by Sir Laurence Gardner, Kt St Gm., KCD, KT St A.
Extracted from Nexus Magazine

Volume 6, Number 5 (August-September 1999)

from NexusMagazine Website
 

It seems like hardly any time since I was here. It's only ten months ago, I guess, but in the past few months Genesis of the Grail Kings has been completed, published and is already making a significant impact in Britain, with launches now taking place further afield.

Duncan has asked me to begin by giving some background about myself once again. I am involved with a number of organizations - the Celtic Church being one in particular, for which I'm the Grand Prior in Britain [that is, the Celtic Church of the Sacred Kindred of St Columba].

Not necessarily that the established Church organizations like the Celtic movement very much, but that's the way of it. I am also appointed as a Presidential Attaché to an organization called The European Council of Princes.

The Council was founded in 1946, directly after the War, and the object was fairly straightforward. (In fact, some of the financing actually came from this country [Australia], and a lot from America as well). It was at a time when there was a tremendous fear about the build-up of further extremist right-wing factions, and there was also the fear that the communist left-wing might take a hold in Europe. It was decided, therefore, to set up a watchdog committee called The International Council of Government, whose brief was to keep an eye on the extreme political factions.

As it transpired, it didn't have very much to keep an eye on and, once the European Common Market came into being, it became much more involved with that from the 1960s. The Council quite liked the idea of the trading agreements and the general mutuality, although it doesn't like things too much in the way they have now developed within the European Union.

About ten tears ago, the Council changed its name to become The European Council of Princes.

With the eventual establishment of the European Parliament, there could hardly be a Council of Government as well. In fact, the Council was not a government at all: it was simply an advisory body consisting of thirty-three European royal houses. These might be reigning houses, dispossessed houses or deposed houses but, whatever the case, various princes and princesses of these families formed the Council.

For the longest time now, their objective has been a fairly simple one, and that is to look after the constitutional clauses within the various nation states (European countries, with the exception of Britain, have Written Constitutions). And so, when the European Parliament decides to enact this new law or impose that new dictate, the Council of Princes is able to say, "Look, you can't actually do that because it contravenes, say, clause 7 in subsection (b) of the Constitution of this or that country".

The Council of Princes is not especially political - it is more of a social Council in practice; and I am appointed as an Attaché by virtue of the fact that its President since 1992 has been HRH Prince Michael of Albany, the current heir to the Royal House of Stuart - the House that was deposed in Britain from 1688.

The House of Stuart, having taken over the presidency of the Council from the House of Habsburg-Austria, related it to its one-time Royal Academy, which was a very scientific establishment. In fact, in the 1700s in particular, it was highly Rosicrucian - very scientific and alchemical. From the time of Robert the Bruce, the Chancellor of that organization was given the title Prince Saint Germain. This title had little to do with the 5th-century saint himself (except indirectly), but it had to do ultimately with the Stuart Royal Court in France, at the Palace of Saint Germain.

The Chancellor title was changed in the 1700s to Count Saint Germain, and in the 1890s it was changed again to become Chevalier Saint Germain. My present title is that of Chevalier Saint Germain - which is where the knighthood comes from. As distinct from an English knighthood, mine is a Franco-Scot distinction attached to the Stuart Royal Court of France [as ratified by King Louis XIV in 1692], in the key Noble Order of the Royal Palace of Saint Germain-en-Laye, near Paris.

Being a Stuart supporter, I am not really a great fan of the House of Hanover, as you know. However, I have now become attached to a particular Hanoverian establishment. The oldest antiquarian society in the world, constituted by the House of Hanover [by charter of King George III of Britain] in the middle 1700s, is an association called the Society of Antiquaries which, in Scotland, forms an adjunct to Historic Scotland - a Government department. Well, as a non-fan of the House of Hanover, I was privileged and delighted a few months ago to be made a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland - so it rather looks as if I've been blessed to have a little bit of a foot in the establishment's academic camp.

Now, back to where we are today. I have to begin of course by thanking Duncan and the NEXUS team for affording me the opportunity to link my first Australian visit for the new book, Genesis of the Grail Kings, with the NEXUS Conference. And I would like to thank those of you who, since I was last here, have written to me. Some of you may have had a reply by now; my correspondence was more or less up to date around Christmas, but it has fallen behind again. So, if you're still waiting, please bear with me; I will respond.

I first began to talk publicly about the subject matter of Genesis of the Grail Kings back in October 1997 and, indeed, we covered a good deal of related ground at the NEXUS Conference last July. So, with the book now completed and published, I guess the time has come to move on to other things in preparation for future works.

Originally, and beginning with Bloodline of the Holy Grail, I had planned for a series of three books on the Grail theme, covering some 6,000 years of Messianic inheritance from the time of Adam, through King David and Jesus, down to the present day.

However, in the course of compiling this genealogical descent and its fascinating history, the concept for another book has arisen. This has come about more by popular demand than by strategic planning, and I have become so enthused with the idea that there will now be four books in this particular series. It is, in fact, about this fourth book (rather than the immediate Genesis successor) that I would like to speak today.

Bloodline of the Holy Grail covers an historical period from the time of Jesus through the past 2,000 years. Subsequently, Genesis of the Grail Kings was written to answer the most asked of all resultant readers' questions: Why was the Grail Bloodline so important in the first place? Why was the kingly line which descended to Jesus and beyond so unique from the outset in old Mesopotamian times?

This was the subject which we discussed here last year, and we saw how the Messianic succession of Grail dynasts (or Dragon Kings) was alchemically conceived and purpose-bred for the role of earthly leadership. We looked at the records of ancient Sumer, which talked of the Anunnaki gods and their "creation chamber".

We saw how the great vulcans of the era produced the enigmatic Highward Fire-stone (the white powder of monatomic gold) that was used to feed the Light-bodies of the Babylonian Kings and Egyptian Pharaohs.

And we saw how this substance, when ingested, had stunning effects on the body's endocrinal system. Ultimately, we followed the senior line of royal descent (a line that was genetically determined by the mitochondrial DNA of the Dragon Queens) down to the time of Moses. And we visited the Temple, discovered in 1904, high on the Bible's Mount Horeb, where the monatomic fire-stone was made.

Now we shall take a look at the wider scheme of things, in terms of the folklore and fable which have emanated from the alchemical realm of the Pendragons. And we shall consider, in particular, the longstanding disputes which have prevailed between the sacred Bloodline and the Church establishment. These stories and their historical roots (whether portrayed in fairy tale, nursery rhyme or Gothic romance) will form the basis of a forthcoming book, entitled Ring Lords of the Dragon: Beyond the Portal of the Twilight Realm.

So, today, we shall be looking at the world of enchantment, with a little myth, a little magic and a good deal of historical fact, as some of the characters of popular legend take their place on the stage of reality. And, at the conclusion of this talk, we shall open the door to one of the most intriguing, but suppressed, secrets of our heritage.

On the face of it, the Grail-related stories (whether of Cinderella, Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty or Count Dracula) each hold their separate mysteries and enchantments, but it is not generally understood that they all stem from a common historical base which is rooted in the culture of the Grail Kings.

Even though some of the themes have their origins in very old lore, the majority of tales (as we know them) were newly slanted from the Dark Ages onwards, and especially from mediaeval times when the Church's persecution of Grail heretics was in full swing, leading to the Catholic Inquisitions.

Among the best known of these heterodox Christians (or "heretics") in the Middle Ages were the Cathars, the Pure Ones of the Languedoc region in southern France.

And they, in line with the Dragon tradition of the Ouroboros Ring Lords, referred to the Messianic Bloodline as the Elven Race. As we shall see, the terms "elf", "fairy", "pixie" and the like were all representative of various castes within the kingly succession.

The Ouroboros (as detailed in Genesis of the Grail Kings) was a symbol of wholeness, unity and eternity, usually identified by a serpent (in the form of a ring) clutching its own tail. With a cross positioned beneath the ring, the emblem becomes the familiar device of the female - the Venus symbol (as portrayed on the cover of Genesis of the Grail Kings).

Alternatively, with a cross positioned above the ring, it becomes the masculine Orb of sovereign regalia. And with the cross positioned within the ring, it becomes emblematic of the Holy Grail itself - identified as the Dew Cup, or the Rosi-crucis.

In the Cathar language of old Provence, a female elf was an albi (elbe or ylbi), and Albi was the name given to the main Cathar centre in Languedoc. This was in deference to the matrilinear heritage of the Grail dynasty, for the Cathars were supporters of the original Albi-gens - the Elven Bloodline which had descended through the Dragon Queens of yore, such as Lilith, Miriam, Bathsheba and Mary Magdalene.

It was for this reason that, when Simon de Montfort and the armies of Pope Innocent III descended upon the region in 1209, it was called the Albigensian Crusade.

Through some 35 years, tens of thousands of innocent people were slaughtered in this brutal campaign - all because the inhabitants of the region were champions of the original concept of Grail kingship, as against the pseudo-style of monarchy which had been implemented by the papal machine.

In practical terms, Church kingship prevailed from the 8th century and it has continued through the ages to the present day. But the fact is that, under the strict terms of sovereign practice, all such monarchies and their affiliated governments have been illegitimate.

So, what is Church kingship? It is precisely that with which we have become so familiar. It applies to all monarchs who achieve their regnal positions as a result of Church coronation - by the Pope, or, in Britain, by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In terms of true kingship, there is no necessity for coronation because kingly and queenly inheritance are, and always were, "in the blood" - to be precise, in the mitochondrial DNA of the Sangréal.

In the old scheme of things, kingship was automatic because it was an alchemical inheritance which, in practice, had nothing to do with ruling over anyone or anywhere. By virtue of an illegal dictate, however, monarchies were brought under Church control and the magical Realm of the Ring Lords was supplanted by the material and territorial reigns of the papal kings.

One might ask why this was allowed to happen. Why did no one stand up for the legacy of the Holy Grail? Well, the fact is, they did; the Cathars did, the Knights Templars did, the Rosicrucians did. Indeed, any number of gnostic groups and fraternities did, and it was this open support which led to the hideous tortures and executions of the papal Inquisitions and witch-hunts that persisted through so many generations.

By the Middle Ages, the Church controlled the majority of European monarchies (with Scotland a notable exception, as a result of which King Robert the Bruce and the whole Scottish nation were excommunicated). The Church, therefore, influenced governments, parliaments and educational establishments (as it still does today). And, by implication if not by direct instruction, the military forces of the pseudo-kings operated at Church command.

The Church held such enormous financial, political and military power that the Grail adherents became an "underground stream", living in fear of their lives at every turn.

They were not only heretics: they were singled out for punishment as sorcerers and necromancers. And since they did not conform to papal dictates, they were clearly Satanists! The women, of course, were all whores, but this was nothing new; the Roman Church had forged this dogmatic classification at the time of its earliest constitution!

Before looking at some aspects of the Ring legacy, it is important to consider the original document which made Church kingship possible in the first place.

In this context, I do not use the word "important" lightly, because the implementation of this particular document some 1,248 years ago led to just about every social injustice that has since been experienced in the Christian world. The document to which I refer is called "The Donation of Constantine". All monarchical and governmental practice has, for centuries, been based upon the initial precept of this charter but, as we shall see, the precept is wholly invalid.

There are those in our midst today who, under the dynastic rule of Grail entitlement, are rightful kings and queens. But many of the dynasties which have actually reigned have done so with little or no sovereign heritage. They have gained their positions simply because it suited the Church to crown them as its puppet representatives.

Moving forwards in history from the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Davidic Kings of Judah and the Dragon Kings of Scythia, we arrive in the Dark Ages with the Celtic kingdoms of Europe and, essentially for the purposes of this story, with the Fisher Kings in Gaul (which later became France).

It is because of this continuing period of Grail sovereignty in the Celtic realms that conventional history now refers to the "Dark Ages" - about which, we are told, there is so little documentary record. There is, however, any amount of surviving material from the era.

The period is only "dark" because the Church and the imperial overlords decided to veil it from scrutiny, removing documentary evidence from the educational environment in order to perpetuate the myth that everyone and everything outside the Roman establishment was ignorant and barbaric.

As detailed in Bloodline of the Holy Grail, the Church of Rome (founded by Emperor Constantine the Great in the 4th century) had little to do with the Nazarene style of Christianity which it officially superseded and had hitherto persecuted. It was an entirely new, hybrid form of male-dominated "churchianity" based upon a contrived apostolic succession of popes.

The separate Nazarene movement (often called the Celtic Church) continued in opposition under the direction of Grail dynasts from the family of Jesus, and they were styled the Desposyni, meaning Heirs of the Lord.

At that time, the Bloodline houses of the Desposyni held the reins of Dragon kingship in Europe. But the bishops of the Roman Church sought to undermine this tradition, and eventually managed this in the 8th century when they deposed the Merovingian Fisher Kings of the Franks after some 300 years of regnal succession.

With the sudden, contrived demise of this Grail dynasty in 751, a new style of kingship was introduced in the West - kingship not by any right of succession, but by individual decree of the Pope - and it was this which led to much of the fairy tale and folklore which is so familiar today. The new style of papal kingship was made possible by the so-called "Donation of Constantine" which, although now known to have been forged, was not open to debate at the time.

When the Donation made its first appearance in the middle 8th century, it was alleged to have been written by Emperor Constantine 400 years earlier (although, strangely, never produced in the interim).

It was even dated and carried his supposed signature. What the document proclaimed was that the Pope was Christ's elected representative on Earth, with the power to "create" kings as his subordinates. The provisions were put into operation by the Vatican in 751, whereupon the longstanding Merovingians were deposed and a whole new dynasty was supplemented by way of a family who had hitherto been mayors of the Royal Palace (the equivalent of prime ministers).

They were dubbed "Carolingians", and their only king of any consequence (through some 236 years) was the legendary Charlemagne.

As a result of this strategy, the whole nature of monarchy changed from being an office of "guardianship" to one of "rule". Henceforth, the papal monarchs were territorial governors rather than patriarchs of the people. By virtue of this monumental change, the longstanding Grail Code of princely service was forsaken and European kings became servants of the Church - which had the power to make them or break them.

How do we know today that the Donation is a forgery?

Well, there are many reasons, but the most obvious is that its New Testament references relate to the Latin Vulgate version of the Bible. This edition was translated and compiled by St Jerome who was not born until the year 340, some 26 years after Constantine (who died, anyway, in 337) supposedly signed the document!

Indeed, there was more than half a century between Constantine's alleged signing and the appearance of the particular Latin Bible that was used in its content. Notwithstanding this, the language of the Donation was, in any event, that of the 8th century and bore no relation to the writing style of Constantine's day.

The truly ridiculous aspect of all this is that the Donation was proved to be a forgery some 550 years ago, during the Renaissance, but its overwhelming dictate, which cemented the Pope as the supreme spiritual and temporal head of Christendom, has prevailed regardless.

As explained in Genesis of the Grail Kings, the monarchs of the Grail succession were called Messiahs (Anointed Ones) because, in the early days in Mesopotamia and Egypt, they were anointed with the fat of the sacred Messeh (the holy dragon or crocodile).

By virtue of this, they were also called Dragons. The Dragon, emblematic of wisdom, was the epitome of the Holy Spirit which, according to the Book of Genesis, moved upon the waters of time, while the Grail was the perpetual Blood Royal - the Sangréal. Originally, in old Mesopotamia, it was called the Gra-al - the Sacred Blood of the Dragon Queens - and it was said to be the "nectar of supreme excellence". The ancient Greeks called it ambrosia.

The concept of fairies (the fair folk) was born directly from this base, being a derivative of "fey" and relating especially to "fate". In the Celtic world, certain royal families (especially those of the Pendragons, or Head Dragons) were said to carry the Fairy Blood - that is to say, the fate or destiny of the Grail Bloodline - while the Elf Maidens of the Albi-gens were the designated guardians of the Earth, starlight and forest.

But how was it that the dragons, fairies and elves of history became enveloped within a shroud of supernatural enigma? Why was it that their stories were moved from the world of reality into a domain of romance and nursery tale? What had all this to do with the Donation of Constantine?

To answer these questions, we must now step through the Portal of Enchantment into the Twilight Realm of the Shining Ones, for theirs is the enlightened Realm of the Ring Lords.

Three Rings for the Elven Kings under the sky.
Seven for the Dwarf Lords in their halls of stone.
Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die.
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
One Ring to rule them all.
One Ring to find them.
One Ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

So it is cited by Gandalf the Wizard in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, one of the most popular tales of all time.

In essence, the contested ownership of the One Ring is little different to the enduring quest for the Holy Grail. Although presented from quite opposite standpoints, both are quests for the maintenance of sovereignty, but each has been misapplied at various stages of history by those who perceived the Ring and the Grail as power weapons. Hence, it was imperative (in the respective stories) that access to the Grail was protected by severe questions, just as it was essential to keep the One Ring from the evil Sauron of Mordor, who eventually lost his power when the Ring was destroyed in the fires of the Mount of Doom.

There is, however, an essential difference between Tolkien's One Ring, which is portrayed as dark and divisive, and the Golden Ring of Grail romance, which is a ring of love and enlightenment.

The latter was further symbolized by the ring of iron-clad knights who sat at the Round Table - a ring that was broken (leading the land into chaos and waste) when Arthur forsook the Celtic Code in favor of the Roman persuasion (or, as the later Christianized version of the story differently explains, when Guinevere was unfaithful to Arthur with Lancelot).

It has been said on occasions that the great genius of 19th-century composer Richard Wagner was that he recognized the Ring saga as a version of the Grail Quest. However, if anything, the reverse is true. What he recognized was that the popular Holy Grail legends were, in fact, stylized retellings of the more traditional Ring Quest.

Both Richard Wagner and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (in his Arthurian writings) understood that the Grail Quest was a spiritual aspect of the Ring Quest, but that in essence they were alike, if not the same.

What they also recognized was the fact that both the Ring and the Grail could bring disaster, though by different means. The power of the Ring had to be withstood, otherwise it would enslave its master, whereas the power of the Grail would retaliate with vengeance if misused. Either way, the moral is the same in that, ultimately, power is self-destructive when achieved through selling one's soul. Hence, the Ouroboros Ring can be a halo or a crown, but it can equally become a noose.

Adolf Hitler's fanatical obsession with finding the Hallows of Grail Castle was a prime example of this misconceived notion of power. In his search for the Hallows, he obtained an ancient lance (said to have been used by Charlemagne) which he insisted was the Longinus spear that pierced the side of Jesus at the Crucifixion. This, he reckoned, was the sacred Spear of Destiny, so revered in Grail lore. With this in his possession, Hitler was confident that his empire would be as strong as that of Charlemagne.

But legend had it that, after many great victories, Charlemagne was doomed to defeat from the moment he lost the magical weapon. And so it was that on 30 April 1945 - the very day when the American 7th Army, under General Patton, seized the lance from Nuremberg Castle - Adolf Hitler accepted his defeat and [apparently] shot himself.

Whether applied in fact or fantasy, the concept of the Ring and the Grail was such that it inspired hope for the social and natural environments. The Grail Hallows (the Sword, Chalice, Ouroboros and Spear) were traditionally regarded as tools of princely service but, when presumed to be weapons of power, they would always, one way or another, destroy the wielder from within.

These Hallows were represented in the four suits of the Tarot's Minor Arcana as the Swords, Cups, Pentacles and Wands - subsequently to become the Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs that we know today.

Throughout the best part of this millennium, no organization has misused the Grail Chalice symbolism to greater effect than the Christian Church establishment. From the earliest times, the Rosi-crucis (the chalice and wine of the Grail sacrament) was a prerogative of the Albi-gens, being emblematic of the Blood Royal in the womb of the Dragon Queen.

However, the Church has long misappropriated this aspect of the Hallows ceremony to become its Eucharistic power-weapon, supposedly to bind its followers into communion with ecclesiastical dogma. But, as time goes by, this very power is being seen to subside as the congregations diminish in the quest for greater truths and more substantial enlightenment from legitimate sources.

In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Queen of the Fairies is Titania, whose name represents the pre-Olympian god-race of the Titans. In particular, she is the Moon Goddess Diana. Their king, Oberon, however, had an historical base, being inspired by an ancestor of Shakespeare's colleague Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

He was a founding member of Elizabeth Tudor's 16th-century Court Poetry and Magic Syndicate - along with Francis Bacon, John Dee, Edmund Spenser and others of the Rosicrucian "underground stream" who aided and guided much of Shakespeare's work.

Edward de Vere was, at that time, Lord Chancellor of England - as had been many generations of his forebears, including Albrey, the 12th-century Prince of Anjou and Guisnes, whose titular name, Albe-Righ, meant Elf King. What the Syndicate knew full well, despite their loyalty to Elizabeth, was that the House of Tudor had no prior right to the English throne, having simply taken it, by might of the sword, from the preceding House of Plantagenet.

That apart, the Plantagenets themselves were a junior branch of the House of Anjou, whose senior branch was the House of Vere. Indeed, in 1861, the noted royal historian Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay described the Veres as,

"the longest and most illustrious line of nobles that England has ever seen".

Their ancestry was jointly Pictish and Merovingian, descending from the ancient Grail House of Scythia.

Here was a true kingly line of the Elven Race, and it was for this reason that Oberon (a variant of Aubrey/Albrey, the historical Elf King) became Shakespeare's King of the Fairies. Such was the translatory nature of all Rosicrucian symbology, whether portrayed in stories, artwork, watermarks or the Tarot.

Some time earlier, in 1408, Edward de Vere's ancestor, Richard (Lord Chamberlain and 11th Earl of Oxford), had been invested as a Knight of the Garter by King Henry IV at Windsor Castle. Also invested at the same time was King Sigismund of Hungary, who had revived the ancient Egyptian Order of the Dragon - within which Richard de Vere held the hereditary distinction of Lord Draconis.

One way or another, the nursery tales which emanated from the "underground stream" were stories of lost brides and usurped kingship - based upon the subjugation of the Grail Bloodline by the Church of Rome and, in later times, by the sectarian Puritans of the Protestant movement.

The Catholics had their Dominican Grand Inquisitor, Tomâs de Torquemada, and the Puritans had their equivalent in Matthew Hopkins, the Witchfinder-General.

Favored executions, in each case, were hanging, drowning or burning at the stake, and the common command was:

"Kill them all - God will know his own!"

The fairy tale concept was essentially geared to stories relating to these persecutions: allegorical accounts of the predicament of the true Royal Family - the Ring Lords of the Sangréal, whose fairies and elves (having been maneuvered from the mortal plane of orthodoxy and status quo) were confined to a seemingly Otherworld existence.

They were tales of Grail Princes who were turned into frogs, of Swan Knights who roamed the wasteland, and of Dragon Princesses locked in towers or put to sleep for hundreds of years.

In the course of their persecution, the Elf Maidens were pricked with bodkins, fed with poisoned apples or condemned to servitude - while their champions swam great lakes, battled through thickets and scaled mighty towers to secure and protect the matrilinear heritage of the Albi-gens. They include such well-known stories as Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White and Rapunzel.

In all cases, the underlying theme is the same, with the Bloodline Princess kept (through drugging, imprisonment or some form of restraint) out of reach of the Grail Prince who has to find and release her in order to preserve the dynasty and perpetuate the line. For the most part, the establishment of the "Mother Church" was symbolized by a malevolent stepmother, an evil witch or some other jealous female with an opposing vested interest.

Always, the stories are reminiscent of the Lost Bride of the King in the Old Testament's Song of Solomon. Their content also embodies the forlorn aspect of Mary Magdalene, the bride of Jesus, whose royal heritage and maternal legacy were so thoroughly undermined by the Christian bishops.

An interesting feature of many classic fairy tales is that they truly are very old stories. Take Cinderella, for example. If asked who wrote Cinderella, many people would answer that it was the Brothers Grimm, while others would say it was Charles Perrault. However, these men were not actually writers of fairy tales, as is commonly thought. They were collectors, compilers and interpreters of the tales.

The story of Cinderella can be traced back to the Carolingian era, with its first known version appearing in the year 850. Perrault published his well-known edition in 1697 in France, while Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm produced their German version in 1812.

Over the years, many people have likened Tolkien's wizard, Gandalf, to Merlin of the Arthurian tales. At the same time, Tolkien's Aragorn has been likened to King Arthur but, as Tolkien himself pointed out, there is really a closer similarity between Aragorn and the historical Charlemagne.

The challenge which faced Charlemagne, who had been charged by the Church to establish a viable Empire from various disunited kingdoms, was not unlike that which confronted Aragorn, who reunited the divided kingdoms of Middle Earth. But there was a marked difference in practice, for Aragorn was far more like Arthur in having an advisory wizard, whereas Charlemagne did not because the Church would not consent to counselors outside its own appointees.

Aragorn's was therefore more of a Celtic-style environment, with the enemy being the evil Sauron.

Charlemagne, on the other hand, was a champion of the Roman Church whose adversaries were the supporters of the unlawfully ousted Merovingian establishment - an establishment to which Aragorn would personally have been well suited.

In the event, it became essential for the Church to settle some form of Ring entitlement upon Charlemagne so that he was perceived to conform to the Dragon tradition. And so a suitable tale was invented to the effect that a serpent appeared at his court with a golden ring in its mouth - an enchanted ring that compelled him to love whoever's finger it was on.

At this stage, it is of interest to note that a newly proposed three-film series of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is currently in its early stages of development. After some 18 months of negotiation with the American film company Newline Cinema, the $260-million contract has been acquired by New Zealand film-maker Peter Jackson.

Various parts of New Zealand will apparently make ideal Middle Earth locations for the project, and it is hoped that the first film (based upon Book I of Tolkien's 1950s trilogy) will be released within the next couple of years. This film, The Fellowship of the Ring, will subsequently be followed by The Two Towers and The Return of the King.

With a speaking cast of about sixty and many thousands of extras, it has recently been rumored that one of the key roles, that of Gandalf, is hotly tipped for Sean Connery. Given that The Lord of the Rings has been voted "the most popular book of the century", and with stars of this calibre, we could well be looking at one of the first mammoth box-office attractions of the new millennium.

The composer Richard Wagner's personal association with Grail lore and, of course, his own famous Ring Cycle are well known.

It is therefore very appropriate that one of the present hopeful contenders for The Lord of the Rings film score is Richard Wagner's own descendant, Adrian Wagner, who is now in touch with the film company in this regard.

When Bloodline of the Holy Grail was released, I was heartened to learn that the Wagner Grail tradition of Lohengrin and Parsifal was still very much to the fore. At that time, in parallel with my book, Adrian Wagner released an album called The Holy Spirit and the Holy Grail. Now, as a companion to my latest work, he has composed the compelling musical suite, Genesis of the Grail Kings.

One apparent fact about Tolkien's elven folk is that, unlike the cute little elves of many children's tales, these characters are actually larger and more powerful than average mortals. They are also endowed with greater powers of wisdom, they ride magical horses and closely resemble the ancient Irish king-tribe of the Tuatha Dé Danann. In this regard, Tolkien was quite accurate with his assessment of the original Ring Lords of the Albi-gens who, in the far distant years BC, were called the Lords of the Sidhé (pronounced "shee").

The Sidhé was a transcendent intellect, known to the Druids as the Web of the Wise, while "druid" (druidhe) was itself a Celtic word for "witch" - an English form of the Saxon verb wicca, meaning "to bend" or "to yield" (as indeed do willow and wicker).

The Tuatha Dé Danann (or Dragon Lords of Anu) were masters of the transcendent Sidhé, and were duly classified as "fates" or "fairies".

Before settling in Ireland (from about 800 BC), they were the world's most noble race, alongside the early Kings of Egypt, being the Black Sea Princes of Scythia (now Ukraine). Like the original dynastic Pharaohs, they traced their descent from the great Pendragons of Mesopotamia; and from them sprang the kingly lines of the Irish Bruithnigh and the Picts of Scotland's Caledonia.

In Wales they founded the Royal House of Gwynedd, while in Cornwall in the southwest of England, they were the sacred gentry known as the Pict-sidhé - from which derives the term "pixie".

So, from a single caste of the original Blood Royal - whether known as the Sangréal, the Albi-gens or the Ring Lords - we discover many of the descriptive terms which sit at the very heart of popular folklore. For here, in this one noble race, we have the "elves", "fairies" and "pixies" - not beguiling little folk, but distinguished Kings and Queens of the Dragon succession.

One of the most important Scythian words was uper, which meant "over" or "above" - a word that we still use in today's English in such definitions as "superintendent" or "supervisor". In titular form, a Scythian Uper was an Overseer or, more importantly, an Overlord - the equivalent of a Pendragon.

Later, in the Hungarian and Romanian regions, the word gained the variant form, Oupire.

Until the mediaeval fabrications of the Christian Church, there was nothing remotely sinister or supernatural about the definition of Oupire, but this was eventually destined to change when the witch-hunts began, for the priestly/kingly Oupires were, in the eyes of Rome, the equivalent of Magian Druids.

They were therefore witches, and the Sidhé definition (Web of the Wise) became newly dubbed as "the Web of the Weird".

In the main, outside the Celtic regions of Britain, the traditional Oupires had been apparent in the Balkan and Carpathian regions of Europe, having prevailed from Transylvania to the Black Sea in ancient times. They were therefore not only associated with witches but with Gypsies.

The Church bishops and Inquisitional friars suspected them of being the ultimate rulers of the Land of Elphane - the twilight realm of fairy gold, magic springs and the abiding lore of the Greenwood, all of which were anathema to the Church. They were said to be wandering people of the night, who consorted with evil spirits. At that stage, a new word was born into the language of Christian Europe. The word, a straightforward corruption of Oupire, was "vampire".

In addition to vampires, another classification was soon to enter the Inquisitional vocabulary as the Dominican Black Friars and the Franciscan Grey Friars compiled their lists of undesirables. They had now moved beyond the realm of ordinary heretics and pagans, for alongside their fabricated vampire myth they conjured another form of shape-shifting phenomenon: the werewolf.

Quite suddenly, there appeared to be no end to the fantastic creatures that were reckoned to stalk the streets and forests in search of unsuspecting victims.

But the beauty of all this was that it had the effect of making people lean more heavily upon the Church - the only perceived route to salvation. These vampires and werewolves, it was said, could not be killed by conventional means.

Even God was out of the picture, for only the power of Jesus Christ (the Savior of humankind) could defeat these diabolical beings. They were portrayed as devils, demons and emissaries of Satan, who had to be exorcised and destroyed by the monks and clerics. And so the Church was in business with a whole new genre of scary folklore to counter the Grail Quest legends and esoteric artwork of the "underground stream".

On the one hand, there were the Albigensian tales of Swan Princes, Dragon Queens and Elf Maidens, comprising the lore of the forgotten Bloodline and the Lost Bride, wherein knights and chivalric champions battled against all odds to preserve the sacred heritage of the Holy Grail. In these stories, there were wizards of the Druidic school and wise hermits to guide the knights upon their journeys and missions.

But nowhere in these tales of enchantment did a gallant priest or bishop ever ride to the aid of a damsel in distress, for the Church was, in practice, the adversary.

What the bishops did, however, at the 1545 Council of Trento in northern Italy, was they formally blacklisted and outlawed the prophecies of Merlin, withdrawing all related material from the public domain. Eventually, in order to weigh the literary balance in the Church's favor, a new breed of writing was born, and it came into its own as Gothic Romance.

The premise behind these tales was not so much about saving victims, but rather more about destroying the enemies of contrived "churchianity" - with crucifixes galore and gallons of holy water being the essential weapons in the dreaded undertaking against the sinister "evil ones".

Then, in time, the Christian movement had a wonderful idea for its own Merlin competitor: not a wizard as such, but an early Church bishop with canonized status. But, what a very strange choice they made!

Back in AD 325, one of the characters at Emperor Constantine's Council of Nicaea was a certain Nicholas, Bishop of Myra.

At this Church conference the bishops were debating the nature of the Holy Trinity and of how Jesus was not simply the Son of God but was also God incarnate. The ageing Libyan priest, Arius of Alexandria, was not at all happy about this new concept and decided to make his feelings known. But when he rose to speak, Nicholas of Myra immediately punched him in the face!

This, of course, brought the debate firmly back onto the required track - subsequent to which, the violent protagonist was rewarded for his effort and duly became Saint Nicholas. This titular name was later corrupted in parts of Europe to become Sinterklaas or Sintniklaus, and then, in the English-speaking countries, to Santa Claus. Now, by virtue of a good deal of strategic propaganda, he is lovingly revered by children as the jolly, gift-bearing Father Christmas - a far cry from the original vindictive bishop of historical record.

Within the Celtic Church of the Dark Ages (in the days of Taliesin and the Merlin seers to the kings), there had been some very prominent adepts of the old wisdom: abbots and culdees such as St David, St Patrick and St Columba, all of whom were denounced in their day by the Roman Church for their so-called wizardry and pagan beliefs.

Even the later papal establishment regarded them all as necromancers and sorcerers, but this is not the way things are currently portrayed. Although the Merlin prophecies were expressly banned by the Council of Trento, the teachings of David, Patrick and Columba were so firmly cemented in society that the Church pursued a different strategy of incorporation.

A thousand years after the lifetimes of these Druidic Magi, the Vatican elected to bring them into the orthodox saintly fold so that the real truth of their Celtic environment would be overshadowed. Then, only a couple of years ago, the British Post Office and the Anglican Church joined forces to promote the gentle St Columba of the Celts alongside his bitter Catholic rival, St Augustine of Rome, who came to England with an express papal brief to destroy the Columban movement immediately after Columba's death in 597.

Notwithstanding this historical fact, however, the anniversary postage stamps and substantially hyped propagandist material of 1997 portrayed these two arch-enemies as if they had been blood brothers in a common cause - proving beyond doubt that new myths of "churchianity" are still being created to this day.

With regard to the werewolves, who were said to manifest at the height of the full moon, the definition of were is, quite simply, "man" (hence, "werewolf" is "man-wolf"), but it comes rather more precisely from an ancient High Druidic caste of Wood Lords (called Weres or Wallans).

Their totem animal was the wolf - just as other tribes were represented by, say, a boar or a horse.

These totems were really no more than the early predecessors of heraldry, whereby families became identified by the animals, plants, shells and other devices on their banners.

Historically, the Wallans became very influential, founding great kingly dynasties in Ireland, Wales and England. The great Cadwallan of Wales was of this Druidic race, as was King Casswallan, the intrepid son of Beli Mawr - the greatest of all the sovereign Wood Lords in about 100 BC.

Other totems, of course, were the various god and goddess representations, and it is especially relevant that one of these still holds a prime British national position today, having persisted though the centuries from the early culture of the Wood Lords.

The original Wallans were apparent in Mesopotamia around 3,800 years ago, in about 1800 BC. They were called the Yulannu, which meant, quite simply, Wood Lords. Indeed, it was from their culture that the original Yule tradition derived, subsequently making its way across Europe to Scandinavia.

The venerated Goddess of the Yulannu was Barat An-na (Great Mother of the Fire-stone). The Sumerians called her Antu. She was the wife of the god Anu, and the mother of Enki. In later times, she was identified with Diana of Ephesus (Diana of the Nine Fires).

The cult of Barat An-na spread across Syria into the Phoenician kingdom, where they began to portray her on their coins. In these representations, she sat by the seashore with a torch of fire, and at her side was a round shield bearing the cross of the Rosi-crucis.

Along with the Wallan Druids, the culture of Barat An-na was brought to the British islands, where her name became compacted to Bratanna. And in those islands, her image persisted to the extent that she became the great tribal goddess - a goddess who, despite all the emergent centuries of Christianity, has prevailed to this very day.

Her image on the coins has barely altered, except that her flaming torch became a lighthouse, and the Rosi-crucis cross of her shield was amended to become the Union Jack. But, after all this time, she is still the Mother Goddess of the land, the Lady of the Fire-stone: Britannia.

Earlier, I mentioned the mighty King Casswallan who reigned in Britain at about the time of King Herod the Great. By virtue of being the son of the great Beli Mawr, he was not only a Wood Lord but was also a Ring Lord of the Cassi; hence, he was Cassi-Wallan or Casswallan.

The Cassi tribes were also from Mesopotamia, prior to which (having previously settled in the northern Zargos Mountains along with the Yulannu) they were Carpathian princes of the Sidhé. They were, in fact, of the Tuatha Dé Danann Fairy strain. They reigned in regional Mesopotamia from the 18th century BC and, from about 1600 BC, they governed all Babylonia for another 500 years.

This particular race developed one of the oldest Ring cultures in history and, in ancient Ireland, they were the sacred race of the god-men: the Vere-Bolg. The greatest of their Ring shrines still exists, known as Newgrange today - originally a sacred royal seat identified as a Rath.

These shrines ("fairy rings") were called the Creachaire (temple-tombs), and they housed the Raths which were turf-covered mound dwellings constructed upon a framework of poles. In later times, they were called Tepes (pronounced "tepesh") - from which derived the American Indian tepee - and they were reckoned to be Portals to the Netherworld, the sacred domain of ancestral souls.

It is from this mound-dwelling practice that the tribal name of the Cassi Kings evolved, for a Cassi was a Place of Wood. They were the seats of the Portal Guardians: the Oupires, the Ring Lords of the Sidhé, who, as we saw earlier, were later dubbed "vampires".

One of history's best known Grail Fairies was Princess Melusine, daughter of the Pictish King, Elinas of Alba - a descendant of the 2nd-century King Vere of Caledonia, Lord of the Dragon. In the year 733, Melusine (maintaining the family heritage) married Rainfroi de Vere, Prince of Anjou, and among their offspring was Count Maelo, the commander of Emperor Charlemagne's army.

From Maelo's own marriage to Charlemagne's sister sprang the Vere Counts of Guisnes who, as previously mentioned, were the reputed Elf Kings and became England's Great Chamberlains and Earls of Oxford.

In the Arthurian and Magdalene traditions of the Ladies of the Lake (as discussed in Bloodline of the Holy Grail), Melusine was a "fountain fey" - an enchantress of the Underwood. Her fountain at Verrières en Forez was called Lusina (meaning "Light-bringer"), from which derived the name of the Royal House of Lusignan - the Crusader Kings of Jerusalem.

The Fount of Melusine was said to be located deep within a thicket wood in Anjou, and Melusine was often depicted as a mermaid - as she is still beguilingly portrayed in an old painting at Count Dracula's Bran Castle in Romania.

In the 12th-century, Melusine's descendant, Robert de Vere, 3rd Earl of Oxford and legal pretender to the Earldom of Huntingdon, was appointed as King Richard I's Steward of the forest lands of Fitzooth. As Lord of the Greenwood and titular Herne of the Wild Hunt, he was a popular people's champion of the Sidhé heritage - as a result of which he was outlawed for taking up arms against King John.

It was he who, subsequently styled Robin Fitzooth, became the prototype for the popular tales of Robin Hood.

Of all the monarchs who ever sat upon the throne of England, the Tudor Queen, Elizabeth I, was by far the most in tune with ancient cultures and wood lore. She was even called the Faerie Queene and, before being formally crowned, she was installed by the people as their Queen of the Greenwood. This was an ancient ritual of the Shining Ones - the Elven Race of the Albi-gens.

The ceremony was conducted in the mist of early dawn in the depths of Windsor Forest and, to facilitate the installation, the customary Robin Hood legacy of the House of Vere was brought into play.

At that time, the Queen's Lord Chamberlain was Edward de Vere of Loxley, 17th Earl of Oxford, and it was his office to invest Elizabeth by first deposing the Caille Daouine. This was the traditional King of the Forest (whose name had given rise to Scotland's Pictish realm of Caledonia) - the mighty Stag of the Seven Tines, upon whose back Lord Vere rode into the ceremonial clearing.

Edward de Vere of Oxford was a friend and student of the Rosicrucian alchemist and Secret Service operative John Dee, and he worked closely with the statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon (later Viscount St Albans). Between them (along with others) they comprised the Royal Court Syndicate which was responsible for providing much of the material for the works of their playwright colleague, William Shakespeare.

As mentioned in connection with Melusine, fountains, springs and water in general were always associated with the Ring Lord female line. This stems from the very earliest times of the Anunnaki, whose founding mother (as explained in ancient Mesopotamian literature) was Tiâmat, the Sea-dragon. In later times, these queens were commonly represented as mermaids (mere maids), and were often called Ladies of the Lake.

This was a style granted to Mary Magdalene when she had settled in Provence from AD 44.

While the male descendants of Mary Magdalene and Jesus became the noted Fisher Kings in Gaul, the female line retained its Dragon Queen status, in a quite separate dynasty, as the matriarchal Queens of Avallon in Burgundy. They were known as the House del Acqs (the House of the Waters), and among their number was the great 6th-century Queen Viviane, revered as the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian romance.

This heritage was so important to the Celtic Church that, when King Kenneth MacAlpin united the Scots and Picts in 844, his extant installation document made special mention of his descent from the Queens of Avallon.

The true significance of King Arthur was his immediate joint descent in both the male and female lines of the Albi-gens. His father was King Aedàn of Dalriada, the Pendragon of Britain in the year 559 and a descendant of the Wood Lord Beli Mawr. His mother was Ygerna del Acqs, the daughter of Queen Viviane, whose grandson (by Ygerna's sister, Viviane II) was the legendary Lancelot del Acqs.

Ygerna (sometimes called Igraine in the Grail tradition) was the High Queen of the Celtic kingdoms, and her daughter Morgaine (by her first husband, Gwyr Llew of Carlisle) was High Priestess of the Sisters of Avallon.

Over the years, there have been any number of speculations concerning the historical Arthur, but these are mainly fronted by tourist establishments endeavoring to claim the Arthurian heritage for their particular parts of England or Wales. The fact is, however, that (in line with the traditional accounts) there was only ever one High King of Britain called Arthur. There was only ever one Arthur born as the son of a Pendragon.

There was only ever one Arthur whose mother was Igraine of Avallon and whose grandmother was the recognized Lady of the Lake. There was only ever one Arthur with a son named Modred, and there was only ever one Arthur with a sister called Morgaine (or Morganna as some of the stories refer to her).

In this regard, the old annals of Scotland and Ireland, along with the records of the Celtic Church, are unanimous in identifying Arthur mac Aedàn of Dalriada. He was invested as Sovereign Commander and High King in the year 575 by the Druid, Merlin Emrys, and his primary seat was at Carlisle in the north of England, from where he controlled the military defense of the English-Scottish border country.

Returning to the Raths (or royal mound-dwellings), we should perhaps consider the fact that, as mentioned, these Portals to the Netherworld were called Tepes - for this was the very style afforded to one of the most enigmatic of all Gothic figures: Count Dracula.

Historically, and quite outside the Christian propagandist mythology which surrounds the vampire character of Bram Stoker's famous novel, Dracula was Prince Vlad III of Wallachia, who is often referred to as Vlad Tepes.

Since the word tepes relates to "wooden poles", it is often thought that Vlad's descriptive nickname relates to his individual method of executing enemies of the State by impaling them upon wooden stakes. Hence, Vlad Tepes is sometimes said to mean "Vlad the Impaler". This, however, is completely untrue. He was called Tepes (as were many other Druidic elders before him) because, within the ancient Ring Lord culture of the Sidhé, he was an appointed Creachaire Portal Guardian.

Vlad Tepes, a 15th-century Prince in Romania, founded the capital city of Bucharest. His popularized name, Dracula, means "Son of Dracul", and Dracul (or Dragon) was a style by which his father was known within the Grail fraternity of the Ordo Draconis (The Imperial Court of the Dragon) from 1431.

During this past century, ever since the 1897 novel, Dracula, was published, Vlad has become an archetype of the Church-promoted Gothic tradition. However, the establishment's real fear of Dracula was not his harsh treatment of enemies, as is so often cited, nor that he was a blood-sucking vampire in the Stoker tradition.

What they feared was his in-depth knowledge of alchemy and the fact that he was truly an operative Oupire - a venerated Overlord of the Rath, a Portal Guardian in the ancient Yulannu manner of the Ring Lords.

Those of you who have read Bloodline of the Holy Grail, or maybe even Genesis of the Grail Kings, will be familiar with the terracotta portrayal of the Sumerian goddess, Lilith, from around 2000 BC. In this depiction (as in those of other Anunnaki hierarchy) Lilith is seen to be holding the Rod and Ring of Divinely Measured Justice. The Rod was actually an instrument of measure, and in some portrayals it is very clearly marked in calculable units (like a modern ruler). By Babylonian times, it was referred to as the Rule, and the one who held the Rule was the Ruler - which is from where our governmental term derives.

The Ring (as mentioned at the beginning of this talk) was a symbol of wholeness, unity and eternity. It represented a continuance of Divine Justice - a justice that was measured by the Rod (or Rule). Hence, the Ring was the ultimate insignia of the Anunnaki Overlords - the enigmatic Oupires who were responsible for the establishment of municipal government and kingly practice - for they were the progenitors of civilization from about 4000 BC.

In view of this, it is of particular interest to note that Tolkien, when asked about the Middle Earth environment of his book, The Lord of the Rings, answered that he perceived its setting to relate to somewhere around 4000 BC.

"The cauldron has always been boiling," he said. "We simply add new ingredients to the soup."

In this respect, his popular tale, although enthralling, was not actually new in concept.

From the earliest of European times, the Saxon god, Wotan (or Odin, the equivalent of the Sumerian Anu), was said to have ruled the world with eight rings, having one more, the ninth ring (the One Ring), to govern the others.

During the mediaeval days of the Church's persecution of heretics and, indeed, through the Middle Ages and beyond, all manner of Grail-related subject matter fell prey to the wrath of the bishops and friars. Unsuspecting victims were accused of any number of apparently unsavory practices, and any association with the Ring culture was proscribed. Indeed, when Joan of Arc was accused of witchcraft, one of the charges laid against her by the bishops was that she used magical rings for enchantment and curative purposes. As a result, she was burnt at the stake in 1431. But, in 1920, the Church reconsidered her case and she was pardoned and canonized!

As detailed in Bloodline of the Holy Grail, not only were proscriptions leveled against the writings of Merlin - with a good deal of other literature confined to the supposedly "lost" coffers of the Dark Ages - but pictorial art also came under close scrutiny and many new rules were made.

One of these was that the Virgin Mary could only be portrayed wearing blue and white (just as she is commonly depicted today). The reason for this was that other colors, especially the red of the cardinals, might have implied that she held some form of ecclesiastical office within a Church that afforded no clerical status to women.

What is not so commonly known is that the Church's regulations also applied to music - in particular, ancient music which could be traced to cultures other than that of Rome, Greece or Lydia. It is by virtue of these implemented regulations that so many of today's reference books determine that, for the most part, music evolved either from Greece or from various parts of the Roman Empire.

It is precisely the same with the English language, which is largely, but quite erroneously, said to derive from Greek and Latin. To cement this notion very firmly into our culture, we are taught from the classical literature of Homer and Virgil; but what is always forgotten is that both the Greek and Roman languages themselves evolved from other, far older, sources.

Much of the language of Europe, including the English language, can be traced back into Phoenicia, Syria, Egypt, India and Mesopotamia, with many of the word stems being thousands of years old.

In the world of music, we have the very same scenario and, by virtue of discoveries made in the past few decades, there is no doubt that structured and sequenced music played a major role way back in the days of the Babylonian kingdoms and beyond. Silver pipes, bells and drums, along with beautifully ornamented harps and lyres, have all been unearthed in ancient Sumer from graves dating back five or six thousand years, and it is known that lutes were also used.

Buried along with kings and queens of the Dragon succession, these finely produced instruments were clearly ceremonial and would appear to have been used in ancient Star Fire and Fire-stone rituals, as described in Genesis of the Grail Kings. The Fire-stone ritual (the ritual of the goddess Antu, or Barat An-na) was largely a levitation ceremony conducted with the monatomic, superconductive element of the Highward Fire-stone (the white powder of gold).

Even in modern times, music has been used to perform levitational feats - notably in Tibet, where prohibitively large stone blocks have been lifted and positioned high in the mountains by using anti-gravitational sound frequencies.

The ritual involves nineteen musicians and, behind them, 200 monks, radiating outwards in lines (in groups of five) at five-degree intervals, facing towards a mountain cave.

The musicians use thirteen barrel-drums of variant sizes (weighing up to 150 kilograms apiece), suspended from wooden frames and directed towards a bowl-shaped cavity in which the required boulder is placed, between the musicians and the cave. Also, there are six long trumpets positioned at intervals between the drummers. On command, the trumpets and drums begin, with the monks at the rear providing a baffle whilst chanting.

The time span before levitation of the stone occurs is four minutes and, in this manner, stones have been lifted some 400 meters, to be lowered into their necessary mountain temple positions.

Having made an intensive study of the intricacies of this ancient procedure, Adrian Wagner has recreated a musical enactment in "The Phoenix and the Fire-stone" track of the Genesis of the Grail Kings album - strategically breaking the sequence with a Golden Mean partition and concluding immediately before the four-minute deadline.

Locked within this are frequencies that are so low as to be inaudible to conscious awareness, but which resonate directly with the frequency of the pineal gland. This, as many of you will know, is the gland responsible for heightened states of awareness and perception.

Also included within the Genesis album are aspects of musical harmonics which were banned by the Vatican in the Middle Ages, subsequent to their use by the Knights Templars and Cistercian monks in the construction of their Magdalene-dedicated Notre Dame cathedrals, which are noted for their architectural defiance of gravitational theory.

The knights of this particular branch of the Templars (constituted by King Baldwin of Jerusalem in 1118) were called the Guardian Princes of the Royal Secret.

One of these musical sequences is the most famous of all: a tritone dubbed by the Church as "the Devil's interval". This is a direct extraction from the discovered harmonic scales of ancient Mesopotamian deities, which include the Enki scale, Enlil scale, Anu scale, Marduk scale, Kingu scale, Inanna scale and others.

No composer has done so much to preserve the legacy of Ring lore as Adrian's great-great-grandfather, Richard Wagner. His renowned 16-hour, four-part Nibelungen Ring Cycle - The Rhinegold, The Valkyrie, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods) - was largely drawn from Burgundian folklore, but derived ultimately from the very old Norse mythology of the Volsunga Saga.

The Ring's ultimately key character is the warrior Siegfried who, while under the spell of a potion, betrays the woman he loves - a goddess-turned-mortal called Brunhilde, who then masterminds his death.

Subsequently, however, she realizes her error and throws herself upon Siegfried's funeral pyre to be with him in eternity. The magical Ring that Siegfried gave to Brunhilde is retrieved from the ashes by the Rhinemaidens, the rightful Water Guardians of the Gold. And, by virtue of this, along with Brunhilde's self-sacrifice, a hitherto curse (placed upon the Ring by Alberic the Nibelung, Dwarf Lord of the Underworld) is lifted.

The Ring had originally been stolen from the Rhinemaidens by the Nibelung, who lost it to Brunhilde's father, the sky-god Wotan. Then Siegfried won it by killing a dragon. But, upon the final cleansing of the Ring by the Rhinemaidens, Wotan perishes, together with his dream kingdom of Valhalla. With the Ring now back in its rightful hands, the world is redeemed and the Cycle is complete.

And so, once again the traditional Ring lore is apparent, just as in Tolkien and the Grail stories, for the Ring is finally seen to destroy those who hold it without the right of affinity.

The golden Ring itself (forged from the enchanted flat-stone of the Rhinegold) had the power to afford its master the lordship of all the world, but only at the cost of forsaking love and selling his soul to the Ring's awesome power.

In terms of the straightforward Messianic line of King David and Jesus, the most powerful of the Ring Lords was King Solomon, who, in the Hebrew Talmud, was said to be the mightiest magician of the age. His great wisdom and considered judgment as a sorcerer-king were directly attributed to his ownership of an enchanted ring, and the legend of King Solomon's Ring was clearly a major inspiration for Tolkien.

In the same manner as Solomon, Tolkien's Ring Lord, Sauron, used his One Ring to command all the demons of the Earth. Solomon used the demons to build a Temple of Jerusalem, whilst Sauron used them to build the Tower of Mordor. The rings were also similar (as is usual in the tradition), in that each had the power to corrupt and destroy its master.

Solomon's Ring achieves his downfall through the agency of the demon Asmodaeus, whereas Sauron is, in effect, his own destructive demon.

Along with the rings, there are also story similarities concerning the possession of light-radiating jewels, with Solomon's being the Schamir and the Elf King Thingol's being the Silmaril - each of which is said to be an heirloom of the respective King's race.

By virtue of such Jewish writings, the Dominican wrath of the Spanish Inquisition (from about 1480) was largely directed against the Jews, especially those connected with Kabbalistic studies, and it was really as a direct result of this persecution that the witch-hunts began.

Prior to that, the Roman Inquisition had been more concerned with heterodox Christians: those heretics who were Christians of one sort or another (Arians, Nestorians, Nazarenes, or whatever), but were not members of the Roman Church, and whose culture revolved, to some extent, around traditions of magic and alchemy that were outside Church control. But, here were the Jews putting forward their own versions of the old lore - particularly those Jews in the Narbonne region of the Spanish Marches, where the House of David had once been given privileged rights of princely independence by Emperor Charlemagne.

It was recognized, therefore, that the net should be cast over a wider arena, so as to take account of those of completely different persuasions. It was no longer a matter of the Church simply endeavoring to clean up the Christian house. What of the Jews? What of the Muslims? What of the pagans in general?

And so, from the late 15th century, the Inquisition began a thorough process of "ethnic cleansing".

No one who was other than a full-blooded and obvious Catholic was safe. But, there had to be some new form of classification to pull all the prey into the ever-expanding net.

The Grand Inquisitor at the time was the brutal Tomâs de Torquemada, Senior Confessor to Ferdinand II and Queen Isabella of Spain. Under his direction, the answer was found and, very soon, the friars had set their sights upon "the most diabolical heathens who ever conspired to overthrow the Roman Church".

In 1484, two Dominicans, Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published a book called The Hammer of Witches.

This evil but imaginative work gave full details of what was perceived to be the hideous new threat posed by all the practitioners of satanic magic. The book was so persuasive that, two years later, Pope Innocent VIII issued an official Bull to authorize the suppression of this blasphemous sect.

Up to that point, the cult known as Witchcraft (to the extent that it existed at all) had not really constituted a threat to anyone. It rested mainly in the continuation of pagan ritual and fertility rites by the peasant classes. In real terms, it was little more than the vestige of a primaeval belief in the divine power of natural forces, focused above all on Pan, the mischievous Arcadian god of the shepherds.

Pan was traditionally portrayed with the legs, ears and horns of a goat, but the creative Dominicans had other ideas about the pipe-playing Horned One, and they blackened his image so that he was seen to correspond to the Devil himself. However, since the Inquisitors were all men, it was determined that witchcraft must be a form of depravity linked to the insatiable wantonness of women!

The problem was that nobody really knew who these presumed witches were, and so a series of ludicrously tragic trials and tests was devised to root them out. In the midst of all of this, the harsh Puritan sect became politically allied to the Roman strategy, implementing its own witch-hunts in England and, later, in America.

Over a period of some 250 years, more than a million innocent men, women and children were murdered by the delegated authority of the witch-finders.

It was against the backdrop of this religious fanaticism and persecution that the Renaissance movement was born - an era of rebirth and resurrection, facilitated by an environment of democratic free-thinking.

This era (with its height in the early 1500s) was the age when Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo developed the harmony of classical art to its highest form. And it was the age in which the excitement of pagan- oriented scholarship re-emerged in a burst of color to cross new frontiers of science, architecture and design.

During the course of this, in 1614 and 1615, two tracts, entitled The Rosicrucian Manifestos, emerged from Germany. These were immediately followed by an associated romance called The Chemical Wedding, written by the Lutheran pastor Johann Valentin Andreae.

The publications announced a new Age of Enlightenment and Hermetic liberation in which certain universal secrets would be unlocked and made known.

In view of the advent of Britain's scientific Royal Society and the inspired work of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Edmund Halley, Christopher Wren and others a few decades later, the prophecies were correct enough but, at the time, they were veiled in allegory and appeared to convey an even more pertinent message.

The writings centered upon the travels and learning of a mysterious character named Christian Rosenkreutz, a Brother of the Rosy Cross. His name was plainly designed to have Rosicrucian significance, and he was depicted wearing the apparel of the Knights Templars.

The action of The Chemical Wedding takes place in the magical Castle of the Bride and Bridegroom - a palace filled with lion effigies, where the courtiers are students of Plato. In a setting worthy of any Grail romance, the Virgin Lamplighter arranges for all present to be weighed on the scales, while a clock tells the motions of the heavens and the Golden Fleece is presented to the guests.

Music from strings and trumpets is played throughout, and all is cloaked in an atmosphere of chivalry, while Knights in Holy Orders preside.

Beneath the castle stands a mysterious sepulchre bearing strange inscriptions, and outside in the harbor are twelve ships of the Golden Stone, flying their individual flags of the Zodiac. Amid this curious reception, a fantasy play is conducted to tell the compelling story of an unnamed princess who, cast ashore in a wooden chest, is discovered by a prince, whom she marries, thereby causing a usurped royal heritage to be restored.

This is another Lost Bride fairy story of the type we have already seen. But, when combined with the two earlier publications, The Chemical Wedding's Grail significance was blatantly obvious, and the Church wasted no time in bringing the full weight of its condemnation against the Rosicrucian movement.

Having considered the historical Fairies, Pixies and Elves, we can now take a look at some others of the so-called Shining Ones: the Sprites, Goblins and Gnomes.

The definition of "sprite" is no more nor less than a "spirit person" - one of the transcendental realm of the Sidhé. The original Sprites were the ancient Scythian ghost warriors who painted their bodies grey-blue to look like corpses when they entered the battlefield.

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the character Puck is described as a "sprite", and in traditional English wood lore Puck is identified with a certain Robin Goodfellow who was said to be a "goblin". His father was Herne the Hunter. Hence, Oberon and Herne are one and the same. The name Oberon (a variant of Albrey the Elf King, as we have seen) is itself a derivative of the Scythian Oupire (meaning "over") and Ron (meaning "reign").

Oberon, therefore, means "Over Reign", which is the same as High King or Pendragon.

The description of "goblin" stems immediately from the Germanic word kobelin, and the kobelins were said to be mine-workers or those who worked underground. In the context of the Ring culture, goblins were, in essence, attendants of the Oupire Portal Guardians of the Rath - the mound-dwellings of the Tepes gateways to the ancestral Netherworld - and they were just as human as the Oupires themselves.

Gnomes, like Goblins, were said to be the guardians of the underground treasures - which is why the word is today associated with banking, as in the so-called "Gnomes of Zurich". The word root is in the Greek equivalent of gno-, from which we get "gnosis" and "gnoble" ("noble"). The Gnomes were therefore, once again, of the noble race and were referred to as "the Wise Ones".

Their job was indeed one of guardianship: they were guardians of the gnosis (the knowledge) and the Sacred Bloodline of the Albi-gens. It is by way of the noble (or gnomic) distinction that the Fairy Race in general was referred to as the Gentry - particularly the Druidic caste of the Pict-sidhé (the Pixies) who were the ultimate custodians of law and culture. Their female counterparts were the Behn-sidhé (the Banshee), which, in old Irish, simply means "the Wise Women".

In life, when presented with a seemingly insurmountable problem, one can either submit to the stress and pressure that it causes or, alternatively, one can mentally diminish the problem. That does not mean that it goes away, but it can appear less harassing and more controllable.

Well, that was precisely what the Church did with the Dragon succession - the Ring Lords of the Albi-gens, the Sacred Bloodline of the Holy Grail.

By way of redefining all the original names - Fairies, Elves, Pixies, Gnomes, Goblins, Sprites, or whatever - they diminished the problem by miniaturizing the nominal significance. In so doing, the transcendental race of the Sidhé was portrayed as minute little figures and moved into the realm of mythology. The fraudulent Donation of Constantine was then brought into play and, henceforth, only the Church could determine who was and was not a king!

If this strategy did not work sufficiently on its own, as was indeed the case in the Renaissance (a period of a more general awareness and enlightenment), then part two of the plan was brought into operation.

This was more specifically targeted at the key members of the Messianic strain: the ultimate Dragon succession of the Albi-gens - the dynastic Kings and Queens of the Sangréal and their senior Oupires. These people were real, and everyone knew that, so they could not be confined to the superficial realm of fantasy. They could, however, be portrayed as if (being of the Dragon blood) they were of a weird, half-human strain, beyond the Christian pale.

At best, they were perhaps mermaids and, at worst, they were vampires, but either way they were the evil, shape-shifting emissaries of Satan!

The fact that anyone believed such nonsense is difficult to comprehend in these more level-headed times. However, the myth is still operative and, to some extent, it is still working with a vengeance. It is even working on some whose apparent mission in life is to expose such propagandist dogma, but who - by way if its own cleverly contrived strategy - have actually fallen prey to it. In this regard, at this very moment there are some well-known, supposedly intelligent folk who should know better, claiming that the British Royal Family, along with myself and others, are really hideous reptiles from another planet!

One of the most surprising things about the Scythian Ring Lords is that their preserved remains from thousands of years ago (discovered even as far north as Siberia) show their bodies substantially tattooed with ring-tailed lemurs. Lemurs, we are led to believe, are native to (and pretty much restricted to) Madagascar and the Comoros Islands off Mozambique, but here they are, where we are told they never were, in northern Europe and the Black Sea regions!

It has long been known that there was once a continent, inhabited by a great king-tribe, which was noted for its lemurs.

Hence, it has been dubbed "Lemuria", setting a good many enthusiasts searching for its sunken whereabouts beneath the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian oceans as if it were the lost city of Atlantis.

Maybe such a concealed territory does exist. However, the fact is that (by whatever name it was once known) the mightiest Lemurian land tract was never lost.

It was the great mainland continent which still exists today, stretching across eastern Europe through the one-time USSR.

This was the original realm of the great Ring Lords, tracing back to about 40,000 BC - the homeland of the Oupires of the Pict-sidhé. It was the land of the mighty Warlords of the Dragon before they migrated and battled their way southwards in the ever-cooling climate of the last ice-age. Undoubtedly, the environment was once very warm there, as is proved by the fact that the lemurs travelled about as far south as they could possibly go by land before Madagascar and the Comoros broke away from the southern African mainland.

What did these early god-kings look like?

Well, they are now thoroughly identifiable from their preserved remains, which have been excavated at various sites from as far afield as Transylvania and Tibet. With their light-brown to red hair and pale eyes, the leather-clad men stood at least six foot six inches and upwards, while even the women were over six feet tall. Undoubtedly, these forebears of the Gaelic and Celtic High Kings were among the most awesome warriors of all history.

Of particular interest is the fact that the Anunnaki gods were as much a part of the Sidhé culture as they were of the Mesopotamian tradition. It was not for no reason that the settlement of Anu was hundreds of miles north of Sumer on the Caspian Sea. It was not for no reason that the ancient centre of Scythopolis (Sidhé-opolis), which the Syrians called Beth-Shean (the House of Power), was 800 miles away in Galilee.

Indeed, it is now suspected that the Ubaid culture of southern Mesopotamia - the culture which introduced municipal structure from about 5000 BC - was actually the Uper-ad culture: that of the Scythian Overlords, the Upers or Oupires.

It is also reckoned that the subsequent culture of the region, phonetically called Sumerian (pronounced "Shumerian"), was actually Sidhé-murian ("Shee-murian"). In fact, the case for this is now considerable, since the early Ring Lords of Scythia (the Tuatha Dé Danann king-tribe) were actually called the Sumaire.

And in the language of old Ireland - to where many of the caste migrated - the word sumaire means "dragon".

So, why have we not learned about these people in our histories? The answer is straightforward. They were, in practice, the real Elves and Fairies of our heritage, but their story was quashed from the earliest days of Roman suppression and subjugation - as the diminution of their figures caused a parallel diminution of their history.

The fact is, however, that for all we have been told about our cultural identity being from the classical scholarship of Greece, or from the imperial majesty of Rome, these things are entirely untrue. Such establishments appeared very late in the day.

The true sovereign heritage of Western culture - the culture from which derived all the so-called myth and legend which sits so comfortably within a collective race memory (no matter what the Church and academics might say in their attempts to sway us) - comes from one place alone. It comes from a place and time that might just as well be called Middle Earth as by any other name.

It comes from the long-distant Realm of the Ring Lords.