Vincent Bridges Archive

Adapted For The Western Vernacular By Vincent Bridges

Fear not the Transition, for death is but a passage, the greatest of many passing in the course of life.

As The Preacher has said: “Unto all things there is a season.” The solid fabric of phenomenal reality begins to fray and fade from perception, the light of the world grows dim and the breath subsides, thoughts fall away, the subtle continuity of consciousness lapses. . .

And through the gap, we come Home, again.

Release, therefore, release all attachments to things of this world, all entanglements, all ties.  See the people and places you have loved, bid them farewell and release them. See the ones you have wronged or injured you, forgive them and release them.

This must be done to allow the mind to rest free of thought forms while the senses of the body subside. In this way the experience of the falling away merges smoothly into a natural state of quiescence.

When the perception of things seen in the light of the world begins to fade, to sink within, then the five bodies, or elements, begin to sink within themselves.

Earth sinks into water. The physical sensations and awareness of the body is absorbed into the watery emotions of the formative body.

Water sinks into Fire. Thoughts and emotions are absorbed into the fiery mythological structures of the astral body.

Fire sinks into Air. The vast and luminous forms of myth are absorbed into the airy awareness of the all-knowing psychic body.

And Air then sinks into the Ether. Awareness is absorbed, raindrop to the ocean, into Mind/Spirit/Light.

Within the Mind/Spirit/Light are images of loved ones who have gone before, or angels and shining Beings come to help and to welcome.

Let the light grow brighter, blazing like the Sun and dancing like fireflies.

Let your soul ignite, blaze up with joy, all desires disappear, but the one desire, more light, ever more Light, which is granted.

The light of the noonday sun becomes but the shrouded light of a lamp in an opaque vessel.

All impulse toward ignorance vanishes and the Light becomes clear, like a deep autumn blue sky, compared to which, the brightest light seen in life is but a glimmer of twilight.

This is the Clear Light, the resolution of all opposites. Its recognition is the acknowledgment of an old friend, the reuniting of Mother and Son, source and its creation. It is the return, to our one true Home, Mind/Spirit/Light.

In truth, there is no part of you, that is not of the Light. For there is power in the Light, there is the Light of wisdom, and there is mercy in the Light, for, indeed, The Light has healing in its wings.

Light in Extension: The Path of RA

© 1995 Vincent Bridges

In the theology of the priests of Heliopolis, we catch a glimpse of mankind's earliest spiritual understanding of the nature of light. Those clever theologians managed to describe its relativistic quality ­­ nothing with any matter at all can go faster than light ­­ in terms of a mythological unity of great depth and philosophical complexity, the "operative and creative power" imagined by the Egyptians as the great god RA.

This powerful archetypal image was crafted by the rehket-sa, or "assembly of sages," of Heliopolis, with the help of a group of beings known as the Henmemet, or "The Shining Ones." From earliest times, (the spelling of the name of the city itself, Annu ­­ a finned spear-head, a jar and the symbol for city ­­ suggests the place where the space-ships land their cargo). Heliopolis seems to have been a very cosmopolitan place, one where several races and a few interplanetary species mingled freely. The spelling of the name Henmemet suggests a group of physical beings, definitely not spirits, who are "filled with light." This phrase re-occurs as the priests of RA try to describe life for the departed believer in the Boat of a Million Years; in a sense, the followers of RA would become like the Henmemet and travel the stars fed and clothed with light. Perhaps it is these celestial voyagers who educated the sages of Annu in the arts of mathematics, geometry, physics, astronomy, and so on through the familiar list of the early dynasties' unexpected sophistication. Wherever they learned or discovered the information, the priests of Annu were the first humans to code these physical constants, clues to the structure of the universe, into a mythical theology that is descriptive of the actual nature of both physical and psychological reality.

If we think of RA as the personification of all that we now call the nature of light, then his role as the original creative principle suddenly comes into sharp focus. Time, we are told, began with the first appearance of RA; eternity is referred to as "since the time of RA." These are ideas that strongly suggest the role of light as the ultimate yardstick of the space/time continuum. Without the activity of photon binding and threshold kindling, our physical reality would not exist. It is the discontinuous nature of quantum events, the absorption and emission of photons, which creates this discreet and sentient existence. Therefore, RA, when understood as the nature of light, does creatively enact our world and all its parts.

The ancient Egyptians expressed this in the way they spelled the word, ra. The "r" sound is rendered as a mouth, or a vesica piscis and the "a" is the out-stretched hand symbol. The determinatives are: a sun symbol with a line to the ground and the seated god figure, which tells us that this ra is a god who localizes the energy of the sun, or great light. The phonetic symbols suggest, in hieroglyphic rebus fashion, that the waves give or supply the energy of the sun. The mouth of RA is a schematic for the sine wave of a vibrating string, and, as the vesica, generates the irrational number of the square root of 3. This number divides the volume-form of the cube (a cube with edges equal to 1; a rectangular plane is passed diagonally through the cube, the diagonal of which equals the square root of three) and, remember, every form in the created universe is a volume. Think of the square root of the as a form generator, regular polygons arising one after the other in the succession of vesica constructions unfolding from the self division of unity. This form-creating flow, the glyphs suggest,is the gift of the local energy source, the sun. This gift of form is the essence of what the Egyptian theologians considered divine. In that sense, RA was indisputably the One God, the unity at the heart of diversity.

Hang on to that realization. It is a clue to understanding the basic mysteries of Egyptian theology. The Followers of RA, like the Henmemet, who visited Heliopolis in the early dynastic era, were real people, not spirits. It is from them that the concept of "God the Principle," the "RA Function" passed to the priests of the City of the Sun. The "Light Beings," that is, creatures who are fed on, clothed by, and enveloped in light, naturally became the focus of the religious concept they taught. If we believe (as the early Egyptians thought) in the RA Function, the "One God who is All Gods," then we will become like these light beings when we die. Like them, we will voyage forever in the Boat of a Million Years...

Beliefs like these were popular with the priests and the intellectuals, but the mass of Egyptian people never wavered from their faith in the shamanic paradise of Osiris, a vegetation god whose worship created a cult of the deified dead. If the RA function existed since the beginning of time, then the Osiris cult surely has its beginnings in the moment the first Handy monkey learned of death. The only god worthy of respect to that grieving monkey was one who could assuage the awful lonely emptiness of extinction. An afterlife of judgement and reward ensured that existence was continuous and that it had meaning, even if that meaning was judged as negative. Ausar Un-Nefer, Osiris the Justified One, filled the existential void of death with a panoply of shamanic ordeals and divine interaction. Life was anything but dull in the Hall of the Lord of the Dead.

The genius of the IVth Dynasty Heliopolitan theologians and social scientists lies in their creative resolution to the problem of these two contrasting afterlives. Ausar (Osiris) was invited into the Boat of a Million Years and was asked to sit at the right hand of RA. In fact, he was asked to be RA's regent, his viceroy among the monkeys, as it were. The name, Ausar is spelled with the eye of RA above a throne, and the god figure as a determinative. His distinctive function, "stability," symbolized by the backbone-like djed, was once, along with "light," considered one of the powers of RA. Osiris worship, with its shamanic paradise, was thus elevated by its merger with the RA function to the level of an universal religion. As such it long out lasted the priests of RA, whose functions were usurped by Amun of Thebes. (Although a memorialized form of the ancient wisdom continued to be celebrated among the ruins of Heliopolis until the arrival of the Arabs in the seventh century of the Common era.)

The union of these two god-forms produced the central mystery of the Egyptian religious experience. A line of the Vth Dynasty Pyramid Texts reads: "The Great Secret, The Great Mystery; it is RA, it is Osiris." This could be interpreted as: "The Great Secret: we are of extra-terrestrial origin ­­ The Great Mystery: we can return to that level of being; it is RA (who reveals the Great Secret), it is Osiris, (who shows us the Great Mystery)."

This blending of cosmological and metaphorical values supplied the inner tension that kept the Egyptian mysteries vital for over three thousand years. The path of RA offered a transcendentally cosmological existence in the boat of a million years, while the path of Osiris promised eternity in an astral metaphor for life along the Nile. We are told in the "Book of the Dead" that RA and Osiris are twin souls, united between the pillars of the Djed, but we are left with few clues as to how this unification was to be accomplished.

The clues that we do have (see discussions at Edfu and Letopolis) point to the agency of Heru-Ur, the elder sky god who somehow manages to be both cosmological and metaphorical and therefore acts as a medium for their unification. Strangely enough, the Neophyte Ritual of the nineteenth century magical group, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, suggests the same process by having the god-form of Heru-Ur (Aeouris) be the active or initiatory form of Osiris. In that same ritual, much is made of an Egyptian phrase, "Khabs m Pehket," which is translated as "Light in Extension." With this inspired choice, the Order penetrated to the core of the Egyptian mysteries.

The Egyptians had many words that meant "light," showing a subtle and sophisticated understanding of both physics and optics by their varied spellings and usage. But one, the one used by the Order, had a very unusual series of meanings associated with it. Khabs in its root meanings suggests "to shine or sparkle like a star." It can also mean the star itself, or any other celestial "lamp," as in the "Lamps of the Decans." This meaning of "lamplight" became a mystical phrase associated by the experience of being filled with light, as were the Henmemet. In this sense it passed into Islam as the 35th verse of the 24th sura of the Koran, becoming over time the focus of many Sufi sects, including the Al Hagag Sufis of the Temple Mosque at Luxor. Khabs implies the whole mystery of RA and "the Path of Becoming Light," as pehket (the word translated as "extension" by the Golden Dawn), expresses the physically focused nature of the Osiris cult.

How these fragments of Heliopolitan wisdom found their way into a nineteenth century English magical society is quite another story, but their very survival indicates the deep archetypal power of these formulations. "Light in Extension" seems to be the key to activating the Equinox of the Gods, the Unification of the Paths of RA and Osiris, and the medium through which this will occur (is occurring!) seems to be that of the ancient God of the Sky, Heru-Ur. After all, March 21 in the Cairo calendar is called the "feast of Re-constituting Heaven: The Company of the Gods, union of the houses of RA, Ausar and Heru."

The Path of Ausar and the Mysteries of Resurrection

© 1995 Vincent Bridges

THE DJED AND THE TREE OF LIFE

The Djed seems to be a pre-dynastic "fetish" which somehow was absorbed into the Egyptian language as the ideograph for stability. The best we can say is that in its original connotations, the djed was connected with fertility, the supernatural life energy of the grain itself. When the First Dynasty priests began their grand synthesis of Egyptian theology, the djed became one of the fourteen power or "kaw" of the Great God RA. Each power was given to one of the Memphis triad, and so Ptah ended up with the djed.

Ptah's Djed was often shown with a Uas scepter sort of plugged into the top of it, along with the crook and flail that would later become the emblems of Osiris himself. It would appear that Osiris assumed those objects from the ideograph of the djed. Ptah has become associated with Sokar, the God of the Land of the Dead, which Osiris absorbed at the beginning of the Old Kingdom.

A Variety of Djeds showing a pillar supporting four horizontal tiers.

Fortunately, Egyptian is very logographic as well as ideographic and phonetic. This means that word signs can be spelled out using similar sounds and meanings to the sign. Djed is also the Egyptian word for "to speak," "to declare," "to say." With emphasis, Ddd-jed, it is the sacred word itself, speech deified. Interesting as this is, it is the other roots that really strike a suggestive nerve. Djedd, same word, slightly different emphasis, means, "star," or actually, the culmination or azimuth, of the star.

And now, suddenly we erupt into the Kabbalah. Again, the same word, djedd, is also a perfectly good Hebrew word dzeth, and they both mean an olive tree. The same word, in very similar pronunciation, is found in both Coptic and Arabic. Note also that the Hebrew letter teth, the serpent, spelled in full, is similar both in pronunciation and in numerical value ­­ dzeth is 417 and teth is 419.

The olive tree connection leads us to fertile ground. The olive tree is the original Tree of Life, perhaps even the burning bush of Moses (Again, see Koran 28:37). The combination of the idea of star and the image of the tree of life suggests an interesting cluster of meaning associated with the djed. Even more interesting, 417, in Hebrew, is the value for Noah's Arc. The djed is an object that can safely carry us through the vast waters from one world to the next.

The concept of the Djed as a sacred object can be broken down into three categories:

1) Djed as an idea is found from early Dynastic times associated with the Uas and the Ankh, as in the three in one concept "life/stability/serenity." From this came the verb djed, which meant stable, to be permanent.

2) The Djed-pillar is the sacred object worshiped in pre-Dynastic times in the Delta as the world tree. In a small Osiris shrine against the north wall of the Karnak complex, there is a beautiful relief of the World Tree blossoming from the djed.

3) The third category is the djed amulet, a small usually gold or bone replica of the djed pillar that was worn to ensure that the deceased had the permanence and stability of Osiris. The name, "backbone of Osiris," is written as a djed pillar with a sperm-like tear drop shape moving upward toward an hemi-sphere. We can see this as emblematic of the sexual force, the sperm, moving upward to the dome of the cranium ­­ the rise of the force of kundalini.

This concept is made even clearer by the specialized word for astral light or psychic brilliance in Egyptian, which is also pronounced djed. Written as the combination of the "kaw" powers light and stability, this word has very definite magical connotations. The light ideograph, a sun disk shown radiating energy downward, has no phonetic value but indicates a being of light. In this sense it finds its way into the word aakhu, a spirit being, a description or title very similar to the Mayan Ahau. Light in this sense is divine light, the cosmic beam mediated through the vibrations of the sun itself. It also shows us the nature of the Equinox of the Gods and gives us a clue to creation of the twin soul RA/Osiris.

The Djed is the ancient image of the world tree as the focus of a sort of planetary kundalini force. To be disconnected ­­ the Djed on its side ­­ is to be out of touch with the greater galactic community. To raise the djed was to open a portal between the worlds, to reconnect the human community with the greater community of sentience in the galaxy. It was the function of the Pharaoh to perform this essentially magical feat, as it was the function of the Mayan Kings. Djed is the channel for the galactic communication beam, as well as the beam itself. The raising occurs in all of us as we become in tune with the flow of telluric kundalini, and then we become Djedi, the "stable ones."

Raising the Djed from Abydos

THE CAIRO CALENDAR

The Cairo Calendar is an ant-eaten piece of papyrus bought by the Cairo Museum in 1943. The second section of this work, whose title is something like "An Introduction to the start of Everlastingness and an end to Eternity," gives a reading for each day of the year. (These concepts could be productively worked. They suggest the root of the concept of "spiritual consciousness," a sort of self-remembering similar to that of the Sufis and Gurdjief). As part of determining whether or not a day is auspicious, the mythology related to that day is also given. The Cairo calendar is our only source for how some of these concepts relate to time and the framework of the year. The Calendar gives many pieces of several different mythologies, and ties them together by how these archetypal and mythic events impact upon humanity. A truly amazing document!

The Cairo calendar mentions the Djed three times. The first comes in September, the nineteenth day of the second month of Inundation. The Calendar tells us; "It is the day of the going forth of Nun to set up the Djed pillar in its place to compensate the gods in its presence." Now this is most intriguing. If Nun is the primal water, the original being, then who are the gods? Two days before, on Day 17, we are told that the Major and Minor Ennead emerged from "the chaotic waters of Nun." These are the gods before who Nun sets up the Djed. "In its place" would, of course, be the primal mound at Edfu, but how are the gods compensated by its presence? Why do gods need to be compensated? What does the Djed pillar do for these primal beings?

The next Djed date, October 25 in our reckoning, the 26th day of the third month of Inundation, is very important. "It is the day of establishing the Djed of Atum in heaven and on the land of Heliopolis at the moment of the uproar. The Two Lords are reconciled, causing the land to be in peace. All of Egypt is given to Horus, and all of the desert to Set. Tehuti goes forth to be judged before RA."

The Cairo calendar is a curious collection of folkloric fragments. Its hieratic script dates it in the New Kingdom, but some of its phrases are extremely obscure, suggesting that they go back to the Old Kingdom and perhaps beyond into pre-dynastic times. Certainly this glimpse of the resolution of the conflict between Horus and Set is rather unusual, with its almost deus-ex-machina-like djed. "The djed of Atum" is an unique concept, which I can find no where else. Atum is the Heliopolitan creator god, the self-created lord of all. In the 175th chapter of the Book of the Dead, Atum addresses Osiris concerning the end of the world:

"I am but doing away with all that I have done since the earth emerged from the watery primal state of the abyss of Nun. I am fate and Osiris. I have changed into other serpents. Neither the gods nor mankind can perceive the double beauty I have created for Osiris, greater than all the gods. I have granted him the Mound of the Dead."

This begins to resemble the image of a caduceus, the serpent-entwined rod of the Greek psycho-pomp Hermes. The serpents of course, are connections to the earth current, the word serpent is Egyptian, djed-ft, is related to the roots used in the Djed itself, indicating that the concepts were related. Atum's statement, "I am fate and Osiris," is the core of the mystery. We can read the meaning of this as close to the Buddhist's "suffering and the release of suffering." Granting Osiris the Mound of the Dead is to give him the position of the original Nun djed-pillar, as a sort of mediator among the worlds.

The last Djed day in the Cairo calendar is the sixth day of the second month of Emergence, January 3rd in our current reckoning. "It is the day of putting up the djed-pillar of Osiris. The gods are sad, with their faces downward when they remember Osiris." The Calendar lists the other Djed days are very favorable, but this one is listed as very unfavorable. The sadness of the gods suggests their compassion for the human condition. In that sense, the "djed of Osiris" can be seen as a sort of divine rescue. Saddened by our fate, the gods gave us an escape mechanism, the Djed.

THE WORLD TREE

Now, let's try to pull all of this information into a coherent picture. The djed began as a power object to the Neolithic cultures of the Delta. It symbolized "stability," or rather "divine establishment." The world tree or axis is a common motif in shamanic practices, indicating an awareness of the infra-structure of the universe. As this idea became a word, it was associated with similar sounding words in order to have a phonetic spelling. The root complex of the spelling of the word djed encompasses the concepts of speech, including divine speech, the culmination of a star and an ol;ive tree, the world tree itself. This tells us that the ancient Egyptians thought of the Djed as something divinely pronounced, a tree that links the earth and the stars.

Interestingly enough, the Indo-European group of languages have a complex of root words that are very similar to that which we have just outlined in Egyptian. The world tree in this case is the oak, *dorw in ancient Indo-Aryan. Just as the olive tree was the Tree of Life in the Mediterranean because of its ability to supply food, and therefore ensure stability, it was the oak that provided this stability for the ancient proto-Europeans wandering in the vast oak forests of the post-glacial warm spell. The word for oak also meant firm, strong, stable and enduring. Our modern English words truth, trust, and even tree come from these roots. Druid is also in the *dorw family, and means, "seer of the oaks."

Whenever we trace the decendants of the root words of the oak family in the various Indo-European languages, from Ireland to India, we find that they are prominently featured in a religious usage. And in India we find large pieces of the puzzle.

A passage in the Rigveda echoes the notation in the Cairo Calendar: "Which is the tree, which is the forest from which they have fashioned Heaven and Earth, the stationery, undecaying, and giving protection to the deities." The word for tree here, daru, is the direct derivation of *dorw. Daru is The Tree, the World Tree, the Cosmic Pillar around which the entire universe was thought to revolve. The world tree is often shown in ancient Indian folk art as a great tree crowned with the Pole Star. Polaris is called dhruva, another derivative, which meant the firm, or fixed one.

So far, we are no further along than we were in the Egyptian tradition. But in sixth century BC India, the methodology was scientifically recorded and therefore preserved. Pantajali left us a kind of psychology lab manual, a do-it-yourself handbook on enlightenment in his Yoga Sutras. This is a work containing very specific formulas for the systematic unfolding of consciousness.

This is not the place to discuss yoga or Indian philosophy. We are on an intellectual scavenger hunt for forgotten ideas, looking for the connections. The connection here lies in Formula 28 in the third section of Patanjali's work, which is concerned with powers, or abilities. It states that "by performing samyama on the Pole star (dhruva), one gains knowledge of the motion of the stars."

On the surface, this seems obvious. Watch the night sky from anywhere in the northern hemisphere of the planet and you can't help but observe the relationship of the Pole Star to the motion of the other stars. This is not a "power" but an observation. What happens then when you make "samyama" on the "dhruva?"

We have no equivalent in English for the Sanskrit word "samyama." To Pantanjali it meant a degree of meditation in which the three qualities of the mind merge. In essence, this means the ability to focus the mind, while permitting the mind to flow freely and, at the same time, unite the mind with the object of the meditation. It's a sort of mental calisthenics, like patting one's head simultaneously with rubbing the stomach: it produces a deep state of rapport with whatever one is focusing upon, be it an image of a deity, or the Pole Star. This intense rapport allows for an actual exchange of energy, a transferral of "power," hence the name of the section. Some of this "power" is of course, knowledge.

Thanks to the explosion of interest in eastern meditation practices, we now have a large group of individuals who have learned the trick, but do not have the cultural infra-structure of the Hindu world view. In a sense, what the trained western meditators have done is provide a degree of proof for the contention that the methods are indeed scientific, and not culturally dependent. The technique and its expression in the Sutra, is very precise, and its results are repeatable, as has been demonstrated by an experiment at Maharishi University.

In the late seventies, Dr. Jonathan Shear put together an experiment based on the very Yoga Sutra in which we are interested. Published in the January 1981 edition of Metaphilosophy, his paper is extremely thought provoking. He states that, just as we have done, "one would expect to perceive the motion of the stars in the context of the heavens as we are accustomed to perceive and think about them." But this doesn't happen.

The early stages of the experience, the meditators reported, had that sort of imagery, but something else began to happen: "The Pole Star is seen at the end of a long rotating shaft of light. Rays of light come out from the shaft like the ribs of an umbrella. The umbrella-like structure on which the stars are embedded is seen as rotating... The whole experience is described as quite spectacular, blissful, colorful and melodious." The meditators themselves were taken by surprise. They had no idea that this image of the World Tree was an actual archetype until they stumbled across it. Dr. Shear is emphatic when he states "the experience is the innocent by-product of the proper practice of the technique."

Above is our archetypal Djed. The cosmology of the ancient Hindu Puranas echoes both Dr. Shear's meditators and the legends of the Djed. Dharma, the Cosmic Law that resides at the highest point of the celestial structure, is also an oak-root word. The Rigveda tells us that "on top of the distant sky there stands/ The Word encompassing all." The Djed is one of Plato's Ideal Forms, as he describes in the story of the ascent of Er to the Realm of Ideal Forms in the Republic. It doesn't matter whether the seer resides in India or in Egypt, Britain or Greece, when the glimpse comes, a great tree upon which the universe turns appears as a shaft of brilliant white light, its streaming branches clusters of galaxies.

Stability then becomes the link between earth and stars. We are stable only as long as we are connected to our stellar source. For the ancient Egyptians, this meant internal as well as external. They envisioned everyone as connected to a Khabs or star body. The djed, the spine of the individual, became the channel for that divine, or stellar connection. A person who had this internal stellar connection was seen as one who had control of the life force itself, a Djedi. There are many elements of sexual energy in this connection, suggesting both Hindu and Tibetan Tantric practices.

The Cairo Calendar gives us some tantalizing fragments of a Djed myth, one that connects Nun, Atum and Osiris in new and unusual ways. If this can be accepted as a fragment of Heliopolitan secret lore, and I think it can, then we have the key to the mystery of the djed.

Nun raises a djed, on the primal Edfu mound, to "compensate" the gods. For what? It can only be that they are no longer in "heaven" or the watery abyss of Nun, which is perhaps interstellar space. The Djed supplies their much needed connection to that heavenly base. The second appearance of the djed is a shock in both heaven and earth, an uproar, the Calendar noted it. A direct channel was opened so that the council of the gods, RA and the holders of his "kaw" could be physically present to judge the conflict. This djed of Atum is unique, perhaps the only time the Djed beam was used in this manner. The third djed is the memorial to Osiris. The gods take pity on mankind; the rescue is established.

The Djed is our connection to the galaxy; the Egyptian equivalent to the Mayan Xibalba Portal, the gateway to the Otherworld. The madness of Set caused the Djed to fall on its side. Pharaoh must raise it up, that is, re-establish the divine or extra-terrestrial connection. Our illness is the illness of aggression and violence, the power to destroy. Our cure is the sense of our place in the greater universe, an end to the isolation of humanity. These are concepts that the Egyptians were concerned with thousands of years ago. Let's hope we understand them in time.

NOTES ON EGYPTIAN RELIGION

© 1996 Vincent Bridges

I. Notes on the Great Myth

We see the religion of ancient Egypt through the filters of the royal cult and the theology of immortality. Consequently, much of the marginally related, but nonetheless significant, material has been lost or overlooked. The Great Myth, the mythological framework in which Egyptian Theology functions and gains expression, was unstated; perhaps because it was secret, jealously held by the temple initiates, or possibly because it was so well known as to be universal. Recovery of this lost Great Myth supplies a pattern in which the chaotic pieces of Egyptian mythology can be comfortably accommodated.

To discern the Great Myth, we must first examine the different theological systems co-existent in Egyptian religious thought. The ancient Egyptians never codified their myths into one orthodoxy; mythology for them was a sub-set of philosophy or natural science, not a revealed truth. Therefore, the Egyptians' creation myths read like anthropomorphised versions of cosmology texts. In fact, the great intellectual feat of the Memphite Recension was the insistence that these concepts are abstract images, not concrete, placed-in-time events. Humanity has seldom formulated a more inclusive and subtle statement of ontological and eschatological concerns than the Memphite theology. Its inclusiveness points up the lack of orthodoxy by accommodating several other traditions within the metaphor. Atum-Ra, Tehuti and Osiris are seen as forms of the Great Design, Ptah. As such, they are complementary, not antithetical.

In this spirit, we can begin to look for the threads of inter-relationship that define the boundaries of the Great Myth. We shall examine this question from three perspectives: 1) the five great traditions and their relationships, 2) the mythic structure derived from these relationships, and 3) the nature of myth as language.

1) The Five Great Traditions - These traditions can be sub-divided into the three traditions based on temples and localities: the Memphis/Hermopolis/Heliopolis, the Theban and the Edfu/Dendara of Upper Egypt; and two non-local traditions, that of the Great Goddess and Osiris.

a) Memphis/Hermopolis/Heliopolis - Because of its political clout in the IVth through VIth Dynasties, the tradition of Heliopolis is the best known of all the Egyptian theologies. It was also extremely influential in the development of all the other traditions. The myths of Heliopolis form one portion of the bedrock on which the Great Myth rests. Only slightly less influential are the traditions of Hermopolis. These very esoteric myths are the intellectual underpinning of the later Memphite Theology. Tehuti, Thoth of the Greeks, was never assimilated as were Atum-Ra and Ptah. He remained as the Divine Ambassador no matter who was High God. Tehuti's peculiar relationship to all the traditions is an important clue to the structure of the underlying myth. We will return to this point later. At some time during the late Vth or early VIth Dynasty, the priest of Ptah in Memphis produced a unitary version of the creation myths that tried to gather both Hermopolis and Heliopolis into the same mythic form.

b) Thebes/Luxor - The Egyptian city of Waset attained political prominence at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. Its creator deity, a fragment of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad known as Amun with the attribute of invisibility, did not become the state deity until the New Kingdom. Amun, said to be simultaneously created by the spirits of Hermopolis and Ra the Sun God, was a composite, and ultimately political, tradition. The ancient local deity of the nome was Montu, the falcon-headed warrior god related to the Edfu/Dendara tradition. As Amun, the Hidden One, seen as an ancient serpent god who formed the world and then retreated, evolved during the Middle Kingdom, Montu became Khonsu, the Moon God; while Sekhmet, as Mut, became the Sun Goddess. This Theban Triad became a syncretic focus for the official religious expression of the New Kingdom.

c) Edfu/Dendara - This tradition spans the whole range of Egyptian history, from the pre-dynastic murks to the last flash of Ptolemaic splendor. Focused on the myths of Horus the Elder and Hathor/Sekhmet, this tradition presents a somewhat revamped cosmology, although it agrees in outline with the basic Heliopolitian position. This tradition holds the divine right by which the King held office. The union of the disk, a new year ceremony, was an Edfu tradition that was celebrated in every temple and affirmed the authority of Horus as Divine King. The sacred marriage of Horus and Hathor, celebrated at both Dendara and Edfu, commemorated an important but almost overlooked moment in Egyptian mythological history. The Edfu traditions were overshadowed by the Cult of Amun, but managed to retain a degree of political power until Roman times. The Goddess myths of Dendara survived as a component of the Great Goddess Tradition.

d) The Great Goddess Tradition - The Isis cult formed a core for a large collection of goddesses. She was Isis at Philae, Hathor at Dendara, Neith at Sais, Mut at Thebes, Sekhmet at Memphis, and Ejo at Buto and Nekhabit at El Kab; these last two the goddesses of Lower and Upper Egypt whose union was symbolized by the snake and vulture crown of the King. The Goddess tradition supported the various political and traditional arrangements, but was most closely identified with Osiris and the Younger Horus.

e) The Osiris Tradition - Osiris is the theological glue that holds the Egyptian system together. Traces of the Osiris cult are found in pre-dynastic cultures, surviving until the Arab conquest. The Osiris tradition emerged in the late IVth Dynasty as a component of the Heliopolitian "orthodoxy." This was a brilliant stroke of theological politics, and perhaps formed the basis of the Heliopolitian influence. The matter of Osiris bridged the mythological gap between cosmology and human history. Osiris was worshipped in many places, even Karnak, the Egyptian Vatican, has its Osiris chapel. Busiris in the Delta and Abydos in Upper Egypt were both important cult centers.

2) Mythic Structure - We can think of the Egyptian myths as episodes in a vast cosmic drama that stretches from the creation of the universe to the founding of Kingship by the followers of Horus. This drama is played out in five great acts: 1) The Creation and Emergence of the High God, 2) the Departure of the High God and the Separation of Earth and Sky, 3) the Reign of Osiris and the Fall of Set, 4) The Great Conflict between Horus and Set, 5) the Salvation of Osiris and Kingship of Horus.

a) Creation and the Emergence of the High God - At the beginning of all Egyptian creation myths there is only Nu, the primeval water of the universe. This can be pictured as an active void or a field of potential order. In this water, this field, the original Spirit moved. Heliopolis thought of this spirit as Atum, who self-generated the first twain, or pair of dualities, Shu, moisture, and Tefnut, heat and dispatched his eye, his sentience, to survey the void. In Hermopolis this was pictured as the union of the Negative Qualities to form the Cosmic Egg of existence. The sages of Memphis imagined this as the Original Spirit, here called Ptah, designing and braiding together the pattern of the future.

The Original Spirit emerged from the primeval waters as a mound, or a point of stability in a universe of undifferentiated movement. This emergence was variously imagined as a flower opening, a serpent rearing, a pillar rising or even a child emerging from the flower. The Spirit then re-called his Eye, and flying up like the Primeval Bird, tamed his sentience, his Eye, as his daughter and embraced her. Her tears of joy became the small fragments of sentience that spread through the universe as human consciousness. The Original Spirit became the High God, and the first Golden Age began.

2) Departure of the High God and the Separation of Earth and Sky - The High God, after a while, retreated from his creation. This is a key theological point in Egyptian mythology. The absence of the High God supplies a transcendent void in which the evolution of sentience unfolds. As The High God departs, Shu and Tefnut give birth to Geb and Nuit, the Earth and the Sky. The stars, our local universe, were created by another act of separation. Shu separates his children, literally opens up space/time, and gives birth to the stars. The body of Nuit becomes the river of stars and Geb swallows the seven cobras that form the ring of the world. Geb, matter, becomes the pattern through which Nuit, time, flows.

3) The Reign of Osiris and the Fall of Set - Nuit also gave birth to the Five: Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys and Horus the Elder. Osiris became the overseer of the High God, and taught mankind the skills of civilization. Another Golden age ensued. But Set grew jealous of his brother's authority and plotted against him. The Fall of Set introduced evil into the world: the will to power overcame the will to be compassionate. Set murdered Osiris and dismembered his body. Isis, with the help of Tehuti, (Thoth) gathered the pieces and magickally impregnated herself. Isis and Nephthys sat vigil over the body of Osiris while Set ruled the world in confusion and fear. Set fought the serpents of Geb, seeking to gain power over the earth itself. Isis went to hiding in the Delta and gave birth to Horus, the re-incarnation of Osiris.

4) The Great Conflict between Set and Horus - Horus survived a series of childhood adventures in the Delta and the desert. As a young man, Horus set out to avenge his "father." He challenged Set to a series of great battles that came close to destroying the world. Tehuti called upon the Council of the Gods to settle the dispute. Horus is eventually judged the victor and given the Kingship. Set is demoted to a being of storms and made to serve the Divine Boat.

5) The Salvation of Osiris and the Reign of Horus - Horus the Elder brought the news to Osiris in the Duat, the netherworld, that Horus had avenged him and become King. Osiris was liberated to become the judge of the afterlife, and Horus the Younger became the living God on earth.

Soon however, Horus the Younger grew unstable. His conflict with Set had poisoned him with violence. He soon joined Osiris in the Duat. Horus the Elder became King, but the Council of Ra decided that the contagion of Set was too pernicious for humanity to survive. Ra dispatched his Eye to destroy mankind. Tehuti and Horus the Elder outsmarted the Eye: the fiery lion-goddess became the nurturing cow. Horus and Hathor dwelt in Upper Egypt until the forces of Set emerged again. In the war against Set's monsters, Horus and Hathor passed their divine DNA onto a group of human sages, the Shemsu Hru, or the Followers of Horus. From this group came the organization that created the first King of a unified Egypt.

3) The Nature of Myth as Language - For the Egyptians, myth was a language, one that expressed great wisdom about nature and the mind of man. The cosmological myths describe mathematical processes; for instance Ptah can be understood as Phi, which can be derived from the hieroglyphs used to spell p-t-h. Ptah can be seen as the master weaver, braiding the future course of evolution into our DNA. The Children of Nuit are different. They are more metaphorical than mathematical. Osiris can be seen as the force of compassionate order; Set as the individualistic impulse to power. The Fall of Set creates a mythic politics that explains the nature of evil. The ongoing mythopoetic drama continues into history; King Aha/Menes, founder of the Ist Dynasty who united the Two Lands, was the son of Horus and therefore not separate from the mythological past, but a continuing part of it.

The mythic language of ancient Egypt provided an incredibly high level of civilization. Society had meaning that was deeply embedded in the structure of the culture itself. The Great Myth was the thread on which the interplay of intellectual components was strung.

II. Notes on the Priesthood

It is important to remember that the priesthood was a civil function in ancient Egypt. Recruited from the local population, the priests served three months at a time then returned to their daily lives. A small core of superior priests, or adepts, served the temple full time. During the New Kingdom, every temple, no matter how small, had at least one resident priest. The function of a priest was to maintain the universal order as dictated by the Gods in the Zep Tepi, or the First Time, the original Golden Age of the High God. To this end, their primary function was to perform the rituals of the Divine Drama, the Great Myth, at the appropriate time and in the correct way. By involving a large portion of the local population in its services, the temple became the center of local culture.

The initiation, or installation, of a priest was essentially the same in all temples. A baptism in a sacred pool, symbolic of the waters of Nu, the Cosmic Ocean, washed away all evil. Then the candidate was sprinkled with oil and water as purification, led to the statue of the Goddess and instructed in the secret ways of touching and working with the statue. The candidate then undertakes a ten day fast, at the end of which the mysteries are revealed by some sort of psychic/shamanic experience.

Within the temple structure, there were classes of priests. The administrative officials in the large temples, such as Karnak, functioned as a separate group, one not too concerned with religious perspectives. They took care of the business end of the temple and its property. The religious establishment also had its classes. The temple of Amun had five different priestly sections, each with its own sub-divisions. The High Priest of Ptah at Memphis was called "the great chief of all artisans," as all crafts were under the protection of Ptah. These first and second "prophets," mis-translated by the Greeks from the Egyptian "servants of the God," were mostly royal appointments and could be chosen from any level of society. They led the higher ranks of the priesthood in the ritual functions of the temple.

The upper ranks of the priesthood were drawn from the class of priestly specialist. This included: The Stolists, who dressed and cared for the divine image; scholars and scribes; timekeepers and astrologers; and the musicians, dancers and singers. Of these, the scribes and scholars were the most diverse.

Below the specialists were the "purified ones," the low clergy who acted as the participants in the rituals. They carried the lesser cult objects, the standards and the banners of the God or Goddess. Among this group could also be found the public oracles and interpreters of dreams.

III. Notes on Priesthood of Memphis in the Early XVIIIth Dynasty

In the early New Kingdom, Memphis was still a great city, even though no longer the political capital of the country. The Hewet-ka-Ptah, the Palace of the Spirit of Ptah, dominated the city, which spread from the Nile banks to the hills of Sakkarah. The main function of the Temple was the regulation of all industry. The specialists of Ptah include a master of every known craft. We known little of the ritual structure of the temple, but portions of its cosmology have survived on the Shabaka Stone. From this we glimpse a rarefied atmosphere of philosophical speculation, from which the practical crafts of Memphis grew.

Within the temple complex was the smaller House of Sekhmet. This was tended by both men and women, but the High Priest and most of the specialists would have been women. Drawn from the local nobles, admission to the house of Sekhmet's priesthood would have been available to an outsider only through the specialists. Most of the major specialties, time-keeping and so forth, would have been shared by the entire temple, but Sekhmet would have had some specialties all her own. From the oblique hints we have left, these seem to have been: 1) skill with animals, including possibly shape-shifting or totemic shamanism, 2) dancing and 3) trance skills.

As Ptah was the protector of crafts and craftsman, so Sekhmet was the ruler of all animal life, huntress and the creator in a way of domestication. Osiris is credited with domesticated the animals of the field, but Sekhmet is said to have made a pact with the wild animals, the cats and the cobras, to protect the grain of Egypt. Shape-shifting would have been a part of the Sekhmet festival that re-enacted the Eye of Destruction. There is some suggestion that the priestess of Sekhmet had the ability to become a lioness and render judgment, particularly on the servants of Set.

Dancing was an important component of the Sekhmet mysteries at Memphis. Little has survived of these dances, though we can suppose that they demonstrated the geometric principles of the Memphite cosmology and were based on Phi and the square root of 5. The trance skills were related to the oracular specialties, some of which involved allowing the Goddess to take possession of a body and speak through it, much as the state oracle of Tibet does to this day.

Politically, this period was a turbulent one for the priestly caste. The Precinct of Amun at Thebes emerged as the state religion and its high priest became the "chief of all prophets of the South and the North." This "pontificate" ruled the religious environment and eventually became a rival to the royal power. The smaller precincts, such as Memphis, retained some political power, but were essentially caught between the power plays of Thebes and Heliopolis. The Servants of Ptah and Sekhmet would have occupied an uneasy neutral ground, and they would have been careful to support who ever was in power. We know that they supported Hatshepsut, just the Heliopolitian tradition supported Tutmose III.

Abydos, the Osireion and Egyptian Sacred Science

By Vincent Bridges

(C) 9/1/2000

Far up the Nile in Upper Egypt, sometime during the fourth millennium BCE, three great confederations, formed around the cult centers of what our earliest references call "the living gods," unified to create the first great Egyptian kingdom. Eventually, this federation would spread north and south to conquer the Two Lands of the Nile and become the 1st Dynasty. In the south, a cult of Horus the Elder formed around Edfu and Neken and grew into its own state. Just north of Neken, in the bend of the great river, the living god was a goddess, Hathor, the consort of Horus. Since time immemorial, far back into the mists of Egyptian prehistory, the Lady of the House of Heru sailed down the river each year to meet her mate, Horus the Elder, at the ancient mound of Behdet at Edfu and celebrate the sacred marriage.

This ancient closeness between the cult centers of the two early confederations led to a degree of political unity. However, Upper Egypt did not become a truly powerful federation until the addition of the third great independent confederation, that of Thinis down river from Nubt of Hathor. The living god of the cult center and capital, Abydos, was a dog deity named Khent-Amenty, which meant something like "Head of the West." Since the entrance to the underworld, the land of the dead, was said to lie through the gap in the Libyan hills to the west, Khent-Amenty was seen as a kind of psycho-pomp or guardian of the land of the dead.

This of course is supposition, as the cult of Osiris later overlaid and distorted most of the original doctrines of Khent-Amenty. We can not even say with any degree of certainty when this happened. As early as 3,000 BCE, Osirian funeral artifacts appeared at Abydos. Within a few hundred years, the 1st Dynasty kings of a unified Egypt built tombs and cenotaphs at Abydos in order to be near the tomb of Osiris and the gateway to the Land of the Dead. From then on, Abydos was the center of the Osirian mysteries.

But the core of the Osirian mysteries may lie within the ancient cult of Khent-Amenty. Even though not much remains of the cult, the ancient cenotaph reconstructed by Seti I in the course of building his temple to Osiris, provides us with our most valuable clues. Called the Osireion to give it a proper Greek emphasis by its 19th century rediscoverers, Flinders Petrie and Margaret Murray, this structure is one of the most unique and intriguing in all Egypt.

To understand this, we must imagine what the area looked like during the rise of the Thinite confederation. Abydos, or Abedju (which, curiously enough, can be loosely translated as "heart of the world axis," perhaps the same concept as the Greek Omphalos), in its wide bowl-shaped valley was primarily a ritual and funeral site. The administrative and trading center lay a few miles north, near the current village of Birba. The deep green valley, where the cultivated land reached almost to the Libyan hills, was seen as a spiritual enclave. In the center of the bowl, angled on a southeast/northwest axis from the western gap in the hills, lay the original Thinite necropolis.

Standing among its ruins, the eroded mounds of pre-dynastic mastabahs, one is immediately struck by the alignment to the western gap. Because of the angle, the equinox sunset does not fall in the gap. The ancient Thinite necropolis is aligned so that it is the summer solstice sunset that shines down on it through the gap. Following this line through the old necropolis brings us to Seti's temple grounds. The line itself crosses the Osireion before running through the western wall of the Hall of the Djed in Seti's temple. Of course, Seti's temple was built in the 19th Dynasty, and so wasn't there in the Thinite era. But something like the Osireion just might have been there, and served as the terminal point of the sacred "path of the Dead" guarded by Khent-Amenty.

An image from an Old Kingdom sarcophagus suggests how it may have originally looked. We see a hemispheric mound, similar to other omphalos images, with a chamber deep inside labeled "Osiris lives." On the top of the mound are four large and prominent trees, representing the four axis of the celestial sphere, the four Trees of Life. We can easily imagine this tall mound rising from the valley floor and defining the central alignment of the Thinite necropolis as it guarded the path and its mysteries. Thus the term "Khent-Amenty" or Head of the West, from the top-of-the-head like appearance of the Osireion mound.

Equally curious is that Khent-Amenty, a dog-like deity shown recumbent on a black standard, may in fact reflect an earlier understanding of the zodiac. The guardian of the west suggests a match for that guardian of the east, the Sphinx, and both can be related to the same constellation, that of Leo. Primitive cultures have often seen Leo as a dog-like creature, and it has even been suggested that the Sphinx originally depicted a dog. At the time of the earliest pre-dynastic cultures at Abydos, the ancestors of the Thinites around the turn of the 5th millennium BCE, the summer solstice sun was in Leo. So, standing in the sacred grove on top of the Osireion mound, one would have seen the sun set, and there, sparkling in the night sky, would have been Khent-Amenty, the black dog of Leo, guarding the path of eternal life.

With this in mind, we can glimpse the greater pattern of precessional astronomy behind all of Egyptian sacred science. The Aker or horizon of the Sphinx marks the half round, every 13,000 or so years, rising of Leo on the equinoxes. The Aker/horizon of Abydos -- and there is a curious sphinx-like Aker shown in the OsireionÕs Book of Caverns -- marks the quarter cycle with the summer solstice alignment of Leo. Thus using Leo, or more precisely the cusp of Leo/Cancer, which would allow the maximum visibility of Khent-Amenty through the gap, it is possible to track with great accuracy the turning of the seasons in the Great Year.

Interestingly enough, the date for the best viewing of Khent-Amenty/Leo from the location of the Osireion is the early 7th millennium, the approximate date, given the water erosion of its figure, for the construction of the Sphinx. There are also similarities in the construction of the Osireion and the SphinxÕs so-called Valley Temple. Both use massive unadorned blocks of granite as their prime architectural component. But while the Valley Temple has sophisticated polygonal shapes to its blocks, reminiscent of the stone work at Tianahuaco in Peru, the Osireion uses severely simple blocks of regular, although massive, size. The temptation is to suggest that both structures belong to the same ancient culture, with perhaps the Osireion being the oldest because of its simplicity of design.

Given the totality of the evidence, it seems likely that this is true, to a degree. Some head-like mound surely existed as the terminus of the summer solstice alignment, probably with some kind of simple chambered tomb inside of it. However, according to the evidence of the experts, Seti I extensively rebuilt the Osireion. On the main superstructure of the central island, it was once possible to see, three courses of masonry down, the cartoche of Seti I. Since this implies massive structural work in Seti's time, we might as well suppose that he completely rebuilt the structure according to some ruined original. He as much as tells us this in the inscriptions in the antechamber. The Old Kingdom sarcophagus mentioned above suggests that its basic design was well known, and there is some evidence in the Osireion itself that an earlier king, the 11th Dynasty Mentuhotep II, did some rebuilding at the site.

What we do know is that sometime in the decade before 1300 BCE, work on the main Osiris temple halted until the early years of Rameses II reign. The temple itself has a curious L shape that is unique in Egyptian temple architecture, and which seems designed to avoid building over the Osireion. Even those scholars who insist that the Osireion is SetiÕs cenotaph do not explain why the design of the main temple was shifted to accommodate the Osireion. Most unexplained of all is the sudden appearance of another Book of the Dead style version of the underworld known as the Book of Caverns.

While this is not the place to go into the intricacies of the Osirian mysteries, the importance of the Book of Caverns information must be stressed. Here, the creation drama is taken over to form the mythology of the salvation of the Prisoner in the Underworld. This unusual viewpoint forms the basis for a kind of Gnostic shamanism that lies at the core of Egyptian sacred science.

The Book of Caverns depicts the underworld journey of the sun through a series of caverns, bringing light to the depths and the darkness. In those depths is Osiris, protected and isolated by the cosmic serpent -- Wer, the ancient One, or Nehaher, the Fearful Face, or as we are told in the Book of Caverns, Neheb-kau, the primeval snake power. As the sun shines into the depths of the chamber beneath the Sphinx-like Aker, Osiris begins to revive, his life force returns, symbolized by the erect penis. In order to free himself from the primeval snake power, an exchange must take place with the sun. "O you who were in the coils of the serpent," the sun declares, "I deliver him to you by the order which comes from my mouth. I will cause you to breathe with what comes from my mouth... and may my light... give illumination to your caverns without the serpent seeing."

Osiris had always been mysteriously connected with the idea of divine light, either of the sun and/or the moon. Chapter 183 of the Book of the Dead has Thoth, a moon god, announcing to Osiris that "he made the light shine on your inert body, for you he illuminated the dark ways." This echo from the ancient mysteries continues down to the 19th century magical order, The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which used similar words in its ritual of the Neophyte. However, the clearest exposition of this idea can be found in the Gnostic text known as the Paris Papyrus, one of the gems looted from Egypt by Napoleon's savants.

In papyrus IV, lines 475 Ñ 830, we find a ritual to attain immortality by inhaling light. The aspirant is first told to perform seven days of rituals, and then three days of dark retreat. On the morning of the eleventh day, the aspirant is to face the rising sun and perform an invocation: "First source of all sources . . . perfect my body . . . (so) that I may participate again in the immortal beginning . . . that I may be reborn in thought . . . and that the holy spirit may breathe in me." With this, the aspirant inhales the first rays of the rising sun and then leaves his body behind, rising into the heavens, filled with Light. "For I am the Son (of the Sun), I surpass the limits of my souls, I am (magical symbol for Light)."

During the late New Kingdom, the ideas from the Book of Caverns became popular enough to be included on tombs and coffins. On the coffin of a late 20th Dynasty noble, we can see how these ideas reached their common form. Osiris as Sokar is entombed in a seven-step mound formed from the coils of the primeval serpent. The inner sun shines down on his body, and on glyphs identifying Abydos. Above the apex of the pyramid formed of the serpent's body, Osiris sits enthroned on the gnomonic cube of space, his arms crossed in the position of the resurrected god. Isis and Nepthys stand behind him, with Horus before him offering a lotus on an omphalos-like mound. At the edge of the picture, behind Isis and Nepthys, is a strange being with an unidentifiable glyph on his head. He is holding two straightened snakes at right angles to each other over his navel center.

This simple ideograph holds the key to many mysteries, but for now let us direct our attention to the two most cogent, the mystery man with the straightened snakes and the offering from Horus. According to the authorities, including A. Piankoff (who suspects that the entire Book of Caverns is a remnant of the ancient Abydos cult), this mysterious figure represents the primal forces, the faceless beings found in the underworld. Why such a being should be holding two crossed snakes is left unexplained.

One of the main themes in the Book of Caverns is that of "straightening" the primeval serpent. In some versions, the serpent is chopped into pieces, an idea echoed in the checkerboard snake seen here. To straighten the cosmic snake then is to align one's self in space/time. In that sense, our primal force is holding two of the three alignments of the cube of space, the axis of the Great Year defined by the Leo alignments of the Sphinx and Khent- Amenty. This suggests that the mystery of Osiris' resurrection, the mystery of immortality, is also the mystery of time itself.

And then, there is that gift of Horus . . .

In most scenes of this kind, we would expect to see Horus presenting Osiris the magical Eye or an Ankh, and so the offering of a simple lotus is unusual. The lotus is the symbol of Upper Egypt, but this is no political symbol Horus is presenting. It is a simple lotus, but perhaps one of a particular kind. The mound suggests Abydos, and there might have been a rare kind of lotus grown just at Abydos.

Given the recent revelations concerning the psychotropic qualities of the Blue Lotus of Upper Egypt, perhaps this supposition is correct. However, once we start thinking along these lines, other ideas spring to mind. If, as seems most likely, the active ingredient in the Blue Lotus is in the Tryptamine family of psychotropic alkaloids, then we might have to rethink our basic understanding of the entire Osirian myth. Most tryptamines have trouble passing the blood-brain barrier without synergestic help from other alkaloids, usually in the beta-harmoline/beta-carboline families. In South America, these synergestic brews are known as "yage," and are extensively used as a shamanic agent. Indeed, the complex knowledge of nature displayed by the native peoples of the rain forest and high plateau of the Andes seems to have been gained directly through the use of these shamanic agents.

Perhaps that is how the ancient Egyptians came by their sophisticated knowledge of the cosmos and human destiny. But do we have any evidence of anything like "yage," other than the Blue Lotus, in ancient Egypt?

Recent Jordanian ethno-botanical research has disclosed that a type of "yage" brewed from Acaia tree gum, Syrian rue seeds and various grasses of the genus Phalaris has served as the major Bedouin shamanic agent for thousands of years. This is interesting because the Acaia tree has always been held to be sacred to Osiris. From the Middle Kingdom on, we have images showing Osiris being fed or even suckled from the Acaia tree. The sacred trees shown growing from the top of the Osireion mound are often described as Acaias. Even more curious is the fact that several of the barley grasses grown in pre-dynastic times, as today, in raised "Osiris" beds are rich in natural tryptamine alkaloids.

This casts the so-called "barley hymns" to Osiris, such as Coffin Text 330, in a very different light. "Whether I live or die, I am Osiris, I enter in and reappear through you . . . The Gods are living in me for I live and grow in the grain that sustains the Honored Ones." And again: "I am the Lord of Khennet, I have entered into the natural order of the world, I have reached its limits . . ." Khennet is often translated as a name for the royal granary, but may in fact be related to the Osireion, in its ancient form of "head of the west." Khen-net, could be a contraction of KHENt-aMEnTy. In this sense, we might think of the Osireion as not just a temple or a tomb/cenotaph, but as a sophisticated shamanic laboratory and botanical garden.

Horus is also the god of Light, in the sense of a mystical or inner sun. His offering of the lotus brings the light motif full circle, presenting us with the idea of inner and outer light sparked by the unusual, straightened snakes of the times. To unravel this final mystery, we must focus on the question of the light. Why are the texts insistent on certain kinds of light?

The Paris Papyrus suggests sunrise, while the alignment at the Osireion suggests sunset. The "midnight sun" of the Book of Caverns suggests starlight, while the strange insistence on including Thoth suggests moonlight, or possibly, an eclipse. The cosmic alignment gives still another kind of light, a unique eruption from either a nova or the center of the galaxy, as proposed by Dr. Paul LaViolette, and which could be related to the Great Year of precession if the eruptions are regular.

So we have four categories of "light" to consider. Sunrise and sunset could be considered as red light, that is sunlight filtered of all but the longest, and therefore the reddest, waves by the atmosphere. Starlight is a natural form of luminal coherence, such as is achieved in modern lasers. While starlight is nowhere as coherent as a laser, it does exhibit some of the same properties of frequency coherence. Also certain stars have light of a particular frequency, exhibited as their color; Canopus is green, Antares, red and Sirius a brilliant blue-white. Light from such stars exhibit coherence around these color frequencies.

Moonlight is simply reflected sunlight. However moonlight, like sunlight, seems too common for the scenario. Moonrise and moonset would also be reddened by the atmosphere, in addition to polarized by reflection, so that this would give these moments a unique light signature. Unfortunately, these moments are not indicated in the texts. But there are intriguing indirect pointers to suggest that an eclipse, and their light, could have been very important.

Around the central portion of the Osireion's inner chamber are seventeen small chambers. This is an unusual number, a prime, which seems to have no relationship to any cosmic or planetary cycles. But when we add to this the ten pillars of the central island, we get 27, a key precessional number. Even more curious, when we account for "Osiris" as the central section of the island, we find that we have 18.6, the number of years in an eclipse cycle. We arrive at this by means of geometry. The center of the island contains another well, a square, and a smaller island reached by faux steps. The space defined by the small island and its steps is related to the square well in the proportion of 1: Phi, or 1.618. If we assign this value to Osiris, then we have a total of 18.618, which will define eclipse cycles within a few hours of accuracy.

So, if the hidden secret of the Osireion is the ability to predict eclipses, then what is the quality of eclipse light? Lunar eclipses would seem to be the absence of light, except perhaps for reflected starlight. A solar eclipse however is another matter, particularly a total eclipse. The body of the moon blocks the main light of the sun, allowing only the corona light to reach the earth. This is rich in the higher frequencies of the ELM spectrum, appearing almost ultra-violet blue, and is known to have a pronounced effect on all life, including humans. Perhaps this is the "midnight sunlight" which revives Osiris in the underworld?

Our fourth kind of light is even harder to get a handle on. This new light, timed by some portion of the precessional cycle, would exhibit unknown characteristics that could include radical shifts in our perceptions, and given the brain chemistry connection between the life cycle and the serotonin/melotonin cycle, perhaps even an enhancement of our species' life span. In that sense, the resurrection of Osiris is something that happens rarely, once or twice during the Great Year, and produces radical shifts in human development when it occurs.

In many ways, this interpretation makes the most sense. The Osirification of a species is something that happens regularly, along with the burst of new precessional light. This new light drives us toward our future, and our destiny as a sentient species. Indeed, this seems to our modern consciousness the most likely explanation. But it does not explain those, throughout history, who have tried to hasten this process of Osirification.

However, if we assume that some kind of cosmological, precessionally timed Osirification did in fact occur, then perhaps we can reverse engineer the techniques of the Osiris cult who tried to reproduce it. While we cannot know exactly the qualities of light from, say, a galactic core eruption, we can determine some of its characteristics. Since it is exploding outward at the speed of light, we would see it as doppler-shifted toward the upper end of the spectrum. It would appear as deep ultra-violet blue. Also, the effect of the clouds of dust that obscure the center of the galaxy at the moment would act as an "eclipse" giving the impression of bluish light pouring out from around a block of darkness.

With these similarities, it easy to see the importance a solar eclipse would have. In many ways, it could be seen as a smaller and less intense version of the eruption light, down to the sense of having most of it blocked out. The light would also be rich in the upper ELM frequencies, just as the eruption light. However, a total solar eclipse happens only once or twice a generation at any locality. Surely, the Osiris cult would look for other sources of the proper light qualities.

And the place to look would be starlight, the blue white stars such as Sirius or the Pleiades. Both of these stars have mystical antecedents, with Sirius being deeply involved in the Osiris cult. Traditionally associated with Isis, through whose auspices Osiris was resurrected, Sirius is the brightest star in the sky. But is there a connection between the Osireion and Sirius?

Strangely enough, yes. If we assume that the orientation of the Osireion chamber itself was not changed by Seti's reconstruction, then another intriguing alignment emerges. At the same time period, the turn of the 7th millennium BCE, when Khent-Amenty/Leo was setting on the summer solstice sunset through the mountain gap, Sirius was high in the southwestern sky, perfectly aligned with the central axis of the Osireion. This certainly suggests that the midnight sun whose light resurrects Osiris is the focused, coherent starlight of Sirius, seen by the ancient as the best available analog for the eruption light of the precessional Osirification.

This idea would also connect the sunrise/sunset light. These moments, and their red-light qualities, would be used to anchor the physical containers, both the bodies of the initiates and the physical structure of the mound and chamber. It might also be useful for the growth of the initiatesÕ psychotropic pharmacology. In this perspective, the pattern of light delineated by the Osirian mysteries becomes part of a larger sacred science that includes such cosmological ideas as the quality of time being related to the quality of light, a sophisticated pharmacological technology to achieve resonance with that frequency wave of new light, and knowledge enough to make use of eclipse light and Sirius light to mimic the new light of the precessional moment.

Of course, the process of Osirification remains obscure. A major clue is provided by the geometry of the Osireion itself. We have seen how Osiris is described as Phi by the geometry of the central structure. This tendency, as shown by the analysis of the Osireion by Lucy Lamy, extends in several very interesting directions.

First, the basic geometry she delineates is an edge-on double pentagram. Interestingly, this is also the indole/receptor pattern formed by serotonin and typtamine alkaloids when they are absorbed by the brain. In this instance, geometry and architecture mimic the internal process. This is a powerful clue to the inherent sacred science of Osirification.

The geometry found in the Osireion also suggests a nest of 3D generative roots, the square root of 2, 3 and 5, and the Golden Mean ratio of Phi. As Mayan scholar John Major Jenkins elucidates in his Mayan Sacred Science, these incommensurable numbers form the connective tissue that holds the collective and the individual worlds together.

The geometry of the Osireion displays this level of understanding, and extends it to include the merging of the Cubes of Space. Any pentagon can be used as the basis of an exercise called squaring the circle, or in 3D, cubing the sphere. The double pentagon of the Osireion allows two such cubed spheres, interpenetrating in the space of the central Osiris island, whose Phi structure allows us to generate another pentagonal figure. This pentagon pair, unlike the original, interpenetrates to a degree that suggests that the resolution to the whole geometric complex is the dodecahedron, composed of 12 pentagonal faces. Traditionally, this platonic solid is used to represent the spirit.

As witches have alleged for centuries, the pentagram is also a gateway to higher dimensions. The simplest 3D solid, the tetrahedron, has its 4D complement, the pentatope, which is a tetrahedron with another tetrahedron on each of its four faces. The shadow of a 4D wire figure pentatope in 3D is a pentagon/pentagram. Two back to back pentagon/pentagrams allow the packing and unpacking of tetrahedrons into and out of the 4D space of the pentatope, in effect forming a cascade channel for energy of a higher order, 4D, to flood into a lower frequency space, 3D.

Empire of the Sun: Ancient Mysteries of Nostradamus

Sunday, September 28th, 2003

quotes by Fredric Mistral

texts and photos by Vincent Bridges (c) 2003

“As far back as I can remember, I have in front of me a barrage of mountains whose hillocks and slopes, cliffs and narrow valleys were blue from dawn ’til dusk; a blue that varied in intensity according to the time of day. This is the chain of the Alpilles, surrounded by olive groves like some mountain of ancient Greece and a lofty keeper of legends and glory…” 

“Caius Marius, the savior from Rome still popular throughout the region awaited the barbarians at the foot of this rampart, behind the walls of his camp; his trophies have been gilding under the sun of Les Antiques, near St. Remy, for two thousand years…”

“On the steep rocky cliffs of the the mountain… the princes of Les Baux built their stronghold. The gracious chatelaines held their courts of love in the fragrant vales of Les Baux… at the time of the troubadours.”

“Oh delightful fragrances! Oh light! Oh gentle nature’s peace; what longings of paradise you place in my child’s soul…”

Think of a triangle, with a town and its castle at each of the points. There’s a river on two of the three sides, but the third side drifts so openly toward the marshes of the south and the sea that the delta might as well be an island. Across the center of the triangle, almost due east to west, runs a jagged chain of sharp cliffs and steep valleys known as the Little Alps. In actuality, they look more like an Impressionist version of the mountainsides of ancient Greece, shrunken to a more human scale, and placed like a stage set in the middle of a rocky plain.

A few million years ago, the pressure from the growing Alps and the Pyrenees buckled a portion of the ancient seabed and thrust it straight up into the air. As the sea retreated, the bed on either side of the buckled rock silted up and became a stony and desert-like plain, the little Crau to the north, and the Crau to the south. The chain of limestone peaks that separates them runs roughly 20 miles, from Eyguieres, the eastern edge and the highest peak at just under 1,500 feet, to St. Gabriel in the west. At the widest point, the Alpilles are barely three miles across. Small in scale, but rich, as Frederick Mistral put it, in “legends and glory.”

The legends began six thousand years ago when the Neolithic hunters formed small communities in the safety of the mountain-top caves and springs at Les Baux and Eygaliere. Around three thousand years ago, a proto-Celtic civilization developed, one which welcomed the Greek traders who arrived half a millennium later in the 6th century BCE. Three hundred or so years later when Rome arrived in the first flush of its empire building, the Ligurians were cultured philosophers who had dwelt in peace so long they had virtually forgotten the art of war. Rome saved them from the more nomadic Celts sweeping down from the north, but at the price of their independence. The Salian confederation of Ligurian tribes was defeated by the Romans within a generation and soon thereafter the entire region was annexed as Rome’s first province, the Provincia Narbonenis. A century later, Augustus and Julius having made safe the roads back to Rome – and in doing so made Celtic Gaul Roman – the first province, Provence, became the centerpiece of the transalpine empire.

The ancient city of Glanum Livii, at the foot of its sacred mountain

Nestled in a narrow valley to the north of the Ligurians’ sacred mountain stood the ancient capital of Liguria, the Celto-Greek city of Glanon, Romanized as Glanum Livii. Founded half a millennium before the turn of the common era, Glanum’s authority depended on its closeness with the Druidic priesthood at Les Baux and in the Valley of the Ancients at Cordes. In the Roman era, it was eclipsed by Arelate (Arles), which had wisely backed Julius Caesar in his dispute with Pompey in 49 BCE. Even as Arelate grew, Glanum adhered to its old ways, absorbing first the Romans, and then in the middle of the first century CE, an influx of Jews from Palestine and other parts of the new Roman Empire. Some of these Jews were followers of a rabble-rousing magician, Jesus the Nazorean, who had just claimed the ancient throne of David in Jerusalem, and been executed for treason by the Romans for the attempted restoration of the ancient lineage. The fleeing followers included, perhaps, members of Jesus’ immediate family. As they spread throughout the region preaching their Gospel, the cultured and thoroughly Helenized Druid philosophers were also converted to the new faith. From this unique blend of spiritual influences would grow an alternative version of what, a century or two later, would be called Christianity.

original lion guardian of the spring at Ste. Maries-de-le-Mer, circa 1st century CE

This blending of spiritual influences began when the Egyptians of the 18th and 19th Dynasties arrived, more than a millennium before Glanum was founded at the foot of its holy mountain. The Egyptians built trading forts off what was then mouth of the Rhone, near the present day Ste. Maries-de-le-Mer, and traveled up the Rhone as far as Lyons. In the Greek era, trade flowed freely from Alexandria by way of Massilia. With the trade came an influx of ideas and philosophies from the east. In the late third century BCE, Buddhist missionaries arrived, dispatched by King Asoka in India to preach the Eight-fold path to all the ends of the earth. For the next three centuries, small enclaves of Buddhist hermits could be found living in the ancient grottoes and caves of the region. Helenized statues of the Buddha have been unearthed in the caves near Lamanon, and in at least one grotto said to have been used by St. Marie Magdalene, north of Nimes. This unique overlapping of influences created the very cosmopolitan and syncretic context from which the new faith emerged, appearing suddenly and full blown with the fervor of a Jewish messianic cult, the compassionate techniques of the early Buddhists, and an emphasis on the Goddess-mother and child, that is pure paganism, recognizable all the way back to the first Neolithic hunters.

Street corner Madonna and Child, St. Remy-de-Provence

St. Remy-de-Provence, where statues of the Virgin and Child still bless every important street corner, grew from the ruins of Glanum’s destruction. Depopulated first by Diocletian’s persecution at the end of the third century CE, there was little left to sack by the time the Visigoths arrived in the early fifth century. At the turn of the sixth century, the area was revitalized and given a new name by one of those odd quirks of fate that seem to drive the history of the Dark Ages. The Visigoths made Arelate their new capital, and Alaric II proclaimed himself king of the new empire of the Goths. They were opposed only by the newly Christianized Merovingian Franks under Clovis. Declaring that it was against God’s will that the fairest portion of Gaul should be ruled by heretics and heathens, Clovis invaded the south and defeated Alaric II at the battle of Vouille. In the bargain, he became the master of southern France all the way to the Pyrenees.

The Municipal Arch at Glanum, Les Antiques

During the campaign, Clovis traveled the ancient Roman road from Arelate to Avenio (Avignon) and camped with his army in the fields north of the ruins of Glanum, around what would come to be called Les Antiques. While camped at Glanum, Clovis experienced a miraculous visitation from his mentor, St. Remy, who prophesied for Clovis the future of his dynasty -”The Kingdom of France is predestined by God for the defense of the… only true Church of Christ. This kingdom shall one day be great among the kingdoms of the earth…” – as well as his personal future – “At the end of his most glorious reign, he shall go to Jerusalem, and shall lay down his Crown and Scepter on the Mount of Olives…” Clovis was so impressed by this experience that he gave the entire area to the church of Rheims, and so the new hamlet that grew on the site was called St. Remy’s town. Clovis went on to become the greatest of the Merovingian Kings, and St. Remy-de-Provence remained ever after woven into the sacred tradition of French kingship.

Hilltop farmhouse or “mas” in Eygaliere

The fortified hilltop villages, such as Eygaliere, fared better in the next few centuries than did the new towns such as St. Remy. Hit hard by the plagues of the sixth century and the Arab invasion of the eighth, a small measure of stability returned to the region with the rise of the Carolingians. The area around St. Remy became virtually independent as a kind of Dark Age city state, and survived in this form until the rise of the Lords of les Baux in the middle of the tenth century CE. Around 950, a local nobleman named Hughes claimed by right of descent, the ancient lineage once again, the old Roman watchtower and Druidic observatory at the entrance to the Valley of the Ancients at Cordes, directly in the center of the Alpilles. Perched like a vast boat – hence the name les Baux, the beam or keel of a ship that would in local usage come to mean any sharp uprising of rock – floating to the south of the sacred mountains, the terrace has an unobstructed view of the entire southern horizon, making it possibly the most significant Neolithic and megalithic astronomical location in all of Europe. Militarily, the site commanded both the Roman road to the north, through the passes it looms above, and the east/west road across the Crau, which ran directly below the rocky fortress. Possession of this site made Hughes and his descendants the masters of the medieval empire of the sun.

Les Baux, as seen from across the Valley of the Ancients

The Lords of les Baux adopted the idea of a semi-divine lineage, proclaimed by Clovis after his vision at St. Remy, and combined it with the ancient local traditions of Druidic astronomers to produce what to their contemporaries was the odd idea that they were descended from the third wise man, Balthazar. But from within the local mythic context, this was the only description possible for a tradition that clearly preceded Christianity, even as it recognized and embraced it. Of course the Druids of the Valley of the Ancients had foreseen the new age in the sky, so why shouldn’t they have sent a wiseman, a magi, in search of the meaning of the Star? The Lords of les Baux took the mythic Star, shown with 16 rays, as their family crest.

At the height of their power and influence, the Lords of les Baux ruled roughly one hundred villages and hilltop keeps on both sides of the Alpilles and by the late twelfth century had taken on a role in international power politics. Their support encouraged Frederick I Barbarossa in his end-run around the Roman church, resulting in his 1179 coronation as King of Arles. The facade of St. Trophime in Arles, designed and sculpted for the occasion, has a frieze depicting the entire story of the Magi as a direct nod to the influence of the Lords of les Baux. It was also the time of the Troubadours, who sang at the courts of love held in Les Baux, Romanin and Roquemartine, and the Cathar heresy, which the Lords of les Baux embraced, as well as the first appearance in written form of the Kabbalah, the transcendent light mysticism of the Jews, whom the Lords of les Baux held as being under their direct protection. The troubadour cited as the source for the original Grail legend by both Chretein de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach, one Guyot de Provence, was a vassal of the Lords of les Baux, and it is therefore not unusual to find images and motifs from the Grail Romances springing to mind as one contemplates the fortress of Les Baux.

Les Baux as Grail Castle

Within a generation, all would be on the verge of ruin, as first the Pope and then the French King launched crusades against the heretics of the south. After invasion and inquisition came the first waves of the Black Death, and the Lordship of les Baux passed to the Counts of Provence. In the fifteenth century, this was Good King Rene D’Anjou, who gave Les Baux to his second wife, the beloved Queen Jeanne. It is fitting that in its final days of independence, Les Baux was ruled by a Queen. After her death, King Louis XI of France destroyed the fortifications, but Les Baux continued to be an important fiefdom. In the sixteenth century, it passed to the Marechal of France, Anne de Montmorency. With the good Marechal, we arrive in the time of the region’s most famous historical figure, Michel de nostra domina, nicknamed Nostradamus by his contemporary, Francois Rabelais. The sixteenth century was a crucial point in the history of France and Europe, and Nostradamus was part of all the conspiracies and diverse intellectual currents of the era. Within his lifetime, his influence would begin to shape the events of European power politics, and after his death his shadow would continue to haunt the future, touching even our own more rational age.

The Rue Hoche, the old Jewish quarter of St. Remy-de-Provence

Michel, eldest son of Jaume de nostra domina, a local grain merchant and notary, was born in mid December 1503 in his grandmother house on the Rue Hoche, the main street of the ancient Jewish section of St. Remy-de-Provence. He spent his first fifteen years in St. Remy, playing in the shadow of Les Antiques and absorbing the region’s legends and history from his two grandfathers. At that period, Glanum was a legendary memory, but one that was accessible to the adventurous. The crypt of the small chapel of St. Jean, a few hundred yards from Les Antiques, opened on to the ancient buried temple of the Goddess of the spring, the nympheum, of Glanum. And from there, miles of underground water chambers and sewers were available, running from Glanum and the monastery of St. Paul de Mausole out to the ancient quarries and beyond. His youth in St. Remy, with its mixture of myths and ancient history, had a profound effect on the future Seer of Provence. In six quatrains of his famous Prophecies, he returned to the scenes of his youth, implying that a great secret, the local myth of the “Silver Goat,” would be discovered there one day.

The Dome of the Rock and the Palace of the Popes at Avignon from across the Rhone

At fifteen, young Michel departed for the university school at Avignon, the scene of the French Captivity of the Church in the fourteenth century and still the center of the region’s intellectual life in the sixteenth century. In September 1521, his studies interrupted by an outbreak of the plague, Michel left Avignon and began his first period of wandering. By 1529, he was in Montpelier where he applied for admission to the medical school. One of his fellow students, the already famous humanist Francois Rabelais, Latinized Michel’s surname as Nostradamus. It is not clear whether Nostradamus ever received his doctorate, but by the early 1530s he had settled in Agen, in southwestern France, in order to study with the Italian humanist Julius Ceasar Scaliger. Nostradamus married a local girl, and quickly had two children. But disaster soon struck, and both his new wife and their two children died of the plague. By 1534, Nostradamus was on the move again.

For a decade, Nostradamus wandered the south of France, from Provence to the Basque coast and Bordeaux and back again. By 1544, we find a contemporary mention of him studying the plague and its treatment with Louis Serres in Marseilles, and then, a year or so later, he was summoned to Aix and Salon to organize the fight against the plague. He was so successful that the next year he was called to Lyon for the same reason. These exploits made him well-known, and along with the division of father’s estate, he found himself wealthy enough to married the most eligible young widow in Salon-de-Provence, Anne Ponsard. But before he could settle down to wedded bliss, Nostradamus found it necessary to make a trip to Italy.

Of all of Nostradamus’ mysterious periods of wanderlust, this last journey to Italy is perhaps the most odd. He married Anne, bought and began to refurbish a house in Salon, and then left for a two-year excursion. It is hard not to consider that he was in some way summoned to Italy, or at least compelled by reasons more powerful than just gathering recipes for his book on cosmetics. His old friend Rabelais was in Italy, and may have been the source of the invitation. Nostradamus alludes in his later works to collecting a number of volumes on occult philosophy during his trip that would later serve as the source of his magickal practices. Soon after the election of Pope Julius III in 1550, Nostradamus returned to Salon-de-Provence and began the work that would make him famous for the next half a millennium.

Salon-de-Provence, Nostradamus’ home for the last decades of his life

Nostradamus was famous almost from the moment of his return, becoming a sixteenth century superstar within the decade when his prediction of Henri II’s death came true. Before his death in 1566, he was the confident of the Queen of France, and officially proclaimed the royal Councilor and Physician in Ordinary to the Crown. He charted the future of French Kings, Henri II and his sons, discovered the founder of the next dynasty, the ten-year old Henri de Bearn, recognized a future Pope, and composed a history of mankind’s possible and alternate futures in the Green Language of the Hermetic adept. And he accomplished all this without having his work placed on the newly developed Index of prohibited books, or even running afoul of the Inquisition. That alone shows that Nostradamus had many friends in powerful places.

Whatever we make of his prophecies, there can be no doubt that they have continued to fascinate us. Each era has seen the reflection of its own time and problems in Nostradamus’ enigmatic verses, but he was right enough, often enough, with his predictions that our fascination is warranted. From a historical perspective, we can see Nostradamus as part of a reformation movement, not just within the church or the state, but an attempt to chart out the reformation of the human spirit through the vehicle of time. Nostradamus saw himself in the larger tradition of the Old Testament prophets and others such as the Sybils of ancient Rome and the more recent Joachim of Flores. But, and here’s the important twist, he also saw himself as a man of the renaissance, a man of science, pragmatic and empirical. His prophetic abilities were to him a kind of future science, known to the ancients, dimly reconstructed by the scholars of his era, but surely to be perfected sometime in the long reach of human history. In that sense, we can see his Prophecies as an attempt to communicate not just across time, but across levels of awareness as well.

Michel-de-Apocalypse, Salon-de-Provence

The mystery of Nostradamus is ultimately the mystery of the region itself, the ancient empire of the Sun. From the Druid Seers of Les Baux, the philosophers and early Christians of Glanum, to the Merovingians origins of St. Remy, the Magi of Les Baux, the Cathars, the Kabbalah, the Templars and the legends of the Grail, Nostradamus’ vision rested on a solid basis of local myth and tradition. For example, just out Nostradamus’ back door in Salon-de-Provence, where he would have to have seen it everyday, is the Eglise St. Michel-de-Apocaylpse. On its arched tympanum we find not just St. Michel holding the sealed book of esoteric knowledge, but also posing as Ophiucus, the serpent holding esoteric 13th sign of the zodiac marking the center of the galaxy. Below his central figure is a lamb and shofar horn, the horn of judgment, beneath a Templar cross. Around these central figures are “Green” language images of the Tree of Life along with the Merovingian fleur-de-lis. Nostradamus had but to take a walk in the evening to contemplate, on one church front, the deepest core of his philosophy.

Vincent Bridges

A New Jerusalem in Bohemia

The Mystery of the Prague – Jerusalem Alignment:

A New Jerusalem in Bohemia

© Vincent Bridges 2011

In the heart of Prague’s Old Town, just off the main tourist routes and a few blocks southeast of Charles Bridge, is the semi-restored church of St. Anne and St. Lawrence, now a cultural center sponsored by the former Czech President, Vaclav Havel, and his wife Dagmar’s foundation. I had no idea, when I attended a reception there last October, that I was in fact at the center of a fascinating mystery, one that is virtually unknown, even in the Czech Republic.

I was mingling, drinking excellent champagne and making good use of my half dozen or so words of Czech, when I stopped to look at one of the exhibits on the restoration of the church. It contained a timeline of the church’s history, which informed me that it had once been the property of the Knights of the Temple, The Templars, then passed to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, now of Malta, before becoming the property of the Dominican Order in the mid 14th century. The arc of that ownership was striking enough, but under the Templar reference was a line about the church as “V Jerusalemu.” Now, even my far from adequate knowledge of Czech could handle that one: In Jerusalem. Why, I wondered, would a church, especially a Templar church in the depths of Prague’s Old Town, be called “In Jerusalem?”

As I considered it, I could remember only two connections between Prague and Jerusalem. The cornerstone of the Old-New Synagogue had supposedly been flown straight from the ruins of the Old Temple in Jerusalem to Prague, making the city something of a second “Mother Israel” to the Jews of the Disapora. Curiously enough, that legend had emerged at the same time the second connection to Jerusalem was established. Charles IV, the Luxemburg Emperor and King of Bohemia in the mid 14th century, had been somewhat obsessed with building churches modeled on the “New Jerusalem” of St. John’s Revelation. One such model church had stood in the center of Charles’ Square for over 400 years. Neither of these stories, however, had anything to do with the Templars, or the Church of Sts. Anne and Lawrence.

The reception wound down, and, standing in St. Anne Square waiting for my taxi, I tried to put this new idea into the context of Prague itself. Within a few blocks in any direction of where I stood, one could find traces of mystics and alchemists, from Giordano Bruno and John Dee to Jan Kominsky and Jan Hus, scientists, Kepler and Tesla, freemasons, theosophists, spiritualists, musicians and artists. Prague is perhaps the most densely esoteric city in Europe. And that deep substratum of esotericism seems to rest on the bedrock of an unseen web of inter-connected places, thresholds actually, portals in the original mythic sense of praha itself. Could there be one of these energetic portals, doorways, between Prague and Jerusalem?

The idea tickled my fancy and so, a few weeks after my return from Europe, I turned my attention to unraveling the mystery. Within days of my decision, a good friend in the Czech Republic, Radka Slooten, sent me coincidentally a website on Prague Castle that included a whole page on the work of Jan Cihak. Suddenly, it all clicked and a strange pattern emerged, one that I found hard to believe. Think of a Great Cross, centered on a Holy Crossing point, aligned to the winter/summer solstice axis, the Solar Cross, and anchored on what was then the spiritual center of the world, Jerusalem, built, maintained and elaborated on for over a millennium as a great city grew up around it. What was the purpose? And why here, why Prague?

The starting point of any answer, of course, is the curious story about the stones from the Temple in Jerusalem being brought by an angel to the Old-New Synagogue. The story as commonly told is that the angels brought the stones of the Temple to Prague on the condition that they would be returned when the Messiah came. In Hebrew “on condition” is “al tnaj;” which can be divided, incorrectly, to give us the German “alt neu,” or Old-New, according to its sound. While this derivation is unlikely, for many reasons, it does give us a very curious Green Language pun. The old becomes new under certain conditions, the arrival, or return, of the Messiah. It is in this sense that the Jews called Prague the “City and Mother in Israel,” and considered it second in importance only to Jerusalem.

However, no one is quite sure when the Jews arrived in Prague. David Gans, in his 17th century Branch of David, gives a date of 995 CE for the first settlement, but there surely would have been Jews in Prague long before that date, with or without a fixed settlement. The Old-New Synagogue was built in 1270 CE and there is no contemporary mention of stones from the Temple in Jerusalem. In fact the earliest versions of its origins describe another sort of miracle: the synagogue was supposedly discovered fully constructed under an ancient mound. The Jerusalem story apparently dates to the era of Charles IV, the mid 14th century, who had a curious interest in connecting Prague and Jerusalem. By the early 16th century, Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand I could be reassured by the Old Town council that the Jews shouldn’t be banished, as they “had lived in this land before their Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.”

The Jewish legends are suggestive of some kind of link to Jerusalem, but they depend on other influences. Those influences are mostly Christian and they provide a context in which the legends of a direct Jewish connection to Jerusalem become plausible, if not actually required. And curiously, the era that Gans notes as the beginning of Jewish settlement in Prague is also the era we must turn to next to understand the Christian context of the Prague – Jerusalem connection.

For the first thousand years or so of the Christian era, from the 1st century to the 10th, Bohemia was a pagan no man’s land beyond the Danube border of the Old Roman Empire. Dark Age states came and went, built on shifting tribal alliances and trade with the west. Around the turn of the 10th century, a new dynasty, the Premyslid, gained ascendancy over the other small states by straddling the divide between the newly Christianized civilization of the west and the ancient tribal and pagan culture of the Slavs. From these tensions came the beginnings of the Kingdom of Bohemia. The Premyslids created their own national myth in the story of All-Father Czech, his son Krok and his three daughters. The youngest of those daughters was the mystical Libusse, who traditionally named Prague, foresaw its future and made Premysl the Plowman a Duke, founding the dynasty bearing his name.

In 995 CE, the same year Gans credits the Jews with a permanent settlement in Prague, the Premyslids conquered the last remaining tribal holdouts, the Slavnikovici, to become the uncontested Dukes of the region. Over the next two centuries, they consolidated their power, creating Bohemia in the process. The Premyslids did not become Kings until the later part of that process; the Bohemian region remained under the authority of the church, and indirectly under the Pope. During those centuries, as a sort of undercurrent to the political strife, betrayals and assassinations, a group of small round churches were built across Prague and Bohemia. These vaguely Byzantine small domed rotundas were built by design on the older pagan power places in a conscious attempt to co-opt the sacredness of the landscape into a new Christian pattern.

It began with the early Premyslids. To show the power of his new religion, Duke Brivoj, the first Christian Premysl, had a chapel to the Virgin Mary built on the sacred hill, the pagan Gigi or world center on the plateau where Prague Castle now stands. This chapel, built in the late 9th century, was also meant as the Premysl family mausoleum. When Duke Vaclav, the future St. Wenceslas, was murdered in the early 10th century, he was buried in the new rotunda to St. Vitus built on or near the site of the earlier chapel. This rotunda lasted only 140 years or so; it was rebuilt on a much grander scale in 1060 CE, then rebuilt again as the core of St. Vitus Cathedral.

Around this center point, a constellation of Christian institutions developed. On the Hradcany plateau, the St. George Basilica, with its convent, and the lost rotundas to St. Maurice and St. Bartholomew were built near St. Wenceslas’ rotunda. Further out, the Praemonstratensian Monastery claimed the high point of the saddle between Petrin Hill and the Hradcany, calling it Mount Zion. The Benedictines had earlier claimed Brevnov Hill, near the ancient settlement at Sarka to the west, and The Knights of St. John built a monastery and command center on a key location by the left bank of the river. Between the arrival of the Knights of St. John in the mid 12th century and the arrival of the Templars in the early 13th century, there was a wave of rotunda building across Bohemia, including the three remaining rotundas in Prague, St. Martin at Vysehrad, St. Stephan in what would become New Town, and Holy Cross near the Old Town riverfront.

By the time of Premysl Ottakar II and the height of Premyslid power in the mid 13th century, the transition from pagan sacred spots to Christian churches was almost complete. From the Hradcany plateau with its growing cluster of Christian structures, the ancient pagan alignments were maintained. To the north, a line ran through the Premysl stronghold at Levy Hradec to Rip Mountain, which also has its 12th century rotunda perched on top. The St. Vitus rotunda, and later the cathedral, acted much like the long vanished Gigi; it became a switching point in the web of leftover pagan astronomical alignments and the newly Christianized dynastic alignments. One of the most important of the pagan alignments was the sight line toward the winter solstice sunrise, and this also became Christianized.

Sometime after 1060 CE and the rebuilding of St. Wenceslas’ rotunda on Hradcany, but before 1090, a small chapel was built on the southern end of the Romanesque Old Town, near the river’s right bank. It was originally named the chapel of the Finding of the Holy Cross, after a local miracle involving a Christian girl tied to a cross and thrown into a sacred spring. The cross was returned to the surface by a high wind; the girl drowned however, and the rotten cross was buried in the crypt of the 12th century rotunda. In this story, we can see the transition from pagan to Christian in stark relief; the pagan virgin spirit of the lake or spring is sacrificed to the new power of the Cross. And, as with the old castle at Vysehrad, there are stories of hidden crypts filled with ancient treasure under the rotunda.

But we are left wondering: what makes this “cross” particularly holy?

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that someone did “find” the Holy Cross spot, the sacred lake and its legends, and by making it the center of a sacred alignment created its own special quality of “holiness.” From the St. Wenceslas rotunda on the Hradcany plateau, the Holy Cross Rotunda is in the general direction of the winter solstice sunrise. A third point is needed is make a clear alignment, and this point is provided by another rotunda, built within a generation of Holy Cross, on another watery sacred spot. The Rotunda of St. Stephan was the center of a small village, Na Rybní?ku (“By the Pond”) just outside the Old Town wall and whose springs would provide the water for the 14th century expansion of New Town. It falls in line with the St. Wenceslas rotunda and the Holy Cross to point directly toward the winter solstice sunrise.

We can think of this as the vertical axis of a cross, aligned to the winter solstice sunrise. The horizontal axis was also part of the plan. Two other Romanesque chapels, with towers if not rotundas, fall in a line perpendicular to the winter solstice axis; St. Clement in Po?í?í, or “riverside,” the center of an old settlement along the Vltava, and the church of Sts. Phillip and James, on the ancient pagan sacrifice spot dedicated to Petrun, at the foot of the hill named for him, Petrin, on the far left bank of the river. St. Clement, although extensively and heavily rebuilt through the centuries, has at least survived. The church of Sts. Phillip and James was demolished in the late 19th century, and its place is marked by the modern Arbes’ Square in the lower part of the Little Town. These churches however were built equidistant from the Rotunda of the Holy Cross, at about 2,400 meters, or 7,200 feet, roughly one and a third miles.

Thus the Romanesque Prague of the 13th century was incorporated within a great Holy Cross aligned to the solstices, winter solstice sunrise and summer solstice sunset along the vertical axis, and anchored east-west by a pair of chapels with towers on pagan sacred spots. Another Romanesque church from the mid 12th century, St Peter’s on the Riverside, marked the summer solstice alignment from the Holy Cross rotunda through the more distant location of Old Boleslav, an alignment deemed important by the early builders on the Hradcany plateau. But, to the Christians of the 11th and 12th century who built the pattern, even a great Cross based on the solstices would not have been considered as a Holy Cross. Unless it also pointed to another, even more sacred location?

Curiously, the winter solstice sunrise at the latitude of Prague is in fact in the direction of Jerusalem, which makes the alignment from St. Wenceslas’ rotunda through the Holy Cross and St. Stephan’s, who was martyred in Jerusalem, even more remarkable. In the era when the western Crusaders were in fact conquering Jerusalem, the builders in Prague were constructing their Great Cross in an alignment with the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. No wonder the Knights of St. John and the Knights of the Temple were attracted to Prague.

These two crusading orders occupied opposite sides of the river, with the Knights of St. John, who arrived first, taking the area near the old settlement below the castle on the left, and the later arriving Templars taking the right bank in Old Town, just north of the Rotunda of the Holy Cross. In that sense, the proximity of the Templar Church of St. Lawrence to the Jerusalem alignment of the Holy Cross line could be said to give meaning to the “In Jerusalem” of the church’s name. The church was in Jerusalem because it was, roughly, within the Prague/Jerusalem alignment. Soon, the idea of “In Jerusalem” would become even more prominent as the last initiated King in Europe, Charles IV, tried to transform Prague into a new version of Jerusalem.

A century after the Templars built St. Lawrence, the Luxemburg dynasty having married into the last of the Premyslids, Prague was in the hands of Charles I of Bohemia, Charles IV in terms of Holy Roman Emperors, and he was an Emperor with a plan. Prague was going to surpass Rome by being rebuilt in the shape of Jerusalem itself. The upper portion of New Town, the region between Wenceslas Square and Charles Square and down to the river, was laid out using a 12th century map of Jerusalem as template and the major squares and thoroughfares follow the same pattern to this day. The central region of the upper portion of Charles Square corresponded to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and Charles eventually built a small church there, the Church of the Holy Body, built, like his reworking of St. Wenceslas’ Chapel in St. Vitus, as a model of the New Jerusalem from St. John’s Revelation.

In his Jerusalem template for the New Town, the region near the Rotunda of St. Stephan corresponded to the hill of Golgotha in Jerusalem, and since, as Holy Roman Emperor, he owned the original Spear of St. Loginus, the Roman soldier who thrust his spear into Christ’s side on the hill of Golgotha during the Crucifixion, Charles renamed the rotunda for St. Longinus. This of course fixed the winter solstice alignment with Jerusalem, specifically Golgotha. Jan Cihak, a Czech researcher who has spent years following these esoteric clues, finds that the line from St. Wenceslas, through Holy Cross and St. Longinus, falls almost exactly on the Rotunda Anastasia built in 335 CE on Mount Calvary (Golgotha). Such precision indicates that the early 12th century cartographers were sophisticated enough to account for the curvature of the earth’s surface.

The mystery is not about Prague’s connection to Jerusalem, but who created the alignment of rotundas that defines the connection? And why?

The best we can do is to suggest an anonymous, or at least unrecorded, organization of monks or clerics, operating with church and state approval and charged with the process of absorbing and transforming the infrastructure of the local paganism. Around the time Jerusalem fell to the 1st Crusade, 1099 CE, the basic outline of the alignment and the urban Great Cross was in place. And, perhaps, this was the moment when the realization dawned that the winter solstice sunrise line also pointed to Jerusalem. Hence the naming of the third marker in the winter solstice line for St. Stephan, the first martyr of Christianity who was stoned to death in Jerusalem. There is also the connection between St. Wenceslas and St. Stephan, martyrs who shared, early on, the same Feast Day, December 26th, as noted in the 19th century Christmas carol: “Good King Wenceslas looked out/On the feast of Stephen…” From the Rotunda of St. Wenceslas one can indeed look out on a winter sunrise over St. Stephan’s on St. Stephan’s Day.

And that is also the best answer to the question: why? To the Dark Age and newly Christianized builders, working to establish a Christian gloss on the local pagan sacred spots and alignments, the accident of the winter solstice’s alignment with the almost infinitely remote Jerusalem, the center of the known universe and the place where the new Dying God of Christianity saved the world, must have seemed the epitome of the miraculous. This allowed the superimposition of Duke Vaclav’s murder over St. Stephan’s martyrdom to create the new patron saint of Bohemia, St. Wenceslas, whose rotunda and tomb marked the sighting point for the line, through the Holy Cross and the Rotunda of St. Stephan to the Holy City.

A thousand years ago, when the pagan sites and alignment were Christianized, the winter solstice sunrise fell half way through Sagittarius, a thousand years from the cusp of Sagittarius/Capricorn, the winter solstice point in Ptolemy’s era, and a thousand years from our present point on the cusp of Scorpio/Sagittarius. To cartographers and astronomers smart enough to create the alignment to Jerusalem with such precision, then the knowledge of the precession of a fixed point, such as an equinox or solstice, through time would have been apparent. And so, in this way, the rotunda builders were also creating a pattern that pointed unerringly toward a very specific moment in time, a thousand years later, our current era.

At the present moment, the winter solstice sunrise over Prague, viewed along the axis of the Holy Cross, presents us with an amazing vision. In the predawn sky, the figure of the 13th sign of the Zodiac, Ophiucus the Serpent Holder, stands with his left foot on the rising sun, in alignment with the hidden sun of the center of our galaxy, which appears from Prague to be the center point where all these images come together, Jerusalem. Could it be that this is the real mystery of the alignment? Could a thousand years of visionary Emperors and alchemists, magicians and scientists and astronomers, all have been attracted to and working with the energy of Prague as a kind stage in which to glimpse our current era?

This literal sign in the sky also suggests Fulcanelli’s idea, from the Hendaye chapter of Mysteries of the Cathedrals, of aligning the celestial and terrestrial crosses as a way to predict the season of catastrophe. The celestial cross of the solar and precessional year aligns in Prague with the terrestrial cross of the city itself, and the very earthly cross of the crucifixion. Could the creators of this alignment have been aware of this ancient way to time the apocalypse? It seems quite likely and perhaps the most telling piece of evidence is the use of the symbols on the Hendaye Cross, the angry Sun, man in the moon face and the eight rayed star, on the old stained glass windows of the Templar Church “In Jerusalem” and dedicated to St Lawrence. The only change is the four ages have here become an explosion from the sun, the 17th ray, which echoes the use made of this symbol by the Knights of St. John on Malta.

In 1585 Dr. John Dee, perhaps the smartest man in the world, arrived in Prague to preach the coming apocalyptic new age to the Emperor Rudolph II. Rudolph was perhaps unimpressed by Dee’s angelic warnings, but the choice of Prague as the imperial city had not been by accident. Rudolph had a sense for the larger destiny of Prague, one that definitely included its mysterious alignment with and affinity for Jerusalem, and perhaps had a better idea of its importance to our current era than did Dee.

As I mingled last October, enjoying the ambiance of the restored church and the convivial atmosphere, I knew that I had indeed found some sort of nexus, a crossroads or a doorway, I just didn’t know to what. Turns out it was not only a doorway to a mystery, the Jerusalem alignment, but a portal to our future as well. I plan to be there for the solstice in 2012. Seems like a good place from which to watch the show.

1/17/2011

Astronomical Images in the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami

Astronomical Images in the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami de Futuri Christi Vicarii ad Cesarem Filium D. I. A. Interprete: A 13th Century Look at the Galactic Centre and its Role in the Timing of the Apocalypse

© 2009 by Vincent Bridges

Presented at the 44th International Medieval Conference, May 7th, 2009, Kallamazoo Michigan, for the Societas Alchimica

The Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami de Futuri Christi Vicarii ad Cesarem Filium D. I. A. Interprete (The Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus on the Future Vicars of Christ to Cesar his son, as expounded by Lord Abbot Joachim) is a collection of eighty watercolor images compiled as an illustrated codex and a version of the well-known Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus of the 13th-14th century. In this version, and unique to it, is a series of seven images that allow us to glimpse the time period in which the heretical Joachimites believed the Apocalypse would occur. These seven images contain the earliest known representation of the center of our galaxy, and its location between Scorpio and Sagittarius. As Fulcanelli described in the Hendaye chapter of Le Mystere, this is a clue to the timing of the “season of catastrophe,” and the secret of the alchemical transformation of time.

In 1994, an article by Italian journalist Enza Massa in the “Giornale dei Misteri” caught the attention of Ottavio Cesare Ramotti, a former Italian state policeman and encryption expert. The article concerned the rediscovery of a manuscript in the Italian National Library in Rome.Originally uncovered in the 1930s by Vatican University professor Ernesto Buonamico, who used some of the images in an attempt to find a role for Mussolini in Nostradamus’ predictions, the folio had an uncertain origin. Claiming to have been in the Vatican Library, it was sold to the National Library in 1888 by a mysterious and somewhat unscrupulous bookseller. The manuscript languished in obscurity until 1982, after the attack against pope John Paul II, when three journalists from “Giornale dei Misteri” began to study the manuscript and 12 years later one of them, Enza Massa, wrote the article that Ramotti read.

Ramotti was already a Nostradamus “scholar” at that point, having figured out a method of decrypting the quatrains into, of all things, modern Italian. When he began to look deeper into the manuscript itself, he found more and more points of similarity between the images and his interpretations of the quatrains. He explained these connections in his 1998 book, translated into English as The Nostradamus Code. In his zeal to prove that the images were somehow connected to Nostradamus, and therefore prove his new interpretation, Ramotti completely lost sight of the original manuscript.

The manuscript is small, only 83 pages in total. Eighty pages contain illustrations of an obviously allegorical nature; two pages contain notes linking some of the images to figures in the Papacy, from Urban VIII to Alexander VIII. One page was obviously meant to serve as an introduction, but it survived heavily damaged.

This introductory page reads:

To the honest reader,

From the prophetic mosaic of the Roman pontiffs (from Urban VII) (and) those preceding him are missing here by reason of the injuries of devouring time, according to divine will, which is uttered not by possession but in sleep, and not by divine inspiration in the most eminent Abbot Joachim I, but by other ways, for our forebears have sent us a soothsayer of good and scarce possession.

Cino gave this in gift to the most eminent Cardinal Barberini who has beseeched it with the permission of the most reverent Abbot.

The prophecies seen by the venerable Joachim … from Sir Ce … (mus) that which … Abbot foresaw.

Brother Cinus Beroaldus of the Carthusian Librarians at Corati, 6 September 1629

The two pages of notes bear the following heading: Visions of Michele Nostradamus on the future Vicars of Christ to his son, Cesare. This note is signed D.I.A. Interprete, which is likely Dominus Ioachim Abatis. (See appended notes for a translation of this section.)

Also, and most curious, the last page of the illustrations contains a note as well. It reads:

“Apocalyptic predictions by Anito Efesio, prince of painters of his epoch, later clarified by the prophetic inspiration of Abbot Ioachim, Tommaso Guidini of Saint John’s, by approval of the most pious Carthusian Fathers, copied and restored it in the year of our lord 1343 from the corruption of time and corrosion inflicted by the conflicts of this place.”

No Nostradamus there, and a date of 1343 points to a longer history indeed.

Ramotti does make the suggestion that the images are part of Nostradamus’ inspiration, perhaps even one of those ancient books that he supposedly burned after writing his prophecies, but actually passed on to his son, Cesare. This seems at first a likely answer, but it leads to even more significant questions. In his book, Ramotti follows the commentary of the Abbot Joachim, and mixes in the prophecies of St. Malachy, a 12th century Irish mystic, whose enigmatic references to future Popes were discovered and published in the 1590s. While not conclusively, some of the imagery in the illustrations does suggest the mottoes of St. Malachy. Abbot Joachim, who wrote the two pages of interpretation, seemed to think so. However the author of the 1343 note refers only to Joachim of Flores, and not St Malachy.

Can we authenticate the basic manuscript as having been created in the 14th century? Actually we can, and fairly easily. The manuscript, handwriting and ink experts consulted in the History Channel’s special “The Lost Book” agreed that the notes on St. Malachy dated from the 1690s, the introductory note mentioning, possibly, Cesare de Nostradame dates from no early than 1590, and the other 80 or so pages are consistent with an origin point in the mid 1300′s, as stated in the note actually written on the last page of illustrations. All we need to put the “Lost Book of Nostradamus” into its proper context is to find other collections of manuscripts with the same or similar images.

The origin of the work is clearly the 13-14th century Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus, Visions of a Summation of the Papacy, a Latin text that collects portraits of popes and prophecies related to them, which circulated from the late thirteenth to the early fourteenth century in a broad range from Provence to Bohemia, following has been described as the Cathar refuge trail. Originally a series of some thirty prophecies, based on Greek prototypes, known as the Genus nequam prophecies, derived from the Byzantine Leo Oracles, a series of twelfth-century Byzantine prophecies that foretell a savior-emperor destined to restore unity to the empire. Their poems and tempera illuminations mix fantasy, the occult, and pseudo-history in a chronology of the popes. Each prophecy consists of four elements, an enigmatic allegorical text, an emblematic picture, a motto, and an attribution to a pope. The series was augmented in the fourteenth century with further prophecies, written in imitative continuation of the earlier set, but with more overtly propagandist aims. By the time of the Council of Constance (1414–1418), both series were united as the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus and misattributed to the Calabrian mystic Joachim of Flores, actually a pseudo-Joachim. There are close to fifty manuscript versions of this collection.

Most of these collections contain images that are almost the same as those in the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami some even in a similar sequence. One these collections, Marston MS 225, in the manuscript and rare-book library of Yale University, comes from the German areas of Bavaria and Bohemia, probably from within the courts of Emperors Frederick III and Maximilian I, having had an impact on the various sovereigns of the Holy Roman Empire, down to Charles IV and Rudolph II. (See appended note for a list of manuscript collections with similar images.)

The oldest of these folios, Carpentras Bm Ms 0340, dates from circa 1280, just a few years after the crusade against the Cathars in Southern France. The town of Carpentras was a center of Catharist activity, and because of its inclusion within the new Papal enclave of Avignon, it remained such until the late 14th century. The Carpentras version contains most of the same images as the “Lost Book” and most of the Vaticinia material, including some fairly standard apocalyptic images. Another manuscript, Lyon Bm Ms 0189, from just a little further up the Rhone River, has the same core images as the “Lost Book” and the others, but it contains some strikingly apocalyptic images. These images, however, are fairly direct representations of Revelation’s apocalypse without much in the way of occult or arcane symbolism.

In the British Museum Rare Book Collection, there is another rather splendid version of the Vaticinia Summis Pontificibus, Harley 1340 British Library. This collection also has the same core images, all extremely heretical, as the “Lost Book” and it dates from the late 1400′s in Imperial Bohemia. Like the version in the Yale Library, this collection can be said to have had an influence on, or been influenced by, the Catharist survivals in Bavaria and Bohemia. This collection in fact is close to in time or contemporaneous with John Huss, the early Czech “protestant” against the Church of Rome.

There are also the repeated images that reference the famous 12th century mystic Joachim of Flores. The Church condemned his Trinitarian view of time in 1215, but it managed to survive in an underground form until the Renaissance. Exactly how Joachim and St. Malachy overlap, and when, points to a solution to the problems presented by the manuscript’s purported origins.

Thirty years after Nostradamus’ death, in the late 1590s, and about the time Cesare was working on his history of Provence, Dom Arnold Wion discovered and published the enigmatic mottoes of future Popes attributed to St. Malachy. They had been circulating privately for perhaps as much as a decade before Wion made them public. Also, the Trinitarianism of Joachim of Flores was making a come back as part of the new Hermetic movement, which included Giordano Bruno and Dr. John Dee.

Politically, the royal line of France was failing, and King Henry of Navarre, a protestant picked by Nostradamus at age 12 as a future king of France, became Henry IV of France in 1589. Even though he became Catholic to ascend the throne, his supporters saw this as a move toward moderation and even a loosening of the Church’s stranglehold. The emergence of prophecies implying the eventual end of the Catholic Church was an appealing part of this movement.

This suggests that possibly Cesare held onto this part of his father legacy, and then used it to gain favor with the Church at the start of the Counter-Reformation. The future Pope Urban VIII might have found such a document to be intriguing enough to give it to the Abbot Joachim, who seems to have been a scholar of St. Malachy’s mottoes. Perhaps he was looking for clues to his own elevation.

The time line is the key. It is just possible that this manuscript was in Nostradamus’ possession, and that he gave it to his son Cesare, who in turn gave it to Cardinal Barberini for the reasons speculated on above. The possible mention of Cesare Nostradamus from 1629 is damaged and very obscure. The only clear mention of Nostradamus, in the heading of the two pages of St Malachy commentary, can be dated no earlier than 1690, as Pope Alexander VIII is mentioned. By then Nostradamus’ fame had grown to be as great as the ancient seers, and so the last Abbot Joachim used him as reference to confirm the mottoes of St Malachy. The original visions of Joachim of Flores have now long disappeared from the interpretation and the new, and Church approved, visions of St Malachy have replaced them. And they are attributed, strangely enough, to Nostradamus as if that made them somehow more relevant.

What is clear from all this is that whether or not Cesare Nostradamus ever owned it, the manuscript is proof of a very heretical and apocalyptic movement or society that survived at least until Nostradamus’ era. Since the manuscript was in fact produced sometime around the mid 14th century, as the note on the last page says, and that it sums up the apocalyptic tradition of both Joachim of Flores and an obscure group of apocalyptic visionaries with Catharist leanings, then it is likely that if this particular version of the Vaticinia originated in Provence (as seems probable from its similarities to both the Carpentras and Lyon versions) then it passed through the hands of Rene D’Anjou, who was a collector of apocalyptic manuscripts and obscure artists. He also stands at that peculiar junction point in both time and space, Provence in the mid 1400s, where the last gasps of the Cathar heresy could become the tarot cards, the Holy Grail could be openly searched for, and Kings could still found orders of chivalry with esoteric preoccupations. In his last years, one of his physicians was Nostradamus’ maternal grandfather, Jean de St. Remy.

And it is just possible that his first teacher and father figure, his maternal grandfather Jean, did pass on to his bright young pupil an ancient volume of mysterious images of heresy and apocalypse that he had received for his service to Good King Rene. And if so, then it is easy to see why Michael de Nostradame chose not to burn it along with his other books and magical papers, but to pass it along to his son, Cesare.

We will perhaps never really know if this is true. The connections are not solidly historical. There is a letter by Cèsare, written to the French scientist Fabri de Peiresc, in which mention is made of several miniatures painted by Cèsar, and of a booklet that was destined as a gift to King Louis XIII in 1629, however there is no evidence whatsoever of any connection between these and the Vaticinia. The connections to St Malachy appear to be stronger, but, given the dates, the manuscript could have influenced Wion in his “reconstruction” of St Malachy’s mottoes. The influence of Joachim of Flores is just as obvious as St Malachy, but even that could be a misreading.

Looking just at the images themselves, without the struggle to shape them into a prophetic pattern, an outline begins to emerge. Many of the recurring images, Popes as or riding on dragons, burning towers or furnaces and wheels of fortune, viticulture and the slaughter of the innocents, the Three Fates and so on, are clearly heretical and/or alchemical in intent. Others, and these are unique to the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami, appear to have a direct astrological or astronomical meaning. Something is being communicated, but just what is very obscure indeed. If they are the remnants of an almost lost apocalyptic tradition, as seems most likely, then the need is even greater to interpret them on their own terms, and within their historical framework.

When we do that, we arrive back in Provence and the lower Rhone River a generation or so after the end of the crusade against the Cathars. They would clearly have resonated to the Pope as the Beast of Revelation, images of destruction and genocide and slaughter, as well as demons controlling King and Church. However, the component of the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami that makes it truly unique are the series of seven images found in no other version of the Vaticinia.

In the first of these seven images, a seven-rayed sun rises in Leo, above a Lion and a seven-spoke wheel hangs in the sky below a blank banner. The blank banner is a recurring motif in this series of images. The other versions of the Vaticinia have some degree of commentary, while this complete collection has none. From this we might suppose that phrases or sentences were meant to appear on the banners. The next image also has a few blank banners, but here a man sits a book on the Tree of Life, with an eight-spoke wheel above and an archer and two fish, probably meant to represent Sagittarius and Pisces, below.

The next image continues the eight-spoked wheel motif, but the Tree of Life is being attacked by a club-like thing, and arm hold an upright sword, around which another banner entwine while below yet another banner are a scorpion and a ram, again perhaps Scorpio and Aries. Next, the wheel motif continues, except here a crescent moon hangs below it. Beneath that an archer with a blindfold and a mythological woman struggle over a bow and arrow, amidst even more blank banners and a bull and a pair of scales, Taurus and Libra. These first four images then give us seven zodiacal signs: Taurus, Libra, Leo, Scorpio, Aries, Pisces and Sagittarius.

Note that Taurus and Aries share a cusp, as do Sagittarius and Scorpio and Libra and Pisces are opposite each other. Also, Libra and Scorpio have a cusp, as do Pisces and Aries. The traditional spring and fall equinox falls on the cusp of Aries/Pisces and Libra/Virgo. The pattern then points to the equinox moving a whole sign backward, from Pisces/Aries to Aquarius/Pisces and Libra/Virgo to Virgo/Leo. The sun in Leo then is clearly the fall equinox on Leo/Virgo. This gives a rough date for this sequence of events, and that date is now, as the fall equinox began its move into Leo in 1999.

The next image pinpoints the date. From the wheel hangs, like a medallion, a V with three crescents, and suspended from it is what looks an eclipse. In August of 1999, most of Europe experienced a total eclipse, and a lunar eclipse both before and after the solar eclipse. Counting the one in February, there were three lunar eclipses that year. Below the medallion like eclipse image, is what looks like a badly drawn scorpion with an arc and a spiral between its claws. 1999 was also the year when the solar system aligned with and crossed the galactic meridian. Could the arc and spiral represent the center of our galaxy? The simple answer seems to be yes.

The last two images continue and complete the eight-spoke wheel motif; in the last of the series, the wheel is shattered. In the next to last, it remains intact, as a veil is lowered – apocalypsis in Greek means simply that, lowering the veil. A man is studying under a mystic symbol, and below him are three women, divided by another set of blank banners. The last image shows the wheel as shattered, a wild man raving, holding a blank book, and below that, two women and a stag deer. The immediate future, from this viewpoint, doesn’t look that promising.

However, the symbolism itself points to the Great Cross at Hendaye, which uses the same basic symbols and temporal markers to locate the same era, roughly the twenty years from 1992 to 2012, as the traditional date of the apocalypse. (See The Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time, Weidner and Bridges, Inner Traditions 2003 for more detailed information on the Cross.) This somewhat amazing overlap of concepts, between an alchemist of the 20th century writing about a monument created in the 17th century that actually seems to encode the information of a small group of heretical Cathar from Provence, on the other side of France from Hendaye, would seem to be solid proof that some kind of heretical Catharist Chiliasm sect or society survived long enough to pass along the information.

And there is one further intriguing bit of evidence, in, of all places, the Voynich manuscript. This enigmatic text was once owned by Rudolph II, and perhaps was studied in reference to the other astro-alchemical texts of the day, including perhaps versions of the Vaticinia. The Voynich has one image in its collection of stars patterns and peculiar zodiacs that looks very much like a top down view of our galaxy. When compared to a computer-generated image, the similarities are stunning. The very idea of a galaxy wasn’t conceived of until the early 20th century, and even then, with powerful telescopes, no one could see the center of our own galaxy.

Yet the Chialists of Provence knew all about it in the 13th century. The next question to ask is how did they learn this amazing bit of information? Or perhaps that should be, from whom?

Other Vaticinia by Collection

Arundel 117 British Library

Beinecke Marston Ms 225

Bildindex 1

Bildindex 2

Bildindex 3

Bildindex 4

Bildindex 5

Carpentras Bm Ms 0340

Châlons En Champagne

Gnm Hs 86851

Harley 1340 British Library

Lyon Bm Ms 0189

Lyon Bm Ms 0195

NN Spencer 185

NN Spencer 212

NN Spencer 223

Pierpont Morgan Library Ms M 402

Stift Kremsmuenster

Tours Bm Ms 0520

Unknown & Misc.

Vaticinia Siue Prophetiae

Prophesies Michael Nostradamus’ “On the Future Vicars of Christ to [his] son Cesar”

Dee and Shakespeare: The Origins of the Hermetic Revolution in the Elizabethan Theatre

© 2009 by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns

In 1921, The Occult Review, a British illustrated monthly journal, ran an insightful article entitled “Shakespeare and the Occult” that quite plausibly concluded that many of his plays were unintelligible without an understanding of the esoteric subjects they featured. Today, if you google the words Shakespeare plus Occult, you’ll find over half a million hits. Included are modern Rosicrucian claims that: “No one familiar with esoteric doctrines can have any question as to Shakespeare’s familiarity with the wisdom of the Illuminati.” You’ll also find Jewish community groups studying “Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult.” Dozens of books explore similar connections. From this, we can be fairly safe in concluding that the consensus on Shakespeare’s knowledge of esoteric wisdom is almost unanimous, from scholars to the public.

But that agreement raises the vexing question of how did even a well-educated young provincial with a definite gift for language come by such a wealth of occult knowledge? This question opens the door to the issue of Shakespeare’s identity; and, while it doesn’t prove that the Bard was really someone else (Bacon, or de Vere or even Marlowe) it does suggest that Shakespeare had some kind of secret life, one that brought him into contact with a mentor who could provide him with sources from Holinshead to Aggripa. If we follow the trail of Shakespeare’s esoteric themes and their sources we come to the conclusion that only one library, one knowledgeable teacher, existed for the necessary range of subjects: that of Dr. John Dee.

John Dee was the Einstein of the era, a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and occultist, who collected the largest library in England and one of the best in Europe. Dee occupied that middle ground in the history of science where mathematics and magic had not yet split into widely different disciplines, and much of his life was devoted to alchemy, angelic communication and Hermetic philosophy. Beginning in the early 1580s, Dee, along with his “scyer” or clairvoyant Edward Kelley, conducted a years long series of communications with angelic intelligences. In 1583, Dee, Kelley and their families embarked on a kind of apocalyptic missionary journey in which they attempted to enlisted both Stephen I and Rudolph II, the rulers of Poland and The Holy Roman Empire. Dee returned to England in 1589, leaving Edward Kelley behind in Prague, and found his library ransacked and his reputation wrecked. Elizabeth I eventually made him Warden of Christ College, Manchester, where lived until a few before his death in 1609. Kelley apparently died in Prague sometimes during the mid 1590s while attempting to escape from one of Rudolph II’s prisons.

From the work of Joy Hancox, who concluded that Dee was the most likely channel for the sophisticated geometry of the original Elizabethan theatres, we can place Dee and Shakespeare roughly in the same milieu, that of the Burbages and the Globe Theatre. However, even though Dee was in London during Shakespeare’s meteoric rise to fame in the early 1590s, and kept many journals and diaries of visitors and events, there is no mention of the name Shakespeare. If Dee knew Shakespeare, then he knew him under another name and from very different circumstances.

Curiously, some kind of oral or family tradition connecting Edward Kelley and Shakespeare seems to have survived long enough for Elias Ashmole, in the mid 17th century, to pick up on it and in his 1652 anthology dedicate Edward Kelley’s poem “Concerning the Philosopher’s Stone” (Ashmole’s title as well) to Kelley’s “especiall good Friend, G.S. Gent.” Calling William Shakespeare “G.S.” would not be much of a stretch; especially since Shakespeare’s baptism records in Stratford-upon Avon, from April 26, 1564, list his name as “Gulielmus Shaksper.” But if Shakespeare was the “G. S.” of Ashmole’s dedication, how did he become the “especiall” friend of Edward Kelly?

The original title of the 1589 poem was simply: “The praise of vnity for frendship’s sake made by a stranger/ to further his frende his Conceyts.” Since the poem itself is an instructional piece, designed to give insight into a kind of alchemical theatre, then we suppose that the “conceyts,” or conceits in the sense of personal creative endeavors, involve both the theatre and alchemy. Clearly, Kelley is writing to someone who knows the secret, has perhaps actually witnessed the art of transmutation. And just as clearly, that someone is a poet, “nature’s sower,” and a member of the “schoole” mentioned in the poem’s last line.

In Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, the same collection that includes Kelley’s poem, we find an important clue. Ashmole’s commentary on Dee and Kelley’s continental adventures contains a description of Kelley’s transmutation, performed to “gratifie Master Edward Garland and his Brother Francis.” Garland is a name that appears in the same collection of Danish documents that contains the original of Kelley’s Philosopher’s Stone poem. And both brothers turn up in Dee’s diary; indeed Dee refers to several “Garland” brothers; Francis, Edward, and Robert; and a fourth “Garland,” Henry. None have ever been positively identified, even though they’re most frequently described acting as couriers. No archival records in England have ever been found that show a payment to or letter from any of these men; no civic record of any kind lists their names.

Given their roles as couriers, it is quite likely that “Garland” is a code word, and “brothers” meant in the sense of members of an exclusive organization, such as a fraternity or a secret society. So these Brothers of the Garland are lumped together by Dee in his diary as a generic way to refer to these agents, and possibly students. Edward Garland is perhaps the easiest to identify, because his name disappears quickly from Dee’s diary entries to be replaced in the same context with the name of a person we can trace, Edward Dyer.

Dyer was a member of a “schoole,” the “Areopagus” circle around Sir Philip Sidney – whose uncle, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, had been tutored in his youth by Dr. Dee – and as such was certainly known to Dee before he arrived. The transition from Edward Garland, in the early diary entries, to Edward Dyer just over a year later shows how Dee used the concept of the Brothers Garland. They were the couriers, spies and students who were part of a larger group, or school, of poets and playwrights.

Francis Garland continued to appear in Dee’s diaries, including six mentions along with Edward Dyer. In fact a group that included Francis Garland, Joan Kelley’s brother, Edward Dyer, and Dyer’s “man” Rowles left for England just ahead of Dee and his family. If Dyer, an informant for Lord Treasurer Burgley, was indeed one of the witnesses of Kelley’s transmutation, then Burghley’s insistence on getting the now-knighted Sir Edward Kelley away from Rudolph II’s court and back to England becomes clearer. Dyer had seen the trick worked, and had persuaded his superiors so convincingly that when Kelley wouldn’t return, Dyer was dispatched back to Prague to become his student.

But what of Francis Garland? Here’s a man who apparently doesn’t exist outside of his connections to the circle around Dee and Kelley, and mainly appears in Dee’s diary connected with Edward Dyer. As with his “brother” Edward, we can safely assume that his real name wasn’t “Francis Garland.” Could this person be the G. S. or “Gulielmus Shaksper” to whom Ashmole thought Kelley had dedicated his poem on the Philosopher’s Stone? Could Francis Garland, confidant of Dee and Kelley and a witness to an alchemical transmutation, actually be William Shakespeare?

The simple answer seems to be yes.

Comparing the dates when Dee notes Francis Garland in his diaries with the known dates of Shakespeare’s life shows clearly that the idea is impossible to disprove. Most of the dates for Francis Garland fall in what is known as the “Lost Years” of Shakespeare. We know that Shakespeare left Avon around 1585, probably soon the birth of the twins Hamnet and Judith, and we know nothing of what he was doing until the early 1590s when some of his plays were produced. The next firm date we have is April 18, 1593, when his poem Venus and Adonis was registered in London. Francis Garland appears in Dee’s diary from December 1586 through March of 1595, and in all that time we find not a single instance of Shakespeare being somewhere else when Francis Garland was visiting Dee.

In fact, if we assume that Garland is Shakespeare, it appears that he visited Dee before the registration and publication of both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Francis Garland visits Dee on March 17th 1593, and Venus and Adonis is registered on April 18th. Garland visits Dee on March 28th 1594, and The Rape of Lucrece is registered on May 19th. It is tempting to think that the young pupil, Garland/Shakespeare, was showing his mentor his latest works of alchemical poetry; Venus and Adonis in particular is filled with alchemical symbolism. By Garland’s last visit in 1595 it is possible that both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were finished and read with approval by Dee.

If we make the identification of Dee’s “Francis Garland” with the rising playwright William Shakespeare then most of the mysteries surrounding Shakespeare’s life disappear like actors at the end of a play. A sudden light is thrown on the so-called lost years, and a real person, not a cipher or a mask, emerges. The young Will didn’t waste his time holding horses in front of playhouses and apprentice as an actor; he went directly to the source of the national literary Renaissance; the Sidney group. And in that circle he met Dyer, who was perhaps in need of another bright young poet who could write quickly and cleanly. And so, off to Prague as Francis Garland…

Garland, or Shakespeare, was likely a member of Dee’s inner circle for close to nine years. In the later years, he was Dee’s main point of contact with Kelley, and he was, in light of Kelley’s poem, perhaps even closer to Kelley than Dee. During those years, full of adventure and marvels, we can easily see Shakespeare, or Garland, maturing and learning, absorbing everything, from politics and court protocol to intrigue and esoteric insights, that he would later turn to such good use in his plays.

And what of those plays? If we see Shakespeare as a poet who was also a spy and an occultist, then where did the theatre come from? Perhaps he was already interested in acting and playwriting when he met Dyer, and Dee and Kelley, or perhaps the idea came from Dee, who was known from his youth for being interested in the mechanics of stagecraft. Indeed, many of the standard theatrical devices of the Elizabethan stage, such as ending a show with a curtain drop, apparently have their origins in Dee and Kelley’s angelic workings. It is even likely that Dee designed the “sacred geometry” of the theatre space itself.

When Dee returned to England in December 1589, he found that much had changed. But he still had the Queen’s ear and lost no time in heading to Richmond and her court. Elizabeth would stay in touch, including a private visit to Mortlake in December 1590, where Dee apparently wanted permission, and money, for some unnamed venture. Two days later, a visitor, Richard Cavendish, confirmed her agreement with Dee’s venture in “philosophie and alchemie.”

Early versions of both Spenser’s Fairie Queen and Sidney’s Arcadia had been published since Dee’s return, and young playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe were inventing a new form of literature down in Shoreditch and on Bankside. Even Garland/Shakespeare was at work on a play, Henry VI part one. Perhaps part of Dee’s “philosphie” endeavor was the encouragement of the new theatrical art form, which was indeed allowed to flourish over the next few years until the plague closed the theatres. Dee’s role was of necessity behind the scenes, but Shakespeare/Garland took up front and center stage. By 1594, he was a member of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men and one of the most popular of the rising playwrights.

The rise of Shakespeare’s popularity in the mid-1590s represents a watershed for art, politics and occultism. In the best sense of turning the wheel, this was truly revolutionary. Suddenly, very deep and powerful ideas were turned loose in the public consciousness without the control and interference of the Church. The Elizabethan theatre was essentially a magical theatre, from the sacred geometry of the space in which they were presented to the subject matter and language of the plays themselves. And because of Dr. Dee’s influence, this was a Hermetic revolution.

This Hermetic revolution in the theatrical arts served as the starting point for further revolutions, both political and scientific. The Tempest, whose main character Prospero is thought by some scholars to be based on Dee, and by others on Shakespeare himself, , was performed for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in 1613. Frederick V would go on to become the King of Bohemia and the leader of the Protestant revolution in central Europe until he was deposed in 1622. This was also the years when the Rosicrucian manifestos were circulating, attracting minds such as that of Liebnitz and leading the way toward the Royal Societies in England and France.

Dee’s work, particularly his Monas Hieroglyphica from 1564, was a major influence on Rosicrucian philosophy, and there are echoes of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosencrutz. Dee and Kelley’s alchemical work and the work of their followers can be seen as the origins of modern chemistry and physics. In the same way, Shakespeare’s plays are the origin point of modern psychology.

Once we begin to see Shakespeare in the light of his years as Francis Garland, and begin to appreciate the deep and long lasting influence of Dee on Shakespeare’s life and development, the outlines of a larger plan emerges. Dr. Dee had lost none of his missionary fervor, which had launched the long exodus to begin with, after his return in 1589. It was simply channeled in a different direction, toward perhaps the growing hermetic revolution in the Elizabethan theatre, spearheaded by his old pupil Garland, or William Shakespeare.

One last point: The 1623 collection of Shakespeare’s works opens with The Tempest. His friends who published it must have known his connection to John Dee and gave the pride of place to the play that makes the point most clearly. From Shakespeare’s point of view, the play can be seen both as a nod toward his old mentor, and as a salute and elegy to his own career as a magician and hermetic revolutionary. Dee could expect no less from a friend like Francis Garland.

***

NOSTRADAMUS: On The Verge of World War III

By Vincent Bridges

Sunday, March 9th, 2003

Apocalyptic Sequence of Events:

I/16

Saturn joined with (Scorpio) transiting toward Sagitarrius

At its highest, saluting the increase, exaltation

Pest, famine, death through military hands,

The century and the Cycle aproaches its renewal.

I/30

Because of the tormented seas, the strange ship,

Will arrive at an unknown port:

Notwithstanding the signals from the branch of palm,

After death, pillage: good advice (or birds) arriving late.

I/55

Under the opposite Babylonian climate,

There will be great shedding of blood:

Heaven will appear unjust both on land and sea and in the air,

Sects, famine, kingdoms, plagues, confusion.

I/69

The great mountain seven stadia around (4,247 feet),

After peace, war, famine flooding:

(The impact) will spread far, drowning great countries

Even antiquities and their mighty foundations.

I/70

Rain, famine and war in Persia will not cease,

A trust too great will betray the monarch:

For the end was planned in France,

A secret sign for one to be more sparing.

II/19 (Jewish State)

Newcomers build a place without defense,

Occupying a place (which) until then (was) inhabitable:

Meadows, houses, fields, towns, to take at pleasure,

Famine, plague, war, extensive arable land.

II/46

After a great misery for mankind an even greater approaches.

The great motor of the centuries is renewed

It will rain blood, milk, famine, iron and pestilence,

In the sky will be seen a fire, dragging a trail of sparks

II/62

Mabus will soon die, then will come,

A horrible undoing of people and animals,

At once one will see vengence,

One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

II/96

A burning torch will be seen in the night sky

Near the end and the source of the Rhone:

Famine, weapons: the help provided is late,

When Persia turns to invade Macedonia.

III/19

In Lucca it will come to rain blood and milk,

Shortly before the change of governor:

Great plague and war, famine and drought will be seen,

Far from where their Prince rector will die.

* VI/6 (Comet and Eclipse prediction)

There will appear towards the seven stars of Ursa major and Polaris,

Not far from Cancer, the bearded star:

Susa, Siena, Boetica, Eretria,

Great Rome will die, the night having vanished.

VI/10

In a short time the colors of temples

Black and white, the two will be intermingled.

The red and the yellow ones will carry off their possesions.

Blood, earth, plague, hunger, fire, maddened with thirst

VII/6

Naples, Palermo and all of Sicily

Will be uninhabited through barbarian hands,

Cosica, Salerno, the island of Sardinia,

Hunger, plague, war, the end of the extended evils.

VIII/17

Those at ease will suddenly be cast down

The world put into trouble by three brothers,

The enemies will sieze the marine city,

Lost Book of Nostradamus

By Vincent Bridges

Sunday, October 28th, 2007

Okay, so I’m watching Scary Movie 3 on Comedy Central last night when an odd commercial comes on featuring all kinds of signs saying: “The end is coming,” and “the end of the world.” This catches my interest and I un-mute just in time to hear my own voice saying something about the “exact date of the Apocalypse.” Then the logo for Lost Book of Nostradamus, my new History Channel special, comes on; it is a promo spot, done especially for the comedy channel.

This morning, while channel surfing over breakfast, I found a whole three-minute piece on Fox & Friends, featuring one of my segments from the show as a teaser and an interview with my friend Victor Baines, who is also on the show. Who would have ever thought that I would make Fox News announcing the end of the world? Reality is stranger than any fiction. Trust me, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried!

What started as a way to get the History Channel interested in making a follow up to my first Nostradamus special, Nostradamus: Five Hundred Years Later, has blossomed into a gargantuan enterprise, backed by the largest promotional blitz ever done by the History Channel. They even had an hour long Behind the Scenes on the TV Guide channel and a countdown clock on the History Channel itself. This show seems planned to take Nostradamus and the End of the World into the mainstream.

For the first hour, the show’s reenactments and forensic drama are mixed with a few nods to Nostradamus’ prophetic abilities, and lots of teasers that whatever the Lost Book turns out to be, it is going to be very important. The second hour moves deeper into the prophecies, and eventually concludes that the book wasn’t likely to have been created by Nostradamus, although it could have belonged to him. It could even have been one of his sources, one that helped him pinpoint our present time period as one to watch.

And here the show turns into the Vincent & Friends Apocalyptic Comedy Troupe, as Victor Baines and my former co-author Jay Weidner back me up as I interpret the crucial seven images in the series from the Lost Book as pointing to the events happening in the sky right now, culminating just five years from now in 2012. The connections between the imagery in the Lost Book and these celestial events are made even more apparent by the symbolism of a 13th century church front just a few feet away, around the corner, from Nostradamus’s door. I point all this out in the show, and the producers did a fine job of animating it, and it is quite convincing.

So, how did the core of our book, The Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (2003, Destiny Books) end up on television, with a huge media blitz behind it, in a special on Nostradamus?

That is actually a long and complicated story going back more than eight years to our first research trip for Mysteries. We stayed in the 18th century chateau built on the estate of Nostradamus’ brother Bertrand, and some sort of connection was made. The Balkan war insights came less than a month after we returned, and I got my start as an authority on Nostradamus. After the 2003 television show, where I actually did some of my talking head shots on the ground in France, my connection to the Maestro became even closer. But I had no idea what was coming next.

I had seen some of the images in the Lost Book in an earlier book by O. C. Ramotti, The Nostradamus Code. The images in that book were definitely intriguing, and the main reason to buy the book, but Ramotti’s interpretations left much to be desired. I find it far beyond belief that Nostradamus, when decoded, was actually writing in modern Italian. But still, those images were very strange!

Last spring, as the Lost Book was being examined forensically in Rome, I got to see for the first time the complete series of images and I knew very quickly that the core series not only depicted the center of our galaxy, but also was talking about the galactic alignment itself. Here was manuscript evidence, dating from at least the 16th century, that someone had known of the center of galaxy and even its spiral shape, long before modern astronomy discovered it in 1917.

That alone made the Lost Book of Nostradamus a truly unique discovery. Here was solid evidence that a main point of our argument in Mysteries, that an unknown group of initiates or believers had retained sophisticated knowledge concerning the “end of the world” galactic alignment at least since the Middle Ages, was in fact correct. A heretical and possibly chilaist group of initiates kept the knowledge, in the form of images that were eventually perhaps only semi-understandable. These images were treasures, copied and recopied, until finally they disappeared into the Vatican Library.

And now, I get to announce their true meaning and value on nation television!

The Body of Light and the Alchemical Secret

By Vincent Bridges (©2003, 2007)

I know, myself, that the goddess Isis is the mother of all things‚ and that she alone can bestow Revelation and Initiation.

Le Mystere des Cathedrales, page 136

1 – The Soul-Star Place

Just west of where the Nile begins to widen out into the fan-shaped delta, a rough limestone escarpment rises a few hundred feet and then flattens off into a wind swept plateau. An ancient civilization, perhaps a colony of lost Atlantis, built a complex pattern of structures on the edge of the plateau. Fulcanelli, in Dwellings of the Philosophers, suggests that they were built at the end of the last Ice Age, and Schwaller de Lubicz confirms that it is water erosion that can be seen on the Sphinx and its enclosure, giving us a date of at least 12,000 years ago for their construction. Whatever their age, these monuments have fascinated humanity throughout history.

Consider the tale, first written down in the XVIIth Dynasty from a Middle Kingdom version of a IVth Dynasty original, of Prince Radjedef, the Djedi and King Khufu. The King and his four sons are relaxing at the palace telling stories of famous magicians. Radjedef tops them all by announcing that he knows of a living magician equal to those of the past. Khufu is interested and Radjedef tells him of the Djedi, or stable one, who is apparently ageless and knows many things, including, “the shrines of the secret chambers of the enclosure of Tehuti.” Now Khufu is really interested, because the King “had spent much time in seeking for himself these secret chambers of the enclosure of Tehuti to fashion for himself their likeness for his horizon.” Khufu dispatches Radjedef to bring the Djedi back to the palace.

He returns with the Djedi, who quickly charms and awes the court with his magical abilities. Then the King comes to the point: ‚ÄúNow, as for the rumor that you know the number of the shrines of the secret chamber of the enclosure of Tehuti…?‚Äù Djedi says that he does not, although he knows where that information can be found. ‚ÄúThere is a box of flint in a chamber called the Revision of On: in that box.‚Äù The Djedi claims that he cannot recover this information, but the eldest of the triplets then in the womb of the wife of the high priest of ‚ÄúRe, Lord of Sakhbu,‚Äù will discover the information and found a new Dynasty. (This story comes from a cycle of five magical tales in Berlin Papyrus 3033, paraphrase and translation by the authors.) Whatever we may think of the miraculous origins of the Vth Dynasty, this tale poses some interesting questions. Just what is the ‚Äúenclosure of Tehuti?‚Äù And what are the ‚Äúshrines of the secret chambers‚Äù whose likeness Khufu wants for his own ‚Äúhorizon?‚Äù Why is it that the information concerning these secrets could be found in a chamber called ‚ÄúRevision‚Äù in On, or Heliopolis as the Greeks called it a thousand years into its decline?

The so-called Inventory Stele of Khufu, found in the Isis Chapel near Khufu‚Äôs mortuary temple at Giza in the 1850‚Äôs, suggests that the “enclosure of Tehuti‚” is none other than the Great Pyramid complex itself. The stele clearly states that at least the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were in existence at the time Khufu ascended to the throne. Peter Lemesurier, a pyramid scholar, has speculated that Khufu, which means simply (he) “protects us,” assumed the name of the traditional builder of the pyramid, Knum Khufu, or “Knum protects us” to symbolize his possible reincarnative connection with this semi-mythical builder. One of the earliest artifacts of Egyptian civilization, the Narmer palette, indicates that the pyramids predated the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. A pyramid in a rectangular enclosure looms over the right shoulder of Narmer/Menes on the Lower Egypt side of the tablet like some relic from a forgotten age. The Djedi story then presents us with the image of a King who doesn’t know the secret chambers of his own tomb, if we are to believe the Egyptologists. But the enclosure of Tehuti is clearly no tomb, and Khufu was sincerely interested in discovering its secrets. What these shrines of the secret chambers might be is suggested by the archaic title for the ancient Nome or precinct of On, Sakhbu. The literal translation of this word is “soul star place,” and the ancient Egyptians used it to describe the entire plateau at Giza.

According to the Pyramid Texts, the “soul star place,” which contains the enclosure of Tehuti and its secret chambers, is the Duat on earth through which the King travels as he makes his journey toward re-birth in Re‚Äôs Boat of a Million Years. Khufu wishes to know its secret so that his horizon, his transition, might truly result in immortality among the imperishable stars. This was no idle concern for Khufu. The Djedi story suggests that his failure to understand the mystery caused the failure of his Dynasty. It would be the Vth Dynasty Pharaohs who would bring forth or make public the secrets of the enclosure of Tehuti.

But the “soul star place” remains, and its inconceivably ancient monuments continue to haunt us with their mystery. Perhaps, just perhaps, the shrines of the secret chambers, like some time locked vault, have begun to open and we can glimpse through them an awe-filled universe of meaning and connection in which the ancient builders lived.

The secret chambers began to open in 1989 with an article in the Oxford journal, Discussions in Egyptology. Engineer Robert Bauval argued that not only did the pyramids at Giza exhibit a grand unified pattern, but also that pattern mirrored the stars in the constellation of Orion. In ancient Egypt, Orion was the “Place of Osiris,” suggesting a deep connection between the constellation and the myth of death and rebirth. Bauval’s idea made sense, (he would go on to co-author the bestsellersThe Orion Mystery and The Message of the Sphinx) and further investigation has shown that the entire pyramid field, from Dashur to Abu Roash, may mirror the stars in the sky above it.

The plan of the Giza pyramids also exhibits an amazing degree of geometrical and mathematical coherence. For example, the three pyramids fit inside a rectangle formed from a vesicia piscis, from which the generative roots (the square root of 2, 3 and 5) are derived. The vesicia piscis also determines the angle of each face and the height of the floor of the King’s chamber. R.J. Cook demonstrated that a geometrical axial system linked the smaller pyramids with the center pyramid. He found that this system of linkages was based on the use of 60 degree and 26.5 degree angles. Sixty degrees is the angle of an isosceles triangle; 26.5 degrees is the angle of the diagonal of a double square. The floor of the King’s Chamber is a double square and the ascending and descending passages are set at 26.5 degrees; this can hardly be accidental. The entire complex seems arranged to create a pointer indicating the helical rising of Orion/Osiris. Even more fascinating, a line drawn at 26.5 degrees north of east, the indicator point for the pre-dawn rise of Orion, runs from the second pyramid to Bethlehem in Palestine. Given the similarity between the dying god Osiris and the resurrected Christ, this alignment suggests an ancient stellar connection much too significant to be co-incidental.

A number of Giza researchers, including Max Toth, Rocky McCollum and William Buehler, have noticed that the arrangement of the three major pyramids produces a short section of a Golden Mean spiral. Extending this spiral on the ground leads to a small rise in the escarpment a few kilometers to the south-east of the pyramid complex. This area has received very little archeological attention since it covers a portion of the local village’s cemetery. The 1947 survey map notes the existence, near the center of the spiral, of an unidentified ruin of which nothing seems to have survived to the present. Without more research, including on-site inspection, the ground level Golden Mean spiral seems to be a dead end.

But, we wondered, what if we draw the Golden Mean spiral in the sky? If the pyramids are modeled on the stars in Orion’s belt, then they should also describe a small section of the Golden Mean spiral. If we continue the line in the sky, following the yellow brick road of the Golden Mean, we arrive at the heart of the figure of Orion/Osiris.

Visually, this appears to be an empty region of space, but radio and x-ray astronomy reveal a seething area of collapsing stellar material below and to the left of the shoulder star, Bellatrix. Stars are being born in the heart of Orion. Indeed, the general area of Orion has more stellar formation occurring than anywhere else in our local galactic neighborhood. The complex geometry of Giza, the Sakhbu or “soul star place” was apparently designed to embed and encode certain “truths” about the star fields of Orion. Giza’s monuments function as a cosmic clock, ticking off the ages through cyclical stellar alignments while establishing galactic scale resonance with the regions of energetic star birth far off in Orion. This resonating clock reminds of us who we are and where we came from on a galactic scale. It holds our cosmic memory, the echo of self-awareness that allows us to overcome our monkey body programming.

2 – “The sky has born you with Orion. . .”

The question remains: If the enclosure of Tehuti is the pyramid complex itself and the shrines of the secret chambers are the stellar alignments and geometric resonance points on the Giza plateau, then how can this information be found in a flint box in a storeroom in Heliopolis? Several authors have suggested that the answer is perhaps a symmetry set of geometric solids, a primitive model of Buckminister Fuller’s icosa-dodecahedral earth grid. From our investigation, it seems more likely to have been The Precious Stone and the astronomical and practical instructions needed to make it work. And this does make sense; the monuments on Giza were there for all to see, no secret there. But how to use them was a secret that could be coded into a text and stored with a few models in a flint box.

Given that the “Book of Coming Forth unto the Light” the core of the Pyramid Texts, appeared near the end of the Vth Dynasty, maybe SahuRe, the eldest of the royal triplets, did indeed find that flint box with the secret operating manual for the “soul star place.” The Pyramid Texts, mankind’s oldest religious writings, were carved on the internal walls of one Vth Dynasty pyramid and four more from the VIth Dynasty. Frozen, like an ant in amber, these inscriptions record the definitive expression of an ancient star religion, whose beliefs included the translation of the dead king into a star in the constellation of Orion. Even the Victorian Egyptologists with their Christian and solar bias agreed that the Pyramid Texts had greater antiquity than the Vth Dynasty. Gaston Maspero, their original discoverer and translator, thought “the greater part were originally written during the pre-historic period of Egypt.”  That is, at least before about 3300 BC. Professor R. T. Rundle Clark, who had a great respect for the Pyramid Texts, notes that “the rising of Orion in the southern sky after the time of its invisibility is the sign. . . Osiris has been transformed into a living soul.” (Remember, the ability to mark this moment is one of the major design factors involved in the overall plan of the monuments on Giza. This line, indicated by the 26.5 degree angle north of east, points to the summer solstice sunrise at the time of Orion‚Äôs return; it also runs to Bethlehem.) The Texts themselves are quite clear on this:

“Behold he has come as Orion, behold Osiris has come as Orion. . . O king, the sky conceives you with Orion, the dawn-light bears you with Orion. . . you will regularly ascend with Orion from the eastern regions of the sky, you will regularly descend with Orion in the western region of the sky.” (Pyramid Texts, line 820-2) “O king, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion, who Navigates the (Duat) Netherworld with Osiris; you ascend from the east of the sky, being renewed in your due season, and rejuvenated in your due time. The sky has born you with Orion. . .” (Pyramid Texts, line 882-3) A little further along in the same passage, we find an important clue: “I am a soul. . . I (am) a star of gold. . .” (Pyramid Texts, Line 886-9) Thus the dead King, as an “Osiris” evolved to inhabit a newly born stellar matrix in the constellation of Orion. The Duat, translated as Netherworld by most Egyptologists, actually appears to be the star birth Bardo field in the heart of Orion. There the newly immortal King must “Navigate the Duat” as a companion of Orion/Osiris. Significantly, the Osiris-king announces: “The sky is pregnant of wine (the dawn-light), Nuit has given birth to her daughter, the dawn-light, I raise myself indeed. . .” (Pyramid Texts, line 1082-3) In several places in the Pyramid Texts, a curious statement is made: “The (dead) king’s sister is Sothis, (Sirius) his offspring is the Morning Star. . .” (Pyramid Texts, lines 357, 929, 935, 1707) It is easy to see Isis, Osiris’ sister/wife, as the star Sirius, which follows Orion in the sky. But to see Horus, Osiris’ offspring, as the Morning Star, Venus, takes a bit of understanding. Until we remember that Venus, rising against the zodiac of the ecliptic, creates a five-pointed star through time. This symbol, a star made of five lines drawn from a common center toward the points in the zodiac of Venus’ rising, covers the ceiling of Unas’ pyramid where the earliest Pyramid Text is inscribed.

Horus, the son of Osiris, was the prototype of the earthly king; the Egyptian Pharaohs ruled in his name. As such, the symbol of Horus preserves the idea of transcendence and the possibility of stellar evolution. Again, the Pyramid Texts give a flavor of this: “. . .and Har-Sopd has come forth from you as Horus who is in Sothis (Isis). . . and he protects you in his name of Horus, the son who protects the father. . .” (Pyramid Texts, lines 632-3) Har-Sopd, or Horus who is the morning star, is depicted as a hawk-headed human with a Nuit star in a circle above his head.

If the Pyramid Texts are truly the operating manual for the monuments on Giza and their evolutionary resonance with the star fields of Orion, then they deserve much more study than they have received in the century or so since their discovery. Others, primarily Robert Bauval in The Orion Mystery, have drawn attention to these clues, but Egyptologists and archeologists have been slow to respond. No attempt has been made to examine other texts of comparable antiquity, such as the Builder Texts of Edfu and Dendera, for more clues. It is as if this tantalizing evidence of man’s early fascination with this vibrantly creative area of stellar birth leads to a dead end. Perhaps for the academics, with reputations to make and preserve, it does. But for the group of mystics, scientists and esoteric philosophers interested in ancient wisdom, these clues provide startling evidence of Old Kingdom Egypt’s knowledge of the equivalent of a spiritual unified field theory. For them, the monuments on Giza are reminders of humanity’s galactic destiny.

3. “a star of Gold”

Let’s start with the clue about gold. “I am a soul, I (am) a star of gold‚” Osiris/Pharaoh announces. Before we dismiss this as mere poetry, remember that the Egyptian hieroglyphic language was capable of a dense structure of meaning. The “soul,” sa, has a precise meaning. It is the wave nature, the flow of the breath, of the spirit, the khu. The Hebrew word ruach, breath or spirit, preserves this meaning. In Genesis, we are told that God’s breath, His ruach moved across the waters of chaos to begin the process of creation. The sages of On would have agreed, saying that Re put forth his sakhu as he rose from the waters of Nun.

Therefore, the king is declaring that he has entered the state of being called “soul,” a state where the flow of spirit is self-sustaining, self-referencing and self-aware. To be such a soul is to have the possibility of immortality. He reinforces this by declaring that he has become a “star of gold.”  This also has a very precise meaning. One of the deepest held secrets of the Egyptian mysteries was how to rearrange the Nuit star, five lines pointing out from a common center, into an interlocked pentagram, the same five lines crossing around the common center to create an infinite nest of Phi ratios. To the Egyptian sages, this symbolized the embedding of cosmic evolution, the Light of the Horus current, into biological evolution.

And indeed, this pentagonal array is a constant in nature, appearing in everything from the petals on a flower to the bipedal symmetry of the human form. The Pythagoreans claimed that the pentagram was the perfect symbol of humanity, and that its extension into space, the Gnostic “light in extension” of the dodecahedron, was the ultimate symbol of spirit. As the crystalline form of DNA actually forms a dodecahedron, the Pythagoreans were more correct than we might suppose. Just as the pentagram is a nest of phi ratio recursion, gold, by its atomic geometry, is the most fractally recursive element. The outer d/f electron sub-shells exhibit a 5/7 symmetry pairing, which gives gold the shape of the perfect dodeca-icosa fractal. The dodecahedron, the Pythagorean symbol of spirit, nests with the icosahedron, a symbol for water, to create a polygon that is a model of the crystalline structure of our planetary jewel, according to researchers such as Beth Hagen. The planet then is the vessel or container for the unfoldment of The Cosmic Serpent of DNA, “living in water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire,” as Jeremy Narby described it. So the newly dead king’s statement can now be read as: “I am a self-sustaining, self-aware being, whose fractality, inside and out, is as infinite as the perfect shape of gold.” Suddenly, we are on a different level of understanding. With a flash, we see that the Egyptians were not just superstitious priests worshipping the sky out of ignorance; they were spiritual scientists with deep insight into the nature of reality and the physics of immortality. This insight seems to have come from the original creators of the Giza complex; those ancient sages who wrote down the secret texts and stored them in that flint box in Heliopolis. But there is another way to interpret “the number of the shrines of the secret chamber of the enclosure of Tehuti…” The secrets in the flint box, guarded by the Brotherhood of Heliopolis, could be an Egyptian version of the Tree of Life or the I Ching, in which the 64 shrines count the moon year of Tehuti, whose name means “the one who measures the moon,” with its 13 months for a total 384 days or moving lines. Whatever the secret, its recovery by the Vth ands VIth Dynasty Pharaohs led to the expression of the soul-star religion on the walls of the later pyramids at Sakkara.

The Pharaoh did not become a soul merely by dieing. He underwent another, internal, process before his transition to a star of gold, a soul inhabiting a stellar matrix in the heart of Orion. The internal process of building a container for the outburst of transformative energies in the body can only be accomplished by the realization of infinite compassion. Literally, the oldest trick in the book Work by Lee Sanella and Isaac Bentov, Kundalini – Psychosis or Transcendence?, has shown that the onset of neural superconductivity, the tantric Kundalini or serpent power, is mediated by the sonic entrainment of the heart’s rhythm. A December, 1996 article by Dr. Irving Dardik in Cycles magazine entitled “Heart Waves as Fractality” confirms that fractal immune identity is a possible solution to chronic illness. Perfect fractality, perfect coherence and self-awareness, produce perfect immunity, or near immortality of the body.

These findings suggest that by meditating on compassion, feeling the feelings of all beings, the sonic entrainment of the heart’s rhythm is braided into more complex and coherent patterns. These complex sound patterns can then contain the super-conductive neural charge of Kundalini onset, which is nothing less than a sudden resonance with the vivid laser-like intensity of the internal DNA light, and the use of this higher charge energy flow to braid a new being, the state of inhabiting a soul, becoming a conscious expression of the DNA. This soul charge can then be used to open a “magnetic wormhole” to the star fields in Orion. Or, it can be used to create a diamond imperishable body for use as a teaching vehicle down here on earth.

From the Tibetan Buddhist tradition comes many examples of the latter use of this implosive soul force. Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century CE, is said to have attained his diamond body in the Asura Cave in Nepal after three years of tantric meditations. Something happened in that cave; the whole hillside is still pervaded with an astral intensity strong enough to grow a image of Tara, the Tibetan Isis, out of solid rock. Padmasambhava himself demonstrated the power of this transformation by melting the rock of the cave wall and pressing his hand into it like Clark Gable in wet cement on Hollywood Boulevard.

The Pharaoh then, as he began his journey to the star fields, should be seen as a kind of Boddhisatva, an enlightened being making a leap of evolution. The Pharaoh would, in theory, have completed a tantric-type compassion realization and then perhaps used a trace of “alchemical” gold to crystallize the process. Done properly, this would result in an enlightened being capable of compassionately inhabiting a newly born star. In other words, a person whose weak laser light from the DNA had suddenly become “pumped” by the feedback of conscious compassion into a powerfully coherent flash of light. If this flash is done consciously, with full mindfulness all the way down the level of the DNA, then the “Diamond Body of Light” becomes stable and perhaps even flexibly tangible. Carried to its end, the implications of this belief system suggest that a vast compassionate and enlightened being also inhabits our own star, the sun. From this perspective, it is easy to understand the solar influence on Egyptian religion. Even Akhnaton’s insistence on worshipping the sun’s physical body, the Aton, as the only source of divinity makes sense as a way of establishing and strengthening a direct communication with that vast compassionate being whose star body is our sun and whose blueprint lies at the core of DNA. The monuments of the “soul star place” and their hieroglyphic operating manual, the Pyramid Texts, offer solid evidence of an advanced civilization far back in prehistory that understood both the stellar mechanics of our local galactic neighborhood, the psycho-dynamics of neural superconductivity and the photon emission and absorption of DNA. This alone should make us sit up and take notice. That it does not may have consequences far beyond our comprehension. What happened to the advanced civilization that designed and built these monuments? Was it destroyed in some cosmic catastrophe predicted by its own cosmic clock? Is that catastrophe point approaching critical once again? Fulcanelli and the message of the Cross at Hendaye, as well as such distant cultural groups as the Mayan and the Inca, point to a date around 2012 as the crisis point. Terence McKenna, in his “Time Wave Zero” computer program, which uses the permutation pattern found in the primal arrangement of the I Ching’s trigrams, predicts that novelty, or lack of continuity in ideas, will also reach infinite around December of 2012. Keeping in mind what we have discovered about the ability of the DNA to absorb or emit light, then perhaps what has been interpreted as “novelty” is really the ability to absorb and translate the new influx of Light?

Perhaps this cosmic event is meant to be a harvesting mechanism for biologics who have learned to inhabit “souls” through the realization of compassion. If that is the case, then learning to weave your Bardo or transitional body into nicely fractal flows of self-awareness as infinite compassion, in other words communicate directly with your DNA, may just become the ultimate survival skill. The geometry of Giza’s monuments and their resonance with the star fields of Orion teaches us that human evolution has a cosmic, stellar component. The pyramid complex holds our contiguous memory through the implosion of galactic catastrophe, and offers us hope for our own evolution. The practitioners of the ancient star religion, as shown by the monuments and legends they left behind, believed that sentience was evolving toward ever greater levels of compassionate awareness as a living stellar matrix, coalescing and nurturing the planetary jewels in hopes of nourishing life, which would in turn evolve toward stellar sentience. Perhaps we can think of this as the prime directive of our DNA programming.

As Nuit, the Egyptian star goddess, declared to Aleister Crowley in the first section of the Book of the Law: “Every man and every women is a star.” When we remember that all the matter in our bodies originated in the heart of stars, and that our consciousness, freed from its prison of matter, has the ability to return to the stars, then it is possible that Nuit is describing the literal truth. From the stars we came, and to them, if we learn our lessons, we shall one day return.

4 – The Secret of Light

Is this then the secret of alchemy, the science of Al Khema, and the black land of Egypt?

In part the answer is yes, but we must remember that the Pharaonic science of immortality by re-birth as a star in Orion is but one application of the ancient star-science we have called astro-alchemy. According to Egyptian tradition, the institution of kingship was received from the Hru Shemsu, the semi-divine Company of Horus, so that humanity might have a direct connection with the process of creation. One of the duties of the Pharaoh was to keep the Djed of Osiris properly aligned so that the world participated in the divine or stellar stability. The Patriarch Abraham, through his knowledge of Egyptian and Indian astronomy, formulated the Djed concept as the Tree of Life, the pattern of divine unfoldment that created the world and formed the basis of human sentience. Hebrew Gnostics, such as Rabbi Nehuniah and the Mercabah traditions of the Bahir, developed this idea into the mystical Path of Return. By experiencing the states of being, symbolized originally by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and later by the images of the Tarot Trumps, the cabalist ascends by degrees to the Godhead. This pattern was visualized as both internal, as a map to the active Kundalini centers in the body, and external, as the dragon axis of the galactic alignments.

William Stirling wrote in The Canon: An Exposition of the Pagan Mystery Perpetuated in the Cabala as the Rule of All Art: “The process of creation may be expressed by inscribing the cabalistic diagram in the upper hemisphere, so that the apex or crown reaches to the Milky Way, while the tenth step will coincide with earth.‚” Stirling’s “cabalistic diagram” is the ten step pattern of unfoldment known to occultists as the Tree of Life, and according to his explication, it is the basic pattern of the Canon itself.

He writes: “The doctrine of the Cabala was reduced to a geometric diagram, in which ten steps were grouped according to a progressive scheme, so that the emanations of the Spirit of the Elohim issues from the first step called the Crown, and after passing through the whole figure is carried through the ninth step, and finally reaches the tenth or last of the series.” This cabalistic diagram described by Stirling was first elucidated in the 2nd century Sepher Yetsirah. It pictures reality as the intersection of levels of abstraction. Stirling tells us that “the ideas which the ancients connected and combined into this figure of ten progressive steps, appears to form the basis of all their philosophy, religion, and art, and in it we have the nearest approach to a direct revelation of the traditional science, or Gnosis, which was never communicated except by myths and symbols.” From this we can see that the framework, the Gnostic pattern, behind the universal language of symbolism, the Language of the Birds and the Green Language, is this great word/world tree of geometry.

All of which points to DNA as the source of the imagery. Remember, the ten spheres and the serpent-like entwining of the 22 paths, make for a total of 32 qualities and their reflection, which of course matches the 64 protein synthesis code words of t-RNA. The 22 letters of the paths correspond to the 20 amino acid pairs and the two punctuation marks formed by t-RNA. The 23 chromosomes that each individual passes on in reproduction can be seen as the 22 paths of the language, with the addition of the Malkuth, or earth element that creates both gender and individuality. In essence, the Tree Of Life is an elegant and symbolic way to express the patterns found in the DNA. It is also the Ladder of our western shamanic Gnosis.

Fulcanelli used this Tree of Life pattern to organize his perspective on alchemy. He carefully gives us four Trees, suggesting the projected Tree of Life on the celestial sphere of the Bahir. From this astronomical pattern of alignments comes the Cube of Space, the Precious Stone of the Wise, which eventually became the Holy Grail and the Philosopher’s Stone of alchemy. The projected Tree of Life pattern also gives us insight into the Pharaonic star-birth process. The projected Tree, whose Tiphareth point falls on the cusp of Taurus/Gemini and includes the Pleiades, contains the constellation of Orion. In this arrangement, the Netzach sphere falls on Sirius, hence its connection to Isis and the confusion with Venus, the planetary attribution for that sphere. On the Tree of Life, developed as the Path of Return, the path from Netzach to Tiphareth is attributed to the Hebrew letter Nun and the Tarot Trump Death. Significantly, it is also attributed to the zodiacal sign of Scorpio, the location of the “stinging” center of the galaxy.

With this in mind, we can see the Pharaoh’s star-birth as part of a larger process. The star fields of Orion, which lie a mere 70 light years away, are the closest area of stellar creation to our solar system. The Pharaoh attained immortality in these star fields as he passed in death along the path of Nun, which in Egyptian is the word for the primeval ether soup out of which all of creation arose, through the area of stellar formation in the heart of Orion. Thus, by being reborn as a star in Osiris’ company, the Pharaoh reenacted on a local level the original creation of the universe.

In order to achieve this, the Pharaoh must initiate the transformational and creative process within himself before or at the moment of death. LaViolette has demonstrated that spontaneous creation of matter and energy from the ether soup is a matter of geometric stressors, symbolized by his Model G reaction pattern and known to the ancients as the Ankh, the image of “universal life” in Fulcanelli‚Äôs words. The Ankh, as we have noted, is the only form of the cross to contain the entire Tree of Life pattern without disturbing its natural order. It is also symbolic of the Southern Cross, visible in the winter sky through most ancient Egypt’s history, and its use as an astral marker of the galactic alignment.

The constellation Crux, the Southern Cross, stands on the galactic meridian, and its vertical axis points to the South Celestial Pole. Its horizontal axis is tilted, at this precessional epoch, to point directly at the galactic center. If we continue the vertical line from the South Celestial Pole through the Cross and on to Centaurus and Corvus and then to the cusp of Leo/Virgo, we see that the Southern Cross is a perfect precessional marker in the sky. The age can be read by its vertical orientation. The Southern Cross connects the South Celestial Pole and the start point of the precessional Great Year in Leo/Virgo. As this axis moves backward through time, the Southern Cross forms the galactic seasons by aligning the celestial and ecliptic poles with the solstice and equinoxes and the galactic meridian.

Since the Southern Cross is now a Southern Hemisphere constellation, we do not realize that it was visible on the southern horizon above the 30-degrees north-latitude line for most of the precessional epoch of Aries. The Greeks, who were too far north to appreciate it clearly, considered it as part of the constellation Centaurus and only learned of its importance, and the idea of precession itself, from the Egyptians. As the epoch of Aries drew to a close, it was obvious that the Cross was leaving the Northern Hemisphere for another 23,760 years. Thus the Southern Cross is the “essential cross [that] salutes the measure of the twelfth part,” or the one precessional epoch of 2,160 years out of the twelve epochs of the complete precessional year, 25,920 years, when it is visible above 30 degrees north latitude.

The Pharaoh then built the Ankh within himself by aligning his subtle bodies or energy fields in this pattern. Dr. Robert Masters, in his book The Goddess Sekhmet, describes the Egyptian theory of the five magical bodies that, when aligned properly, creates a super-sensible or divine consciousness. This is even more interesting when we remember that Sekhmet, as the Great Eye of Ra, is actually a metaphor for the eruption of the galactic core. Masters‚Äô five bodies, the Aufu, the Ka, the Hadit, the Khu and the Sahu, are exact duplicates in function with LaViolette’s five reaction steps in the self-sustaining Model G active ether geometry.

When this alignment is achieved, there is a burst of spontaneous matter/energy creation, which if employed consciously, can be used to generate a “light body” the diamond or imperishable body of the Tibetan tantrics. When it occurs without conscious initiation and control, then a number of dire results can occur, from illness and insanity to death by spontaneous combustion. Indeed, the numerous and well-documented examples of spontaneous human combustion are proof of the process’ reality. Modern physics has no answer for the mystery of such combustion, but if we see it as one end of a spectrum, the other being the creation of an immortal light body, then the mystery resolves itself.

To see this a little more clearly, we need to look once more at the Egyptian magical text mentioned in chapter three. From the Paris Papyrus, it is one of the gems discovered in Egypt by Napoleon’s savants. In papyrus IV, lines 475-830, we find a ritual to attain immortality through inhaling Light. The aspirant is first told to perform seven days of rituals, and then three days of dark retreat. On the morning of the eleventh day, the aspirant is to face the rising sun and perform an invocation: “First source of all sources. . .perfect my body. . .(so) that I may participate again in the immortal beginning. . .that I may be reborn in thought. . .and that the holy spirit may breathe in me.”

With this the aspirant inhales the first rays of the rising sun, and then leaves his body behind and rises into the heavens, filled with Light. “For I am the Son (of the Sun), I surpass the limits of my souls, I am (magical symbol for Light).”

Eleven is the number of the Gnostic sephiroth Daat, and Fulcanelli uses this mystical perspective in his explication of the 46th image in Le Mystere. Whether Fulcanelli knew of the Paris Papyrus and its formula for inhaling light is unclear, but he certainly understood the process. We can see this in his description of the enigmatic credence of Lallemant Mansion, which he assigns to the Daat position in his fourth Tree of Life pattern.

An architectural credence is a false door or window. This immediately suggests the Egyptian false door used in tombs and the Islamic mithrab or prayer niche. In Egyptian architecture, the false door allows the “Ka” or the spirit double that lies within all of us, access to the “Ka” statue, the body’s immortal form, hidden in a chamber behind the door. This is the doorway to the Duat, or the astral realm of the light beings. The spirit, or light within us, lives in this realm after the death of the body. This echoes the Gnostic “spark of light” trying to find it’s way back to the great central light of the universe. In Islam, the mithrab is the prayer doorway to Mecca and the inner mysteries of Mohammed’s revelation. In many Sufi sects, the mithrab has the geometric pattern of the Tree of Life, without Malkuth, inscribed in its niche. This is usually coupled with the Light Verse from the Qu’ran, Sura 24, verse 35. To the Sufis, this verse exemplifies the very idea of illumination. Idries Shah called the verse “the essence of Sufism” and goes on to suggests that it “conceals the nature of the cognition of the extra dimensions of the human consciousness which comes beyond the intellect.” The mithrab/credence in Lallemant mansion combines Islamic concepts with the even deeper meaning of a door to the Duat from Egyptian cosmology. It has three layers, as does the Egyptian false door. On the inner surface of the niche is a letter rebus that, as we will see, distills the essence of the Sufi Light Verse. We are also reminded of the Abbot Suger: “Bright is the noble work, this work shining nobly/ Enlightens the mind so that it may travel through the true lights/ To the True Light where Christ is the true door.”

In the niche of the credence at Lallemant are the letters RERE on one line, followed by the letters, RER on the next. This is repeated twice more for a total of six lines, hence doubling or crossing: two times three equals six. It looks like this:

RERE RER RERE RER RERE RER

Fulcanelli slyly suggests that we break the pattern down into RE, RER, RERE in order to understand its hidden meaning. This kind of binary triplet patterning occurs in the I Ching and in our RNA/DNA codes, significant clues, as we will see. He also suggests that we look at the pattern as a rebus, or word picture. In Hebrew, the letter R, or Resh, was considered the pictogram of the Face, and was attributed to the sun. This suggests Horus Or, the elder sun god, whose Egyptian name, Hru, is the same word as “face.” The letter E, in its aspirated consonant form, is Heh in Hebrew, or “the window.” RE then suggests “The Light of the Face of the Sun” shining through a window. It is also Re, the Egyptian sun god of Heliopolis. Given this, then it follows that one possible meaning of this section of image #46 is “The Light shines in.”

Following the same rebus pattern, RER becomes the Light shining in and generating more light inside. This internal light is the double of the “Light of the Face of the Sun.” It is “the light of the son of the Sun,” that is – the transmutational illumination that is inside of each of us, the spark of the Gnostics.

Continuing the idea, RERE is the generated internal light shining out again on the world. The reversal expressed in the pattern calls attention to this outward projection. Thus the two words, RERE and RER, can be read as: 1) Light shining in, light shining out: RERE; and 2) Light shining in stimulates internal light; RER. This all sounds fairly mystical but what does it actually mean?

The repetition suggests a sequence with six lines, such as a hexagram of the I Ching. If we take the RER to be a yin line and the RERE to be a yang line, then the credence gives us the 64th hexagram of the I Ching: “Before Completion.” If we flip the attribution so that RER is yang and RERE is yin, then we have hexagram #63, “After Completion.” These hexagrams are composed of two trigrams, Li, flame or light, and K’an, water or the abyss. Therefore we have the image of “fire over water; the conditions before transition” and “water over fire, the conditions after transition” as the sages described it in the text. This image suggests the Silver Star of the Wise, rising from the depths of space to signal the completion of the Great Work, and the symbol of both the prima materia and the completed process, the cosmic serpent biting its own tail of DNA itself.

Jeremy Narby, in his book The Cosmic Serpent, describes DNA as “living in water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire.” This certainly matches the image of the two hexagrams we can make from the pattern on the credence, and suggests that the I Ching and the DNA light language might be the same thing, the same “text.” Researchers, such as Rattemeyer, Popp and Ho, consider this bio-photon emission and absorption as a kind of “bio-communication between cells and organisms” and their work over the last 15 years suggest that this language is used not merely on the cellular level but also as a communication and organization mechanism in macro-organisms such as plankton swarms. Narby presents startling evidence that shamanic states can function as an access way to this internal flow of information in the form of symbols and imagery.

In the early 1970s, a German physician published a small monograph, entitled The I Ching and the Genetic Code, with introductions by a Buddhist and a mathematician. In this work, Dr. Martin Schonberger pointed out the obvious connections between the genetic code as unraveled by Crick and Watson, and the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching or Book of Changes. Dr. Schonberger‚Äôs comparisons can be summarized as 1) Both the DNA and the I Ching are based on polarity, yin and yang in the case of the I Ching, up and down symmetry in the case of DNA’s double helix; 2) Four “letters” are available, A,T,C,G in the case of DNA, resting yin, moving yin, resting yang and moving yang in the I Ching, which are grouped in pairs; 3) Three of these words form either a code for protein synthesis or a trigram; 4) The direction in which the codes are read is strictly determined in both; 5) There are 64 of these triplets or double trigrams, from which all creation, in the case of DNA, and fate in the case of the I Ching, are derived; 6) Two of these triplets have names, beginning and end. In the DNA they serve as punctuation between code sequences. In the I Ching, we have hexagrams # 63 and # 64, which serve the same purpose.

Soon after Dr. Schonberger’s book was published, Fritz Albert Popp began his groundbreaking work on bio-photon emission and communication by the DNA. As soon as Dr. Schonberger learned of Dr. Popp’s early work, he wrote to him and asked his opinion. “Since information and matter cross in the genetic code, it may be expected that evolution has selected the most favorable, i.e. the surest, and at the same time most economical, principle,” Dr Popp wrote back. “The only solution to the problem is to seek understanding of DNA‚ as you have done, from the information theory angle.”

As we saw above, the Tree of Life is also a way to organize the information of the DNA. When viewed as a 3 dimensional object, the Tree of Life becomes a prism-like crystal, which increases its resemblance to the liquid crystal of DNA. We can see these two great information theories as emblematic of the eastern and western approaches. The Ladder-like approach of the Tree of Life complements the language-like structure of the I Ching. What unites them is the realization of the DNA/light, even in symbolic terms, from which they originate.

And there is also a temporal element. The McKenna brothers, Terence and Dennis, in their groundbreaking work The Invisible Landscapepostulated that the King Wen arrangement of the I Ching contained a backward and forward flowing pattern of numbers, and that these numbers could be used to construct an interface with similar vital holons, or holistic hierarchies, in the organization of space/time.

The McKennas demonstrated this by overlaying the 384 lines of the 64 hexagrams (6 x 64 = 384) on the 13-month lunar calendar (13 x 29.53 days = 383.89 days). They then used these basic units to develop a temporal lock with the solar/sunspot cycle, the Zodiacal Ages, and the length of the Great Year of precessional motion. With the same increment, 64, they found it was possible to assemble a 26-step model of space/time from the size/age of the universe down to Planck’s Constant. In this view, the I Ching is a fractal model of all that is, was, or will be. It is also hologramic, in that the piece, the I Ching, or the DNA code, contains the information of the whole evolving universe.

Applying this realization to the structure of the King Wen arrangement also produces a model of the holonic nature of evolution. If we think of the time from the emergence of life on earth to the immediate future, roughly 1.3 billion years, as one increment and then begin to divide that by 64, some interesting time periods are highlighted. Our first division, one 64th of 1.3 billion years, brings us to the high point of the mammals, 18 million years ago. The next division by 64 brings us to 275,000 BCE, the dawn of Homo sapiens. Dividing again by 64 brings us to the high point of the ancient cultures such as the Egyptian around 2300 BCE. Another division brings us to the mid 20th century and the last 67 + years of the cycle.

According to this view, all of biological and cosmological time is approaching a point of concrescence in the near future. The McKennas found that a date, the winter solstice of 2012, matched the waveform derived from King Wen’s arrangement to historical events. The end of World War II and the atomic bomb, for instance, fell on 1945, the year of the last division, the beginning of the last 67 + years of biological and galactic evolution which completes the vast hexagram of time which began 72.25 billion years ago.

Perhaps this might be just coincidence.

Or is there really a very sophisticated meme for transformation and gnosis that runs through all religions and spiritual traditions? Is this tradition holding the knowledge of our past for a release some time in the future? Could light, in the form of weak laser pulses from our DNA, be the source of this information? Could the pattern itself, the yin/yang polarity of hexagrams #63 and #64, reveal when understood the ultimate secret?

5. “Light upon Light”

The Sufis certainly seemed to be aware of this same pattern and the secret within it. In fact the pattern is most clearly recognized in the Light Sura of the Qu’ran. Sura 24, verse 35, which reads (in an Egyptianized version):

Re is the Light of the Heavens and the earth, A light that is like unto a lamp within a niche. The lamp shines within a crystal like a blazing Star, Lit from the Tree of Life, the Djed, of neither east nor west, Its fuel, translucent oil, radiating without the effect of fire Light upon Light!

The pattern in image #46 and the light verse parallel each other like this:

Re is the Light of the Heavens and the earth, RE is the first line ‚”Light shines through everything. (The luminous “sea” of light generated by all the DNA on the planet.)

A light that is like unto a lamp within a niche. RER (light) is the second line – The lighting of the inner lamp, the light within our souls, the light within the niche. (The light coming from our DNA in its niche or vase of chromatin.)

The lamp shines within a crystal like a blazing Star, ERRE is the third line — The inner light blazes out like a star, or a light body. (The resonance or amplification of the DNA light generated by meditative focus or shamanic states of consciousness.)

Then just repeat the pattern for the second three:

Lit from the Tree of Life, the Djed, of neither east nor west, RER is the fourth line’s the miraculous light of the Djed, which is the galactic center axis, the third pillar of the Dragon axis. (A new stimulus to the DNA, perhaps designed to be received by the long strands of non-sense coding.)

Its fuel, translucent oil, radiating without the effect of fire ERRE (light) is the fifth line, the oil of the inner light radiating without the effect of fire. This is the inner light that creates the translucent light body. (The new light stimulates the transformation of the DNA, possibly activating whole new sections of code.)

Light upon Light! RER is the sixth line — Light upon light. The ultimate Gnostic ideal for the perfection of the universe Рall will be one with the Light. (This new light, and its effect on the DNA, allow for a transformation into Light.)

The last ER begins the pattern over again in reverse order, just like the DNA itself. This creates an endless interweaving of meaning. (1)RE/(2)RE – R/(3)ER – RE/(4)RE – R/(5)ER – RE/(6)RE – R/(7)ER/(6) R – ER/(5)ER – RE, and so on to infinity. This sums it up: The pattern repeats the same information over and over. It seems to be saying that the unfoldment of light and the creation of “light upon light” are of paramount importance, the ultimate secret of alchemy. The secret of how to create light and inhale it until the alchemist becomes pure golden light.

Fulcanelli tells us to seek first the vessel in which to contain the volatile, meaning that a container is necessary for the work to succeed. Without it, we are left only with the uncontrollable fire of spontaneous combustion. He also comments that we should undertake nothing until we “have received the light on this eggshell, which the masters of the Middle Ages called the secret secretorum.”  The inscription on the interior of the credence, which, Fulcanelli informs us, has never been explained by any visitor, reveals this secret of secrets. But once the meaning of this curious inscription has been revealed, the student finds the very heart of the alchemical mystery. As we saw above, the meaning of this curious inscription can be deciphered by referring to the Light Verse of the Qu’ran.

Its gnostic injunction, “Light upon Light” points us in the right direction. The message of the credence can be summarized as the Light shining into the vessel, sparking an internal light fueled by the translucent oil of brain chemistry. This internal light fills the entire body, converting it into light, which then radiates out as the shining light or star body of imperishable quality. The fragment of the Paris Papyrus suggests that the original light that shines in is the light of the sun. But what if there is a special kind of light, such as the glow of an exploding galactic center, which triggers this transformation whether we are prepared or not? In addition to a physical disaster, we could also be faced with a spiritual or psychological disaster in which the transformational process is triggered automatically, creating havoc among those who are unprepared for the astro-alchemical transmutation. The preparation of this alchemical vessel, the vase of Fulcanelli, is the vase of Mary, the Queen of Heaven, which contains the all-healing balm, and is formed from the projection of the Tree of Life on the celestial sphere. When this vase is filled with the mystical fire of continuous creation, the prima materia is transformed into the philosophical mercury, from which the powder of projection, the active form of the Philosopher‚Äôs Stone, can be derived.

As Fulcanelli informs us in very clear language: “Therefore make your vase, then your compound; seal it with care, in such a way that no spirit can escape; heat the whole according to the art until it is calcinated. Return the pure part of the powder obtained to your compound, which you will seal up in the same vase. Repeat for the third time and do not give me any thanks.” In this comment, Fulcanelli has supplied the careful student with all the information required to understand the process. We can do no better than agree with the Master when he says: “I ask for neither remembrance nor gratitude, but only that you should take the same trouble for others as I have taken for you.”

6 – The mystery of the cathedrals is the secret of light.

“Bright is the noble work, this work shining nobly/ Enlightens the mind so that it may travel through the true lights/ To the True Light where Christ is the true door.”

Abbot Suger on St. Dennis Cathedral

From the cathedral builders‚ “Lux Continua of Abbot Suger’s quote all the way back to the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt and their star religion, we find this overwhelming emphasis on light. It is a common factor in spiritual beliefs and practices around the planet, and the art of light, the Green Language of the DNA, is the key element in the science of alchemy. Cathedrals and other temples through out human history were places designed to aid the successful communication between DNA and human beings. Each step in the initiatory process was designed to further enhance this communication. Using richly coloured light, darkness, music, prayer, invocation and rituals, including when possible the ingestion of psycho-active substances, the alchemist/shaman would drift deeper and deeper into the galactic knowledge that lies at the heart of the photon emission symbolism of the coiled serpent that is DNA. This transmission of knowledge became the starting point for all of human culture.

Until the last decade or so of the 20th century, the Green Language of the Initiates could only be understood symbolically and metaphorically, or experienced as an internal awareness. Now however, the work of a whole cadre of molecular biologists has provided our mystical gnosis with a solidly physical and experimentally verifiable basis from which to understand Fulcanelli’s Ur-language. If the light emitted as weak laser pulses by the DNA of all life is in fact a language or form of communication that uses symbols and imagery, as suggested by the evidence, then the most important secret of all, “the number of the shrines of the secret place of Tehuti” would be the text or informational content of that message. As we have seen, both the Tree of Life and the I Ching can be considered as ways of translating the text of DNA’s message into a communicable exogenetic form. Both of these versions contain information on the structure of life, the absorption and emission of photons and point to the same specific time, the coming galactic alignment in 2012, as the moment of the apocalypse, in its original meaning of cosmic unveiling.

The increasing graphs of Terence Mc Kenna’s Time Wave Zero point to a maximum of “novelty” at that point. Perhaps this novelty is simply the graph of the DNA’s increasing sensitivity to the new frequencies of light produced by the galactic alignment or the arrival of a galactic core burst? Could the cosmic unveiling be of a new form of Light that forces on us a species wide transformation? Could this already be occurring? Could the message really be extinction or enlightenment?

“Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, ‘Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?‚’ ‘And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; But the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ‘Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day that you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.’” Genesis Chapter Three Verses 1 – 4

DNA is in everything that lives and DNA created everything that lives. But what if DNA is more than just a collection of molecular codes? What if DNA is, itself, intelligent? And what if this intelligence is cosmic, or at least galactic, in nature?

What if life is not an accident, or just a series of adaptations and mutations, as our modern day evolutionists would have us believe? What if life is a universal prerogative? As Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve tells us in his book Vital Dust: ‚ÄúLife was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain. There is hardly any room for “lucky accidents‚Äô in the gradual multi-step process whereby life originated.”

The incredible degree of chance required to explain the “accident” theory of evolution causes the entire idea to collapse. Dr. De Duve and other biologists are moving swiftly towards the idea that DNA has a blueprint, or a map, that guides it towards complexity. This would help to explain the many gaps and holes in the theory of evolution. From the very beginning of its origins here on Earth, it appears that DNA has been on a constant course towards increasing complexity, from bacteria to one-celled creatures, from aquatic to land, from plants to flowers, from animal to human, from nature to culture.

But why does DNA seek complexity?

Nature, in the form of DNA, seeks to propagate itself. It is highly likely that this propagation is not limited to our small planet but that it stretches throughout the entire universe. Is it possible that DNA is occupying and populating billions of worlds with a vast multitude of forms and shapes, creating more vessels in which complex life can evolve?

If propagation of itself is its number one goal, then how might DNA achieve a high degree of efficiency and success in this act? Could there be a link between DNA’s inner design towards complexity and its own desire to propagate itself? We might even think of these as twin drives, the need to evolve complexity arising out of the need to propagate. Complexity by its very nature would insure survival.

Perhaps DNA is continuously rolling the dice, recombining itself on each new world always seeking greater complexity. It continues this process until it creates the most complex organism in the universe: a Conscious Being. This is a Being that can examine the DNA itself, understand it and perhaps communicate directly with it. This is a Being that can gaze out into the cosmos and know what it is seeing. The reason for creating this Conscious Being would be so that the DNA could successfully pass on its intergalactic knowledge to such a creature. The Conscious Being would not only learn this vital and unique information, but would also be in a position to do something with it. And one of the first things such a Conscious Being attempted would be to translate the information received from the DNA into a symbolic framework that could be shared.

Using its own inner photon emission as its way of transmitting the knowledge, DNA generates light, and therefore image and symbol, as its language. As the Conscious Being learns more from the DNA, it also increases its chances for success and survival. It is therefore in the DNA’s interest to create ever more conscious beings with which to communicate. The art of Alchemy was born from this understanding. The coiled serpent has always been an alchemical symbol for cosmic knowledge. Alchemy, “the science of light” sought to establish a direct line of communication with the Intelligence that lies at the heart of matter. Therefore, alchemy seeks, and has always sought, the means of direct communication with the DNA. Once this communication was firmly established, the doorway to a vast array of information and knowledge opened. The wisdom of a million worlds became available to those who had realized, understood and transmitted the secret of Alchemy.

Through many centuries this ancient wisdom, in true communication with the DNA, revealed that certain sounds, architecture, lights and plant substances enhanced the experience and made the communication between human and the DNA more pristine. The initiations into this wisdom were a preparation for the advance into the light of pure knowledge, the experience of Gnosis. As the initiate advanced through the degrees of this illumination, the communication with the DNA became clearer and less garbled.

This knowledge eventually became a tradition. The tradition implies that the DNA in human beings can be altered by any shift in the quality of light that strikes our eyes and affects our pineal gland. This subtle alteration in the quality of light changes the way that we perceive time. Therefore the quality of light dictates the quality of time.

The successful alchemist is in close communication with the DNA. This line of communication is dictated by the quality of light that is measured and predicted by the cube of space. As our planet and solar system pass through the galaxy the quality of light changes, sometimes dramatically. Changes, in the nature of light, causes changes in the nature of time, sometimes catastrophically.

Once, all over the world, there was an initiatory tradition that understood this and much more.

“If a person has eyes that know how to see, he will look upward to the heavens and he will see the beautiful image of the serpent coiled there, at the place where the great sky begins. Then he will understand that no being in heaven, or on earth, or in hell was formed without the serpent.” The Gnostics by Jaques Lacarriere

The Emerald Tablet, itself a glyph for the Green Language of the DNA, insists that the great secret is “As above, so below.” From the perspective of the DNA, this is nothing less than the literal truth. Let us imagine for a moment what it would be like to see the world from the view point of a successful shaman/alchemist, a 46th degree Ophiuchus serpent holder so deeply absorbed into the DNA Light that, as David Ovason suggests, one is literally dressed in the skin of the dragon. Looking out into space, one sees the great dragon coiled around the still point of the sky. Looking inward one sees the great serpent of fire encircling the life force itself.

It is as if the universe is one infinite fractal hologram where the same patterns and images repeat no what the scale, and that fractal universe is also within us, within every cell of our body, radiating light and information just like the greater universe of stars and planets.

To the ancient Egyptians, one would then be ready for translation into an imperishable body in the heart of Orion. In the Tibetan tradition, one might, as did Padmasambhava, create a Diamond Body from this realization here on earth as a way to fulfil the boddhisatva vow of infinite compassion. Either way, the process is virtually the same, and, most important, it is available to all of us. All it takes is sentience.

In closing, we can do no better than to leave the last word to Fulcanelli himself:

Nostradamus’ Quatrains and the next Balkan War

By Vincent Bridges

March 29th, 2006

Next Balkan War:

I/74

After tarrying they will move forward by rowing for Epirus.

The great relief effort will be toward Antioch:

The black curly-haired one will strain hard for the Empire,

Brazen Barb(arossa) will be roasted on a spit.

This is one of those quatrains just on the edge of becoming intelligible as events happen. It has had other close possibilitites through the years, the Barbary pirates, the Battle of Lepanto, even Hitler is suggested. But the attack toward Syria from the Balkans, the black curly haired leader under the double eagle of the Hapsburg, struggling for the Empire, sounds alot like Milosovic and his plans. Roasted on a spit suggests hoisted by a rocket, perhaps.

II/3

Because of heat like that of the sun upon the sea,

Around Negroponte the fish will become half cooked:

The inhabitants will come to make the first slice into them.

When (in) Rhodes, and Genoa their (food) will fail.

This could be describing the effect of an asteroid strike in the Aegean, or it could be the effect of an act of nuclear terrorism in Yugoslavia. The first five quatrains of Century II seem to be related and point to the same scenario, that of the aftermath of the last Balkan war. II/1 suggests WWI-like conflict in Turkey; II/2 also focuses on the Islamic holy war; II/3 is quoted above, and relates to the nuclear terrorism; II/4 is a suggestion that Libya will be involved; and II/5 points to a time period between march 1998 and February 2000. II/6 is the famous quatrain on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if to make the point sharper.

II/52

For several nights the earth will shake,

In the spring two great efforts together:

Corinth and Ephesus will swim in two seas,

War set in motion by two valiant in combat.

This is another quatrain in the process of emerging. The earth of this spring has shaken with the bombs of NATO; the two great efforts could be the Balkans and the situation in Iraq. Greece and Turkey would indeed be on opposite sides in the conflict, and Ephesus is the first church mentioned in Revelations, giving the whole thing an apocalyptic twist. The two valiant fighters could be Milosovic and Saddam.

II/32

Milk, blood, frogs prepared in Dalmatia,

Conflict given, pest near Balennes

The cry will be great from all of Slavonia,

Then will be born a monster near and inside Ravenna.

This quatrain falls in the midst of others of great significance. II/29 tells of the teacher from the east; II/30 describes the third anti-christ; II/31 relates an ecological disaster; and II/32 is a caution about terrorism in the Balkans. The 1st line points to biological agents being prepared and released in the Balkans or along the Dalmatian coast. The monster born in Ravenna is obscure, but could have significance as events develop.

II/84

Between Campania, Siena, Florence, Tuscany,

Six months nine days without a drop of rain:

The foreign tongue in the Dalmatian land,

It will overrun: devastating the whole world.

This quatrain suggest that events in the Balkans could effect the weather, possibly through the green house effect, and thereby devastate the whole world.

II/96

A burning torch will be seen in the night sky,

Near the end and the source of the Rhone,

Famine, weapons: the help provided is late.

When Persia turns to invade Macedonia.

This key quatrain is also listed as one of the thirteen quatrains in the so-called apocalyptic sequence. It suggests either an asteroid strike or a rocket attack in conjunction with an Iraqi involvement with the Balkan conflict. The rocket strike seems to be aimed at Provence and the mouth of the Rhone, echoing other quatrains about the destruction of the maritime city, Marseilles.

III/3

Mars and Mercury and the silver (Moon) in conjunction.

Towards the south there will be a great drought:

From the bottom of Asia an earthquake will be reported,

Corinth (Greece) and Ephesus (Asia Minor) then in a troubled state.

Another quatrain in the process of revealing itself. The astronomical window is March 1998 to the summer of 2000, and the events are already taking place. Sub-Saharan Africa is fast disappearing in a great drought and plague, last month’s severe earthquake in the Himilayas qualifies as the bottom of Asia, and Greece, the Balkans, and Ephesus, Turkey (and that old apocalyptic referrence), are definitely in a troubled state.

III/7

The fugitives, fire in the sky on the pikes,

Next conflict will be that of the frolicking ravens,

From earth they cry for aid and heavenly assistance,

When near the walls (borders?) will be the combatants.

Here we have a quatrain that could be taken from this week’s newspapers. The fugitives, the fire in the sky on the pikes of Cruise missiles, all describe the events of the past week. The 2nd line identifies the place of the next conflict, perhaps indicating the start of WWIII, as Kosovo, where, on the Field of Blackbirds, the Turks slaughtered a Serbian army in 1389. The Kosovar Albanians are crying to heaven (the NATO air-strikes?) for aid, and the referrence to the borders suggest the latest flash-point of the captured soldiers on the borders of Kososvo and Macedonia. Altogether too close for comfort.

IV/55

When the crow on the tower put together by bricks,

For seven hours will continue to squawk:

Death presaged, by blood the statue is stained,

Tyrant murdered, and to the gods the people pray.

If the last quatrain could be filled in out of last week’s headlines, then this one could be fulfilled in the next few weeks. The battle monument outside Pristina is suggested by the crow on the tower. For seven hours, (days, weeks?) a warning will sound, presaging the death of the Tyrant. The stained statue could relate to despoiling religious sites in the area, while the Tyrant’s death could be caused by a missile strike or a commando raid. (See I/74)

V/48

After the great afflication of the scepter,

Two enemies will be undone by them:

The fleet from Africa will appear to rise up before the Hungarians,

By sea and land horrible deeds will take place.

This quatrain and the one before it, V/47, suggest an attack by Saddam Husein in conjunction with Libya during a Balkan, Greece/Turkey, dispute.

V/70

The regions subject to Balance,

Will trouble the mountains with a great war:

Both sexes made captive, beholden to (their liberators) and all of Byzantium,

So that at dawn they will cry out from land to land.

Another really close one. The region subject to Balance, or adjustment, is the Balkans under scrutiny by NATO, the EU, and so on. The mountains are at the moment troubled by a great war. The people of Kosovo are made captive by the situation, and cry out from land to land, from mosque roof at morning prayers and by internet, around the world.

V/91

At the great market (European Community?) called that of the liars,

Of all Torrent and the field of Athens:

They will be surprized by the light horsemen,

By the Albanians — Mars, Leo and Saturn in their signs.

This quatrain follows V/90, a prediction of Nuclear Terrorism, and suggests the time period of the late 1990′s. (Best guess astrology for last line equals 3/23- 27 1999, the start date of the current Kosovo Crisis.) The Balkan powers all see the EU and NATO as liars, and perhaps they are, rushing into the fields of Athens, the battle fields of north eastern Greece, Macedonia and Kosovo. The light horsemen could be the guerillas of the KLA or the Serbian death-squads, with a suggestion of the pale horsemen of Death in the Apocalypse.

VI/21

When those of the Northern pole are united together,

In the East will be great fear and dread:

The newly elected man is upheld — the great one trembles,

Rhodes, Byzantium will be stained with Barbarian (Libyan-Arab) blood.

Again this quatrain follows one of significance on another, somewhat parallel track. VI/20 relates the importance of Pope John XXIII in reforming the church by accepting the vessel of the “enduring race.” Here we see the basic agreement of the Northern powers, NATO and Russia, causing fear, or perhaps pretend fear, in the East. Clinton and Saddam are contrasted in line 3, and the outcome of the current Kosovo situation suggested in line 4.

X/58

At the time when (in) mourning the feline monarch

Will make war upon the young Macedonian:

Gaul to stagger, the bark (of St. Peter) to be in jeopardy,

To try Marseilles in the West entreaty (negotiations).

Culture Wars? What’s a culture war?

by Vincent Bridges

Thursday, June 16th, 2005

Like the mysterious and unending “war on terror,” the idea of a culture war has become one of those touchstones of reality in early 21st century America. Try googling the words and you get roughly half a million hits. Here’s some of my favorites:

The Catholic publishing company Fidelity Press has a magazine devoted to the Culture Wars, whose masthead announces “No social progress outside the moral order.” Run by an Ultramontanist named E. Michael Jones, it offers a comfortingly Hitlerite view of Catholicism that is actually close to the heart of the new Pope, Benedict XVI. Some examples of his rants:

“How Contraceptives Cause Drive-by Shootings. E. Michael Jones explains in a step by step narrative how the sexual revolution, conceived by foundations, taken over by the federal government, ratified by the courts, and implemented in the name of “freedom,” destroyed our cities. Freedom of this sort, to paraphrase a song, is just another word for political control. The Cultural Revolution had a secret weapon, one that was so successful, it’s been used ever since. This talk puts the connection between morals and politics into an easy to follow irrefutable argument.”

“Why the Homosexual is Our Ideal Citizen. President Clinton once told homosexual supporters he thought promotion of their lifestyle should be made mandatory in public schools. He and vice-president Gore praised Hollywood for promoting homosexuality. Why? There aren’t enough homosexual citizens to affect the voting balance. This is an attempt to turn the homosexual into the ideal citizen and a role model for us and our children. Do you know why we are all supposed to act like homosexuals even if we aren’t? This talk is crucial to those who want to understand the political meaning of homosexuality and how it is being used against the overwhelming majority of this country’s citizens.”

At Probe Ministries, Sue and Ray Bohlin are taking a high-minded perspective, with compassion for those struggling with all forms of sexual deviancy and a staunchly anti-political stance, well, sort of anyway:

“Even if abortion ended tomorrow, if every homosexual became heterosexual, and if drugs and pornography were things of the past, people without Christ would still be lost in their sins.” The main “sin” being the lack of belief in Ray and Sue’s very narrow view of religious truth.

Another article on their website, by Rick Rood, former director of publications at Probe, has this to say about Xian attitudes toward other religions:

“The only remaining option is the attitude of Christian exclusivism (sic) –the view that biblical Christianity is true, and that other religious systems are false. This is more than implied in numerous biblical statements, such as in Acts 4:12: “And there is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men, by which we must be saved.”

“What should our attitude be toward followers of other religions? It is important for us to distinguish our attitude toward non-Christian religions from our attitude toward followers of those religions. Though we are to reject the religion, we are not to reject them by mistakenly perceiving them to be “the enemy.” The biblical injunction is to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves no matter what their religion. Rather than viewing them as “the enemy,” we should see them as “the victims” of the enemy who are in need of the same grace that has freed us from spiritual slavery–in need of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The view from the extreme right, as shown by the above selections, is that the culture war will go on until everyone, in the country and then by God???s will the entire planet, will be regimented into good, literal interpretation fundamentalists.

What did Bush say? “If you’re not with us?”

WALKING IN THE WOODS: A Brief Guide to Observational Geomancy

by Reverend Vincent Bridges

All too often, our theoretical discussions of Geomancy leave the impression that this is something best left to professionals. However, by being a little observant anyone can become a solid, practical geomancer. You don't even need to dowse or know how to read a map. Just keep your eyes open on your next walk in the woods and try these simple experiments and observations.

First, walk a few yards off the path into the woods. Roughly face east and just relax. Feel the forest around you. Turn slowly to the north, your left, and stop when you see one of the following: 1) a tree with multiple trunks 2) a clump of unusually twisted trees or 3) a tree with an unnatural growth pattern of any kind.

If you turn about a quarter to the left before seeing one of the above, you are in an energy-rich geomantic area. Turning less than a quarter is very energy-rich. Half-way is normal energy patterning and three-quarters suggests that the area is energy-poor. These are rough estimates, but reliable as a guide. Continue through a complete turn, noting the above in each quadrant.

If you find that each quadrant of your circle has a couple of the above signs, adding up to an odd number, then you are most likely in a small dome area, a place where the intersection point of a larger structure "domes" onto the surface in a bubble-like flow of energy. These spots are similar to what is called "blind springs" in dowsing and should be rich in animal and insect habitations. The eldest tree of the area is also probably close by.

If only one quadrant of your circle has any of the above signs, then you are probably in a smaller dome cap area. This is the spot where local phi-ratio spiral line returns to the ground. This can be felt as a sort of downward pull in one particular spot, the point where the phi-ratio shifts to the molecular level, the dot at the end of the spiral. These spots will often have excessive growth, maybe even underbrush and briars, In the summer, they are the favorite localities of gnats who dance in big columns on the energy stream.

If you found and even number of the above signs, then you are either in a direct flow of a spiral energy line, or at a node point where two or more streams of energy cross. Direct flow is often indicated by doubled trees. It is often possible to follow the entire spiral simply by walking from doubled tree to doubled tree. Dowsing does come in handy at the intersection points, which have often multiple cluster points at the exact crossing point. Direct flows of local spirals feel almost giddy, and crossing nodes are felt as a slight spinning sensation. Often trees will grow away from these structures, twisting along with the direction of the spin.

If the woods you are walking will allow, try following one of the spiral lines until you find the dome spot. )If you started from a dome spot, try to find the smaller dome cap as described above). This is usually recognizable by the openness of the area, its lack of underbrush and even perhaps its lack of trees. The trees at the edge of a large dome will appear to be bending backward, away from the energy up welling. Remember, these dome spots are energy donuts, there is a calm center surrounded by an energetic toroidal shape.

When you find the dome, look for the eldest tree. This will be a very old tree, close to the oldest in the area, perhaps somewhere in the immediate vicinity of the some spot. The eldest tree is often near water, such as the head of a spring, and can be felt as an actual presence, rather like J.R.R. Tolkien's Ent. I recommend giving it a hug or making contact with it in some other way.

Also, remember, yang (or positively charged energy) flows along ridge lines. Yin (negatively charge energy) flows along valley floors and water courses. Where the two meet -- mountain springs, river gorges or water falls and so forth--are places where the energy can be naturally tapped and used. Places where the underbrush is very thick and choked-looking are probably spots where the dead orgone energy (the black chi) collects and should be avoided.

Vincent Bridges is the only professional geomancer (reader of Earth energies) listed in the first edition of Who's Who in service to the Earth..

ADDITIONAL GEOMANTIC INFORMATION by DARLENE:

Major and minor grid lines tend to connect Domes with each other. However, the energetics of the local spots, that which can be seen and experienced on the land, will tend to spiral and cross in and out of these larger energetic structures. It is a way for the land to locally distribute the energy from the grid. The energy of domes are skyward, outward and yang in nature. They are places to make connections with key local and non-local presences. But this is only one half of the equation. As the local energies spiral towards the valleys, a natural cleansing take place.

Yin energy points are located in valleys, near streams or other bodies of water or within caves. Yin areas are just as powerful, but they have a different purpose. They work naturally to transmute any negativity draining its way (as long as the eco-system is intact). Yin spots are feminine in nature and are good places for humans to live near. Devic presences are usually more accessible, (and friendlier) than those found higher up.

RE-MEMBERING THE WEB: Grid Engineering and the Zodiacal Earth Temple

©1993 Vincent Bridges

Mindscape by DarleneEven in North Carolina, the predawn hours in late December are bitterly cold. A full moon hangs low in the southwest, as if waiting for its appointment with the earth's shadow. The air is crisp and clear; a faint whiff of wood smoke from the sweat lodge fire sweetens the breeze from the east. The earth seems hushed, as if the animals and the plants, the devas and the landscape-angels are holding their breaths in anticipation. Through the chill, a tangible sense of hope can be felt rising up from the ground. (Artwork: "Mindscape" ©1997 by DARLENE)

The People are coming! The quiver runs through the woods. The old raccoon chatters nervously and the wood sprites dance with a wreath of swirling leaves. The People are coming up the hill, a slow solemn procession walking reverently in the bright cold darkness. They pass through the rainbow gate and enter the earth temple, forming two concentric circles among the stones. They are here--as the animals and the spirits know--to attempt something almost forgotten, something that must be remembered if our planet, the planet that belongs to all of us, is to survive ...

In a way, Grid Engineering is mankind's oldest science. The Ashmolean Library at Oxford houses a set of small hand-sized carved stones, dated to around 2600 B.C. At first thought to be toys, recreational or perhaps gambling devices, these precise geometrical spherical versions of the cube, tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and other compound and semi-regular solids, such as the cuboctahedron, are now recognized as evidence of neolithic man's familiarity with the concepts of sacred geometry. The stones illustrate the patterns necessary to visualize the earth's energy grid.

This early interest in solid spherical geometry was not idle intellectual curiosity. To create, as a mental image, the complete grid pattern from its regular solid components produces a deep level of resonance between the consciousness holding the image and the actual pattern on the earth. This resonance allows a flow of in-form-ation, a dance of energy shapes, to cascade from one level of the hologram to another. In other words, visualizing the earth as a nest of spherical solids allowed the ancient engineers to communicate directly with the intelligence of the planet itself.

Many of our ancient civilizations began with major geomancy projects. From the pyramids and the Giza complex, to Stonehenge and New Grange, all the way to the Adena people of central Ohio (carefully marking out the serpent mound in the center of a geologically unique area), great cultures seem to grow from great geomancy projects. In fact, those three civilizations were more or less contemporary, making 2800 to 2000 B.C. the golden age of earth temples. The synchronicity grows even stranger when we consider that the last vestige of these cultural currents died out at about the same time. The Adena culture faded about 500 B.C., but was revived by the Hopewell, who continued into the 6th century A.D. The Celts were also the inheritors and continuers of the megalithic traditions, and they were finally Christianized, orthodoxly, in the 8th century. The Temple at Heliopolis fell to the Moslem Arabs in 640 A.D., thus ending a chain of knowledge that was over three millennium long.

History is a long list of these losses, a catalog of the extinction of cultures and traditions. Urban sprawl, with its suburban concrete enclaves, is the result of an ignorance of the earth's rhythms and structures so profound as to be literally pathological. The plagues of the 20th century, from industrialization to Total War, from cancer to AIDS, derive from this pathological dis-association from the reality of the earth beneath our feet. We must remember the world web, and how to work with it to enhance our lives and our communities, or we may not survive.

Perhaps the best representations of the physical reality of the world web or grid comes from the work of R. Buckminster Fuller. In Synergetics 1 he presented evidence that under ideal conditions of delicately balanced heat and pressure, balloon skins revealed patterns identical to his Unified Vector Geometry 120 Circle surface pattern. Since the crust of the earth is much like the balloon skin, also under delicately controlled heat and pressure, then this analogy would seem to hold. This 120 circle pattern is also the complete symmetry angles of an icosahedron, which contains within it all the other regular solids, and is the final result of the neolithic visualization of the spherical solids.

UNIFIED VECTOR GEOMETRY (UVG) BASIC TRIANGLE. Within the Basic Triangle's 30, 60, and 90 degree angles (whose line and vertexes define 120 of those triangles, 62 major grid points, and 15 major great circles) are arrayed at 45 intersection points and 16 lines which manifest 106 minor great circles and 4800 minor points over the surface of the globe (UVG total is 4862 points).

To clinch the connection, we need only consider that semi-regular spherical solids found among our ancient visualization stones, the cuboctahedron. Fuller patented a world map based on the cuboctahedron, claiming it was the only shape to correctly map the proportions of the land masses from a sphere to a flat surface. Perhaps out neolithic engineer had the same realization.

Given the reality of the planetary grid, the question becomes: how do we tap into our local portion of it?

The problem of locating the grid on the earth is solved by placing the three anterior angles of the spherical tetrahedron on the major geothermal, and geomagnetic disturbances of the planet. This can be taken as the basic orientation for the rest of the grid. We then look for the major UVG triangle containing our location. For the mid-Atlantic states the UVG bio-region runs from off Bermuda to Hudson Bay, over to Alberta, and then back to Bermuda. The center line of this triangle, which acts as a conduit for the flow of the entire bio-region, runs through the saddle of an unusual geological formation in North Carolina called Pilot Mountain. An isolated peak dominated by a granite dome rising over 2000 feet from the valley floor, the mountain gained its name from its prominence as a landmark and vantage point.

To the indigenous people historical to this area, the Saponi and Keauwee Indians, the mountain was called Jomeoke which meant something like "home of the thunder." Indian shamans from all over the eastern woodlands would visit the dome-like outcropping of quartz and feldspar riddled granite to commune with the raven spirits who dwelled there. The ravens are still there, but the Park Service frowns on climbing the dome. The Grid line (center line of the whole bio-region) runs between the dome and the hump-like escarpment three hundred yards away.

This creates an enormous upwelling of energy. The energy of the line is thrown high into the atmosphere, forming a 45 miles-in-radius torus of energy as it falls back to earth. This circular area is organized by an extremely regular pattern of energy and yields twelve crisp UVG triangles. Immediately suggestive of a zodiacal pattern, the circular regularity of the bio-region and other propitious feng shui, point out the area's geomantic uniqueness. These unusual qualities made it an excellent choice for the location of an earth temple.

If we take the greater bio-region's center line as the solstice line in our local zodiac, then each of the UVG triangles can be seen as a sign of the zodiac--the solstices being the cusps of Gemini/Cancer and Sagittarius/Capricorn. This gives as a new way to describe the quality of each component of the local bio-region, by relating the zodiacal attribution to its correspondences in other traditions and cultures.

The Earth Temple project began as an exercise in a class on Grid Engineering for architects and city planners. The class was held at Wellsprings Farm, a retreat center in Vienna, North Carolina, which was geomatically analyzed and dowsed during the course of the class. Wellsprings falls within the Cancer region, or the heart meridian in Chinese terms; and the center line of that region runs through the property. Intersection of the 0-7 line, running north/south, and the 32-33-41 line running east/west, falls just north of the old Yadkinville Road on the property. This dome-like intersection point creates a small torus, similar to the one at Pilot Mountain except its only a few hundred yards in diameter. This torus spins off a complex patterns of energy spirals, nodes and yin points. An energy map of the Wellsprings property looks like a plate of phi ratio spaghetti.

The most important point on the energy map is found just northeast of the main dome where thirteen spirals of primal water erupt up to within a few feet of the surface and then arc out into a somewhat regular pattern. Two of the spirals were close enough together to braid into one flow, which became the Gemini area, and the other eleven are space so that a regular zodiac pattern could be imprinted upon them. This blind spring falls in the edge of the dome's torus, and also extends into the north/south flow of the 0-7 line. This causes the location to act as a control gear on the flow along the local UVG line, which carries the energy of the rest of the local grid into the central vortex of Pilot Mountain. An energy jump is made from the 33 point directly into the vortex of the torus upwelling; there are no other points in-between. A 33 point is a direct access to the main grid structure.

The Wellsprings' geomantic structure has been located by a Native American shaman who placed a simple wheel of quartz stones in the center of the blind spring's dome cap. This acted to temper the flow. But the flow was unfocused, allowing and reflecting a broad range of dissonance. The Grid Engineering class was focused on how to tune this unique control-gear location.

A simple geometric pattern emerged as we developed the basic numbers 12 and 33. The thirteen flows of primal water were used to create the hologram of the zodiac, within which the seven sacred planets or rays move and interact. The circle of the nine archetypes of human evolution create an image of the surface of the planet and the mental condition of humanity. The six-pointed circle is the atomic and sub-atomic forces within matter and the five-pointed star is the microcosm of the mind that projects the entire hologram.

THE ZODIACAL EARTH TEMPLE DESIGN: Outer Circle: Twelve obelisk-shaped igneous stones (granite) corresponding to the zodiac, Planetary Circle: Seven rocks which move throughout the structure (milky quartz), Ennead Circle: Nine porous sedimentary stones (limestone or soapstone), Hexagrams: Six energetic dense stones (obsidian); Triangle: three large pieces of ocean rock (marl), Two Pillars: dense sedimentary rock trimmed to 1 sq foot (slate), Five-Pointed Star: Five near-perfect quartz clusters with individual points, 1" to 3" in diameter, Center: One large, near perfect amethyst point.

It was a fascinating exercise, a wonderful flight of mystical geometry. Perhaps we came closer to understanding how the designers of Stonehenge thought about their work, and certainly a few of the architects began to see their work in a different light, but I never dreamed that I was designing an actual structure. Or less than a year later, it would be under construction.

It happened because the landscape angel demanded that it happen. Our first awareness of this entity came when Bill Stewart, who participated in the original medicine wheel ceremony, took a photograph of the spot just after the wheel had been finished. He saw nothing as he took the shot, but after the photograph was developed, there was a ghostly sphere of light floating in the southwest of the circle. This was definately not a film glitch or something on the lens. With the aid of a magnifying loupe, the ball is glowing clearly enough to light up the leaves and rocks around it. I named it "the landscape angel," and forgot about it. That is until the last session of our Grid Engineering class ...

It was raining. I walked up to the dome to check on the possibility of bringing the class there. I sat on a log and for about 45 minutes I went into a state of deep meditation. All I could remember when I came around was that a very tall, orange figure had been insistent. Since I knew the pattern, I should build the temple. And he/it would take no excuses. I laughed it off, but it refused to go away. The idea grew until one day, almost nine months later, the owners of Wellsprings called and said the time is right to build the temple. Let's do it. They didn't know then how right the time really was!

ZODIACAL HOLOGRAM. This design shows the web of inter-connectedness modeled by the ZET. This view has each level separated out so that the individual structures can be more easily seen. Note the position of the five-pointed star within the central triangle. This shows the nature of the spirit pathways in the pentagram and the relationship of the horizontal or elemental plane to those flows of energy. The ZET embodies the universal hologram and contains ever richer depths of symbolic meaning.

Designing an abstract exercise in sacred geometry is one thing, getting it built on the land, charged and ready to go on time is quite another. The creation of something like the Zodiacal Earth Temple inevitably becomes a community project. many people must contribute their time and expertise if the project is to succeed. Given this perspective, it is easy to see how civilizations were created by the social cohesion of these vast religious projects.

Very early on the question was asked: "Just what are we trying to accomplish here?"

The purpose of the Earth Temple is to create a geomanically resonant structure which will allow conscious access to the world grid. This open channel could then be used to tune and adjust the flow of telluric energy. Such a structure would function on the level of an integrative geometric projection of hologramic coherence which produces harmonic phase-lock between the three holon-to-photon orthorotations of dimensional scale. In my fanciful moments I called it a "metaxic monad," that is a singularity tangent to all realities but located in none of them.

Basically, the Earth Temple was designed as a place to heal and transform, both the earth and ourselves. The difference between any sacred spot and the Earth Temple is the degree of awareness and conscious intent that went into the design and its execution on the land. The geometric qualities of the design began to unfold into complex symbolic correspondences as the project developed. Each point in the diagram became a stone of a certain density and type, or a certain size and programmed with the very specific "magickal" or subtle energetic qualities. This turned the geometry of the design into psychic architecture; building the Temple between the worlds.

THE HEXAGRAM can be considered the union of masculine and feminine, up and down, fire and water, and so on. This primary duality of function is represented in the ZET by the inclusion of the triangle and the pillars within the figure of the hexagram. Each of these symbolic structures acts upon the whole pattern in unique ways.

THE PILLARS OF DUALITY fall on the ascending sides of the upright, or masculine, triangle;of the hexagram. They create, within that triangle, four 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangles. The first diagram above shows the interference pattern generated by these four triangles. The second diagram illustrates how these Pythagorean triangles influence the archetypal and zodiacal circles by a process of lamination, or direction one-to-one projection. Only one of these laminations is shown in the diagram.

These complex processes transform the temple into a metaphor, a living symbol--a space where mind, spirit and matter intermingle. However, even as the project went into development, one crucial factor remained unexamined.

Adjustments of the telluric currents are traditionally done as the rising of the appropriate celestial objects over the horizon. Stonehenge is aligned to the mid-summer sunrise, for instance, while many North American medicine wheels align on bright stars such as Sirius and the Pleiades. The Zodiacal Earth Temple, designed as a balanced transformative structure, needed a balanced timing of sun and moon. This limited us to either a summer solstice with a new moon, or a winter solstice with a full moon. As soon as this occurred to me, I knew there was the possibility of a problem--an insurmountable one.

Simply put, this combination--a full moon within 24 hours of the solstice--occurs only once in 112 years. The celestial requirements were extremely important if we actually hoped to effect change within the web. If the Earth Temple was to become anything more than an intellectual exercise, these requirements of timing would have to be met. Then suddenly another and even bigger celestial requirement made itself apparent. If our "metaxic monad" were to have any effect upon the grid, it would have to be inserted at a moment when the energy of the grid was "off-line." We needed a lunar eclipse. These specific celestial requirements together happen once every 672 years. It seemed impossible that we could be so lucky. But we were.

December 21, 1991 marked the solstice, as well as a full moon with (from where we were in North Carolina) a partial eclipse. We had embarked on a large project--one that could only have an effect once every 672 years--at just the right moment, by "coincedence." To me, this is the most remarkable part of the whole Zodiacal Earth Temple story. That so much was guided into place, including a trip three quarters around the world to charge the central crystal in the ancient geomanic centers of Egypt, is almost beyond miraculous. We had higher guidance: it is almost as if the planet herself needed this to happen.

The triangle turns the feminine or down-pointing triangle of the hexagram into an unfolded, or flattened tetrahedron. Each face of the tetrahedron has two points of the inner triangle as its base line, generating a tightly focused movement of energy toward the point of the tetrahedron. This unfolded tetrahedron then reflects itself onto the archetypal and zodiacal circles. In this reflected (as opposed to laminated) projection, the direction of the flow of energy is reversed, going from tightly focused in a point to broadly covering three points on the outer circle. These processes are representative of the structural differences between masculine and feminine psyche.

The masculine triangle of the hexagram connects the 1-2-3 progression of the stem with the fourth, or grounding quality of the inner triangle of the unfolded tetrahedron. The flow line of that figure continues on through the spirit pathways on the pentagram into the pillar point on the opposite side of the masculine triangle. A quantum interval is created where the feminine triangle of the hexagram reflects the flow, producing the flowering of the outer circle. The feminine triangle of the hexagram acts as a mirroring interval generating quantum discontinuity across dimensional scale.

By the twenty-first of December, our community had grown to almost one hundred people, including well-wishers, ill-wishers and the merely curious. Three months of classes and fieldwork and ritual ceremonies led up to the all-night vigil. A dedicated community of geomantic engineers came through the prolonged and intense process. This community continues to evolve new ways of providing stewardship to the earth.

At 5:23 am that brisk solstice morning, a group of approximately one hundred hardy souls witnessed the charging of the Temple. Most of these people had spent the evening in purification rituals along with drumming and chanting or simply meditating in the Wellsprings pyramid room. The 45 stones of the Zodiacal Earth Temple pattern had already been charged and placed in their circles, including the planetary stones in their appropriate places within the signs of the zodiac for that moment in time/space. The template itself was ready to be activated.

The landscape angel had been very specific about how to turn the temple on. Sound, at the earth frequency harmonics of 7.83 hertz, which would then be turned into scaler waves by the Waz Scepter. This device is similar to the ancient magic rod of the Egyptian priests, but designed to be used as a geomantic instrument. This instrument was placed in the center of the Temple, over the amethyst central point and allowed to vibrate and eventually gyrate in synch with the earth harmonics generated by voices and 7.83 harmonic "Earth Attuners."

The Waz Scepter turned the sound waves into a scaler wave front vortex that aligned with the geometry of the Temple to generate a phase-lock across dimensional scale, so that the alignment of holon-to-photon ortho-rotations allows the Temple to spin freely though all dimensional co-ordinates. Our model then becomes a more-or-less functional mirror of the Universe, from our local point-of-view looking out to the cosmos.

The activation went smoothly. A tingle went through the grid, creating those resonant frequencies that permitted the web to cohere. It felt to me as if the earth sighed when we touched the right point. A great sigh of relief and comfort, as if a long neglected itch were scratched.

It took several months and some fine tuning for the energies to smooth out. The owners, who had to live with all this weirdness, reported glowing lights, as if the forest were on fire, coming from the Temple. Wiring and other electrical problems commenced the moment the last stone went into place the afternoon before the activation and continued for a full month. "Things" were seen in the woods, and some people, coming upon the Temple late at night said they "had the holy Be'jesus scared out of them."

It was quickly apparent that the Temple acted as a mirror. Whatever feelings or emotions people brought to the Temple was amplified and reflected back at them. The Zodiacal Earth Temple became a marvelous teaching tool with lessons about psychological processes as well as having connections with the earth.

As I sit in the Temple, thinking of all the work and the miraculous timing, I flash on that simple neolithic engineer with his spherical projections of the elemental solids. We are remembering a lost science, pulling the pieces out of history's dust heaps and dark corners. But who taught that neolithic geomancer? Did he invent the spherical projections he carved into the stones to reflect the nature of his perceptions of the grid, or did someone reveal this information to him?

Perhaps, as we explore more geomantic engineering projects, such as the structures on Mars, the answer will find us.

NOTES ON THE LABYRINTH, DNA & PLANETARY ALIGNMENT

© 1998 Vincent Bridges (text) and DARLENE (illustrations)

The labyrinth is an example of what Gurdjieff called objective magick, a coherent symbol construct capable of working directly on the unconscious mind. Its origins are mysterious, although the maze family of symbols have been traced back over 3500 years in places as diverse as Peru, Arizona, Iceland, Crete, India, Egypt and Sumatra. This symbolic continuity is perhaps our strongest proof of its spiritual coherence and magickal effectiveness.

When the Zodiacal Earth Temple project began, I was told by the landscape angel that the people working on the project, especially at the beginning, absolutely must build and walk a labyrinth before any work began on the temple itself. At the time, I was not too familiar with the idea of labyrinths, other than as a historical artifact, and so I asked the landscape angel to explain it to me. Why did we need to do this?

The angel replied that the labyrinth harmonized the DNA of the individual with the earth's elemental patterns. Sort of like a translator interface which would allow two different operating systems to talk with each other. What follows is not the angel's exact words, but my understanding based on the angel's suggestions.

Numbers are very important, so we start with the basic number of the human unconscious, revolutionary number nine as the Beatles reminded us. The Ennead is common to both Gurdjieff and the ancient Egyptians, and symbolizes the unfoldment of the cosmos and the projection of the DNA's programming. Evolution can be seen as a series of inter-dependent imprint triggers leading to a galactic level of "human" consciousness. Four of these triggers are automatically fired, in most sentient beings, by experiences in the course of life; four related triggers are consciously fired; and the spirit trigger is randomly fired, just to keep things interesting.

We think of DNA as some kind of internal intelligence that knows how to build all the different types of cells needed to grow and run your body. The human genome project is mapping out this sort of process, but here we are looking at the activity of DNA in a completely different way. Dr. Timothy Leary, in his masterpiece, Neuro-Politics, outlines a scheme of DNA imprint projection, (similar in process to that which causes a duck to consider the first living and moving thing it sees after birth as its mother) which interprets behavior as an interactive evolutionary imperative. Developmental stages are triggered, first by environmental necessity, then by conscious intent, leading to a free will based integration of body, mind and consciousness on a truly cosmic scale.

Using a simplified version of this concept, we can think of the primary imprint triggers as: 1) Security, 2) Territory, 3) Intellect, and 4) Social. Security imprinting in humans, as in ducks, is concerned with mother and mothering. To feel secure, this deep and strong process of being fed and loved must take place. It constellates into an imprint pattern, for good or ill, around 18 months.

The next imprint trigger is that of a sense of ego territory, a definition of self versus other. This primary boundary imprint is in place by the time the child is about three to five years old. Like the security imprint, ego territory is a long process of definition that eventually constellates or solidifies into a belief system about self.

Trigger number three is a little different. It begins the imprint process when the individual begins to categorize the other on the outside of the ego boundary. That is, when the child begins to analyze and draw conclusions from his environment. In our current society, this imprint is severely skewed in a large percentage of the population, firing either not at all, or in place of the lower two, so that only Intellect is triggered. In a more regular developmental pattern, this trigger constellates around 9 to 10 years old.

The Social imprint is the one that most of us can most readily identify. That's because the DNA is less concerned, overall, with quality than quantity. Therefore everyone goes through puberty and few humans avoid its onslaught. We are driven by our glands to seek out the sexual other. This imprint trigger conditions us for life as firmly as does the lower three. It constellates between 13 and 15 years old.

And with that, the hardwired developmental imprints cease. The DNA has done its job, the mind has been provided with a host and the means to replicate itself. From now on, its up to the individual consciousness to interact with its own evolution.

That interaction begins with the onset of self-determined pleasure, seen in a chaotic form in teenagers hanging out and just having fun. This hedonic urge is often so powerful that it overcomes the hardwired lower imprint circuits. Addictions to various sorts of pleasure stimulation, including everything from sex, consumerism and cocaine to ecstatic religious practices, results from a misuse of this self-determined imprint trigger.

Each of these higher imprint triggers is directly related to a lower one. The fifth trigger, Pleasure, is connected to trigger number one, Security, and so on. That means that the next trigger, number six or Psychic, is connected to number two, Territory. The concept of a psychic imprint trigger is a little strange until you think about it. Some people do just seem to have the gift, as if something just fired up inside them. And, most important, we can learn to fire this psychic trigger ourselves, or even have it triggered by exposure to someone else who has it going. The connection also suggests that psychic skills are related to our ability to define inner and outer boundaries, a useful insight indeed.

Intellect, number three, is directly related to number seven, Mythic. As our intellect allows to analyze our external and internal reality, our mythic imprint allows to analyze and describe Reality. This is a subtle concept, and a very subtle trigger. People who have fired this trigger, such Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and so on, usually start their own religions to share their mythological insights.

Just as our Social trigger, number four, forces us into human relationships, firing the eighth trigger, Cosmic Consciousness, forces us into a relationship with sentience on a galactic scale. Attaining a general human imprinting on this level would seem to be the goal of the Boddhisatva vow.

The last imprint trigger, Spirit or as Chapel Perilous, is related to all eight other triggers. It can be fired randomly, as a moment of gnostic grace, or as the result of serious dysfunction in other imprint activity. Its action is mysterious, but it is something that we all face along the way. It holds the pattern together and acts as a thermostat to the process of evolution itself.

To symbolize this, we take nine stones and from them we make a labyrinth that inter-weaves our DNA imprint triggers with the elements of time and space down here on the surface of the planet.

First of all, we locate our spot. A labyrinth works best on a dome cap, or as the dowsers call it, a blind spring. This is a spot where the underground water rises up to near the surface and divides into an odd number of water/energy lines. I like to dowse for the center point, or the point of maximum energy flow, to place my Spirit stone.

Then depending on the size of the dome cap or blind spring, I form a large square from the next four stones, corners toward the quarter compass directions, NE, SE, SW, NW. Midway between these outer stones and the center point, place the other four stones.

I then have a large X made from nine stones. The center is Spirit, the outer four, from the SE corner clockwise, are Security, Territory, Intellect, and Social. Then jumping to the inner ring of stones for Pleasure, Psychic, Mythic and Cosmic, lined up opposite their matching outer number: 1-5, 2-6, 3-7, 4-8. From this pattern, a number of associations can be drawn.

The square-within-a-square design contains a spiral flow. Winding out from Spirit, we follow the numbers in a counter-clockwise spiral to the east. Starting with Security in the SE, we follow the numbers clockwise to arrive at Spirit in the center. We can think of this inside-out flow pattern as a template for a toroidal, or vortex-like, energy structure similar to a stable smoke-ring.

To continue locating our pattern in space/time, we add lines out from the center spirit stones to the cardinal points of the compass, N, S, E, W. Like a pyramid, we are quartering space by marking the passage of time. In that sense, we assign the symbols of the solstices and equinoxes to these points.

We can now create the wheel of the year by adding the old cross-quarter days, February 1st, May 1st, August 1st and November 1st. This allows us to align our human life cycle development with the unfolding of time through the cycle of the seasons. We are born at the spring equinox, imprint security at Beltane, territory at Lammas, intellect at Samhain and social at Imbolc. We then turn inward at a new equinox and imprint Pleasure at Beltane, Psychic at Lammas, Mythic at Samhain and Cosmic at Imbolc. Then we pass beyond to Spirit as we approach a new equinox. In fact, life on the planet seems to match this pattern. More births, of all kinds, occur at the spring equinox, and deaths, of all kinds, are more prevalent in the late winter, after Imbolc. Life responds to the pattern of the flow.

Now that we have aligned our life cycle with the planetary seasonal cycle we must allow for the reflection of a spiritual reality, the elemental forces. Our time/space co-ordinates give us the eight points on the wheel of the earth. To describe spiritual co-ordinate realities, or higher dimensions, you need eight more points.

The higher imprint triggers supply this elemental force. We symbolize this by drawing the L symbol with the higher imprint stone at the shift point. This gives us sixteen points on the surface of our wheel, which form the eight dimensional reality tunnels of the labyrinth.

To see this, we must mentally, or on paper, complete the circuit board-like 2D template we have created. On the ground, all we need are nine stones, four lines out from center and eight lines formed by the elemental Ls. But it helps to also be familiar with the geometric basis for the symbolic construct's operation.

3 circlesfour squares20 lines 

First then, draw a circle around the outer four points, and then the inner four. Then draw in the two squares within these circles. Next, connect the solstice and equinox points in a square touching the outer circle. Then draw a circle connecting the intersection points, all 12 of them, between the inner and outer circles. Finally, connect the intersection points on the solstice/equinox lines inside the inner circle into a square.

This gives us three circles, four squares, 20 lines, 36 points and the center. This computer-chip-like geometric mandala is a model of the universe that mathematically graphs the transformations between dual 3D structures, the octa-hex of the planetary crystal, and dual 4D structures such as the hyper-cube and the 16-cell, or hyper-octahedron. It also unites mystical models such as the Mayan Calendar, the kabbalistic Tree of Life and the I Ching with the DNA codons, phi-based pentagonal geometries and the precessional motion of the equinoxes.

The center is the divine world, as the spirit point, in the kabbalistic model. the other three circles represent the enfolded lower worlds of archetypes, foundations and actions. The points contained in these three circles are 32, the number of the sephiroths on the Tree of Life. Thirty-two pairs of both trigrams and the three part DNA code forms the I Ching and the human codons.

Human activity is circumscribed by the actions of the higher DNA imprints, which means that we cannot will ourselves into spirit. But the divine can act upon and through us. Therefore, the inner circle has four points, connected with the solar stations and the fixed signs of the zodiac, which represents the four Arc-Angels, or parabolas of divine Intent.

Add these four points to the spiritual structure of our 32/64 pattern and we have a 36/72 pattern. This of course is the root of pentagonal geometry. A circle divides into five parts with angles of 72 degrees each. It also points to the precession of the equinox, which moves back through the zodiac at the rate of one degree every 72 years. Just as 32 + 1, the center/spirit, = 33, or the number of completion and perfection, so to does 36 +1 = 37 equal a cosmic completion. 37.5 eclipse cycles of 690 years each equals 25,920 years or one complete precessional cycle.

So our little circuit board diagram contains a very complete symbolic model of an interactive universe. However, all of this simply a neat and tidy bit of mental calisthenics unless we can make it work on the ground. Which is just what developing this pattern into a labyrinth does.

Let's go back to our pattern on the ground; nine stones, four lines radiating outward from the center point, and eight lines from the inner four stones to make a total of sixteen points on the perimeter. Starting at the top point and counting counter-clockwise, mentally label each point with a number, 1 through 16.

Then, with corn meal or some other visible and earth friendly substance, connect the points in a clockwise direction, 1 with 16 and so on around to 8 - 9. You have just created a labyrinth.

Now, before we walk our labyrinth, let's examine the process in terms of all we have learned about the inherent patterning.

First of all, the difference between a right-handed, clockwise spinning labyrinth and a left handed, counter-clockwise spinning one depends on the point of entry. (For a right spin labyrinth label number counter-clockwise and draw clockwise. For a left spin, label clockwise and draw counter-clockwise.) A right spin labyrinth enters from the second imprint, territory, while a left spin enters from the first, security. In a right spin, you start path number three between Psychic Intelligence and Spirit, while a left spin starts between Pleasure Intelligence and Spirit.

left-handed labyrinthwalking the labyrinth 

In use, this represents the difference between deep organic dysfunction and personality or ego dysfunction. There is also a basic matter of polarity, which might change depending whether this done in the northern or southern hemispheres.

The order of walking the paths in the labyrinth is 3, 2, 1, 4, 7, 6, 5, 8. If we think of this pattern as beginning and ending with 9, Spirit, then we have described a braided spiral from the center of the pattern and back again. The developmental pattern, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, spirals inward and then outward in a single, time-like direct-current flow. Walking the labyrinth creates an inside-out, Moebius strip-like alternating-current flow that transforms the dysfunction of Chapel Perilous into the gnostic grace of Spirit.

Since all of us have gone through imprint trigger four, puberty, the labyrinth starts at that level to recapitulate imprints one through three. Then imprint four is reformed by walking the path. From there, we jump to the mythic, to give us meaning as we open our higher imprint triggers, then the psychic to make it effective, then pleasure to make it fun. Only then do we go on to the Cosmic, which is incomprehensible without a sense of humor. We return by unwinding the way we came, transformed by the experience.

We can get a sense of how this transformation occurs by noting the entry stones at the start of each path.

Path Three - Starts between (Right Spin) Psychic and Spirit, showing the psychic effectiveness necessary to reform path three, the Intellect.

Path Two - Starts between Security and Pleasure to reform Territory.

Path One - Starts between Territory and Psychic to reform Security.

Path Four - Starts between Pleasure and Spirit to reform Social.

Path Seven - Starts between Mythic and Spirit to activate the Mythic imprint trigger.

Path Six - Starts between Cosmic and Social to activate the Psychic imprint.

Path Five - Starts between Mythic and Intellect to activate the Pleasure imprint.

Path Eight - Starts between Cosmic and Spirit to activate the Cosmic.

Now as we walk the labyrinth we have laid out from our circuit board design, we are interweaving levels of consciousness and reality. The objective magick of this powerful symbolic construct works directly on our unconscious mind, whether we understand the depth of geometry embedded within it or not.

And so we gathered to build and walk our labyrinth. As we worked, I gave the teaching as the angel had described it. Our first problem arose with the nine stones themselves.

We were instructed to ask each stone we found if it wanted to be one of the nine. Some people within the group failed to take this seriously and selected a rock that didn't want to be there. Even though it was a very dull rock, it bit the young man who tried to force it into the array. He left with a nasty cut on his palm.

Even dull rock seemed to come alive as we worked with the labyrinth. The group began to form a sense of clarity and focus that it hadn't been able to achieve before. People began to actually feel the power and reverence of the Earth beneath their feet. Spirit began to move, and by the time we had walked the pattern itself, things had shifted.

One lady, well intentioned but not really connected, was asked by the angel to leave. She listened and left. The group focus tightened and we, as a group, felt the need for certain processes and ceremonies needed to start the Zodiacal Earth Temple. What had been a fun community project began a spiritual adventure.

Walking the labyrinth, with a fully conscious intent, may just be the best technique human's have ever developed for interacting directly with the mind of the planet. As the need for this kind of communication grows greater, learning the secrets of the labyrinth could become one of humanity's most important endeavors.