this kingly succession was modelled specifically for leadership, and in all aspects of knowledge, culture, awareness, wisdom and intuition they were highly advanced against their mundane contemporaries. In order to keep their blood as pure as possible, they always married within a close kinship.
It was fully recognised that the prominent gene of the succession was carried within the blood of the mother. Today we call this the ‘mitochondrial DNA’. And so was born a tradition inherited by their kingly descendants in Egypt and by the later Celtic rulers of Europe. True kingship, it was maintained, was transferred through the female, and so kingly marriages were strategically cemented with maternal half-sisters or first cousins.
Having reached the point where the Plant of Birth is first mentioned in the records, we are at about 3500 BC; and it is at this point that we begin to learn how the kingly succession was orally fed with bodily supplements from the early days. This practice continued for more than 1,000 years until the nourishment program became wholly scientific and alchemical.
Before getting into the detail of the kingly diet, it is worth considering why it was that the all-important Royal Bloodline which progressed from Cain and his sons was strategically ignored by the Hebrews and the Christian Church in favour of their promoting a parallel junior line from Adam’s son Seth. Why was it that the immediate Cainite dynasty was eventually shunned by the fearful disciples of Enlil-Jehovah?
In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, the lines of descent are given from Cain and from his half-brother Seth, but it is of interest to note that through the early generations the names detailed in each list are pretty much the same, although given in a different order: Enoch, Yared, Mahalaleel, Methuselah and Lamech.
In view of this, it has often been suggested that the line from Seth down to Lamech’s son Noah was (not very cleverly) contrived by the Bible compilers so as to avoid showing the true descent from Cain to the time of Noah. If this were the case, then something must have occurred during the lifetime of Noah to cause the ancestral story to be veiled by the later writers. The answer is to be found in the Bible itself.
At that stage in the family’s history, the vengeful Jehovah apparently warned Noah and his sons against the ingestion of blood – an edict which became expressly important to the later Jewish way of life. It has long been a customary Jewish practice to hang meat for blood-letting before cooking and consumption.
But, in contrast, the Christian faith is especially concerned with the figurative ingestion of blood. In the Christian tradition it is customary to take the Communion sacrament (the Mass) wherein wine is drunk from the sacred chalice, symbolically representing the blood of Jesus, the lifeblood of the Messianic Vine.
Could it be, perhaps, that the modern Christian custom is an unwitting throw-back to some distant pre-Noah ritual which Jehovah opposed? If so, then since it is known that the chalice is a wholly female symbol which has been emblematic of the womb from the earliest times, might this even have been an extract of menstrual blood? The answer to these questions is ‘Yes’. That was precisely the custom, but it was not so unsavoury as it might seem. Indeed, few of us think to enquire about the ultimate sources of many of today’s ingested medicines and bodily supplements, and those in the know would often be reluctant to tell us. The Premarin hormone, for example, comes from the urine of pregnant mares, while certain growth hormones and insulin are manufactured from E. coli, a faecal bacterium.
The blood extract in question was, in the first instance, not human but from the sacred Anunnaki lunar essence – that of Enki’s sister Nin- khursag, the designated Lady of Life. It was defined as the most potent of all life-forces and was venerated as being ‘Star Fire’. It was from the womb of Nin-khursag that the kingly line was born, and it was with her blood, the divine Star Fire, that the Dragon succession was supplementally fed.
In ancient Egypt, Nin-khursag was called ‘Isis’, and by either name she was the ultimate Mother of the Messianic line, for hers was the matriarchal gene which constituted the ‘Beginning’, the ‘Gene-Isis’, or, as the Greeks identified it, the Genesis.
It is worth reminding ourselves, then, that the biblical edict to abstain from blood came not from Enki the Wise but from Enlil-Jehovah – the God of Wrath who had instigated the Flood, had wrought havoc in Ur and Babylon, and had endeavoured to deceive Adam by saying that he would die if he ate from the Tree of Knowledge. This was not a god who liked people, and the Sumerian records are very clear in this regard. Hence, if he forbade the taking of blood, this was not likely to have been an edict for the benefit of Noah and his descendants – it was most probably to their detriment.
In strict terms the original Star Fire was the lunar essence of the Goddess, but, even in an everyday mundane environment, menstruum contains the most valuable endocrinal secretions, especially those of the pineal and pituitary glands. The brain’s pineal gland in particular was directly associated with the Tree of Life, for this tiny gland was said to
secrete the very essence of active longevity, called soma, or, as the Greeks called it, ambrosia.
In mystic circles, the menstrual ‘flow-er’ (‘she who flows’) has long been the designated ‘flower’ and is represented as a lily or a lotus. Indeed, the definition ‘flow-er’ is the very root of our modern word ‘flower’. In ancient Sumer, the key females of the Dragon succession were all venerated as lilies, having such names as Lili, Luluwa, Lilith, Lilutu and
Lillette.
In pictorial representation, the Messianic Dragon bore little relation to the winged, fire-breathing beast of later Western mythology. It was, in essence, a large-jawed serpent with four legs, very much like a crocodile or a monitor. This was the sacred Messeh whose name was ‘Draco’. Draco was a divine emblem of the Egyptian Pharaohs, a symbol of the Egyptian Therapeutate, of the Essenes at Qumran, and was the Bistea Neptunis (the sea serpent) of the descendant Merovingian Fisher-Kings in Europe.
In the old Hebrew Bibles, all references to serpents are made by use of the word nahash (from the stem NHSH); but this usage does not relate to serpents in the way that we would know them – that is, as venomous snakes. It relates to serpents in their traditional capacity as bringers of wisdom and enlightenment, for the word nahash actually means ‘to decipher’ or ‘to find out’.
Serpents, in one form or another, were always associated with wisdom and healing, and the Trees of Life and Knowledge are customarily identified with serpents. Indeed, the insignia of many of today’s medical associations is precisely this image of a serpent coiled around the Plant of Birth (Tree of Life) – a depiction shown in the clay reliefs of ancient Sumer to be Enki’s personal emblem.
Interestingly, though, another common emblem for medical relief organisations depicts two coiled serpents, spiralling around the winged caduceus of Hermes the magician. In these instances the true symbolism of the Star Fire ritual is conveyed, and this symbol can be traced back to the very origins of the alchemical mystery schools and gnostic
institutions.
The records explain that the central staff and entwined serpents represent the spinal cord and the sensory nervous system. The two uppermost wings signify the brain’s lateral ventricular structures. Between these wings, above the spinal column, is shown the small central node of the pineal gland.
[Also, one can't help but notice the resemblance to DNA-The Magus]
The combination of the central pineal and its lateral wings has long been referred to as the ‘Swan’, and in Grail lore (as in some yogic circles) the Swan is emblematic of the fully enlightened being. This is the ultimate realm of consciousness achieved by the mediaeval Knights of the Swan, as epitomised by such chivalric figures as Perceval and Lohengrin.
Most of you are probably quite familiar with the functions of the pineal and other glands of the endocrinal system. But for those who are perhaps not, the pineal is a very small gland, shaped like a pine cone and about the size of a grain of corn. It is centrally situated within the brain, although outside the ventricles and not forming a part of the brain-matter as such.
The pineal gland was thought by the 17th-century French optical scientist René Descartes to be the seat of the soul – the point at which the mind and body are conjoined. The ancient Greeks considered it likewise, and in the 4th century BC Herophilus described the pineal as an organ which regulated the flow of thought. This gland has long intrigued anatomists because, while the rest of the brain is ‘double’, the pineal has no counterpart.
In the days of ancient Sumer, the priests of Anu (the father of Enlil and Enki) perfected and elaborated a ramifying medical science of living substances, with menstrual Star Fire being an essential source component. In the first instance, this was pure Anunnaki lunar essence called ‘Gold of the Gods’, and it was fed only to the Kings and Queens of the Dragon succession. Later, however, in Egypt and Mediterranea, menstrual Star Fire was ritually collected from sacred virgin priestesses who were venerated as ‘Scarlet Women’. Indeed, the very word ‘ritual’ stems from this practice, and from the word ritu – which defined the sacred ceremony of the ‘Red Gold’.
Endocrinal supplements are, of course, still used by today’s organotherapy establishment, but their inherent secretions (such as melatonin and serotonin) are obtained from the dessicated glands of dead animals and they lack the truly important elements which exist only in live human glandular manufacture.
In the fire symbolism of ancient alchemy, the colour ‘red’ is synonymous with the metal ‘gold’. In some traditions (including the Indian tantras), ‘red’ is also identifiable with ‘black’. Hence, the goddess Kali is said to be both ‘red’ and ‘black’. The original heritage of Kali was, however, Sumerian, and she was said to be Kalimâth, the sister of Cain’s wife
Luluwa.
Kali was a primary princess of the Dragon House, and from her Star Fire association she became the goddess of time, seasons, periods and cycles. Because of this, her name was the root of the word ‘calendar’ (kalindar), which is concerned with the divisions of seasonal time.
In the early days, therefore, the metals of the alchemists were not common metals but living essences, and the ancient mysteries were of a physical, not a metaphysical, nature. Indeed, the very word ‘secret’ has its origin in the hidden knowledge of glandular secretions. Truth was the ritu (the ‘redness’ or ‘blackness’), and from the word ritu stems not only ritual but also the words ‘rite’, ‘root’ and ‘red’. The ritu, it was said, reveals itself as physical matter in the form of the purest and most noble of all metals: gold. Hence, gold was deemed an ‘ultimate truth’.
Just as the word ‘secret’ has its origin in the translation of an ancient word, so too do other related words have their similar bases. In ancient Egypt, the word Amen was used to signify something hidden or concealed. The word ‘occult’ meant pretty much the same (‘hidden from view’), and yet today we use ‘Amen’ to conclude hymns, while something ‘occult’ is deemed sinister. In real terms, however, they both relate to the word ‘secret’, and all three words were, at one time or another, connected with the mystic science of endocrinal secretions.
Since Kali was associated with ‘black’ (being ‘black but beautiful’), the English word ‘coal’ (denoting ‘that which is black’) stems also from her name via the intermediate word kol. In the Hebrew tradition, Bath-Kol (a Kali counterpart) was called the ‘Daughter of the Voice’, and the voice was said to originate during a female’s puberty. Hence, the womb was associated with the voice, and Star Fire was said to be the oracular ‘Word of the Womb’. The womb was, therefore, itself the ‘utterer’, or the ‘uterus’.
The ‘Scarlet Women’ were so called because of their being a direct source of the priestly Star Fire. They were known in Greek as the Hierodulai (‘Sacred Women’) – a word later transformed (via medieval French into English) to ‘harlot’. In the early Germanic tongue, they were known as Horés – which was later Anglicised to ‘whores’. However, the word originally meant, quite simply, ‘Beloved Ones’. As pointed out in good etymological dictionaries, these words were descriptions of high veneration and were never interchangeable with such words as ‘prostitute’ or ‘adulteress’. Their now common association was, in fact, a wholly contrived strategy of the mediaeval Roman Church in its bid to
denigrate the noble status of the sacred priestess.
The withdrawal of knowledge of the genuine Star Fire tradition from the public domain occurred when the science of the early adepts and later Gnostics (the true pre-Christian Christians) was stifled by the forgers of historic Christianity. A certain amount of the original gnosis (or knowledge) is preserved in Talmudic and rabbinical lore, but, generally speaking, the mainstream Jews and Christians did all in their power to distort and destroy all traces of the ancient art.
In addition to being the ‘Gold of the Gods’, the Anunnaki menstruum was also called the ‘Vehicle of Light’, being the ultimate source of manifestation, and in this regard it was directly equated with the mystical ‘Waters of Creation’ – the flow of eternal wisdom. It was for this reason that the Rosi-Crucis (the Dew Cup, or Cup of the Waters identified as a red cross within a circle) became the Mark of Cain, and the subsequent emblem of the kingly succession.
It was said that the Light remained quite dormant in a spiritually unawakened person but that it could be awakened and motivated by the spiritual energy of self-will, and by constant self-enquiry. This is not an obvious mental process, but a truly thought-free consciousness – a formless plane of pure Being.
By the 1880s, the governing establishments of Christendom were dreading the very word ‘archaeologist’. And so, archaeological digs were brought under strict control, and their funding and undertakings had to be approved by newly designated authorities.
One of these, the Egypt Exploration Fund, was established in Britain in 1891, and on the very first page of its Memorandum and Articles of Association it is stated that the Fund’s objective is to promote excavation work “for the purpose of elucidating or illustrating the Old Testament narrative”.
In short, this meant that if something was found which could be used to support the scriptural teaching, then we (the public) would be informed. Anything which did not support the Church interpretation of the Bible was not destined to see the light in the public domain.
Now we are going to take a look at one of the monumental finds from that era – a discovery about which very little is known to people at large. In fact, it is probably the most important biblical discovery ever made and it has stunning implications far beyond the discovery itself, for this is the ultimate story of the Phoenix and the Fire-stone.
Within the Book of Exodus, a significant biblical mountain is named. It sits in the extensive range of the Sinai Peninsula – the upturned triangular land-mass which lies above the Red Sea between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqabah. In the Old Testament, the mountain is firstly called ‘Mount Horeb’, then it is called ‘Mount Sinai’, and is subsequently called ‘Horeb’ again as the story progresses.
The story, of course, is that of Moses and the Israelite exodus from Egypt. This was the mountain upon which, according to Exodus, Moses saw the burning bush; the mountain where he talked with Jehovah; and the place where he received the Ten Commandments and the Tables of Testimony.
Something that we should recognise at this stage is that at the time of Moses (roughly 1350 BC) there was no mountain called ‘Mount Sinai’. There was no mountain by that name even in the days of Jesus, nor even for another 300 years.
It should also be said that the Old Testament which is familiar to us today is a translation from a Hebrew text compiled only 1,000 years ago, and it is therefore a few centuries younger even than the canonical New Testament.
The mountain now generally known as Mount Sinai sits in the south of the peninsula, quite near to the bottom point of the upturned triangle. It was given its name in the 4th century AD by a mission of Greek Christian monks, 1,700 years after the time of Moses. It is now sometimes called ‘Gebel Musa’ (or ‘Mount of Moses’), and a small Christian retreat, St
Catherine’s Monastery, still exists there. But, was this the Sinai mountain which the Bible calls ‘Mount Horeb’? Well, it transpires that it was not.
The Book of Exodus goes into some detail to explain the route taken by Moses and the Israelites from the Nile Delta land of Goshen, down across Sinai, across the wilderness regions of Shur and Paran, to the land of Midian (which is to the north of present-day Jordan). From this route it becomes very easy to identify the location of Mount Horeb. It sits a good deal north of Gebel Musa.
The word horeb simply means ‘desert’, and the great desert mountain which soars to over 2,600 feet within a high stone plateau above the Plain of Paran is today called ‘Serâbît’ – or, to be more precise, Serâbît el-Khâdim (the Prominence of the Khâdim).
In the late 1890s, the British Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, a Professor at the University College, London, applied to the Egypt Exploration Fund to take an expedition into Sinai. By January l904, he and his team were in Sinai, and in March of that year they took their expedition to the heights of Mount Serâbît.
In the following year, Petrie published the detailed results of his findings, but added to his report the fact that this information would not be made available officially to the Egypt Exploration Fund subscribers; they would receive only maps and a general outline. Furthermore, Petrie explained that even though he had taken previously funded teams into Egypt, from the time of that Sinai expedition his sponsorship by the Fund had been terminated. Why? Had he perhaps broken the binding rule of the Articles by divulging something which was contrary to Bible teaching? He certainly had.
In fact, Petrie had discovered the great secret of the sacred mountain of Moses – a secret which not only made sense of the Exodus portrayals, but which (in so doing) blew the lid totally from their common scriptural interpretation.
What the Bible does not make clear is that Sinai was not a foreign land to the Egyptians. It was actually regarded as a part of Egypt and came under Pharaonic control. So Moses and the Israelites had not left Egypt once they were east of the Nile Delta; they were still in Egypt, having the whole Sinai Peninsula to cross before they entered the Palestinian land of Canaan.
During the time of Moses, Sinai came under the control of two Egyptian officials: the Royal Chancellor and the Royal Messenger. This was the era of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty – the dynasty of the Tuthmosis and Amenhotep Pharaohs, along with Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. The Royal Messenger of those times was Neby, an official who was also the mayor and troop commander of Zaru in the Nile Delta region of Goshen, where the Israelites had lived before the exodus.
The position of Royal Chancellor was hereditary in the Hyksos family of Pa-Nehas, and Panahesy of this family was the official Governor of Sinai. We know him better from the Bible as Phinehas. He became one of the first priests of the new Mosaic structure, but previously he had been the Chief Priest at Pharaoh Akhenaten’s temple at Amarna.
Before we get back to Sir William Flinders Petrie, and to understand the root significance of his discovery, it is worth making a necessary distinction between the Israelites and the Hebrews of the Mosaic era. At that time they were not one and the same, as Bible teaching seems to indicate. The Hebrews were the family and descendants of Abraham, and their place of residence was, in the main, Canaan (or Palestine). The Israelites, on the other hand, were the family and descendants of one of Abraham’s grandsons, Jacob, whose name was changed to ‘Israel’. It was Jacob’s family alone who had moved into Egypt, and it was their descendants who eventually returned with Moses – to be reunited, after countless generations, with their fellow Hebrews.
The difference between the strains was, of course, that the Israelites had long been subjected to the laws and religions of Egypt and they knew very little about the customs of their cousins in Canaan. Through more than 400 years they had been in an environment with a whole pantheon of gods; and although they had developed a ‘One God’ concept within their own fraternity, that god was not the Jehovah of the Canaanite Hebrews.
The Israelites’ god was a faceless entity whom they called, quite simply, ‘the Lord’. In the Israelite language he was called ‘Adon’. This is one of the reasons why the names ‘Lord’ and ‘Jehovah’ were always separately identified in early texts, although they were brought under the wrap of the single God in later times to suit the emergent Jewish and Christian faiths. To the Egyptians, the name of this Lord (Adon) was quite similar; they called him ‘Aten’. From this derived the name of Pharaoh Akhenaten, meaning ‘Servant of Aten’.
So, when Moses and the Israelites made their exodus into Sinai, they arrived not as worshippers of Jehovah but of Aten; and it was for this very reason that they were given a whole new set of laws and ordinances to bring them into line with the Hebrew culture of their prospective new homeland.
When Moses and the Israelites left the Nile Delta, their obvious route to Canaan (where they were eventually headed) would have been directly across the wilderness of northern Sinai. So, why did they push southward into the difficult high country to spend some time at the Horeb mountain of Serâbît? This was a question that had long puzzled Petrie and his team.
So, what precisely did they find high on the Bible’s holy mountain? Well, to begin with, they found nothing very much. But on a wide plateau near the summit there were distinct signs of ancient habitation, and some pillars and standing-stones could be seen protruding above the ground-rubble. This rubble had been deposited, little by little, by wind and landslides over some 3,000 years. But when it was finally moved away, the truth of the Bible story emerged. Petrie wrote:
There is no other such monument which makes us regret that it is not in better preservation. The whole of it was buried, and no one had any knowledge of it until we cleared the site.
What they found was an enormous temple complex. Set within an enclosure wall was an outer temple, built over an expanse of 230 feet (approx. 70 metres). This extended outwards from an inner temple cut within a great cave in the mountainside. From the various cartouches, carvings and inscriptions it emerged that the temple had been in use from as far back as the time of Pharaoh Sneferu, who reigned about 2600 BC and whose immediate successors are reckoned to have built the pyramids of Gizeh.
The above-ground part of the temple was constructed from sandstone quarried from the mountain and it comprised a series of adjoined halls, shrines, courts, cubicles and chambers. Of these, the key features unearthed were the main Sanctuary, the Shrine of Kings, the Portico Court, and the Hall of the goddess Hathor (to whom the whole complex was dedicated).
All around were pillars and stelae denoting the Egyptian Kings through the ages, and certain Pharaohs such as Tuthmosis III (founder of the Rosicrucian movement in Egypt) were depicted many times on standing-stones and wall reliefs.
The adjoining Cave of Hathor was carved into the natural rock, with flat inner walls that had been carefully smoothed. In the centre (from about 1820 BC) stood a large upright pillar of Pharaoh Amenemhet III, the son-in-law of Esau. Also portrayed were his senior chamberlain and his seal-bearer.
Deep within the cave Petrie found a limestone stela of Pharaoh Ramesses I – a slab upon which Ramesses (who is traditionally reckoned by Egyptologists to have been an opposer of the Aten cult) surprisingly described himself as “The ruler of all that Aten embraces”. Also found was an Amarna statue-head of Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiye of Egypt, with her cartouche set in the crown.
In the courts and halls of the outer temple there were numerous stone-carved rectangular tanks and circular basins, along with a variety of curiously shaped benchtables with recessed fronts and split-level surfaces. There were also round tables, trays and saucers together with alabaster vases and containers, many of which were shaped like lotus flowers. In addition, the rooms housed a good collection of glazed plaques, cartouches, scarabs and sacred ornaments designed with spirals, diagonal squares and basketwork. There were magical wands of an unidentified hard material, and in the portico were two conical stones of about six inches and nine inches, respectively, in height.
The explorers were baffled enough by these finds, but they were further confounded by the discovery of a metallurgist’s crucible. Ever since, Egyptologists have argued as to why crucibles would have been necessary in a temple – while at the same time debating a mysterious substance, called mfkzt, which seemed to be related to the crucible and the conical stones and which had dozens of mentions in wall and stelae inscriptions.
Some have suggested that mfkzt might have been copper; many have preferred the idea of turquoise; and others have supposed it was perhaps malachite. But these are all unsubstantiated guesses, and there were no traces of any of these materials at the site.
Sinai is noted for its turquoise mines, but if turquoise mining had been a primary function of the temple masters over so many centuries then one would expect to find turquoise stones in abundance within the tombs of Egypt. But such is not the case. Hardly any have been found.
Another cause of wonderment has been the innumerable inscribed references to ‘bread’, along with the prominent hieroglyph for ‘Light’ found in the Shrine of the Kings. The discovery which caused the most bewilderment, however, was the unearthing of something which was identified as the enigmatic mfkzt to which the ‘bread’ symbolism seemed to be related. Laying some inches deep in a storeroom was a considerable supply of the finest, pure white, unadulterated powder.
At the time, some suggested that the powder could be a remnant of copper smelting, but, as was quickly pointed out, smelting does not produce white powder; it leaves a dense black slag. Moreover, there was no supply of copper ore within miles of the temple, and the old smelting works were in any event apparent in the distant valleys. Others guessed that the powder was ash from the burning of plants to produce alkali, but there was no trace whatever of any plant residue.
For want of any other explanation, it was determined that the white powder and the conical stones were probably associated with some form of sacrificial rite, but again it was pointed out that this was an Egyptian temple and animal sacrifice was not an Egyptian practice. Moreover, there were no remnants whatever of bones or any other foreign matter within the mfkzt, which appeared for all the world like a hoard of sacred talcum-powder.
Some of the mysterious powder was taken back to Britain for analysis and examination – but no results were ever published. The rest (opened to the elements after 3,000 years) was left to become a victim of the desert winds.
What has become apparent, however, is that this powder was seemingly identical to the ancient Mesopotamian fire-stone or shem-an-na – the substance that was made into bread-cakes and used to feed the Light-bodies of the Babylonian Kings and the Pharaohs of Egypt.
This, of course, explains the temple inscriptions denoting the importance of bread and light, and this white powder (the shem-an-na) was identified with the sacred manna that Aaron placed in the Ark of the Covenant. In Egypt, the cakes made from this powder were called ‘scheffa food’, while the Israelites called them ‘shewbread’.
The Book of Exodus tells us that the Master Craftsman who made the original shewbread for Moses in Sinai was Bezaleel, the son of Uri Ben Hur. But Bezaleel was not a baker; he was a noted goldsmith – the very man who made the golden accoutrements for the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant.
This conforms precisely with the function of the priestly Master Craftsmen in Mesopotamia. They were the great Vulcans and metallurgists of Tubal-cain, who manufactured the valuable shem-an-na from pure gold.
As for the crucible, the conical stones and the great array of tanks, tables and equipment which made the Sinai temple appear more like a gigantic laboratory than a church, it emerges that this is precisely what it was.
What Petrie had actually found was the alchemical workshop of Akhenaten and of the 18 dynasties of Pharaohs before him – a temple-laboratory where the furnace would have roared and smoked in the production of the sacred fire-stone of the high-spin shem-an-na. Quite suddenly, the words of Exodus begin to make sense as we read them again with a wholly new insight:
And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
In Exodus we read that Moses took the golden calf which the Israelites had made, and then burnt it in the fire and ground it to a white powder. This is precisely the process of a shem-an-na furnace, and it is evident that the Egyptian priests of the goddess Hathor had been working their fire for countless generations before the priests of Aten became involved in the time of Moses.
It was in fact Pharaoh Tuthmosis III who had reorganised the ancient mystery-schools of Thoth and founded the Royal School of the Master Craftsmen at Karnak. They were called the ‘Great White Brotherhood’ because of their preoccupation with a mysterious white powder. A branch of this fraternity became especially concerned with medicines and healing, and they became known as the Egyptian ‘Therapeutate’. In much later times, the Therapeutate extended its activities into Palestine, especially into the Judah settlement of Qumran where they flourished as the Essenes.
But what was so special about the goddess Hathor? Why was she the chosen deity of the Sinai priests? Hathor was a paramount nursing goddess, and as the daughter of Ra she was said to have given birth to the Sun. She was the originally defined ‘Queen of the West’ and ‘Mistress of the Netherworld’, to where she was said to carry those who knew the right spells. She was the revered protectress of womanhood, the ‘Lady of the Sycamore’, and the goddess of love, tombs and song. And it was from the milk of Hathor that the Pharaohs were said to gain
their divinity, becoming gods in their own right.
On one of the rock tablets near to the Mount Serâbît cave entrance is a representation of Tuthmosis IV in the presence of Hathor. Before him are two offering-stands topped with lotus flowers, and behind him is a man bearing a conical cake of white bread. Another relief details the mason Ankhib offering two conical bread-cakes of shem-an-na to the king, and there are similar portrayals elsewhere in the temple complex. One of the most significant perhaps is a depiction of Hathor and Amenhotep III. The goddess holds a necklace in one hand, while offering the emblem of life and dominion to the Pharaoh with the other. Behind her is the treasurer Sobekhotep, who holds in readiness a conical cake of white bread. Sobekhotep is described as the “Overseer of the Secrets of the House of Gold, who brought the noble and precious stone to His Majesty”.
I mentioned earlier that, upon coming out of Egypt into Sinai en route to Canaan, the Israelites would have expected to be made familiar with the laws and ordinances of their new homeland. However, although this appears to have been partially the case, the situation was largely reversed on the religious front, with the Egyptian customs being introduced to the native Hebrews.
It was upon the mountain at Sinai that Jehovah first announced his presence to Moses. Being an Aten supporter, Moses asked this new lord and master who he was, and the reply was “I am that I am”, which in phonetic Hebrew became ‘Jehovah’. However, for the longest time
afterwards, the Israelites were not allowed to utter the name ‘Jehovah’ – with the exception of the High Priest who was allowed to whisper the name in private once a year. The problem was that prayers were supposed to be said to this new godhead – but how would he know the
prayers were said to him if his name was not mentioned?
The Israelites knew that Jehovah was not the same as Aten (their traditional Adon or Lord), and so they presumed he must be the equivalent of the great State-god of Egypt, even if not one and the same. It was decided, therefore, to add the name of that State- god to all prayers thereafter, and the name of that god was ‘Amen’. To this day, the name of ‘Amen’ is still recited at the end of prayers. Even the well-known Christian Lord’s Prayer (as given in the Gospel of Matthew) was transposed from an Egyptian original which began, “Amen, Amen, who art in heaven…”
As for the famous Ten Commandments (said to have been conveyed to Moses by God upon the mountain), these too are of Egyptian origin and they derive directly from Spell Number 125 in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. They were not new codes of conduct invented for the Israelites, but were simply newly stated versions of the ritual confessions of the Pharaohs. For example, the confession “I have not killed” was translated to the decree “Thou shalt not kill”; “I have not stolen” became “Thou shalt not steal”; “I have not told lies” became “Thou shalt not bear false witness”; and so on.
Not only were the Ten Commandments drawn from Egyptian ritual, but so too were the Psalms reworked from Egyptian hymns (though they are attributed to King David). Even the Old Testament Book of Proverbs – the so-called ‘wise words of Solomon’ – was translated almost verbatim into Hebrew from the writings of an Egyptian sage called Amenemope. These are now held at the British Museum, and verse after verse of the Book of Proverbs can be attributed to this Egyptian original. It has now been discovered that even the writings of Amenemope were extracted from a far older work called The Wisdom of Ptah-hotep, which comes from more than 2,000 years before the time of Solomon.
In addition to the Book of the Dead and the ancient Wisdom of Ptah-hotep, various other Egyptian texts were used in compiling the Old Testament. These include the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts, from which references to the Egyptian gods were simply transposed to relate to the Hebrew god Jehovah.
In Bloodline of the Holy Grail I made the point that the modern style of Christianity, which evolved from the Roman Church in the 4th century AD, was actually a created ‘hybrid’ – a religion based on themes from numerous others, including, of course, Judaism.
Now it transpires that Judaism itself was no less of a hybrid in the early days, being a composite of Egyptian, Canaanite and Mesopotamian traditions, with the stories, hymns, prayers and rituals of the various and sundry gods brought together and related to a newly contrived ‘One God’ concept.
What is particularly interesting is that, historically, this was not fully contrived in the time of Abraham, nor even in the later time of Moses. It did not happen until the 6th century BC, when tens of thousands of Israelites were held captive by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Until that time, the Hebrew and Israelite records referred to any number of gods and goddesses by individual names, and under a general plural classification of ‘the Elohim’.
Through some 500 years from the captivity, the scriptures existed only as a series of quite separate writings, and it was not until after the time of Jesus that these were collated into a single volume. Jesus himself would never have heard of the Old Testament or the Bible, but the scriptures to which he had access included many books that were not selected for the compilation that we know today.
Strangely, though, some of these books are still mentioned in the modern
Bible text as being important to the original culture. They include the
Book of the Lord, the Book of the Wars of Jehovah, and the Book of
Jasher. Why were they not included? Quite simply because their content
did not suit the new Jehovah-based religion that was being created.
Jasher, for example, was the Egyptian-born son of Caleb; the brother-in-
law to the first Israelite judge Othneil; and the appointed royal staff-
bearer to Moses. It is generally reckoned that the Book of Jasher’s
position in the Bible should be between the books of Deuteronomy and
Joshua, but it was sidestepped by the editors because it sheds a very
different light on the sequence of events at Mount Horeb in Sinai.
The familiar Exodus account explains that Jehovah issued instructions to
Moses concerning masters and servants, covetousness, neighbourly
behaviour, crime, marriage, morality and many other issues including the
all-important rule of the Sabbath, along with the Ten Commandments.
But, in Jasher (which pre-dates the Exodus writings), these laws and
ordinances are not conveyed to Moses by Jehovah. In fact, Jehovah is not
mentioned at all. The new laws, says the Book of Jasher, were
communicated to Moses and the Israelites by Jethro, High Priest of
Midian and Lord of the Mountain. In effect, Jethro was the overall
governor of the Sinai temple.
In Hebrew, the title ‘Lord (or Lofty One) of the Mountain’ was translated
as ‘El Shaddai’, and this is particularly significant for that was precisely
the name related to Moses when he asked the Lord to reveal his identity.
The Lord said, “I am that I am. I am he that Abraham called ‘El
Shaddai’”. “I am that I am” eventually became transposed to the name
‘Jehovah’, but, as related in Jasher (and as confirmed in Exodus when
correctly read), this Lord was not a deiform god at all. He was Jethro the
El Shaddai, the great vulcan and Master Craftsman of the Hathor temple.
Apart from the fact that we are taught about certain aspects of the Bible
text, I think it is fair to say that not too many of us actually study the
books ourselves. As a result of this, our perceived images are generally
those conjured by picture-books and films. Hollywood, of course, has
done us proud with its portrayals of Moses on the mountain and God
blasting the words of the Ten Commandments onto two great, barely
portable, granite slabs. In Exodus, however, there is no such depiction,
and the Commandments are said to have been written down by Moses
himself (at the dictation of the Lord) after he had broken the first tablets
that he was given.
As for the other part of the Sinai package, the Tables of Testimony, these
are stated in the teachings of the Kabbala and the Midrash to have been
held within a sacred gemstone which Moses placed “in the palm of his
hand”. This was the same Divine Stone of Wisdom said to have been
inherited by King Solomon. In the earlier texts of Egypt it was called the
‘Tablet of Hermes’, which embodied the wisdom of Thoth.
According to the records of the ancient Dragon Court of Egypt (founded by Queen Sobeknefru in 1785 BC), an early guardian of the Table was Chem, the High Priest of Mendes. The word chem (or khame) means ‘blackness’, and from this root word derived the word ‘alchemy’ – the science of extracting light from the blackness. To us, Chem is perhaps
better known as the biblical Ham, the grandfather of Nimrod, whose family was cursed by the Hebrews because his historical tradition was in conflict with the emergent Jehovah-based culture.
Readers of Gothic novels and books about sorcery will, of course, recognise the name Chem of Mendes. He is often symbolised by a goat, which was precisely the emblem of Ham in ancient Egypt. The only difference is that in latter-day Christian lore the goat is meant to be symbolic of the Devil. What we now discover, however, is that by following the story of Chem of Mendes we are led directly to the Sinai temple and to the white powder of gold.
Mendes was a major city of the Egyptian Delta, and Chem was the temple’s designated Archon of the 10th Age of Capricorn. It was in this Capricorn regard that his symbol was a goat, generally depicted by an inverted pentagram. This five-pointed star has two uppermost points, which are the horns of the Goat of Mendes. The two downward-sloping
side points represent the ears, and the single base-point is the chin and beard.
When a pentagram is seen in this inverted position, it is regarded as a male emblem, but the pentagram star is, of course, a female device (a Venus symbol) and is usually shown with the single point uppermost.
In the pentagram’s male position, Chem is personally identified by an emerald jewel set centrally at the meeting of the horns. When turned about, the pentagram achieves its female status with the uppermost single point becoming the head of the goddess. The side points are now arms, while the twin points (once the horns) are now at the base, being
the legs of the goddess, with the emerald jewel of Venus established in the vulval position.
Sometimes the inverted pentagram of Chem is shown with flames rising from the sacred jewel between the horns. These flames are traditionally referred to as ‘Astral Light’. But when reversed into the Venus position, the uterine flames are identified as ‘Star Fire’, the lunar essence of the goddess.
>From the earliest times, whether representing Astral Light or Star Fire, the pentagram was indicative of enlightenment. It was associated with the pre-Jewish Sabbath – a ritualistic period of reflection and experience outside of general toil. For this reason, Chem of Mendes was called the ‘Sabbatical Goat’ – from which derived today’s use of the word ‘sabbatical’ in academic circles.
In view of this age-old tradition, it is hardly surprising that the pentagram and Sabbatical Goat became associated with heterodox Christians (like the Cathars of Languedoc) from medieval times. In contrast, the orthodox Christian Church endeavored to overawe the old wisdom of the mystery schools by creating a hybrid religion based upon salvation from the
unknown – a salvation that was only attained through people’s subjugation to the authority of the bishops. As an outcome, the spiritually based doctrines of the Gnostic movement (which sought to ‘discover’ the unknown) were declared blasphemous by the Inquisition, while the
pentagram and the goat were denounced as symbols of black magic and witchcraft.
From those times (even to the present day in some circles), personal attainment and learning which does not conform to the bishops’ opinions has been considered heretical. And individually acquired wisdom became so feared that the Goat of Mendes has been decried as
the epitome of the Devil himself. This is manifest in a wealth of trashy propagandist novels (by Dennis Wheatley and others) wherein crucifixes and holy water abound as the weapons used against the so-called emissary of Satan.
Ham (or Chem) is given in the Old Testament as a son of Noah, but in the oldest records he is correctly identified (along with Japhet) as being a son of the great Vulcan and goldsmith Tubal-cain who is better known to historians as King Meskalam-dug, the Hero of the Good Land.
In the early lore of Palestine, Chem was synonymous with a certain Azazel of Capricorn who (according to the Book of Enoch) made known to men “all the metals, and the art of working them, and the use of antimony”. Antimony is the black element otherwise known as ‘stibium’. This is an essential ingredient of the preparatory alchemical process when producing the Philosophers’ Stone. In the ancient Arab world, antimony was called kohl, from which derives the word ‘coal’, meaning ‘that which is black’. The related word ‘alcohol’ stems from the Arabic al-kohul – the highly refined ‘philosophical mercury’ prepared from spirits of wine
rectified over antimony.
Azazel of Capricorn actually appears in the Bible, but not in the authorised English-language translation. In the Vulgate Book of Leviticus there is an early reference to the custom of Atonement, and it states that Aaron shall cast lots upon two goats, “one for the Lord, and the other for Azazel”. That which fell to the lot of the Lord was to be sacrificed as a ‘sin
offering’, and the other was to be sent into the wilderness as an ‘atonement’.
The more familiar English translation is somewhat confusing, for the name ‘Azazel’ has been supplanted by the word ‘scapegoat’. The reason for the substitution was simply that the original sequence made it quite clear that Hebrew offerings were made both to Jehovah and to Chem-Azazel, while the Book of Enoch (which was excluded from the Old Testament) drew readers’ attention to the direct link between Azazel and hermetic alchemy.
In the tradition of the Rosicrucian mystery schools, the writings of Chem (the Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis) were recorded as “The most ancient monument of the Chaldeans concerning the Philosophers’ Stone”. Being associated with the wisdom of Thoth (or Hermes), they were defined as hermetic teachings, and they were directly linked to the fire alchemy of
pyramid construction.
The very name ‘Hermes’ derives from the word herma, which means ‘a pile of stones’, and the Great Pyramid was called the ‘Sanctuary of Thoth’. The word pyr, from which derive ‘pyro-’, ‘pyre’ and ‘pyramid’, actually means ‘fire’ – and the pyramids were so called because they
were ‘fire-begotten’.
This leads us to one of the great unanswered questions: How did they build the pyramids? Were the thousands of massive blocks raised to great heights with such accuracy by hundreds of thousands of slaves using nothing but ropes and ramps over an undefined period of time, as
is the common speculation? Certainly not. To construct an inclined plane to the top of the Great Pyramid at a gradient of 1:10 would have required a ramp 4,800 feet (approx. 1,463 metres) long, with a volume three times greater than that of the Pyramid itself.
As we saw earlier, the powder of the highward fire-stone is a monatomic superconductor. It is exotic matter with a gravitational attraction of less than zero. Recent experiments with this amazing white powder of gold have proven that, under certain conditions, the substance can weigh less than nothing and can be made to disappear into an unknown dimension. The most interesting quality of the powder, however, is that it rides upon the Earth’s magnetic field, so that when it is in a zero-gravity state it is capable of transposing its own weightlessness to its host, thereby facilitating levitational powers. This host might be a laboratory pan, a
container, or a table – or it could just as easily be an enormous block of stone!
The age-old tradition relates that in the secret repository of the King’s Chamber within the Great Pyramid the builders had placed “instruments of iron, and arms which rust not, and glass which might be bended and yet not broken, and strange spells”. But what did the first explorers find, having tunnelled their way into the sealed chamber? The only furniture was a lidless, hollowed stone coffer, and it contained not a body but a layer of a mysterious powdery substance. This has been superficially determined to be grains of feldspar and mica, which are both minerals of the aluminium silicate group.
During the course of the recent white powder research, aluminium and silica were two of the constituent elements revealed by conventional analysis of a granular sample that was known to be a 100 per cent platinum-group compound.
Standard laboratory testing is done by striking a sample with a DC arc for 15 seconds at a Sun-surface heat of 5,500° Centigrade. However, with the white powder, a continuation of the burn-time way beyond the normal testing procedure revealed the noble platinum metals of which the substance truly consisted.
It is because of the limitations placed on the conventional testing sequence that five per cent by dry weight of our brain tissue is said to be carbon, whereas more rigorous analysis reveals it as the platinum metals iridium and rhodium in the high-spin state.
The King’s Chamber was, in fact, contrived as a superconductor, capable of transporting the Pharaoh into another dimension of space-time. And it was here that the Pharaoh’s Rite of Passage was administered in accordance with the Book of the Dead.
The key to this Rite of Passage is defined by a single conical inscription near the entrance to the Chamber. This hieroglyphic symbol – the only verifiable hieroglyph on the whole of the Gizeh Plateau, and the very same as appeared many times at the Sinai mountain temple – reads, quite simply, ‘Bread’.
In the context of this talk, we have stepped beyond the bounds of the Bible to witness the alchemical and scientific process which facilitated the genesis of the Grail Kings. This line of succession from Cain, through Egypt to King David and onward to Jesus, was purpose-bred to be the earthly Purveyors of the Light. They were the true Sons of the Gods, who were fed firstly on Anunnaki Star Fire from about 3800 BC and, subsequently, on ‘high-spin’ metal supplements from about 2000 BC. In short, they were bred to be leaders of humankind, and they were both mentally and physically maintained in the ‘highward’ state: the ultimate
dimension of the missing 44 per cent – the dimension of the Orbit of Light, or the Plane of Sharon.
Only during the past 150 years or so, and more specifically during the past 80 years, have the great storehouses of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Syrian and Canaanite record been unearthed from beneath the desert sands. First-hand documentary evidence from before Bible times has
now emerged on stone, clay, parchment and papyrus, and these many tens of thousands of documents bear witness to a far more exciting history than we were ever told.
Had these records been available throughout the generations, the concept of a particular race enjoying a single Divine revelation would never have arisen, and the exclusivity of Jehovah – which has blinded us for the longest time, setting us in warlike fashion against those of other
faiths who follow their own traditions – would never have taken such an arrogant hold.
Gradually, as new discoveries are made, it is evident that we are now emerging from the darkness of our preconceived but unfounded notions. Even so, our centuries of Church-led indoctrination make it very difficult to discard the restrictive dogma of inbred third-hand tradition in favour of a greater enlightenment from those who were there at the time.
The truly inspiring prospect is that the learning curve has still not ended. Just as a single glacier is but a continuation of age-old activity, so too are the ancient wisdoms that now fall to us one by one, with each new facet of learning ready to be stacked upon the former knowledge.
Fortunately, the dawn of consciousness is already behind us and, although some will choose to look backwards beyond its veil, many will step with vigour into the new millennium to witness a bright new sunrise – a revelation of unbounded possibility and a restoration of our true universal inheritance.
***
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 5, Number 6 (October-November 1998); Sir Laurence Gardner
The true Grail bloodline originated with the Anunnaki gods in southern Sumeria at least 6,000 years ago and was sustained by ingestion of an alchemical substance called ‘Star Fire’.
Bloodline of the Holy Grail is essentially concerned with the Messianic Bloodline as it has descended through the family of Jesus Christ down to the present day. It is also concerned with comparing the New Testament Gospels with the first-hand historical accounts of the era, as related in both the Roman and Jewish archives. In this regard, it details how the eventual Christian High Church corrupted and manipulated the early records to suit its own political agenda.
Despite the contrived doctrine that Jesus was born of a virgin and was the ‘one and only’ son of God (definitions that did not feature in the original pre-Roman texts), the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke actually give details of Jesus’ descendant lineage from David of Israel and the Kings of Judah. What was so special about this Bloodline in the first place?
Given that the dynastic succession from Jesus has been expressly prominent in sovereign and political affairs through 2,000 years – with the family constantly supporting constitutional democracy against control by the Church establishment – its status rests upon the fact that Jesus was a lineal descendant of King David.
But, what was it that made the line of David so important, and so different from any other? It was this very question which set me on the trail for my next book, Genesis of the Grail Kings, which tells the story of the Messianic line from the very beginning.
The Bible explains that the Bloodline story began with Adam and Eve, from whose third son, Seth, evolved a line which progressed through Methuselah and Noah, and eventually to Abraham who became the Great Patriarch of the Hebrew nation. It then relates that Abraham brought his family westwards out of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) to the land of Canaan (or Palestine), from where some of his descendants moved into Egypt. After a few generations they moved back into Canaan where, in time, the eventual David of Bethlehem became King of the newly defined Kingdom of Israel.
If viewed as it is presented in the scriptures, this is a fascinating saga; but there is nothing anywhere to indicate why the ancestral line of David and his heirs was in any way special. In fact, quite the reverse is the case. His ancestors are portrayed as a succession of wandering territory- seekers who are seen to be of no particular significance until the time of King David. Their biblical history bears no comparison to, say, the contemporary Pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Their significance, we are told, comes from the fact that (from the time of Abraham) they were designated as ‘God’s chosen people’. But even this leaves us wondering, because, according to the scriptures, their God led them through nothing but a succession of famines, wars and general hardship – and, on the face of it, these early Hebrews do not appear to have been too bright!
We are faced, therefore, with a couple of possibilities. Either David was not of this Abraham succession at all, and was simply grafted into the list by later writers. Or maybe we have been presented with a very corrupted version of the family’s early history – a version that was specifically designed to uphold the emergent Jewish faith, rather than to represent historical fact.
In consideration of this, I was reminded of precisely what I had found with the New Testament. The Gospel texts that have been in the public domain for centuries bear little relation to the first-hand accounts of the era. The New Testament, as we know it, was compiled by the 4th-century bishops to support the newly contrived Christian belief. But, what if the Jewish scribes had previously done exactly the same thing?
Clearly, I had to get back to the more ancient writings in order to find any anomalies. The problem was that, even if this were possible, the earliest Hebrew writings (which were rehashed many centuries later) were themselves only written between the 6th and the 1st centuries BC, so they were not likely to be that authentic in their telling of history from
thousands of years before. Indeed, it was plain that this would be the case, because when these books were first written their express purpose was to convey a history which upheld the principles of the Jewish faith – a faith that did not emerge until well into the ancestral story.
Given that the first group of these books was written while the Jews were held captive in Mesopotamian Babylon in the 6th century BC, it is apparent that Babylon was where the original records were then held. In fact, from the time of Adam, through some 19 said generations down to Abraham, the whole of Old Testament patriarchal history was Mesopotamian. More specifically, the history was from Sumer in southern Mesopotamia, where the ancient Sumerians did indeed refer to the grasslands of the Euphrates delta as the Eden.
When researching for Bloodline of the Holy Grail, I found that good sources for some background information were the various Gospels and texts that were not selected for inclusion in the canonical New Testament. Perhaps, I thought, the same might apply to the Old Testament. The books of Enoch and Jubilees, for example, were among those not
included.
A further book, to which attention is specifically drawn in the Old Testament books of Joshua and Samuel, is the Book of Jasher. But despite its apparent importance to the Hebrew writers, it was not included in the final selection.
Two other works are also cited in the Bible. The Book of Numbers draws our attention to the Book of The Wars of Jehovah. And in the Book of Isaiah we are directed towards the Book of the Lord.
What are these books? Where are these books? They are all mentioned in the Bible (which means they all pre-date the Old Testament), and they are all cited as being important. So, why did the editors see fit to exclude them when the selection was made?
In pursuing an answer to this question and in studying the substance of the Old Testament prior to its corruption, one fact which becomes increasingly clear is that in English-language Bibles the definition ‘Lord’ is used in a general context, but in earlier texts a positive distinction is drawn between ‘Jehovah’ and ‘the Lord’.
It has often been wondered why the biblical God of the Hebrews led them through trials and tribulations, floods and disasters, when (from time to time) he appears to have performed with a quite contrary and merciful personality. The answer is that, although now seemingly embraced as ‘the One God’ by the Jewish and Christian churches, there was originally a distinct difference between the figures of Jehovah and the Lord. They were, in fact, quite separate deities. The god referred to as ‘Jehovah’ was traditionally a storm god, a god of wrath and vengeance, whereas the god referred to as ‘the Lord’ was a god of fertility and wisdom.
So, what was the name given to the Lord in the early writings? It was, quite simply, the prevailing Hebrew word for ‘Lord’, and the word was ‘Adon’. As for the apparent personal name of Jehovah, this was not used in the early days, and even the Bible tells that the God of Abraham was called ‘El Shaddai’, which means ‘Lofty Mountain’.
The apparent name ‘Jehovah’ came from the original Hebrew stem YHWH, which meant ‘I am that I am’ – said to be a statement made by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, hundreds of years after the time of Abraham. ‘Jehovah’ was therefore not a name at all, and early texts refer simply to ‘El Shaddai’ and to his opposing counterpart, ‘Adon’.
To the Canaanites, these gods were respectively called ‘El Elyon’ and ‘Baal’ – which meant precisely the same things (‘Lofty Mountain’ and ‘Lord’).
In our modern Bibles, the definitions ‘God’ and ‘Lord’ are used and intermixed throughout, as if they were one and the same character, but originally they were not. One was a vengeful god (a people-hater), and the other was a social god (a people-supporter), and they each had wives, sons and daughters.
The old writings tell us that throughout the patriarchal era the Israelites endeavoured to support Adon, the Lord, but at every turn El Shaddai (the storm god, Jehovah) retaliated with floods, tempests, famines and destruction. Even at the very last (around 600 BC), the Bible explains that Jerusalem was overthrown at Jehovah’s bidding and tens of thousands of Jews were taken into Babylonian captivity simply because their King (a descendant of King David) had erected altars in veneration of Baal, the Adon.
It was during the course of this captivity that the Israelites weakened and finally conceded. They decided to succumb to the ‘God of Wrath’, and developed a new religion out of sheer fear of his retribution. It was at this time that the name of Jehovah first appeared – and this was only 500 years before the time of Jesus.
Subsequently, the Christian Church took Jehovah on board as well, calling him simply ‘God’ – and all the hitherto social concepts of the Adon were totally discarded. The two religions were henceforth both faiths of fear. Even today, their followers are classified as ‘God-fearing’.
So, where does that leave us? It leaves us knowing that within an overall pantheon of gods and goddesses (many of whom are actually named in the Bible), there were two predominant and opposing gods. In different cultures they have been known as ‘El Elyon’ and ‘Baal’; ‘El Shaddai’ and ‘Adon’; ‘Arhiman’ and ‘Mazda’; ‘Jehovah’ and ‘Lord’; ‘God’ and ‘Father’. But these styles are all titular; they are not personal names.
So who precisely were they? To find the answer we have to look no further than where these gods were actually operative, and the old Canaanite texts (discovered in Syria in the 1920s) tell us that their courts were in the Tigris-Euphrates valley in Mesopotamia, in the Sumerian Eden delta of the Persian Gulf.
But what did the ancient Sumerians call these two gods? What were their personal names? We can trace the Sumerian written records back to about 3700 BC, and they tell us that the gods in question were brothers. In Sumer, the storm god who eventually became known as Jehovah was called ‘Enlil’ or ‘Ilu-kur-gal’ (meaning ‘Ruler of the Mountain’), and his
brother, who became Adon, the Lord, was called ‘Enki’. This name is really important to our story because ‘Enki’ means ‘Archetype’.
The texts inform us that it was Enlil who brought the Flood; it was Enlil who destroyed Ur and Babylon, and it was Enlil who constantly opposed the education and enlightenment of humankind. Indeed, the early Syrian texts tell us that it was Enlil who obliterated the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Dead Sea – not because they were dens of wickedness, as we are taught, but because they were great centres of wisdom and learning.
It was Enki, on the other hand, who, despite the wrath of his brother, granted the Sumerians access to the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. It was Enki who set up the escape strategy during the Flood, and it was Enki who passed over the time-honoured Tables of Destiny – the tables of scientific law which became the bedrock of the early mystery schools in Egypt.
Many books talk about the hermetic school of Tuthmosis III of Egypt, who reigned about 1450 BC. But it is not generally known that the school he originally inherited was the Royal Court of the Dragon. This had been founded by the priests of Mendes in about 2200 BC and was subsequently ratified by the 12th dynasty Queen Sobeknefru.
This sovereign and priestly Order passed from Egypt to the Kings of Jerusalem; to the Black Sea Princes of Scythia and into the Balkans – notably to the Royal House of Hungary, whose King Sigismund reconstituted the Court just 600 years ago. Today it exists as the Imperial and Royal Court of the Dragon Sovereignty, and after some 4,000 years it is the oldest sovereign Court in the world.
But what were the earliest aims and ambitions of the Order back in Pharaonic times? They were to perpetuate and advance the alchemical strength of the Royal Bloodline from Lord Enki, the Archetype.
The kings of the early succession (who reigned in Sumer and Egypt before becoming Kings of Israel) were anointed upon coronation with the fat of the Dragon (the sacred crocodile). This noble beast was referred to in Egypt as the Messeh (from which derived the Hebrew verb ‘to anoint’), and the kings of this dynastic succession were always referred to as ‘Dragons’, or ‘Messiahs’ (meaning ‘Anointed Ones’).
In times of battle, when the armies of different kingdoms were conjoined, an overall leader was chosen and he was called the ‘Great Dragon’ (the ‘King of Kings’) – or, as we better know the name in its old Celtic form, the ‘Pendragon’.
One of the interesting items from the archives of the Dragon Court is the origin of the word ‘kingship’. It derives from the very earliest of Sumerian culture, wherein ‘kingship’ was identical with ‘kinship’ – and ‘kin’ means ‘blood relative’. In its original form, ‘kinship’ was ‘kainship’. And the first King of the Messianic Dragon succession was the biblical Cain
(Kain), head of the Sumerian House of Kish.
On recognising this, one can immediately see the first anomaly in the traditional Genesis story, for the historical line to David and Jesus was not from Adam and Eve’s son Seth at all. It was from Eve’s son Cain, whose recorded successors (although given little space in the Old Testament) were the first great Kings (or Kains) of Mesopotamia and Egypt.
Two more important features then come to light when reading the Bible again with this knowledge in mind. We all tend to think of Cain as being the first son of Adam and Eve, but he was not. Even the Book of Genesis tells us that he was not, and it confirms how Eve told Adam that Cain’s father was the Lord. Who was ‘the Lord’? The Lord was Adon, and Adon was Enki. Even outside the Bible, the writings of the Hebrew Talmud and Midrash make it quite plain that Cain was not the son of Adam.
So what else have we been wrongly taught about this particular aspect of history? The Book of Genesis (in its English-translated form) tells us that Cain was ‘a tiller of the ground’. But this is not what the original texts say at all. What they say is that Cain had ‘dominion over the Earth’ – which is a rather different matter when considering his kingly status.
In fact, the Bible translators appear to have had a constant problem with the word ‘Earth’, often translating it to ‘ground’, ‘clay’ or ‘dust’. But the early texts actually referred to ‘The Earth’. Even in the case of Adam and Eve, the translators got it wrong. The Bible says: ‘Male and female he created them, and he called their name Adam.’ The older writings use the
more complete word ‘Adama’, which means ‘of the Earth’. But this did not mean they were made of dirt; it means that they were ‘of The Earth’ – or, as the Anchor Hebrew Bible explains in absolutely precise terms, they were ‘Earthlings’.
There is a lot to be said about the story of Adam and Eve and of how they were the result of clinical cloning. Writers such as Zechariah Sitchin have written at some length in this regard, and my new book delves far more deeply into the subject. I shall not dwell upon this particular aspect now because I want to move more directly into the alchemy of the Messianic Bloodline of the Earthly Dragon Kings. What I will say is that the Sumerian records state that around 6,000 years ago, Adam and Eve (known then as ‘Atabba’ and ‘Ava’, and jointly as the ‘Adama’) were purpose-bred for kingship at the House of Shimti by Enki and his sister-wife Nin-khursag. In Sumerian, the word Shi-im-ti meant ‘breath-wind-life’.
Adam was certainly not the first man on Earth, but he was the first of the alchemically devised kingly succession. Nin-khursag was called ‘Lady of the Embryo’ or ‘Lady of Life’, and she was the surrogate mother for Atabba and Ava who were created from human ova fertilised by the Lord Enki.
It was because of Nin-khursag’s title, Lady of Life, that Ava was later given the same title by the Hebrews. Indeed, the name Ava (or Eve) was subsequently said to mean ‘Life’. And there is an interesting parallel here, because in Sumerian the distinction ‘Lady of Life’ was Nin-tî (Nin meaning ‘Lady’, and tî meaning ‘Life’). However, another Sumerian word, ti (with the longer pronunciation, ‘tee’), meant ‘rib’; and it was by virtue of the Hebrews’ misunderstanding of the two words, tî and ti, that Eve also became incorrectly associated with Adam’s rib.
Both Enki and Nin-khursag (along with their brother Enlil, the later Jehovah) belonged to a pantheon of gods and goddesses referred to as the Anunnaki, meaning ‘Heaven came to Earth’. In fact, the Grand Assembly of the Anunnaki (later called the ‘Court of the Elohim’) is mentioned in Psalm 82 wherein Jehovah makes his bid for supreme power over the other gods.
According to the Dragon tradition, the importance of Cain was that he was directly produced by Enki and Ava, so his blood was three-quarters Anunnaki. His half-brothers Hevel and Satanael (better known as Abel and Seth) were less than half Anunnaki, being the offspring of Atabba and Ava (Adam and Eve).
Cain’s Anunnaki blood was so advanced that it was said that his brother Abel’s blood was ‘Earthbound’ by comparison. Cain, it was said in the scriptures, ‘rose far above Abel’, so that his brother’s blood was swallowed into the ground. But this original description was thoroughly mistranslated for our modern Bible, and we are now told that ‘Cain rose
up against Abel and spilled his blood upon the ground’. This is not the same thing at all.
We can now progress our story by considering the oldest Grant of Arms in sovereign history – a Grant of Arms which denoted the Messianic Dragon Bloodline for all time. The Sumerians referred to this insignia as the Gra-al. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? From biblical history, however, we know it better as the ‘Mark of Cain’.
This ‘Mark’ is portrayed to us by the Church as if it were some form of curse. But, knowing what we now know, the Bible does not actually say this. What it says is that, having got into an argument with Jehovah over a matter of sovereign observance, Cain feared for his life. We are then informed that the Lord placed a mark upon Cain, swearing sevenfold
vengeance against his enemies.
No one has ever really understood why Jehovah should decide to protect Cain when it was he who held the grievance against him. But the fact is that Jehovah did not make this decision. Cain’s protector was not Jehovah. As stated, the ‘Mark’ was settled upon Cain by the Lord – and the Lord (the Adon) was Cain’s own Father, Enki.
Few people ever think to enquire about the supposed enemies of Cain as defined in Genesis. Who could they possibly have been? Where would they have come from? According to the Bible, only Adam and Eve, with their sons Cain and Abel, existed – and Cain had apparently killed Abel. If we are to accept the text as it stands, there was no one around to be his enemy!
So, what was this Sumerian Gra-al which the Bible calls ‘the Mark of Cain’? It was an emblem dignified as the ‘Cup of the Waters’ or the Rosi- Crucis (the ‘Dew Cup’), and it was identified in all records (including those of Egypt and Phoenicia and in the Hebrew annals) as being an upright, centred red cross within a circle. Throughout the ages it was developed and embellished, but it has always remained essentially the same and is recognised as being the original symbol of the Holy Grail.
Another anomaly is presented soon afterwards in Genesis when we are told that Cain found himself a wife. Who on Earth were her parents if Adam and Eve were the only couple alive? Without confronting this anomaly at all, Genesis then proceeds to list for us the names of Cain’s descendants!
It becomes clear from all of this that some very important information has been edited from the Old Testament narrative. Clearly there were plenty of other people around at the time and it is not difficult to find their stories outside the Bible. Quite apart from the Sumerian annals, even old Hebrew and early Christian texts give us far more information in this regard.
In order to further enhance the succession from Cain, he was married to his half-sister – a pure-bred Anunnaki princess, Luluwa. Her father was Enki and her mother was Lilith, a granddaughter of Enlil. Although not giving the name of Cain’s wife, the Bible does name their younger son Enoch, while the Sumerian records cite his elder son and kingly successor, Atûn, who is perhaps better known as King Etana of Kish.
Etana was said to have ‘walked with the gods’, and to have been fed from the ‘Plant of Birth’ (or the ‘Tree of Life’, as it is called in Genesis). Henceforth, the kings of the line were designated as being the twigs of the Tree – and the ancient word for ‘twig’ was klone (clone). In later times this ‘Plant’ or ‘Tree’ was redefined as a ‘Vine’, and so the Gra-al, the Vine and the Messianic Bloodline became conjoined as one in the literature of subsequent ages.
By virtue of their contrived breeding, this kingly succession was modelled specifically for leadership, and in all aspects of knowledge, culture, awareness, wisdom and intuition they were highly advanced against their mundane contemporaries. In order to keep their blood as pure as possible, they always married within a close kinship.
It was fully recognised that the prominent gene of the succession was carried within the blood of the mother. Today we call this the ‘mitochondrial DNA’. And so was born a tradition inherited by their kingly descendants in Egypt and by the later Celtic rulers of Europe. True kingship, it was maintained, was transferred through the female, and so kingly marriages were strategically cemented with maternal half-sisters or first cousins.
Having reached the point where the Plant of Birth is first mentioned in the records, we are at about 3500 BC; and it is at this point that we begin to learn how the kingly succession was orally fed with bodily supplements from the early days. This practice continued for more than 1,000 years until the nourishment program became wholly scientific and alchemical.
Before getting into the detail of the kingly diet, it is worth considering why it was that the all-important Royal Bloodline which progressed from Cain and his sons was strategically ignored by the Hebrews and the Christian Church in favour of their promoting a parallel junior line from Adam’s son Seth. Why was it that the immediate Cainite dynasty was eventually shunned by the fearful disciples of Enlil-Jehovah?
In the Old Testament Book of Genesis, the lines of descent are given from Cain and from his half-brother Seth, but it is of interest to note that through the early generations the names detailed in each list are pretty much the same, although given in a different order: Enoch, Yared, Mahalaleel, Methuselah and Lamech.
In view of this, it has often been suggested that the line from Seth down to Lamech’s son Noah was (not very cleverly) contrived by the Bible compilers so as to avoid showing the true descent from Cain to the time of Noah. If this were the case, then something must have occurred during the lifetime of Noah to cause the ancestral story to be veiled by the later writers. The answer is to be found in the Bible itself.
At that stage in the family’s history, the vengeful Jehovah apparently warned Noah and his sons against the ingestion of blood – an edict which became expressly important to the later Jewish way of life. It has long been a customary Jewish practice to hang meat for blood-letting before cooking and consumption.
But, in contrast, the Christian faith is especially concerned with the figurative ingestion of blood. In the Christian tradition it is customary to take the Communion sacrament (the Mass) wherein wine is drunk from the sacred chalice, symbolically representing the blood of Jesus, the lifeblood of the Messianic Vine.
Could it be, perhaps, that the modern Christian custom is an unwitting throw-back to some distant pre-Noah ritual which Jehovah opposed? If so, then since it is known that the chalice is a wholly female symbol which has been emblematic of the womb from the earliest times, might this even have been an extract of menstrual blood? The answer to these questions is ‘Yes’. That was precisely the custom, but it was not so unsavoury as it might seem. Indeed, few of us think to enquire about the ultimate sources of many of today’s ingested medicines and bodily supplements, and those in the know would often be reluctant to tell us. The Premarin hormone, for example, comes from the urine of pregnant mares, while certain growth hormones and insulin are manufactured from E. coli, a faecal bacterium.
The blood extract in question was, in the first instance, not human but from the sacred Anunnaki lunar essence – that of Enki’s sister Nin- khursag, the designated Lady of Life. It was defined as the most potent of all life-forces and was venerated as being ‘Star Fire’. It was from the womb of Nin-khursag that the kingly line was born, and it was with her blood, the divine Star Fire, that the Dragon succession was supplementally fed.
In ancient Egypt, Nin-khursag was called ‘Isis’, and by either name she was the ultimate Mother of the Messianic line, for hers was the matriarchal gene which constituted the ‘Beginning’, the ‘Gene-Isis’, or, as the Greeks identified it, the Genesis.
It is worth reminding ourselves, then, that the biblical edict to abstain from blood came not from Enki the Wise but from Enlil-Jehovah – the God of Wrath who had instigated the Flood, had wrought havoc in Ur and Babylon, and had endeavoured to deceive Adam by saying that he would die if he ate from the Tree of Knowledge. This was not a god who liked people, and the Sumerian records are very clear in this regard. Hence, if he forbade the taking of blood, this was not likely to have been an edict for the benefit of Noah and his descendants – it was most probably to their detriment.
In strict terms the original Star Fire was the lunar essence of the Goddess, but, even in an everyday mundane environment, menstruum contains the most valuable endocrinal secretions, especially those of the pineal and pituitary glands. The brain’s pineal gland in particular was directly associated with the Tree of Life, for this tiny gland was said to
secrete the very essence of active longevity, called soma, or, as the Greeks called it, ambrosia.
In mystic circles, the menstrual ‘flow-er’ (‘she who flows’) has long been the designated ‘flower’ and is represented as a lily or a lotus. Indeed, the definition ‘flow-er’ is the very root of our modern word ‘flower’. In ancient Sumer, the key females of the Dragon succession were all venerated as lilies, having such names as Lili, Luluwa, Lilith, Lilutu and
Lillette.
In pictorial representation, the Messianic Dragon bore little relation to the winged, fire-breathing beast of later Western mythology. It was, in essence, a large-jawed serpent with four legs, very much like a crocodile or a monitor. This was the sacred Messeh whose name was ‘Draco’. Draco was a divine emblem of the Egyptian Pharaohs, a symbol of the Egyptian Therapeutate, of the Essenes at Qumran, and was the Bistea Neptunis (the sea serpent) of the descendant Merovingian Fisher-Kings in Europe.
In the old Hebrew Bibles, all references to serpents are made by use of the word nahash (from the stem NHSH); but this usage does not relate to serpents in the way that we would know them – that is, as venomous snakes. It relates to serpents in their traditional capacity as bringers of wisdom and enlightenment, for the word nahash actually means ‘to decipher’ or ‘to find out’.
Serpents, in one form or another, were always associated with wisdom and healing, and the Trees of Life and Knowledge are customarily identified with serpents. Indeed, the insignia of many of today’s medical associations is precisely this image of a serpent coiled around the Plant of Birth (Tree of Life) – a depiction shown in the clay reliefs of ancient Sumer to be Enki’s personal emblem.
Interestingly, though, another common emblem for medical relief organisations depicts two coiled serpents, spiralling around the winged caduceus of Hermes the magician. In these instances the true symbolism of the Star Fire ritual is conveyed, and this symbol can be traced back to the very origins of the alchemical mystery schools and gnostic
institutions.
The records explain that the central staff and entwined serpents represent the spinal cord and the sensory nervous system. The two uppermost wings signify the brain’s lateral ventricular structures. Between these wings, above the spinal column, is shown the small central node of the pineal gland.
[Also, one can't help but notice the resemblance to DNA-The Magus]
The combination of the central pineal and its lateral wings has long been referred to as the ‘Swan’, and in Grail lore (as in some yogic circles) the Swan is emblematic of the fully enlightened being. This is the ultimate realm of consciousness achieved by the mediaeval Knights of the Swan, as epitomised by such chivalric figures as Perceval and Lohengrin.
Most of you are probably quite familiar with the functions of the pineal and other glands of the endocrinal system. But for those who are perhaps not, the pineal is a very small gland, shaped like a pine cone and about the size of a grain of corn. It is centrally situated within the brain, although outside the ventricles and not forming a part of the brain-matter as such.
The pineal gland was thought by the 17th-century French optical scientist René Descartes to be the seat of the soul – the point at which the mind and body are conjoined. The ancient Greeks considered it likewise, and in the 4th century BC Herophilus described the pineal as an organ which regulated the flow of thought. This gland has long intrigued anatomists because, while the rest of the brain is ‘double’, the pineal has no counterpart.
In the days of ancient Sumer, the priests of Anu (the father of Enlil and Enki) perfected and elaborated a ramifying medical science of living substances, with menstrual Star Fire being an essential source component. In the first instance, this was pure Anunnaki lunar essence called ‘Gold of the Gods’, and it was fed only to the Kings and Queens of the Dragon succession. Later, however, in Egypt and Mediterranea, menstrual Star Fire was ritually collected from sacred virgin priestesses who were venerated as ‘Scarlet Women’. Indeed, the very word ‘ritual’ stems from this practice, and from the word ritu – which defined the sacred ceremony of the ‘Red Gold’.
Endocrinal supplements are, of course, still used by today’s organotherapy establishment, but their inherent secretions (such as melatonin and serotonin) are obtained from the dessicated glands of dead animals and they lack the truly important elements which exist only in live human glandular manufacture.
In the fire symbolism of ancient alchemy, the colour ‘red’ is synonymous with the metal ‘gold’. In some traditions (including the Indian tantras), ‘red’ is also identifiable with ‘black’. Hence, the goddess Kali is said to be both ‘red’ and ‘black’. The original heritage of Kali was, however, Sumerian, and she was said to be Kalimâth, the sister of Cain’s wife
Luluwa.
Kali was a primary princess of the Dragon House, and from her Star Fire association she became the goddess of time, seasons, periods and cycles. Because of this, her name was the root of the word ‘calendar’ (kalindar), which is concerned with the divisions of seasonal time.
In the early days, therefore, the metals of the alchemists were not common metals but living essences, and the ancient mysteries were of a physical, not a metaphysical, nature. Indeed, the very word ‘secret’ has its origin in the hidden knowledge of glandular secretions. Truth was the ritu (the ‘redness’ or ‘blackness’), and from the word ritu stems not only ritual but also the words ‘rite’, ‘root’ and ‘red’. The ritu, it was said, reveals itself as physical matter in the form of the purest and most noble of all metals: gold. Hence, gold was deemed an ‘ultimate truth’.
Just as the word ‘secret’ has its origin in the translation of an ancient word, so too do other related words have their similar bases. In ancient Egypt, the word Amen was used to signify something hidden or concealed. The word ‘occult’ meant pretty much the same (‘hidden from view’), and yet today we use ‘Amen’ to conclude hymns, while something ‘occult’ is deemed sinister. In real terms, however, they both relate to the word ‘secret’, and all three words were, at one time or another, connected with the mystic science of endocrinal secretions.
Since Kali was associated with ‘black’ (being ‘black but beautiful’), the English word ‘coal’ (denoting ‘that which is black’) stems also from her name via the intermediate word kol. In the Hebrew tradition, Bath-Kol (a Kali counterpart) was called the ‘Daughter of the Voice’, and the voice was said to originate during a female’s puberty. Hence, the womb was associated with the voice, and Star Fire was said to be the oracular ‘Word of the Womb’. The womb was, therefore, itself the ‘utterer’, or the ‘uterus’.
The ‘Scarlet Women’ were so called because of their being a direct source of the priestly Star Fire. They were known in Greek as the Hierodulai (‘Sacred Women’) – a word later transformed (via medieval French into English) to ‘harlot’. In the early Germanic tongue, they were known as Horés – which was later Anglicised to ‘whores’. However, the word originally meant, quite simply, ‘Beloved Ones’. As pointed out in good etymological dictionaries, these words were descriptions of high veneration and were never interchangeable with such words as ‘prostitute’ or ‘adulteress’. Their now common association was, in fact, a wholly contrived strategy of the mediaeval Roman Church in its bid to
denigrate the noble status of the sacred priestess.
The withdrawal of knowledge of the genuine Star Fire tradition from the public domain occurred when the science of the early adepts and later Gnostics (the true pre-Christian Christians) was stifled by the forgers of historic Christianity. A certain amount of the original gnosis (or knowledge) is preserved in Talmudic and rabbinical lore, but, generally speaking, the mainstream Jews and Christians did all in their power to distort and destroy all traces of the ancient art.
In addition to being the ‘Gold of the Gods’, the Anunnaki menstruum was also called the ‘Vehicle of Light’, being the ultimate source of manifestation, and in this regard it was directly equated with the mystical ‘Waters of Creation’ – the flow of eternal wisdom. It was for this reason that the Rosi-Crucis (the Dew Cup, or Cup of the Waters identified as a red cross within a circle) became the Mark of Cain, and the subsequent emblem of the kingly succession.
It was said that the Light remained quite dormant in a spiritually unawakened person but that it could be awakened and motivated by the spiritual energy of self-will, and by constant self-enquiry. This is not an obvious mental process, but a truly thought-free consciousness – a formless plane of pure Being.
By the 1880s, the governing establishments of Christendom were dreading the very word ‘archaeologist’. And so, archaeological digs were brought under strict control, and their funding and undertakings had to be approved by newly designated authorities.
One of these, the Egypt Exploration Fund, was established in Britain in 1891, and on the very first page of its Memorandum and Articles of Association it is stated that the Fund’s objective is to promote excavation work “for the purpose of elucidating or illustrating the Old Testament narrative”.
In short, this meant that if something was found which could be used to support the scriptural teaching, then we (the public) would be informed. Anything which did not support the Church interpretation of the Bible was not destined to see the light in the public domain.
Now we are going to take a look at one of the monumental finds from that era – a discovery about which very little is known to people at large. In fact, it is probably the most important biblical discovery ever made and it has stunning implications far beyond the discovery itself, for this is the ultimate story of the Phoenix and the Fire-stone.
Within the Book of Exodus, a significant biblical mountain is named. It sits in the extensive range of the Sinai Peninsula – the upturned triangular land-mass which lies above the Red Sea between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqabah. In the Old Testament, the mountain is firstly called ‘Mount Horeb’, then it is called ‘Mount Sinai’, and is subsequently called ‘Horeb’ again as the story progresses.
The story, of course, is that of Moses and the Israelite exodus from Egypt. This was the mountain upon which, according to Exodus, Moses saw the burning bush; the mountain where he talked with Jehovah; and the place where he received the Ten Commandments and the Tables of Testimony.
Something that we should recognise at this stage is that at the time of Moses (roughly 1350 BC) there was no mountain called ‘Mount Sinai’. There was no mountain by that name even in the days of Jesus, nor even for another 300 years.
It should also be said that the Old Testament which is familiar to us today is a translation from a Hebrew text compiled only 1,000 years ago, and it is therefore a few centuries younger even than the canonical New Testament.
The mountain now generally known as Mount Sinai sits in the south of the peninsula, quite near to the bottom point of the upturned triangle. It was given its name in the 4th century AD by a mission of Greek Christian monks, 1,700 years after the time of Moses. It is now sometimes called ‘Gebel Musa’ (or ‘Mount of Moses’), and a small Christian retreat, St
Catherine’s Monastery, still exists there. But, was this the Sinai mountain which the Bible calls ‘Mount Horeb’? Well, it transpires that it was not.
The Book of Exodus goes into some detail to explain the route taken by Moses and the Israelites from the Nile Delta land of Goshen, down across Sinai, across the wilderness regions of Shur and Paran, to the land of Midian (which is to the north of present-day Jordan). From this route it becomes very easy to identify the location of Mount Horeb. It sits a good deal north of Gebel Musa.
The word horeb simply means ‘desert’, and the great desert mountain which soars to over 2,600 feet within a high stone plateau above the Plain of Paran is today called ‘Serâbît’ – or, to be more precise, Serâbît el-Khâdim (the Prominence of the Khâdim).
In the late 1890s, the British Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, a Professor at the University College, London, applied to the Egypt Exploration Fund to take an expedition into Sinai. By January l904, he and his team were in Sinai, and in March of that year they took their expedition to the heights of Mount Serâbît.
In the following year, Petrie published the detailed results of his findings, but added to his report the fact that this information would not be made available officially to the Egypt Exploration Fund subscribers; they would receive only maps and a general outline. Furthermore, Petrie explained that even though he had taken previously funded teams into Egypt, from the time of that Sinai expedition his sponsorship by the Fund had been terminated. Why? Had he perhaps broken the binding rule of the Articles by divulging something which was contrary to Bible teaching? He certainly had.
In fact, Petrie had discovered the great secret of the sacred mountain of Moses – a secret which not only made sense of the Exodus portrayals, but which (in so doing) blew the lid totally from their common scriptural interpretation.
What the Bible does not make clear is that Sinai was not a foreign land to the Egyptians. It was actually regarded as a part of Egypt and came under Pharaonic control. So Moses and the Israelites had not left Egypt once they were east of the Nile Delta; they were still in Egypt, having the whole Sinai Peninsula to cross before they entered the Palestinian land of Canaan.
During the time of Moses, Sinai came under the control of two Egyptian officials: the Royal Chancellor and the Royal Messenger. This was the era of Egypt’s 18th Dynasty – the dynasty of the Tuthmosis and Amenhotep Pharaohs, along with Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. The Royal Messenger of those times was Neby, an official who was also the mayor and troop commander of Zaru in the Nile Delta region of Goshen, where the Israelites had lived before the exodus.
The position of Royal Chancellor was hereditary in the Hyksos family of Pa-Nehas, and Panahesy of this family was the official Governor of Sinai. We know him better from the Bible as Phinehas. He became one of the first priests of the new Mosaic structure, but previously he had been the Chief Priest at Pharaoh Akhenaten’s temple at Amarna.
Before we get back to Sir William Flinders Petrie, and to understand the root significance of his discovery, it is worth making a necessary distinction between the Israelites and the Hebrews of the Mosaic era. At that time they were not one and the same, as Bible teaching seems to indicate. The Hebrews were the family and descendants of Abraham, and their place of residence was, in the main, Canaan (or Palestine). The Israelites, on the other hand, were the family and descendants of one of Abraham’s grandsons, Jacob, whose name was changed to ‘Israel’. It was Jacob’s family alone who had moved into Egypt, and it was their descendants who eventually returned with Moses – to be reunited, after countless generations, with their fellow Hebrews.
The difference between the strains was, of course, that the Israelites had long been subjected to the laws and religions of Egypt and they knew very little about the customs of their cousins in Canaan. Through more than 400 years they had been in an environment with a whole pantheon of gods; and although they had developed a ‘One God’ concept within their own fraternity, that god was not the Jehovah of the Canaanite Hebrews.
The Israelites’ god was a faceless entity whom they called, quite simply, ‘the Lord’. In the Israelite language he was called ‘Adon’. This is one of the reasons why the names ‘Lord’ and ‘Jehovah’ were always separately identified in early texts, although they were brought under the wrap of the single God in later times to suit the emergent Jewish and Christian faiths. To the Egyptians, the name of this Lord (Adon) was quite similar; they called him ‘Aten’. From this derived the name of Pharaoh Akhenaten, meaning ‘Servant of Aten’.
So, when Moses and the Israelites made their exodus into Sinai, they arrived not as worshippers of Jehovah but of Aten; and it was for this very reason that they were given a whole new set of laws and ordinances to bring them into line with the Hebrew culture of their prospective new homeland.
When Moses and the Israelites left the Nile Delta, their obvious route to Canaan (where they were eventually headed) would have been directly across the wilderness of northern Sinai. So, why did they push southward into the difficult high country to spend some time at the Horeb mountain of Serâbît? This was a question that had long puzzled Petrie and his team.
So, what precisely did they find high on the Bible’s holy mountain? Well, to begin with, they found nothing very much. But on a wide plateau near the summit there were distinct signs of ancient habitation, and some pillars and standing-stones could be seen protruding above the ground-rubble. This rubble had been deposited, little by little, by wind and landslides over some 3,000 years. But when it was finally moved away, the truth of the Bible story emerged. Petrie wrote:
There is no other such monument which makes us regret that it is not in better preservation. The whole of it was buried, and no one had any knowledge of it until we cleared the site.
What they found was an enormous temple complex. Set within an enclosure wall was an outer temple, built over an expanse of 230 feet (approx. 70 metres). This extended outwards from an inner temple cut within a great cave in the mountainside. From the various cartouches, carvings and inscriptions it emerged that the temple had been in use from as far back as the time of Pharaoh Sneferu, who reigned about 2600 BC and whose immediate successors are reckoned to have built the pyramids of Gizeh.
The above-ground part of the temple was constructed from sandstone quarried from the mountain and it comprised a series of adjoined halls, shrines, courts, cubicles and chambers. Of these, the key features unearthed were the main Sanctuary, the Shrine of Kings, the Portico Court, and the Hall of the goddess Hathor (to whom the whole complex was dedicated).
All around were pillars and stelae denoting the Egyptian Kings through the ages, and certain Pharaohs such as Tuthmosis III (founder of the Rosicrucian movement in Egypt) were depicted many times on standing-stones and wall reliefs.
The adjoining Cave of Hathor was carved into the natural rock, with flat inner walls that had been carefully smoothed. In the centre (from about 1820 BC) stood a large upright pillar of Pharaoh Amenemhet III, the son-in-law of Esau. Also portrayed were his senior chamberlain and his seal-bearer.
Deep within the cave Petrie found a limestone stela of Pharaoh Ramesses I – a slab upon which Ramesses (who is traditionally reckoned by Egyptologists to have been an opposer of the Aten cult) surprisingly described himself as “The ruler of all that Aten embraces”. Also found was an Amarna statue-head of Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiye of Egypt, with her cartouche set in the crown.
In the courts and halls of the outer temple there were numerous stone-carved rectangular tanks and circular basins, along with a variety of curiously shaped benchtables with recessed fronts and split-level surfaces. There were also round tables, trays and saucers together with alabaster vases and containers, many of which were shaped like lotus flowers. In addition, the rooms housed a good collection of glazed plaques, cartouches, scarabs and sacred ornaments designed with spirals, diagonal squares and basketwork. There were magical wands of an unidentified hard material, and in the portico were two conical stones of about six inches and nine inches, respectively, in height.
The explorers were baffled enough by these finds, but they were further confounded by the discovery of a metallurgist’s crucible. Ever since, Egyptologists have argued as to why crucibles would have been necessary in a temple – while at the same time debating a mysterious substance, called mfkzt, which seemed to be related to the crucible and the conical stones and which had dozens of mentions in wall and stelae inscriptions.
Some have suggested that mfkzt might have been copper; many have preferred the idea of turquoise; and others have supposed it was perhaps malachite. But these are all unsubstantiated guesses, and there were no traces of any of these materials at the site.
Sinai is noted for its turquoise mines, but if turquoise mining had been a primary function of the temple masters over so many centuries then one would expect to find turquoise stones in abundance within the tombs of Egypt. But such is not the case. Hardly any have been found.
Another cause of wonderment has been the innumerable inscribed references to ‘bread’, along with the prominent hieroglyph for ‘Light’ found in the Shrine of the Kings. The discovery which caused the most bewilderment, however, was the unearthing of something which was identified as the enigmatic mfkzt to which the ‘bread’ symbolism seemed to be related. Laying some inches deep in a storeroom was a considerable supply of the finest, pure white, unadulterated powder.
At the time, some suggested that the powder could be a remnant of copper smelting, but, as was quickly pointed out, smelting does not produce white powder; it leaves a dense black slag. Moreover, there was no supply of copper ore within miles of the temple, and the old smelting works were in any event apparent in the distant valleys. Others guessed that the powder was ash from the burning of plants to produce alkali, but there was no trace whatever of any plant residue.
For want of any other explanation, it was determined that the white powder and the conical stones were probably associated with some form of sacrificial rite, but again it was pointed out that this was an Egyptian temple and animal sacrifice was not an Egyptian practice. Moreover, there were no remnants whatever of bones or any other foreign matter within the mfkzt, which appeared for all the world like a hoard of sacred talcum-powder.
Some of the mysterious powder was taken back to Britain for analysis and examination – but no results were ever published. The rest (opened to the elements after 3,000 years) was left to become a victim of the desert winds.
What has become apparent, however, is that this powder was seemingly identical to the ancient Mesopotamian fire-stone or shem-an-na – the substance that was made into bread-cakes and used to feed the Light-bodies of the Babylonian Kings and the Pharaohs of Egypt.
This, of course, explains the temple inscriptions denoting the importance of bread and light, and this white powder (the shem-an-na) was identified with the sacred manna that Aaron placed in the Ark of the Covenant. In Egypt, the cakes made from this powder were called ‘scheffa food’, while the Israelites called them ‘shewbread’.
The Book of Exodus tells us that the Master Craftsman who made the original shewbread for Moses in Sinai was Bezaleel, the son of Uri Ben Hur. But Bezaleel was not a baker; he was a noted goldsmith – the very man who made the golden accoutrements for the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant.
This conforms precisely with the function of the priestly Master Craftsmen in Mesopotamia. They were the great Vulcans and metallurgists of Tubal-cain, who manufactured the valuable shem-an-na from pure gold.
As for the crucible, the conical stones and the great array of tanks, tables and equipment which made the Sinai temple appear more like a gigantic laboratory than a church, it emerges that this is precisely what it was.
What Petrie had actually found was the alchemical workshop of Akhenaten and of the 18 dynasties of Pharaohs before him – a temple-laboratory where the furnace would have roared and smoked in the production of the sacred fire-stone of the high-spin shem-an-na. Quite suddenly, the words of Exodus begin to make sense as we read them again with a wholly new insight:
And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.
In Exodus we read that Moses took the golden calf which the Israelites had made, and then burnt it in the fire and ground it to a white powder. This is precisely the process of a shem-an-na furnace, and it is evident that the Egyptian priests of the goddess Hathor had been working their fire for countless generations before the priests of Aten became involved in the time of Moses.
It was in fact Pharaoh Tuthmosis III who had reorganised the ancient mystery-schools of Thoth and founded the Royal School of the Master Craftsmen at Karnak. They were called the ‘Great White Brotherhood’ because of their preoccupation with a mysterious white powder. A branch of this fraternity became especially concerned with medicines and healing, and they became known as the Egyptian ‘Therapeutate’. In much later times, the Therapeutate extended its activities into Palestine, especially into the Judah settlement of Qumran where they flourished as the Essenes.
But what was so special about the goddess Hathor? Why was she the chosen deity of the Sinai priests? Hathor was a paramount nursing goddess, and as the daughter of Ra she was said to have given birth to the Sun. She was the originally defined ‘Queen of the West’ and ‘Mistress of the Netherworld’, to where she was said to carry those who knew the right spells. She was the revered protectress of womanhood, the ‘Lady of the Sycamore’, and the goddess of love, tombs and song. And it was from the milk of Hathor that the Pharaohs were said to gain
their divinity, becoming gods in their own right.
On one of the rock tablets near to the Mount Serâbît cave entrance is a representation of Tuthmosis IV in the presence of Hathor. Before him are two offering-stands topped with lotus flowers, and behind him is a man bearing a conical cake of white bread. Another relief details the mason Ankhib offering two conical bread-cakes of shem-an-na to the king, and there are similar portrayals elsewhere in the temple complex. One of the most significant perhaps is a depiction of Hathor and Amenhotep III. The goddess holds a necklace in one hand, while offering the emblem of life and dominion to the Pharaoh with the other. Behind her is the treasurer Sobekhotep, who holds in readiness a conical cake of white bread. Sobekhotep is described as the “Overseer of the Secrets of the House of Gold, who brought the noble and precious stone to His Majesty”.
I mentioned earlier that, upon coming out of Egypt into Sinai en route to Canaan, the Israelites would have expected to be made familiar with the laws and ordinances of their new homeland. However, although this appears to have been partially the case, the situation was largely reversed on the religious front, with the Egyptian customs being introduced to the native Hebrews.
It was upon the mountain at Sinai that Jehovah first announced his presence to Moses. Being an Aten supporter, Moses asked this new lord and master who he was, and the reply was “I am that I am”, which in phonetic Hebrew became ‘Jehovah’. However, for the longest time
afterwards, the Israelites were not allowed to utter the name ‘Jehovah’ – with the exception of the High Priest who was allowed to whisper the name in private once a year. The problem was that prayers were supposed to be said to this new godhead – but how would he know the
prayers were said to him if his name was not mentioned?
The Israelites knew that Jehovah was not the same as Aten (their traditional Adon or Lord), and so they presumed he must be the equivalent of the great State-god of Egypt, even if not one and the same. It was decided, therefore, to add the name of that State- god to all prayers thereafter, and the name of that god was ‘Amen’. To this day, the name of ‘Amen’ is still recited at the end of prayers. Even the well-known Christian Lord’s Prayer (as given in the Gospel of Matthew) was transposed from an Egyptian original which began, “Amen, Amen, who art in heaven…”
As for the famous Ten Commandments (said to have been conveyed to Moses by God upon the mountain), these too are of Egyptian origin and they derive directly from Spell Number 125 in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. They were not new codes of conduct invented for the Israelites, but were simply newly stated versions of the ritual confessions of the Pharaohs. For example, the confession “I have not killed” was translated to the decree “Thou shalt not kill”; “I have not stolen” became “Thou shalt not steal”; “I have not told lies” became “Thou shalt not bear false witness”; and so on.
Not only were the Ten Commandments drawn from Egyptian ritual, but so too were the Psalms reworked from Egyptian hymns (though they are attributed to King David). Even the Old Testament Book of Proverbs – the so-called ‘wise words of Solomon’ – was translated almost verbatim into Hebrew from the writings of an Egyptian sage called Amenemope. These are now held at the British Museum, and verse after verse of the Book of Proverbs can be attributed to this Egyptian original. It has now been discovered that even the writings of Amenemope were extracted from a far older work called The Wisdom of Ptah-hotep, which comes from more than 2,000 years before the time of Solomon.
In addition to the Book of the Dead and the ancient Wisdom of Ptah-hotep, various other Egyptian texts were used in compiling the Old Testament. These include the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts, from which references to the Egyptian gods were simply transposed to relate to the Hebrew god Jehovah.
In Bloodline of the Holy Grail I made the point that the modern style of Christianity, which evolved from the Roman Church in the 4th century AD, was actually a created ‘hybrid’ – a religion based on themes from numerous others, including, of course, Judaism.
Now it transpires that Judaism itself was no less of a hybrid in the early days, being a composite of Egyptian, Canaanite and Mesopotamian traditions, with the stories, hymns, prayers and rituals of the various and sundry gods brought together and related to a newly contrived ‘One God’ concept.
What is particularly interesting is that, historically, this was not fully contrived in the time of Abraham, nor even in the later time of Moses. It did not happen until the 6th century BC, when tens of thousands of Israelites were held captive by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Until that time, the Hebrew and Israelite records referred to any number of gods and goddesses by individual names, and under a general plural classification of ‘the Elohim’.
Through some 500 years from the captivity, the scriptures existed only as a series of quite separate writings, and it was not until after the time of Jesus that these were collated into a single volume. Jesus himself would never have heard of the Old Testament or the Bible, but the scriptures to which he had access included many books that were not selected for the compilation that we know today.
Strangely, though, some of these books are still mentioned in the modern
Bible text as being important to the original culture. They include the
Book of the Lord, the Book of the Wars of Jehovah, and the Book of
Jasher. Why were they not included? Quite simply because their content
did not suit the new Jehovah-based religion that was being created.
Jasher, for example, was the Egyptian-born son of Caleb; the brother-in-
law to the first Israelite judge Othneil; and the appointed royal staff-
bearer to Moses. It is generally reckoned that the Book of Jasher’s
position in the Bible should be between the books of Deuteronomy and
Joshua, but it was sidestepped by the editors because it sheds a very
different light on the sequence of events at Mount Horeb in Sinai.
The familiar Exodus account explains that Jehovah issued instructions to
Moses concerning masters and servants, covetousness, neighbourly
behaviour, crime, marriage, morality and many other issues including the
all-important rule of the Sabbath, along with the Ten Commandments.
But, in Jasher (which pre-dates the Exodus writings), these laws and
ordinances are not conveyed to Moses by Jehovah. In fact, Jehovah is not
mentioned at all. The new laws, says the Book of Jasher, were
communicated to Moses and the Israelites by Jethro, High Priest of
Midian and Lord of the Mountain. In effect, Jethro was the overall
governor of the Sinai temple.
In Hebrew, the title ‘Lord (or Lofty One) of the Mountain’ was translated
as ‘El Shaddai’, and this is particularly significant for that was precisely
the name related to Moses when he asked the Lord to reveal his identity.
The Lord said, “I am that I am. I am he that Abraham called ‘El
Shaddai’”. “I am that I am” eventually became transposed to the name
‘Jehovah’, but, as related in Jasher (and as confirmed in Exodus when
correctly read), this Lord was not a deiform god at all. He was Jethro the
El Shaddai, the great vulcan and Master Craftsman of the Hathor temple.
Apart from the fact that we are taught about certain aspects of the Bible
text, I think it is fair to say that not too many of us actually study the
books ourselves. As a result of this, our perceived images are generally
those conjured by picture-books and films. Hollywood, of course, has
done us proud with its portrayals of Moses on the mountain and God
blasting the words of the Ten Commandments onto two great, barely
portable, granite slabs. In Exodus, however, there is no such depiction,
and the Commandments are said to have been written down by Moses
himself (at the dictation of the Lord) after he had broken the first tablets
that he was given.
As for the other part of the Sinai package, the Tables of Testimony, these
are stated in the teachings of the Kabbala and the Midrash to have been
held within a sacred gemstone which Moses placed “in the palm of his
hand”. This was the same Divine Stone of Wisdom said to have been
inherited by King Solomon. In the earlier texts of Egypt it was called the
‘Tablet of Hermes’, which embodied the wisdom of Thoth.
According to the records of the ancient Dragon Court of Egypt (founded by Queen Sobeknefru in 1785 BC), an early guardian of the Table was Chem, the High Priest of Mendes. The word chem (or khame) means ‘blackness’, and from this root word derived the word ‘alchemy’ – the science of extracting light from the blackness. To us, Chem is perhaps
better known as the biblical Ham, the grandfather of Nimrod, whose family was cursed by the Hebrews because his historical tradition was in conflict with the emergent Jehovah-based culture.
Readers of Gothic novels and books about sorcery will, of course, recognise the name Chem of Mendes. He is often symbolised by a goat, which was precisely the emblem of Ham in ancient Egypt. The only difference is that in latter-day Christian lore the goat is meant to be symbolic of the Devil. What we now discover, however, is that by following the story of Chem of Mendes we are led directly to the Sinai temple and to the white powder of gold.
Mendes was a major city of the Egyptian Delta, and Chem was the temple’s designated Archon of the 10th Age of Capricorn. It was in this Capricorn regard that his symbol was a goat, generally depicted by an inverted pentagram. This five-pointed star has two uppermost points, which are the horns of the Goat of Mendes. The two downward-sloping
side points represent the ears, and the single base-point is the chin and beard.
When a pentagram is seen in this inverted position, it is regarded as a male emblem, but the pentagram star is, of course, a female device (a Venus symbol) and is usually shown with the single point uppermost.
In the pentagram’s male position, Chem is personally identified by an emerald jewel set centrally at the meeting of the horns. When turned about, the pentagram achieves its female status with the uppermost single point becoming the head of the goddess. The side points are now arms, while the twin points (once the horns) are now at the base, being
the legs of the goddess, with the emerald jewel of Venus established in the vulval position.
Sometimes the inverted pentagram of Chem is shown with flames rising from the sacred jewel between the horns. These flames are traditionally referred to as ‘Astral Light’. But when reversed into the Venus position, the uterine flames are identified as ‘Star Fire’, the lunar essence of the goddess.
>From the earliest times, whether representing Astral Light or Star Fire, the pentagram was indicative of enlightenment. It was associated with the pre-Jewish Sabbath – a ritualistic period of reflection and experience outside of general toil. For this reason, Chem of Mendes was called the ‘Sabbatical Goat’ – from which derived today’s use of the word ‘sabbatical’ in academic circles.
In view of this age-old tradition, it is hardly surprising that the pentagram and Sabbatical Goat became associated with heterodox Christians (like the Cathars of Languedoc) from medieval times. In contrast, the orthodox Christian Church endeavored to overawe the old wisdom of the mystery schools by creating a hybrid religion based upon salvation from the
unknown – a salvation that was only attained through people’s subjugation to the authority of the bishops. As an outcome, the spiritually based doctrines of the Gnostic movement (which sought to ‘discover’ the unknown) were declared blasphemous by the Inquisition, while the
pentagram and the goat were denounced as symbols of black magic and witchcraft.
From those times (even to the present day in some circles), personal attainment and learning which does not conform to the bishops’ opinions has been considered heretical. And individually acquired wisdom became so feared that the Goat of Mendes has been decried as
the epitome of the Devil himself. This is manifest in a wealth of trashy propagandist novels (by Dennis Wheatley and others) wherein crucifixes and holy water abound as the weapons used against the so-called emissary of Satan.
Ham (or Chem) is given in the Old Testament as a son of Noah, but in the oldest records he is correctly identified (along with Japhet) as being a son of the great Vulcan and goldsmith Tubal-cain who is better known to historians as King Meskalam-dug, the Hero of the Good Land.
In the early lore of Palestine, Chem was synonymous with a certain Azazel of Capricorn who (according to the Book of Enoch) made known to men “all the metals, and the art of working them, and the use of antimony”. Antimony is the black element otherwise known as ‘stibium’. This is an essential ingredient of the preparatory alchemical process when producing the Philosophers’ Stone. In the ancient Arab world, antimony was called kohl, from which derives the word ‘coal’, meaning ‘that which is black’. The related word ‘alcohol’ stems from the Arabic al-kohul – the highly refined ‘philosophical mercury’ prepared from spirits of wine
rectified over antimony.
Azazel of Capricorn actually appears in the Bible, but not in the authorised English-language translation. In the Vulgate Book of Leviticus there is an early reference to the custom of Atonement, and it states that Aaron shall cast lots upon two goats, “one for the Lord, and the other for Azazel”. That which fell to the lot of the Lord was to be sacrificed as a ‘sin
offering’, and the other was to be sent into the wilderness as an ‘atonement’.
The more familiar English translation is somewhat confusing, for the name ‘Azazel’ has been supplanted by the word ‘scapegoat’. The reason for the substitution was simply that the original sequence made it quite clear that Hebrew offerings were made both to Jehovah and to Chem-Azazel, while the Book of Enoch (which was excluded from the Old Testament) drew readers’ attention to the direct link between Azazel and hermetic alchemy.
In the tradition of the Rosicrucian mystery schools, the writings of Chem (the Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis) were recorded as “The most ancient monument of the Chaldeans concerning the Philosophers’ Stone”. Being associated with the wisdom of Thoth (or Hermes), they were defined as hermetic teachings, and they were directly linked to the fire alchemy of
pyramid construction.
The very name ‘Hermes’ derives from the word herma, which means ‘a pile of stones’, and the Great Pyramid was called the ‘Sanctuary of Thoth’. The word pyr, from which derive ‘pyro-’, ‘pyre’ and ‘pyramid’, actually means ‘fire’ – and the pyramids were so called because they
were ‘fire-begotten’.
This leads us to one of the great unanswered questions: How did they build the pyramids? Were the thousands of massive blocks raised to great heights with such accuracy by hundreds of thousands of slaves using nothing but ropes and ramps over an undefined period of time, as
is the common speculation? Certainly not. To construct an inclined plane to the top of the Great Pyramid at a gradient of 1:10 would have required a ramp 4,800 feet (approx. 1,463 metres) long, with a volume three times greater than that of the Pyramid itself.
As we saw earlier, the powder of the highward fire-stone is a monatomic superconductor. It is exotic matter with a gravitational attraction of less than zero. Recent experiments with this amazing white powder of gold have proven that, under certain conditions, the substance can weigh less than nothing and can be made to disappear into an unknown dimension. The most interesting quality of the powder, however, is that it rides upon the Earth’s magnetic field, so that when it is in a zero-gravity state it is capable of transposing its own weightlessness to its host, thereby facilitating levitational powers. This host might be a laboratory pan, a
container, or a table – or it could just as easily be an enormous block of stone!
The age-old tradition relates that in the secret repository of the King’s Chamber within the Great Pyramid the builders had placed “instruments of iron, and arms which rust not, and glass which might be bended and yet not broken, and strange spells”. But what did the first explorers find, having tunnelled their way into the sealed chamber? The only furniture was a lidless, hollowed stone coffer, and it contained not a body but a layer of a mysterious powdery substance. This has been superficially determined to be grains of feldspar and mica, which are both minerals of the aluminium silicate group.
During the course of the recent white powder research, aluminium and silica were two of the constituent elements revealed by conventional analysis of a granular sample that was known to be a 100 per cent platinum-group compound.
Standard laboratory testing is done by striking a sample with a DC arc for 15 seconds at a Sun-surface heat of 5,500° Centigrade. However, with the white powder, a continuation of the burn-time way beyond the normal testing procedure revealed the noble platinum metals of which the substance truly consisted.
It is because of the limitations placed on the conventional testing sequence that five per cent by dry weight of our brain tissue is said to be carbon, whereas more rigorous analysis reveals it as the platinum metals iridium and rhodium in the high-spin state.
The King’s Chamber was, in fact, contrived as a superconductor, capable of transporting the Pharaoh into another dimension of space-time. And it was here that the Pharaoh’s Rite of Passage was administered in accordance with the Book of the Dead.
The key to this Rite of Passage is defined by a single conical inscription near the entrance to the Chamber. This hieroglyphic symbol – the only verifiable hieroglyph on the whole of the Gizeh Plateau, and the very same as appeared many times at the Sinai mountain temple – reads, quite simply, ‘Bread’.
In the context of this talk, we have stepped beyond the bounds of the Bible to witness the alchemical and scientific process which facilitated the genesis of the Grail Kings. This line of succession from Cain, through Egypt to King David and onward to Jesus, was purpose-bred to be the earthly Purveyors of the Light. They were the true Sons of the Gods, who were fed firstly on Anunnaki Star Fire from about 3800 BC and, subsequently, on ‘high-spin’ metal supplements from about 2000 BC. In short, they were bred to be leaders of humankind, and they were both mentally and physically maintained in the ‘highward’ state: the ultimate
dimension of the missing 44 per cent – the dimension of the Orbit of Light, or the Plane of Sharon.
Only during the past 150 years or so, and more specifically during the past 80 years, have the great storehouses of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Syrian and Canaanite record been unearthed from beneath the desert sands. First-hand documentary evidence from before Bible times has
now emerged on stone, clay, parchment and papyrus, and these many tens of thousands of documents bear witness to a far more exciting history than we were ever told.
Had these records been available throughout the generations, the concept of a particular race enjoying a single Divine revelation would never have arisen, and the exclusivity of Jehovah – which has blinded us for the longest time, setting us in warlike fashion against those of other
faiths who follow their own traditions – would never have taken such an arrogant hold.
Gradually, as new discoveries are made, it is evident that we are now emerging from the darkness of our preconceived but unfounded notions. Even so, our centuries of Church-led indoctrination make it very difficult to discard the restrictive dogma of inbred third-hand tradition in favour of a greater enlightenment from those who were there at the time.
The truly inspiring prospect is that the learning curve has still not ended. Just as a single glacier is but a continuation of age-old activity, so too are the ancient wisdoms that now fall to us one by one, with each new facet of learning ready to be stacked upon the former knowledge.
Fortunately, the dawn of consciousness is already behind us and, although some will choose to look backwards beyond its veil, many will step with vigour into the new millennium to witness a bright new sunrise – a revelation of unbounded possibility and a restoration of our true universal inheritance.
***
LINKS: http://www.marymagdalenebooks.com/blog/lire-article-718360-9852093-holy_grail_part_1.html
The Grail exists as a result of the soul’s longing for a solution to the mystery of self-consciousness.
Grail legends have existed throughout history. The Grail is often represented as something physical, which materially exists. It can be a jewel, a precious stone, or a holy stone which fell from heaven, or a cup or goblet. It can be an enormous bowl called a Crater, which evokes Celtic origins, or a platter - it’s never simply called a plate - on which is the food of the gods carried by a maiden. For maiden read virgin. (The symbolism is clear, the sublime bliss can be achieved by eating the food of love offered by a virgin. It’s no accident that the “Mary” in the Grail stories, at the time of the Troubadours, was the Virgin Mary.)
The common elements in Grail stories include a great castle perched on top of a precipitous mountain and a sacred glade through which runs a river, whose source never dries up; these are Celtic elements. Through this landscape we follow the adventures of a young man on a quest or journey, throughout which he is tested in trials of physical, emotional and spiritual strength and has to learn various lessons, some of them quite harsh. He has to face daunting challenges. In the end he reaches Heaven, or Knowledge, or Bliss, or Enlightenment. Or he finds a Treasure - the Grail.
Once the Grail is found, by someone who has passed all the tests and is therefore worthy of possessing it, the object - the Grail - will restore harmony to the world and happiness to humanity. This is of course, what every Knight earnestly desires. However, to some the Grail, called spiritual perfection, becomes a material object or even a simple search for financial treasure.
The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château and the Treasure of Montségur are basically Holy Grail legends, become recently more powerful because Mary Magdalene has been thrown in. She was apparently a priestess to the Cathars, who practised a religion based on love, and she wrote books of wisdom that became the great Cathar treasure, and are still waiting to be found. None of which is historically true. But the Grail is too powerful a concept to resist.
Many think of the Grail legends as being of Christian origin but there are pre-Christian similar stories everywhere. There’s a story that Seth, one of the children of Adam and Eve, returned to the Garden of Eden where he was given the Grail by God as a sign that God had not forgotten his people. We hear that the Grail was an emerald stone from the crown of the Light bringer, Lucifer, the Angel of the Morning. During the war between the angels it fell to earth; Lucifer lost the war, and became the Devil.
Author Hannah Closs, writing about the Grail in the 1930’s, compared legends of the East with the Grail stories, often thought to have originated at the time of the Crusades, and tells us “Connections with the Arabs and even long before them were far stronger” than suspected. This Arab connection was merely reinforced when the Crusades began in 1099.
I saw a film recently about the Occitan culture in Languedoc and the Troubadours. The experts had reconstructed the musical instruments and the songs of the Troubadours, and I recognised various harmonies that came from India, for the Occitan songs ended with minor chords. (The music we are used to nearly always ends with a major chord, which makes it more satisfying.) The music travelled across the Mediterranean to Spain and then from Saragossa to Carcassonne; the troubadour culture had begun. And so it seems to me true that Grail Legends came from the East.
The Dark Age Kings
Between 400AD and 800AD events took place in England and France that were later used in the Grail legends of the Middle Ages. Rival and treacherous kings featured in his story, and a wasteland. The Visigothic king Théodoric, established a brilliant court at Toulouse in 418AD. Then there was a sequence of natural catastrophes - floods, earthquakes, hails of falling stars, dramatic eclipses of the sun - which lasted two years. The darkened sky affected the weather patterns and the crops; there was “a waste land.”
These catastrophes continued. In 469 when King Euric was fighting in central France, there were strange tales of blood spouting in the town centre. In the sky was seen two suns among the stars. (A comet?) When he was fighting in Provence in 472 there was an eruption of Vesuvius in Italy. After 472 the volcano was relatively quiet until an immense eruption in 1631 which killed 18,000 people.
On 26th May 492 there was an earthquake at Ravenna. In the late summer of 526 a comet appeared over Italy and Europe; there were frequent earthquakes.
In France the 5th century Visigothic king Alaric was attacked and killed by the Frankish invaders from the north. Now, like the legendary King Arthur of Britain, he is waiting silently under the Montagne d’Alaric to rise again and ride into battle to save his people.
Alaric battled with evil and lost; but one day he will return to bring about a peaceful world. King Arthur of Britain, half-Roman, half Celt, was also the rightful king but failed to protect his people from the savage invaders, the Jutes, Angles and Saxons. Like Alaric, Arthur is a “sleeping warrior” who will return to rescue Britain when the time is right.
In 532 Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was betrayed by traitors and burnt. Historian Theophanes wrote; “the same year there was a great running of stars from the evening till dawn, so that all were struck with amazement and said; “the stars are falling “ from the sky, nor do we know of such a thing at any other time.”
In 536 there was plague in Europe.
I read in the Guardian in September 2002 about scientists who quoted the legend of King Arthur, which involved a “waste land”. The scientists had discovered, from the growth rings of trees around the world, that a natural global catastrophe shook the world around 540. Failed harvests and epidemics always coincided with stunted tree growth. The skies had darkened, summers were chilly, crops had failed, famine was widespread and one third of the people of Europe perished.
The scientists claimed this wasteland was caused by a cometary bombardment and Arthur had died around 540. It was interesting that the scientists linked this event only to Britain, rather than to Europe, for I found a 13th century reference to a comet in Gaul so big that the sky seemed on fire in either 540 or 541. Was it then, a different catastrophe 122 years earlier, in 418, when Théodoric began his kingship in Gaul? In 1990 three British astronomers calculated the earth had been threatened by cometary bombardment between 400 and 600. So was there a series of catastrophes which lasted around 200 years?
Yes. These catastrophes were caused by violent volcanic explosions.
We know well the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883; the noise was heard 3,000 miles away, shock waves and tunsamis travelled all around the world, while whole towns were buried or borne away by tidal waves. The debris from the explosion was funnelled upwards by the crater to reach jet-steams 20 miles high to form a layer of dust three miles in depth, which caused strange sunsets and dark days, and caused a lowering of temperature world-wide.
I read the history of Krakatoa. To my surprise the volcano had exploded many times before 1883. It had exploded in 416AD - near enough to the time the Visigoths under Théodoric came to Gaul to be acceptable as the cause of the natural catastrophes there, the dark skies, the waste land.
Krakatoa is situated between the south Indonesian islands of Sumartra and Java. A Javanese court poet wrote a history of Java called “Book of Kings.” He says about the 416 eruption; A thundering noise was heard from the mountain Batuwara, which was answered by a similar noise coming from Kapi (Krakatoa). A great glaring fire which reached the sky came out of this mountain . . the whole world was greatly shaken and violent thundering accompanied by heavy rains and storms took place. . . the noise was fearful . . Kapi burst into two pieces with a tremendous roar and sank into the deepness of the earth. The water of the sea rose and inundated the land . . the people were drowned and swept away with all their property . . . later the land around Kapi became sea . . and this event was the origin of the separation of Sumatra and Java.
That was in 416 but what about the world-wide catastrophe of around 540 quoted the scientists of the King Arthur story? That also was Krakatoa! Analysis of dust in the ice-cores of the poles dated the event between 510 and 560; the “Book of Kings” dated it precisely as 535. Rome found the skies were veiled and the spring and summer exceptionally cold. There was a plague in Constantinople, and drought and famine all over the land.
These events which caused a “waste land” spanned 200 years. In France they were related to the Visigoths, but in Britain they were related to King Arthur.
The stories of King Arthur and King Alaric are quite similar. Alaric the Visigoth was a much-loved man who tried to keep everybody happy. He had a council of advisers and they were all equal; a sort of Visigothic Knights of the Round Table? Alaric had an illegitimate son called Gesalaric and a legitimate son called Amalaric, by his wife who was the daughter of Théodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king of Italy. Théodoric the Great tried to control and arrange people to suit his own ends. He was a manipulator - a Merlin character. He had promised Alaric support against Clovis. But at a third meeting with Clovis, at which there was no sign of Théodoric, Alaric, with only a routine garrison with him, was attacked. Had he been betrayed?
Alaric returned to his Languedocian strongholds, with his son Amalaric, only 5 years old. There is no mention that Gesalaric, then aged 20, was with his father, and one wonders why. Alaric moved the court to his fortress on the Montagne d’Alaric, to await reinforcements from Théodoric the Great. The reinforcements never came.
That summer of 508, his council saw the Franks slaughtering villagers in their houses and burning the standing corn in the fields. They left a wasteland behind them. Alaric and his knights tried to stop them, and Alaric lost his life in the battle.
There’s a mystery about Gesalaric. Immediately after his father’s death the Visigothic nobles elected him king in Narbonne, then Gesalaric joined his forces with those of his grandfather, Théodoric the Great, which had arrived at last. At the same time Amalaric, as the “true” king, was taken to safety in Rhedae (Rennes-le-Château) by the Royal family, who didn’t know for some time that Gesalaric had been elected.
Gesalaric the illegitimate son, jealous of the true king, seems similar to Mordred, the son hoisted on Arthur when he was seduced by Morgan le Fay.
Could the reason why Gesalaric was never taken with his father to negotiation meetings, and the reason why his grandfather Théodoric consistently rejected him, be that Gesalaric had somehow been hoisted onto Alaric and was illegitimate? (Some history books say his mother was a discarded woman from the harem of Théodoric himself.) Like Mordred in the Arthurian stories, they never believed he was a true son? And then, when the young man was desperate to prove himself, they took his attempts to be a crude and treasonable attempt at power? Just like Mordred?
A major part of the Arthurian legends is that Arthur will rise from the dead and come back to protect the British people. Similar legends applied to the Visigoths, especially Alaric. One can still see today the sarcophage of Ragnachilde, Alaric’s mother, in the Musée des Augustins at Toulouse, sculpted with a scene representing the “resurrection of the son of the widow.” This seems a direct statement of the belief that Alaric would rise again from the dead.
It’s no surprise to hear that Alaric is sleeping in an underground chamber on the Montagne d’Alaric, until such a day when he can rise into battle to protect and save the people of Languedoc. Similarly, Arthur of Britain is a “sleeping warrior” who will return to rescue Britain when the time is right. There are such strong similarities between these stories; history in Britain and in France became mythic and coalesced into Grail legends.
The historical King Arthur
It’s thought King Arthur lived in the 5th or 6th century, was Romano-British or Romano-Celtic, and tried to protect his country against the Saxons after the Romans had left Britain to her fate in 410AD. Arthur won the battle of Badon against the Saxons in 500AD and then lived and ruled in Powys, at the time covering central England and north Wales. He rebuilt the abandoned Roman town of Virconium (near Shrewsbury) as his headquarters and died around 540. His possible grave is at Berth, a burial site near Virconium that has yet to be excavated.
The official history of the British Isles tells us the Saxons didn’t come until 520AD, when they landed in East Anglia and set up a kingdom with Norwich as its capital.
So the dates don’t tie up, unless Arthur was born about 500 and met his end in 540 at the time of the catastrophe?
There are two Arthurs. Arthur the real Celtic chieftain was trying to hold together his fragmented country in the period immediately after the Romans left. The other Arthur is legendary and became Arthur the once and future king.
The English chroniclers were adapting material that had come from France. Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote the first Grail story about 1180, said that Arthur’s court was situated at Nantes in Brittany, and Arthur was buried on the Isle of Avallon, until the day he will be needed to take the role of king once again. There is a French town called Avallon, slightly to the west of Vézelay, that was founded around this time.
One of the Grail legends, “Queste del Saint Graal” written between 1215 and 1230, declares that the events of the Grail story occurred 454 years after the death of Jesus, which specifically dates the Grail story to 487AD - Visigothic/Merovingian times.
The legendary king Arthur was “born” between 400 and 800AD. The legend of Arthur as the once and future king grew up about 600; as did other legends of Kings-that-would-come-back. There are some 70 of them in France alone. Charlemagne himself lies in some grotto somewhere, waiting to wake up to rescue France (although he never did in the Great War), and his famous beard keeps growing and winds itself around the legs of the table supporting him.
Arthur was sometimes known as Ursus - the name means “bear.” The Visigoths knew of a group of stars they called The Chariot of the Skies, the Little Bear, which gave them navigation from the Pole Star. They often used a bear as their emblem and it featured on their flags.
The Merovingians also worshipped the bear of the Great Bear in the skies and their deity eventually became Arduina, the goddess who gave her name to today’s Ardennes hills in northern France where the Merovingians lived. The name “Ursus”, was also adopted by them, from Mérovée to Clovis. Clovis was baptised by St. Rémy the bishop at Reims in 496. Rémy predicted to Clovis; at the end of time, a descendant of the Frankish kings will reign over all the ancient Roman empire. This makes it clear that the Roman Church and the Roman Empire were one. Merovingian kings ruled from 448 to 750AD. The period of their ascendancy, say the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, coincides with the period of King Arthur, which constitutes the setting for the romances of the Holy Grail.
The Merovingian kings did no ruling, they left that to their ministers; they were psychic priest-kings. They could heal by the laying on of hands and they could communicate telepathically with men or beasts. They were reputed to be occult adepts. One Merovingian king had a crystal ball and magic talismans buried in his grave with him.
In history the Merovingian bloodline died out around 755, when the last king was murdered by Pepin le Bref, who founded another dynasty unrelated by blood to the Merovingians. However, a hushing up had been done, for king Dagobert II married a Visigothic princess who lived at Rhedae, and their descendant was Guilhem of Gellone.
Early Grail stories in France and Spain.
Some 300 years later, Guilhem of Gellone, a descendant of Alaric, became a legendary figure after his death in 812. At least six major epic poems were composed about him. Dante, in the Divine Comedy, wrote about Guilhem of Gellone, presenting him as an heroic figure.
Guilhem was a true cosmopolitan and a scholar who had studied under Jewish (that is, cabalistic) and Muslim teachers in Toledo. Guilhem spoke Arabic, Hebrew, Gothic and Latin. He collected books and manuscripts and opened a library and Academy of Jewish studies at Gellone, near Montpellier. Later Guilhem converted to Roman Christianity and founded an abbey at his home Gellone, that you can still visit today.
But his library of ancient teachings has completely disappeared.
By the early 13th century, Guilhem was called Willehalm and was a member of the Grail family in an epic romance by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who also wrote Parsival.
In this story “Willehalm” was fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, while his shield carried a design representing the Lion of Judah. In Toledo he had met Flegetanis, a man of mixed Jewish and “heathen” descent. Flegetanis was a Hebrew scholar who confided the true story of the Grail to Kyot of Provence, a troubadour who told and sang a tale of mystic quests. Kyot based his story on one written by Flegetanis - Guilhem’s student - then gave this story to Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian, who declared in 1180 he was writing the truth “which had come from Provence especially for the people of Germany.” It was then the Germans appropriated the Grail myths as their own, as did writers in Britain.
So the Grail stories came to France from the Arabs of Muslim Spain, from Toledo, once the capital of the Visgothic kingdom, where had been a great study centre for the wisdom of the Cabbala of the Jews in the time of the Visigoths. From France the legends went to Germany and Britain. There was a Cabalistic school at Toledo, as there was in Gerona in Spain and Montpellier in France.
Flegetanis was Jewish on his mother’s side but why was he a heathen on his father’s side? The reference to learning his abc’s which implies his main language was not Latin but a language that used symbols and not what we call the alphabet today; that is, Arabic, Aramaic or even the old language of the Goths.
It does seem that some of the historical personages on which the Holy Grail legends were based were Visigothic.
When you put together various events from the Dark Ages - mysterious or psychic kings, natural catastrophes, the co-operation between Eastern and western philosophies, the slow growth of civilisation defined as idealism, egalitarianism, negotiation and co-operation, it is obvious the origins of the Grail legends arose due to historical events in the years between 400 and 800AD. The “waste land”? It was the result of natural catastrophes at first, but then it was what Charles Martel left in Septimania after his campaign in 737. He destroyed everything, burning fields and buildings and towns. Poor people had nowhere to live and no food to eat and roamed the burnt countryside like ghosts until they died of hunger.
The Glastonbury legends
By the 12th century the stories became more complicated, with various knights on various quests and the King dealing with problems due to the infidelity of a woman and a treasonable nephew. Versions were re-written in French and German, events were taking place in great forests (Celtic, like Brittany) or in great castles, as in Germany.
In England the Arthur stories were closely linked to the west country. In 1191, monks at the abbey of Glastonbury claimed to have found the graves of Arthur and Guinevere to the south of the Lady Chapel of the Abbey Church, which was visited by a number of contemporary historians including Giraldus Cambrensis. The remains were later moved and were lost during the Reformation. Many scholars suspect that this discovery was a pious forgery to substantiate the antiquity of Glastonbury's foundation, and increase its renown; it’s unlikely Arthur was buried there.
Then at Glastonbury the legends turned suddenly Christian. The legend that Joseph of Arimathea retrieved certain holy relics was introduced by the French poet Robert de Boron in his 13th-century version of the Grail story. It was this story that related how Joseph captured Jesus' blood in a cup (the "Holy Grail") which was subsequently brought to Britain. The earlier versions of the Grail story do not call the grail "holy" or mention anything about blood. The Holy Grail was now defined as a cup. Out of this cup, at the Last Supper, Jesus drank wine; then Joseph of Arithmathea took the cup with him to Jesus’s crucifixion, and held it against Jesus’s poor tortured body, so that he could collect the blood of his brother.
Why anybody would do this it is beyond us to know or understand and certainly the Jews, with their horror of uncleanliness, would never have done it or allowed it to happen. However, it was accepted at Glastonbury and pilgrims thronged there in their thousands.
Medieval times are the days of pilgrimages and relics, sometimes called The Cult of the Relics by historians. The employers of the day were obliged by the Church to give their workers forty days off, either to go on a pilgrimage or a crusade. The more interesting the relics that a church had, the more pilgrims they attracted and the churches and cathedrals became rich on this original “spiritual tourism.” Relics of Jesus himself were thin on the ground, for it was believed his body had ascended into Heaven. Many places settled for a relic of the True Cross. (If these were put together, they are enough to make a veritable forest.)
Glastonbury had Jesus’s blood, and some say, sweat too. Joseph of Arithmathea took this to Glastonbury, along with the Virgin Mary, and the earliest church in England was dedicated to her and the cup was placed in it. Later hundreds of pilgrims came to play homage to the Cup and the Virgin and Glastonbury became rich.
Joseph is said to have arrived in Glastonbury by boat over the flooded Somerset Levels. On disembarking he stuck his staff into the ground and it flowered miraculously into the Glastonbury Thorn (or Holy Thorn). It is true that a species of hawthorn tree called Crataegus Monogyna grows within a few miles of Glastonbury and is not known anywhere else, It flowers twice annually, once in spring and again around Christmas time.
There’s an interesting mountain called Glastonbury Tor, with a church to St. Michael on the top of it. The footpath that winds round it is very old. It’s thought, after excavations done on 1979, this was used by the Celts, and was a maze around the mountain, on which one could find the entrance to Annwn, the Other World or Underworld containing the cauldron, a Grail object. When the Christians arrived, headed by Joseph of Arimathea, they adapted this for Christianity.
Even today, the Tor is thought to have a hidden space inside it, which can be entered but which is full of danger, but you might meet Joseph of Arimathea.
Thus I was fascinated to find a similar modern legend about Bugarach (The magic mountain where the world was due to end in December 2012, but it didn’t) in the Languedoc region, just to the east of Rennes-le-Château. A well-known spiritual tour guide describe how he was taken to a cavern underneath Bugarach to experience an Essene initiation. This mountain, apparently, was riddled with caves used by the Essenes and the Cathars. (Historically the Cathars were never involved with Bugarach, and the Essenes died out in 74AD after Galilee was crushed by the Romans.)
The tour-guide had to enter the cave on all fours without light, he panicked and was told he must conquer his fear. He did so and they proceeded and in the dark he sensed he was on the edge of a precipice - and he was. They came to a massive cave and waded through icy-cold water into another large cave.
Today Glastonbury Abbey presents itself as "traditionally the oldest above-ground Christian church in the world," which according to the legend was built at Joseph's behest to house the Holy Grail, 65 or so years after the death of Jesus. The legend also says that as a child, Jesus had visited Glastonbury along with Joseph, supposedly his uncle. We now know, however, that Joseph was Jesus’s brother. He was the first one born of Joseph and so named after his father, which was the custom in those days. It was probably Joseph that got married at Cana.
There is however, historical truth in the association of Joseph of Arimathea with Glastonbury. He was a businessman, trading in tin, a wealthy commerce in those days, which took him Cornwall and Angelsey as well as Glastonbury. He founded a church in 64AD, probably for his tin-workers, and was promoted locally and made exempt from taxes on his lands. The church was dedicated, then or later no-one knows, to Sainte Maria, the mother of Jesus, hence the Jesus Maria stone in 6th century characters. A Grail expert called Graham Phillips has proved that Joseph of Arimathea and Mary the mother of Jesus, came to Britain after the crucifixion and settled not in Glastonbury but in Angelsey, where they founded the Celtic church based on very early Christianity with no belief in the Trinity.
Then came the Templars
The Templars were an order of Knights who came to the Holy Land in the 12th century. They then invented “banking” - you could leave your money with them for a piece of paper and then change the paper back to your own money when you reached your destination. They became rich, but having mixed with the Judaic and Arab cultures, their thinking was not strictly Roman Catholic, and they were persecuted by the Roman Church in the early 14th century, and the Order was disbanded.
But meanwhile, the Templars had tried to teach people hidden spiritual truths by picture cards, thus evading upsetting religious authorities. It’s said they got the idea from the Saracens. The cards became the Tarot cards, which still exist today. The Major Arcana describes the soul’s spiritual journey, the hazards encountered, and the final illumination. This is basically the Grail’s story and message. Many of the people in these cards are women and goddessess.
Some say the cards were used to create new stories by placing them in a different sequence. I find this unlikely, for they are all numbered. They can be laid out in a figure-of-eight-on-its-side style, which represents eternity, and can be seen on some of the cards. There is also a Minor Arcana of four suites, now named swords, wands, cups and pentacles but originally called sword, spear, grail and dish; all part of the Grail legends.
The book “The Templar Revelation” by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, argues that the figures admired by the Templars were, rather than Jesus, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. As far as I can research, this is the first mention of Mary Magdalene connected to the Grail legends.
The Grail exists as a result of the soul’s longing for a solution to the mystery of self-consciousness.
Grail legends have existed throughout history. The Grail is often represented as something physical, which materially exists. It can be a jewel, a precious stone, or a holy stone which fell from heaven, or a cup or goblet. It can be an enormous bowl called a Crater, which evokes Celtic origins, or a platter - it’s never simply called a plate - on which is the food of the gods carried by a maiden. For maiden read virgin. (The symbolism is clear, the sublime bliss can be achieved by eating the food of love offered by a virgin. It’s no accident that the “Mary” in the Grail stories, at the time of the Troubadours, was the Virgin Mary.)
The common elements in Grail stories include a great castle perched on top of a precipitous mountain and a sacred glade through which runs a river, whose source never dries up; these are Celtic elements. Through this landscape we follow the adventures of a young man on a quest or journey, throughout which he is tested in trials of physical, emotional and spiritual strength and has to learn various lessons, some of them quite harsh. He has to face daunting challenges. In the end he reaches Heaven, or Knowledge, or Bliss, or Enlightenment. Or he finds a Treasure - the Grail.
Once the Grail is found, by someone who has passed all the tests and is therefore worthy of possessing it, the object - the Grail - will restore harmony to the world and happiness to humanity. This is of course, what every Knight earnestly desires. However, to some the Grail, called spiritual perfection, becomes a material object or even a simple search for financial treasure.
The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château and the Treasure of Montségur are basically Holy Grail legends, become recently more powerful because Mary Magdalene has been thrown in. She was apparently a priestess to the Cathars, who practised a religion based on love, and she wrote books of wisdom that became the great Cathar treasure, and are still waiting to be found. None of which is historically true. But the Grail is too powerful a concept to resist.
Many think of the Grail legends as being of Christian origin but there are pre-Christian similar stories everywhere. There’s a story that Seth, one of the children of Adam and Eve, returned to the Garden of Eden where he was given the Grail by God as a sign that God had not forgotten his people. We hear that the Grail was an emerald stone from the crown of the Light bringer, Lucifer, the Angel of the Morning. During the war between the angels it fell to earth; Lucifer lost the war, and became the Devil.
Author Hannah Closs, writing about the Grail in the 1930’s, compared legends of the East with the Grail stories, often thought to have originated at the time of the Crusades, and tells us “Connections with the Arabs and even long before them were far stronger” than suspected. This Arab connection was merely reinforced when the Crusades began in 1099.
I saw a film recently about the Occitan culture in Languedoc and the Troubadours. The experts had reconstructed the musical instruments and the songs of the Troubadours, and I recognised various harmonies that came from India, for the Occitan songs ended with minor chords. (The music we are used to nearly always ends with a major chord, which makes it more satisfying.) The music travelled across the Mediterranean to Spain and then from Saragossa to Carcassonne; the troubadour culture had begun. And so it seems to me true that Grail Legends came from the East.
The Dark Age Kings
Between 400AD and 800AD events took place in England and France that were later used in the Grail legends of the Middle Ages. Rival and treacherous kings featured in his story, and a wasteland. The Visigothic king Théodoric, established a brilliant court at Toulouse in 418AD. Then there was a sequence of natural catastrophes - floods, earthquakes, hails of falling stars, dramatic eclipses of the sun - which lasted two years. The darkened sky affected the weather patterns and the crops; there was “a waste land.”
These catastrophes continued. In 469 when King Euric was fighting in central France, there were strange tales of blood spouting in the town centre. In the sky was seen two suns among the stars. (A comet?) When he was fighting in Provence in 472 there was an eruption of Vesuvius in Italy. After 472 the volcano was relatively quiet until an immense eruption in 1631 which killed 18,000 people.
On 26th May 492 there was an earthquake at Ravenna. In the late summer of 526 a comet appeared over Italy and Europe; there were frequent earthquakes.
In France the 5th century Visigothic king Alaric was attacked and killed by the Frankish invaders from the north. Now, like the legendary King Arthur of Britain, he is waiting silently under the Montagne d’Alaric to rise again and ride into battle to save his people.
Alaric battled with evil and lost; but one day he will return to bring about a peaceful world. King Arthur of Britain, half-Roman, half Celt, was also the rightful king but failed to protect his people from the savage invaders, the Jutes, Angles and Saxons. Like Alaric, Arthur is a “sleeping warrior” who will return to rescue Britain when the time is right.
In 532 Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, was betrayed by traitors and burnt. Historian Theophanes wrote; “the same year there was a great running of stars from the evening till dawn, so that all were struck with amazement and said; “the stars are falling “ from the sky, nor do we know of such a thing at any other time.”
In 536 there was plague in Europe.
I read in the Guardian in September 2002 about scientists who quoted the legend of King Arthur, which involved a “waste land”. The scientists had discovered, from the growth rings of trees around the world, that a natural global catastrophe shook the world around 540. Failed harvests and epidemics always coincided with stunted tree growth. The skies had darkened, summers were chilly, crops had failed, famine was widespread and one third of the people of Europe perished.
The scientists claimed this wasteland was caused by a cometary bombardment and Arthur had died around 540. It was interesting that the scientists linked this event only to Britain, rather than to Europe, for I found a 13th century reference to a comet in Gaul so big that the sky seemed on fire in either 540 or 541. Was it then, a different catastrophe 122 years earlier, in 418, when Théodoric began his kingship in Gaul? In 1990 three British astronomers calculated the earth had been threatened by cometary bombardment between 400 and 600. So was there a series of catastrophes which lasted around 200 years?
Yes. These catastrophes were caused by violent volcanic explosions.
We know well the explosion of Krakatoa in 1883; the noise was heard 3,000 miles away, shock waves and tunsamis travelled all around the world, while whole towns were buried or borne away by tidal waves. The debris from the explosion was funnelled upwards by the crater to reach jet-steams 20 miles high to form a layer of dust three miles in depth, which caused strange sunsets and dark days, and caused a lowering of temperature world-wide.
I read the history of Krakatoa. To my surprise the volcano had exploded many times before 1883. It had exploded in 416AD - near enough to the time the Visigoths under Théodoric came to Gaul to be acceptable as the cause of the natural catastrophes there, the dark skies, the waste land.
Krakatoa is situated between the south Indonesian islands of Sumartra and Java. A Javanese court poet wrote a history of Java called “Book of Kings.” He says about the 416 eruption; A thundering noise was heard from the mountain Batuwara, which was answered by a similar noise coming from Kapi (Krakatoa). A great glaring fire which reached the sky came out of this mountain . . the whole world was greatly shaken and violent thundering accompanied by heavy rains and storms took place. . . the noise was fearful . . Kapi burst into two pieces with a tremendous roar and sank into the deepness of the earth. The water of the sea rose and inundated the land . . the people were drowned and swept away with all their property . . . later the land around Kapi became sea . . and this event was the origin of the separation of Sumatra and Java.
That was in 416 but what about the world-wide catastrophe of around 540 quoted the scientists of the King Arthur story? That also was Krakatoa! Analysis of dust in the ice-cores of the poles dated the event between 510 and 560; the “Book of Kings” dated it precisely as 535. Rome found the skies were veiled and the spring and summer exceptionally cold. There was a plague in Constantinople, and drought and famine all over the land.
These events which caused a “waste land” spanned 200 years. In France they were related to the Visigoths, but in Britain they were related to King Arthur.
The stories of King Arthur and King Alaric are quite similar. Alaric the Visigoth was a much-loved man who tried to keep everybody happy. He had a council of advisers and they were all equal; a sort of Visigothic Knights of the Round Table? Alaric had an illegitimate son called Gesalaric and a legitimate son called Amalaric, by his wife who was the daughter of Théodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic king of Italy. Théodoric the Great tried to control and arrange people to suit his own ends. He was a manipulator - a Merlin character. He had promised Alaric support against Clovis. But at a third meeting with Clovis, at which there was no sign of Théodoric, Alaric, with only a routine garrison with him, was attacked. Had he been betrayed?
Alaric returned to his Languedocian strongholds, with his son Amalaric, only 5 years old. There is no mention that Gesalaric, then aged 20, was with his father, and one wonders why. Alaric moved the court to his fortress on the Montagne d’Alaric, to await reinforcements from Théodoric the Great. The reinforcements never came.
That summer of 508, his council saw the Franks slaughtering villagers in their houses and burning the standing corn in the fields. They left a wasteland behind them. Alaric and his knights tried to stop them, and Alaric lost his life in the battle.
There’s a mystery about Gesalaric. Immediately after his father’s death the Visigothic nobles elected him king in Narbonne, then Gesalaric joined his forces with those of his grandfather, Théodoric the Great, which had arrived at last. At the same time Amalaric, as the “true” king, was taken to safety in Rhedae (Rennes-le-Château) by the Royal family, who didn’t know for some time that Gesalaric had been elected.
Gesalaric the illegitimate son, jealous of the true king, seems similar to Mordred, the son hoisted on Arthur when he was seduced by Morgan le Fay.
Could the reason why Gesalaric was never taken with his father to negotiation meetings, and the reason why his grandfather Théodoric consistently rejected him, be that Gesalaric had somehow been hoisted onto Alaric and was illegitimate? (Some history books say his mother was a discarded woman from the harem of Théodoric himself.) Like Mordred in the Arthurian stories, they never believed he was a true son? And then, when the young man was desperate to prove himself, they took his attempts to be a crude and treasonable attempt at power? Just like Mordred?
A major part of the Arthurian legends is that Arthur will rise from the dead and come back to protect the British people. Similar legends applied to the Visigoths, especially Alaric. One can still see today the sarcophage of Ragnachilde, Alaric’s mother, in the Musée des Augustins at Toulouse, sculpted with a scene representing the “resurrection of the son of the widow.” This seems a direct statement of the belief that Alaric would rise again from the dead.
It’s no surprise to hear that Alaric is sleeping in an underground chamber on the Montagne d’Alaric, until such a day when he can rise into battle to protect and save the people of Languedoc. Similarly, Arthur of Britain is a “sleeping warrior” who will return to rescue Britain when the time is right. There are such strong similarities between these stories; history in Britain and in France became mythic and coalesced into Grail legends.
The historical King Arthur
It’s thought King Arthur lived in the 5th or 6th century, was Romano-British or Romano-Celtic, and tried to protect his country against the Saxons after the Romans had left Britain to her fate in 410AD. Arthur won the battle of Badon against the Saxons in 500AD and then lived and ruled in Powys, at the time covering central England and north Wales. He rebuilt the abandoned Roman town of Virconium (near Shrewsbury) as his headquarters and died around 540. His possible grave is at Berth, a burial site near Virconium that has yet to be excavated.
The official history of the British Isles tells us the Saxons didn’t come until 520AD, when they landed in East Anglia and set up a kingdom with Norwich as its capital.
So the dates don’t tie up, unless Arthur was born about 500 and met his end in 540 at the time of the catastrophe?
There are two Arthurs. Arthur the real Celtic chieftain was trying to hold together his fragmented country in the period immediately after the Romans left. The other Arthur is legendary and became Arthur the once and future king.
The English chroniclers were adapting material that had come from France. Wolfram von Eschenbach, who wrote the first Grail story about 1180, said that Arthur’s court was situated at Nantes in Brittany, and Arthur was buried on the Isle of Avallon, until the day he will be needed to take the role of king once again. There is a French town called Avallon, slightly to the west of Vézelay, that was founded around this time.
One of the Grail legends, “Queste del Saint Graal” written between 1215 and 1230, declares that the events of the Grail story occurred 454 years after the death of Jesus, which specifically dates the Grail story to 487AD - Visigothic/Merovingian times.
The legendary king Arthur was “born” between 400 and 800AD. The legend of Arthur as the once and future king grew up about 600; as did other legends of Kings-that-would-come-back. There are some 70 of them in France alone. Charlemagne himself lies in some grotto somewhere, waiting to wake up to rescue France (although he never did in the Great War), and his famous beard keeps growing and winds itself around the legs of the table supporting him.
Arthur was sometimes known as Ursus - the name means “bear.” The Visigoths knew of a group of stars they called The Chariot of the Skies, the Little Bear, which gave them navigation from the Pole Star. They often used a bear as their emblem and it featured on their flags.
The Merovingians also worshipped the bear of the Great Bear in the skies and their deity eventually became Arduina, the goddess who gave her name to today’s Ardennes hills in northern France where the Merovingians lived. The name “Ursus”, was also adopted by them, from Mérovée to Clovis. Clovis was baptised by St. Rémy the bishop at Reims in 496. Rémy predicted to Clovis; at the end of time, a descendant of the Frankish kings will reign over all the ancient Roman empire. This makes it clear that the Roman Church and the Roman Empire were one. Merovingian kings ruled from 448 to 750AD. The period of their ascendancy, say the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, coincides with the period of King Arthur, which constitutes the setting for the romances of the Holy Grail.
The Merovingian kings did no ruling, they left that to their ministers; they were psychic priest-kings. They could heal by the laying on of hands and they could communicate telepathically with men or beasts. They were reputed to be occult adepts. One Merovingian king had a crystal ball and magic talismans buried in his grave with him.
In history the Merovingian bloodline died out around 755, when the last king was murdered by Pepin le Bref, who founded another dynasty unrelated by blood to the Merovingians. However, a hushing up had been done, for king Dagobert II married a Visigothic princess who lived at Rhedae, and their descendant was Guilhem of Gellone.
Early Grail stories in France and Spain.
Some 300 years later, Guilhem of Gellone, a descendant of Alaric, became a legendary figure after his death in 812. At least six major epic poems were composed about him. Dante, in the Divine Comedy, wrote about Guilhem of Gellone, presenting him as an heroic figure.
Guilhem was a true cosmopolitan and a scholar who had studied under Jewish (that is, cabalistic) and Muslim teachers in Toledo. Guilhem spoke Arabic, Hebrew, Gothic and Latin. He collected books and manuscripts and opened a library and Academy of Jewish studies at Gellone, near Montpellier. Later Guilhem converted to Roman Christianity and founded an abbey at his home Gellone, that you can still visit today.
But his library of ancient teachings has completely disappeared.
By the early 13th century, Guilhem was called Willehalm and was a member of the Grail family in an epic romance by Wolfram von Eschenbach, who also wrote Parsival.
In this story “Willehalm” was fluent in Hebrew and Arabic, while his shield carried a design representing the Lion of Judah. In Toledo he had met Flegetanis, a man of mixed Jewish and “heathen” descent. Flegetanis was a Hebrew scholar who confided the true story of the Grail to Kyot of Provence, a troubadour who told and sang a tale of mystic quests. Kyot based his story on one written by Flegetanis - Guilhem’s student - then gave this story to Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian, who declared in 1180 he was writing the truth “which had come from Provence especially for the people of Germany.” It was then the Germans appropriated the Grail myths as their own, as did writers in Britain.
So the Grail stories came to France from the Arabs of Muslim Spain, from Toledo, once the capital of the Visgothic kingdom, where had been a great study centre for the wisdom of the Cabbala of the Jews in the time of the Visigoths. From France the legends went to Germany and Britain. There was a Cabalistic school at Toledo, as there was in Gerona in Spain and Montpellier in France.
Flegetanis was Jewish on his mother’s side but why was he a heathen on his father’s side? The reference to learning his abc’s which implies his main language was not Latin but a language that used symbols and not what we call the alphabet today; that is, Arabic, Aramaic or even the old language of the Goths.
It does seem that some of the historical personages on which the Holy Grail legends were based were Visigothic.
When you put together various events from the Dark Ages - mysterious or psychic kings, natural catastrophes, the co-operation between Eastern and western philosophies, the slow growth of civilisation defined as idealism, egalitarianism, negotiation and co-operation, it is obvious the origins of the Grail legends arose due to historical events in the years between 400 and 800AD. The “waste land”? It was the result of natural catastrophes at first, but then it was what Charles Martel left in Septimania after his campaign in 737. He destroyed everything, burning fields and buildings and towns. Poor people had nowhere to live and no food to eat and roamed the burnt countryside like ghosts until they died of hunger.
The Glastonbury legends
By the 12th century the stories became more complicated, with various knights on various quests and the King dealing with problems due to the infidelity of a woman and a treasonable nephew. Versions were re-written in French and German, events were taking place in great forests (Celtic, like Brittany) or in great castles, as in Germany.
In England the Arthur stories were closely linked to the west country. In 1191, monks at the abbey of Glastonbury claimed to have found the graves of Arthur and Guinevere to the south of the Lady Chapel of the Abbey Church, which was visited by a number of contemporary historians including Giraldus Cambrensis. The remains were later moved and were lost during the Reformation. Many scholars suspect that this discovery was a pious forgery to substantiate the antiquity of Glastonbury's foundation, and increase its renown; it’s unlikely Arthur was buried there.
Then at Glastonbury the legends turned suddenly Christian. The legend that Joseph of Arimathea retrieved certain holy relics was introduced by the French poet Robert de Boron in his 13th-century version of the Grail story. It was this story that related how Joseph captured Jesus' blood in a cup (the "Holy Grail") which was subsequently brought to Britain. The earlier versions of the Grail story do not call the grail "holy" or mention anything about blood. The Holy Grail was now defined as a cup. Out of this cup, at the Last Supper, Jesus drank wine; then Joseph of Arithmathea took the cup with him to Jesus’s crucifixion, and held it against Jesus’s poor tortured body, so that he could collect the blood of his brother.
Why anybody would do this it is beyond us to know or understand and certainly the Jews, with their horror of uncleanliness, would never have done it or allowed it to happen. However, it was accepted at Glastonbury and pilgrims thronged there in their thousands.
Medieval times are the days of pilgrimages and relics, sometimes called The Cult of the Relics by historians. The employers of the day were obliged by the Church to give their workers forty days off, either to go on a pilgrimage or a crusade. The more interesting the relics that a church had, the more pilgrims they attracted and the churches and cathedrals became rich on this original “spiritual tourism.” Relics of Jesus himself were thin on the ground, for it was believed his body had ascended into Heaven. Many places settled for a relic of the True Cross. (If these were put together, they are enough to make a veritable forest.)
Glastonbury had Jesus’s blood, and some say, sweat too. Joseph of Arithmathea took this to Glastonbury, along with the Virgin Mary, and the earliest church in England was dedicated to her and the cup was placed in it. Later hundreds of pilgrims came to play homage to the Cup and the Virgin and Glastonbury became rich.
Joseph is said to have arrived in Glastonbury by boat over the flooded Somerset Levels. On disembarking he stuck his staff into the ground and it flowered miraculously into the Glastonbury Thorn (or Holy Thorn). It is true that a species of hawthorn tree called Crataegus Monogyna grows within a few miles of Glastonbury and is not known anywhere else, It flowers twice annually, once in spring and again around Christmas time.
There’s an interesting mountain called Glastonbury Tor, with a church to St. Michael on the top of it. The footpath that winds round it is very old. It’s thought, after excavations done on 1979, this was used by the Celts, and was a maze around the mountain, on which one could find the entrance to Annwn, the Other World or Underworld containing the cauldron, a Grail object. When the Christians arrived, headed by Joseph of Arimathea, they adapted this for Christianity.
Even today, the Tor is thought to have a hidden space inside it, which can be entered but which is full of danger, but you might meet Joseph of Arimathea.
Thus I was fascinated to find a similar modern legend about Bugarach (The magic mountain where the world was due to end in December 2012, but it didn’t) in the Languedoc region, just to the east of Rennes-le-Château. A well-known spiritual tour guide describe how he was taken to a cavern underneath Bugarach to experience an Essene initiation. This mountain, apparently, was riddled with caves used by the Essenes and the Cathars. (Historically the Cathars were never involved with Bugarach, and the Essenes died out in 74AD after Galilee was crushed by the Romans.)
The tour-guide had to enter the cave on all fours without light, he panicked and was told he must conquer his fear. He did so and they proceeded and in the dark he sensed he was on the edge of a precipice - and he was. They came to a massive cave and waded through icy-cold water into another large cave.
Today Glastonbury Abbey presents itself as "traditionally the oldest above-ground Christian church in the world," which according to the legend was built at Joseph's behest to house the Holy Grail, 65 or so years after the death of Jesus. The legend also says that as a child, Jesus had visited Glastonbury along with Joseph, supposedly his uncle. We now know, however, that Joseph was Jesus’s brother. He was the first one born of Joseph and so named after his father, which was the custom in those days. It was probably Joseph that got married at Cana.
There is however, historical truth in the association of Joseph of Arimathea with Glastonbury. He was a businessman, trading in tin, a wealthy commerce in those days, which took him Cornwall and Angelsey as well as Glastonbury. He founded a church in 64AD, probably for his tin-workers, and was promoted locally and made exempt from taxes on his lands. The church was dedicated, then or later no-one knows, to Sainte Maria, the mother of Jesus, hence the Jesus Maria stone in 6th century characters. A Grail expert called Graham Phillips has proved that Joseph of Arimathea and Mary the mother of Jesus, came to Britain after the crucifixion and settled not in Glastonbury but in Angelsey, where they founded the Celtic church based on very early Christianity with no belief in the Trinity.
Then came the Templars
The Templars were an order of Knights who came to the Holy Land in the 12th century. They then invented “banking” - you could leave your money with them for a piece of paper and then change the paper back to your own money when you reached your destination. They became rich, but having mixed with the Judaic and Arab cultures, their thinking was not strictly Roman Catholic, and they were persecuted by the Roman Church in the early 14th century, and the Order was disbanded.
But meanwhile, the Templars had tried to teach people hidden spiritual truths by picture cards, thus evading upsetting religious authorities. It’s said they got the idea from the Saracens. The cards became the Tarot cards, which still exist today. The Major Arcana describes the soul’s spiritual journey, the hazards encountered, and the final illumination. This is basically the Grail’s story and message. Many of the people in these cards are women and goddessess.
Some say the cards were used to create new stories by placing them in a different sequence. I find this unlikely, for they are all numbered. They can be laid out in a figure-of-eight-on-its-side style, which represents eternity, and can be seen on some of the cards. There is also a Minor Arcana of four suites, now named swords, wands, cups and pentacles but originally called sword, spear, grail and dish; all part of the Grail legends.
The book “The Templar Revelation” by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, argues that the figures admired by the Templars were, rather than Jesus, John the Baptist and Mary Magdalene. As far as I can research, this is the first mention of Mary Magdalene connected to the Grail legends.
"the year 555: Marriage of Taliesin the Bard with Viviane-Charis Avallon del Acqs:
Alliance Yeshuah descendant of Joseph with the daughter of King Supreme of Avallon." --Walter Lake
Merlin contrived a union between Ygerne; who was of the Sangréal bloodline and Uther Pendragon of the lineage of David (Pen-Dragon King) through Joseph of Aramathea in order to bring about the birth of Arthur Pendragon.
From here the Sangréal descent throughout Christendom was expressed not least than through Godfroi de Bouillon, himself being of the Pendragon line of King David.
"According to Guillaume de Tyre, the Templar Knights or the Order of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon was founded in 1188. Its founder is said to be one Hugues de Payen, a nobleman from Champagne and vassal of the Count of Champagne. One day Hugues, unsolicited, presented himself with eight comrades at the palace of Baudouin I - King of Jerusulem, whose elder brother Godfroi de Bouillon, had captured the Holy City nineteen years before. Baudouin seems to have received them most cordially, as did the Patriarch of Jerusulem - the religious leader of the new kingdom and special emissary of the pope." (from Baigent et al).
Later in the 17th and 18th centuries; the Jacobite cause was an attempt to preserve the Sangréal lineage through knowledge of the sacred bloodline in its descent from the Merovingian Franks through Arthur Pendragon and through to the Scottish Stuart Dynasty. It is likely that the Jacobites resonated morphically with the bloodline because they were themselves part of it. The Jacobites were often part of noble families who tended to marry their cousins and thus keep the bloodline relatively unchanged.
Christian Waller - Morgan Le Fay
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Anna, kinswoman of the Virgin Mary The early Welsh royal families claimed to be relatives of the family of Jesus.
According to Harleian MS. 3958, Beli Mawr was husband to Anna (who may be a confabulation of Dôn), a "near kinswoman [consobrina] of the Virgin Mary." A medieval tradition identifies her as a sister (or daughter) of Joseph of Arimathea, but the tradition is not old enough to be authentic. There is no reason to think she was an historical figure.
Dôn seems to have been a Christianized version of the Celtic goddess Anû, the mother goddess of the Celts. In Gaul she was called Belisama. In Ireland she was Danu, the matriarch of the Túatha Dé Danann, who took their name from her. The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh legends, calls her Dôn, sister of Mâth mab Mathonwy, King of Gwynedd.
"Chronologically speaking, if Anna married a Briton after her father arrived in this country, then we must assume that she was nearer to Jesus' age than her cousin, Mary (ie. born c. 0). Beli is recorded in the Mabinogion and Welsh Genealogies as having been the father of Caswallon (or Cassivellaunus), the leader of the Celtic tribes who repelled Cæsar's invasions of 55 & 54 bc. He could, therefore, not possibly have married Anna of Arimathea. Moreover, the local ruler whom Joseph received his land gift from, is said to have been Arfyrag (or Arviragus), Beli & Anna's supposed great great grandson." (David Nash Ford, "St. Joseph of Arimathea: Ancestor of Kings?" in Early British Kingdoms (visited Nov. 21, 2011).
King Arthur If King Arthur was a real person, as many scholars believe, then he was a war leader in 6th century Britain. Some part of his life might have been authentically recorded by English monks such as Gildas (c500-570), Bede (672/3-736), Nennius (9th century), and Geoffrey of Monmouth (c1100-c1155). However, these accounts are confused and contradictory. Arthur might have been related in some way to the Roman aristocrat Ambrosius Aurelianus, although the relationship is first recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was writing 600 years later.
There is no doubt about Ambrosius’ existence. He was mentioned in a near contemporary document by the monk Gildas, who says he won an important battle against the invading Anglo-Saxons. Some scholars believe it is possible to sketch a brief genealogy for Ambrosius, perhaps from the Roman usurper Constantine III or from a distant cousin of the Emperor Theodosius I (or both).
In modern times there has been an explosion of genealogies drawn from Grail romances that turn fictional characters from the 11th and 12th centuries into historical people. The seminal works for these genealogies are Holy Blood, Holy Gail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982) and Bloodline of the Holy Grail, by Laurence Gardner (1996). They are best characterized as “alternative history”.
Beli Mawr The early Welsh royal families claimed to be descended from Beli Mawr.
Beli Mawr was in fact a Welsh version the Celtic sun god. Among the Brythonic Celts he was Belenus (the Shining One), a fertility god who looked after sheep and cattle. In Ireland, he was Bilé, the god of death. His festival was Beltaine (Fire of Bel), held May 1st. On that day, purifying fires were lit.
According to the Mabinogion his name was Beli son of Mynogan. Wikipedia says, "However, it should be noted that in medieval Welsh tradition, Beli Mawr is often given the patronymic fab Manogan / Mynogan ("son of Manogan"). This appears to derive from a textual garbling of the name of a real historical figure, Adminius, son of Cunobelinus; after being transmitted through the Roman authors Suetonius and Orosius, this name became Bellinus filius Minocanni in the medieval Latin text from Wales, Historia Brittonum. Thus, although Beli became a separate personage in medieval pseudohistory from Cunobelinus (Welsh Cynfelyn, Shakespeare's Cymbeline), he was generally presented as a king reigning in the period immediately before the Roman invasion; his "son" Caswallawn is the historical Cassivellaunus."
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, his name was Heli, he succeeded his father Digueillus, and he reigned 40 years.
The Mabinogion names his three sons as Lludd, Casswallawn and Nynnyaw, or four sons Lludd, Casswallawn, Llevelys and Eveyd. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he had three sons, Lud, Cassivelaunus and Nennius.
Brân the Blessed The early Welsh royal families claimed to be descended from Brân the Blessed and his father Llŷr Llediath.
Brân was legendary king of the Silures, probably originating as a Christianized form of the Celtic god Brân. He is one of the principal characters of the 1st Branch of the Mabinogion, which begins "Bran the Blessed (Bendigeidfran), the son of Llyr and Penarddun, daughter of Beli son of Mynogan, was ruler of Britain. Bran was the brother of Manawyddan and Branwen (Bronwen), and the half-brother of Nissyen and Evnissyen." He is said to have been succeeded by his uncle Caswallawn.
In Christian legend Brân is said to have been baptized in Rome in 36 CE. "Bran was said to have been taken as a captive to Rome where he joined the household of St. Paul. Returning to Britain, with SS. Aristobulus and Joseph of Arimathea some years later, he became among the first to introduce Christianity to the Island, hence his epithet of "the Blessed". This whole story is a late 17th century fabrication based on misinformation." (David Nash Ford, "Bran Fendigaid alias Bendigeitvran: Celtic God of Regeneration" in Early British Kingdoms(http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/bios/bran.html, visited Nov. 21, 2011)
The story of Brân's conversion to Christianity is probably a confusion with the historical Cunobelin (Arfyrag's father) who was thought to have been taken captive to Rome where he became converted to Christianity. (David Nash Ford, "St. Joseph of Arimathea: Ancestor of Kings?" in Early British Kingdoms (http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/articles/josanc.html, visited Nov. 21, 2011). Brân and Cunobelin both had sons named Caradoc, and the different Caradocs became confused. There is, no doubt an added confusion of Caradocs here, as far too few generations are given.
In Arthurian romance Brân became Bron(s), the Fisher King. He is said to have married Enygeus, a sister of Joseph of Arimathea and of Anna the Prophetess (perhaps the same person as Anna, the near kinswoman of the Virgin Mary. She had 12 sons, including Alain de Borron. This story mangles the earlier version, in which Brân was a grandson of Anna, the sister (or daughter) of Joseph of Arimathea.
In the Arthurian romance 'Bonedd yr Arwyr, Brân is made both a paternal and maternal ancestor of King Arthur.
Brutus The early Welsh kings claimed descent from Brutus, the legendary 1st King of Britain, which is said to have been named for him.
Welsh genealogists called him Brwt. He is said to have founded Troia Nova ("New Troy"), which became corrupted to Trinovantum, and now is London. He is not mentioned in any classical source and is not considered to be historical.
Brutus was first mentioned in the 9th century, by Nennius, who says he was a son of Hiscion, grandson of Alanus (Mannus), and a descendant of Noah. One variant makes him a grandson or great grandson of the Trojan hero Aeneas, great grandson of the legendary Roman king Numa Pompilius, and traces his genealogy to Japheth, son of Noah. Another variant makes him the son of Silvius and grandson of Ascanius, the father of Aeneas, and traces his genealogy to Ham, son of Noah. [Historia Brittonum.]
Geoffrey of Monmouth says Brutus was son of Silvius and grandson of Ascanius. He was exiled from Italy. He went to Greece, and liberated the Trojans enslaved there. Then, he crossed to the island of Albion, which he re-named for himself, and became the first king. After his death, each of his sons received one-third of Britain, Locrinus (England), Albanactus (Scotland) and Kamber (Wales).
Many scholars believe the Hiscion son of Alanus named by Nennius as Brutus' father was identical to the Istro son of Mannus, who appears in Germanic tradition as the eponymous ancestor of the Istvaeones, one of the three divisions of Germanic proto-tribes.
Charlemagne Millions of people in the world today are descendants of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, and they can prove it. Charlemagne’s family were upstarts, however. There are no proven links between Charlemagne and his predecessors in the Merovingian dynasty. In fact, Charlemagne has only 10 proven ancestors.
According to Harleian MS. 3958, Beli Mawr was husband to Anna (who may be a confabulation of Dôn), a "near kinswoman [consobrina] of the Virgin Mary." A medieval tradition identifies her as a sister (or daughter) of Joseph of Arimathea, but the tradition is not old enough to be authentic. There is no reason to think she was an historical figure.
Dôn seems to have been a Christianized version of the Celtic goddess Anû, the mother goddess of the Celts. In Gaul she was called Belisama. In Ireland she was Danu, the matriarch of the Túatha Dé Danann, who took their name from her. The Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh legends, calls her Dôn, sister of Mâth mab Mathonwy, King of Gwynedd.
"Chronologically speaking, if Anna married a Briton after her father arrived in this country, then we must assume that she was nearer to Jesus' age than her cousin, Mary (ie. born c. 0). Beli is recorded in the Mabinogion and Welsh Genealogies as having been the father of Caswallon (or Cassivellaunus), the leader of the Celtic tribes who repelled Cæsar's invasions of 55 & 54 bc. He could, therefore, not possibly have married Anna of Arimathea. Moreover, the local ruler whom Joseph received his land gift from, is said to have been Arfyrag (or Arviragus), Beli & Anna's supposed great great grandson." (David Nash Ford, "St. Joseph of Arimathea: Ancestor of Kings?" in Early British Kingdoms (visited Nov. 21, 2011).
King Arthur If King Arthur was a real person, as many scholars believe, then he was a war leader in 6th century Britain. Some part of his life might have been authentically recorded by English monks such as Gildas (c500-570), Bede (672/3-736), Nennius (9th century), and Geoffrey of Monmouth (c1100-c1155). However, these accounts are confused and contradictory. Arthur might have been related in some way to the Roman aristocrat Ambrosius Aurelianus, although the relationship is first recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who was writing 600 years later.
There is no doubt about Ambrosius’ existence. He was mentioned in a near contemporary document by the monk Gildas, who says he won an important battle against the invading Anglo-Saxons. Some scholars believe it is possible to sketch a brief genealogy for Ambrosius, perhaps from the Roman usurper Constantine III or from a distant cousin of the Emperor Theodosius I (or both).
In modern times there has been an explosion of genealogies drawn from Grail romances that turn fictional characters from the 11th and 12th centuries into historical people. The seminal works for these genealogies are Holy Blood, Holy Gail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (1982) and Bloodline of the Holy Grail, by Laurence Gardner (1996). They are best characterized as “alternative history”.
Beli Mawr The early Welsh royal families claimed to be descended from Beli Mawr.
Beli Mawr was in fact a Welsh version the Celtic sun god. Among the Brythonic Celts he was Belenus (the Shining One), a fertility god who looked after sheep and cattle. In Ireland, he was Bilé, the god of death. His festival was Beltaine (Fire of Bel), held May 1st. On that day, purifying fires were lit.
According to the Mabinogion his name was Beli son of Mynogan. Wikipedia says, "However, it should be noted that in medieval Welsh tradition, Beli Mawr is often given the patronymic fab Manogan / Mynogan ("son of Manogan"). This appears to derive from a textual garbling of the name of a real historical figure, Adminius, son of Cunobelinus; after being transmitted through the Roman authors Suetonius and Orosius, this name became Bellinus filius Minocanni in the medieval Latin text from Wales, Historia Brittonum. Thus, although Beli became a separate personage in medieval pseudohistory from Cunobelinus (Welsh Cynfelyn, Shakespeare's Cymbeline), he was generally presented as a king reigning in the period immediately before the Roman invasion; his "son" Caswallawn is the historical Cassivellaunus."
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, his name was Heli, he succeeded his father Digueillus, and he reigned 40 years.
The Mabinogion names his three sons as Lludd, Casswallawn and Nynnyaw, or four sons Lludd, Casswallawn, Llevelys and Eveyd. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he had three sons, Lud, Cassivelaunus and Nennius.
Brân the Blessed The early Welsh royal families claimed to be descended from Brân the Blessed and his father Llŷr Llediath.
Brân was legendary king of the Silures, probably originating as a Christianized form of the Celtic god Brân. He is one of the principal characters of the 1st Branch of the Mabinogion, which begins "Bran the Blessed (Bendigeidfran), the son of Llyr and Penarddun, daughter of Beli son of Mynogan, was ruler of Britain. Bran was the brother of Manawyddan and Branwen (Bronwen), and the half-brother of Nissyen and Evnissyen." He is said to have been succeeded by his uncle Caswallawn.
In Christian legend Brân is said to have been baptized in Rome in 36 CE. "Bran was said to have been taken as a captive to Rome where he joined the household of St. Paul. Returning to Britain, with SS. Aristobulus and Joseph of Arimathea some years later, he became among the first to introduce Christianity to the Island, hence his epithet of "the Blessed". This whole story is a late 17th century fabrication based on misinformation." (David Nash Ford, "Bran Fendigaid alias Bendigeitvran: Celtic God of Regeneration" in Early British Kingdoms(http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/bios/bran.html, visited Nov. 21, 2011)
The story of Brân's conversion to Christianity is probably a confusion with the historical Cunobelin (Arfyrag's father) who was thought to have been taken captive to Rome where he became converted to Christianity. (David Nash Ford, "St. Joseph of Arimathea: Ancestor of Kings?" in Early British Kingdoms (http://www.earlybritishkingdoms.com/articles/josanc.html, visited Nov. 21, 2011). Brân and Cunobelin both had sons named Caradoc, and the different Caradocs became confused. There is, no doubt an added confusion of Caradocs here, as far too few generations are given.
In Arthurian romance Brân became Bron(s), the Fisher King. He is said to have married Enygeus, a sister of Joseph of Arimathea and of Anna the Prophetess (perhaps the same person as Anna, the near kinswoman of the Virgin Mary. She had 12 sons, including Alain de Borron. This story mangles the earlier version, in which Brân was a grandson of Anna, the sister (or daughter) of Joseph of Arimathea.
In the Arthurian romance 'Bonedd yr Arwyr, Brân is made both a paternal and maternal ancestor of King Arthur.
Brutus The early Welsh kings claimed descent from Brutus, the legendary 1st King of Britain, which is said to have been named for him.
Welsh genealogists called him Brwt. He is said to have founded Troia Nova ("New Troy"), which became corrupted to Trinovantum, and now is London. He is not mentioned in any classical source and is not considered to be historical.
Brutus was first mentioned in the 9th century, by Nennius, who says he was a son of Hiscion, grandson of Alanus (Mannus), and a descendant of Noah. One variant makes him a grandson or great grandson of the Trojan hero Aeneas, great grandson of the legendary Roman king Numa Pompilius, and traces his genealogy to Japheth, son of Noah. Another variant makes him the son of Silvius and grandson of Ascanius, the father of Aeneas, and traces his genealogy to Ham, son of Noah. [Historia Brittonum.]
Geoffrey of Monmouth says Brutus was son of Silvius and grandson of Ascanius. He was exiled from Italy. He went to Greece, and liberated the Trojans enslaved there. Then, he crossed to the island of Albion, which he re-named for himself, and became the first king. After his death, each of his sons received one-third of Britain, Locrinus (England), Albanactus (Scotland) and Kamber (Wales).
Many scholars believe the Hiscion son of Alanus named by Nennius as Brutus' father was identical to the Istro son of Mannus, who appears in Germanic tradition as the eponymous ancestor of the Istvaeones, one of the three divisions of Germanic proto-tribes.
Charlemagne Millions of people in the world today are descendants of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, and they can prove it. Charlemagne’s family were upstarts, however. There are no proven links between Charlemagne and his predecessors in the Merovingian dynasty. In fact, Charlemagne has only 10 proven ancestors.
Illustration: The Last Sleep of Arthur in Avalon by Edward Burne-Jones
Vivienne and Merlin
Vesica
In Eire the Cult of Ankou was associated with Sidhe mounds, Raths, hills and Barrows, and hence labyrinths. Known as Mari <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mari_%28goddess%29> in the Basque region and associated with the Morias or fates, Ankou was the original model for the Black Madonnas there. The goddess Ankou, Black Annis, was derived fromthe Greek 'Anku-Kis' who was a form of the earlier Egyptian Goddess of the underworld - Anu Ket. In the Semitic-Ugaritic texts found in Ras Shamra in 1928, Ankou is called Anat, a witch goddess and regeneratrix who shape-shifted into the form of the Morrighan or Morgana, a black predatory bird. We are here in the presence of 'An' the ancient Dragon Mother who is both a sustainer and a reaper,a phoenix figure whose Raven like attributes link her to the Kershalyi and Locolico of the first dragon homeland of Transylvania. In Breton churches her priestess Morgana is portrayed as a wouivre or double-tailed mermaid or dragoness and in this respect she is identical with another Priestess, Ygraine.
Daughter of Amlawdd ap Cynwal, king of the Britons and Gwen verch Cunedda
Wife of Rhica; Gorlois (Hoel) of Tintagel and Uther ap Custennyn, King of Britons
Mother of Elen d'Anaumide; Elaine verch Gwyrlys; Morgana le Fay; Gormant ap Gwyrlys; Gania de Cornouaille; Arthwyr ap Uthyr, High King of Britain; Morgause (Anna); Madog ap Uthyr; Wife of Percival Verch Uther; Wife of Urien verch Uther; Cador Duke of Cornwall and Anna verch Uthyr
Nicknames: "Eigr", "Eigyr", "Eigiyr", "Igerna", "Igraine", "Ingerna", "Ygerne", "Ygerma del Acqs" . The Cult of the Ankh or Ankou was the Court of the Dragon of Ankh-fn-Khonsu and his successor Sobekhnefru, whose most sacred inner symbol, historically, was the winged Orobouros with a pendantGreek cross; the Ankh of Nin-Kursag or Hathor, and her daughter Innana or Venus. In tracing the history of one, via Egypt to its ancient Sumerian roots, we inevitably therefore recount the story of the other. They are, therefore, the same thing and represent The realm of the Dead (or more pertinently, precisely and poetically "The Undead"), Tir N'an Og, Elysium, Drakenberg, Lothlorien, The Court of the Kingdom of Elphame, The Court of the Kingdom of Elphame, The Grove of the Swan Maidens and the Hall of the Dragon Lords of the Rings, the Repha'im or Rapha Elohim.
Daughter of Amlawdd ap Cynwal, king of the Britons and Gwen verch Cunedda
Wife of Rhica; Gorlois (Hoel) of Tintagel and Uther ap Custennyn, King of Britons
Mother of Elen d'Anaumide; Elaine verch Gwyrlys; Morgana le Fay; Gormant ap Gwyrlys; Gania de Cornouaille; Arthwyr ap Uthyr, High King of Britain; Morgause (Anna); Madog ap Uthyr; Wife of Percival Verch Uther; Wife of Urien verch Uther; Cador Duke of Cornwall and Anna verch Uthyr
Nicknames: "Eigr", "Eigyr", "Eigiyr", "Igerna", "Igraine", "Ingerna", "Ygerne", "Ygerma del Acqs" . The Cult of the Ankh or Ankou was the Court of the Dragon of Ankh-fn-Khonsu and his successor Sobekhnefru, whose most sacred inner symbol, historically, was the winged Orobouros with a pendantGreek cross; the Ankh of Nin-Kursag or Hathor, and her daughter Innana or Venus. In tracing the history of one, via Egypt to its ancient Sumerian roots, we inevitably therefore recount the story of the other. They are, therefore, the same thing and represent The realm of the Dead (or more pertinently, precisely and poetically "The Undead"), Tir N'an Og, Elysium, Drakenberg, Lothlorien, The Court of the Kingdom of Elphame, The Court of the Kingdom of Elphame, The Grove of the Swan Maidens and the Hall of the Dragon Lords of the Rings, the Repha'im or Rapha Elohim.
Mari. http://songosmeltingpot.blogspot.com/2008/10/basque-mythology.html
The most prominent mythical being of the Basque traditions, without any doubt, is a beautiful woman: Mari. She habitually resides in the interior of the Earth and emerges at the surface in specific epochs via various caves and caverns. She alternates, therefore, moving from one mountain to another before the amazed look of man. Mari is beautiful and dressed in elegance, the quintessential essence of feminine guile. At other times, she adopts the form of different animals, or becomes a ball of fire crossing the horizon. The quality of her personal affects, such as her household furnishings, is considered the equivalent of solid gold, as prime example of the magnificance corresponding to her station. Haughty and arrogant in the defense of her interests, she allows no mortal to enter her dwelling, so that none of her personal goods are unduly appropriated. Mari has powers that allow her to reduce the stolen gold to coal with the simple contact of day light; and she knows how to turn tell the coal to turn into gold, the good services. At times it is risky to approach her, including her cave. She does not put up with the shepherds building their cabins in the environs of Supelegor. One such was pursued by the Lady, transformed into a raven, and although he escaped with his life, he died shortly afterwards as a consequence of the scare. The geography of Mari's influence was at one time more extensive than it is today. The children of la Burunda called the leftovers of the meal with bread that the men brought when they returned home «pan of Mari of the mountain», basoko Mariren ogia. And, to the south of Urbasa, in Améscoa, this custom continued until very recently: they used to tell the children «Eat the bread of the old woman of the mountain» or also, «bread of the little grandmother of the mountain». There are also areas where the traditions of this spirit are still very much alive, but where they do not use her name. They call her, simply, the Lady, Damea. Theses stories, however, are usually very similar and refer to the same person. Mari's spouse is Maju or Sugaar and her children are Attarrabi and Mikelats. According to the traditions of Arbizu, she continues to appear from time to time, the Lady of Aizkorri. She moved from the cave at Putterri, in Aralar, to the mountains of Cegama along the slope of the mount. The legends of Mari have, on the other hand, a very significant religious connotation. Repeatedly, the refusal of Christian practices by part of the protagonist is demonstrated; the origin of her marginalized life is even attributed to this rebellion.
http://www.evertype.com/misc/basque-jies/basque-jies.html
The name by which the primary deity in Basque mythology is chiefly known is Mari.[5] She is chief of many spirits -- most of whom are female -- found throughout the mythology. Mari is both a proper name and a generic title (that is, "Mari" vs. "the Mari"). It is accompanied by the name of the place with which she is associated. In Am�zqueta, Txindokiko Marie is 'the Mari (or Mistress) of Txindoki'. She is known by many other names: Marie Labako 'Mari of the Oven' (in Isp�ster), Marije Kobako 'Mari of the Cave' (in Marquina), Andre Mari Munoko 'Madam Mari of Muno' (in Oyarzun), Muruko Damea 'the Lady of Muru' (in At�un), Anbotoko Dama 'Lady of Anboto' (in Zarauz), Anbotoko Sorgi�a 'the witch of Anboto' (in Durango), Aketegiko Sorgi�e 'the witch of Aketegi' (in Cegama), and so on.[6] Numerous places are named after her: Marizulo 'Mari's cavern' (on the mountain of Larrunarri above Am�zqueta), Marijenkobia 'Mari's cave' (in Anboto), and Marikutx 'Mari's tomb' (a dolmen in Izarraitz) are examples.[7] Her husband, Maju, also bears the names Sugaar and Sugoi, which mean 'snake'. He often appears as a sickle or half-moon of fire; his passage is said to forebode a storm. Maju visits Mari each Friday to comb her hair, according to legend in Zarauz.[8] http://reclaimingthedarkgoddess.blogspot.com/2010/04/mari-goddess-of-moon.html
Although Mari's name is reminiscent of the Christian name Mar�a, we might easily consider the syncretism to be at least partly coincidental; for there are resonances within the native Basque in other contexts. http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=usva&c=words&id=12178
Cult of the Sun.
The sun is a mythical element of primal order in the ways of thinking of the traditional world. It orbits in the firmament, emerging in the morning before going to rest in the breast of the mother earth. There are expressions such as «Eguzki amandrea badoia bere amangana», "Grandmother Sun goes toward her mother", that give understanding to this belief. The earth is regarded as immense, extending in all directions. Not even the Sun itself reaches the ends of the earth when, at the end of its path, it arrives at the western seas or the red seas (itxasgorrieta) where it enters the bowels of its mother, the Earth (according to reports of Elosua), from where it will leave in the morning. The traveller who walked the worlds (munduz-mundu) with his rooster, whose song announced the dawn, did not reach farther than the country in which the men, beating the rocks with their sticks, managed to force the Sun to leave every morning (story of Atáun). However, the Sun is not only a natural phenomenon that inspires more or less original cosmogonic theories in each age. It is the luminary that renews each day to the eyes of man the great scene of the world rescued from the shadows of the night, and it is also the maker of the light that illuminates the souls after death. Data remain that reveal sacred character the Sun had for archaic societies. In the morning and at night, they directed prayers to the Sun, in words that demanded transcendental virtue, and they treated it as sacred. Here is a prayer recorded in Azoleta (Valcarlos), and which a priest discreditted as an old wives tale, atso-kontua: O Iruzki Saindia, eman zahuzu biziko eta hileko argia! "Holy Sun, give us the light of life and death!" Upon the introduction of the Christian calendar in the West, the liturgical commemoration of the Birth of the Savior, Christmas, was introduced in the festival of winter, and the birth of John the Baptist replaced the celebration of the summer solstice festivals. This change would leave its mark on the Basque traditions. Some ancient practices disappeared, others became Christianized, and there are more than a few demonstrations that reveal the deep-rooted aspect these traditions had in their day, as elements of important myths that shaped the mentality of our ancestors. Despite the spectacularness of the joyful presence of the Sun on the morning of San Juan, these is a transcendental moment that recapitulates the prerogatives of the summer soltice. At midnight, nature is renewed, curses are neutralized, and sicknesses are healed, in virtue of the rites that are performed in this precise moment. It is equivalent to a new creation.
The sun is a mythical element of primal order in the ways of thinking of the traditional world. It orbits in the firmament, emerging in the morning before going to rest in the breast of the mother earth. There are expressions such as «Eguzki amandrea badoia bere amangana», "Grandmother Sun goes toward her mother", that give understanding to this belief. The earth is regarded as immense, extending in all directions. Not even the Sun itself reaches the ends of the earth when, at the end of its path, it arrives at the western seas or the red seas (itxasgorrieta) where it enters the bowels of its mother, the Earth (according to reports of Elosua), from where it will leave in the morning. The traveller who walked the worlds (munduz-mundu) with his rooster, whose song announced the dawn, did not reach farther than the country in which the men, beating the rocks with their sticks, managed to force the Sun to leave every morning (story of Atáun). However, the Sun is not only a natural phenomenon that inspires more or less original cosmogonic theories in each age. It is the luminary that renews each day to the eyes of man the great scene of the world rescued from the shadows of the night, and it is also the maker of the light that illuminates the souls after death. Data remain that reveal sacred character the Sun had for archaic societies. In the morning and at night, they directed prayers to the Sun, in words that demanded transcendental virtue, and they treated it as sacred. Here is a prayer recorded in Azoleta (Valcarlos), and which a priest discreditted as an old wives tale, atso-kontua: O Iruzki Saindia, eman zahuzu biziko eta hileko argia! "Holy Sun, give us the light of life and death!" Upon the introduction of the Christian calendar in the West, the liturgical commemoration of the Birth of the Savior, Christmas, was introduced in the festival of winter, and the birth of John the Baptist replaced the celebration of the summer solstice festivals. This change would leave its mark on the Basque traditions. Some ancient practices disappeared, others became Christianized, and there are more than a few demonstrations that reveal the deep-rooted aspect these traditions had in their day, as elements of important myths that shaped the mentality of our ancestors. Despite the spectacularness of the joyful presence of the Sun on the morning of San Juan, these is a transcendental moment that recapitulates the prerogatives of the summer soltice. At midnight, nature is renewed, curses are neutralized, and sicknesses are healed, in virtue of the rites that are performed in this precise moment. It is equivalent to a new creation.