Chapter 1

The Nature of the Quest

The Ancient Secret Science Revealed


Many literary critics seem to think that a hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists. […] But the true test of a hypothesis, if it cannot be shown to conflict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlates and explains.
Cornford,

Origins of Attic Comedy

 

 

Disjecta Membra


The theme of the Quest for the Holy Grail is so much a part of Western Culture that it would be difficult to even imagine its absence. The number of books, paintings, sculptures, plays, movies, popular songs and other artistic or literary expressions that deal with the “matter of the Grail” are too numerous to even count.

 

The Holy Grail represents many things to many people, but in general we could say that it represents the Quest for All and Everything. This attitude has crept into our language when we say, “Oh, he’s searching for the Holy Grail of _____”.

 

You can fill in the blank with about any field of endeavor. Everyone who considers the subject, even momentarily, is certain that, at the core of the Legend is a secret and/or some ultimate prize of a material nature. It could even be said that the attachment Western Society has to the Legends of the Grail is really all out of proportion to the actual confusing content of the stories themselves.

 

In fact, many people who are certain that there is a deep meaning to the Legend of the Holy Grail haven’t even read the original stories that gave birth to that legend.

Yet, something acts on us - each and every one - to trigger the imagination, the soul, whenever the subject comes up; and this suggests that there is some vital thing - some magic - some mysterious archetypal dream - that the very words “Holy Grail” awakens in the spirit of Western peoples. It activates something in our collective unconscious, transforming the muddled and confusing elements of the original stories into an enchanted land of heroic love and mighty feats of derring-do that can only be performed by the purest and the best; and all of us - in our most private fantasies - dream that we are “The One” who can achieve the Grail.

Anyone who studies the matter of the Grail already knows that there are literally multiple thousands of scholarly and/or imaginative works on the subject. There are essays, studies, criticisms - volumes of them - devoted to this fascinating subject. The student of Grail literature also knows that these endless treatments of the subject present an almost hopeless muddle of contradictory opinions and perspectives. For example: there is one school of thought that proposes the Grail to be an entirely “Christian matter”.

 

There are undeniably Christian elements that dominate certain versions. Then, there is the school of thought that claims that the Grail matter is essentially pagan, and most definitely of Celtic provenance. They point out that the later Christianized versions were attempts by ecclesiastics to “cover-up” and amalgamate a popular theme to Christian purposes. These two are the broadest divisions, but no means the only ones!

 

Each group can be subdivided into branching schools, holding forth on any of dozens of theories.

The problem is that each of these two perspectives and their many subsets are faced with insurmountable problems when trying to promote their individual arguments. The theory of the Christian origin of the Grail breaks down completely when confronted with the most distressing fact that there is no Christian tradition concerning a “Joseph of Arimathea”.

 

It seems that Joseph does not exist outside of the Grail stories and must be relegated - by Christianity - to romantic fantasy. In fact, as Jessie Weston reported, as early as 1260, the Dutch writer, Jacob van Maerlant denounced the whole Grail issue as “lies”, declaring that the Church knew nothing of it. And he was right. The Pagan-Celtic advocates have to face their own difficulties when dealing with the legends. The part of the Grail stories that can be proven to be definitely pagan and Celtic - the Perceval story - in its original form, has nothing to do with the Grail at all!

So the problem is this: while parallels can be found for one or another feature of the whole cycle of stories when taken in isolation, this cannot serve a broad overview because to derive parallels necessitates breaking the stories up into a group of independent themes. There is no “Q” document, as is theorized for the Gospels of the New Testament - a lost original source from which different elements are drawn. There is no prototype with all the elements in one story - the Waste Land, the Fisher King, the Hidden Castle with its otherworldly feast and mysterious vessel and maidens, the Bleeding Lance and Cup.

In short, for either the pagan-Celtic or Christian perspective, there is just no original source that has preserved all of the elements together. What this means is that the most logical approach to take to the subject is to understand at the outset that neither school of thought can ignore the other and that a broader approach is needed. This means that the origin of the Grail story must be somewhere other than in popular legends or Christianized tales.

Jessie L. Weston, after more than thirty years of study, wrote a little book entitled From Ritual to Romance.

 

She noted therein an observation that was startling in its implications:

Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J. G. Frazer’sThe Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults described. The more closely I analyzed the tale, the more striking became the resemblance, and I finally asked myself whether it were not possible that this mysterious legend - mysterious alike in its character, its sudden appearance, the importance apparently assigned to it, followed by as sudden and complete a disappearance - we might not have the confused record of a ritual once popular, later surviving under conditions of strict secrecy? This would fully account for the atmosphere of awe and reverence, which even under distinctly non-Christian conditions never fails to surround the Grail.[…]

 

The more closely one studies pre-Christian Theology, the more strongly one is impressed with the deeply and daringly spiritual character of its speculations, and the more doubtful it appears that such teaching can depend on the unaided processes of human thought, or can have been evolved from such germs as we find among the supposedly ‘primitive’ peoples. […]

 

Are they really primitive? Or are we dealing, not with the primary elements of religion, but with the disjecta membra of a vanished civilization? Certainly it is that so far as historical evidence goes our earliest records point to the recognition of a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human race.

The Folk practices and ceremonies studied - the dances, the rough Dramas, the local and seasonal celebrations, do not represent the material out of which the Attis-Adonis cult was formed, but surviving fragments of a worship from which the higher significance has vanished.

My aim has been to prove the essentially archaic character of all the elements composing the Grail story rather than to analyze the story as a connected whole.21

21 Weston, Jessie L., From Ritual to Romance (London: Cambridge University Press 1920) pp. 3, 4, 7, 10.

Let me repeat those two most important statements: The “disjecta membra of a vanished civilization”, and “surviving fragments of a worship from which the higher significance has vanished".

 

In short, what Ms. Weston has proposed is that the Grail Stories were a brief emergence into the general consciousness of something so ancient that finding the threads and re-weaving the whole cloth of the Sacred Tapestry might require a perspective of not merely thousands of years, but possibly tens of thousands of years - antediluvian, even!

 

The very thought of something so daring in scope literally took my breath away. However, being naïve and something of a fool willing to rush in where angels fear to tread, I made the decision that I was going to search for the pieces to this puzzle if it took me the rest of my life.

Upon considering this idea as a hypothesis, I began to imagine how such an event might manifest. I came across another interesting item that helped me adjust the “lens” through which I was viewing reality. There is a story found in the History of Herodotus, which is an exact copy of an original tale of Indian origin except for the fact that in the original, it was an animal fable, and in Herodotus’ version, all the characters had become human. In every other detail, the stories are identical.

 

Joscelyn Godwin quotes R. E. Meagher, professor of humanities and translator of Greek classics, saying:

“Clearly, if characters change species, they may change their names and practically anything else about themselves.” 22

22 Godwin, Joscelyn Arktos, (Kempton Illinois: Adventures Unlimited Press, 1996).

Going further still, Mircea Eliade clarifies for us the process of the “mythicization” of historical personages. Eliade describes how a Romanian folklorist recorded a ballad describing the death of a young man bewitched by a jealous mountain fairy on the eve of his marriage. The young man, under the influence of the fairy, was driven off a cliff. The ballad of lament, sung by the fiancée, was filled with “mythological allusions, a liturgical text of rustic beauty”.

The folklorist, having been told that the song concerned a tragedy of “long ago”, discovered that the fiancée was still alive and went to interview her. To his surprise, he learned that the young man’s death had occurred less than 40 years before. He had slipped and fallen off a cliff; in reality, there was no mountain fairy involved.

Eliade notes that “despite the presence of the principal witness, a few years had sufficed to strip the event of all historical authenticity, to transform it into a legendary tale”. Even though the tragedy had happened to one of their contemporaries, the death of a young man soon to be married “had an occult meaning that could only be revealed by its identification with the category of myth”.

The myth seemed truer, more pure, than the prosaic event, because “it made the real story yield a deeper and richer meaning, revealing a tragic destiny”.

In the same way, a Yugoslavian epic poem celebrating a heroic figure of the fourteenth century, Marko Kraljevic, abolishes his historic identity, his life story is “reconstructed in accordance with the norms of myth”. His mother is a Vila, a fairy, as is his wife. He fights a three-headed dragon and kills it, fights with his brother and kills him, all in conformity with classical mythic themes.

The historic character of the persons celebrated in epic poetry is not in question, Eliade notes.

“But their historicity does not long resist the corrosive action of mythicization.”

A historic event, despite its importance, doesn’t remain in the popular memory intact.

“Myth is the last – not the first – stage in the development of a hero.”

The memory of a real event survives perhaps three centuries at best, as the historic figure is assimilated to his mythical model and the event itself is blurred into a category of mythical actions.

“This reduction of events to categories and of individuals to archetypes, carried out by the consciousness of the popular strata in Europe almost down to our day, is performed in conformity with archaic ontology”, Eliade writes. “We have the right to ask ourselves if the importance of archetypes for the consciousness of archaic man, and the inability of popular memory to retain anything but archetypes, does not reveal to us something more than a resistance to history exhibited by traditional spirituality?” 23

23 Eliade, Mircea, The Myth of The Eternal Return; (New York: Bollingen Foundation, Princeton University Press 1954) pp. 40, 43, 44, 46.

 

This mythicization of historical personages appears in exactly the same way in all times and cultures. As it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun”. Historical events are “assimilated” to the mythical archetype, and things that were never done by the hero are often assigned to him. Events, places and other characteristics of the “larger and deeper” context are also “attached”.

What this suggests is that mythicization of historical persons takes place in accordance with some “exemplary standard” This is why all of the mythical heroes resemble one another in so many respects. It’s not that each and every one of them did the same things; it is that somebody did something - at least one thing - that was heroic and therefore belonged to the exemplar. By so doing, they were “assimilated” to the archetype.

 

We are not suggesting that the real heroes or historical characters did not exist or that they did nothing heroic. That is not in question. What seems to be evident is that their real, historical nature - what they really did - cannot resist the “corrosive action of mythicization”. Therefore, discovering the identity of any hero by trying to compare his story to actual historical “facts” just simply will not work.

 

And there is something else important to consider here: if a fairly ordinary “hero” and his collection of localized deeds are “assimilated” to an exemplar, even if we do discover his identity, it means very little. We have only discovered one of many, many individuals assimilated to the same archetype, and we risk going around in circles forever, trying to sort the facts, in order to discover some “magical artifact” that is connected to the exemplar. In some instances the tribal memory can “hold” a recollection of an ancestor’s name, even if they have no clue about what that ancestor really did in complete terms. In other cases, the real name is forgotten and the name of the exemplar is attached.

 

This may not seem to be much help in figuring out who really did what, but, with care and patience and comparison, we can come to some logical conclusions about the past, before written historical records based on facts were written down - or before the original written accounts were destroyed - which is another distinct possibility.

Another point that is crucial to our investigation is that myths do tend to preserve the ideas of institutions, customs and landscapes even if we cannot rely on them for what we would call personal historical truth. And finally, what we perceive from studying myths, legends, sagas, and epics is the evident fact that they are not “creative inventions” of whole cloth. There is a model. There is a reduction of events to categories and individuals to archetypes, and this model is in conformity with archaic ontology! It could even be said that mythicization of historical persons lays bare for us the meaning of the person and event - meaning that can only be seen by withdrawing from the immediate historical event.

 

This leads us to ask the question:

“Does this tendency of the consciousness of man to retain archetypes and assimilate historical events and people to those exemplars reveal something to us about the true nature of the Exemplar itself?”

What is the true nature of the Exemplar?”

 

This is going to be a very important question to remember as we go along. It will assist not only in understanding how stories from various sources can be both true and not true at the same time. It is also going to be a major clue in our investigation of certain very important matters that will come into play as being pivotal in the Grail Quest. Is there a level of reality at which the Exemplar exists and which impresses itself upon humanity in broad psychological terms?

 

In other words, does the mythical archetype refer to a Theological Reality, a hyperdimensional realm, from which our own is “projected” like a movie, and in which we live and move and have our being like game pieces on a board?

As we study the Grail stories in comparison to other myths and legends, we notice the ubiquity of the universal theme of a Golden Age, which was destroyed in some terrible way - a deluge, a fall from grace, a punishment. We suspect that Geoffrey of Monmouth interwove this tradition cleverly with the story of King Arthur. In most cases, the stories talk about the world before, giants, the Gods and their doings, in terms that seem to be utterly fantastic.

 

The usual explanation ascribes such stories to any number of theories based on the fearful and ignorant state of the howling savages of the Stone Age who imaginatively created myths to explain the inexplicable forces of nature around them.

Many “alternative” researchers and theorists have already expounded at great length on the idea that many myths represent an archaic reality. Among the ideas they have proposed are those that follow the pattern that there was a time in human history when the planets interacted violently and these became the foundational myths of the “wars of the Gods”. In such scenarios, the “thunderbolts” of Jove are the exchanges of electrical potentials between planets.

 

Others have proposed that such stories represent the interactions of aliens or alien-human hybrids with advanced technology. In these theories, the “thunderbolts” of Jove are nuclear weapons and Jove was just a regular guy with a big bomb.

After considering our little story about the mythicization of history and the historicization of myth, we have some idea that both of these approaches could be true. In the case of the Grail Stories, we are dealing with the same problem many times over. However, in the Grail stories, there are repeated references to the same symbols or “objects of cultic value”. These mysterious objects form the central theme of the action of the story of the quest, and it seems that a true understanding of these objects is as essential to the hero himself as it is to the modern day “seeker of mysteries”.

 

The objects are a cup or dish, a lance or sword, and a stone. If we begin to search through myth and legend, finding one of them here, another there, and then reassemble these elements, we come to a certain idea: that they all are part of an ensemble.

But what does this ensemble of elements really represent?

 

When we consider these elements carefully, and study them, we come to the idea that an ancient scientific knowledge might be what is being portrayed in these stories, and how such knowledge might be “mythicized” over time if the infrastructure of civilization were destroyed. Naturally, the story Lord of the Flies immediately comes to mind as one example, but there are certainly many other situations where this process can be examined. In any event, the more we examine this matter, and the more examples we study, the more we realize that Ms. Weston was definitely onto something.

Let us consider the “Grail Hallows”, appearing repeatedly in myth and legend, as elements of an ancient technology. Let us observe how these objects were utilized, and the magical powers that were attributed to them. Let us note that all of these abilities were the attributes of a mastery of Space-Time manipulation. Keeping in mind that that myths DO tend to preserve the ideas of institutions, customs and landscapes. If this is so, the ancient legends are a stunning view of the universe as well as descriptions of very exciting technology.

So, let us proceed with this idea as a working hypothesis. We don’t have to accept it as true, let’s just play with it.

Imagine, if you will, a worldwide civilization similar in many ways to our own with advanced technology (though the technology of the ancient world was obviously quite different, as we will see). Imagine further that the imminent threat of a great cataclysm is realized too late to make proper preparations to preserve the civilization itself; or, perhaps the calamity is so devastating that it cannot be preserved. Imagine that the infrastructure of the civilization is destroyed. Imagine that, over the entire globe, out of say, six billion people, only 10 million survive, so terrible is the cataclysm.

 

Furthermore, the survivors themselves are so widely scattered, and all means of travel and communication have been destroyed, so that any idea of them gathering together to re-implement the infrastructure that formerly existed is impossible. What is more, many of those who survived are not even technically capable of doing so.

But, in four or five locations, a small handful of people with higher educations did survive. However, the unfortunate thing is, their education is so specialized that they are able to re-implement only limited and selected elements of the former civilization. And so, they do the best they can. They become the Lords of the Flies, so to speak, and they seek to find a way to re-create what was lost; to seek out the additional knowledge, to rebuild the world from the ashes.

Having only uneducated and technically deficient people to do all the necessary work, and knowing that when they die, what they do know will be lost, they attempt to pass on as much knowledge as they can to as many as they can, knowing that even this is incomplete. Or, conversely, they create an “elite power structure” where the knowledge is only dispensed to a very few in order to keep the reins of power in their own hands and the hands of their descendants.

In such a situation, what knowledge would be considered the most valuable to pass on? What would be foremost in the mind of such a person?

Well, the progenitor of a power hungry elite would certainly pass on knowledge that would perpetuate the Control of others. But an individual who wishes to help humanity as a whole might be thinking that a better world may come if they can only pass on what they know, and leave it up to those who come after to add the missing pieces.

 

Would not this knowledge be the important things about the civilization itself? It’s infrastructure? It’s modes of communication, of travel, of laws and ethics; its high science; and most of all, the terrible information that was revealed at the very last, just before everything was blasted back to Stone Age conditions: the knowledge that the earth regularly and cyclically undergoes cataclysm.

Imagine the sighting of an oncoming disaster, such as a barrage of comets, in our own civilization. The first thing our scientists would do would be to make measurements and observations; study path and trajectory; and soon they would announce on television, to the world, that we are about to go through a dangerous period that, apparently, is part of a long period cometary shower.

 

They would announce their numbers to the world, and everyone would know, just a short time before the destruction, that what they are facing has been here before. And that knowledge, revealed too late, would be the one thing that the survivors of such destruction would want to pass on to their children. And so, in such an environment, under such conditions, myths would be born consisting of memories of the world before and all its glorious technology, how it ended, and that disaster will come again.

Imagine, if you will, a group of survivors.

 

They emerge from their place of safety to find that the world that they knew is not just damaged, but that the violent convulsions of the planet have folded over, ground up, and washed away most of what formerly existed. The factories, the power plants, the cities, the superhighways, the railway lines, the airports and airplanes, the great ships and industrial complexes - all reduced to twisted bits of iron, incinerated wood, and concrete that has been ground into gravel.

 

With what skills they have, lacking anything but the most rudimentary hand-made tools, they build their little community and try to survive in the best way they can.

As time goes by, our little community of survivors is doing well. They have grown old, and now they sit around the fires with a new generation of little ones gathered around to hear stories of “what did you do when you were young, grandpa?”

 

And the grandfathers sigh with longing for the ease and comfort and marvels of all that was lost, and answer:

“We went out to dinner at fine restaurants and watched movies.”

“What is a movie, Grandpa?”

“Well, it is a big place where everybody used to go to see famous movie stars having wonderful adventures. Everybody would sit in a row of seats and the movie would appear on a big white wall in front of us.”

“What appeared on the wall?”

“The images of the movie stars.”

“What is a movie star, grandpa?”

“A movie star is a famous person who pretends to be someone else in order to tell a story.”

“What is an image, grandpa?”

“It’s a sort of projection of the real movie star who is not actually there. They live somewhere else, and when they are not acting in movies, they have ordinary lives.”

“How does it happen that the image of the movie star can be seen when they are not really there?”

“Well, that’s technology. It has to do with a light that is shone through a long piece of transparent stuff that runs around a wheel.”

“What runs the wheel, grandpa?”

“Electricity.”

“What is electricity, Grandpa?”

“It’s a great force that is in the air. Electricity is what you see when you see lightning. When we were little, we used electricity to make everything work. It was the power that made our lights come on. It was what we used to cook our food. We used electricity to run our stereos and radios and televisions.”

“Grandpa, what is a television?”

“It’s a sort of box and the images of the same movie stars that you see in a theater can be seen right in your own house.”

“How do the images get into the television?”

“They come through the air. There were satellites floating high in the air around the world that sent these images into the television. The same satellites also helped us to be able to talk to anybody anywhere in the world on a telephone.”

“Grandpa, what’s a telephone?”

We will leave this most interesting question and answer process and jump now to a time when Grandpa has gone to his reward, and the grandchild has grown up and has children.

 

He is telling his own children about the stars in the skies that send messages into boxes and make it possible for anyone to talk to anyone else anywhere in the world. He also is telling his grandchildren about the great movie stars in Hollywood who could appear on a blank wall in a big theater after a big banquet with the Gods, or, under special circumstances, if the Gods choose to speak from the heavens, in a special box in a person’s very own home.

Skip another generation, and we have the community falling upon hard times. They remember the stories of the world before, and it seems that they need help. Perhaps if they build a replica of the box like object that was so important a part of the time of plenty, they will be able to communicate with the Gods in Hollywood who will then bring the famine or plague to an end.

So, they build a box and set it on an altar. They begin to call upon the different names they remember from the grandfather’s stories. “Oh, great mother Elizabeth Taylor! Hear our plea! Come to help us great father Clark Gable!” But nothing happens. Perhaps the Gods are angry? Maybe they want something? How about a sacrifice? Some wine, perhaps? Maybe the Gods miss the banquet part? They want a nice succulent lamb. No? Well, how about a newborn infant? A virgin? Two? A dozen or so?

And so, as time goes by, the facts of what existed before become little more than fairy tales, clues to a former time, buried in layers of ignorance and superstition. And as the populations grow, and travel is undertaken, they meet tribes with similar stories but from different angles. Perhaps they meet a group whose “grandfather” was a great scientist. He taught his grandchildren to memorize scientific formulas.

 

Naturally, because their grandfather was a scientist and passed “scientific and superior knowledge” to them, they feel that they are in a position to instruct those ignorant rubes that are invoking Liz Taylor and Clark Gable. No, indeed, it must be done this way: you have to form a circle around the television and say the right words, the magical formulas.

 

And so, the combined tribes begin to dance around the “Cube of Space”, chanting,

“Eeee equals Emmmm Ceeee squared! Eeee equals Emmmm Ceeee squared! Eeee equals Emmmm Ceeee squared! We appeal to the great God of Ein-Stein! Speak to us!”

And if they do it long enough, they will induce the production of certain brain chemicals, which will lead to states of ecstasy, and there you have it! The proof that it works. And so, we have our legends of great occult science in the making.

I’m sure that the reader can take these short vignettes even further, and see how the memory of the golden age was passed down, and how myths, if they were properly examined and analyzed, could be the key to finding the threads of an ancient technology, the disjecta membra of a lost civilization.

However, that is not to say that there were not some groups who did actually manage to re-create some of the technology. It seems evident that some scientists, some technocrats, survived and were responsible for the sudden emergence of the civilizations that we know in our recorded history. It is also equally likely, human nature being what it is, that the very progenitors of these civilizations became the elite, and as often happens, when the elite take advantage of the masses, revolutions come about destroying the very wellsprings of that knowledge.

Also, as noted, there were probably others who sought to preserve the knowledge, encoded for the future time when only a revival of technology would make any of it comprehensible. This brings us to another line of thought.

In 1984, the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation and a group of other institutions commissioned Thomas A. Sebeok, to elaborate answers to a question posed by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The American government had chosen several desert areas in the US for the burial of nuclear waste. The idea was that it was easy to protect it from intrusions at the present time, but since they were dealing with deadly elements which had half-lives of ten thousand years or more, how to protect people in the future from destroying humanity by dangerous intrusions into such areas?

 

Ten thousand years is more than enough time for great empires and civilizations to rise and perish. In just a few centuries after the last pharaoh had disappeared, the knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs had disappeared as well, so it is conceivable that mankind could be reduced to a “dark age” existence that came into being following the decline of the Golden Age of Greece, and the fall of the Roman Empire. The question was: How will we warn the future about the danger?

 

Umberto Eco discusses Sebeok’s findings:

Almost immediately, Sebeok discarded the possibility of any type of verbal communication, of electric signals as needing a constant power supply, of olfactory messages as being of brief duration, and of any sort of ideogram based on convention. Even a pictographic language seemed problematic.

Sebeok analyzed an image from an ancient primitive culture where one can certainly recognize human figures, but it is hard to say what they are doing dancing, fighting, or hunting?

Another solution would be to establish temporal segments of three generations each, (calculating that, in any civilization, language will not alter beyond recognition between grandparents and grandchildren), giving instructions that, at the end of each segment, the message would be reformulated, adapting it to the semiotic conventions prevailing at the moment. But even this solution presupposes precisely the sort of social continuity that the original question had put into doubt.

Another solution was to fill up the entire zone with messages in all known languages and semiotic systems, reasoning that it was statistically probable that at least one of these messages would be comprehensible to the future visitors. Even if only part of one of the messages was decipherable, it would still act as a sort of Rosetta stone, allowing the visitors to translate all the rest.

 

Yet even this solution presupposed a form of cultural continuity, however weak it would be.

The only remaining solution was to institute a sort of ‘priesthood‘ of nuclear scientists, anthropologists, linguists and psychologists supposed to perpetuate itself by co-opting new members. This caste would keep alive the knowledge of the danger, creating myths and legends about it. Even though, in the passage of time, these ‘priests’ would probably lose a precise notion of the peril that they were committed to protect humanity from, there would still survive, even in a future state of barbarism, obscure but efficacious taboos.

It is curious to see that, having been presented with a choice of various types of universal language, the choice finally fell on a ‘narrative’ solution, thus reproposing what REALLY DID HAPPEN MILLENNIA AGO (my emphasis). Egyptian has disappeared, as well as any other perfect and holy primordial language, and what remains of all this is only myths, tales without a code, or whose code has long been lost.

 

Yet they are still capable of keeping us in a state of vigil in our desperate effort at decipherment. 24

24 Eco, Umberto, The Search For The Perfect Language, (Oxford: Blackwell 1995) p. 177, emphasis mine.

It is extraordinarily significant to me that Eco has suggested so clearly here the idea that our ancient ancestors may have been faced with the knowledge of a very great peril to mankind and “brain-stormed” for a solution as to how to transmit this information to future generations. And it is with this idea that we come back to the myths that formed the foundation for said religions and form a “working hypothesis” that such stories are the “narratives” provided by our ancestors to warn us about something, as defined by Thomas Sebeok in his report to the Office of Nuclear Waste Isolation.

 

And here we find the problem: We cannot just read these things, put the pieces together like a regular puzzle and thereby discover the answer.

 

We have to deeply analyze the stories, discover the various versions and their inversion; and, by tracking the roots of words, discover their relations. In such a way, we just MIGHT be able to discover what it is our ancestors knew and what they have so desperately tried to tell us.

 


Alchemy and the Enclave in the Pyrenees


Nowadays, our materialistic science derides alchemists as misguided mystics who followed a dream of discovering a substance that could transform base metals into gold. Yes, they admit that much scientific discovery was accomplished in these pursuits, but they toss out the objective of the alchemists as just a pipe dream.

 

Nevertheless, there are interesting stories there, some so deeply curious that the mind cannot grapple with the implications, and they are immediately discarded as too fantastic for serious consideration. I want to recount a few of them here so that the reader who is not familiar with the literature might be sufficiently intrigued to do research on his/her own.

But first, a short discussion of the “Philosopher’s Stone”. This is the goal of the Alchemist; a fabled substance that can not only transmute metals into gold, but can heal any illness, banish all sickness from a person’s life, and confer an extended lifespan, if not immortality, on the body. At least, that is how it is described. That may or may not be a “cover story”.

It was thought that, by a lengthy process of purification, one could extract from various minerals the “natural principle” that supposedly caused gold to “grow” in the earth. In an anonymous 17th Century alchemical text, The Sophic Hydrolith, this process is described as “purging [the mineral] of all that is thick, nebulous, opaque and dark”, and what would be left would be a mercurial “water of the Sun”, which had a pleasant, penetrating odor, and was very volatile.

Part of this liquid is put aside, and the rest is then mixed with a twelfth of its weight of “the divinely endowed body of gold”, (ordinary gold won’t do because it is defiled by daily use). This mixture then forms a solid amalgam which is heated for a week. It is then dissolved in some of the mercurial water in an egg-shaped phial.

Then, the remaining mercurial water is added gradually, in seven portions; the phial is sealed, and kept at such a temperature as will hatch an egg. After 40 days, the phial’s contents will be black; after seven more days small grainy bodies like fish eyes are supposed to appear. Then the “Philosopher’s Stone” begins to make its appearance: first reddish in color; then white, green and yellow like a peacock’s tail then dazzling white; and later a deep glowing red. Finally, “the revivified body is quickened, perfected and glorified” and appears in a beautiful purple.

This and many similarly obscure and crazy sounding texts are the bulk of Alchemical Literature. It occurred to me early on that these texts were a code, and so I persisted in reading many texts of this kind and searching for clues there and in the stories of the alchemists themselves. It was in reading the anecdotes about so-called Alchemists that I became convinced that there was, indeed, something very mysterious going on here.

For example: In 1666, Johann Friedrich Schweitzer, physician to the Prince of Orange, writes of having been visited by a stranger who was “of a mean stature, a little long face, with a few small pock holes, and most black hair, not at all curled, a beardless chin, about three or four and forty years of age (as I guessed), and born in North Holland.”

Before I finish the story, it needs to be pointed out that Dr. Schweitzer, who was the author of several medical and botanical books, was a careful and objective observer and was a colleague of the philosopher, Baruch Spinoza. Schweitzer was a trained scientific observer; a reputable medical man, and not given to fraud or practical jokes. And yet, what I am about to describe is, in modern understanding, impossible.

Now, what happened was that the stranger made small talk for awhile and then, more or less out of the blue, asked Dr. Schweitzer whether he would recognize the “Philosopher’s Stone” if he saw it. He then took out of his pocket a small ivory box that held “three ponderous pieces or small lumps... each about the bigness of a small walnut, transparent, of a pale brimstone colour”. The stranger told Schweitzer that this was the very substance sought for so long by the Alchemists.

Schweitzer held one of the pieces in his hand and asked the stranger if he could have just a small piece. The man refused, but Schweitzer managed to steal a small bit by scraping it with his fingernail. The visitor left after promising to return in three weeks time to show Dr. Schweitzer some “curious arts in the fire”.

Well, as soon as he was gone, Dr. Schweitzer ran to his laboratory where he melted some lead in a crucible and added the tiny piece of stone. But, the metal did NOT turn into gold as he anticipated. Instead, “almost the whole mass of lead flew away, and the remainder turned into a mere glassy earth”.

Three weeks later, the mysterious stranger was at his door again. They conversed, and for a long time the man refused to allow Dr. Schweitzer see his stones again, but, at last “he gave me a crumb as big as a rape or turnip seed, saying, receive this small parcel of the greatest treasure of the world, which truly few kings or princes have ever known or seen”.

Schweitzer must have been a whiner because he recounts that he protested that this was not sufficient to transmute as much as four grains of lead into gold. At this, the stranger took the piece back, cut it in half, and flung one part in the fire, saying: “it is yet sufficient for thee!”

At this point, Schweitzer confessed his theft from the previous visit, and described how the substance had behaved with his molten lead. The stranger began to laugh and told him,

“Thou are more dextrous to commit theft than to apply thy medicine; for if thou hadst only wrapped up thy stolen prey in yellow wax, to preserve it from the arising fumes of lead, it would have penetrated to the bottom of the lead, and transmuted it to gold.”

The guy leaves at this point and promises to return the next morning to show Schweitzer the correct way to perform the transmutation but,

The next day he came not, nor ever since. Only he sent an excuse at half an hour past nine that morning, by reason of his great business, and promised to come at three in the afternoon, but never came, nor have I heard of him since; whereupon I began to doubt of the whole matter. Nevertheless late that night my wife... came soliciting and vexing me to make experiment... saying to me, unless this be done, I shall have no rest nor sleep all this night... She being so earnest, I commanded a fire to be made - thinking, alas, now is this man (though so divine in discourse) found guilty of falsehood... My wife wrapped the said matter in wax, and I cut half an ounce of six drams of old lead, and put into a crucible in the fire, which being melted, my wife put in the said Medicine made up in a small pill or button, which presently made such a hissing and bubbling in its perfect operation, that within a quarter of an hour all the mass of lead was transmuted into the ... finest gold.

Baruch Spinoza, who lived nearby, came the next day to examine this gold and was convinced that Schweitzer was telling the truth. The Assay Master of the province, a Mr. Porelius, tested the metal and pronounced it genuine; and Mr. Buectel, the silversmith, subjected it to further test that confirmed that it was gold. The testimony of these men survives to this day.

Now, either ALL of them are lying, or Dr. Schweitzer really did have a strange experience exactly as he describes it. The interesting thing is that other people have described similar visitations by strange men who proclaim to them the truth of the alchemical process, demonstrate it, and then mysteriously disappear. It has happened sufficiently often, in widely enough separated places and times to suggest that it is not a collusive fraud nor a delusion.

Twenty years before Schweitzer’s meeting with the mysterious stranger, Jan Baptiste van Helmont, who was responsible for several important scientific discoveries, and was the first man to realize that there were other gases than air; and who invented the term “gas”, wrote:

For truly I have divers times seen it [The Philosopher’s Stone], and handled it with my hands, but it was of colour such as is in Saffron in its powder, yet weighty, and shining like unto powdered glass. There was once given unto me one fourth part of one grain [16 milligrams]... I projected [it] upon eighty ounces [227 grams] of quicksilver [mercury] made hot in a crucible; and straightaway all the quicksilver, with a certain degree of noise, stood still from flowing, and being congealed, settled like unto a yellow lump; but after pouring it out, the bellows blowing, there were found eight ounces and a little less than eleven grains of the purest gold.

Sir Isaac Newton studied alchemy until his death, remaining convinced that the possibility of transmutation existed. The great philosophers and mathematicians, Descartes and Leibnitz, both were convinced that transmutation was a reality. Even Robert Boyle who wrote a book entitled The Sceptical Chymist, was sure until the end of his life, that transmutation was possible!

Why? These men were scientists.

 

The argument that their ideas or observations were less scientific than those of the present day simply does not stand up to scrutiny. As noted, alchemists were rumored at various times to have gained immortality, and one of these was Nicolas Flamel.

 

Flamel was a poor scribe, or scrivener and copyist. The story goes that, in 1357 he bought an old illuminated book...

The cover of it was of brass, well bound, all engraven with letters of strange figures... This I know that I could not read them nor were they either Latin of French letters... As to the matter that was written within, it was engraved (as I suppose) with an iron pencil or graver upon... bark leaves, and curiously coloured...

Reportedly, the first page was written in golden letters that said Abraham the Jew, Priest, Prince, Levite, Astrologer and Philosopher, to the Nation of the Jews dispersed by the Wrath of God in France, wisheth Health. So, quite rightly, Flamel referred to the manuscript as the Book of Abraham the Jew.

The dedication was followed by curses upon anyone who was not either a priest or a Jew reading the book. But, Flamel was a scribe, which he must have imagined exempted him from these curses, so he read the book. The purpose of the book was avowedly to give assistance to the dispersed Jews by teaching them to transmute lead into gold so that they could pay their taxes to the hated Roman government. The instructions were clear and easy, but only described the latter part of the process. The instructions for the beginning were said to be in the illustrations given on the 4th and 5th leaves of the book.

 

Flamel remarked that, although these were well executed,

...yet by that could no man ever have been able to understand it without being well skilled in their Qabalah, which is a series of old traditions, and also to have been well studied in their books.

As the story goes, Flamel tried for 21 years to find someone who could explain these pictures to him. Finally, his wife urged him to go to Spain and seek out a rabbi or other learned Jew who might assist him. So, he made the famous pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James at Compostela, carrying with him carefully made copies of the book.

After his devotions at the shrine, he went to the city of Leon in northern Spain where he met a certain “Master Canches”, a Jewish physician. When this man saw the illustrations, he was “ravished with great astonishment and joy”, upon recognizing them as parts of a book that had long been believed to have been destroyed. He declared his intention to return with Flamel to France, but he died on the trip at Orleans. Flamel returned to Paris alone.

 

But, apparently, the old Jew must have told him something for he wrote:

I had now the prima materia, the first principles, yet not their first preparation, which is a thing most difficult, above all things in the world... Finally, I found that which I desired, which I also knew by the strong scent and odor thereof. Having this, I easily accomplished the Mastery... The fist time that I made projection [transmutation] was upon Mercury, whereof I turned half a pound, or thereabouts, into pure silver, better than that of the Mine, as I myself assayed, and made others assay many times. This was upon a Monday, the 17th of January about noon, in my home, Perrenelle [his wife] only being present, in the year of the restoring of mankind 1382.

Several months later Flamel did his first transmutation into gold. Is this just a story? Well, what IS true and can be verified is that Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel endowed,

“fourteen hospitals, three chapels and seven churches, in the city of Paris, all which we had new built from the ground, and enriched with great gifts and revenues, with many reparations in their churchyards. We also have done at Boulogne about as much as we have done at Paris, not to speak of the charitable acts which we both did to particular poor people, principally widows and orphans.”

After Flamel’s death in 1419 the rumors began. Hoping that they could find something hidden in one of his houses, people searched them again and again until one of them was completely destroyed. There were stories that Nicolas and Perenelle were still alive. Supposedly, she had gone to Switzerland and he buried a log in her grave, and then another log was buried at his own funeral.

In the intervening centuries, the stories persist that Flamel and Perenelle defeated death.

 

The 17th century traveller, Paul Lucas, while travelling in Asia Minor, met a Turkish philosopher who told him that,

“true philosophers had had the secret of prolonging life for anything up to a thousand years...”.

 

Lucas said, “At last I took the liberty of naming the celebrated Flamel, who, it was said, possessed the Philosopher’s Stone, yet was certainly dead. He smiled at my simplicity, and asked with an air of mirth: Do you really believe this? No, no, my friend, Flamel is still living; neither he nor his wife has yet tasted death. It is not above three years since I left both... in India; he is one of my best friends.”

In 1761, Flamel and his wife were reported to have been seen attending the opera in Paris.

Well, there is an issue here regarding the supposed clue about “Abraham the Jew” which seems to point us in the direction of a Jewish fraternity of alchemists or keepers of secrets. I don’t want to go off on that thread here and now because it would add so much complexity to the issues that we might never find our way through the maze. But, to ease the mind of the reader, I will make a few remarks about this here.

 

Even though we have not yet come to the mystery of Fulcanelli, supposedly a 20th century alchemist who accomplished the great work, let me mention while the subject is at hand that Eugene Canseliet, in his preface to the Second Edition of Fulcanelli’s Le Mystere des Cathedrales, apparently upon the instruction of the master alchemist, emphasized dramatically the difference between kabbala and Cabala saying:

...this book has restored to light the phonetic cabala, whose principles and application had been completely lost. After this detailed and precise elucidation and after the brief treatment of it, which I gave in connection with the centaur, the man-horse of Plessis-Bourre, in Deux Logis Alchimiques, this mother tongue need never be confused with the Jewish Kabbala. Though never spoken, the phonetic cabala, this forceful idiom, is easily understood and it is the instinct or voice of nature.

By contrast, the Jewish Kabbala is full of transpositions, inversions, substitutions and calculations, as arbitrary as they are abstruse. This is why it is important to distinguish between the two words, CABALA and KABBALA in order to use them knowledgeably. Cabala derives from cadallhz or from the Latin caballus, a horse; kabbala is from the Hebrew Kabbalah, which means tradition. Finally, figurative meanings like coterie, underhand dealing or intrigue, developed in modern usage by analogy, should be ignored so as to reserve for the noun cabala the only significance which can be assured for it.25

Now, the curious bringing in of the terms “coterie”, “underhand dealing” and “intrigue” in conjunction with what he has just remarked about Kabbalah meaning “tradition”, and Cabala being “horse”, is a most curious juxtaposition of words. It almost seems that Canseliet is telling us that the Kaballah, or the tradition is a red herring.

 

Fulcanelli himself makes a curious remark in Dwellings of the Philosophers:

Alchemy is obscure, only because it is hidden. The philosophers who wanted to transmit the exposition of their doctrine and the fruit of their labors to posterity took great care not to divulge the art by presenting it under a common form, so that the layman could not misuse it.26

25 Fulcanelli, The Mystery of the Cathedrals, 1984, Brotherhood of Life, Las Vegas.
26 Fulcanelli, The Dwellings of the Philosophers, 1999, Archive Press, Boulder.


The point of this short aside is this: don’t assume anything about Jews, Masons, or any other group when trying to solve the mystery. Nearly everything we come across will be obscured. And, when it is right out in plain view, it will be even more difficult to see!

Getting back to our purported alchemists, we come now to the year 1745 in which Prince Charles Edward Stuart, known as the “Young Pretender”, staged his Jacobite rebellion in an attempt to regain the British throne for his father the “Old Pretender”. The Jacobite cause, for all intents and purposes, had been crushed at the battle of Culloden in April of that year, yet there was a constant fear by the British government that the Jacobites were still plotting with their French sympathizers, and being French and in London was, at that time, a liability.

 

This “spy fever” resulted in the arrest of many Frenchmen on trumped up charges, and most of them were later released, but it was a dangerous time for Gallic visitors!

In November of that year, one Frenchman was arrested and accused of having pro-Jacobite letters in his possession. He became very indignant and claimed that the correspondence had been “planted” on him. Considering the mood of the time, it is quite surprising that he was believed and released!

 

Horace Walpole, English author and Member of Parliament, wrote a letter about this incident to Sir Horace Mann on December 9, 1745 saying:

“The other day they seized an odd man who goes by the name of Count Saint-Germain. He has been here these two years, and will not tell who he is or whence, but professes that he does not go by his right name. He sings and plays on the violin wonderfully, is mad and not very sensible.”

This is one of the few “authentic” on the scene comments about one of the most mysterious characters of the 18th century, the Count Saint-Germain. Another acquaintance of the Count Saint-Germain, Count Warnstedt, described Saint-Germain as, “The completest charlatan, fool, rattle-pate, windbag and swindler”. Yet, his last patron said that Saint-Germain was, “perhaps one of the greatest sages who ever lived”.

 

Clearly this was one of those people you either love or hate!

Saint-Germain first comes to our attention in the fashionable circles of Vienna in about 1740, where he made a stir by wearing black all the time! Everybody else was into bright colors, satins and laces, ornate patterns and designs; and along comes Saint-Germain with his somber black outfits set off by glittering diamonds on his fingers, shoe buckles, and snuff box! What an attention getter! If you want to stand out in a roomful of robins, cardinals and bluejays, just be a blackbird! He also had the habit of carrying handfuls of loose diamonds in his pockets instead of cash!

So, there he is, garnering attention to himself in this bizarre way, and naturally he makes the acquaintance of the local leaders of fashion, Counts Zabor and Lobkowitz, who introduce him to the French Marshal de Belle Isle. Well, it seems that the Marshal was seriously under-the-weather, but his illness is not recorded so we can’t evaluate the claims that Saint-Germain cured him. Nevertheless, the Marshal was so grateful that he took Saint-Germain to Paris with him and set him up with apartments and a laboratory.

The details of the Count’s life in Paris are pretty well known, and it is there that the rumors began. There is an account by a “Countess de B___” (a nom de plume, it seems, so we have to hold the information somewhat suspect), who wrote in her memoirs, Chroniques de l’oeil de boeuf, that, when she met the Count at a soiree given by the aged Countess von Georgy, whose late husband had been Ambassador to Venice in the 1670’s, that the old Countess remembered Saint-Germain from those former times. So, the old girl asked the Count if his father had been there at the time. He replied no, but HE had!

Well, the man that Countess von Georgy had known was at least 45 years old then, at least 50 years previously, and the man standing before her could not be any older than 45 now!

 

The Count smiled and said:

 “I am very old”.

“But then you must be nearly 100 years old”, the Countess exclaimed.

“That is not impossible”, the Count replied. He then related some details that convinced the old lady that it was really him she had met in Venice.

The Countess exclaimed: “I am already convinced. You are a most extraordinary man, a devil!”

“For pity’s sake!”, cried Saint-Germain in a loud voice heard all around the room. “No such names!” He began to tremble all over and left the room immediately.

A pretty dramatic introduction to society, don’t you think? But, was it real, or the ploy of a very clever con artist? Did he deliberately choose to adopt the name of someone long dead, about whom he may have already known a great deal, and then did he set out to deceive and con in a manner well known to us in the present time as the modus operandi of the psychopath? Was he a snake oil salesman or a true man of mystery?

In any event, that was the beginning of the “legend”, and many more stories of a similar nature spread through society like wildfire. Saint-Germain apparently fed the fires with hints that he had known the “Holy Family” intimately and had been invited to the marriage feast at Cana where Jesus turned water into wine, and dropped casually the remark that he “had always known that Christ would meet a bad end”.

 

According to him, he had been very fond of Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, and had even proposed her canonization at the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325! What a guy! A line for every occasion!

Pretty soon the Count had Louis XV and his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, eating out of his hand, and it certainly could be true that he was a French spy in England when he was arrested there, because he later did handle some sticky business for the credulous king of France.

In 1760, Louis sent Saint-Germain to the Hague as his personal representative to arrange a loan with Austria that was supposed to help finance the SevenYears’ war against England. But, while in Holland, the Count had a falling out with his friend Casanova, who was also a diplomat at the Hague. Casanova tried hard to discredit Saint-Germain in public, but without success. One has to wonder just what it was that Casanova discovered or came to think about Saint-Germain at this time.

In any even, Saint-Germain was making other enemies. One of these enemies was the Duc de Choiseul, King Louis’ Foreign Minister. The Duc discovered that Saint-Germain had been scoping out the possibilities of arranging a peace between England and France. Now, that doesn’t sound like a bad plan at all, but the Duc managed to convince the King that this was a dire betrayal, and the Count had to flee to England and then back to Holland.

In Holland, the Count lived under the name Count Surmont, and he worked to raise money to set up laboratories in which he made paint and dyes and engaged in his alchemical experiments. By all accounts, he was successful in some sense, because he disappeared from Holland with 100,000 guilders!

He next shows up in Belgium as the “Marquis de Monferrat”. He set up another laboratory with “other people’s money” before disappearing again. (Are we beginning to see a pattern here?)

For a number of years, Saint-Germain’s activities continued to be reported from various parts of Europe and, in 1768 he popped up in the court of Catherine the Great. Turkey had just declared war on Russia, and Saint-Germain promoted himself as a valuable diplomat because of his status as an “insider” in French politics. Pretty soon he was the adviser of Count Alexei Orlov, head of the Russian Imperial Forces.

 

Orlov made him a high-ranking officer of the Russian Army and Saint-Germain acquired an English alias, “General Welldone”.

His successes in Russia could have enabled him to retire on his laurels, but he didn’t. In 1774 he appeared in Nuremberg seeking money from the Margrave of Brandenburg, Charles Alexander. His ostensible alias at this point (apparently he was no longer satisfied with being either a Count or a Marquis) was Prince Rakoczy of Transylvania!

Naturally, the Margrave of Brandenburg was impressed when Count Orlov visited Nuremburg on a state visit and embraced “the Prince” warmly. But later, when the Margrave did a little investigating, he discovered that the real Prince Rakoczy was indubitably dead and that this counterfeit Prince was, in fact, only Count Saint-Germain! Saint-Germain did not deny the charges, but apparently he felt that it was now time to move on.

The Duc de Choiseul, Saint-Germain’s old enemy, had claimed that the Count was in the employ of Frederick the Great. But, that was probably not true because, at this point, Saint-Germain wrote to Frederick begging for patronage. Frederick ignored him, which is peculiar if he had been in the employ of the Prussian king as de Choiseul thought.

In the way of the psychopathic con man who can never quite figure out when to quit, Saint-Germain went to Leipzig and presented himself to Prince Frederick Augustus of Brunswick as a Freemason of the fourth grade!

Now, Frederick Augustus just happened to be the Grand Master of the Prussian Masonic Lodges, so this was really a stupid move on the part of Saint-Germain since it turned out that he was not a Mason! But, it is true of the pattern of all con men; their egos eventually prove to be their downfall! The Prince challenged Saint-Germain because he did not know the secret signals and sent him away as a fraud.

In 1779, Saint-Germain was an old man in his 60’s who continued to claim to be vastly older. He hadn’t lost his touch because, at Eckenforde in Schleswig, Germany, he was able to charm Prince Charles of Hesse-Cassel.

 

At this point, part of his scam included being a mystic, for he is recorded as having told Prince Charles:

“Be the torch of the world. If your light is that only of a planet, you will be as nothing in the sight of God. I reserve for you a splendour, of which the solar glory is a shadow. You shall guide the course of the stars, and those who rule Empires shall be guided by you.”

Sounds rather like the build-up to another con job! Nothing like feeding the ego of the “mark” before slipping away with all his money! However, Saint Germain was on the way to a place where money was of no use. On February 27, 1784, he died at Prince Charles’ home on Eckenforde.

 

He was buried locally and the Prince erected a stone that said:

He who called himself the Comte de Saint-Germain and Welldone, of whom there is no other information, has been buried in this church.

And then the Prince burned all of the Count’s papers “lest they be misinterpreted”. The only reason we can conceive of for that is because the Prince wanted to continue to believe in the powers of Saint Germain, and the papers of the Count did not support that belief.

Supposedly there is evidence that the Count did not die, and many occultists claim he is still alive for these past two centuries! Based upon his pattern of behavior, however, Count Saint Germain seems merely to have been your garden variety psychopath. He may have had certain esoteric knowledge - he was certainly well-versed in many subjects - but his history, and the conflicting stories told about him give us a different perspective, particularly when we examine the histories and personalities of those who believed in him as opposed to those who did not. You can tell a lot about a man by his friends and his enemies.

The mystery of Saint-Germain is mostly due to the uncertainty surrounding his origins. One source says that he was born in 1710 in San Germano, son of a tax collector. Eliphas Levi, the 19th century occultist said that Saint-Germain was born in Lentmeritz in Bohemia, and was the bastard son of a nobleman who was also a Rosicrucian. Levi’s story and accomplishments suggest that he was another psychopath, so his word on the matter is useless.

It is known that Saint Germain had a genuine gift for languages and could speak French, German, English, Dutch and Russian fluently. He also claimed that he was fluent in Chinese, Hindu and Persian, but there was no one about to test him on those. And, we note that Horace Walpole said that he was a wonderful violinist and singer and painter, though none of his purported art has been known to survive. Supposedly, he was able to paint jewels that glittered in a very lifelike way.

There is also a great deal of evidence that Saint-Germain was an expert jeweller - he claimed to have studied the art with the Shah of Persia! In any event, he is reported to have repaired a flawed diamond for Louis XV, who was very pleased with the result. Saint-Germain also had an extensive knowledge of chemistry in all its branches at the time, and the many laboratories that he set up with borrowed money were all designed to produce brighter and better pigments and dyes and also for alchemical studies. Then, there was his reputation as a healer.

 

Not only did he cure the Marshal de Belle Isle, he also cured a friend of Madame de Pompadour of mushroom poisoning. Saint-Germain never ate in company, which was obviously part of his plan to focus attention on himself. He could sit at a table where everyone else was gorging on the most amazing array of delectable dishes, and eat and drink nothing. Casanova wrote:

Instead of eating, he talked from the beginning of the meal to the end, and I followed his example in one respect as I did not eat, but listened to him with the greatest attention. It may safely be said that as a conversationalist he was unequalled.

We note that this is another of the many talents attributed to psychopaths. Colin Wilson, author of The Occult, thought that Saint-Germain must have been a vegetarian. I think everything he did was designed to create an image, an impression, and a false one at that. In the end, the real mystery, aside from his origins, but the two may be connected, is where did Saint-Germain get all his specialized knowledge?

 

Of course, as we have noted here, not all who met Saint-Germain were impressed by his talents. Casanova was entertained by him, but nevertheless thought that he was a fraud and a charlatan.

 

He wrote:

"This extraordinary man, intended by nature to be the king of impostors and quacks, would say in an easy, assured manner that he was three hundred years old, that he knew the secret of the Universal Medicine, that he possessed a mastery over nature, that he could melt diamonds, professing himself capable of forming, out of 10 or 12 small diamonds, one of the finest water... All this, he said, was a mere trifle to him. Notwithstanding his boastings, his bare-faced lies, and his manifold eccentricities, I cannot say I found him offensive. In spite of my knowledge of what he was and in spite of my own feelings, I thought him an astonishing man...”

Count Alvensleben, a Prussian Ambassador to the Court at Dresden, wrote in 1777:

He is a highly gifted man with a very alert mind, but completely without judgment, and he has only gained his singular reputation by the lowest and basest flattery of which a man is capable, as well as by his outstanding eloquence, especially if one lets oneself be carried away by the fervor and the enthusiasm with which he can express himself. Inordinate vanity is the mainspring driving his whole mechanism.

I don’t know about you, but I have met a few people with all of the above qualities and have even been deceived by one or two for a short while. Everything we discover about Saint Germain tends to the theory of the brilliant psychopath. It sounds like an easy thing to dismiss Saint Germain out of hand. But, in the case of the Count, we have a little problem: just which of the stories are really about him? The plot thickens!

It seems that Berthold Volz, in the 1920’s, did some deep research on the subject and discovered, or so it is claimed, (I have never been able to track down this purported proof), that the Duc de Choiseul, who was overwhelmingly jealous of the Count, hired a look-alike imposter to go about as the Count, exaggerating and playing the fool in order to place the Count in a bad light. Is this just another story, either wishful thinking or deliberately designed to perpetuate the legend? Are we getting familiar with this “bait and switch” routine yet?

Supposedly, Saint-Germain foretold the outbreak of the French Revolution to Marie Antoinette who purportedly wrote in her diary that she regretted that she did not heed his advice. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t vouch for it. But, in my opinion, it wouldn’t take a genius to predict that event, considering the social and political climate of the time!

It was said that Saint-Germain appeared in Wilhelmsbad in 1785, a year after he was supposed to have died, and he was accompanied by the magician Cagliostro, the hypnotist Anton Mesmer, and the “unknown philosopher”, Louis Claude de St. Martin. But that is hearsay also.

Next he was alleged to have gone to Sweden in 1789 to warn King Gustavus III of danger. After that, he visited his friend, diarist Mademoiselle d’Adhemar, who said he still looked like he was only 46 years old! Apparently, he told her that she would see him five more times, and she claimed this was, in fact, the case. Supposedly the last visit was the night before the murder of the Duc de Berri in 1820. Again, we find this to be unsupported by evidence.

Napoleon III ordered a commission to investigate the life and activities of Saint-Germain, but the findings were destroyed in a fire at the Hotel de Ville in Paris in 1871 - which many people think is beyond coincidence. My thought would be that the only reason to destroy such a report would be if it had proved the Count to be a fraud.

 

The result of this fire is that the legend is enabled to live on; it is likely that the report would have made some difference in the legend, such as putting it to rest as a fraud. Had it been helpful to the legend, it would not have changed what is already the case, which is that people believe that Saint-Germain was something of a supernatural being. Thus, its destruction, if engineered, must only have been to protect the status quo.

One of the next threads of the legend was gathered into the hands of Helena Blavatsky who claimed that Saint-Germain was one of the “hidden masters” along with Christ, Buddha, Appollonius of Tyana, Christian Rosencreutz, Francis Bacon and others. In my opinion, Blavatsky’s credibility becomes highly questionable by merely making this claim. A group of Theosophists traveled to Paris after WW II where they were told they would meet the Count; he never showed up.

In 1972, a Frenchman named Richard Chanfray was interviewed on French television. He claimed to be Saint-Germain and, supposedly, in front of television cameras, transmuted lead into gold on a camp stove! And, lest we forget the more recent “communications” of the count to the head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, Elizabeth Clare Prophet.

In the end, on the subject of Saint-Germain, we find lies and confusion. Get used to it. And, if Saint-Germain was a fraud we have to think somewhat carefully about those who claim him as their “connection” to things esoteric!

During the 19th and 20th centuries, alchemy lost favor with the rise of experimental science. The time was that of such stellar names as Lavoisier, Priestley and Davy. Dalton’s atomic theory and a host of discoveries in chemistry and physics made it clear to all “legitimate” scientists that alchemy was only a “mystical” and, at best, harmless pastime of no scientific value.

Organizations such as the Golden Dawn and Ordo Templi Orientis devised corrupted mixtures of snippets of alchemy and oriental philosophy, stirred in with the western European magical traditions, but these were clearly distorted imitations composed mostly of wishful thinking, romantic nonsense, and monstrous egos. When one deeply studies the so-called “adepts” of these “systems”, one is confronted again and again with the archetype of the “failed magician” so that one can only shake the head and remember the warning of the great alchemists, that those who do not develop within themselves the “special state” that is required for the “Great Work”, can only bring disaster .

 

There is no doubt in my mind that such groups dabble in “alchemy” of a sort, or “magick” of another, and there is no doubt that they may, in fact, “conjure” connections to sources of “power” on occasion. But, overall, a survey of what can be learned about them tends to point in the direction of much wishful thinking or even the possibility of domination by the forces of entropy in the guise of “angels of light”.

In 1919, British physicist Ernest Rutherford announced that he had achieved a successful transmutation of one element into another: nitrogen to oxygen! Admittedly, his procedures and results in no way resembled the work of the alchemists; but, what he had done was refute the insistence of most scientists of the day that transmutation was impossible.

 

In fact, it soon became known that radioactive elements gradually “decay”, giving off radiation and producing “daughter elements” which then decay even further. For instance one such chain starts with uranium and the end product is lead. So, the question became, can the process be reversed? Or, if you start with another element, what might you end up with?

Franz Tausend was a 36 year-old chemical worker in Munich who had a theory about the structure of the elements that was a strange mixture of Pythagoreanism and modern chemistry. He published a pamphlet entitled, “180 elements, their atomic weight, and their incorporation in a system of harmonic periods”. He thought that every atom had a frequency of vibration characteristic of that element, related to the weight of the atom’s nucleus and the grouping of the electrons around it. This part of his idea was shown to be basically correct by later research.

 

However, Tausend further suggested that matter could be “orchestrated” by adding the right substance to the element, thereby changing its vibration frequency, in which case, it would become a different element.

As it happened, at about the same time, Adolf Hitler was sent to prison for attempting to organize an armed uprising. One of his cohorts was General Erich Ludendorff, but Ludendorff was acquitted of the charges and ran for president of Germany the following year. He was defeated by Hindenburg, so he turned his mind to raising money for the nascent Nazi party. He heard rumors that a certain Tausend had transmuted base metals into gold, and he formed a group, including numerous industrialists, to investigate this process.

Tausend gave instructions that they should purchase iron oxide and quartz which were melted together in a crucible. A German merchant and member of this group, named Stremmel, took the crucible to his hotel bedroom for the night so that it could not be tampered with. The next morning, Tausend heated the crucible in his electric furnace in the presence of his patrons, and then added a small quantity of white powder to the molten mass. It was allowed to cool, and then, when it was broken open, a gold nugget weighing 7 grams was inside.

Ludendorff, to say the least, was ecstatic. He set about forming a company called “Company 164”. Investment money poured in and within a year the general had diverted some 400,000 marks into Nazi Party funds. Then, in December, 1926, he resigned, leaving Tausend to handle all the debts. Tausend managed to continue raising money and on June 16, 1928, supposedly made 25 ounces of gold in a single operation. This enabled him to issue a series of “share certificates” worth 22 pounds each (10 kilograms of gold).

A year later, when no more gold had been produced, Tausend was arrested for fraud, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to four years in prison. Nevertheless, while waiting for trial, he was able to perform a transmutation under strict supervision, in the Munich Mint. This was submitted to the court as evidence that no fraud had taken place, but it was contested and did not save him from prison.

In the same year that Tausend was convicted, a Polish engineer named Dunikovski announced in Paris that he had discovered a new kind of radiation which would transmute quartz into gold. The mineral, spread on copper plates, was melted by an electric discharge at 110,000 volts, and was then irradiated with these new “z-rays”.

 

Investors poured two million francs into Dunikovski’s project, but, within a few months, when no gold appeared, he was also tried and found guilty of fraud. After two years in prison, Dunikovski’s lawyer obtained an early release, and he went with his family to Italy where he again began to experiment. Rumors soon started that he was supporting himself by the occasional sale of lumps of gold.

 

His lawyer, accompanied by the eminent chemist, Albert Bonn, went to see him.

What was discovered was that the quartz being used by Dunikovski (and presumably by Tausend as well) already contained minute quantities of gold. The gold could be extracted by a usual process, producing about 10 parts per million, but Dunikovski’s technique produced almost 100 times as much. Nevertheless, he was only dealing with small quantities of gold because his equipment could only handle small quantities of quartz.

Dunikovski claimed that his process accelerated the natural growth of “embryonic” gold within the quartz. He gave a demonstration before an invited group of scientists that attracted considerable attention. An Anglo-French syndicate formed to bring sand from Africa and treat it in a big new laboratory on the south coast of England, but WW II started at about this time and Dunikovski disappeared. It was rumored that he was “co-opted” by the Germans and manufactured gold for them to bolster their failing economy - but there is no proof.

Since WW II, there have been and still are, many practitioners of alchemy. Much of this activity has been centered in France, including Eugene Canseliet, who claimed to have been a pupil of the mysterious Fulcanelli mentioned above.

In studying alchemy and the history of alchemy and all related books I could find, I came finally to Fulcanelli and the mention of him in the book Morning of the Magicians by Pauwels and Bergier.

Bergier claimed that in June of 1937 - eight years before the first atom-bomb test in New Mexico - that he was approached by an impressive but mysterious stranger. The man asked Bergier to pass on a message to the noted physicist Andre Helbronner, for whom Bergier was then working. The man said that he felt it was his duty to warn orthodox scientists of the danger of nuclear energy. He said that the alchemists of bygone times - and previous civilizations - had obtained such secret knowledge and it had destroyed them.

 

The mysterious stranger said that he really had no hope that his warning would be heeded, but felt that he ought to give it anyway. Jacques Bergier remained convinced until the day he died that the stranger was Fulcanelli. As the story goes, the American Office for Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, made an intensive search for Fulcanelli at the end of the war.

 

He was never found.

The argument against this strange event ever having happened is that plutonium was specifically named by the mystery man, yet it was not isolated until February of 1941, and was not named until March of 1942. This was five years after Bergier’s encounter. Nevertheless, Bergier stood by his story. 27

 

27 It has been noted by the student of Fulcanelli’s only disciple, Eugene Canseliet, Patrick Riviere, that Bergier - just before he died - claimed that Schwaller and Fulcanelli were one and the same individual.

 

Andre VandenBroeck’s AL-KEMI, A MEMOIR: Hermetic, Occult, Political and Private Aspects of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz (1987 Inner Traditions/Lindisfarn Press) claims a clandestine collaboration between Fulcanelli and Rene Schwaller.

 

Supposedly, Schwaller confided to VandenBroeck that Fulcanelli stole from him an original manuscript on the alchemical symbolism of the Gothic Cathedrals and published it under his own name as Mystery of the Cathedrals. VandenBroeck’s allegation seems to be supported only by VandenBroeck himself, and simply does not fit the facts or the timeline.

In her work Fulcanelli Dévoilé (1992 Dervy) Geneviève Dubois suggests that Schwaller believed Jean-Julien Champagne to be Fulcanelli and that it was Champagne who took the manuscript. Champagne was quite a practical joker and was happy to let others think he was Fulcanelli.

 

And, the fact is, if we are talking about Master Alchemists, the history seems to indicate that they have “time travel” capabilities to some extent. So, the matter of knowing the name of the element would not have been too great a difficulty.

In the early 1920’s, in Paris, there was a small man in his early twenties, named Eugene Canseliet who was known as an alchemical enthusiast. He made many references to the fact that he worked with an actual “Master of the Art”. His friend and companion, a poverty stricken illustrator named Jean-Julien Champagne, who was a score of years older than Canseliet, supported these claims.

 

The two of them lived in a run-down building, in adjacent apartments, at 59 bis, rue de Rochechouart, in the Butte-Montmartre district. Because of their hints that they had contact with such a “Hidden Master”, they soon became the center of a circle of aspiring occultists who became known as the Brothers of Heliopolis. It seems that both Canseliet and Champagne were frequently seen in the city libraries, the Bibliotheque Nationale, the Mazarin, the Arsenal and the Sainte Genevieve, studying rare books and manuscripts. Obviously, they were looking for something.

The story heard by those on the edges of this elite little group was to the effect that this “Hidden Master Fulcanelli” was old, distinguished - possibly an aristocrat - and very rich. He was also said to be an immensely learned, practicing alchemist who had either already, or almost, achieved the Great Work.

Nobody (until later, as we saw with Jacques Bergier) except Canseliet and Champagne ever claimed to have met Master Fulcanelli, and, because of this, a great deal of skepticism arose in the occult circles of Paris. But then, the skepticism was laid to rest with the publication of Le mystere des cathedrales in 1926. This first edition consisted of only 300 copies, and was published by Jean Schemit of 45 rue Lafitte, in the Opera district.

 

It was subtitled, “An esoteric interpretation of the hermetic symbols of the Great Work”, and its preface was written by Eugene Canseliet, then aged only 26. The book had 36 illustrations, two of them in color, by the artist, Champagne. So, in one fell swoop, both Canseliet and Champagne were vindicated, and their place among the coterie of occultists assured!

The subject of the book was a purported interpretation of the symbolism of various Gothic cathedrals and other buildings in Europe as being encoded instructions of alchemical secrets. This idea, that the secrets were contained in the stone structures, carvings, and so forth, of the medieval buildings had been hinted at by other writers on esoteric art and architecture, but no one had ever explicated the subject so clearly and in such detail before. In any event, Fulcanelli’s book caused a sensation among the Parisian occultists. In the preface, written by Canseliet, there is the hint that Master Fulcanelli had “attained the Stone” - that is, had become mystically transfigured and illuminated and had disappeared!

He disappeared when the fatal hour struck, when the Sign was accomplished... Fulcanelli is no more. But we have at least this consolation that his thought remains, warm and vital, enshrined for ever in these pages.28

 

28 From Canseliet’s introduction to Fulcanelli’s book.

The extraordinary scholarship of Les Mystere drove the occult crowd of Paris mad with desire to know who Fulcanelli really was! Rumor and speculation ran wild!

 

About these speculations regarding Fulcanelli’s possible identity, Kenneth Rayner Johnson writes:

There were suggestions that he was a surviving member of the former French royal family, the Valois. Although they were supposed to have died out in 1589 upon the demise of Henri III, it was known that members of the family had dabbled in magic and mysticism and that Marguerite de France, daughter of Henri II and wife of Henri IV of Navarre, survived until 1615. What is more, one of her many lovers was the esoterically inclined Francis Bacon (whom many still claim as an adept to this day); she was divorced in 1599 and her personal crest bore the magical pentagram, each of whose five points carried one letter of the Latin word salus meaning ‘health.’ Could the reputedly aristocratic Fulcanelli be a descendant of the Valois, and did the Latin motto hint that some important alchemical secret of longevity had been passed on to him by the family?

Some claimed Fulcanelli was a bookseller-occultist, Pierre Dujols, who with his wife ran a shop in the rue de Rennes in the Luxembourg district of Paris. But Dujols was already known to have been only a speculative alchemist, writing under the nom de plume of Magophon. Why should he hide behind two aliases? Another suggestion was that Fulcanelli was the writer J. H. Rosny the elder. Yet his life was too well-known to the public for this theory to find acceptance.

There were also at least three practical alchemists working in the city around the same period. They operated under the respective pseudonyms of Auriger, Faugerons and Dr. Jaubert. The argument against them being Fulcanelli was much the same as that against Dujols-Magophon: why use more than one alias?

Finally, there were Eugene Canseliet and Jean-Julien Champagne, both of whom were directly connected with Fulcanelli’s book, and both of whom had claimed to have known the Master personally.29

 

29 Johnson, Kenneth R., The Fulcanelli Phenomenon,1992. These stories have since been laid to rest as everything from idle speculation to overt disinfo with the publication in French of Fulcanelli by Patrick Rivière in 2000. An updated and revised second edition, with much new material, appeared in 2004, published by Pardès in their series “Qui suis-je?” An English translation of Mr. Rivière’s book will soon appear and should settle once and for all the questions of Fulcanelli’s identity.

There was one major objection to Canseliet being Fulcanelli: he was too young to possibly have gained the knowledge apparent in the book. And, yes, a study of his preface as compared with the text demonstrated distinctly different styles. So, Canseliet was excluded.

Champagne is the next likely suspect because he was older and more experienced, and it was a certainty that his work as an artist had taken him around France so that he would have had opportunity to view all the monuments described in such detail. The only problem with this theory was that Champagne was a “noted braggart, practical joker, punster and drunkard, who frequently liked to pass himself off as Fulcanelli - although his behavior was entirely out of keeping with the traditional solemn oath of the adept to remain anonymous and let his written work speak for itself”.

 

And, in addition to that, Champagne was an alcoholic whose imbibing of absinthe and Pernod eventually killed him. He died in 1932 of gangrene at the age of 55. His toes actually fell off. Doesn’t sound much like a “Master Alchemist”. As a humorous note, some of the descriptions of the transmutation of the alchemist make you wonder if the toes falling off isn’t part of the process!

Joking aside, there are many more details and curiousities involved in the sorting out of who or what Fulcanelli may have really been, with no more resolution than we had at the beginning of the discussion! It just goes around in circles! The bottom line is: more than one person has attested to Fulcanelli’s existence, his success in transmutation and to his continued existence into the present time which would make him over 140 years old! And some theorists think he may be older than that!

The Morning of the Magicians, by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, was published in 1963, and it was only then that English speaking occultists and students of alchemy became aware of Fulcanelli. At that point in time, it was to be another eight years before Le mystere des cathedrales would be translated into English. But, each of these books awoke a whole new audience of Seekers to the possibility of present day miracles as well as the very real likelihood of a millennia old secret held in trust by persons unknown.

In the English edition of Mystery of the Cathedrals, Eugene Canseliet said that the Master had given him a minute quantity of the alchemical “powder of projection” in 1922 - and permitted him to transmute 4 ounces of lead into gold.

 

Walter Lang, who wrote the introduction to the book received a letter from Canseliet which said, in part:

The Master was already a very old man but he carried his eighty years lightly. Thirty years later, I was to see him again... and he appeared to be a man of fifty. That is to say, he appeared to be a man no older than I was myself.

Canseliet has since said that he has met with Fulcanelli several times since and that Fulcanelli is still living.30

30 Johnson, op. cit.

Canseliet said that he met the Master in Spain in 1954 under highly unusual circumstances. The late Gerard Heym, founder member of the Society for the Study of Alchemy and Early Chemistry and editor of Ambix, its journal, acclaimed as Europe’s formost occult scholar of his day, made friends with Canseliet’s daughter and through her, had a look at Canseliet’s passport. It did carry a Spanish entry-visa stamp for 1954. So, at least on this one item we have a small fact, even if it is hearsay. I haven’t seen it myself.

One friend of Canseliet, who wished to remain anonymous, said that this meeting was “in another dimension... a point where such meetings are possible”. The story was that Canseliet “received a summons”, of some sort; perhaps telepathic, and traveled to Seville where he was met and taken by a long, roundabout route, to a large mountain chateau which proved to be an enclave of alchemists - a colony!

 

He said that Fulcanelli appeared to have undergone a curious form of transformation so that he had characteristics of both male and female - he was androgynous. At one point, Canseliet said, Fulcanelli actually had the complete characteristics of a woman. Some of the more obscure alchemical literature does point to this androgyny. The adept going through the transformation supposedly loses all hair, teeth and nails and grows new ones. The skin becomes younger, smoother and the face takes on asexual characteristics.

After Canseliet’s visit to the Enclave of the Alchemists, apparently somewhere in the Pyrenees, Gerard Heym said that he only had vague recollections of his experiences in Spain, as though some form of hypnosis had been used on him to make him forget the details of what he had seen and been told. (Why are we not surprised?!)

The point of this recitation is that there have been many well attested stories of strange things about alchemy reported by reliable and reputable witnesses, and the stories continue in a sort of “subculture” down to our very day. There is something going on, and it has been going on for a very long time!

 

And since we have encountered an alchemist in recent times - Fulcanelli - who may (or may not) have a clue, we might want to make note of some of the things he had to say about our present subject that may be the equivalent of the thread of Ariadne out of this labyrinth of confusion.

 


A Knight on a Quest


Before proceeding to the subject at hand, some little background is in order. As a child, I was always attracted to the stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. This was only natural, considering my patronymic of birth: Knight. Thus, a great many books on the subject were read and digested at a very early age.

 

But, my general opinion of them changed as I grew older. I consigned them to the realm of fantasies or children’s stories. There was no “real” grail; it was just a pretty tale. They were nice to read and imagine in times of idleness, but I felt that I needed to get about the REAL work of “finding God”. I didn’t realize that, in a very real sense this is the true nature of the Grail quest. In any event, I concentrated many years on this “finding God” business. For me it was as essential a thing to do as it was necessary for me to breathe.

I started in pretty basic ways: believing nothing, testing everything; and over the years I gradually found my way from the hard sciences to the “soft” sciences to the “Para-sciences”. I analyzed and categorized everything as I went and, at the “end”, I thought I had pretty well run the gamut.

 

My categories were more varied and extensive than those of many people, but they were categories nonetheless - and I had more or less reconciled myself to never really knowing God except through “mind”, and mind was, after all, as far as I could see, the beginning and end point of everything. Cogito ergo sum. That was all we could know. I wasn’t happy with this answer, but what else was there?

That is where matters rested until the events described in my autobiography, Amazing Grace, that led to the Cassiopaean transmissions. And then, the Quest began in earnest.

New evidence, new knowledge, can change the entire foundation of what we think we know. And this, of course, is part of the very problem of the Grail. Everyone builds a hypothesis based on what is generally available in the context of “ordinary research” or hypotheses constructed on the foundations of our assumptions about our reality that are part of the social/cultural milieu in which we live. And because we are so invested in our fundamental beliefs about the nature of our reality, we become emotionally invested in these hypotheses - emotionally attached, that is - and when new information is discovered or brought to our attention, we often not only do not WANT to hear or see it - we simply cannot.

Beginning with a state of psychic bankruptcy in 1984, the Cassiopaeans spent ten years disabusing me of my assumptions about our reality, as we perceive it. I had prayed fervently for answers, and the Universe began to answer me in the dynamics of my very life.

 

At a certain point, when I had passed many tests, the mode of communication became more direct and conscious - the Cassiopaean Transmissions themselves - and it became very clear that the Grail Quest was indeed important. It also became clear that it was a far deeper and more complex an issue than most scholars and amateur Grail Questors suppose.

 

What was even more interesting was the fact that the Cassiopaeans led me to discover that the Grail Quest and the “Quest of the Alchemists for the Philosopher’s Stone” is identical. During the years of this initiation, I was guided to re-visit many of the texts I had casually dismissed in my youth in order to “read between the lines” with my “new eyes”.

 

The Cassiopaeans also suggested lines of study and research that had not been a part of my previous work. Among the texts I was guided to consider were the works of the alchemist Fulcanelli.

 

And in the writings of Fulcanelli, I discovered that the very problem I was considering was described:

“Furthermore, in our opinion, it seems insufficient to know how to recognize and classify facts exactly; one must still question nature and learn from her in what conditions and under the control of what will her manifold productions take place. Indeed, the philosophical mind will not be content with the mere possibility of identifying bodies. It demands the knowledge of the secret of their elaborations. To open ajar the door of the laboratory where nature mixes the elements is good; to discover the occult force, under whose influences her work is accomplished, is better. […]

“Alchemy is obscure only because it is hidden. The philosophers who wanted to transmit the exposition of their doctrine and the fruit of their labors to posterity took great care not to divulge the art by presenting it under a common form so that the layman could not misuse it. Thus because of the difficulty one has of understanding it, because of the mystery of its enigmas and of the opacity of its parables, the science has come to be shut up among reveries, illusions and chimeras. […]

“With their confused texts, sprinkled with cabalistic expressions, the books remain the efficient and genuine cause of the gross mistake that we indicate. For, in spite of the warnings... students persisted in reading them according to the meanings that they hold in ordinary language. They do not know that these texts are reserved for initiates, and that it is essential, in order to understand them, to be in possession of their secret key. One must first work at discovering this key.

“Most certainly these old treatises contain, if not the entire science, at least its philosophy, its principles, and the art of applying them in conformity with natural laws. But if we are unaware of the hidden meaning of the terms - for example, the meaning of Ares, which is different from Aries - strange qualifications purposely used in the composition of such works, we will understand nothing of them or we will be infallibly led into error.

“We must not forget that it is an esoteric science. Consequently, a keen intelligence, an excellent memory, work, and attention aided by a strong will are NOT sufficient qualities to hope to become learned in this subject.

 

Nicolas Grosparmy writes:

‘Such people truly delude themselves who think that we have only made our books for them, but we have made them to keep out all those who are not of our sect.’

Batsdorff, in the beginning of his treatise, charitably warns the reader in these terms:

‘Every prudent mind must first acquire the Science if he can; that is to say, the principles and the means to operate. Otherwise he should stop there, without foolishly using his time and his wealth. And so, I beg those who will read this little book to credit my words. I say to them once more, that THEY WILL NEVER LEARN THIS SUBLIME SCIENCE BY MEANS OF BOOKS, AND THAT IT CAN ONLY BE LEARNED THROUGH DIVINE REVELATION, HENCE IT IS CALLED DIVINE ART, or through the means of a good and faithful master; and since there are very few of them to whom God has granted this grace, there are also very few who teach it.’” 31

31 Fulcanelli, Dwellings of the Philosophers (Boulder: Archive Press 1999) pp. 49, 65, 84.

 

At this point in time, as I write this little monograph, I can say that it is true that only by Revelation - by the Initiatory work of the Cassiopaeans - myself in the future - that much of the Secret has been thus far revealed.

The question may be asked: why am I revealing the secret if it has been the tradition to conceal it?

 

Because I am as I am, and from my perspective, what is given to me is only serving myself until I give it to others in response to their asking. And many have asked.

After over thirty years of work, the one thing that has become evident is that the energies of Creation emanate “downward”, and our individuality as human beings is merely an expression of the “Theological Dramas”, so to say. To attempt to exert our will or to make our voice travel “upward”, against Creation is, in essence, an attempt to violate the Free Will of Creation, i.e. Hubris. This is why praying, rituals designed to “change” reality, “positive thinking” with the “intent” to change something “up there”, in order to receive the benefits “down here”, is always doomed to produce more strife, misery and suffering globally.

As I searched through the literature in hundreds of fields of study, the chief thing that became apparent to me is that mankind is in the iron grip of an uncaring control system that raises him up and brings him low for its own mysterious purposes. No group, no nationality, no secret society or religion, is exempt.

I needed answers. I couldn’t live haunted daily by this grief for humanity and the many horrors of history. That was the motivation for the Cassiopaean experiment. Everything we are taught in our society, our history, our religions, and the new age versions of same, is all logically inconsistent and makes a mockery of the very idea of a Creator - Ribbono Shel Olom - Master of the Universe. There was something strange and mysterious going on here on Earth, and I wanted to know the answers. So I undertook the channeling experiment that resulted, after two years of dedicated work, in what is known as the Cassiopaean Transmissions.

In spite of the fact that we hold an “open opinion” regarding the source of this material, the answers we received from the Cassiopaeans - us in the future - were intriguing, to say the least. The closest analogy to the view of reality presented by the Cassiopaeans is graphically explicated in the movie, The Matrix, wherein our reality is presented as a computer program/dream that “stores” human beings in “pods” so that they are batteries producing energy for some vast machine dominating the world.

 

Certain programmed life-scenarios of great emotional content were designed in order to produce the most “energy” for this machine. And it seems that pain and suffering are the “richest” in terms of “juice”.

Another major concept presented in The Matrix was that the “real now” was the reality of the control system that produced the “programmed dream of reality” that was being experienced by those “trapped in the Matrix”. The Matrix Dream Reality was based on the way things were in the past, before a terrible thing had occurred to destroy the world-that-was, after which it came under the control of computers which had become sentient and needed to utilize human beings as “power sources”, or “food”.

The difference between the metaphor of The Matrix and the view of the Cassiopaeans is that they propose a para-physical realm as another layer in the structure of space-time from which our own reality is projected, looping over and over again in endless variations. You could say that the hyperdimensional realms are the “future” in a very real sense.

This para-physical reality of hyperdimensional space - the realm of the Matrix programmers - is inhabited, according to the Cassiopaeans, by beings of both positive and negative polarity who have “graduated” from our reality, but not necessarily in the sense of “dying” and going to a strictly ethereal realm. It is, effectively, a world of the future that creates our present by projecting itself into the past. What is important to realize is that if we think about the future in terms of probable futures, or branching universes, then what we do now, whether we wake up from the Matrix or not, determines what kind of future we experience, individually and collectively.

While these ideas might seem more suited to science fiction than science proper, in fact, some of the most well-known physicists have proposed models and research programs that in no way contradict this hypothesis. They may one day demonstrate the mathematical proof of such a perspective.

For example, Paul Dirac wrote:

“There are, at present, fundamental problems in theoretical physics the solution of which will presumably require a more drastic revision of our fundamental concepts than any that have gone before. Quite likely, these changes will be so great that it will be beyond the power of human intelligence to get the necessary new ideas by direct attempts to formulate the experimental data in mathematical terms. The theoretical worker in the future will, therefore, have to proceed in a more direct way. The more powerful method of advance that can be suggested at present is to employ all resources of pure mathematics in attempts to perfect and generalize the mathematical formalism that forms the existing basis of theoretical physics, and after each success in this direction, to try to interpret the new mathematical features in terms of physical entities.”

Certain ontological problems related particularly to quantum theory suggest that an “observer” (J. A. Wheeler’s “Eye”), watching the universe so as to “create it”, may need to be included in our consideration. That suggests the necessity for expanding the scope of what is nowadays considered as “physical entities”. The answer to “observability of parallel universes” may involve taking into account such an extension.

Now, consider the idea that there are several - maybe even infinite - “probable future yous” as observers. In the picture above, this would be represented as many “eyes” but all of them converging on a single point on the tail - the “now” moment that we perceive, which is the moment of “choice”. It is from these probable futures of infinite potential - of “thought centers” - that reality is projected. It is through human beings that these energies are transduced and become “real”.

You in the here and now - at the conjunction of all of these probabilities all vying with one another to become “real” - have no possibility of “creating” anything in this reality from “down here”, so to say. The realities - the creative potentials - are a projection from higher levels of density. You are a receiver, a transducer, a reflector of the view of which eye is viewing YOU, nothing more.

The phenomenon that these ideas speak to more directly is that of hyperdimensional realities wherein mental energies or consciousness energies are amplified and can be interactive with the environment: technology that suggests not only power for transport that is partly physical, partly “ethereal”; communication that is also partly physical and partly ethereal, as well as powers of “manifestation” that might seem impossible to us in our present state of technology. All of these properties do belong to hyperdimensional existence, and such a state of being has been reported for millennia as being the “realm of the Gods”, including Dragons and Serpents, and critters of all sorts.

If we can describe such realms mathematically and give them a physical reality, as Dirac suggests, then we might also consider the hypothesis that they may be inhabited.

 

Could our “Gods” be inhabitants of this realm?

As many physicists will tell you, all that really exists are “waveforms” and we are waveforms of reality, and our consciousness is something that “reads waves”. We give form and structure to the waves we “read” according to some agreed upon convention.

And so, certain denizens of hyperdimensional space are “read” as more or less “reptilian” because that is the “essence” of their being, the frequency of their “wave form”. We call them the Overlords of Entropy. They are not necessarily physical as we understand the term, nor are they necessarily “alien” as we understand that term either. We suspect that the perceptions of these levels of reality and their “consciousness units” are what is behind many religious conceptions and mythological representations of “Gods and Goddesses” and creatures of all sorts.

It is in this context of the Matrix, and realizing that the inner knowledge of many great mystery teachings down through the ages have presented the same, or a similar concept, that I have come to view the phenomena and interactions of our world. Such a view certainly produces results of becoming “free” from the controls of this Matrix, so I can say that in terms of experiment, it produces replicable results.

 

However, as Morpheus explained to Neo in the movie:

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around; what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand; most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. Were you listening to me Neo, or were you looking at the woman in the red dress? They will fight to protect it...

We could just as well re-write this to say:

When you are inside the Matrix, you look around and see Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Zoroastrians, Wiccans, Magicians... most of these people are not ready to be unplugged... they are so hopelessly inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. Were you listening to me, or were you listening to that ZionistBaptistEvangelist, or purveyor of Magick and mumbo jumbo?

It was also pointed out by Morpheus that any human being who was plugged into the system could be used as an “agent” by something similar to a downloaded program that was designed to activate them in a certain way. A similar state of affairs seems to be the actual case in our reality, with the Controllers acting from some hyperdimensional space of which we have but limited awareness, and even less access.

The option that does seem, realistically, to be open to us is to choose our alignment and prepare ourselves for the emanations that are traveling “downward” to be better received.

 

This is the essential point of Castaneda’s Don Juan when he said:

One of the greatest accomplishments of the seers of the Conquest was a construct he called the three-phase progression. By understanding the nature of man, they were able to reach the incontestable conclusion that if seers can hold their own in facing [human] petty tyrants, they can certainly face the unknown with impunity, and then they can even stand the presence of the unknowable.

“The average man’s reaction is to think that the order of that statement should be reversed,” he went on. “A seer who can hold his own in the face of the unknown can certainly face petty tyrants. But that’s not so. What destroyed the superb seers of ancient times was that assumption. We know better now. We know that nothing can temper the spirit of a warrior as much as the challenge of dealing with impossible people in positions of power. Only under those conditions can warriors acquire the sobriety and serenity to stand the pressure of the unknowable.” 32

32 Casteneda, Carlos, The Fire From Within, (New York: Pocket Books 1985) p. 19.

All around us we see the result of this error: the idea that we can exert our will and voice upward to change what is “above” us in order to change our reality. This idea is at the root of rites and rituals, demanding, pleading, visualizations, tapping, “workings”, and so forth.

 

People who think that “meditating on compassion”, or “feeling the feelings of all beings”, is going to result in the “sonic entrainment of the heart’s rhythm [being] braided into more complex and coherent patterns”, which will then enable the person to “create a diamond imperishable body for use as a teaching vehicle down here on earth”, have missed the entire point. To compare such ideas to the true work of Seeker of Ascension is simply ignorant.

What seems to be true is that before the seeker of Ascension can ever achieve the point of being able to think even momentarily about “the oneness of all beings”, or the “feelings of all beings”, or be in possession of “super-awareness”, he or she has spent many, many years in the struggle to “face petty tyrants”, or to fully realize objective reality in a step by step process that includes action in concert with understanding.

They have repeatedly exposed themselves to as many “unpleasant experiences” as they can find, all the while struggling to master their emotions, desires, and physicality. It is the work of making the physical vehicle “down here” receptive to what one chooses to align with “up there”, as opposed to trying to forcibly change something “up there” in order to have it “down here”. This process is very much involved with what is called “discernment”.

The great Sufi Shaykh Ibn al-’Arabi explains that “imperfection” exists in Creation because “were there no imperfection, the perfection of existence would be imperfect”. From the point of view of Sheer Being, there is nothing but good. But Infinite Potential to BE includes - by definition of the word “infinite” - the potential to not be. And so, Infinite Potential “splits” into Thought Centers of Creation and Thought Centers of non-being. It can be said that Infinite Potential is fundamentally Binary - on or off - to be or not to be. That is the first “division”.

Since absolute non-being is an impossible paradox in terms of the source of Infinite Potential to BE, the half of the consciousness of Infinite Potential that constitute the IDEAS of non-being - for every idea of manifestation, there is a corresponding idea for that item of creation to NOT manifest - “falls asleep” for lack of a better term. Its “self observation” is predicated upon consciousness that can only “mimic” death.

 

Consciousness that mimics death then “falls” and becomes Primal Matter. What this means is that the “self observing self” at the level of the Master of the Universe is constituted of this initial division between Being and Non-being which is, again, only the initial division - the on/off, the yes/no - of creation. You could picture this as an open eye observing a closed eye. It has been represented for millennia in the yin-yang symbol, which, even on the black half that represents “sleeping consciousness that is matter”, you can see the small white dot of “being” that represents to us that absolute non-existence is not possible. There is only “relative” non-existence.

These “thoughts of being and non-being” interact with one another - the observer and the observed - like a viewer looking into a mirror. Creation manifests between the viewer and the mirror. It is at once real, because it consists of matter informed by consciousness, and unreal, because it is ultimately composed of only consciousness acting on consciousness.

At our level of reality, the understanding that “nothing is real”, as has been promulgated by gurus and teachers down through history, is as useless as saying “gravity isn’t real”. Such considerations are useful only for expansion of perception. They are not useful for practical application since the energies of creation apparently transduce through several “levels” before they meet in the middle, so to say, in our third density reality.

 

Organic life exists at the “crossroads” of the myriad ideas or thought centers of being and non-being. As such, they have the capacity to transduce energies “up” or “down” depending on the “consciousness energy directors” of that unit. And again, there are apparently two broad divisions: directed toward being/ observing, or directed toward non-being/ mirroring. This division manifests across all levels of organic life, including human beings. Human beings exist to transduce cosmic energies of creation via organic life.

 

Our “higher selves” are the directors of this transducing of cosmic energies, and the direction in which the energy “flows” is determined by the activities of these higher selves. Against the opposition of those forces seeking to “capture” energy of consciousness and induce it to the “sleep of non-being”, which is gravitational in a certain sense, the energies of consciousness seek to “inform” matter, via awakening the self-awareness of those organic units on earth that are capable of resistance to the gravity of non-being.

As self-aware “transducing units”, the human being has the potential for going either way - toward intensified being, or toward intensified non-being. In this sense, humans also function very much like a lens that can be “adjusted” like a telescope. It can be dialed to select the viewing range, which can be distant and inclusive of more “space/time”, or it can be shortened to only see what is up close and evident in the material world. In other words, our first and most fundamental choice is to choose what we SEE.

When we choose what we SEE - and here we do NOT mean with the physical eyes or even psychically, but rather a more inclusive term that suggests whether or not we are capable of objectivity or subjectivity - we are receiving impressions. Impressions can become knowledge if assimilated. Knowledge leads to awareness. Knowledge and awareness then direct emotions, which then energize actions in the organic world. This is the transducing of energies of Cosmic Thought Centers.

Ibn al-’Arabi tells us that Goodness is Being; to which all positive and beautiful attributes or “names” of God belong. Evil is the lack of good, so it is “nonexistence”. In other words, at the root, Being dwells in “non-existence” which is evil.

 

Here is the sticking point, the item that is generally omitted from most “systems of ascension”.

 

Human beings at our level of reality exist at the crossroads of the Thoughts of Being and Non-being - Good and Evil. Mankind is made in the form of all the names of God - those of Being and Non-being. Assuming the traits of the Names is synonymous with manifesting their properties. The Science of Ascension is to obtain deep knowledge of all the Names and their true properties, the high and the low, the pleasant and the loathsome, the light and the darkness, in differentiated detail, so as to be able to CHOOSE which traits will be assumed.

 

It is only with a full field of vision that a man can discover if what he subjectively thinks is good actually is good and leads to Being, or if it is a deception that induces to Non-being by pretense.

God is the root of ALL Names, noble and base. The task of the seeker of ascension is to bring the Noble traits from latency into actuality and to discover the positive applications of the base traits - even if that application is to “overcome” or transmute. The Shaykh tells us “noble character traits are only those connected to interaction with others”. In other words: DOing. If you SEE the illusion of separation, that is certainly the first thing. The lie is smuggled in by suggesting that this is all that is necessary, that if you just “see it” everything will “change” for you.

God creates the good and the evil, the ugly and the beautiful, the straight and the crooked, the moral and the immoral. Between these traits lie the manifold dangers of the path of the seeker of Truth.

 

Many modern day “teachers” and “gurus” tell us,

“Since there is only One Being which permeates all things, all we have to do is see everything as only light”, and that will transmute the darkness, and we will “create our own reality of light”.

Such a statement ignores the fact that the statement “God is One” describes a reality that is a higher level from which our own “mixed being” manifests. The man who assumes that he can become like God at this level just by thinking it, ignores the facts of Being vs. Non-being which outrays from “God is One” at a level of existence that is clearly several levels above our own.

Evil is REAL on its own level, and the task of man is to navigate the Cosmic Maze without being defiled by the Evil therein. This is the root of Free Will. Man faces a predicament as REAL as himself: he is forced to choose - to utilize his knowledge by applying it - between the straight path which leads to Being, and the crooked paths which lead to Non-Being.

 

Human beings are required to discern between good and evil - consciousness energy directors - at every stage of their existence in this reality. Because, in fact, they must understand that God is consciousness and God is matter. God is good, and God is evil. The Creation assumes all the different properties of the many “Names of God”. The Cosmos is full of Life-giving and Slaying, Forgiveness and Vengeance, Exaltation and Abasement, Guidance and Deception. To attempt to assume God’s point of view and “mix everything” at this level, results only in STAYING at this level.

 

Therefore, human beings must always separate God’s point of view from their own point of view and the fact that all creation assumes the divine Names and Traits.

Thus, the first Divine Command is BE! And that includes Being and Non-being instantaneously.

 

Therefore, the second law is “follow Being or Non-being according to your choice and your inherent nature”.

 

All creation is a result of this engendering command. So, in this respect, there is no Evil, but the second, prescriptive law determines to which “Face of God” one will return: Life or Death.

If the engendering command alone is considered, there is no imperfection in the cosmos, since all creatures follow what God desires for them. In this respect, what is normally called “imperfection“ is in fact perfection, since it allows for the actualization of the various levels of existence and knowledge. In other words, were there no imperfections - in the sense of diminishment, decrease, and lack - there would be no creation. Were there no creation, the Hidden Treasure would remain hidden.

 

Hence Being would be unseen in every respect. There would be no self-disclosure of the Divine Reality, Light would not shine, and God would be the Non-manifest but not the Manifest. But all this is absurd, since it demands the imperfection of Being Itself, which by definition is non-delimited perfection. Being’s perfection requires the manifestation of Its properties. The effects of the Names and Attributes must be displayed for God to be God. […] In other words, Imperfection is demanded by existence itself. To be “other than God” is to be imperfect.

 

…But it is precisely the “otherness” which allows the cosmos and all the creatures within it to exist. If things were perfect in every respect, they would be identical with God Himself, and there would be nothing “other than God.” But then we could not even speak about the cosmos, since there would be no cosmos and no speakers. …So, imperfection is a kind of perfection.

[Chittick]

At the particular stage of existence in which man finds himself, he is equally “receptive” toward the Two primary Faces of God: Being and Non-being. The Shaykh tells us that whatever property, or trait, any human being ultimately “chooses” is what it originally possessed in its state of immutability. The task of the Seeker is to discover what is immutable within, and to purify and amplify it.

 

This is the development of Will. Will is a relationship, which follows knowledge while knowledge follows the object of knowledge. In the process of “ascension”, the object of knowledge is YOU. Knowledge, in and of itself, has no effects. YOU, however, the seeker, can give to knowledge what you actually are, in yourself, thereby displaying YOURSELF in knowledge by your actions in concert with your knowledge.

As noted, there are many Names of God that call to us in our present state of existence. But you are not required to answer every one that calls. The fact that human beings are, in general, ignorant of their own true “essence” gives them the illusion of freedom. And the fact is, all paths come from God, and all paths Lead back to God, but again, it can be via different faces.

 

As the Shaykh says:

“Unto Allah all things come home, and he is the end of every path. However, the important thing is which divine name you will reach and to which you will come home?”

And this brings us to what the Shaykh calls “perspicacity”. This is the special development of the “eye of insight”, or “seeing the unseen” that is crucial to the Seeker. Just as the physical eye, with the refraction of light from the Sun, can discern between the large and the small, the beautiful and the ugly,the shades of colors, the moving from the still, the high and the low, the ability to see the unseen is a property of an “inner light”.

 

This light reveals to the seeker things about external objects that are NOT apparent to the five senses. It reveals to its possessor when a choice that may appear to be benevolent, is a step on the path of Evil. It reveals when a choice that may appear to human estimation as negative is actually a difficult step to felicity for all involved. The Sufis tell us that some individuals have achieved such a level of “seeing” that - upon seeing a person’s footprint on the ground, even if the person is not present - they are able to say whether he is following a life of felicity or wretchedness.

The light of perspicacity seems to be a gift that not everyone has, and those who do have it, may not have developed it to the same degree. What is evident is that those who have it possess an immutable nature of Being which is able to “see” good and evil - they do not see “only good”. Thus, they are able to discern between the “calls” of Nonbeing and Being, and therefore, are able to strengthen their Will along the path of intrinsic Being. It then follows that individuals who are not able to see - or who choose not to see - both Good and Evil, are formed in the mold of subjectivity, which is the human expression of the Call of Non-being.

A human being whose immutable nature is that of Being can strengthen the light of perspicacity by “assuming the traits” of the Names of Being. This does not mean that a person comes to possess traits that do not already belong to him. It means that these traits are amplified and “cultivated”. The Ruling property of an individual is determined by what Face of God is disclosed to him, and this is determined by his preparedness.

 

Felicity can only be disclosed when Evil has been turned away from, rejected; which can only be achieved by a long period of “testing” or being challenged to SEE and then to choose Being over Non-being in order to grow the Will or alignment to Being in a feedback loop. As the Seeker travels this path, he must not see these traits as his own, but rather that he is a locus of God’s manifestation of an ontological attribute.

People imagine that they believe in God when, in fact, what they believe always takes the shape of the receptacle. The old saying is that the water takes on the color of its cup. The deeper implication of this is that a person will only be in disequilibrium if his conscious beliefs are not in conformity with his own immutable nature. In other words, a person whose intrinsic nature is aligned toward Being, will experience disequilibrium, struggle, and even illness by attempting to assume those traits that do not exist in him. In this sense, careful observation of the physical state - even the physical environment - can act as a guide as to whether or not the whole being is coming into alignment.

So it is that different paths can produce different effects for different individuals according to their immutable nature within. Those whose intrinsic nature is toward Being, follow the path of the developing the ability to SEE and to choose alignment with the infinite potential of creation, thereby being conduits of Being as God chooses to manifest through them. They not only see that limitation is illusion, they consciously ACT - they utilize that knowledge to generate energy and light.

Those whose intrinsic nature is toward Non-being, follow the path of limitation of Infinite Being by assuming that they, in their state of ignorance and subjectivity, know better than God how Creation ought to be fixed. They pray for change, they perform rituals, they chant mantras and repeat endless visualizations of “magickal forms” that are supposed to “change” reality. They bomb others with “Love and Light”, (their subjective version of it, of course), and they seek to fix the world “out there” by projecting their subjective view of reality onto the infinite wisdom of Creation.

 

This “consciousness energy direction” even includes the assumption that just knowing that all division is illusion will accomplish the goal of “Ascension”, and that is the most cunning lie of all.

Each approach “ties a knot” in the heart of the believer and fixes him on a path, the object of his belief being the end of the path. All beliefs are equivalent in that God - of one sort or another - is their ultimate objective. But each belief is different in that it leads to a different name of God, or Thought Center. Even materialistic skepticism is a “belief” and leads to “matterizing” of the consciousness that follows this belief. What is more difficult to discern are the many mixed up “spiritual” paths that twist and distort the concepts of Being to engage the seeker on a path to Non-Being.

Going back to the idea of the human being as a transducing unit with a “lens capacity”, what seems to be so is that the process of Ascension begins with the choice of tuning the lens. If the individual chooses to “adjust the dial” to see the entire field of Thought Centers influencing creation, he can then begin to select those that enhance and enliven Creation and Being - the Thought Centers of Awakened Consciousness - then a feedback loop that selects that probable future will be established.

A human being can, by great effort, expand his or her “field of view” toward greater and greater objectivity. With a wider and farther field of view, the awareness of those things, which emanate from the Thought Centers come into focus. When thought centers are more in focus, the individual then has greater ability to discern whether impressions emanate from the Thought Centers of being, or from the Thought Centers of non-being. At this stage, the individual is then able to further “shape” his emotions and direct his actions so as to become an efficient transducing unit of the cosmic energies of Being into this reality. This is knowledge utilization, which generates energy, which generates light.

As this process continues, as the feedback loop is activated between the Cosmic observer and the transducing/actions of the creature - the organic unit, the transducing organ, so to say - strengthens and the exchange between it and the Cosmic Observer accelerates and intensifies. The transducing organ then begins to act as a “homing beacon” for greater levels of that chosen Thought Center energy that “observer from the future” - the “eye” that is the creator.

In the development of such a feedback loop, the human being - as a conduit of creation, a vessel - becomes an active participant of the creation of his own FUTURE in the act of choosing which observation platform and scope he accepts as “real” - objective or subjective. Furthermore, as the energy of such a being is changed and enhanced by the “flow of cosmic energy” passing through him, as he perceives more and more of the creative expressions of Infinite potential, and chooses those he wishes to align with, he becomes colinear with those other expressions of Being - other organic units that may be quite different in make-up, but similarly aware of Infinite Potential - and is thus able to interact with them in a manner that further expands and commutates the energy of transducing.

This can then lead to exponential amplification of the transducing of the energies of Being which can then completely alter the physical nature of the organic unit. Just as a pipe that is used to channel water gets wet from the water flowing through it, so does the human being who has begun the process of aligning with Being becomes saturated with the higher energies being manifested through him or her.

 

This process leads to permeation of the organic nature of the vessel which leads to transformation, in that it “awakens” the “sleeping matter” of the organic unit and makes it a full participant in Being, rather than a weight for the soul to carry or struggle against. The energy of the organic vehicle is then available in the terms described in Einstein’s famous formula, which might give some indication of the potential of such a being.

As the reader can easily see by now, the teachings of the current spate of New Age Gurus constitute the idea that we can exert our will and voice that exists “down here” upward to change what is “above” us in order to change our reality down here. They tell us that we can change our lives, our thinking, move our brains into harmony, or aid the “heart in opening”, obtaining “harmony and balance” which is then going to “open windows in our mind, our heart, and our spirit”, etc. It is claimed that we can do this basically by assuming God’s point of view that “all is one, all is love”. It is stated, (with some truth I should add, since good disinformation is always wrapped in a warm and fuzzy truth), that, “without Divine Unity inside of us, these windows of inspiration are rarely available”.

 

What they do NOT tell you is that the staircase to Divine Unity of Being requires a full field of awareness of Being and Non-being, and this can only be achieved by divesting oneself of the controls of Nonbeing which are, indeed, part of Being, but which seek to obviate Being in a paradoxical sleep of “Unification” which often begins by believing the lie that “knowledge protects” simply by having it.

Indeed, many of the “techniques” sold in the slick packages of “ascension tools” will temporarily produce chemical changes that will feel VERY good, the same way a good meal satisfies hunger temporarily. It really, “feels good”! But just as the steak and salad are digested and most of the matter excreted in a few hours, and another steak and salad is needed to fill the stomach again, so do such practices fail to do anything more than perpetuate the “food chain”.

 

And, staying with the analogy, very little of the “substance” of such practices actually “stays with” the individual.

A considerable period of time is required for the seeker to finally come to the realization that techniques that relieve stress or produce “good feelings”, have done nothing to actually change their lives or their “vibrations”. They are still recognized by their neighbor’s dog, they still find new gray hairs on their heads, and they still get sick and have aches and pains like everyone else. The problem is, again, the “bottom up” ideas have been employed, which only result in remaining in the “mixed” state, or worse, being drawn deeper into the path of non-being.

Well, I should qualify that: to those for whom Non-being is their immutable nature, this is only natural and right and they will thrive following the path of non-being. But for those many, many seekers whose immutable nature is toward Being, this is a terrible trap - the gravitational effect of the Thought Center of Non-Being - to draw all of Creation into Non-Being will act on them in ways that are crippling to their relationships and health. Human beings who go through life feeling as though they have a “hole in their hearts” are those who are not synchronized with their immutable nature.

The natural field of view for the organic unit alone - with no connection to the higher self - is that of the material and/or mechanical interpretation of all phenomena. The influences of the Thought Center of non-being - the source of matter - have been increasing through the manifestation of billions of such units at a single point in time: the present.

The Thought Center of non-being is of a certain nature - contractile subjectivity - that exerts a more or less “gravitational” pull - a desire to absorb and assimilate the soul energies of Being - so as to feed its own contracting nature. Even if it promotes a full field of awareness in principle, it can only view Being as a traitor to its own need to not exist. This results in an individual who may proclaim that all is illusion, but whose actions - or rather lack thereof - betray the deeper immutable state of being.

 

Due to its intrinsic nature, there is a powerful exertion of non-being to destroy and obviate Being and Creation - all the while it is unable to achieve the awareness that it only exists by virtue of Being and Creation IN ACTION!

The powerful exertion of the Thought Center of non-being to absorb and assimilate all of creation, powered by its own contractile subjectivity, poses certain problems both for itself and for Being. Since the fundament of non-being is a LIE - that is to say, the state of absolute non-being that it promotes is a paradoxical impossibility - and the fundament of Being is the objective fact that Existence simply IS via ACTION - or utilization of knowledge which generates light, the essential conflict is between lies and truth.

 

The Thought Center of non-being tells itself the biggest lie of all - that it does not exist - and goes to sleep in pretense. And from this essential point, we see that the nature of subjectivity is that of lies. Lies and belief in lies - whether or not the believer is aware that they are believing a lie - all partake of the same essence - subjectivity and non-being.

The Thought Center of non-being - in its expression as matter - as being “impressed” by Creative consciousness in ACTION, which partially awakens it and draws it into the creation of the organic world - wraps itself around this awakened consciousness. Its intrinsic nature of pretense to non-being acts “gravitationally” on consciousness, and twists and distorts it into varying degrees of subjectivity. It is this interaction of the energy of all possibility, lensed through subjectivity of matter, that produces the myriad manifestations of the material universe.

In the realm of the Thought Center of non-being, there are many manifestations - or ways - of seeking annihilation - the “Base Names of God”. These modes act in a gravitational way to engage, enfold, and distort consciousness to their ends. This results in the formation of consciousness units of great power and depth of cunning - far beyond anything imaginable in our own reality.

These consciousness units use their wiles to assimilate weaker consciousness units so as to accrue more contractile power. Obviously, the more “dense” the consciousness units “consumed”, the more “nutritious” they are. And so they seek, by great cunning, to carefully, and with great patience, manipulate the consciousness units selected for assimilation.

 

It is, effectively, trans-millennial stalking.

These Overlords of Entropy, or so we may call them, by virtue of the overlay of intensified subjectivity - the hallmark of the influence of the Thought Center of non-being - interface with the organic world on a “geographic” scale. Since they have, so to say, an intimate relationship with matter, the contractile consciousness of such a being can affect its area of chosen dominion very much like an overshadowing “cloud” with millions of tendrils of connections between it and its range of influence. This includes even the very matter of the bodies of human beings. It is through these etheric fibers that the Overlords of Entropy assimilate energy.

These overlords have “organs” so to speak. Just as a group of people were described by the Apostle Paul as “the body of Christ”, so are the organs of entropic overlords manifested as individual beings, though their direct connection to a single massive consciousness unit makes them more like “projections” than individually souled beings.

Because of their great drive to conserve and assimilate energy, the overlords are “stingy” with allowances to their organ-beings. It seems that they do not “waste” energy in manifesting and maintaining organic structures for their organs, and thus the organic physicality takes on the configuration of less complex creatures in the organic world. Rather than interacting with an organic structure in a cooperative, awakened state, they exercise control over theirs. Utilizing organic structures that require the least energy to maintain conserves energy. To this end, they draw the energy for their organic units from the pools of archetypal form of the animal kingdom. This energy is more easily accessed, is lower in frequency, and thus more amenable to control.

This seems to be the reason why, when perceived by individuals of the third dimensional self-consciousness - third density - realm, their appearance is generally startling. The reptilian type comes to mind as being the most energy efficient. Again, remember that consciousness is merely “reading waves”.

Due to the contractile nature of this hierarchy and its energy consumption, it is extremely difficult for these organ-beings of the Overlords of Entropy to actively function in our realm for any period of time. When they enter our realm, assuming a third density organic form, they are at a disadvantage. They are temporarily disconnected from the energy pool, which weakens them, but they are at another great disadvantage as well.

 

Since they are not internally connected to an expanding, creative feedback loop of Creative Being, their own entropic overlord is a constant drain on them, pulling them gravitationally as it were, making them even weaker than the natural denizens of this realm. Such are those called aliens and “Men in Black”. It is this great strain on their energy resources that makes such appearances so rife with anomalous glitches. There is no creativity, and thus no ability to pull off such an intrusion into our reality with any convincing effectiveness.

For this reason they generally avoid direct interaction in the organic world, preferring to utilize other methods to stalk and conquer weaker units to “feed” the Thought Center of non-being. To this end, these entropic overlords seek to establish and maintain the “entrainment of creative energy” within the third density reality by deceptively enhancing third density, material interpretations of the phenomenal world.

In short, such beings of enormous geographic domination actively operate, within their geographic field of influence, to divert and discourage those organic units who have tenuous connections to creative energy - their higher selves - from interpretations which will lead to the establishing of a feedback loop with those Thought Centers of Being/Creation.

As noted, the nature of such beings, and the dynamic of their existence, requires massive energy input in order to “control” and direct their own organic physicality. This is possible at the level of overlord/sub-units of the Thought Center of non-being by virtue of the extensive assimilation of other consciousness units, and most especially by virtue of their “geographic” character, which enables them to “connect” to thousands, if not millions, of organic beings in the organic realm.

 

This is, effectively, the “Program of the Matrix”.

This connection is naturally enabled by the aforementioned intrinsic nature of organic units to only perceive the field of view of the organic realm. That is to say that mechanical and material feedback loops are far more easily created between organic units and the sub-units of Non-being by a sort of “gravitational” pull of these sub-units upon the natural inclinations of the organic being.

This establishes “feedback loops” as previously described. The organic unit, “infected” with the material/mechanical view, begins to act according to that Thought Center’s dictates, and this generates activities of that nature in the organic unit.

 

Due to the fact that any given sub-unit of the Thought Center of non-being may be connected to millions of organic units in third density, any of them may be activated singly, or in concert, to fulfill the wishes of the Overlords of Entropy, a “larger” sub-unit of the Thought Center of Non-being.

 


Gurdjieff and Mouravieff


Machiavelli observed that religion and its teachings of faith, hope, charity, love, humility and patience under suffering were factors that render men weak and cause them to care less about worldly and political things, and thus they will turn political power over to wicked men who are not influenced by such ideals. Of course, the real trick is to convince people that the “afterlife” is the only thing worth thinking about, and it is to this end that Christianity has been formulated.

 

It is also to this end that many of the New Age beliefs and “formulations” of the truth about Ascension have been engineered. All you have to do is have faith or meditate or acquire knowledge and awareness that will help you love everything and everybody. Nothing is said about the day-by-day struggle and the necessity for action.

Again let me say this: if the Truth about the REAL process of Ascension were not so detrimental to the agenda of the Controllers of our world, the Matrix, they would not have gone to so much trouble to cover it up. When we finally make the connection between that fact, and the fact that our governing elite is operating on the instructions of the Controllers, we then begin to realize that the drama on the political stage is a shadow of the higher-level agenda.

 

And that leads us to realize that the COINTELPRO operation in the New Age and Human Potential movement has truly been the “opening act”.

Based on observation and research, it is apparent that humanity has now reached a great historical crossroads. We have come to the end of a two thousand year history of intolerance, cruelty and stupidity, which has created our present state of global, collective madness. Humanity, as a collective whole, is arriving at a state of Spiritual Bankruptcy, or “death”. And yet, we cannot assume that this is meaningless.

 

Those who understand the principles of electricity will comprehend when I say that this present global estate is the way nature works and is the establishing of sufficient Contact Potential Difference for the inflow of energy of Cosmic Light. But just as it is in the case of the individual, when that point is reached - that Dark Night of the Soul - there is a “choice” that becomes apparent: the soul is offered the way “up” or the way “down”. In order for this coming inflow of energy to act in positive ways, to create a new reality of Free Will and Balance, there must be a point of contact that can conduct the energy.

 

There must be human “micro-chips” or “circuits” sufficient to sustain this energy or all of humanity will perish. This means that only the development of human beings of a certain sort - with a certain “wiring”, so to say - will result in the global capacity to confront the energies of the Crossroads.

The only other Turning Point in history that can be compared with the present one is that of the “Great Flood”. And so, we come to the idea that the search for the Holy Grail and the alchemical work of distillation of the Philosopher’s Stone is ALSO the “building of an Ark” in order to pass over into the New World.

As things “heat up” here on the Big Blue Marble, we have received much correspondence from individuals asking “what to do”. Many of the old fears and turmoil have surfaced with ideas of pulling up roots and - for reasons of self-preservation - moving here or there or undertaking to follow this or that promoter of “methods of ascension” or methods of “fixing the planet” so that everybody can just “get along” or we can all snuggle up with some warm fuzzies and get some rest.

The reader who has surveyed the material on our website has surely come to the conclusion that what we are saying is “nothing is as it seems and never has been”, including the many religions and “methods of ascension” promoted down through the ages.

But what is lacking is a clearly defined WAY that might give guidance to the seeker in his quest for the keys to his own “salvation” in whatever terms he might define it. I have worked on presenting the WAY in both the Wave Series and the Adventures series by sharing my own experiences and what I have gleaned from much study and research, but some readers are put off by material that deals with all the lies and deceptions that we face in our reality and simply want to read something “uplifting”. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that one cannot be “uplifted” as long as one is mired in quicksand.

 

What seems to be true is that we live in a world of lies - ruled by lies and stealing - and that human beings lie because it is impossible for them to do otherwise. Without a Way, that is.

As a result of our own searching and questing for answers, our repeated trying and testing of sources and materials, little by little we have come to the idea of what NOT to do. But again, there has not been a whole lot about what TO DO.

The Cassiopaeans have indicated certain pathways to follow in terms of research, but as always, we are more or less on our own in acquiring the knowledge and learning how to apply it - and for good reason. You cannot become yourself in the future if you avoid doing those things that make the future what it is. You can accelerate it, or enhance it, perhaps, but you certainly can’t have it handed to you on a platter. If you did, you would avoid doing the many things that are necessary which may include making contacts and connections that “shape the future”.

Among the things we have found via this exertion, is a body of teachings that not only meshes with, but vigorously expands upon the Cassiopaean Transmissions to an extent that we cannot think is accidental. The work in question is that of the Russian exile Boris Mouravieff, presented in his three part study and commentaries entitled Gnosis. Very little information is available on the background of these materials while a good deal of disinformation is circulating in other circles, and it is best to address these problems at the outset.

As it happens, during our research into Boris M., we discovered that he was being soundly lambasted by William Patrick Patterson in his book Talking With the Left Hand in which he accuses Mouravieff of “stealing” his ideas from Gurdjieff. Patterson is the author of four highly praised books on spiritual development and is a longtime student of John Pentland, the man Gurdjieff chose to lead the Gurdjieff Work in America, and the editor of The Gurdjieff Journal©, the only international quarterly devoted to exploring the “ancient teaching of the Fourth way brought and embodied by G. I. Gurdjieff”.

Just in case the reader is not familiar with Gurdjieff, let me give a little background. Dating from his first lectures in Moscow and St. Petersburg in 1912, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff attracted the attention of occultists and many Western aristocrats. His teachings (often referred to as the ‘Gurdjieff Work’ or ‘Fourth Way’) became widely known through the writings and lectures of his pupil, the famous Russian mathematician and journalist Pyotr D. Ouspensky, and were later propagated by Alfred Orage, John G. Bennett, Rodney Collins, and Dr. Maurice Nicoll.

Gurdjieff himself admitted that he was utilizing ‘stolen’ teachings from a wide range of groups that he had encountered (including the Yezidis, the Russian Orthodox Church, and Sufi ‘Bektashi’ and ‘Naqshbandi’ sects in the Hindu Kush and Pamir regions) in his world travels. A deep study of Gurdjieff’s work shows that he was obviously experimenting with his own ideas on how to utilize bits and pieces from these different teachings to create a system that would enable individuals to overcome ingrained “cognitive defects”, become more conscious, and awaken the Higher Self’s “Objective Conscience”.

At a certain point, it seems that Gurdjieff realized that he had undertaken an impossible task since nearly all of his students “heard” only what they wanted to hear. He closed his school and concentrated on putting his ideas into allegory in his book Beelzebub’s Tales To His Grandson (1950), which also incorporated and developed additional esoteric themes into his ideas.

Many of Gurdjieff’s concepts have profoundly influenced our present culture due to the fact that some of his followers were famous and wealthy and had the means to promote them to others in the upper classes. After his death in 1949, Gurdjieff’s legacy was disseminated through many people, and much of his work has been passed on through fragmentation of the many groups into something akin to secular denominations. One of the biggest problems with what happened to Gurdjieff’s work, which seemed to be a sincere attempt to help humanity, was the formation of what can only be called personality cults and identifications with Gurdjieff at the expense and obfuscation of his ideas. It seems that Gurdjieff himself saw this coming at the end of his life.

Groups that are offshoots of Gurdjieff’s teachings have been known to use all kinds of things to reprogram their members, including isolation, group think, authoritarian power structures, and other psychological methods designed to unmask or break down the personal ego. But, what seems clear is that, in the case of Gurdjieff, no one group can claim the whole cheese since he was curiously selective about what he told whom, and even those who were closest to him obviously misunderstood what he was trying to convey, as evidenced by his own statements about this factor towards the end of his life.

 

Mouravieff comments on this:

People interested in esoteric matters will probably have read the book by P.D. Ouspensky, published posthumously, titled In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching. The ideas in that book were presented to Ouspensky by Georges Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff indicates the basis of his teaching: “for the benefit of those who know already, I will say that, if you like, this is esoteric Christianity.”

Ouspensky’s book - correctly indicated by the title - contains only fragments of a tradition which, until recently, was only transmitted orally. And only a study of the complete tradition can give access to the revelation.

 

The system disclosed by the fragments that form Ouspensky’s book and Gurdjieff’s work, originates from revelations issued by the Great Esoteric Brotherhood to which the Apostle Paul alluded in his Epistle to the Romans:

We are assured and know that all things work together and are fitting into a plan for good to and for those who love God and are called according to design and purpose. For those whom He foreknew, He also destined from the beginning to be molded into the image of His Son, that he might become the firstborn of MANY brethren.

 

And those whom He thus foreordained, He also called; and those whom He called, He also justified, made them righteous, and those whom He justified, He also glorified. What then shall we say to this: If God is for us, who can be against us?

[8;28-31]

Boris Mouravieff asks: What should be the attitude of students towards the “Gurdjieff phenomenon” and Ouspensky’s “Fragments”?

The attentive reader will easily find the answer to that question himself in the contents of this book: we must begin by separating the message from the messenger, and we must look for the message beyond the level or information. This is the way to discover and eliminate error.

 

Robin Amis, editor of the English translation of Mouravieff'’s work tells us:

In a myth well known in the Orient we are told that there exists a race of ‘Royal Swans’. The fable adds that if we put milk mixed with water in front of one of them, it will separate out the milk and drink it, leaving the water. That must be the attitude of students.

Saint Gregory Palamas said the same when he wrote in his first Triad:

“As for those people they call ‘theologians’ or ‘teachers,’ and think themselves able to borrow their theological terms, is it necessary even to mention them? Is it necessary that we keep away from ‘the light which lights every man who comes into the world,’ and wait for the terrible shadows of ignorance to illumine us, on the pretext that, just as serpents are useful, this is something useful for us?

 

For the flesh of serpents is only useful to us if they have been killed, and cut up and used with reason as a remedy against their own bites. Those who kill them in this way turn a part of these snakes against themselves, just as if they had killed with his own sword a new Goliath, who had taken arms, who had set himself up to oppose us, who cursed the army of the living God - someone educated in divine things by sinners and illiterates.”

The fact is, Gurdjieff faced great difficulties at the point in time when he sought to experiment with waking up humanity. As noted above, it was “Mission Impossible”. However, what he and his followers did manage to do was to slash a trail through a jungle of lies and disinformation. It is not appropriate for his followers to insist that this bare trail is all there is and that there is no more. Rather, it is only logical to widen the trail, to pass through the gate revealed at the end of the trail, and to discover what lies on the other side.

 

A student of Mouravieff asks:

Why did Gurdjieff hide his sources? Why does he remain silent on this subject, except in rare exceptional circumstances, such as that encounter with Mouravieff at the Cafe de la Paix:

“I find the system at the foundations of the Christian doctrine. What do you say on this matter?” [asked Mouravieff of Gurdjieff]

 

“It is the ABC,” Gurdjieff answered me. “But they do not understand this!”

[A response to William Patrick Patterson’s criticism in his book “Taking with the Left Hand” by a student of Boris Mouravieff Translated from the French by Theodore J. Nottingham]

In his book, Struggle of the Magicians, Patterson includes quotes on the front pages which say:

The Magus is the highest that man can approach to God. - G.I. Gurdjieff

Toast to Gurdjieff:: God give you the strength and the manhood to endure your lofty solitude. - Rachmilevitch Gurdjieff is a kind of walking God - a planetary or even solar God. - A.R. Orage

In response to these ideas, obviously dear to the heart of many Gurdjieff followers, including Patterson, let me just point out that Gurdjieff never accomplished the transmutation. He died just like everybody else. 33

33 And I should add, so did Rene Schwaller.


Considering the fact that several other “seekers” were reputed to have transitioned without seeing death - Flamel and Fulcanelli among them - we might think that the only parts of Gurdjieff’s work that should interest us are the parts that elucidate the work of the affirmed Masters. And frankly, Mouravieff has offered many clues that do, in fact, contribute to the body of alchemical/hermetic knowledge in a significant way.

Mouravieff’s work is extraordinary in its clarity and completion of what was started by Gurdjieff, explaining much that Gurdjieff never explained, or if he did, those he explained it to either did not understand it, or sought to keep it secret so as to dispense it in controlled dollops to those they considered worthy (or who had enough money to pay for it).

I would like to note here that the work of Mouravieff provides that ineluctable bridge between the works of Gurdjieff, Ibn al-’Arabi, Carlos Casteneda, conjectured esoteric Christianity, hermeticism/alchemy and the Cassiopaean Transmissions. It should be noted that the Cassiopaeans - us in the future - have definitively supported the existence and work of a man around whom the Jesus legend formed - though they tell us that the story in the Bible that is supposed to be history is a myth - and here we find a body of teachings that lends background to this view, as well as supplemental information that elucidates the many clues offered by the Cassiopaeans.

This brings us back to the issue of what we are supposed to DO in this day and age that is getting scarier by the minute?

 

When I was at that stage myself, asking what should I do, where, when, how and why, I was quite surprised when the C’s responded that all of the running around to look for “safe places” was just “3D thinking” and that the only thing that counted was:

“Who you are and what you see.” SEEing = perspicacity. And what you see, combined with who you are, determines what you DO. This leads to another important point:

 

C’s: Beware of disinformation. It diverts your attention away from reality thus leaving you open to capture and conquest and even possible destruction. Disinformation comes from seemingly reliable sources. It is extremely important for you to not gather false knowledge as it is more damaging than no knowledge at all. Remember knowledge protects, ignorance endangers. [...] Remember, disinformation is very effective when delivered by highly trained sources because hypnotic and transdimensional techniques are used thereby causing electronic anomalies to follow suggestion causing perceived confirmation to occur.

In the following sections, I will be quoting heavily from Mouravieff’s books, including the introductions, but often with the insertion of “modern terms” at certain points, or terms which will make the excerpts more comprehensible to those who have not delved deeply into such studies. It is my hope that this condensation will inspire the readers to read the works of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and Mouravieff.

 

Robin Amis gives us a little background about the Tradition:

Boris Mouravieff’s trilogy Gnosis is an attempt to recover and describe, in terms understandable to modern man, a particular Tradition handed down over the centuries, in a sometimes broken line, but one that still exists today in the Eastern Orthodox Church. This tradition could be said to be the Christian equivalent of Yoga, Zen, and the other inner traditions of the far Eastern religions, disciplines, which have each existed as specializations within the religion of which they are a part.

It is not one man’s system or invention, but has its roots far back in the history of Christianity - whose roots lie in certain statements of St. Paul, and perhaps even of Christ himself. Their development can be traced first through formative figures of the early churches, and it clearly relates to the doctrines expressed in the key texts of Eastern spirituality such as the Philokalia.

It clearly relates the oral tradition known as the Royal Way that survives to this day in the main centers of monasticism in the Eastern church. But it does not claim to be a work of Orthodox theology, nor to reinterpret Orthodox doctrine.

Mouravieff admits that the survival of this tradition within the church is tenuous, that the doctrine does not appear to survive in full or has not been collected together in full. Monks on Athos admit the existence of the Tradition but say that it has never been fully spelled out in writing. The importance of Mouravieff‘s work is the effort he has made to collect that dispersed information and to make it accessible in practical form.

What are the sources of Mouravieff’s knowledge? It is clear that his text consists of knowledge of a high order.

There are several ways in which the accuracy of a text can be verified, and Mouravieff’s stands up to all these methods of assay. First of all, it fits the Orthodox tradition as expressed by those who still possess the Royal Way. It evokes the confirmation of inspiration described in Plato’s seventh letter. It predicts, in what appears at first to be mere theory, the actual events of the life in the study of Gnosis. It stands the test of practice, and in doing so it remains internally consistent. When it does introduce ideas from other traditions, such as the concept of karma, it does so in ways that, properly understood, remain consistent to the overall statement of the doctrine with a degree of precision equal to that of the mature external sciences.

Those who can discriminate between different levels of knowledge will find in Mouravieff an almost inexhaustible treasury of knowledge that can lead to true spiritual transformation. But it is necessary first to work for this discrimination. Without it, not only will you be unable to differentiate between gnosis and its imitations, but even Mouravieff’s work will not release its gnosis to you in trust.

The idea of esotericism is often misunderstood. The clue can be found in the Gospel of Saint John: “I am the vine, ye are the branches: he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.”

The word translated “without”, the Greek “choris”, quite definitely means “outside”. What this means is that in those times there was an inner knowledge, based on assenting to traditional knowledge - gnosis - which is then confirmed experimentally through techniques of inner observation, and a purely external kind of knowledge, gained through the ordinary senses.

Constantine Cavarnos confirmed that there is an exoteric and esoteric Christianity:

“The first kind of philosophy, external philosophy, comprises for them ancient Greek philosophy and the pagan philosophy of early Christian centuries. The second kind, “internal philosophy”, is identical with the [true] Christian religion.”

[The Hellenic Christian Philosophical Tradition, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont, MA, 1989. p. 109, quoted by Robin Amis in the introduction to Mouravieff’s Gnosis II]

Over the years, this esotericism has formed a Tradition, a science, or discipline of knowledge which may have existed before the time of Christ, but which has since been totally assimilated to the inner meaning of Christianity. Boris Mouravieff says that, “This Tradition, which in Antiquity was only revealed in the Mysteries under the seal of absolute secrecy.”

Under the influence of self-proclaimed initiates of The Tradition such as Guenon and Schwaller, Mouravieff has, unfortunately adopted and included many false teachings in his “social commentary” included in the three volumes of Gnosis.

 

Among these errors, he includes the idea that this Tradition passed from Egypt to Judaea and thus to Christianity - at least not Egypt as we understand it today. What is clear is that the True Tradition of the Eleusinian mysteries is behind Christianity, and it was the Egyptian Tradition elucidated and popularized by Schwaller and other Western occultists that is at the root of the false teaching that corrupted and distorted the work of the man we have come to know as Jesus.

 

It is only in more recent times, with much additional research, including that of Picknett and Prince in The Stargate Conspiracy, that we are even able to begin to separate these threads and come to this understanding. In short, even the work of Mouravieff must be “separated” like the milk from the water.

Regarding the error of understanding True Esoteric Christianity in terms of the Egyptian Religion, in Manly Hall’s exhaustive compendium, The Secret Teachings of All Ages, we find mention of the fact that St. Irenaeus was complaining about the efforts to compare Christianity to the religion of the Egyptians which included the death and resurrection of Osiris/Horus.

 

Irenaeus had some other interesting things to say about this, as Hall points out:

According to popular conception, Jesus was crucified during the thirty-third year of His life and in the third year of His ministry following his baptism. About AD 180, St. Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, one of the most eminent of the ante-Nicene theologians, wrote Against Heresies, an attack on the doctrines of the Gnostics. In this work, Irenaeus declared upon the authority of the Apostles themselves that Jesus lived to old age.

 

To quote:

 

They, however, that they may establish their false opinion regarding that which is written, maintain that He preached for one year only, and then suffered in the twelfth month. [In speaking thus], they are forgetful of their own disadvantage, destroying His whole work, and robbing Him of that age which is both more necessary and more honorable than any other, that more advanced age, I mean, during which also as a teacher He excelled all others. For how could He have had His disciples, if He did not teach? And how could He have taught unless He had reached the age of a Master?

For when He came to be baptized, He had not yet completed His thirtieth year, but was beginning to be about thirty years of age; and, according to these men, He preached only one year reckoning from His baptism. On completing His thirtieth year He suffered, being in fact still a young man, and who had by no means attained to advanced age.

 

Now, that the first stage of early life embraces thirty years, and that this extends onward to the fortieth year, every one will admit; but from the fortieth and fiftieth year a man begins to decline towards old age, which Our Lord possessed while He still fulfilled the office of a Teacher, even as the Gospel and all the elders testify; those who were conversant in Asia with John, the disciple of the Lord, affirming that John conveyed to them that information. And He remained among them up to the time of Trajan.

Some of them, moreover, saw not only John, but the other apostles also, and heard the very same account from them, and bear testimony as to the validity of the statement. Whom then should we rather believe? Whether such men as these or Ptolemaeus, who never saw the apostles, and who never even in his dreams attained to the slightest trace of an apostle?

Well, obviously, this “Gospel” that Irenaeus refers to as testifying that Jesus did not suffer and die has disappeared! But, commenting on the foregoing passage, theologian Godfrey Higgins remarks that it has fortunately escaped the hands of those destroyers who have attempted to render the Gospel narratives consistent by deleting all such statements.

 

He also notes that the doctrine of the crucifixion was a vexata question among Christians even during the second century.

“The evidence of Irenaeus”, he says, “cannot be touched”. “On every principle of sound criticism, and of the doctrine of probabilities, it is unimpeachable.”

[Anacalypsis, Godfrey Higgins, London, 1836, quoted by Manly P. Hall]

Regarding the above comments by Irenaeus, we notice that he was blaming the corruption of the work of Jesus on the Gnostics. What seems altogether possible, considering the revelations of the inner tradition of esoteric Christianity, is that Irenaeus - and others - completely misunderstood the teachings of the metaphor of crucifixion which, it is clear, are an alchemical allegory.

Nevertheless, as years passed, this “misunderstanding” became the foundation of Christianity itself and those who noted its similarity to the Egyptian religion and other dying God myths assumed the transmission from ancient Egypt as we now understand it.

The fad for all things “Egyptian” has been with us for a very long time.

 

Schwaller de Lubicz - the vector of many of these ideas - settled in Egypt in 1938 and for the next 15 years studied the symbolism of the temples, particularly Luxor, finding what he considered to be proof that the ancient Egyptians were the ultimate examples of Synarchy, because they were ruled by a group of elite initiates. He failed to point out that the Egyptian civilization was static and limited. What’s more, it caved in on itself, and never managed to produce any significant work of benefit for humanity, as Otto Neugebauer showed conclusively in his The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, whose evidence we will quote further on in this volume.

The open-minded thinker ought to really consider the purported mysteries of Egypt in terms of the fact that they were so ignorant that they devoted a huge amount of energy to their “cult of the dead”. The whole Egyptian shtick is focused around preserving dead flesh for future or otherworldly reanimation. The very fact that there are so many of these dead bodies for Egyptologists to dig up is the clearest evidence that the Egyptian beliefs were nonsense. So, in that sense, certainly, Christianity as we know it has adopted the “Egyptian religion” and its beliefs in physical resurrection.

The whole issue of the excitement over Egyptian civilization is the belief that they had some mysterious powers because they built the pyramids and we can’t. And has it never occurred to anybody that the existence of the pyramids in conjunction with the worship of an elite group of human beings, while everybody else was wearing loincloths and sweating in the hot sun, might suggest a relationship between the two? The fact is, the Egyptian civilization seems to have been the chief example of a vast chasm between the haves and the have-nots, and they managed to do it longer than anybody else.

In examining the work of Schwaller, we have one of the better examples of the subtle way the negative occult societies attack those who come to bring light, by association and co-opting. The tactic is to find a means of subtly allying their message with that of the truth so as to generate confusion in untrained minds which would tend, on surface evidence, to accept these actually contrary messages as similar, at least in intent.

The negative occultists who are promoting the new Control System borrow all their components from what is of truth, and proceed by the method of imitation. They literally will ape the expression of positive teachings, and all the more carefully when they wish to be mistaken altogether for purveyors of truth, so as to subvert the messages.

 

And so it was that Mouravieff, under the influence of the Synarchists of his day, introduced some of their ideas into his own synthesis of the authentic Tradition, including the idea that the Tradition was passed from Egypt to Judaea via Moses.

Regarding his sources, Robin Amis tells us:

Boris Mouravieff tells us that the Christian Esoteric Tradition has always remained alive within certain monasteries in Greece, Russia, and elsewhere. It is true that this knowledge was hermetically hidden, but at the same time, its existence was known and access to it was never forbidden to those seriously interested in esoteric questions.

Mouravieff tells us that his commentaries are drawn directly from the Eastern Christian Tradition: the sacred texts, the commentaries written around these texts, and especially from the Philokalia which is, above all, the same teaching and discipline, transmitted by fully authorized individuals.

Attentive examination and comparison of Mouravieff’s work to that of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff will show the incomplete character of the latter, as well as the deviations from the ancient doctrine.

Christ categorically affirmed that entry into the Kingdom of God is closed to those who have not been born anew. This second Birth is the object and goal of esoteric work.

Most of the writings of the Philokalia were intended for people who had already acquired some proficiency in esoteric studies. One could actually say the same about the Gospels, corrupted and glossed though they be. Bishop Theophan, in his preface to the Philokalia, insists on the fact that without help nobody can succeed in penetrating the doctrine. This is why esoteric science conserves and cultivates an oral tradition which brings the letter to life. Oriental Orthodoxy has known how to keep this Tradition intact by applying the absolute rule of Hermetism in each particular case. From generation to generation, ever since the time of the Apostles, it has led its disciples up to mystic experience.

If Hermetism has provided a safeguard for nearly twenty centuries, it must be said that circumstances have now changed. At the current point in history, as at the time of the Coming of Christ, the veil has been partially raised. Therefore, for those who want to advance beyond book knowledge, which never goes beyond the domain of information; for those who intensely seek the true sense of life, who want to understand the significance of the mission of those who labor in the vineyards of the Lord at the time of the Harvest, the possibility exists for initiation into this divine Wisdom, mysterious and hidden.

Mouravieff notes that all serious esoteric teaching, as in ordinary education, is almost uniform.

It is generally accepted that nobody can go on to secondary school without having completed an elementary education. Nor can a person be admitted to a university without having a secondary education. These graduations automatically “select” those able to become active members of the cultural elite of human society.

Exactly the same is true in the esoteric Tradition.

However, in our modern world, we encounter a curious phenomenon. For example: we would not seek to discuss Newton’s binomial theorem without having studied algebra, for without this, every opinion we expressed on the subject would be worthless.

Yet, in the esoteric field, we find a host of “experts” who declare their opinions on esotericism without having ever learned even the rudiments of this knowledge.

At the same time, some of them demand “simplicity” from esoteric teachings on the generally accepted principle that Truth itself must be simple. They conclude from this that access to Truth ought to likewise be simple. Then they assert that the methods to access Truth must be easily assimilable.

This argument would be perfectly correct if human beings and the problems they face were simple and just. However, that is not the case. There is a long road to travel from our state of distorted inner disorder to any “original simplicity”.

In practice, the doctrine of “simplicity” - if regarded as an axiom - turns the student aside from the strait gate and the narrow way that leads to Life. Impelled by this counter-truth, he believes he stands before this door, when he is in reality although undoubtedly in perfectly good faith - walking the wide path that leads to perdition, ad majorem Diaboli gloriam, of course.

The Doctrine of Simplicity, correct in itself, but wrongly interpreted, becomes a snare for hearts and minds that are already too corrupt; a danger which should be recognized and avoided.

Some people complain that the subject of the fundamentals of esotericism is not simple. Others have said that it leads to great clarity. This apparent contradiction is explained by the fact that esotericism is addressed to readers who are predisposed to esoteric culture by their nature, formation or personal experience.

Jesus said:

“Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves”. And then he adds: “You shall know them by their fruits”.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for an esoterically unevolved person to discern false prophets spontaneously. He will recognize them more easily by their “fruits”, by the observable results of their works, which serve as signs. The Tradition knows and teaches a whole Science of signs.

Jesus further said:

“Temptations (snares, traps set to entice to sin) are sure to come, but woe to him by or through whom they come! It would be more profitable for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were hurled into the sea than that he should cause to sin or be a snare…”

This warning is disturbing, but its value is real. A thief can carry off our wealth; a ‘ravening wolf‘ can deprive us of salvation.

That ‘ravening wolves’ appear in sheep’s clothing we shall learn from the following text, well-phrased to frighten us:

“It is not everyone that saith unto me: Lord, Lord, who shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that accomplishes the will of my Father which is in Heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works? And then I shall declare unto them, I never knew you: depart from Me, ye who work iniquity”.

The conclusion is that neither prophecies that are fulfilled nor the occurrence of miracles give us any surety against ‘ravening wolves’.

And in our own times:

“There shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall show great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they should deceive the very elect.”

Our era is the time of Transition. We are in the heart of this period, which is relatively short. All the signs show that the necessary conditions for the End are emerging before our very eyes.

As expressed by Boris Mouravieff in his presentation of the Ancient Science of Ascension, only human beings of iron will, guided by a higher consciousness, or Noë, will advance into the New Heaven and New Earth, in literal terms.

 

The coming era has Two Faces: One of Paradise Restored, the other a Deluge of Fire. We can choose which Face we behold.

Mouravieff tells us that the direction humanity chooses will depend upon the attitude of contemporary man. It is not enough to repeat, “Lord, Lord!” to enter the Ark and pass through to the New World. Everything depends on a person’s work; the conscious efforts during this very time. And it is not just efforts applied in any direction, but rather very specific efforts to achieve a state of “living leaven”.

“Leaven” represents a numerically small, even infinitesimal group, lost to sight, even, in a vast and teeming global population, but whose effect and influence will reach the farthest corners of the world. A Divine Revelation is not Static. The time has come when, in the esoteric domain, private research and the pursuit of individual salvation for the self must end.

As Mouravieff says, every era is an “ambience” which holds within it the solution to the problems specific to it. Man can choose his response according to the level of his understanding and Being. And so, the ambience that exists at the present time, at the end of an Epoch, opens up possibilities for man on all planes. It will also eliminate those possibilities that belong to the previous era.

It is in this present period of history that we observe an upsurge in esoteric interest much of which includes, as is usual in such eras, wide promulgation of false teachings and cunning disinformation. At the same time, the Seeker is being offered the data for the “strait gate”. It is up to each individual to understand the significance of what is being offered here, and to get down to work. Many workers are needed in this time in the same way physicians are needed on the battlefield. After all, a doctor is of little use in a society of people who are in a state of robust health.

Today, and in the not-too-distant future, Esoterically Developed Teachers will be in demand in all branches of human activity. It is the purpose of The Quantum Future School to assist in filling this demand for teachers who can aid the individual in his or her personal spiritual processes, as well as to prepare them for the time when they will be needed, and asked, for their services as Spiritual Physicians.

Getting back to the process, assisted by the Cassiopaean transmissions from “myself in the future”, in avoiding the trap of emotional amnesia, I began by collecting data. I had no idea what data would prove to be important, and the Cassiopaeans stressed from the beginning that it was better to assume NOTHING and just collect and sort and see what patterns emerged of themselves from the sorting process. It was rather like the preparations made to put a large, complicated jigsaw puzzle together.

 

One begins by sorting the pieces by color into piles.

 

At the same time, if one comes across fragments that are clearly the “border” pieces, one then puts them in an altogether different pile. Once in awhile, while sorting, serendipity brings two pieces together, and those are put in little “sub-piles”. After this process is completed, it is done again in a more refined and exact way.

However, the Grail Problem has certain complications. It is like having the puzzle; only someone has hidden half or more of the pieces. Not only are we going to have difficulty getting a full outline, even if we DO assemble the pieces we have accurately, we may not be able to determine what the picture truly portrays. Add to this the fact that someone may come into the room and drop pieces into your pile that do not even belong to the puzzle!

Yes, it is that bad, if not worse.

As the reader may guess after thinking about the problem of “putting the puzzle together”, the process of gathering and sorting the pieces as well as the details of the discoveries along the way was lengthy and tedious, but the conclusions arrived at were, to the mind of the present writer, nothing short of shattering. In fact, if an individual CAN fully outline ALL the steps taken to solve so complex a problem as the Grail, he or she probably doesn’t have a clue!

Of course, in the broadest of terms, the Grail Quest is always personal to each and every one who is inspired to undertake it. But, in my case, I was not exactly on the track of the “Holy Grail”, per se. I was simply a seeker of truth - the purest and most objective I could find. After years of collecting puzzle pieces and sorting them, I began to realize that everything became dense as it coalesced around the Grail problem.

 

It is not just a symbol in a story about knightly quests and their performance of feats of derring-do along the way!

 

At some point I realized that this is the Secret of Secrets; the Grand Destiny; the gnosis of the means of uniting Science, Philosophy and Religion, as well as Mind, Matter and Time.

It took me a long time to come to this realization because my nature is fundamentally skeptical. I am constitutionally incapable of taking anybody’s word for anything - I have to “see for myself”. If I read a quoted source in a book, I have to read the source from which the quote is taken. If that source quotes someone else, I am driven to find the original. And, if I ever finally get to the originator of an idea, I am driven to study the life and methods of that person and to discover, if possible, the observations they made which led them to a particular conclusion.

 

This is time-consuming and tedious, no question about it; but it is the only way that satisfies me; and it has certainly borne valuable fruit in the long run. Many ideas and teachings that other seekers accept at “face value”, I have long ago discarded as useless after investigating them deeply and finding they are built on foundations of lies and deception.

Skepticism, the ability not to be fooled, is important; but skepticism can also be “cheap”. It is easy to disbelieve everything, and some scholars seem to take this approach. A better approach is to initially consider nothing absurd, and spend the necessary time to examine it closely and minutely. If you throw away puzzle pieces indiscriminately, you may never complete the puzzle!

 

But, when you find the flaw, even a small one, if it is solidly established as a flaw, you must be prepared to ruthlessly kill the idea and move to another.

Scientific training doesn’t keep your senses from fooling you, but a good scientist doesn’t accept the impressions his senses deliver. He uses them as a starting point, and then he checks, and double checks. He looks for additional evidence, and for consistency among his measurements. A scientist differs from other people in that he knows how easily he is fooled, and he goes through procedures to compensate. 34

 

34 Muller, Richard, Nemesis, (University of Arizona Press 1988).

So, with each little pile of puzzle pieces, one takes up a likely starting piece and attempts to fit the others to it one by one. But, as I noted, it may be so that the “starting piece” has been tossed into the pile to lead one astray, and will NEVER fit anything! And it may take a long time to realize this. Many people never realize it.

 

They trim the piece, they trim other pieces, they force and maneuver to make them fit!

 

And then, of course, having done this, other pieces are found that do, actually, fit, and they crow with delight that they have solved the puzzle never realizing that the “keystone” they started has caused all the adjacent pieces to come together around a false center, thus the primary object has been missed... and the REAL centerpiece will be tossed aside as irrelevant.

 

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