By MICHAEL HOWARD—

Today, especially in New Age circles, the term ‘shamanism’ is often used in a generalised way to describe all kinds of indigenous magical practices in a wide range of cultures worldwide. It has also been projected back into a past that it never had, so we can find modern books on so-called ‘Celtic shamanism’ and even ‘Ancient Egyptian shamanism’. Modern writers on the subject such as Dr. Michael Harner have also created what is called ‘core shamanism’ or ‘urban shamanism’. 

This takes the essence of shamanic beliefs and practices and repackages them in a safe, sanitised and often diluted form that is acceptable for Western seekers of alternative spirituality. In this article, however, we examine and describe the real ‘core shamanism’ as it has been practised for hundreds of years in its homeland of Siberia and the Turkic-speaking areas of Mongolia, and where it is now being revived.

In the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries the area known as Siberia was colonised by the Russians. They were led there by its abundance of wild animals that created a flourishing trade in animal skins and furs. The Tsars used the income from this enterprise to boost their economy and access the foreign currency that helped create the Russian empire. The influx of Russian hunters, fur traders and merchants drastically affected the local population, which consisted of many different tribes. By the 1900s the native population had dwindled to about 10% of the total people living in Siberia. Along with the fur traders there also came missionaries and, in later times, anthropologists. The former were interested in converting the indigenous population to Orthodox Christianity, while the latter wanted to study their tribal culture, spiritual beliefs and ritual practices. Both these groups of outsiders contacted the tribal shamans of Siberia and, for totally different reasons, recorded and commented upon their religious observances.

The earliest references to magical practitioners that could be described as shamans in fact date back to the 13^th century. It was then that the first Western travellers penetrated Central Asia and visited the court of the Mongol rulers. The explorer Marco Polo, for instance, met magicians who were healers and could diagnosis diseases by the use of divination. Polo says they became possessed by what he described as “a devil,” who then used their vocal chords to speak through them.

However, it was an English explorer called Richard Johnston in the 16^th century who first described what sounds very like the activities of shamans proper. He reported witnessing a tribal priest wearing animal skins and playing a drum “shaped like a great sieve” in “devilish rites.” During the ritual the drummer fell into a trance and was possessed by “evil spirits.”

In 1692 another Western explorer, Nicholas Witsen, described seeing a “shaman” or “priest of the Devil.” He was clad in ritual regalia, consisting of an antlered head-dress and a richly decorated robe, and chanted and beat on a drum to attract the spirits. Generally, reflecting the Catholic culture they came from, these Westerners regarded the shamans as fanatical “devil worshippers” who forced their ignorant and uneducated followers to serve evil spirits and demons.

What is Siberian Shamanism?

The meaning of the word ‘shaman’ is shrouded in linguistic mystery and various explanations have been put forward for its origin. One theory is that it is possibly derived from an ancient Chinese term for a Buddhist priest or monk. The Oxford English Dictionary defines its meaning as “a priest or witch-doctor [sic] of (a) class claiming to have sole contact with gods etc.” It says the word comes from the Russian “shaman” and is a translation of the Tungusion word “saman.” In Siberia and Mongolia, shamanism was known as Tengerism, meaning a reverence for sky spirits. It reflected an animistic belief system where everything in the natural world was alive, permeated by spirit force or, in simple terms, inhabited by spirits.

These spirits had to be respected and appeased or else the land would become infertile and barren, the animals relied upon for food would disappear and eventually the world would come to an end. To achieve this essential and vital balance between humans, nature and the spirit world, a magical specialist was required and the shaman took that role. He or she acted as an intermediary or middle person between humanity and the Other, and a caretaker of cultural and magical tradition. Their job involved conducting blessings, especially on new-born babies, performing rituals of protection, divining the future, healing the sick, exorcising ghosts and demons, overseeing the burial of the dead, and generally communicating on behalf of the tribe with the spirit world and its denizens.

Initiation into the shamanic cult could be achieved in several different ways. The easiest was the hereditary route where magical knowledge, power and skill were passed down from grandfather or father to son or, more rarely, from grandmother or mother to daughter. Sometimes children were chosen at a very early age or even at birth by the spirits and instructed by them through the medium of visions and dreams. Young people who suffered a serious illness or disease or from epileptic fits, were introverted and dreamy, or had any form of mental condition or disability, were regarded as natural shamans who had been specially chosen by the spirits.

In later life those who felt a strong calling to become a magical practitioner would retreat from society, usually to a remote place in the wilderness, and undergo a vigil during which they invited the spirits to contact them and teach them the shamanic ways. When a person was actually taken on by another shaman as his assistant or sorcerer’s apprentice, a formal initiation rite was often carried out. The candidate offered an animal sacrifice, called on the spirits to aid them in their task, took an oath of loyalty to their shamanic master or spiritual clan, and accepted the special ritual regalia of a shaman’s office.

Often these initiations by either another shaman or the spirits involved a traumatic visionary death and rebirth experience. Sometimes this included a journey to the underworld, meetings with deities and the would-be shaman’s body being dismembered and then put together again.

The ritual regalia given to the new shaman reflected the fact that he or she was a special person who was separate and different from other members of the tribe. Siberian shamans wore robes made from animal hide and fur and decorated with embroidery, bird’s feathers, silk tassels, ribbons, bells, small mirrors, jewellery representing symbolic motifs such as the World Tree, and assorted metalwork such as copper discs. Headwear consisted of a conical or pointed cap made from felt or fur or the antlers of a reindeer. Some shamans wore iron-shod fur boots so when they stamped their feet they could drive away evil spirits.

The majority of shamans carried a ritual drum similar in shape to the traditional Irish bodhran. These were made from an animal skin stretched over a wooden frame and decorated with feathers and magical symbols representing spirit journeys to the Otherworld or the shamanic cosmology. The drum was very important and represented the symbolic and magical steed that enabled the practitioner to travel from Middle Earth to the realm of the spirits. It was also a magical object in its own right that contained and focused spirit force or energy. By playing it the shaman could both attract spirits and exorcise them. In addition to the drum a magical staff was often carried. This was made of either wood or metal and was decorated with feathers, bells, ribbons and the pelts of small woodland animals.

Different Types of Shaman

Although Westerners used the generic term ‘shaman’ to describe all the tribal magical practitioners of Siberia and Mongolia, in practice they were divided into several different types, categories or classes with specific magical duties and responsibilities. Using English terminology, these included ‘conjurors’ who summoned and controlled spirits, prophets or psychics who foresaw the future, sorcerers who practised ‘black magic’, trance-workers who travelled in spirit form to the Otherworld, healers who were experts in folk medicine and herbalism, and guides to the dead who laid out corpses and conducted funeral rites.

The shaman-healers were often female and they specialised in health matters connected with human and animal fertility, sexuality and children. They were recognisable by their distinctive skirts made from animal hide and brightly coloured woollen hats. Instead of the ritual drum used by the male shamans, they carried a silk fan and prayer beads. Unfortunately when Buddhism came to Siberia and Mongolia many of these female healers were ruthlessly persecuted and exterminated by the misogynist monks. As a result their extensive knowledge of herbs and plants used for natural healing was either lost completely or taken over by Buddhist healers and only practised in a debased or diluted form.

Another female practitioner was the shaman-midwife, who inherited her power from the maternal line of familial descent. As well as ensuring that babies entered this world safely in a physical sense, she was also responsible for their spiritual protection from evil influences during birth and their well-being as children. In this sense she took on the role of a human fairy godmother. Immediately after a birth the shaman-midwife cut the umbilical cord and then purified the new-born baby with salt water and fire. Any (female only) witnesses to the birth could only be present if they had first been ritually purified by the midwife with fire and water. During the first few weeks of a baby’s life it was very important that the proper rituals were performed to protect the child until its spirit was fully established in the material world. If they were not performed properly then the baby’s spirit might return from whence it had come. These essential rites were the responsibility of the shaman-midwife and her assistants.

Another type of shamanic healer was a bone-setter who called upon spirit guides to help them in their healing work. They mainly repaired broken and dislocated bones and torn ligaments, healed back pain caused by spinal injuries or disease and also skin infections such as boils, rashes, psoriasis and eczema. These gifts were inherited from the paternal side of the family and, because the bones of the human body were considered to be spiritually ‘masculine’ in nature, these shamanic bone-setters were always male.

Most of the shamans worked with what modern New Agers call animal allies or spirit-helpers in animal form. These entities assisted them with their magical work and also taught them. For instance, the shaman-midwives described above worked with an animal spirit in the form of a mountain fox. The first bone-setter is supposed to have been taught his skills by a snake so that creature was sacred to the clan. Other shamanic practitioners were assisted by reindeer or wolves for attacking and destroying evil spirits, and ravens for getting rid of diseases. Other important animal spirit helpers included owls, wild ducks, geese, squirrels, bears, frogs and toads, dogs, seagulls and eagles.

One of the most important and respected types of magical practitioners was the shaman-smith. In all cultures all over the world from Europe to Africa the smith took a central role in tribal society and was regarded as a powerful magician or sorcerer because of his mastery over fire and skill in working with metal. There are many legends about blacksmiths making pacts with demons, gods or the Devil or tricking and outwitting them to acquire their skills. There are also many smith gods in ancient mythology who were magicians, made weapons for the Gods or acted as cultural exemplars by inventing agricultural tools. In Siberia the shaman-smiths made and magically consecrated the ritual metal objects used by other shamans. They were only chosen by the spirits and instead of a drum they used their anvils to communicate with the spiritual realm.

‘Black’ & ‘White’ Shamans

As well as the different types of magical practitioner, the shamans were also divided into two separate, but sometimes overlapping, categories – ‘black’ or ‘white’ shamans. The former were regarded as the most powerful of the two and were sometimes known as ‘warrior-shamans’ because they battled evil forces and were consulted as military advisors. They obtained their power from the north (possibly the North Pole or the North Star) and could be easily identified as they always wore black robes with very little, if any, decoration. The primary function of the black shaman was to deal with demons and the dark gods on behalf of their clients. In this role they were hired to curse their enemies and blight their crops and livestock.

In wartime the black shamans attached themselves to the army rather like the modern padres and helped to win battles using their occult powers. In peacetime they took a more positive role as diplomats, political advisors and emissaries and they oversaw the preparation and signing of treaties with the appropriate magical rites. Black shamans were greatly feared, even after their deaths. In the 19^th century when a famous one died she was placed in a coffin made from the ‘unclean’ wood of an aspen. Her corpse was then nailed down with aspen stakes so she could not become a ‘night walker’ and haunt the living.

In contrast, the so-called ‘white’ shamans obtained their magical power from a westerly direction, the home of the benevolent deities and spirits. They operated at a tribal level almost exclusively as healers and diviners and they only had dealings with beneficent entities. It was their role to pacify angry or evil spirits, exorcise them if they possessed human beings and help the tribe live in harmony with their natural environment and the spirit world. To this end on a physical level they were often employed in an administrative role to oversee tribal affairs.

The Yurt, the World Tree & Spirit Flight

In Siberian and especially Mongolian shamanism the yurt, a traditional dwelling constructed from a framework of wooden poles covered with animal skins and with a central smoke-hole in the roof, was a microcosmic symbol or representation of the universe. For this reason all movement inside the yurt was conducted, if at all possible, in a deosil or sunways direction. This also reflected the traditional direction of movement used in shamanic rituals and dances. The centre of the yurt, where a fire burnt in a hearth and was seldom extinguished, was symbolic of the actual centre of the world or universe. The column of smoke that drifted up from the fire and left the yurt through the central smoke-hole in the roof was symbolic of the axis mundi – the World Mountain, World Pillar or World Tree. This links the underworld below with the heavens above and ends at the North and Pole Star around which all the other stars revolve in the night sky.

The shamans believed in three worlds of existence connected together by the World Tree or Tree of Life. They were the lower world or underworld inhabited by the dead who are awaiting reincarnation, the middle world or Middle Earth, the material plane of existence in which human spirits are incarnated, and the upper world or Heaven, the dwelling place of the Gods. Numerous non-human spirits also inhabit each of these three worlds. The shaman can access these other worlds in trance by means of spirit travel. His soul body ascends the column of smoke from the fire and passes through the aperture in the roof of the yurt. It is interesting to note that in medieval times European witches were supposed to fly to their Sabbats by ascending the chimney on their broomsticks. It is obvious that this was not done physically so they also were practising a shamanic type of spirit flight.

Shamans can also fly through the air when they spirit travel, either by shapeshifting into the form of birds (such as geese) or by riding on the back of a flying deer, horse or some other large animal. Again, there are many woodcuts dating from the Middle Ages depicting witches riding through the night sky on the backs of goats and rams. Sometimes the shaman visited the spirit world by ascending the World Tree itself or by travelling along a rainbow. This is another symbol that is found in Northern European paganism where a rainbow bridge connects Midgard (Middle Earth) with Asgard, the realm of the Gods.

One of the methods used by the Siberian shamans to achieve trance and spirit travel was the hallucinogenic fungi amanita muscaria or fly agaric. This red capped white-spotted toadstool has a symbiotic relationship with both birch and fir trees, which grow profusely in northern and arctic climes. It is so closely associated with magical properties in myth and fairy tales that it is frequently depicted in illustrations to modern children’s stories about woodland elves, faeries and goblins. Fly agaric is reputed to be able to open up the ‘crack between the worlds’ and experiments in the 20^th century by the two well-known ethonomycologists Gordon and Valentina Wasson revealed the ethenogenic qualities of this most famous of ‘sacred mushrooms’.

In Siberia fly agaric was sometimes fed to reindeer and then the animal’s toxic urine is drank. The shamans said that taking it put them in touch with the spirit of the plant, who appeared as small mushrooms with eyes and arms and legs attached. Needless to say that in large quantities fly agaric is highly poisonous and can be deadly. It must, as with all hallucinogenic plants used in magical practice, be used in small quantities, treated with respect and only taken after the proper spiritual preparation and then only under expert supervision. It should also be noted that in many countries fly agaric and other psychedelic fungi are classified as dangerous drugs and the possession or partaking of them is illegal.

In common with indigenous folk beliefs in the West, it was accepted in shamanism that the spirit world was not entirely separated from the material one. There are special places in the natural environment – sacra loci – where the two realms meet and touch and interconnect. These can be a sacred mountain or hill, a stone, a river, a lake, a forest or any natural landmark in the countryside. While the shaman may be able to access such ‘gateways’ or ‘portals’ between here and there easily, lesser mortals may be unaware of them or, if they are sensitive, they may feel they are ‘different’ or ‘other’. Spooky places, whether natural sites in the landscape or buildings, associated with folklore, paranormal phenomena and hauntings are usually spirit gateways.

In shamanistic belief all inanimate objects were inhabited or possessed by spirit energy or force who controlled their environs. Some shamans taught that living beings, especially human ones, could have more than one spirit inhabiting their physical body. Many accepted that humans had an etheric, astral or spirit double and this could be projected in trance or spirit travel to roam over the Earth and also enter the Otherworld. The shamans believed that the soul of a human being resided in a spherical or ovoid energy field that surrounds each of us. It is probably what Western occultists would refer to as the auric field or aura. It was this energy field that was attacked by demons or black shamans when they psychically attacked their victims and in that way they could cause illness or death. It was the task of the white shaman to redress the balance by healing the damaged aura and if possible bring the victim back to full health.

Earlier we saw how animals were important clan totems and spirit guides to the shaman. Before the 20^th century and the rise of industrial scale food production, hunting was widespread on the Siberian steppes and in the forests. Unlike Christian belief, it was accepted without question that animals had souls and when hunting them down and killing them it was essential that their sprits were respected and appeased. If they were not, disaster and misfortune could befall the hunter, his family and tribe. When a hunter killed his prey it was always despatched quickly, cleanly and without cruelty. Before it was killed the hunter apologised for having to do so and after death its remains were treated with care and respect. The same rule applied to domestic animals. A master animal spirit ruled each species and prayers and sacrificial offerings of incense and fire were made to them before the hunt began. Hunting purely for pleasure, as practised in the West, was an unknown concept.

Buddhism & the Stamping Out of Shamanism

Despite the early arrival of the fur traders and merchants in Siberia and Mongolia, shamanism survived. In the 16^th century, however, a Mongolian ruler called Altan Khan invited a Tibetan Buddhist mission to the country. His motives were political as he wanted to consolidate his own position as the supreme tribal leader by claiming to be the reincarnation of the great Kubla Khan. The Buddhists agreed to recognise his claim and in return the Khan gave the head of the Buddhist Order the spiritual title of Dalai Lama, which of course exists today even though the present holder is in exile in India. As a result of the Khan’s one conversion, he passed laws banning shamanic rituals and granted the Buddhist priesthood a special status in society and privileges that were not granted to the shamans.

In the 17^th century attempts were made by the Mongolian rulers to eradicate shamanic survival entirely. The black shaman brotherhood refused to submit to the new religion and many were killed. Some of the white shamans came to an accommodation with it. This led to the creation of a third way called ‘yellow shamanism’ that submitted to the control of the lamas and combined shamanic beliefs and practices with Tibetan Buddhism.

During the 18^th century in Siberia, Buddhist, Orthodox Christian and Muslim missionaries attempted to convert the native population and opposed the practice of all rival religions. Considering their modern peaceful and pacifist image, the Buddhist monks were the most severe in this respect and they hunted down shamans, beat them and destroyed their sacred sites, replacing them with their own image-filled shrines. The Russian Orthodox Church also forced the pagan tribes to accept baptism at the point of a sword and they flogged or imprisoned anyone who dared to practice shamanic rites such as divination and animal sacrifice.

Despite this religious persecution, shamanism survived the forced conversions and it continued underground in remote rural areas. Sometimes shamanic elements were incorporated into an unorthodox form of folk Christianity that flourished despite the censure of the priests. This movement produced hybrid sects who coincided their sacrifices with Church festivals and made offerings to saints. Some shamans accepted the patron saints of Russia, SS George and Michael, as their deities. St Michael was even given the honorary title of ‘Master of the Shamans’ and blood sacrifices were made to his icons.

After the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, shamanism had a brief revival as the power and influence of the Orthodox Russian Church and Buddhism in Siberia faded away. However, with the beginning of the bloody Stalinist regime in the 1920s, the new policy of agricultural collectivism caused drastic changes in Siberian society. The Soviet communists regarded the shamans as an example of primitive superstition and social inequality and they were condemned as enemies of the state. There are horrific stories of KGB agents throwing shamans out of helicopters to prove to their followers that they could not fly and also randomly executing them by firing squad. In 1980 the central government in Moscow claimed that shamanism was extinct in Siberia.

When Professor Ronald Hutton of Bristol University visited Siberia in the early 1980s he was told by experts in the field that there were no more shamans alive and shamanism had died out. At the time he accepted this, but later he came to believe that a number of former shamans had managed to survive the pograms. With the collapse of Soviet communism in the later 1980s and early 1990s there was a revival of traditional culture among the ethnic peoples of the former USSR. Professor Hutton has described an encounter by some British musicians visiting Siberia in 1997 with a person who claimed to be a hereditary shaman. He said he had inherited his powers and knowledge from his grandfather, who had been a blacksmith, and he used his skills for healing and exorcising evil spirits.

Tengrism

In the 1990s a neo-shamanic movement known as Tengrism arose in Central Asia and the new Russian Federation. It quickly organised itself and now claims a rather inflated membership of 500,000. One of its prominent leaders is a Kyrgyzstan Member of Parliament called Dastan Sarygulov, who also runs an international scientific centre for Tengrist studies. Its members have a political agenda and attempt to spread their beliefs and ideology in government circles. Apparently they have had some success as a former Kyrgyz president and the present President of Kazakhstan have both declared that Tengrism is the natural and national religion of the Turkic population.

Unlike the shamanism of former times, Tengrism is a monotheistic form of religion with a cosmology that is suitable for the modern world. It is firmly based on trendy ‘green’ or environmental concerns and believes that humanity should live in harmony with the natural world. Forgetting or ignoring the persecution of the past, it also preaches tolerance towards other religions and seeks to co-exist with them in the spirit of interfaith. Strangely it is also a religion without dogma, prayers or a priesthood. The American academic Marlene Larvelle, who has studied Tengrism, claims that it has been influenced by the atheism of the Soviet years and contemporary ideas about modernity. Its political agenda calls for a recognition of Turkic national ideals and the ultimate unification of all Turkic-speaking peoples.

The revival of shamanism in its modern Tengrist form would seem to hearken back to a romantic past that probably never existed in reality. Its increasing popularity among urban Russians is based on an idyllic image of yurts on the steppes, a nomadic lifestyle and living in harmony with nature. This is in direct contrast to the struggle of daily existence in a modern neo-capitalist and corrupt society governed by autocratic rulers.

An inner desire to reconnect with the natural world and follow spiritual values in a technocratic consumer society, a romantic view of the past and an urge to ‘save the planet’ is also the driving force behind so-called ‘urban shamanism’ in the West. However, the Siberian shaman and his Mongolian counterpart were not so much interested in preserving the environment than surviving day by day appeasing the spirits they believed inhabited it. In that sense the shamanism of the past was an essential part of daily life.

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Select Bibliography

Dr. Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princetown University Press, USA, 1972)

Professor Ronald Hutton, Siberian Shamanism and the Western Imagination (Hambledon and London, UK, 2001)

Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods: A Radical History of Plants, Drugs and Human Evolution (Bantam Press, USA 1992)

Marlene Laurelle, ‘Tengrism: In Search of Central Asia’s Spiritual Roots’ in Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Analyst, www.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/3837 (22 March 2008), and www.tengerism.org.

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MICHAEL HOWARD has been studying occultism, magic, folklore and witchcraft for over forty years and lives in England. He is the editor and publisher of the witchcraft magazine The Cauldron and can be contacted by writing to BM Cauldron, London, WC1N 3XX, England or emailing: mike@the-cauldron.fsnet.co.uk.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 110 (September-October 2008).

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By RICHARD SMOLEY

—

“The world,” wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “is the totality of facts, not of things.” So it is, but facts take many forms. The hard-edged events of ordinary reality are only one form, and not always the most important.

This insight can be hard to accept in the positivist world of mainstream Western thought. In these terms, either an event took place or it did not. Truth and falsehood are judged by this criterion alone. And yet such a stance has only a limited value. It is indispensable in history and journalism and perhaps in science (although the anomalous discoveries of twentieth-century physics have blurred the picture somewhat). But in the spiritual dimension, even though there are facts here as well, they are not of this kind. To overlook this truth is to mistake one reality for another.

Conventional Christianity has often made this mistake. Practically from the start, it has presented its case in literalistic terms: the Bible is true; moreover it is literally true. Its facts must be historical facts, and its record of the past must be a true one. At first these claims fostered Christianity’s rapid success in the ancient world. By the early centuries of the Common Era, Greco-Roman civilisation could no longer take its own myths seriously, so it was persuaded to adopt the Scriptures of the Jews and Christians on the grounds that these presented not only sacred truths but an accurate record of the past.

Since the Enlightenment, such claims have been more of an embarrassment than an advertisement for the faith. Over the last 250 years, scholars in many fields have taken Christianity at its word and investigated in great depth just how much the Bible jibes with science and history. The findings have not exactly vindicated the Good Book. Indeed the trend over time has been to call more and more of the Bible into question as a historical record.

From a scientific point of view, the tide began to turn in the early nineteenth century. In 1830–32, the British scientist Charles Lyell published his classic Principles of Geology, arguing that geological changes that are recorded in rocks could not possibly have taken place in the mere 6,000 years that Genesis assigned to the earth’s lifetime, but had occurred over a much longer period. A generation later, another, even more famous scientist, Charles Darwin, suggested that animal species had not been created by the Almighty on a single day of creation in 4004 BCE, but had evolved over much longer periods by what he called “natural selection.” (In fact, when Darwin had finished his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, he sent it to Lyell for comments.)

Historicity of the Bible Questioned

In recent decades, archaeology has cast doubt even on parts of the Bible that had seemed more or less factual, such as the history of Israel in the Old Testament. To take one example, a generation ago most scholars accepted the historicity of the Exodus from Egypt, believing at least that some migration of this kind happened, even if the narrative had to be stripped of its miraculous festoonings. Since then, the picture has changed considerably. Summarising recent findings in their 2001 book The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman contend that the Exodus did not happen in any form that is recognisable from the archaeological record. The first mention of Israel in any known inscription, they note, dates from the reign of the Egyptian Pharaoh Merneptah in 1207 BCE. While this is around the time traditionally assigned to the Exodus, the inscription speaks not of a flight of Israelites (or even an expulsion), but of Merneptah’s successful incursion into Canaan, where Israel is reckoned among the peoples subdued. In any case, the Israelites could not have escaped to Canaan out of the hands of the Egyptians, because Canaan was part of Egyptian territory at the time; Merneptah’s invasion would have been to quiet a troublesome province.

Instead, Finkelstein and Silberman suggest that the biblical account of the Exodus is a composite of folk memories of the Hyksos – a Semitic people who ruled Egypt from c.1670 to c.1570 BCE before being expelled by the Egyptians. The Exodus story as we know it was framed in the seventh century BCE, when the national ideology of Jerusalem and the nation of Judah was beginning to crystallise – and Egypt was a powerful and aggressive neighbour.

Other scholars have come up with equally revolutionary insights. In her work The Great Angel, the British biblical scholar Margaret Barker points out that originally the Israelites worshipped a female goddess, known as Asherah (or sometimes as Hokhmah or “Wisdom”), as the consort of Yahweh, alongside El, the Most High God, and Yahweh himself, who was essentially a national deity allocated to Israel alone. Barker suggests that the famous Deuteronomic reform under the Judahite King Josiah – in which Josiah purges the Temple of these other gods and restores the worship of Yahweh alone (2 Kings 22-23) – was not a reform but an innovation, a purge of time-honoured traditions in an attempt to create a “Yahweh-alone movement.” This movement eventually took over Judaism after the Babylonian Exile and imposed its own agenda on the past.

One could make similar points about much of the rest of the Bible. The “quest of the historical Jesus,” as Albert Schweitzer so famously dubbed it, has gone on for over two centuries now without any really conclusive results. Most scholars are convinced that there is some admixture of myth and legend in the life of Christ as portrayed in the New Testament, but they differ enormously about just what was legend and what was not. The panel of liberal New Testament scholars known as the Jesus Seminar has won some notoriety for contending that Jesus neither said nor did most of the things attributed to him in the Gospels. As shocking as some may find this claim, it is hardly new: an array of German New Testament scholars reached much the same conclusions in the nineteenth century. A still more radical view holds that Jesus never existed at all: his story was merely a Jewish equivalent of the numerous death-and-resurrection myths circulating in the ancient world. Since there is no archaeological evidence for Christ’s life, and the textual evidence is elusive (none of the Gospels, canonical or apocryphal, even claims to be an eyewitness account), this position, as extreme as it is, is hard to definitively refute.

Biblical Stories as Allegory, Not History

What, then, are we to do with the Bible as history? Some will no doubt cling to it. The literary critic Harold Bloom has noted that in evangelical Christianity, the “limp leather Bible,” waved at the audience by the preacher, has itself become a totem. But others are unlikely to find refuge in a simplistic bibliolatry. They may be drawn to another approach – one that is equally ancient, and possibly more profound. It is that the Bible is not, and never was, meant to be taken literally, but has deeper meanings that are to be unearthed by those are capable of doing so.

This idea goes back to the very beginnings of Christianity and has always existed side by side with narrow literalism. Ironically, it was a major impetus for the creation of Christianity as a separate religion from Judaism. The nascent Christian movement often had to allegorise the Hebrew Scriptures to make use of them for its own purposes. The Apostle Paul writes about one biblical passage:

It is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.

But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.

Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all (Gal. 4:22–26).

Paul is saying that the real meaning of the story of Abraham and his two sons lies in the relationship of the Jews and the Christians. Ishmael, the older son, born to Hagar (or Agar), “the bondwoman,” is the Jews, who are in “bondage” to the Law of Moses. Isaac, the younger, born to Sarah, the “freewoman,” represents the Christians, who are freed from having to follow the Law. The story is an “allegory.”

The first authority to use the word “allegory” in this sense (the Greek is allegoria) – and the first to expound the Hebrew Bible in this way – was a philosopher who lived at the same time as both Jesus and Paul: Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BCE–c.50 CE). Although there is no reference to Jesus or Paul in his works or to Philo in the New Testament, it would be hard to overstate Philo’s influence on Christianity. To take one example, it was he who first used the Greek word logos (often translated as “word”) to mean the creative, structuring element in consciousness and to contend that this principle had engendered the world. Philo’s view was prevalent in the Judaism of the first century CE, in which the logos was often seen as a kind of deuteros theos or “second god.” The Christians appropriated this theology, especially in the Gospel of John, whose prologue “In the beginning was the Word” etc. is almost a programmatic statement of Philo’s thought. Philo, of course, never equated this logos with Jesus, as the Christians did, and once the Christian view had spread throughout the ancient world, the Jews dropped the concept of the logos entirely.

In any event, Philo viewed the Hebrew Bible through the lens of allegory. Here is Philo on Genesis:

“And on the sixth day God finished his work which he made.” It would be a sign of great simplicity to think that the world was created in six days, or indeed all in time…. But… it would be correctly said that the world was not created in time, but that time had its existence as a consequence of the world….. When, therefore, Moses says, “God completed his works on the sixth day,” we must understand that he is speaking not of a number of days, but that he takes six as a perfect number.

Philo goes on to explain what he means by a perfect number. Obviously this is a far richer and more sophisticated understanding of a sacred text than the simplistic idea that the world was made in six literal days.

The Christian theologian who is most indebted to Philo was the third-century Church Father Origen. Origen went further than Philo, however, in being much more eager to discard the literal truth of passages that seemed contrary to reason. Here is Origen on Genesis:

Who is so silly as to believe that God, after the manner of a farmer, “planted a paradise eastward in Eden,” and set in it a visible and palpable “tree of life,” of such a sort that anyone who tasted its fruit with his bodily teeth would gain life: and again that one could partake of “good and evil” by masticating the fruit taken from the tree of that name? And when God is said to “walk in the paradise in the cool of the day” and Adam to hide himself behind a tree, I do not think anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries through a semblance of history and not through actual events.

Origen does not spare the Gospels or the writings of the Apostles, “for,” he writes, “the history even of these is not everywhere pure, events being woven together in the bodily sense without having actually happened; nor do the law and the commandments contained therein entirely declare what is reasonable.”

Such an attitude seems strikingly modern – and yet these are the words of a third-century Church Father. Origen spoke of three levels of meaning to Scripture (body, soul, and spirit, in accordance with the tripartite division of human nature accepted by early Christianity). This view would be tremendously influential. The scholar Beryl Smalley has written that “to write a history of Origenist influence on the West would be tantamount to writing a history of Western [biblical] exegesis.”

By the Middle Ages, Origen’s three levels of meaning for Scripture would be expanded to four. They were called the literal, allegorical, moral, and “anagogical” or mystical senses. Dante, writing in the early fourteenth century, refers to them in his Letter to Can Grande, where he says of the Exodus:

If we look at it from the letter alone it means to us the exit of the Children of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if from allegory, it means for us our redemption done by Christ; if from the moral sense, it means to us the conversion of the soul from the struggle and misery of sin to the status of grace; if from the anagogical, it means the leavetaking of the blessed soul from the slavery of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory. And though these mystical senses are called by various names, in general all can be called allegorical, because they are different from the literal or the historical.

Origen, who is evasive about actually setting out the hidden meaning of Scripture (“it was the method of the Holy Spirit rather to conceal these truths and to hide them deeply,” he writes), makes reference to Egypt as well. He speaks of “the descent of the holy fathers into Egypt, that is, into this world.” For Origen as for Dante, then, the Exodus ultimately presents an allegory of spiritual liberation.

Origen died around 253 CE, crippled by torture during the persecution of the Christians by the Roman Emperor Decius. Since then, Origen has had an ambiguous destiny in the mainstream church. Revered in his own day, in later centuries he fell into disrepute among the orthodox. This happened for a number of reasons, but it was largely because his views on the relationship between the Father and the Son did not jibe with the doctrine of the Trinity as it would evolve in the fourth and fifth centuries. Furthermore, later theologians did not feel entirely comfortable with Origen’s assertion that much of Scripture was not meant to be taken as literally true. Although the churchmen were generally content to accept his idea that there were other meanings in addition to the literal one, they did not like to think the literal sense was wrong or even (as we’ve seen Origen say about the myth of Eden) ridiculous.

Protestantism and Literalism

If the Catholic and Orthodox churches were always comfortable with a symbolic meaning to the Bible, where did today’s excruciating biblical literalism come from? Partly from Protestantism. Catholicism and Orthodoxy always regarded the Bible as an authority, but never as the authority: the teachings and practices of the Church itself were held to be of at least equal weight. The Catholic Church always insisted that the Bible could be easily misunderstood by those who lacked the proper training; this was why the Church discouraged Bible reading by laypeople until comparatively recently.

By the early modern era, however, the Catholic Church had become so corrupt that some Christian leaders (and many of the ordinary faithful) realised that the church was keeping an exclusive monopoly on spiritual power largely to suit its own worldly ends. In breaking with the church, these leaders – the Protestant Reformers – decided to return to the Bible as the only proper authority: sola scriptura, “Scripture only,” as the formula had it.

This in itself might not have been so problematic, but the Protestantism that reached the American frontier in the nineteenth century was dominated by men who had little education and little idea of any other literature than the Bible. Such people have always existed: Thomas Aquinas, the medieval Catholic theologian, was alluding to them when he said, “Timeo hominem unius libri”: “I fear a man of one book.” In the United States, and, I suspect, in much of the rest of the English-speaking world, evangelical Christianity has become co-opted by these “men of one book.” Today in many parts of the US, it is possible to go into people’s houses and see no other book than the Bible. It is this element in Christianity that has made its presence felt in the rise of fundamentalism.

As a result, the Bible’s inner meaning has increasingly become the province of esotericism. Regarding the story of Christ, in her book Esoteric Christianity the Theosophist Annie Besant speaks of “the Christ of the human Spirit, the Christ who is in every one of us, is born and lives, is crucified, rises from the dead, and ascends into heaven, in every suffering and triumphant ‘Son of Man.’” The story of Christ is thus the story of each of us; the Incarnation symbolises our own descent into the world of materiality, where we pass across the stage for a short while before being crucified on the cross of time and space. But this suffering and death is only transitory or even illusory, since the Logos – the principle of consciousness – in ourselves cannot die. It will be resurrected again in other forms, recognisable or otherwise. (In the Gospels the risen Christ is sometimes recognised by his disciples, sometimes not.)

Some may find themselves impatient with these ideas, insisting that they are nothing more than a way of skirting the issue of historical factuality that must supposedly serve as the bedrock of faith. But what, might one ask, is being dismissed as mere allegory? Viewed in the way sketched out above, the stories of the Exodus and the passion of Christ are not mere edifying tales of the past. Nor are they creeds for blind belief or flags around which to rally the faithful. Rather they are deep expressions of what is going on inside us now. To know from inner experience what it is to be spiritually in “the land of Egypt, the house of bondage,” to see the Logos in ourselves crucified on the cross of time and space, is not evasion but among the most profound insights a human being can have.

I would even take the argument a step further. An allegorical reading of the Bible can actually be more demanding than merely dwelling on the meaning of the letter. Acknowledging “Pharaoh,” “Moses,” the “scribes and Pharisees,” even Christ as parts of ourselves can be unsettling. Few are eager to come to grips with their inner tyrants and hypocrites, and there are possibly even fewer who can bear to see their own higher natures. After all, to know that Moses the lawgiver exists in oneself is already a step out of the house of bondage. To see the Christ within is already to experience a resurrection. Such realisations confer a responsibility upon us that we are not always delighted to face.

As a result, it is often easier to keep these things at the safe remove of antiquity – to follow the disputes about who was the Pharaoh of Exodus; to pore over accounts of recent excavations in Biblical Archaeology Review; to thrill over the latest news feature that breathlessly proffers some allegedly new fact about the historical Jesus. In such a way we can keep these issues alive, but at a comfortable distance: they remain ineluctably “other,” about people who lived long ago. I suspect that this dynamic helps explain the unshakable thirst for biblical archaeology among the American public.

All this said, there is admittedly a problem with leaning too heavily on allegorical readings of Scripture. To be no longer able to take one’s own myths literally – even while accepting them in a figurative sense – does strip them of their power. This is due to the limits of our own understanding; we as a civilisation seem unable to hear the message “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet believed” (John 20:29). This is not a call to blind, stupid faith; it is an appeal to recognise realities that do not present themselves to our physical eyes and hands – the “evidence of things unseen.” But, trusting as we do in the Gradgrindian world of cold, hard facts, we put more trust in texts than in our own inner experience. We discover that the texts are not telling the exact truth about history, and we lose our faith.

Despite the noise (much of it overstated) about rising fundamentalism in the Western world, this loss of faith is likely to accelerate. What will happen when the news sinks in and we collectively understand that much, perhaps most, of the Bible is not literally true? We may continue to see their beauty and power as myths, just as we do with the tales of the Olympian gods, but they will have lost their numinous force for us. We will see the old gods mocked and derided, as they were in antiquity in the satyr plays of the classical Athenian stage and the satires of Lucian, and as we see today in films like Dogma and Jesus Christ Superstar.

In such instances, new myths, new versions of eternal truths arise. What these will be in the future remains to be seen; it is hard to imagine that they will come from any religion now existing. Of the models of reality now available, it is above all the one provided by science that has most captured the imagination of the thinking public. Like Christianity in ancient times, it seems to offer truth in place of myth, actualities in place of legend. And then we are left with a question that, I suspect, will not be answered in the lifetime of anyone reading these pages now: what will happen when the facts of science, implacably hard and substantial as they now seem, are proved to be myths in turn?

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Bibliography

Dante Alighieri, Letter to Can Grande della Scala, Translated by James Marchand, http://medieval.ucdavis.edu/20B/Can.Grande.html

Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God, Louisville, Ky.: Westminster/John Knox, 1992.

Annie Besant, Esoteric Christianity, or the Lesser Mysteries, Reprint, Wheaton, Ill.: Quest, 2006.

Harold Bloom, The American Religion, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts, New York: Touchstone, 2001.

Susan A. Handelman, The Slayers of Moses: The Emergence of Rabbinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982.

Origen, On First Principles, Translated by G.W. Butterworth, Reprint, New York: Harper & Row, 1966.

Philo, The Works of Philo, Translated by C.D. Yonge, Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1993.

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, Translated by W. Montgomery, Reprint, New York: Macmillan, 1961.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, 2nd edition, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971.

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RICHARD SMOLEY is author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); and The Essential Nostradamus. His latest book is Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and is executive editor of Quest magazine. His web site is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 110 (September-October 2008).

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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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By ROBERT MOSS—

I have known since I was a very small boy in Australia that there are worlds beyond physical reality, and that we can journey to those worlds and gain first-hand knowledge of the multidimensional universe and about what actually happens after death.

When I was nine years old, I was woken up to these possibilities during a crisis of illness. I was rushed to hospital in Melbourne after complaining of a pain in my lower right abdomen. The medical staff found that my appendix was about to burst and I was wheeled into an operating room in short order for an emergency appendectomy.

Under anesthesia on the operating table, I found myself hovering above my body, somewhere up near the ceiling. I decided I didn’t want to watch the bloody work with the scalpel and flowed through the door and along the corridor to where my mother sat hunched and weeping. I couldn’t stand her pain, so I drifted off to a window, to the brightness outside, to the colours of spring and the laughter of young lovers seated at a sidewalk table, drinking each other’s smiles. I felt the pull of the ocean. I could not see the beach from the hospital window, so I floated through the glass and out onto a ledge where a blackbird squalled at me and shot straight up into the air. I followed the bird and sailed over the rooftops.

I saw a huge moon-round face, its mouth opened wide to form the gateway to Luna Park. I swooped down through the moon-gate – and plunged into darkness. I tried to reverse direction, but something sucked me downwards. It was like tumbling down a mineshaft, mile after mile beneath the surface of the earth.

I fell into a different world. It was hard to make out anything clearly in the smoke of a huge fire pit. A giant with skin the colour of fine white ash lifted me high above the ground, singing. The people of this world welcomed me. They were tall and elongated and very pale, and did not look like anyone I had seen in my nine years in the surface world. They told me they had dreamed my coming, and raised me as their own. For the greater part of my schooling, I was required to dream – to dream alone, in an incubation cave, or to dream with others, lying in a cartwheel around the banked ashes of the fire in the council house.

Years passed. As I grew older, my recollection of my life in the surface world faded and flickered out. I became a father and grandfather, a teacher and elder. When my body was played out, the people placed it on a funeral pyre. As the smoke rose from the pyre, I travelled with it, looking for the path among the stars where the fires of the galaxies flow together like milk.

As I spiralled upward, I seemed to burst through the Earth’s crust into a world of hot asphalt and cars and trams – and found myself shooting back into the body of a nine-year-old boy in a Melbourne hospital bed.

It was a little hard to discuss these experiences with the adults around me at that time, and we did not yet have Raymond Moody’s useful phrase “near-death experience” to describe an episode of this kind. One of the doctors said simply, “Robert died and came back” – with memories that made me quite certain of the existence of worlds beyond the obvious one, and of the fact that consciousness survives physical death.

There is great contemporary interest in the NDE in Western society, and this is a very healthy thing, because to know about the afterlife, we require first-hand experience, and need to be ready to update our geographies and itineraries frequently in the light of the latest reliable travel reports. In ancient and traditional cultures where there is a real practice of dying, near-death experiencers – who may be called shamans or initiates – have always been heard with the deepest attention and respect.

There is a Tibetan name for such a person, delog, pronounced “day-loak”. It means someone who has gone beyond death and returned. The famous Tibetan Book of the Dead, with its detailed account of the possible transits of spirit after death, emerged from the experiences of such travellers.

But to have first-hand knowledge of what lies beyond death, we do not have to go through the physical extremity of an NDE. We can learn through our dreams, the dreams in which we receive visitations from departed loved ones and others who are at home on the Other Side, and the dreams in which we travel beyond the body and into their realms.

Our dreams open portals into the multidimensional universe, including the places we may travel after physical death. As we become active dreamers, we come to realise that dreaming is not so much about sleeping as about waking up – to a deeper reality and a deeper meaning in life, and death.

The Departed are Dreaming with Us

One of my driving purposes in writing The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead was to help some of the many people in our society who are hungry for confirmation that communication with the departed is not “weird” or “unnatural”, let alone impossible, and that it is possible to extend love and forgiveness and healing across the apparent barrier of death. We encounter our departed, especially in dreams, because they are still around (sometimes because they have unfinished business or are not actually aware they are dead); or because they come visiting; or because we travel, in dreams or visions, into astral realms where the departed are entirely at home.

It’s not just that we dream of the dead; our departed are dreaming of us, and trying to reach us through dreams. Sometimes our departed return as counsellors or “family angels”, as my father returned to me, many times, in the year after his death in Australia in 1987, with loving messages and practical guidance for the family. Sometimes our departed need us to play guides, because they are confused or stuck between the worlds, clinging to old appetites and attachments – which can be extremely unhealthy for the living, who may pick up the feelings and addictions and even the past physical symptoms of the dead.

One of the cruelest things that mainstream Western culture has done is to suggest that communication with the departed is either impossible or unnatural.  There is nothing spooky or “supernatural” involved, though these experiences take us into realms beyond physical reality. It is especially easy to meet our departed in dreams (if we are willing to listen to our dreams) for three reasons:

Our Departed are Still With Us

Quite frequently dreams reveal that the departed are present because, quite simply, they never left. The departed may linger because they have unfinished business, or wish to act as guide and protector to the family, or are attached to people and places they loved in waking life, and this may be a perfectly happy situation for a year or two.

But there comes a time when our departed need to move on, for their own growth, and so they do not become a psychic burden to the living. Because our society does a poor job in preparing people for the afterlife, many people who have passed on do not know they are dead, and hover in a limbo close to familiar people and places on this Earth. After death, we continue to be driven by our ruling interests, appetites and addictions. Some of those who have died but not truly “passed on” continue to try to feed their cravings via the living. When the departed remain earthbound, the effects are unhealthy both for those who have died and those among the living to whom they are connected. When the dead are enmeshed with the living, the result is mutual confusion, loss of energy, and the transfer of addictions, obsessions and even physical ailments from the departed to the person whose energy field he or she is sharing.

Helping the departed may involve a loving dialogue, a simple ritual of honouring and farewell, and invoking spiritual helpers. As we become active dreamers, familiar with the geography of the afterlife, we may find we are called on to provide personal escort services and help to instruct some of our departed on their options on the other side. William Butler Yeats noted, with a poet’s insight, that “the living can assist the imaginations of the dead.”

Our Departed Come Calling

Most people who remember dreams can recall one in which someone on the other side made a phone call, sent a letter, or simply turned up at the door or the bedside. Our departed return to us in dreams for all the reasons they might have called on us in physical life – including the simple desire to tell us how they are doing and see how we are coping – and for larger reasons: to bring emotional healing, to bring us helpful information, to instruct us on life beyond death and the reality of worlds beyond the physical.

Our departed may come visiting to offer or receive forgiveness. They may come to show us how they are doing on the other side.

Our departed can be excellent psychic advisers when they achieve clarity on the other side and are aware that they are not confined to the rules of space and time.

Our departed may come as health advisors and family counsellors. My friend Wanda Burch had received many dreams containing possible health advisories, but was finally driven to seek medical attention when her deceased father turned up in her dreams in a doctor’s white coat and yelled at her, “You have breast cancer!” Her father’s dream intervention helped put her on the path of healing and recovery.

Our departed may visit us in dreams to help us prepare for our own deaths and reassure us that we have friends on the other side. 

In Dreams, We Travel to Realms of the Departed

In our dreams, we are released from the laws of physical reality, and travel into other dimensions, including environments where the departed may be living. Through dreams of this kind, we can begin to develop a personal geography of the afterlife, which will be vastly enriched when we learn the art of conscious dream travel, which is at the heart of my own teaching and practice.

In my workshops, I often invite participants to focus on a dream or memory of a departed person and make it their intention to journey – with the help of shamanic drumming – to seek timely and helpful communication with that person and to learn about the environment where that person is now living. From these journeys, we have collected multifarious and fascinating details of reception centres, transition zones, places of recovery and further education and communications arrangements on the other side. We have learned that more than one vehicle of soul survives physical death, and each has a different destiny. We have explored many afterlife locales shaped by human imaginations and collective belief systems.

Dreaming is the Best Preparation for Dying

A second reason I wrote The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead is that I believe that dreaming is the best preparation for dying, and that through dreams we can gain first-hand knowledge of the transitions of spirit after death. Active dreamers have no doubt there is life after death. We become familiar with many alternative neighbourhoods and transition zones on the Other Side. We may develop the understanding – again through direct experience – that consciousness survives the body in more than one energy body, and that different vehicles of consciousness have different fates.

By helping someone who is approaching death to open to their dreams, we help them to find their way home, and approach the last stage of physical life with greater courage and clarity, as a time of growth and awakening.

All we need do, to begin with, is to suggest to the dying person that if he or she happens to remember a dream, we would love to hear it, and to cherish the moment of sharing.

Open a safe space for dreaming, and beautiful things can happen. Katy’s octogenarian father Ed moved into hospice care after a debilitating series of strokes. His doctors thought he would probably succumb to kidney failure within a month. In fact, he survived for another six months, a time of deepening pain and frustration over the failures of the flesh that was nonetheless a period of immense learning and high adventure thanks to his discovery of dreaming. In each of her frequent visits, Katy gently encouraged him to share any dreams he remembered.

As dream sharing became daily practice for Katy’s father, many varied gifts came through. Some of his dreams rehearsed him for physical adjustments he needed to make as his body declined, easing these passages for a proud and once strong man. Dreams of broken plumbing and laying pipes, for example, prepared Ed for the catheterization that was eventually required.

In an intriguing series of dreams, he was excited to find himself doing new work and feeling really good about it – an unlikely scenario, in ordinary reality, for a sick man in his 80s. In one of these dreams, he was working on an “angel machine.” When Katy asked him what that was, he explained, “I’m supposed to comb out the feathers on the angel wings” and giggled like a happy child, full of wonder.

Towards the end, Katy’s father often slipped into waking dreams, moving between the worlds with increasing fluency, learning the art of re-entering a sleep dream to gather more insight and energy effortlessly, without any formal instruction.

One of his big dreams seemed to promise a happy landing on the other side and opened a fascinating personal locale in the possible afterlife. He dreamed that on a day of heavy snow, he attended a magnificent banquet in a beautiful mansion. Everyone was dressed to the nines, and an elegant, distinguished man wearing an ambassador’s sash with his dinner jacket showed Ed around and poured him a delicious drink “like white champagne” but beyond anything available in ordinary reality. Delighted by his welcome, Katy’s father had the feeling he would be going back to the mansion of the dream ambassador. On the day he passed, it was snowing heavily for the first time in months, as in the dream.

Through their days and nights of dream sharing, father and daughter deepened their loving connection. Katy confirmed and validated her father’s experiences as he opened to realities beyond the physical, an inspiring example of how we can help each other on the roads of dying (and living). Katy believes that dreaming provided her father with a vehicle in which he could travel to the other side. “He was fearful of leaving this life that he loved so much, but with the dreaming he grasped that perhaps there really is a life ‘over there’ that is just as much fun.” His fear of death gave way to a willingness to let go.

The story of Ed’s dreaming does not end with his passing. Within days, he started turning up in the dreams of his loved ones. He appeared to the one family member who had not been able to visit him in the hospice, sat with her under a tree for what seemed like hours, and made her laugh. He returned Katy’s visits in the dreamtime. In Katy’s dreams, he often appeared doing things (like skiing) that he had failed to do, or to master, in the life he had left.

This moving episode confirms the wisdom of the Lakota Indian saying that “the path of the soul after death is the same as the path of the soul in dreams.” This is why dreaming is the best preparation for dying.

The Poet as Guide to the Other Side

I had another reason for undertaking The Dreamer’s Book of the Death. I have noticed that most of us tend to live with more courage and clarity – and cope with the challenges of everyday life with better grace – when we have looked Death in the face.

As we do this, we may enlist the support of personal guides who are quite familiar with conditions on the Other Side.

I was well advanced on my work, a little after Samhain/Halloween in 2004, when I learned that I had drawn a most interesting helper. On a raw day on the Connecticut coast, I was leading a visionary journey for a circle of my advanced students. We had made it our shared intention to travel to a location in nonordinary reality that I call the House of Time, a place from which onward journeys to other times and other life experiences are usually easy, and where encounters with master teachers sometimes take place. I was drumming for the group and watching over them while – at the same time – I let part of my consciousness travel into the Library of the House of Time.

I found Yeats waiting for me, on an upper level. He asked me, “What better guide to the Other Side than a poet?” The answer that came to me was: none. I remembered how Virgil appears as Dante’s guide through the Inferno, drawn by Dante’s “love and long study” of his poetry. Whether the Yeats who was appearing to me now was a projection of a part of myself, or some essence of his life and work, or the individual spirit of the dead poet, I could hardly refuse his offer to guide me.

So my work took on a further dimension. This, of course, was not my first encounter with Yeats. He had appeared in my dreams many times. In one series of dreams, he demonstrated experiments in “mutual visioning” that he had conducted with Florence Farr, and attempts to build his Celtic Castle of the Heroes on the astral plane with his great (but forever lost) love Maud Gonne.

But after that post-Halloween encounter in 2004, things picked up. While I immersed myself in fresh study of the books and papers in which Yeats had recorded his efforts to communication with the dead and to monitor the soul’s journey between death and rebirth, the play of dreams and visions and synchronicity in my own life became intense and wonderful. That benign entity that Koestler called “the Library Angel” worked overtime, arranging bookish discoveries at the most unlikely times and places. In a screened and protected psychic environment, I was introduced to many “dead” people who described their experiences of afterlife transitions in vivid and fascinating detail. Sometimes I felt that the dead were holding a séance for the living – specifically myself.

I gained a new depth of understanding of what Yeats had laboured to convey about death and dreaming in the two versions of his fascinating, difficult book A Vision. He concluded that the main difference between the dream state during physical life and the dream state after death is that prior to death the soul remains in “exclusive association with one body.”

In the 1925 edition of A Vision, Yeats made his simplest and most important observation about the connection between death and dreaming: “In sleep we enter upon the same life as that we enter between death and birth.” He explains that in dreaming, the spirit may travel through some of the levels of being that are accessible after death. In rare cases, moving beyond the astral plane, the spirit may discover “a new centre of coherence” in the celestial body. So dreaming may be an exact rehearsal for the progression of the spirit after death as it gradually disentangles itself from lower energy bodies to move to higher planes.

In the 1937 edition of A Vision, Yeats develops the provocative thesis that our dreams of the departed are frequently the result of the departed reaching for us. Yeats describes an early phase in the after-death transition that he calls “Dreaming Back,” through which the departed seek to review, understand and resolve the issues of the life experience that has ended. With the help of “teaching spirits” a soul in this phase “may not merely dream through the consequences of its acts but amend them, bringing this or that to the attention of the living.” During this phase the dead often appear to the living in dreams.

Yeats wrote that “the souls of enlightened men return to be schoolmasters of the living, who influence them unseen.” I believe this has been my experience, and that it is an experience open to all of us, which will unfold according to our interests and affections, and our willingness to do the work.

In The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead I have sought to honour Yeats’s grand design of producing a Western Book of the Dead that shows a little of what happens in the soul’s journey between death and rebirth. At its heart, the message of my Book of the Dead is as simple, and as urgent, as this: We don’t need to wait for death to remember what the soul knows: how and why we came into our present bodies, and where we will go when we leave them.

If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.

ROBERT MOSS was born in Melbourne and is a world-renowned dream explorer, shamanic counselor, bestselling novelist and former magazine editor and lecturer of ancient history at the Australian National University. He now lives in the United States and teaches Active Dreaming – his pioneer synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism – all over the world and is the founder of a contemporary mystery school. His many books include Conscious Dreaming, Dreamgates, Dreaming True, Dreamways of the Iroquois and The Dreamer’s Book of the Dead. Please visit his website at www.mossdreams.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 96 (May-June 2006).

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By ROBERT BLACK—

The secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke in conversation with Judas Iscariot during a week three days before he celebrated Passover. …Jesus said to him, “Step away from the others and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.”
– The Gospel of Judas¹

From an historical point of view this find is as important as the Nag Hammadi writings discovered half a century ago. Everything tells us that we are dealing with the Gospel of Judas referred to by Irenaeus in the second century AD. It is fantastic that something like that re-appears after 1800 years.
– Dr. Stephen Emmel²

The story of how the Gospel of Judas arrived in the Western world is a fascinating tale. Like many of the so-called Gnostic Gospels, it somehow travelled out of Egypt and arrived in the US with a large price tag. Unlike many manuscripts which vanish sight unseen, luck or providence if you like brought this manuscript not only to light but finally to restoration and publication. In the words of Professor Elaine Pagels, “the discovery of the Gospel of Judas is astonishing.”

Originally unearthed by a farmer in 1978 near El Minya, Egypt, from where it had been hidden in a “tomb-like box” for some 1,600 years, the leather-bound papyrus codex was in superb condition. The farmer secretly sold the codex to an antiquities dealer in Cairo, without advising Egyptian Antiquities. In a clandestine meeting in 1983, the antiquities dealer offered the codex for sale to various scholars in Geneva, however with an asking price of over $3,000,000 and a dubious provenance, the price was considered extraordinary.

Ironically, while the Gospel survived well in Egypt, it seriously deteriorated when stored for some 16 years in a safety deposit box in Hicksville, New York. Finally purchased by antiquities dealer Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos in 2000, the following year the codex was acquired by the Maecenas Foundation for Ancient Art in Switzerland. With the help of National Geographic and an agreement reached with the Egyptian government, restoration work soon began.

Known as the Codex Tchacos (named after Dimaratos Tchacos, father of Frieda Nussberger-Tchacos), it is a 26-page document written on 13 sheets of papyrus leaf in ancient Egyptian, or Coptic. The codex contains not only the Gospel of Judas, but the First Apocalypse of James, the Letter of Peter to Philip, and a small fragment of text that scholars have called the Book of Allogene.

If we focus on the Gospel of Judas, the document is a 3^rd century Coptic translation of a now lost Greek text, thought to have been written by a group of early Gnostic Christians before 180 CE. While its significance is much debated, there is no question about its authenticity. There is universal agreement it is the genuine article. “All you had to do was look at this thing once,” said Bart Ehrman, a scholar of early Christianity. “I’ve seen a lot of ancient manuscripts, and there was no question.”³ According to James M. Robinson, America’s leading expert on ancient religious texts from Egypt, “I don’t know of any scholar who thinks this is fake.”⁴

Heresy Hunting

Back in the 2^nd century of the Christian era, the Christian Bishop Irenaeus mentioned a Gospel of Judas was in use among the Kainites, an early Gnostic Christian sect. In part I of his Against Heresy, paragraph 31.1, he wrote:

(Some) stated that Cain owes his existence to the highest power, while Esau, Korak, the Sodomites and all other men are dependants of each other. (…) They believe that Judas the Betrayer was fully informed of these things and that only he understanding the truth like no one else fulfilled the secret of betrayal that confused all things, both in heaven and on earth. They invented their own history called the Gospel of Judas.

The Gospel had been known to exist for some time when discussed by Irenaeus around 180 CE, with his primary source being Justin Martyr. This moves the date back to around 140 CE, and most scholars therefore date the Gospel itself to around 120 CE or even earlier. This is significant because it places the Gospel of Judas within the same timeframe as the Biblical gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The publication of the Gospel of Judas undertaken by National Geographic is unlikely to disturb the mainstream Christian church. In a recent interview, Monsignor Walter Brandmuller, president of the Vatican’s Committee for Historical Science, called it “a product of religious fantasy,” and went on to say, “There is no campaign, no movement for the rehabilitation of (Judas) the traitor of Jesus.”⁵

From past experience with the Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and the Nag Hammadi Library unearthed two years earlier, whatever the merits of a document it does not bring about a religious revolution. There is an entrenched power structure within Christendom and regardless of the strength of evidence presented, the Church will use spin, distortion and, if necessary, violence (remember the first crusades were against the Cathars) to preserve its dominion.

The significance of the Gospel of Judas needs to be seen in the context of the larger picture provided by Gnosticism and current scholarship regarding Christian origins. Too often modern Christians live in a sort of self imposed ghetto. They read Christian books, subscribe to Christian magazines, and generally are not exposed to scholarship except through the lens of their chosen leaders or churches. In many cases even when a Christian leader tries to inject scholarship and critical thinking, it is still filtered through a very antiquated religious lens. There does seem to be a surprisingly large gap between modern research into Christian origins, even that generally available, and the information the average Christian receives within his or her community.

Over the last 100 years the academic model that has arisen in regards to Christian origins is radically different from the traditional Christian worldview. It would be fair to say Christianity is sometimes even seen as a Gnostic heresy and not vice versa. While this is an inflammatory way of describing Christian origins, it does seem quite clear that within the early Christian “spectrum” there was an exceptionally wide range of traditions and practices. This diversity was not only tolerated but encouraged and embraced. Christianity was not a single, monolithic tradition handed down from one leader to another in succession; it was diverse and multi-faceted with many dispersed centres of power.

Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton who specialises in studies of the Gnostics, recently said in a statement, “These discoveries are exploding the myth of a monolithic religion, and demonstrating how diverse – and fascinating – the early Christian movement really was.”⁶

Gnostic Christianity

Although later denounced by certain leaders as ‘heretics’, many of these Christians saw themselves as not so much believers as seekers, people who ‘seek for God.’⁷
– Elaine Pagels

Early Christianity seems to have included many differing viewpoints from the rather staid Judaic Christian mix of James the Brother of Jesus to the esoteric Gnosticism of the followers of Mary Magdalene and Simon Magus. Variations in approach were such that within one movement there were libertine sects that used sex and mind altering substances, and others which were strictly ascetic and celibate. There were groups which were strictly Judaic in focus even to the point of keeping the old laws and festivals of Israel, while others were clearly influenced by the Greek Mysteries and even Buddhist traditions.

Each of these communities had their own sacred texts and interpretations of the teachings of Jesus; the majority would now be considered Gnostic, i.e. they emphasised personal and direct experience of the divine. Accordingly, each of these groups acted like a “Mystery Cult” and had their own specialised practices, mythologies and rites. Many had distinct Gospels which included unique revelations from Jesus to their founders. For example, in the Pistis Sophia, we read of the secret teachings of Jesus to Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Thomas begins… “These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote them down.”⁸

These secret writings and communities flourished for hundreds of years. It was only in the early 4^th century that Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a letter to some Christians in Egypt ordering them to reject what he called “secret, illegitimate books.”⁹ In 363 CE the first synod (of Laodicea) was held to decide the official contents of the Bible.

Certainly by the middle of the 4^th century, Christianity had become a political force and dissenting views were not tolerated. Under threat and violent persecution, Gnostic communities withdrew from public view, to survive as an ‘underground’ movement. This continued right through to such groups as the Templars and Rosicrucians, and even to the present day.

Clearly, early Christianity offered a wide spectrum of beliefs and practices catering to the unique needs of people with differing levels of spiritual development. This helps us understand the Gospel of Judas. While Christendom has attempted to downplay the significance of this Gospel, its message, like that of Gnosticism in general, is actually quite confronting and challenging.

Secret Teachings

The Gospel of Judas is a secret account of the revelation that Jesus spoke to Judas Iscariot. It portrays Judas as one of the initiates, a specially loved and favoured disciple who undertook one of the most painful missions asked by his teacher, to betray the saviour as part of a greater plan of spiritual import.

The Gospel outlines a specifically Gnostic worldview, offering a cosmology which is fairly consistent with the radical Gnostic sects of the period. Cosmology in Gnosticism is a complex idea with many Aeons, worlds, dimensions and forms. It is impossible to appreciate the cosmology of the Gospel of Judas without these, however, I cannot give them comprehensive coverage here, but I will try to give a general outline.

There is a world of light which is beyond all created forms. This spiritual realm contains various dynamic intelligences or energies, of which one, Barbelo, is discussed in the Gospel of Judas.

For there exists a great and boundless realm, whose extent no generation of angels has seen.
– Gospel of Judas

There are many dimensions or worlds which exist between this higher reality and the physical world, and all are populated with forms of varying potencies.

The physical world is depicted as flawed, even evil, and is beyond the boundary of these worlds. It is the product of a bloodthirsty and ignorant creator deity. His name is given as Nebro, which means ‘rebel’; while others Gnostics call him Yaldabaoth. There are many myths and stories about how he came to exist and create the physical world.

Judas said to Jesus, “[What] is the long duration of time that the human being will live?”

Jesus said, “Why are you wondering about this, that Adam, with his generation, has lived his span of life in the place where he has received his kingdom, with longevity with his ruler?”

Judas said to Jesus, “Does the human spirit die?”

Jesus said, “This is why God ordered Michael to give the spirits of people to them as a loan, so that they might offer service, but the Great One ordered Gabriel to grant spirits to the great generation with no ruler over it – that is, the spirit and the soul…
– Gospel of Judas

While the Gospel of Judas does not present a full account of the creation process, when interpreted in conjunction with other Gnostic texts it certainly presents a mythos which is very much at odds with the standard Judeo-Christian legend. Saklas, a demi-god under Yaldabaoth, creates the body of man while the angels Michael and Gabriel, emissaries of the world of light, allow spirits from the world of light to incarnate within these shells.

This is very similar to Mandaean myths of creation where the physical bodies created by lesser spirits cannot even move off the ground, writhing and screaming in the dirt. In sympathy, emissaries of the light world allow spirits to enter them. But becoming trapped, fascinated by the allure of the flesh, these spirits now believe they are physical rather than spiritual beings.

There is a suggestion, also found in other Gnostic literature, of various degrees of spiritual awakening. Some beings only have one soul, some have two, some have none. In the Gospel of Judas, those with one soul receive it from Michael, while those with both a soul and spirit have received them from Gabriel. Each of these classes are under varying degrees of control by the rulers (principalities and dominions) that manipulate our world.

This model is found within the Gnostic schools where there are three levels of initiation:

1. Hylic – most of sleeping humanity, under full control of rulers.

2. Psychic – partially awakened, under partial control of the rulers.

3. Pneumatics – awakened.

There is an essential dualism within the Gospel of Judas which helps explain the significance of Jesus’s death and the role of Judas. Since man’s origin is within the spiritual dimensions and the flesh is a cage, then death is not to be feared but a form of liberation. Accordingly, Judas helps Jesus escape his prison of flesh and liberate the essential true nature within him.

You will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me.
– Gospel of Judas

The Gnostics taught that in some way or another we must each overcome the body and its demands and liberate the true Christ nature within. While individual praxis may vary from asceticism to libertinism, the goal is the same. In addition, these Gnostics also identify the creator of the physical world as our enemy, and hence see Yaldabaoth as the primary force holding us back from achieving true liberation.

Indeed, in the Sethian tradition, Yaldabaoth is identified with Jehovah and the serpent of Genesis is actually seen as the liberator. This relates back to Irenaeus’ claim the followers of the Gospel of Judas were “Kainites” since in this interpretation, Cain is the saviour, not Abel, and the Sodomites are the people of God, not the slaughtering puritans and so on.

We also find within the Gospel of Judas reference to both Seth and Adamas which is significant as they tie elements of the Gospel to the Naassene or Serpent Gnostic traditions. This has strong resonance with the Greek Orphic Tradition which is superbly covered in The Gnostic Secrets of the Naassenes by Mark Gaffney.

There is a distinct absence of the saving power of the blood of Christ or the vicarious nature of the crucifixion in the Gnostic texts. Indeed the crucifixion and Resurrection are not even mentioned in the Gospel of Judas. The role of Judas shows the path to liberation is in awakening the Christ within and overcoming the restrictions created by both the physical body and the forces of the lower spiritual/physical worlds. These are sometimes represented as the planets, powers and dominions or rulers.

The multitude of those immortals is called the cosmos –  that is, perdition – by the Father and the seventy-two luminaries who are with the Self-Generated and his seventy-two aeons. In him the first human appeared with his incorruptible powers. And the aeon that appeared with his generation, the aeon in whom are the cloud of knowledge and the angel, is called [51] El. […] aeon […] after that […] said, ‘Let twelve angels come into being [to] rule over chaos and the [underworld].’ And look, from the cloud there appeared an [angel] whose face flashed with fire and whose appearance was defiled with blood. His name was Nebro, which means ‘rebel’; others call him Yaldabaoth. Another angel, Saklas, also came from the cloud. So Nebro created six angels – as well as Saklas – to be assistants, and these produced twelve angels in the heavens, with each one receiving a portion in the heavens.
– Gospel of Judas

Judas works with Jesus to help liberate him from the power of the body; he plays an important role within the initiatory process of the crucifixion and Resurrection, which some suggest was actually an initiatory drama rather than a real historical event, but that is outside our discussion here.

This Gospel needs to be interpreted within the larger framework of the dualist Gnostic tradition. The motif of Judas as special disciple and the negative interpretation of both the body and the world resonate through the vast majority of the Gnostic sects. In addition, the emphasis on Jesus as a giver of light, a transmitter of the message from the higher dimensions rather than as a sacrifice, is central to a Gnostic view of salvation.

Jesus was seen as a way-shower, an emissary, a being whom we should emulate, not worship. This approach is central to the Gnostic vision; liberation comes through individual effort inspired perhaps by the life of Jesus, but ultimately through our own perseverance. In this way we move towards achieving our own state of divinity, our own theosis.

The Gospel of Judas is certainly a fascinating revelation, though it does not necessarily add greatly to what we already know about the Gnostic vision. What it does do, however, is bring home the significance of this message for today’s world. If the Gospel of Judas had been taken seriously by the early Church and the Gnostics not suppressed, anti-Semitism and all its related violence may not have had such a disastrous effect within Western history. If Judas was only doing his job as a “special” disciple of Jesus, then the whole myth of “Judas the Christ Killer” dissolves and is replaced by Judas, the holder of the Mysteries.

In 2006 with continued violence instigated by self-proclaimed religious fundamentalists, it is perhaps time we rehabilitate the Gnostic tradition. Gnosticism brings a spirit of openness, diversity, individual responsibility and freedom. With the publicity brought about by The Da Vinci Code and now the publication of the Gospel of Judas, it is time we let go of old prejudices, superstitions and narrowly held opinions and allow a different light to shine from beyond the confines of matter.

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Recommended Reading

Adam, Eve and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels
Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism by Kurt Rudolph
The Gnostic Bible: Gnostic Texts of Mystical Wisdom form the Ancient and Medieval Worlds by Willis Barnstone
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Gnostic Philosophy: From Ancient Persia to Modern Times by Tobias Churton
The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas
The Gospel of Judas by Bart D. Ehrman, Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin Meyer, and Gregor Wurst
Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy
The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “Original Jesus” a Pagan God? by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy
The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy by Yuri Stoyanov
The Secrets of Judas: The Story of the Misunderstood Disciple and His Lost Gospel by James M. Robinson

Footnotes

1. The Gospel of Judas, as translated by a team led by Rodolphe Kasser and provided by the National Geographic Society.
2. www.michelvanrijn.nl
3. “Scholars have ‘no question’ on authenticity”, by Tom Avril, The Philadelphia Inquirer, 7 April, www.philly.com
4. “Another Take on Gospel Truth About Judas, Manuscript Could Add to Understanding of Gnostic Sect”, by Stacy Meichtry, 25 February, Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com
5. Ibid.
6. “In Ancient Document, Judas, Minus the Betrayal”, by John Noble Wilford & Laurie Goodstein, 7 April, New York Times, www.nytimes.com
7. “The ongoing evolution of Christianity”, by Jane Lampman, May 15, 2003, Christian Science Monitor, www.csmonitor.com
8. “The Gospel Truth”, by Elaine Pagels, April 8, New York Times, www.nytimes.com
9. Ibid.

ROBERT BLACK is a writer on Gnosticism, Vajrayana Buddhism, and Eastern and Western schools of theory and practise. He has been studying such subjects for some 25 years and is equally at home within an Eastern or Western esoteric setting. While he has a strong academic foundation for his work, he believes it is the practical use to which these traditions are put which counts.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 96 (May-June 2006).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 96 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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By JASON JEFFREY—

If man is not affected in some way by the Moon, he is the only thing on Earth that isn’t.
– Robert Millikan (1868-1953), US physicist & 1923 Nobel Prize winner

Probably no heavenly body has received as much attention down through the ages as our Moon. The causes of this fascination are obvious: the Moon enlightens the night and appears as a remarkable and large object in the sky. As a regulator of Earth’s tides and life’s biological cycles, the Moon’s importance to our physical existence is second only to that of the Sun.

Sacred scriptures, ancient myths, and even modern day pagans, all exalt the Moon in one way or another. Omens, spells, wishes, oracles, divination, and calendars cluster around it throughout history. Moon magic, the belief that working rituals at the time of different phases of the Moon brings about physical or psychological changes, is essential to various pagan and witchcraft systems. Witches in Greek and Roman literature were regularly accused of ‘drawing down the Moon’ by use of a magic spell.

Nevill Drury, a respected authority on mystical and occult traditions, says “traditionally… the Moon has been regarded as a ‘funnel’ drawing on the light of the stars and constellations and transmitting their energies to the Earth.”¹

In Western astrology the Moon is said to represent the feeling intuitive nature of the individual as well our deepest personal needs, our basic habits and reactions, and our unconscious. In esoteric astrology the Moon represents attachment to form, and under certain circumstances a variety of limiting conditions are related to the Moon, ranging from blatant materialism to subtler forms of limitation such as debilitating nostalgia, sentiment and regret.

The word “lunacy” – which derives from the Latin for Moon, “luna” – denotes the traditional link made in folklore between madness and the phases of the Moon. Several studies have tried to get to the bottom of this age-old belief. A 1976 report compared 34,318 crimes against lunar cycles. It found offences occurred more frequently during a full Moon. Other research, however, failed to find any firm link between the cycles of the Moon and irrational behaviour.

England’s Lunacy Act of 1842 gave allowances for uncharacteristic crimes committed during the full and new Moon. This law distinguished between the chronically insane and the lunatic. It was argued the lunatic became deranged at these times because of the Moon’s power and thus could not be held accountable for his or her actions.

Interestingly, a study of the Moon’s effect on mental health patients, conducted by the University of Liverpool in 2000, found a significant change at the time of the full Moon, but only in subjects with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

Whether we are conscious of it or not, the Moon exerts some sort of influence upon our biological and psychological states. But does it go any deeper than this?

Gurdjieff and Ouspensky

The Fourth Way philosophy claims to help individuals cease to be slaves of external and internal influences by building up a core of heightened consciousness. Its ultimate goal is the realisation of the full potential of human evolutionary possibilities. Its founder, George Gurdjieff (1872-1949), frequently spoke of the thoughtless mechanical behaviour of humanity, and was fond of commenting humans are “food for the Moon.”

What did Gurdjieff mean by this phrase? Many interpreted “food for the Moon” as a figure of speech – perhaps Gurdjieff meant we are slave to our mechanical conditioning and feed our baser impulses. But while it can be interpreted in this fashion, Gurdjieff was primarily being literal.

Peter Ouspensky, Gurdjieff’s most famous disciple, lectured at length concerning the Moon’s role in human affairs and its place in the cosmological scheme of things.

Ouspensky said the Moon drives the individual’s mechanical aspects like a pendulum moves the gears of a clock. The degree to which one’s actions are driven by the Moon is proportional to one’s level of contact with higher influences. For people incapable of moving themselves through life by nobler spiritual impulses, the Moon provides a propulsive force. Without this force, mechanical individuals would be passive as puppets without a puppeteer.

In the cosmological scheme proposed by Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, Earth is like a mother to the Moon which is still a fetus in the sense it cannot yet “breathe” on its own, hold an atmosphere, or support life. Someday, the Earth will evolve into a being like the Sun, while the Moon will transform into a second Earth. Humanity was simply a stage in this process.

“The Moon is actually a fragment of this Earth, which must now constantly maintain the Moon’s existence,” Gurdjieff said.² In that sense, the Moon is like a parasitic thought form. Nevertheless, the equation is balanced because in exchange for the Moon propelling our mechanical movement, we feed the Moon so that it may grow and one day be born as a living planet.

As to how organic life feeds the Moon, Gurdjieff taught that most human beings are mere “slugs” with no souls and that following death their remaining psychic energy is “food for the Moon.” Like a magnet, the Moon draws the fine matter of human souls into it: “Everything living on the Earth, people, animals, plants, is food for the Moon. The Moon is a huge living being feeding upon all that lives and grows on the Earth.”

Only through an intensive effort of conscious evolution – what he called “self-remembering” – was it possible for an individual to escape being eaten by the Moon. “The liberation that comes with the growth of mental powers and faculties is liberation from the Moon.” Gurdjieff always maintained Man is not truly conscious, and his actions are entirely mechanical: “Everything ‘happens,’ he cannot ‘do’ anything. He is a machine controlled by accidental shocks from outside.”

To escape these deleterious lunar influences, Ouspensky said we must “create Moon within ourselves.”³ By this he meant we must develop within a driving mechanism that takes the place of the external lunar influence; in this way we can break free of the puppeteer.

Boris Mouravieff, who was an associate of both Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, formulated an esoteric system for spiritual evolution founded upon the inner traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy and Fourth Way principles. His extensive three volume work, Gnosis, deals extensively with the question of lunar influences and spiritual development.

He concurs with Gurdjieff and Ouspensky on the role of the Moon, but also warns “that organic life functions as a transmitter station sending refined energy to the Moon to assist its growth. Despite increases in the human population and thus an increase in quantity of energy transferred, times of peace do not produce sufficient energy and so catalysts for suffering such as wars and catastrophes arise to sustain the process.”⁴

Mouravieff and Ouspensky emphasise that despite the hypnotic nature of the Moon and the urgent necessity for individuals to overcome its influence, there is still an important cosmological reason for its existence. If nothing else, the Moon’s unique position in relation to the Earth was paramount in making physical ‘conscious’ life possible.

Theosophy

Together with Henry Steel Olcott, Madame H.P. Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875. Theosophy, the “grandmother” of today’s “New Age” movement, tells us the Moon was home to an earlier “life wave” which has since migrated to Earth.

In The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky states the Moon served a dual purpose in religious rites: “Personified as a female goddess for exoteric purposes, or as a male god in allegory and symbol, in occult philosophy our satellite was regarded as a sexless Potency to be well studied, because it was to be dreaded… But whether male or female…, the Moon is the Occult mystery of mysteries, and more a symbol of evil than of good.”

Perhaps the Moon is identified with evil rather than good because it is now what Madame Blavatsky calls “a dead planet.”

How did this occur? An article by William Quan Judge elaborates: “in a remote period, when there was no Earth, the Moon existed as an inhabited globe, died, and at once threw out into space all her energies leaving nothing but the physical vehicle. Those energies revolved and condensed that matter in space nearby and produced our Earth; the Moon, its parent, proceeding towards disintegration but compelled to revolve around her child, this Earth.”⁵

To fully appreciate why all this happened, a study of Theosophical cosmology is required, but space does not permit a full explanation here.

Elsewhere in The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky’s view of the Moon’s relationship to the Earth is similar to Fourth Way thinking:

“The moon is now the cold residual quantity, the shadow dragged after the new body, into which her living powers are transfused. She now is doomed for long ages to be ever pursuing the Earth, to be attracted by and to attract her progeny. Constantly vampirised by her child, she revenges herself on it, by soaking it through and through with the nefarious, invisible and poisonous influence which emanates from the occult side of her nature. For she is a dead, yet a living body. The particles of her decaying corpse are full of active and destructive life, although the body which they had formed, is soulless and lifeless.”

Theosophy differs from the Fourth Way which holds the Moon is not yet ready to sustain life. But they both agree the Moon is vampirising the life forms of Earth.

Are we food for the Moon, or are these warnings the ravings of lunatics? Although modern science tells us we have nothing to worry about, ancient wisdom and folklore paint a very different picture. Ignoring these dangers has perhaps left us wide open, more so when we do not recognise the signs or symptoms of the Moon’s ‘drawing up’ effect.

Whatever the reality, the Fourth Way, Theosophy and all schools of esoteric philosophy have the solution. By overcoming our mechanical tendencies, we strengthen our resistance to the lunar effect, and for that matter all planetary influences. And by “creating Moon” within ourselves – that is, building up our essential self – we not only gain victory over the negative lunar influence, but awaken to a higher level of consciousness.

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Footnotes

1.  The Dictionary of the Esoteric by Nevill Drury, Watkins Publishing, London 2002
2.  In Search of the Miraculous by P. Ouspensky, 1949
3. The Fourth Way by P. Ouspensky, 1957
4.  Gnosis II: Study And Commentaries On The Esoteric Tradition Of Eastern Orthodoxy, Book Two, Mesoteric Cycle, by Boris Mouravieff, Praxis Institute, 1992
5.  “Moon’s Mystery and Fate”, Path, June, 1894.

JASON JEFFREY holds an interest in a wide range of subjects including geopolitics, the ‘New World Order’, Big Brother, suppressed technology, psychic/spiritual development, ancient civilisations and esotericism. He can be contacted at jasonjeffrey88@gmail.com

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 96 (May-June 2006).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 96 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

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By ANDREW COLLINS—

Angels are something we associate with beautiful Pre-Raphaelite and renaissance paintings, carved statues accompanying gothic architecture and supernatural beings who intervene in our lives at times of trouble. For the last 2000 years this has been the stereotypical image fostered by the Christian Church. But what are angels? Where do they come from, and what have they meant to the development of organised religion?

Many people see the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, as littered with accounts of angels appearing to righteous patriarchs and visionary prophets. Yet this is simply not so. There are the three angels who approach Abraham to announce the birth of a son named Izaac to his wife Sarah as he sits beneath a tree on the Plain of Mamre. There are the two angels who visit Lot and his wife at Sodom prior to its destruction. There is the angel who wrestles all night with Jacob at a place named Penuel, or those which he sees moving up and down a ladder that stretches between heaven and earth.

Yet other than these accounts, there are too few examples, and when angels do appear the narrative is often vague and unclear on what exactly is going on. For instance, in the case of both Abraham and Lot the angels in question are described simply as ‘men’, who sit down to take food like any mortal person.

Influence of the Magi

It was not until post-exilic times – i.e. after the Jews returned from captivity in Babylon around 450 BC – that angels became an integral part of the Jewish religion. It was even later, around 200 BC, that they began appearing with frequency in Judaic religious literature. Works such as the Book of Daniel and the apocryphal Book of Tobit contain enigmatic accounts of angelic beings that have individual names, specific appearances and established hierarchies. These radiant figures were of non-Judaic origin. All the indications are that they were aliens, imports from a foreign kingdom, namely Persia.

The country we know today as Iran might not at first seem the most likely source for angels, but it is a fact that the exiled Jews were heavily exposed to its religious faiths after the Persian king Cyrus the Great took Babylon in 539 BC. These included not only Zoroastrianism, after the prophet Zoroaster or Zarathustra, but also the much older religion of the Magi, the elite priestly caste of Media in north-west Iran. They believed in a whole pantheon of supernatural beings called ahuras, or ‘shining ones’, and daevas - ahuras who had fallen from grace because of their corruption of mankind.

Although eventually outlawed by Persia, the influence of the Magi ran deep within the beliefs, customs and rituals of Zoroastrianism. Moreover, there can be little doubt that Magianism, from which we get terms such as magus, magic and magician, helped to establish the belief among Jews not only of whole hierarchies of angels, but also of legions of fallen angels – a topic that gains its greatest inspiration from one work alone – the Book of Enoch.

The Book of Enoch

Compiled in stages somewhere between 165 BC and the start of the Christian era, this so-called pseudepigraphal (i.e. falsely attributed) work has as its main theme the story behind the fall of the angels. Yet not the fall of angels in general, but those which were originally known as ’îrin (’îr in singular), “those who watch”, or simply ‘watchers’ as the word is rendered in English translation.

The Book of Enoch tells the story of how 200 rebel angels, or Watchers, decided to transgress the heavenly laws and ‘descend’ on to the plains and take wives from among mortal kind. The site given for this event is the summit of Hermon, a mythical location generally associated with the snowy heights of Mount Hermon in the Ante-Lebanon range, north of modern-day Palestine (but see below for the most likely homeland of the Watchers).

The 200 rebels realise the implications of their transgressions, for they agree to swear an oath to the effect that their leader Shemyaza would take the blame if the whole ill-fated venture went terribly wrong.

After their descent to the lowlands, the Watchers indulge in earthly delights with their chosen ‘wives’, and through these unions are born giant offspring named as Nephilim, or Nefilim, a Hebrew word meaning ‘those who have fallen’, which is rendered in Greek translations as gigantes, or ‘giants’.

Heavenly Secrets

In between taking advantage of our women, the 200 rebel angels spent their time imparting the heavenly secrets to those who had ears to listen. One of their number, a leader named Azazel, is said to have “taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals (of the earth) and the art of working them”, indicating that the Watchers brought the use of metal to mankind. He also instructed them on how they could make “bracelets” and “ornaments” and showed them how to use “antimony”, a white brittle metal employed in the arts and medicine.

To the women Azazel taught the art of “beautifying” the eyelids, and the use of “all kinds of costly stones” and “colouring tinctures”, presupposing that the wearing of make-up and jewellery was unknown before this age. In addition to these crimes, Azazel stood accused of teaching women how to enjoy sexual pleasure and indulge in promiscuity – a blasphemy seen as ‘godlessness’ in the eyes of the Hebrew storytellers.

Other Watchers stood accused of revealing to mortal kind the knowledge of more scientific arts, such as astronomy, the knowledge of the clouds, or meteorology; the “signs of the earth”, presumably geodesy and geography, as well as the “signs”, or passage, of the celestial bodies, such as the sun and moon. Their leader, Shemyaza, is accredited with having taught “enchantments, and rootcuttings”, a reference to the magical arts shunned upon by most orthodox Jews. One of their number, Pênêmûe, taught “the bitter and the sweet”, surely a reference to the use of herbs and spices in foods, while instructing men on the use of “ink and paper”, implying that the Watchers introduced the earliest forms of writing. Far more disturbing is Kâsdejâ, who is said to have shown “the children of men all the wicked smitings of spirits and demons, and the smitings of the embryo in the womb, that it may pass away”. In other words he taught women how to abort babies.

These lines concerning the forbidden sciences handed to humanity by the rebel Watchers raises the whole fundamental question of why angels should have possessed any knowledge of such matters in the first place. Why should they have needed to work with metals, use charms, incantations and writing; beautify the body; employ the use of spices, and know now to abort an unborn child? None of these skills are what one might expect heavenly messengers of God to possess, not unless they were human in the first place.

In my opinion, this revelation of previously unknown knowledge and wisdom seems like the actions of a highly advanced race passing on some of its closely-guarded secrets to a less evolved culture still striving to understand the basic principles of life.

More disconcerting were the apparent actions of the now fully grown Nephilim, for it says:

And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood. Then the earth laid accusation against the lawless ones.

By now the cries of desperation from mankind were being heard loud and clear by the angels, or Watchers, who had remained loyal to heaven. One by one they are appointed by God to proceed against the rebel Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim, who are described as “the bastards and the reprobates, and the children of fornication”. The first leader, Shemyaza, is hung and bound upside down and his soul banished to become the stars of the constellation of Orion. The second leader, Azazel, is bound hand and foot, and cast for eternity into the darkness of a desert referred to as Dûdâêl. Upon him are placed “rough and jagged rocks” and here he shall forever remain until the Day of Judgement when he will be “cast into the fire” for his sins. For their part in the corruption of mankind, the rebel Watchers are forced to witness the slaughter of their own children before being cast into some kind of heavenly prison, seen as an “abyss of fire”.

Seven Heavens

The patriarch Enoch then enters the picture and, for some inexplicable reason, is asked to intercede on behalf of the incarcerated rebels. He attempts to reconcile them with the angels of heaven, but fails miserably. After this the Book of Enoch relates how the patriarch is carried by angels over mountains and seas to the “seven heavens”. Here he sees multitudes of angelic beings watching stars and other celestial bodies in what appear to be astronomical observatories. Others tend orchards and gardens that have more in common with an Israeli kibbutz than an ethereal realm above the clouds.

Elsewhere in ‘heaven’ is Eden, where God planted a garden for Adam and Eve before their fall – Enoch being the first mortal to enter this domain since their expulsion.

Finally, during the life of Enoch’s great-grandson, Noah, the Great Flood covers the land and destroys all remaining traces of the giant race. Thus ends the story of the Watchers.

The Sons of God

What are we to make of the Book of Enoch? Are its accounts of the fall of the Watchers and the visits to heaven by the patriarch Enoch based on any form of historical truth? Scholars would say no. They believe it to be a purely fictional work inspired by the Book of Genesis, in particular two enigmatic passages in Chapter 6. The first, making up Verses 1 and 2, reads as follows:

And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the ground, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all that they chose.

By ‘sons of God’ the text means heavenly angels, the original Hebrew being bene ha-elohim. In Verse 3 of Chapter 6 God unexpectedly pronounces that his spirit cannot remain in men for ever, and that since humanity is a creation of flesh its life-span will henceforth be shortened to “an hundred and twenty years”. Yet in Verse 4 the tone suddenly reverts to the original theme of the chapter, for it says:

The Nephilim were in the earth in those days, and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them: the same were the mighty men which were of old, the men of renown.

As the Pentateuch is considered to have been written by Moses the lawgiver in c.1200 BC, it is assumed that the lines of Genesis 6 influenced the construction of the Book of Enoch, not the other way round. Despite this obvious assumption on the part of Hebrew scholars, there is ample evidence to show that much of Genesis was written after the Jews return from captivity in Babylon during the mid-fifth century BC. If this was the case, then there is no reason why the lines of Genesis 6 could not have been tampered with around this time. In an attempt to emphasise the immense antiquity of the Book of Enoch, Hebrew myth has always asserted that it was originally conveyed to Noah, Enoch’s great grandson, after the Great Flood, i.e. long before the compilation of Genesis. This claim of precedence over the Pentateuch eventually led the Christian theologian St Augustine (AD 354-430) to state that the Book of Enoch was too old (ob nimiam antiquitatem) to be included in the Canon of Scripture!

Roots of the Nephilim

There is another enigma contained within the lines of Genesis 6, for its appears to embody two entirely different traditions.

Look again at the words of Verse 2. They speak of the Sons of God coming unto the Daughters of Men, while in contrast Verse 4 states firmly: “The Nephilim were in the earth in those days and also after that when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men (author’s emphasis)”.

And also after that…

The meaning seemed clear enough: there were two quite separate traditions entangled here – one concerning the fallen race known to the early Israelites as the Nephilim (mentioned elsewhere in the Pentateuch as the progenitors of a race of giants called Anakim), and the other concerning the bene ha-elohim, the Sons of God, who are equated directly with the Watchers in Enochian tradition. Theologians are aware of this dilemma, and get around the problem by suggesting that the angels fell from grace twice – once through pride and then again through lust. It seems certain that the term Nephilim was the original Hebrew name of the fallen race, while bene ha-elohim was a much later term – plausibly from Iran – that entered Genesis 6 long after its original compilation.

In spite of the contradictions surrounding Genesis 6, its importance is clear enough, for it preserved the firm belief among the ancestors of the Jewish race that at some point in the distant past a giant race had once ruled the earth.

So if the Watchers and the Nephilim really had inhabited this world, then who or what were these seemingly physical beings? Where did they come from? What did they look like? Where did they live and what was their ultimate fate?

The Book of Enoch was a vital source of knowledge with regard to their former existence, but I needed more – other less tainted accounts of this apparent race of human beings.

Then came an important break.

The Dead Sea Connection

Hebrew scholars had long noted the similarities between some of the reactionary teachings in the Book of Enoch and the gospels according to the Essenes – a fundamental, yet very righteous religious community spoken of by classical scholars as having existed on the western shores of the Dead Sea. This connection was strengthened after 1947 when it was realised that among the Dead Sea Scrolls, now considered to have been written by the Essenes, were various fragments of texts belonging to several copies of the Book of Enoch. Up until this time the only complete manuscript copies available to the literary world had been various copies written in the Ethiopian written language of Ge’ez, the first of which had been brought back to Europe by the Scottish explorer and known Freemason James Bruce of Kinnaird following his famous travels in Abysinnia between 1769 and 1772.

Not only did the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm the authenticity of the Book of Enoch, but they also showed that it had been held in great esteem by the Essene community at Qumran, who may even have been behind its original construction sometime after 165 BC. More importantly, Hebrew scholars also began to identify various other previously unknown tracts of an ‘Enochian’ flavour among the Dead Sea corpus, and these included further references to the Watchers and their offspring the Nephilim. Many of these individual fragments were eventually realised by Dead Sea scholar J.T. Milik to be extracts from a lost work called the Book of Giants.

Previously this had only been known from isolated references in religious texts appertaining to the Manichaeans, a heretical gnostic faith that swept across Europe and Asia, as far as China and Tibet, from the third century AD onwards.

The Book of Giants continues the story told in the Book of Enoch, relating how the Nephilim had coped with knowing that their imminent destruction was due to the improprieties of their Watcher fathers. Reading this ancient work allows the reader a more compassionate view of the Nephilim, who come across as innocent bystanders in a dilemma beyond their personal control.

Visage Like A Viper

Yet aside from this still very fragmentary treatise, other Enochian texts have surfaced among the Dead Sea Scrolls which in my opinion are just as important. One of these is the Testament of Amram.

Amram was the father of the lawgiver Moses, although any biblical time-frame to this story is irrelevant. What is much more significant is the appearance of the two Watchers who appear to him in a dream-vision as he rests in his bed, for as the heavily reconstructed text reads:

[I saw Watchers] in my vision, the dream-vision. Two (men) were fighting over me, saying… and holding a great contest over me. I asked them, ‘Who are you, that you are thus empo[wered over me?’ They answered me, ‘We] [have been em]powered and rule over all mankind.’ They said to me, ‘Which of us do yo[u choose to rule (you)?’ I raised my eyes and looked.] [One] of them was terr[i]fying in his appearance, [like a s]erpent, [his] c[loa]k many-coloured yet very dark… [And I looked again], and… in his appearance, his visage like a viper, and [wearing...] [exceedingly, and all his eyes...].

The text identifies this last Watcher as Belial, the Prince of Darkness and King of Evil, while his companion is revealed as Michael, the Prince of Light, who is also named as Melchizedek, the King of Righteousness. It is, however, Belial’s frightful appearance that took my attention, for he is seen as terrifying to look upon and like a ‘serpent’, the very synonym so often used when describing both the Watchers and the Nephilim. If the textual fragment had ended here, then I would not have known why this synonym had been used by the Jewish scribe in question. Fortunately, however, the text goes on to say that the Watcher possessed a visage, or face, “like a viper”. Since he also wears a cloak “many-coloured yet very dark”, I had also to presume that he was anthropomorphic, in other words he possessed human form.

Visage like a viper…

What could this possibly mean? How many people do you know with a “visage like a viper”? For over a year I could offer no suitable solution to this curious metaphor.

Then, by chance, I happened to overhear something on a national radio station that provided me with a simple, though completely unexpected answer. In Hollywood, Los Angeles, there is a club called the Viper Room. It is owned by actor and musician Johnny Depp, and in October 1993 it hit the headlines when up-coming actor River Phoenix tragically collapsed and died as he left the club following a night of over-indulgence. In the media publicity that inevitably surrounded this drugs-related incident, it emerged that the Viper Room gained its name many years beforehand when it had been a jazz haunt of some renown. Story goes that the musicians would take the stage and play long hours, prolonging their creativity and concentration by smoking large amounts of marijuana. Apparently, the long term effects of this drug abuse, coupled with exceedingly long periods without food and sleep, would cause their emaciated faces to appear hollow and gaunt, while their eyes would close up to become just slits. Through the haze of heavy smoke, the effect was to make it seem as if the jazz musicians had faces like vipers, hence the name of the club.

This amusing anecdote sent my mind reeling and enabled me to construct a mental picture of what a person with a “visage like a viper” might look like; their faces would appear long and narrow, with prominent cheekbones, elongated jawbones, thin lips and slanted eyes like those of many East Asian racial types. Was this the solution as to why both the Watchers and Nephilim were described as walking serpents? It seemed as likely a possibility as any, although it was also feasible that their serpentine connection related to their accredited magical associations and capabilities, perhaps even their bodily movements and overall appearance.

The Appearance of Feathers

Another important reference to the appearance of Watchers comes from the so-called Secrets of the Book of Enoch, also known as 2 Enoch, a kind of sequel to the original work written in Greek and dating to the first century AD. The passage refers to the unexpected arrival of two Watchers as Enoch rests on his bed:

And there appeared to me two men very tall, such as I have never seen on earth. And their faces shone like the sun, and their eyes were like burning lamps; and fire came forth from their lips. Their dress had the appearance of feathers:… [purple], their wings were brighter than gold; their hands whiter than snow. They stood at the head of my bed and called me by my name.

White skin (often ruddied “as red as a rose”), tall stature and facial radiances “like the sun” all recur frequently in connection with the appearance of angels and Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature. Yet what was this reference to their dress having “the appearance of feathers”? Might it relate in some way to the “cloak” worn by the Watcher named Belial who appears in the Amram story, which was said to have been “many-coloured yet very dark”, precisely the effect one might expect from a coat of black feathers, like those belonging to crows or vultures perhaps?

In spite of the fact that Christian art has invariably portrayed angels with wings, this tradition goes back no further than the third or fourth century AD. Before this time true angels (Cherubim and Seraphim did have multiple sets of wings) appeared in the likeness of “men”, a situation that often prompted textual translators to add wings on to existing descriptions of angels. This has almost certainly been the case in the above account taken from 2 Enoch, which was re-copied many times during the early years of Christianity.

With this observation in mind, I felt that the statement concerning the Watchers dress having “the appearance of feathers” was very revealing indeed. It also seemed like an over-sight on the part of the scribe who conveyed this story into written form, for having added wings to the description of the two “men”, why bother saying they wore garments of feathers? Surely this confusion between wings and feather coats could have been edited to give the Watchers a more appropriate angelic appearance.

Bird Shamans

Somehow I knew it was a key to unlocking this strange mystery, for it suggested that, if the Watchers had indeed been human, then they may have adorned themselves in garments of this nature as part of their ceremonial dress. The use of totemic forms, such as animals and birds, has always been the domain of the shaman, the spirit walkers of tribal communities. In many early cultures the soul was said to have taken the form of a bird to make its flight from this world to the next, which is why it is often depicted as such in ancient religious art. This idea may well have stemmed from the widely-held belief that astral flight could only be achieved by using ethereal wings, like those of a bird, something that almost certainly helped inspire the idea that angels, as messengers of God, should be portrayed with wings in Christian iconography.

To enhance this mental link with his or her chosen bird, shamans would adorn their bodies with a coat of feathers and spend long periods of time studying its every movement. They would enter its natural habitat and watch every facet of its life – its method of flight, its eating habits, its courtship rituals and its actions on the ground. In doing so they would hope to become as birds themselves, an alter-personality adopted on a semi-permanent basis. Totemic shamanism is more-or-less dependent on the indigenous animals or birds present in the locale of the culture or tribe, although in principle the purpose has always been the same – using this mantle to achieve astral flight, divine illumination, spirit communication and the attainment of otherworldly knowledge and wisdom.

So could the Watchers and Nephilim have been bird-men?

The answer is almost certainly yes, for in the Dead Sea text entitled the Book of Giants, the Nephilim sons of the fallen angel Shemyaza, named as ’Ahyâ and ’Ohyâ, experience dream-visions in which they visit a world-garden and see 200 trees being felled by heavenly angels. Not understanding the purpose of this allegory they put the subject to the Nephilim council who appoint one of their number, Mahawai, to go on their behalf to consult Enoch, who now resides in an earthly paradise. To this end Mahawai then:

[...rose up into the air] like the whirlwinds, and flew with the help of his hands like [winged] eagle [...over] the cultivated lands and crossed Solitude, the great desert, [...]. And he caught sight of Enoch and he called to him…

Enoch explains that the 200 trees represent the 200 Watchers, while the felling of their trunks signifies their destruction in a coming conflagration and deluge. More significant, however, is the means by which Mahawai attains astral flight, for he is said to have used “his hands like (a) [winged] eagle.” Elsewhere in the same Enochian text Mahawai is said to have adopted the guise of a bird to make another long journey. On this occasion he narrowly escapes being burnt up by the sun’s heat and is only saved after heeding the celestial voice of Enoch, who convinces him to turn back and not die prematurely – a story that has close parallels with Icarus’s fatal flight too near the sun in Greek mythology.

In addition to this evidence, a variation of this same text equates Shemyaza’s sons “not (with) the… eagle, but his wings”, while in the same breath the two brothers are described as “in their nest”, statements which prompted the Hebrew scholar J.T. Milik to conclude that, like Mahawai, they too “could have been bird-men”.
This was compelling confirmation that angels were originally a culture or tribe who practised a form of bird shamanism, perhaps associated with a dark carrion bird such as the crow or vulture.

* * *

Since the Enochian and Dead Sea literature was written by olive-skinned Jews of the post-exilic period, it is quite clear they were reciting traditions concerning a completely different race from a completely different climate. So who were these human angels, and where might they have lived?

Since we now know that the legends of the fall of the angels most probably originated in Iran, more precisely in the north-western kingdom of Media (modern-day Azerbaijan), then there is every reason to associate these traditions with the mountains beyond Media. This is tentatively confirmed by another Dead Sea text entitled the Genesis Apocryphon which records that after his ascent to heaven the patriarch Enoch spent the rest of his life “among the angels” in “paradise”. Although the term “paradise” is used in some translations of the original text, the actual word is “Parwain”.

I was therefore quite stunned to find that among the ancient traditions of the Mandaeans, a Magi-linked religion found mostly among the Marsh Arabs of Lower Iraq, “Parwan” is a holy mountain apparently located in the vicinity of Media in northwestern Iran. Furthermore, both “Parwan” and “Parwain” would appear to derive their root from the old Median word “Parswana”, meaning “rib, side, frontier”, used to describe the peoples and territories beyond the borders of Media.

These would have included the region of Parsa to its south and, more significantly, the mountainous region known as Parsua to its west.

Was Enoch therefore believed to have lived “among the angels” in the harsh mountainous territories beyond the limits of the ancient kingdom of Media? In the remote region of Parsua, to the west of Media, perhaps? Is this where the Watchers came from? Is it from here that they descended on to the plains to take mortal wives and reveal the forbidden arts and secrets of heaven?

In Iranian tradition the realm of the immortals and the seat of the mythical godkings of Iran (who like the fallen race of Judaic tradition were said to have been tall in stature with ivory white skin and shining countenances), was known as the Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian Expanse. Traditions fostered by the Magi imply quite clearly that this ethereal domain was located among the mountains of Media.

All roads appeared to lead to the mountainous region of modern-day Azerbaijan, which forms the eastern-most flanks of a vast snow-capped expanse that stretches west to the Taurus mountains of eastern Anatolia and northern Syria; north to the remote regions of Russian Armenia; and south-east along the length of the Zagros mountains, as they gradually descend towards the Persian Gulf and act as a virtually impenetrable barrier between Iraq and Iran.

This enormous, mostly desolate part of the earth, home in the most part to wandering nomads, bands of warring rebels, isolated religious communities and the occasional village, town or city, is known to the world as Kurdistan – the cultural and political homeland of the much troubled Kurdish peoples.

Yet according to biblical and apocryphal tradition, it was here also that the Garden of Eden, the resting place of Noah’s Ark and the stomping ground of the early patriarchs could be found. It was here too that I now realised I would have to go in search of the realm of the immortals.

Eastwards, in Eden

The Book of Genesis speaks of God establishing a garden “eastwards, in Eden”. Here Adam and Eve became humanity’s first parents before their eventual fall from grace through the beguiling of the subtle Serpent of Temptation. Serpents were not only a primary synonym for the Watchers and Nephilim, but the Book of Enoch even states which “Serpent”, or Watcher, led our first parents into temptation. Interestingly enough, the Bundahishn, a holy text of the Zoroastrian faith, cites Angra Mainyu, the Evil Spirit and father of the daevas, as assuming this same role, and like the Watchers he too is described as a serpent with “legs”.

So where was Eden? All we know is that it was situated among the Seven Heavens, a paradisical realm with gardens, orchards and observatories in which the angels and Watchers reside in the Book of Enoch.

The word ‘Eden’ is translated by Hebrew scholars as meaning ‘pleasure’ or ‘delight’, a reference to the fact that God created the garden for the pleasure of mankind. This is not, however, its true origin. The word ‘Eden’ is in fact Akkadian – the proto-Hebrew, or Semitic, language introduced to Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) by the people of Agade, or Akkad, a race that seized control of the ancient kingdom of Sumer during the second half of the third millennium BC. In their language the word ‘Eden’, or edin, meant a ‘steppe’ or ‘terrace’, as in a raised agricultural terrace.

Turning to the word ‘paradise’, I found that this simply inferred a ‘walled enclosure’, after the Persian root pairi, ‘around’, and daeza, ‘wall’. It is a late-comer to Judaeo-Christian religious literature and was only really used after the year 1175 AD.

The English word ‘heaven’, on the other hand, is taken from the Hebrew ha’shemim, interpreted as meaning ‘the skies’. It can also refer to ‘high places’, such as lofty settlements. Moreover, the Hebrew word-root shm can mean ‘heights’, as well as ‘plant’ or ‘vegetation’, implying perhaps that the word ‘heaven’ might be more accurately translated as a ‘planted highlands’.

This quick round of simple etymology, in my opinion at least, conjured the image of a walled, agricultural settlement with stepped terraces placed in a highlands region. So is this what Eden was – a ‘walled, agricultural settlement’ placed among the mountains of Kurdistan? Had it been tended by angels under the dominion of the heavenly Watchers as is suggested by the text of the Book of Enoch?  More importantly, where had it been located?

The Rivers of Paradise

The Book of Genesis says that from Eden stemmed the headwaters of the four rivers of paradise. The names of these are given as the Pishon, Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates. Of these four, only the last can properly be identified by name. The Euphrates flows through Turkish Kurdistan, Syria and Iraq before emptying into the Persian Gulf. The other three were identified by early biblical scholars respectively with the Ganges of India (although occasionally the Orontes of northern Syria), the Nile of Africa and the Tigris of western Asia, which, like its sister river the Euphrates flows through Iraq and empties into the Persian Gulf. The first two were chosen as suitable substitutes simply because they were looked upon by scholars as the mightiest rivers of the classical world; only the connection between the Hiddekel and the Tigris made any sort of geographical sense.

In no way could it be said that all four of these rivers rose in the same geographical region, a problem that was conveniently overlooked by theologians before the re-discovery of cartography in the sixteenth century. Other sources, particularly the Armenian Church, accepted the Euphrates and Tigris as two of the four rivers of paradise, yet chose to associate the other two, the Pishon and Gihon, with, respectively, the Greater Zab, which rises in Turkish Kurdistan and empties into the Tigris, and the Araxes, which rises in Armenia and empties into the Caspian Sea.

Had the Armenian Church been right to do this? Possibly yes, as they were the inhabitants of the geographical region in question and may well have been privy to local traditions unavailable to the outside theological world.

Whatever the identities of the four rivers of paradise, Kurdish tradition places their headwaters in the vicinity of Lake Van, an enormous inland sea – some 60 miles across and around 35 miles wide – situated on the border between Turkish Kurdistan and Armenia. Indeed, legend records that the Garden of Eden now lies ‘at the bottom of Lake Van’, after it was submerged beneath the waves at the time of the Great Flood.

Curiously enough, it is the mountain of Cudi Dag, or Mount Judi, south of Lake Van that the Moslems as well as the various different faiths of Kurdish extraction locate the so-called Place of Descent, the site where Noah’s Ark came to rest after the Great Flood. The attribution of this very same location with the more familiar Mount Ararat is a pure Christian invention that has no real basis in early religious tradition.

All this therefore implied that the compilers of the Book of Genesis placed both the birth-place of humanity, i.e. the Garden of Eden, and its point of regeneration after the Great Flood in the same general region of northern Kurdistan, surely a clue to the fact that the key to the origins of the Watchers lay in this same geographical area of the map.

The Heavenly Mountain

There is much more, however, for it is not just the Iranian and Jewish races that cite Kurdistan as the cradle of civilisation. The mythologies of both the Sumerians, who ruled the various Mesopotamian city-states from around 3000 BC onwards, and their eventual conquerors, the Akkadians, placed the homeland of the gods in this exact same region. The Akkadians originated as a Semitic, or proto-Hebrew, race of uncertain origin, and in their religious literature this heavenly abode is referred to as Kharsag Khurra, the heavenly mountain. Here the gods, also known as the Anannage, lived in a paradisical realm with gardens, orchards, temples and irrigated fields that not only resemble the Seven Heavens described in the Book of Enoch, but is actually referred to on more than one occasion as edin, the Akkadian for ‘steppe’ or ‘plateau’.

Even further linking Kharsag with the Jewish domain of angels is the knowledge that the Anannage, like the Enochian Watchers, were governed by a council of seven. These undoubtedly equate with the seven archangels of post-exilic Judaism as well as the six so-called Amesha Spentas, or ‘bounteous spirits’, who with the supreme god Ahura Mazda, preside over the angelic hierarchies in Iranian tradition.

Were the Anannage, the gods and goddesses of Kharsag, simply another form of the Watchers of Enochian and Dead Sea literature, whose homeland was a lofty agricultural settlement called Eden or heaven, located somewhere amid the mountains of Kurdistan?

The Search for Dilmun

Kharsag is not the only name used by the ancient Mesopotamians to refer to their place of first beginnings. This cradle of civilisation was also known by the name Dilmun, or Tilmun. Here, it was said, the god Ea and his wife were placed to institute “a sinless age of complete happiness”. Here too animals lived in peace and harmony, man had no rival and the god Enlil “in one tongue gave praise”. It is also described as a pure, clean and “bright” “abode of the immortals” where death, disease and sorrow are unknown and some mortals have been given “life like a god”, words reminiscent of the Airyana Vaejah, the realm of the immortals in Iranian myth and legend, and the Eden of Hebraic tradition.

Although Dilmun is equated by most scholars with the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, there is evidence to suggest that a much earlier mythical Dilmun was located in a mountainous region beyond the plains of Sumer. But where exactly was it located?

Mesopotamian inscriptions do not say; however, the Zoroastrian Bundahishn text and the Christian records of Arbela in Iraqi Kurdistan both refer to a location named Dilamân as having existed around the headwaters of the Tigris, south-west of Lake Van – the very area in which the biblical Eden is said to have been located.

Furthermore, Ea (the Akkadian Enki) was said to have presided over the concourse of Mesopotamia’s two greatest rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates – which are shown in depictions as flowing from each of his shoulders. This would have undoubtedly have meant that the head-waters, or sources, of these rivers would have been looked upon as sacred to Ea by the cultures of Mesopotamia’s Fertile Crescent.

More curious is the knowledge that, as in Hebrew and Iranian myth, there would appear to have been a fall of the gods of Anu, the Anannage. Whilst 300 of their number remained in heaven, some 600 others, under the leadership of Nergal, god of the underworld, settled among mortal kind. Here they provided mankind with everything from basic agriculture, to astronomy, land irrigation, building technology and structured society.

Sounds familiar?

These rebel Anannage lived “in the earth”, a reference to an “underworld” realm connected with the ancient city of Kutha, north of Babylon. In this “House of Darkness” lived “demons” and Edimmu, giant blood-sucking vampires who would return to the surface world after dark to steal the souls of the undead.

Could these infernal beings be a distorted memory of the rebel Watchers and their monstrous offspring, the Nephilim? Might these fallen angels have lived in underground cities after their descent on to the plains?

The Bodies of Birds

Ancient Mesopotamia fathered whole pantheons of devils and demons – each class having its own appearance, functions and attributes. Some were beneficial to mankind, while others caused only pain, suffering and torment in the mortal world.

In the story of the goddess Ishtar’s descent to the underworld, preserved in Assyrio-Babylonian tradition, the “chiefs” of the “House of Darkness” were said to have been “like birds covered with feathers”, who “from the days of old ruled the earth, (and) to whom the gods Anu and Bel have given terrible names”. In one cuneiform tablet written in the city of Kutha by a scribe “in the temple of Sitlam, in the sanctuary of Nergal” it describes the incursions into Mesopotamia of a race of demons, fostered by the gods in some nether region. They are said to have waged war on an unnamed king for three consecutive years and to have had the appearance of:

Men with the bodies of birds of the desert, human beings with the faces of ravens,

these the great gods created,

and in the earth the gods created for them a
dwelling…

in the midst of the earth they grew up and became great, and increased in number,

Seven kings, brothers of the same family,

six thousand in number were their people.

These “men with the bodies of birds” were looked upon as “demons”. They would appear only once a storm-cloud had consumed the deserts and would slaughter those whom they took captive, before returning to some inaccessible region for another year.

There seems every reason to suggest that these fierce “demons” were not incorporeal spirits at all, but beings of flesh and blood adorned in cloaks of feathers and bird paraphernalia.

But who were these human demons, and how did they relate to the development of civilisation in Mesopotamia?

Uncertain Forces

The Sumerians were a unique people with their own language and culture. Nobody knows their true origin or where exactly they may have obtained the seeds of knowledge that helped establish the various city-states during the fourth millennium BC. Yet the Sumerians themselves were quite explicit on this point. They said their entire culture had been inherited from the Anannage, the gods of Anu, who had come from an ancestral homeland in the mountains. To emphasise this point they used an ideogram of a mountain to denote “the country”, i.e. Sumer, and built seven-tiered ziggurats in honour of these founder gods.

Was it possible therefore that the proposed Watcher culture of Kurdistan provided the impetus for the rise of western civilisation?

Archaeologists have no problem accepting Kurdistan as the cradle of Near Eastern civilisation. Shortly after the recession of the last Ice Age, c.8500 BC, there emerged in this region some of the earliest examples of agriculture, animal domestication, baked and painted pottery, metallurgy and worked obsidian tools and utensils. Curiously enough, from c.5750 BC onwards for several hundred years the trade in raw and worked obsidian throughout Kurdistan seems to have been centred around an extinct volcano named Nemrut Dag on the south-western shores of Lake Van, the very area in which both the mythical lands of Eden and Dilmun are likely to have been located.

Kurdistan was undoubtedly the point of origin of the so-called Neolithic explosion from the ninth millennium BC onwards. Indeed, it is because of this settled community lifestyle in Kurdistan that the earliest known form of token bartering developed. This primitive method of exchange eventually led to the establishment of the first written alphabet and ideogram system on the Mesopotamian plains sometime during the fourth millennium BC. It is therefore understandable that civilisation first arose in the Fertile Crescent during this same age. From here, of course, it quickly spread to many other regions of the Old World.

In the light of this information it appears that the evolution of the Middle East seems cut and dry, the actions of a few sophisticated protoneolithic farming communities located in the mountains and foothills of Kurdistan being responsible for the growth of civilised society. Yet what caused this so-called ‘neolithic explosion’, and why on earth did it start in this remote, and very mountainous, region? Something was missing, for as Mehrdad R. Izady, a noted scholar of Kurdish cultural history, has observed:

The inhabitants of this land went through an unexplained stage of accelerated technological evolution, prompted by yet uncertain forces. They rather quickly pulled ahead of their surrounding communities, the majority of which were also among the most advanced technological societies in the world, to embark on the transformation from a low-density, hunter-gatherer economy to a high-density, food producing economy.

What might these “yet uncertain forces” have been? Were they the Watchers, who were said to have provided mankind with the forbidden arts and sciences of heaven? If so, was I overlooking important evidence already unearthed by the spades of palaeontologists and archaeologists that might support such a wild hypothesis?

Turning to the archaeological reports and transactions on excavations in Kurdistan, I searched long and hard. What I found astounded me. For instance, in the late 1950s Ralph and Rose Solecki, two noted anthropologists, were uncovering the different occupational levels inside a huge cave overlooking the Greater Zab river at a site known as Zawi Chemi Shanidar, when they made a discovery of incredible significance to this debate. They unearthed a number of goat skulls placed alongside a collection of wing bones belonging to large predatory birds. All of the wings had been hacked from the bodies of the birds in question, while many had still been in articulation when found. Carbon 14 dating of the organic deposits associated with these remains indicated a date of 10,870 years (+/-300 years), that is 8870 BC.

The bird wings were subsequently identified as those of four Gyptaeus barbatus (the bearded vulture), one Gyps fulvus (the griffon vulture), seven Haliaetus albicilla (the white-tailed sea eagle) and one Otis tarda (the great bustard) – only the last of which is still indigenous to the region. There were also the bones of four small eagles of indeterminable species. All except for the great bustard were raptorial birds, while the vultures were quite obviously eaters of carrion.

The discovery of these severed bird wings had posed obvious problems for the Soleckis. Why had only certain types of birds been selected for this purpose, and what exactly had been the role played by these enormous predatory birds in the minds of those who had placed them within the Shanidar cave?

Shaman’s Wings

In an important article entitled ‘Predatory Bird Rituals at Zawi Chemi Shanidar’, published by the journal Sumer in 1977, Rose Solecki outlined the discovery of the goat skulls and bird remains. She suggested that the wings had almost certainly been utilised as part of some kind of ritualistic costume, worn either for personal decoration or for ceremonial purposes. She linked them with the vulture shamanism of Çatal Hüyük, a protoneolithic community in central Anatolia (Turkey), which reached its zenith a full 2000 years after these bird’s wings had been deposited 565 miles away in the Shanidar cave. Rose Solecki recognised the enormous significance of these finds, and realised that they constituted firm evidence for the presence of an important religious cult in the Zawi Chemi Shanidar area, for as she had concluded in her article:

The Zawi Chemi people must have endowed these great raptorial birds with special powers, and the faunal remains we have described for the site must represent special ritual paraphernalia. Certainly, the remains represent a concerted effort by a goodly number of people just to hunt down and capture such a large number of birds and goats… (Furthermore, that) either the wings were saved to pluck out the feathers, or that wing fans were made, or that they were used as part of a costume for a ritual. One of the murals from a Çatal Hüyük shrine… depicts just such a ritual scene; i.e., a human figure dressed in a vulture skin…

Here was extraordinary evidence for the existence of vulture shamans in the highlands of Kurdistan c.8870 BC! What’s more, all this was happening just 140 miles south-east of the suggested location for Eden and Dilmun on Lake Van at a time when the highland peoples of Kurdistan were changing from primitive hunter-gatherers to settled protoneolithic communities. Might these goats skulls and predatory bird remains have some connection with the “yet uncertain forces” behind the sudden Neolithic explosion in this region? Remember, I had already established that the Watchers wore coats of feathers, plausibly those of the crow or vulture.

My mind reeled with possibilities. What on earth had been going on in this cave overlooking the Greater Zab, which, of course, has been cited as one of the four rivers of paradise? Had it been visited by Watchers, human angels, in the ninth millennium BC? The presence of the predatory bird remains made complete sense, but what about the fifteen goat skulls – how might they have fitted into the picture?

A Goat for Azazel

The Pentateuch records how each year on the Day of Atonement a goat would be cast into the wilderness “for Azazel”, carrying on its back the sins of the Jewish people. Moreover, Azazel, one of the two leaders of the fallen angels, was said to have fostered a race of demons known as the seirim, or ‘he-goats’. They are mentioned several times in the Bible and were worshipped and adored by some Jews. There is even some indication that women actually copulated with these goat-demons, for it states in the Book of Leviticus: “And they shall no more sacrifice their sacrifices unto the he-goats (seirim), after whom they go a whoring”, perhaps a distant echo of the way in which the Watchers had taken wives from among mortal kind. This clear relationship between the Watchers and he-goats is so strong that it led Hebrew scholar J.T. Milik to conclude that Azazel “was evidently not a simple he-goat, but a giant who combined goat-like characteristics with those of man”. In other words, he had been a goat-man – a goat shaman.

So it seemed that not only were the Watchers “bird-men”, vulture shamans indulging in otherworldly practices, but also goat shamans. It is bizarre to think that this association between Azazel and the goat was the impetus behind the goat becoming a symbol of the devil, as well as the reason why the world is so adverse to the inverted pentagram today.

The Peacock Angel

Kurdish scholar Mehrdad Izady also sees the predatory bird remains of the Shanidar cave as evidence of a shamanistic culture whose memory influenced the development of angel lore. Kurdistan is home to three wholly indigenous angel-worshipping cults – the most notorious and enigmatic of these being the Yezidis of Iraqi Kurdistan. Their beliefs centre around a supreme being named Melek Taus, the ‘peacock angel’, who is venerated in the form of a strange bird icon known as a sanjaq. These statues, which sit on a metal column similar to a candlestick, are usually made of copper or brass. More curious is that the oldest known sanjaqs are clearly not peacocks at all, showing instead a bulbous avian body and head with a hooked nose. Izady has suggested that the sanjaq idols are more likely to be representations of a predatory bird like those apparently venerated by the shamans of Shanidar, in other words either the vulture, eagle or bustard.

The Jarmo People

All this was good news, for its helped vindicate the idea of an advanced culture existing in the mountains of Kurdistan at the point of inception of the Neolithic revolution. If it was these vulture shamans who had carried this superior knowledge to the gradually developing farming communities of the lower foothills, then perhaps they really were the truth behind the myth of the Watchers who imparted the heavenly sciences to mankind. There was, however, no description of these shamans beyond the appearance of their ceremonial garments. Did they in any way resemble the tall, white-skinned individuals with shining countenances and viper-like faces referred to in the Enochian and Dead Sea literature? Might there also be archaeological evidence for the former existence of a race bearing at least some of these distinctive features?

Indeed there is, for at a place called Jarmo, which overlooks the Lesser Zab river in Iraqi Kurdistan, archaeologists have uncovered evidence of an advanced protoneolithic community that thrived from around 6750 BC for up to 2000 years; indeed, the oldest known examples of primitive metallurgy have been found at Jarmo. More interesting is the knowledge that these people were a dab hand at producing small sculpted images in slightly-baked clay. Literally thousands of these figurines have been unearthed from the earliest occupational levels upwards. Most of them depict animals and birds. Some represent typically human heads, while others show a female figure, plausibly a representation of the Mother Goddess.

It almost appeared as if the Jarmo community enjoyed capturing images of the world around them, in much the same way that we take photographs today. Yet if this was the case, then how can we explain the presence among these small figurines of several anthropomorphic heads with elongated faces, slit eyes and clear ‘lizard’, or more correctly serpentine features? They are virtually inhuman in appearance and have more in common with bug-eyed aliens than abstract human forms.

Seeing pictures of these Jarmo heads sent a shiver down my spine, for the better examples bore striking similarities to the description of Watchers in Enochian and Dead Sea literature. Was it therefore possible that the neolithic people of Jarmo were depicting in partially abstract form the viper-like faces of the tall strangers in feather coats who would pay them uninvited visits? Was it these strangers who had provided communities like the one at Jarmo with the knowledge of metallurgy as well as the basic rudiments of agriculture?

We can only speculate, but it is worth pointing out that obsidian tools found at Jarmo are known to have been fashioned from raw material obtained from the base of Nemrut Dag on Lake Van. Did the Watchers deal in obsidian? Might these finely-worked tools be a sign of their presence among other similar-like communities of Kurdistan?

* * *

By 5500 BC the inhabitants of the Kurdish foothills were beginning to descend in great numbers on to the plains of Mesopotamia. It was around this date that Eridu (the biblical Erech), the Fertile Crescent’s first city, was established with its own temple complex that included an underground ritual pool.

Sometime around 5000 BC saw the arrival on to the northern plains of Mesopotamia of a new culture who are known today as the Ubaid (after Tell al’Ubaid, the mound-site where their presence was first detected during excavations by the eminent Near Eastern archaeologist Sir Leonard Woolley in 1922). They brought with them their own unique artistic style and funerary practices, including the habit of placing very strange anthropomorphic figurines in the graves of the dead. The statuettes were either male or female (although predominantly female), with slim, well-proportioned naked bodies, wide shoulders, and strange reptilian heads that scholars generally refer to as ‘lizard-like’ in appearance. They bear long, tapered faces like snouts, with wide, eye-slits – usually elliptical pellets of clay pinched to form what are known as ‘coffee-bean’ eyes – and a thick, dark plume of bitumen on their heads to represent a coil of erect hair (similar coils fashioned in clay appear on some of the heads found at Jarmo). All statuettes display either female pubic hair or male genitalia.

Each Ubaid figurine has it own unique pose. By far the strangest and most compelling shows a naked female holding a baby to her left breast. The infant’s left hand clings on to the breast, and there can be little doubt that it is suckling milk. It is a very touching image, although it bears one chilling feature – the child has long slanted eyes and the head of a reptile. This is highly significant, for it suggests that the baby was seen as having been born with these features. In other words, the ‘lizard-like’ heads of the figurines are not masks, or symbolic animalistic forms, but abstract images of an actual race believed by the Ubaid people to have possessed such reptilian qualities.

In the past these ‘lizard-like’ figurines have been identified by scholars as representations of the Mother Goddess – a totally erroneous assumption since some of them are obviously male – while ancient astronaut theorists such as Erich von Daniken have seen fit to identity them as images of alien entities. In my opinion, both explanations attempt to bracket the clay figurines into popular frameworks that are insufficient to explain their full symbolism. Furthermore, since most of the examples found were retrieved from graves, where they were often the only item of any importance, Sir Leonard Woolley concluded that they represented “chthonic deities” that is, underworld denizens connected in some way with the rites of the dead.

In addition to this realisation, it seems highly unlikely that they represent lizard-faced individuals, since lizards are not known to have had any special place in Near Eastern mythology. Much more likely is that the heads are those of serpents which are known to have been associated with Sumerian underworld deities such as Ningiszida, Lord of the Good Tree.

Since the heads of the Ubaid figurines appear to be styled on the much earlier examples found at Jarmo in the Kurdish mountains, were they highly abstract representations of viper-faced Watchers?

That these figurines were found specifically in grave sites suggests that they were connected with some kind of superstitious practice involving rites of the dead. What were the Ubaid attempting to achieve by placing such strange images alongside their deceased relatives? Were they trying to ensure the safe passage of the soul into the next world, or were they attempting to protect the corpse once the burial had taken place?

In later Babylonian tradition there was a true fear that if the dead were not interred in the correct manner, then their souls would be taken down into the underworld to become blood-sucking Edimmu. Is this what the Ubaid feared – that their departed would be made into vampires if the viper-faced Watchers were not appeased in the current manner? Did this include the burial of figurines bearing abstract features connected with their distorted memory of the fallen race?

The Underworld

Although no trace of any underworld domain can today be found in Mesopotamia, chthonic citadels of extreme antiquity do exist in the Near East. For example, beneath the plains of Cappadocia in eastern Turkey there are no less than 36 underground cities, the most famous being the one at Derinkuyu which is estimated to have housed some 20,000 inhabitants. Those cities explored so far penetrate downwards for anything up to a quarter of a mile. They have streets, complex tunnel systems, living quarters and communal rooms and areas. Each one can be sealed off from the outside world by rolling into place huge circular doors, while on the surface the only visible sign of their presence are upright megalithic stones marking the positions of deep wells that double-up as air shafts to the various levels.

No one knows who built these underworld domains. They are at least 4000 years old, while tentative evidence suggests they were constructed as early as 9000 BC, when the final thrust of the last Ice Age was about to bring arctic-style conditions to the Middle East. At the same time rains of fire spewed out of active volcanoes, and when the Ice Age finally receded floods comparable with the deluge of the Bible wreaked havoc in low-lying areas. Moreover, Persian myth records that the ancestors of the Iranian race had escaped the long winter of snow and ice by building a var, a word denoting an underground city (curiously, the word ark means “city” in the Persian language).

The memory of such subterranean worlds are also likely to have been behind the Judaeo-Christian belief in Gehenna and Hell – the fiery realm into which the fallen angels were cast as a punishment for their interference in the affairs of mankind.

Cappadocia’s Lunar Landscape

In the same general vicinity as the underground cities of Cappadocia is a virtual lunar landscape made up of thousands of enormous rock cones whittled into shape by fierce winds over many thousands of years. Local tradition refers to them as peri bacalari, the fire chimneys of the Peri – beautiful fallen angels born of Iblis, the Arab-Persian form of Satan. These ‘fairy chimneys’, as they are inappropriately referred to in English, are today said to be haunted by the djinn, spectral relatives of the angels who also once lived in heaven before their fall.

Many of these ‘fairy chimneys’ were occupied during early Christian times, while a number of them were actually fashioned into rupestral or troglodyte churches from the sixth century onwards. The oldest contain many fascinating images beyond the accepted iconography of the Early Church. These include recurring geometric designs and, in one case a stylised bird-man, which may well reflect an art-style found in the 8000-year-old vulture shrines at Çatal Hüyük. The close proximity of both this unique ‘Christian’ art and the site of Çatal Hüyük to the underground cities cannot be overlooked. Remember too that in the story of Ishtar’s descent into the underworld the goddess encounters beings “like birds covered with feathers”, who “from the days of old ruled the earth”.

Is it possible that the dwellers of the underground cities were indeed the forerunners of those who built the sub-surface citadel of Çatal Hüyük? Might they have been connected with the shamanistic Watcher culture of the Kurdish highlands, which lay some distance to the east of Cappadocia?

Children of the Djinn

If so, then where might these strange shamanistic cultures have originated? Did it simply develop in Turkey and Kurdistan shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, or had its original ancestors migrated from some foreign land? The angel-worshipping cults of Kurdistan see themselves only as descendents of the patriarch Noah, the saviour of humanity whose direct family settled in their land. In contrast, the Kurdish Jews preserve a very curious story concerning the origins of their gentile neighbours, whom they refer to as “children of the djinn”. They say that long ago King Solomon ordered 500 djinn to find him 500 of the most beautiful virgins in the world. They were not to return until every last one was in their possession. The djinn had set about their immense task, going to Europe to seek out the maidens. Finally, after gathering together the correct number, the djinn were about to return to Jerusalem when they learnt that Solomon had passed away. In a dilemma, the djinn decided what to do. Should they return the girls to their rightful homes in Europe, or should they remain with them? Because the young virgins had “found favor in the eyes of the jinn, the jinn took them unto themselves as their wives. And they begot many beautiful children, and those children bore more children… And that is the way the nation of the Kurds came into being”.

In another version of the same story, 100 genies are dispatched by Solomon to search out 100 of the world’s most beautiful maidens for his personal harem. Having achieved this quota, Solomon then dies and the 100 genies decide to settle down with the maidens amid the inaccessible mountains of Kurdistan. The offspring of these marriages result in the foundation of the Kurdish race, “who in their elusiveness resemble their genie forefathers and in their handsomeness their foremothers”.

As non-sensical as these legend may seem, they attempt to explain the inexplicable foreign features of certain Kurdish communities and point to their origin in the biblical kingdom of Solomon, in other words modern-day Israel.

Mountain of the Madai

The Mandaeans of Lower Iraq are more specific about the origin of their race. Although their direct ancestors are said to have come from a mythical location known as the Mountain of the Madai in Iranian Kurdistan, before that their most distant ancestors apparently originated in Egypt. Even though this might seem a mere fantasy on the part of the Mandaeans, it is a fact that their language contains various words that are undoubtedly of ancient Egyptian origin. More importantly, they believe that after death the soul flies north (i.e. towards the mountains of Kurdistan) where it enters a mythical domain known as Mataratha, the place of judgement. Here the intelligences of the neter, the watch-houses, can be found. The term neter can be used as a noun in some Near Eastern languages to mean ‘watchers’, the very name of the first angels given in Enochian and Dead Sea literature, while in the ancient Egyptian language this same word is used to define the semi-divine beings who lived in a golden age known as zep tepi, the First Time. Was it possible that the Watchers of Kurdistan were descendents of the neter-gods of Egypt?

The First Farmers

Although the neolithic explosion is known to have begun in the mountains of Kurdistan sometime around 8500 BC, this was not the genesis of early agriculture, animal domestication, precision tool manufacture and structured community lifestyles. There is strong evidence that they were all present at various sites along the Nile in southern Egypt and northern Sudan as early as 12,500 BC. These advanced communities continued to develop at a steady pace until 10,500 BC, when suddenly they ceased farming for no obvious reason. Scholars have put this complete and utter cessation of a sophisticated agricultural-based lifestyle among the Nilotic peoples down to the extremely high Nile floods which occurred during this epoch. Yet in my opinion there was something more behind this extraordinary U-turn on the part of these communities.

It almost seemed as if those who had taught the Nilotic peoples the rudiments of an agricultural lifestyle had suddenly departed the scene, leaving their obedient pupils to return to primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyles more familiar to the age in question. It is therefore interesting to note that after its apparent disappearance from Egypt c.10,500 BC, agriculture does not reappear again until it blossoms in Kurdistan a full 1500 years later. Is it therefore possible that the teachers of the Nilotic communities departed Egypt for Kurdistan sometime between 10,500 and 9000 BC? Who exactly were these hypothetical agronomists and what made them leave the cultivated steppes of palaeolithic Egypt for pastures new? More importantly, were they the ancestors of the Watchers, the human angels of Enochian and Dead Sea tradition?

Redating the Sphinx

Hard evidence now emerging from Egypt strongly suggests that the Great Sphinx of Giza was not carved during Pharaonic times, as has always been believed, but much earlier instead. As has been widely publicised over the past few years, the geological profile of this most ancient of monuments suggests that it was fashioned before the gradual desiccation of the Middle East in the fourth millennium BC. The intense weathering on its body would appear to have been induced, not by sand erosion, but by rain precipitation over the course of many thousands of years. The last time that rain fell in such profusion was during the period known to climatologists as the neolithic sub-pluvial which occurred between 8000 and 5000 BC. This suggests that the Sphinx was carved either during or before this time.

The Sphinx is quite obviously a lion, the head of which was re-carved in Pharaonic times to represent a king wearing the nemes-headdress. Orientated exactly due east, it gazes out towards the point on the horizon where the sun rises each spring and autumn equinox. Its function is like that of a time-marker, a minute hand on a clock, recording the return of the solar orb as it passes through its 365-day cycle. Yet it also possesses a less obvious, though perhaps more important ‘hour’ hand, and this one marks the minuscule shift in the starry canopy as it turns about its 26,000-year cycle of precession. This visual effect is caused by the extremely slow wobble of the earth, which might be compared with the swaying action of a child’s spinning top if revolving at a snail’s pace.

Built in the Age of Leo

In astronomical terms the phenomenon known as precession causes the 12 zodiacal constellations to shift backwards in line with the ecliptic, the sun’s path, in a regular sequence. In simple terms, this means that the stars rising alongside the sun make way for another constellation every 2160 or so years until all 12 signs have completed this astronomical merry-go-around. To ‘read’ precession as a long-term time-cycle the ancients noted which sign rose with the sun on the spring equinox, the zero-point of the yearly calendar in many Middle Eastern cultures. If we look today towards the eastern horizon just before sun-rise on 21 March we will see the stars of Pisces. When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire in 330 BC, the stars of Aries the ram were seen rising with the equinoctial sun, and when the Pyramids of Giza were built in c.2500 BC, it was the stars of Taurus the bull that rose with the sun on the spring equinox.

If the Great Sphinx was carved as an equinoctial marker at the same time the neighbouring Pyramids were constructed in Pharaonic times, then surely it would make more sense if it was a bull. Making it a lion hints at a connection with the stars of Leo, suggesting that it marked an age when the constellation of Leo rose with the equinoctial sun. The last Age of Leo occurred between 10,970 and 8810 BC, suggesting that the construction date of the Great Sphinx fell somewhere within this time-frame. This is not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination. As far as I am aware, this theory was first put forward by British astro-mythologist Gerald Massey in 1907. In an extraordinary work entitled Ancient Egypt – The Light of the World he boldly concluded that “… we may date the Sphinx as a monument which was reared by these great (Egyptian) builders and thinkers, who lived so largely out of themselves, some thirteen thousand years ago (i.e. in the age of Leo, its astronomical counterpart).”

More recent astro-mythological evidence presented by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval in their 1996 book Keeper of Genesis, convincingly demonstrates that the Great Sphinx, as well as the ground-plan of the Giza plateau as a whole, must date as early as 10,500 BC, the very time-frame given for the sudden cessation of proto-agriculture along the Nile.

Since we know that the great stone blocks removed from the sunken enclosure around the leonine monument at the time of its construction were used to build the nearby Sphinx and Valley Temples, then these too must date from the same distant epoch of human history. All this indicates the presence in Egypt around 10,500 BC of an advanced culture adept in agronomy, engineering, building technology, as well as astro-mythology and geomythics that included a profound knowledge of the earth’s 26,000-year precessional cycle.

Who were these people? Were these builders of the Great Sphinx really the ancestors of the tall, viper-faced Watchers of Kurdistan? Folklore, legend and the spread of Old World agriculture would appear to support this view. Yet if this was the case, then what happened to make this Egyptian Elder culture want to migrate to the highlands of Kurdistan?

Global Destruction

As has already been adequately demonstrated elsewhere (Hapgood, 1958 & 1970; Hancock, 1995; Flem-Ath, 1995), there is ample evidence that as the last Ice Age came to a close in the eleventh and tenth millennia BC, the world was shaken by a series of severe climatic changes and geological upheavals. Volcanoes erupted, earthquakes shook the ground, floods poured across the landscape and long periods of darkness blotted out the sun. This led to the destruction of countless millions of animals and the outright extinction of dozens of individual species.

Cataclysm legends across the world appear to record these events in colourful and often symbolic detail.

Egypt’s proposed Elder culture would have been right in the thick of this global destruction. Certainly it is known that the climatic changes during this epoch caused wide-spread flooding along the Nile, the reason scholars have suggested for the cessation of its proto-agriculture.

Father of Terrors

It seems likely that these troubled times forced Egypt’s high culture to fragment and disperse, hence the sudden cessation of proto-agriculture among the various Nile communities. This supposition is supported by vivid accounts of fire and flood from Egypt itself. For example, surviving Coptic-Arab texts speak of the land being devastated both by floods and a great fire that came from “the constellation of Leo” – a reference not necessarily to some astronomical boloid coming from this part of the heavens, but to the time-frame in which these events occurred, in other words during the Age of Leo.

More telling is the myth of Sekhmet, the lion-headed deity in the Egyptian pantheon. Because the human race had turned its back on the ways of the sun-god Ra, or Re, whom it saw as “too old”, the fierce goddess unleashed an all-consuming fire. Her mass genocide would have resulted in the destruction of humanity had it not been for Ra’s personal intervention. He sent an intoxicating brew to cover the earth. Consuming this mixture made Sekhmet drunk so that she fell asleep.

Assuming that Sekhmet’s fierce fire was in some way representative of an all encompassing conflagration that devastated Egypt, then might the intoxicating brew that covered the earth be a memory of a subsequent flood that also overwhelmed the land? If so, then was Sekhmet herself simply an allegorical allusion to the Age of Leo? The indications are that the lion of Leo came to symbolise the age of chaos and destruction that surrounded the end of the Ice Age, perhaps the reason why the Arabs referred to the Great Sphinx as the “Father of Terrors”.

In the story of Sekhmet the survivors of the human race attempt to escape the goddess’ devastating fire either by climbing a mountain or by hiding in ‘holes’ like ‘snakes’ or ‘worms’. Similar means of protection against the cataclysms that raged during the Age of Leo are found in mythologies around the globe, while the presence of such stories in Egyptian legend point towards the break-up of the Elder culture and its subsequent re-establishment in other regions. Might this have included Cappadocia, where underground cities would appear to have been built as early as 9000 BC, and the mountains of Kurdistan, where the Watchers may well have catalysed the beginning of the Neolithic revolution as early as 8500 BC?

The date for this apparent diaspora of the Elder culture towards the end of the last Ice Age can actually be pinned down with some degree of accuracy. For instance, a ninth-century Coptic-Arab text known as Abou Hormeis records that the astronomer-priests of Egypt, having realised the imminent destruction of their race, conceded that: “The deluge was to take place when the heart of the Lion entered into the first minute of the head of Cancer.” The ‘heart of the lion’ was the name given in classical times to the star Regulus, Leo’s ‘royal star’, which lies exactly on the ecliptic, the sun’s perceived daily course across the sky. Since the constellation of Cancer follows Leo only in the precessional cycle (Leo follows Cancer in the yearly cycle), then this appears to confirm that this legend preserved, not just the memory of probable historical events, but also the approximate date in which they occurred.

At my request, electronics engineer Rodney Hale punched the astronomical information contained in the Abou Hormeis account into a computer using a Skyglobe 3.5 programme. He ascertained that the last time Leo’s ‘royal star’ would have risen and been visible on the eastern horizon just prior to the equinoctial sunrise, was around 9220 BC. When the star Regulus, the ‘heart of the lion’, no longer rose with the sun on the spring, or vernal, equinox, this would have been seen by the astronomer-priests of Egypt as a signal that the Age of Leo had come to an end, and the age of Cancer was either about to commence, or that it had already entered its ‘first minute’ of arc across the sky. This information therefore suggested that it was at this point that the Elder culture had departed Egypt in anticipation of a major deluge that was about to over-run their land.

Kosmokrator

If we now turn to Iranian tradition we find that various Zoroastrian texts, including the Bundahishn, speak of world history beginning 9000 years before the traditionally accepted date for the coming of its great prophet, Zoroaster, in 588 BC. This gives a date of 9588 BC. It was at this time, so one text states, that the faith’s dualistic deities, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, were born from “the fire of the air” and “the water of the earth” – cryptic references once again to fire and flood during the age of Leo.

The twin deities vie for superiority over heaven and earth, a battle that is only settled when Zoroaster is said to have vanquished the daeva-worshipping Magi priesthoods during his own life-time. Ever since this time the ‘Good Spirit’, Ahura Mazda, has ruled supreme.

Did all this imply that the ancestors of the Iranian god-kings had first inhabited their mythical homeland, known as the Airyana Vaejah, the Iranian Expanse, around 9585 BC? Give or take a few centuries, this date was remarkably close to the timeframe in which the Egyptian Elder culture would appear to have broken up. Since the Airyana Vaejah is equated with the Kurdish highlands, might this tradition also record the arrival in the region of those Elders who went on to establish the proposed Watcher culture?

According to Iranian mythology, the dualistic forces of Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu were born to a supreme being known as Zurvan, who symbolised ‘infinite time’. In the Roman cult of the god Mithras, which developed from primary Iranian sources, the concept of ‘infinite time’ was symbolised by a lion-headed deity. Statues depicting this leonine figure show the twelve signs of the zodiac on its chest and a snake curling up over the top of its mane. Although the deity is not identified by name (although it is occasionally linked with Aeon, a gnostic god of time), scholars of Mithraism describe it as a kosmokrator, the controlling intelligence behind the phenomenon of precession.

To find a lion-headed kosmokrator that originated in a tradition that saw world history as having begun in 9588 BC, during the Age of Leo, was impossible to ignore. Could it be possible that although knowledge of the precessional cycle was understood by the Elder culture of Egypt, later cultures who inherited this tradition failed to comprehend its mechanics. So instead of Leo making way for the age of Cancer, and then Gemini, and then Taurus, the symbol of the lion became the one and only kosmokrator, or guardian of infinite time, in much the same way that the Great Sphinx became a precessional time-marker on the plateau at Giza.

Tragedy of the Fall

Egypt’s Elder culture never made it into the pages of history. The memory of their apparent descendents, the Watchers of Kurdistan, is but a hollow victory on their part. Being remembered as beautiful angels who fell from grace, or as immortal gods and goddesses, or as lustful demons who corrupted the minds of mankind, hardly befits their incredible achievements in astronomy, agriculture, geomythics, building technology and structured society. It was almost certainly the descendents of the Egyptian Elder culture who paved the way for the growth of civilisation in the Old World.

Yet these individuals did much more than this, for they would also appear to have left the world an important legacy. It can be traced in the astro-mythology and geomythics of the Giza plateau as well as in the universal myths and legends concerning global cataclysms and precessional data. It transcends all language barriers and can be ‘read’ by all. It is a simple message repeated again and again, like a recurring SOS Mayday signal, and it suggests that what befell their race could one day happen again. For whatever reason, we as a race could sink into oblivion without trace and be wiped clean from the pages of history, unless, that is, we wake up from this collective amnesia we seem to have been experiencing for the past eleven thousand years and realise that we were never the first.

Free thinkers, mystics and maverick scholars have been telling us that civilisation is much older than science would like us to believe for the past hundred years or more. Often their books repeat almost exactly the same evidence time after time. The Pyramids, Tiahuanaco, the Maya, Piri Reis, Hapgood, Plato and the Baghdad battery are just some of the buzz-words repeated again and again. Yet no one other than believers has ever taken these matters seriously.

With the re-dating of the Great Sphinx in particular, there is now too much evidence to deny that at the end of the last Ice Age a high culture existed in this world. Where these people came from is completely unknown. Some might suggest Atlantis, others will say they came from the skies, but to be honest we simply do not know. What is far more important is that we take each step at a time, and stick to hard facts, in the hope that this time the whole world will share in these greatest revelations of our time.

All notes and references used for this article can be found in the author’s book From the Ashes of Angels (published by Michael Joseph, London, ISBN 0-7181-4132-6)  

Be sure to check out the author’s article with new information in New Dawn 138 (May-June 2013). 

Selected Booklist

Bauval, Robert, and Graham Hancock, Keeper of Genesis, Wm Heinemann, London, 1996

Boyce, Mary, A History of Zoroastrianism, 1975, 3 vols., E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1989

Charles, R.H., The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch, Oxford Univ Press, 1912

Eisenman, R., and M. Wise, The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered, Element, Shaftesbury, Dorset, 1992

Flem-Ath, Rand and Rose, When the Sky Fell – In Search of Atlantis, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1995

Fix, William R., Pyramid Odyssey, Jonathan-James Books, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1978

Hancock, Graham, Fingerprints of the Gods – A Quest for the Beginning and the End, Wm Heinemann: London, 1995

Hapgood, Professor Charles, The Path of the Pole, Chilton, New York, 1970

Hapgood, Professor Charles, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings, 1966, Tumstone Books,  1979

Izady, Mehrdad R., The Kurds – A Concise Handhook, Crane Russak, London, 1992

Massey, Gerald, Ancient Egypt – The Light of the World, 2 vols., T. Fisher & Unwin, London, 1907

Milik, J.T., The Book of Enoch – Aramaic Fragments of Qumran Cave 4, OUP, 1976

Morfill, W.R., edit and intro R. Charles, The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, Oxford Univ Press, 1896

Ulansey, David, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries – Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World, OUP, 1989.

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ANDREW COLLINS is a historical writer and explorer living in the United Kingdom. He is the author of more than a dozen books that challenge the way we perceive the past. They include From the Ashes of Angels (1996), which establishes that the Watchers of the Book of Enoch and the Anunnaki of the Sumerian texts are the memory of a shamanic elite that catalysed the Neolithic revolution in the Near East at the end of the last Ice Age; Gateway to Atlantis (2000), which pins down the source of Plato’s Atlantis to the Caribbean island of Cuba and the Bahaman archipelago; Tutankhamun – The Exodus Conspiracy (co-authored with Chris Ogilvie Herald, 2002), which reveals the truth behind the discovery of Tutankhamun’s famous tomb, and The Cygnus Mystery (2007), which shows that the constellation of Cygnus has been universally venerated as the place of first creation, and the entrance to the sky-world, since Palaeolithic times. In 2008 Andrew and colleague Nigel Skinner Simpson discovered a previously unrecorded cave complex beneath the Pyramids of Giza, which has brought him worldwide acclaim. It is a story told in his book Beneath the Pyramids (2009). Andrew’s new book Gobekli Tepe: Genesis of the Gods is to be published by Bear and Company in 2013. For more information go to: www.andrewcollins.com

The above article appeared in New Dawn Nos 40-42 (1997)

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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By RICHARD HEINBERG—

[Humankind] approaches the unattainable truth through a succession of errors. 
- Aldous Huxley, Wordsworth in the Tropics

A state of thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance of knowledge.
- James Clerk Maxwell

Culture consists, in large measure, of commonly shared sets of assumptions and expectations about reality. It is a kind of lens through which we look at the world, one that is implanted in us in infancy and childhood and that is continually readjusted throughout life. According to the curvature and distortion of our lens, some things appear substantive that are actually only phantoms, while other things that are indeed quite solid and real are, to us, invisible.

We take this cultural astigmatism for granted in religion and politics. In politics, facts are widely understood to be merely incidental to worldviews constructed out of ideological and economic necessity. For example, recently most Americans have been convinced by politicians that crime is the result of too few people being in prisons — this despite the well-known fact that their nation already incarcerates a greater percentage of its citizens than does any other, with no observed effect on the crime rate (unless it is an inverse one). They have likewise become convinced that the poverty of the Third World is due to the sad circumstance that people in certain “backward” countries are “not yet ready for democracy,” are inherently unindustrious, or are overburdened by irrational tradition. Meanwhile nearly everyone (in the U.S., though this is not so much the case elsewhere) studiously ignores the clear fact that the Third World has been — and continues to be — systematically plundered by corporations that routinely use the power of the CIA, the World Bank, and (if necessary) the U.S. military to dominate or destroy indigenous enterprise. While this fact is frequently pointed out by certain “radical” political scientists and by the alternative press, it is rarely mentioned by politicians or by the mainstream media because its widespread acknowledgment would be inimical to the purposes of power. But no one is surprised, because most people believe that this is how politics works — that political worldviews are always shaped more by the self-interest of powerful individuals and groups than by mere facts.

Science is supposed to be different. The goal of the founders of Western science was to create a system of inquiry based on evidence, one in which theories would be continually tested, discarded, and replaced according to the impersonal dictates of fact and reason. Science was meant to stand above culture.

This was, and is, a laudable ideal. But science’s quest for objectivity has always had to contend with two unalterable obstacles: the fact that scientists themselves are human beings with prejudices, fears, and ambitions; and the fact that the practice of science takes place within a cultural context wherein the economic goals of elites, class power relations, and a host of shared unconscious assumptions cast an unavoidable and mostly invisible influence on the proceedings. Science does not stand above culture; it swims in it. In science, as in religion and politics, there are power bases to protect, careers to maintain, masses to convert, empires to build. And so the history of science is full of examples of dogmas constructed and defended, evidence suppressed or twisted, and alternative theories ignored.

Such historical examples as the disbelief of early-19th-century scientists in the existence of meteors, Lord Kelvin’s denunciation of X-rays a hoax, and the unwillingness of 18th-century chemists to abandon the phlogiston theory, make for interesting reading. But we seldom look at contemporary science with the degree of skepticism that such past failings would seem to warrant. Yet when a lengthy series of theoretical presuppositions is necessary to form the concepts which lead to experimental and equipment design in a typical research project, which then yields data that must be processed according to the same theoretical presuppositions in order to make sense, then it should be clear to us that even many of the “observed facts” of modern science are largely hypothetical.

That’s not the impression one gets when reading science articles in news magazines, or when watching television science documentaries, in which we are told repeatedly that scientists now “know” that the Universe began fifteen billion years ago in a Big Bang; that life on this planet evolved first from terrestrial chemical processes and then by way of competition and natural selection; that atoms are made up of tiny charged particles; and so on.

Recently it occurred to me that it might be helpful to make a brief reconnoitring of the boundaries of our collective ignorance. My objective here is not to denigrate the achievements of those who have expanded the territory of the known, but merely to call attention to — and honor — the great ocean of the unknown in which our collective knowledge floats.

Physics

In a previous issue of MuseLetter [“Don’t Enshrine the New Physics... Just Yet,” Number 19, July 1993], we explored briefly some of the difficulties with quantum and relativity theories. As we noted there, physicists are fond of pointing out the limitations of the “Newtonian paradigm,” in which space is Euclidean, the Universe is (in principle) entirely predictable, and matter is made up of billiard-ball atoms. The quantum and relativity theories of the early twentieth century are often hailed as having liberated the human mind from mechanistic and dualistic assumptions, and as confirming the mystical worldviews of Eastern religions.

Unfortunately, physicists hardly ever express to the general public their perplexity and inability to reconcile the fundamental contradictions between current theories — though among themselves they occasionally admit that “Physics is now faced with a crisis in which… further changes will have to take place, which will probably be as revolutionary compared to relativity and the quantum theory as these theories are compared to classical physics.” (David Bohm) In light of a statement like this from one of the most eminent scientists of our century, one cannot help but feel a certain bemused skepticism at the attempts of some science popularizers to create a mythic worldview for the masses out of a “new” physics that is already beginning to look a bit tattered and worn around the edges.

Engineering

Viktor Schauberger (1885-1958) was an Austrian engineer, inventor, and natural scientist who, through observation and experiment, came to believe that it would be possible to create a life-enhancing system of technology working on principles entirely different from those presently understood. Virtually all of our current technologies are powered by the liberation of energy through the breaking down of complex materials into simpler ones through combustion and explosion, which produce expansion and heat. Schauberger believed that these processes represent only the destructive side of Nature, and that we have ignored Nature’s creative forces — which are characterized by centripetal, hyperbolic, spiral movement, the lowering of temperature, and the creation of new complex forms. He maintained that our technologies should be going with the flow of Nature rather than forcing actions that are contrary to it. Schauberger designed and built an “implosion generator” which was said to have attained “negative friction”; he also invented water purification systems, hydroturbines, and (reputedly) anti-gravity vehicles. However, his work was largely ignored during his lifetime. At present, about a half dozen groups worldwide are seeking to develop and implement technologies based on Schauberger’s pioneering ideas.

Astronomy

One of the greatest difficulties faced by astronomers is that in most cases they cannot directly probe the objects of their study; rather, they must analyze infinitesimal traces of radiation that have presumably traveled thousands or millions of years to arrive here from stars, galaxies, quasars, and even more exotic objects lying at unimaginable distances. With so little to go on, their analyses of these traces must inevitably incorporate some of the very hypotheses they seek to validate. This can lead to problems.

Lying at the foundation of modern cosmology is the observed spectrographic “red shift” of light from distant objects, which has been interpreted to mean that these objects are moving away from us. According to current views, the objects with the greatest red shifts are furthest distant and are receding fastest, which means that the Universe is expanding in every direction. Hence it must have originated in a huge explosion — the famous Big Bang.

But not everyone subscribes to this interpretation. H. Arp was formerly listed as one of the top twenty astronomers in the world, until he began cataloging apparently-associated celestial objects with differing red shifts. He began to openly suggest that at least some red shifts are not a measure of recessional velocity and distance. His reputation plummeted. I.E. Segal’s chronometric theory of the cosmos predicts a quadratic rather than a linear relationship between red shift and distance, which would do away with the expanding Universe altogether. Some red-shift measurements do indicate such a quadratic relationship. H. Alfven, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, posits a Universe shaped more by electromagnetic than gravitational forces; his theory rules out the possibility that the Universe could ever have had a diameter less than one-tenth its present one. Hence no Big Bang. The upshot of all of this is that we really do not know when or how — or if! — the Universe began; nor do we know what forces are primarily responsible for shaping it; nor do we know for certain how far away distant objects are or whether they are moving toward or away from us.

Closer to home, all of the recently popular theories of the Moon’s origin have been discredited, with no new one taking their place; meanwhile, serious questions have been raised about how the Sun generates its energy, where comets come from, why Mars lost its former atmosphere and lakes of water, and whether the “dark matter” between stars and galaxies may contain the seeds of life.

Geology

The geological record is formed from layers of rock that geologists liken to pages in a book. Unfortunately, that book is far from complete. In fact, of the ten major geological periods, only five or fewer are represented on two thirds of the Earth’s land surface. In some places the “periods” occur in the wrong order. And most fossils used for dating rock layers overlap from a few to all ten layers. The result: the “geological column” by which we construct Earth history is largely hypothetical.

Most geologists interpret this “column” on the basis of the theory of uniformitarianism, according to which the origin of major land features is to be attributed to mechanisms similar to those we see acting today, with small effects accumulating over vast stretches of time. However, there is growing evidence to suggest that the planet’s surface may have been shaped to a large extent by ancient global cataclysms, some of extraterrestrial origin — that is, by collisions with comets and other interstellar debris. With the dinosaur extinctions now widely attributed to a comet impact, cosmic catastrophism as it applies to the geologic past is on the upsurge. But the idea that similar bombardments could have occurred since the origin of humankind is still officially unthinkable.

Geologists believe that the age of rocks can be found by the precise measurement of the radioactive minerals and decay products embedded within them. A similar analysis of a radioactive isotope of carbon is used by archaeologists to tell the age of less-ancient organic materials. Critics of radiometric dating have questioned the assumptions on which these methods rest. (For example, does the radioactive decay rate remain constant despite changes in temperature, cosmic ray influx, and pressure? Evidence suggests that it does not.) Critics also cite instances in which objects of known age, such as freshly-cooled volcanic rocks or just-felled trees, have yielded wildly inaccurate radiometric dates in the thousands or millions of years. But if the radiometric techniques are essentially useless, then how seriously are we to take the interminably repeated assertion that scientists “know” that the Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old?

The Earth’s magnetic field is collapsing. At the present rate it will fall to zero in about 1200 years. No one knows why.

Biology

The problems in biology are so numerous and basic that it is hard to know where to begin, and we cannot hope to do more than name a few of the most glaring ones. Biology is, of course, the science of life; but biologists are generally averse to telling us just what life is. The strategy that is currently popular is to try to erase the conceptual boundary between life and non-life, though even the simplest living cell has characteristics profoundly different from those of any non-living entity. The difficulty comes because many scientists assume that biology should be reducible to chemistry and physics; they abhor the idea that living things might possess some fundamental principle not present in non-living matter. And yet all attempts to generate life out of chemicals (that is, to reproduce the processes that must have — according to theory — brought about the beginnings of life on Earth) have fallen far short of their goal.

A host of difficulties surround Darwinian and neo-Darwinian theories of evolution. In its essence, the word evolution simply means “directional change over time.” There is little question that evolution in this sense has taken place in the biological world. But what kind of evolution, and what has driven it? The idea that chance genetic mutations could add up constructively seems far fetched, since few if any beneficial mutations have ever been seen to occur in Nature. And then there are structures, like the vertebrate eye, which simply would not have functioned until an entire complex of individual features was in place, though none of these by itself would have conferred any advantage to the organism.

Neo-Darwinian theorists treat the idea of natural selection with a kind of religious awe, but critics point out that it is essentially tautological: we say that the fittest survive, but how are we to define “the fittest,” except as “those who survive?” Moreover, natural selection implies fierce, unending competition. Yet, as entomologist P.S. Messenger puts it, “Actual competition is difficult to see in nature.” Nature instead produces unending examples of cooperation. Differing species, and members of the same species, go well out of their way to avoid competition wherever possible.

The science of genetics has gone a long way toward explaining how the physical characteristics of organisms are passed along through generations. But genetics is still unable to explain cell differentiation in embryos, the ability of simple organisms to regenerate lost limbs and organs, and the transmission of instinct.

The battle of evolutionary biologists with the Bible-based creationists has unfortunately served mostly to harden the ranks of the former against admissions that serious problems such as these exist. Our overwhelming ignorance is masked by sweeping declarations about the creative powers of natural selection, and we are deprived of the insights that might come from an honest assessment of the limits of our knowledge of life’s origin and development. Meanwhile, unorthodox but promising ideas — such as Fred Hoyle’s cosmic evolutionism (the proposal that life was seeded on Earth from comets), Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s theory of living systems, and Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of formative causation — are typically given short shrift.

Anthropology

Human origins are no less mysterious than those of other living things. In the past few decades, new techniques — such as the tracing of mutations in mitochondrial DNA — have offered intriguing clues as to the timing of our early ancestors’ significant migrations. But these techniques are not without difficulties.

Meanwhile, we humans exhibit a host of biological features and behavioral characteristics shared by none of our primate relatives, and these beg for explanations. Why our bipedal stance, limb proportions, smooth skin, brain size, tendency to perspire, and ability to breathe voluntarily? Why are humans uniquely prone to lower back pain, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, sunburn, acne, dandruff, and swollen adenoids?

British science writer Elaine Morgan, in her books The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human Evolution, and The Scars of Evolution: What Our Bodies Tell Us About Human Origins, has offered a promising proposal — that during our early evolution we humans passed through a long phase of adaptation to the shallow water of lakes, rivers, and sea coasts. As Morgan points out in her books, the features that separate us from other primates are precisely ones that appear in aquatic mammals such as manatees, dolphins, sea lions, and whales. Lower back pain, varicose veins, and hemorrhoids may derive from our shift from walking in shallow water to walking on land; acne and dandruff from our continuing to secrete furwaterproofing sebum in an aquatic environment in which we became furless; and swollen adenoids from our descended larynx, characteristic of an aquatic mouth-breather.

Morgan’s hypothesis also goes a long way toward explaining the dearth of early human fossil remains. During past Ice Ages the level of the oceans was up to three hundred feet lower than at present. If human beings were shore-dwellers, most of their remains were likely buried underwater.

Morgan’s proposals are still considered eccentric by the establishment.

Archaeology

For decades archaeologists have maintained that the first people to set foot in the Americas crossed a land bridge over the Bering Sea roughly 12,000 years ago. But in several instances human artifacts or remains have turned up in deposits that are much older. While most experts continue to discount these anomalies, others are quietly beginning to concede that human beings may have been living in the Americas for twenty to fifty thousand years — or longer.

According to standard history, Native American cultures evolved in isolation from the rest of the world. For over a century, renegade archaeologists have theorized that the Mayans and Aztecs were influenced by Egyptian, Phoenician, or Chinese explorers. Most such theories perished for lack of incontrovertible evidence. During the past two decades, however, Barry Fell of Harvard, and others, have published descriptions of coins, petroglyphs, and other artifacts that seem to prove that Celts, Basques, Libyans, Arabians, Romans, Egyptians, Hebrews, and Chinese all visited North America at one time or another. The scientific establishment remains unconvinced.

In recent years amateur Egyptologist John Anthony West has called attention to the remarkable weathering patterns on the Sphinx on the Gizeh plateau. Geologists he has consulted are in general agreement that the weathering was caused by water and indicates an age of seven to ten thousand years. Since no other Egyptian monument shows similar weathering (despite similarity of materials), this would seem to indicate that the Sphinx was built in an era long predating the pharaohs. Professional Egyptologists are adamant that the Sphinx is less than five thousand years old and was constructed by the pharaoh Khephren, and ask: If the Sphinx is an artifact of an earlier civilization, where is the corroborating evidence for that civilization’s existence? Good question. But the archaeologists offer no alternative explanation for the Sphinx’s deep water channels.

Psychology

Just as biology deals with life by explaining it away, psychology often treats consciousness (the natural object of its study) as an epiphenomenon, or even — in the case of behaviorism — as something to be ignored altogether. Despite some progress in the past decade, we still have no generally accepted theory of consciousness and we still do not know how memories are stored and accessed.

Because psychology is forced to exist within the mechanistic framework of the rest of science (excepting quantum physics), most psychologists avoid consideration of “paranormal” phenomena such as precognition, telepathy, clairvoyance, etc, which resist rationalistic explanations. Nevertheless, both anecdotal and experimental evidence for such psychic phenomena persists, albeit in maddeningly elusive forms.

These days the idea that the mind can influence the body via the immune system is becoming widely accepted. But extraordinary mind-body phenomena are difficult to understand in terms of known biophysical processes. How is it that, in a single individual with multiple-personality disorder, one personality may suffer from severe food allergies to which another personality is immune?

According to conventional views in psychology, higher mental phenomena are supposed to take place in the cerebral cortex, a late evolutionary development. How, then, is one to explain cases of hydrocephalus in which the cortex is only a millimeter or so thick, but the affected individual shows no obvious mental impairment? British Neurologist John Lorber, in research published during the 1980s, cited the case of a Sheffield University student with an IQ of 126 who had virtually no brain. What does this do to our beliefs about the relationship between the brain and consciousness?

The notion that human consciousness is affected by geomagnetic fields is still at the fringe of scientific acceptability. Two surveys (Stevenson, 1970; and Braud and Dennis, 1989) suggest that paranormal experiences coincide with days of minimal geomagnetic activity; another (Raps, Avi, et al., 1992) shows a high correlation between solar activity (which seems to influence the geomagnetic field) and the outbreak of psychiatric illnesses. Given that the Earth’s magnetic field is diminishing, should we prepare ourselves for the widespread occurrence of psychic — and psychiatric — phenomena?

Conclusions

Readers already familiar with the study of scientific anomalies will know that we have hardly scratched the surface. In virtually every field, widely-accepted views are plagued by internal contradictions; and in many cases these problems are hardly peripheral, but pertain to bedrock issues. Moreover, they tend to compound one another: a scientist in one discipline (such as astronomy), in order to clear up a problem, will often rely on “facts” from another discipline (such as physics), believing that the conclusions he reaches thereby are solidly supported — when in reality they may be resting upon the flimsiest of foundations. This process snowballs from discipline to discipline, specialist relying upon specialist.

When one begins to see the same pattern of anomaly, dogma, and denial in one field after another, the overall picture one gets is of a scientific world-view that is virtually a house of cards. We have created a system of knowledge consisting of millions of observed facts arranged in such a way as to give an essentially false view of the nature of reality. My point is not that science has made no valuable contributions — it has! — but that we always need to see those contributions in context and to appreciate their limitations and the tradeoffs we have made for their sake. The legendary Lao Tze reputedly wrote, “To know how little one knows is to have genuine knowledge.” Ironically, we in the industrialized world — who pride ourselves on living in an “information society” — are perhaps further from having genuine knowledge than were people in most “primitive” cultures throughout history.

The only sane course of action in this circumstance would be to take an attitude of extreme skepticism with regard to all scientific explanations, admit our ignorance, and adopt a stance of great caution with regard to actions we might take with respect to Nature and society based on scientific theories.

Our technological transformation of Nature and our destruction of traditional cultures during the past five centuries have rested upon three pillars — economic greed, religious zealotry, and scientific hubris. It could be argued that each is a twisted manifestation of (or substitute for) a healthy human drive. Our task in creating a new, life-affirming culture must be to carefully remove all three of these props and to replace them with a single sound taproot reaching deep into the heart of the soil and the soul.

Reprinted from Museletter Number 30, June 1994. 

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RICHARD HEINBERG is the author of Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age (Quest Books: 1995), Celebrate the Solstice: Honoring the Earth’s Seasonal Rhythms Through Festival and Ceremony (Quest Books: 1994), and A New Covenant With Nature. Since the publication of this article in his Museletter (now discontinued) Richard has produced many more publications. His website is http://www.richardheinberg.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn 43 (Jul-Aug 1997)

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By MEHMET SABEHEDDIN—

Otto Rahn (1904-1939), described as a gifted young author and historian, was one of this century’s truly fascinating figures. Prior to his mysterious death, at age 35, he wrote two books about the Cathars of southern France: Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (“Crusade Against the Grail”) and Luzifers Hofgesind (“Lucifer’s Court”). Myth and legend continue to shroud both his life and tragic death. His books influenced such authors as Trevor Ravenscroft and Jean-Michel Angebert. In the 1982 best selling book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Otto Rahn’s name appears in a small but intriguing footnote.  

Otto Rahn believed that he had found the location of the Holy Grail Mountain, the Montsalvat of legend, in the Cathar mountain fortress of Montsegur in the French Pyrenees. He was, says  Prof. Joscelyn Godwin, “largely responsible for the mythological complex that associated the Cathars and Montsegur with the Holy Grail and its Castle.”

Norma Lorre Goodrich in her own highly acclaimed work The Holy Grail pays tribute to Otto Rahn’s Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (“Crusade Against the Grail”) describing it as “a wonderful book, a monument to this German idealist author, who died mysteriously during a descent in the Alps.”

According to his French translator, Otto Rahn believed with absolute conviction that (1) the Cathars were the last owners of the Holy Grail, and (2) the Holy Grail “perished” when they died at the hands of the “pope and the King of France” at the beginning of the thirteenth century.

Otto Rahn maintained that hidden within the Grail Romances was the essence of Catharism. The Quest for the Holy Grail was a symbolic presentation of Cathar initiation and the Grail itself (which in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival is a sacred stone) symbolised the Secret Tradition of the Cathars.

The war of the Roman Catholic Church against the Cathars is variously described as a war where Roma and Amor stood opposite each other, in which the catholic (‘common’) idea triumphed with flame and sword over the catharic (‘pure’) idea.

The Cathars or Cathari were members of a Gnostic Christian community which appeared in Western Europe in about 1050. They were also known as the Albigensians or men of Albi. This name derives from the city of Albi in southern France which was one of the Cathars’ chief centres. Perhaps as many as two million people belonged to the movement by the twelfth century and Catharism was beginning to become a serious rival of the Church of Rome.

The Cathar claim to be the true church of Jesus Christ was a real threat to the authority of the Roman Church as Zoe Oldenbourg explains in Massacre at Montsegur:

“The Cathars declared themselves the heirs of a tradition that was older than that held by the Church of Rome — and, by implication, both less contaminated and near in spirit to the Apostolic tradition. They claimed to be the only persons who had kept and cherished the Holy Spirit which Christ had bestowed upon His Church; and it looks as though this claim was at least partially justified….

“Today we are better informed than they were concerning the practices of the Early Church, and have to admit that the Cathars merely followed a tradition somewhat more ancient than that of the [Roman] Church herself. It was with some appearance of reason that they claimed Rome as the party guilty of ‘heresy’ through her falling-out from the original purity which had characterized the Church of the Apostles.”

The medieval Cathars believed in a cosmic battle between the principles of Light and Darkness on whose meetings and encounters everything in the universe was based. Darkness was for them dark matter, the unperfected, the transient. They identified all clerical and secular rulers, principally the Catholic Church as the personification of the Darkness. In their mythology the sun symbolised the primordial Light from which all life emerged. Miguel Serrano coined their doctrine: Solar Kristianity. For Otto Rahn, Montsegur was the “Lighthouse of Catharism.”

Rahn’s Grail Quest

Otto Rahn was born on 18 February, 1904 in Michelstadt in southern Germany. In secondary school he developed a fascination with the history of the medieval Cathars, their faith and revolt against king and pope. From 1922 to 1926 he studied jurisprudence, German philosophy and history. Rahn intended to write a dissertation on Guyot, the Provencal Troubadour on whose lost Grail poem Wolfram von Eschenbach claimed to have based his Parzival.

The medieval Germanic tale of Parzival, revived in the 1800s by Wagnar’s popular mystical music dramas, fired Otto Rahn’s latter day quest for the Holy Grail. He soon pieced together a series of clues gleaned from a study of the history of the Cathars and the poem of Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Knight Templar of the thirteenth century.

Driven by his deep interest in the Cathars and Grail legends, from 1928 to 1932 Rahn researched and travelled widely in France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland.

Early in the summer of 1929 Otto Rahn made his first appearance in the Languedoc region of southern France. He quickly settled in the village of Lavelanet and over the next three months systematically explored the ruined Cathar temple-fortress on Montsegur as well as the surrounding mountain grottoes.

It was in Languedoc that the city of Carcassonne, the holy mountain of the Cathars (Montsegur) and the mysterious church of Rennes-le-Chateau were located. All of these places were steeped in Cathar lore and it was here that all legends of the Holy Grail seemed to converge.

At Montsegur, writes Nigel Pennick, “in 1244 the heretical Cathars had made their last heroic stand against a Catholic crusade which finally triumphed in their destruction. Here, tradition affirms that on the night before the final assault, three Cathars carrying the sacred relics of the faith slipped unnoticed over the wall. They carried away the magical regalia of the Merovingian King Dagobert II and a cup reputed to be the Holy Grail.

“Possession of the Grail has always been the dream of chivalric orders. The Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table, the Templars, even the Teutonic Knights have sought the mystic vessel. But Otto Rahn believed that he could triumph where centuries of questing had failed. He had studied the sacred geometry of Montsegur, its sunrise orientations and its relationship with other sacred places, and had discovered secret underground passages, where he felt the treasure must be concealed.” (Hitler’s Secret Sciences)

Nigel Pennick traces Otto Rahn’s knowledge of ‘sacred geography’ back to the Druids and Templars. The Cathars were also said to be familiar with this esoteric science.

In many meetings with the local people (he spoke the local Provencal language fluently) Otto Rahn gathered everything concerning the Cathars and the Grail.

In 1931 Rahn made an extensive exploration of the grottoes of the Sabarthes area south of Montsegur, notably Ornolac and the massive cavern of Lombrives. Here he explored a huge chamber called “the Cathedral” by the local people. Rahn later described this magnificent cavern as follows:

“In time out of mind, in an epoch whose remoteness has been barely touched by modern historical science, it was used as a temple consecrated to the Iberian God Illhomber, God of the Sun. Between two monoliths one which had crumbled, the steep path leads into the giant vestibule of the cathedral of Lombrives. Between the stalagmites of white limestone, between walls of a deep brown colour and the brilliant rock crystal, the path leads down into the bowels of the mountain. A hall 260 feet in height served as a cathedral for the heretics.”

Rahn tells how, “Deeply stirred I walked through the crystal halls and marble crypts. My hands put aside the bones of fallen pure ones and knights…”

The local people called him a “seducer doubled with believer, an eternal adolescent with a superhuman passion for the Grail and the Hermetic Tradition”.

Both Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (“Crusade Against the Grail”) and Luzifers Hofgesind (“Lucifer’s Court”) are full of remarkable insights and revelations of important historical links.

Deep within the grottoes of Sabarthes Otto Rahn found chambers in which the walls were covered with symbols characteristic of the Knights Templar, side by side with emblems of the Cathars. This finding confirmed the notion, fostered by esoteric historians, that the Knights Templar and the Cathars were at one time closely associated. One intriguing image carved into the stone wall of a grotto was clearly a drawing of a lance. This depiction immediately suggests the bleeding lance that appears over and over again in the Arthurian legends.

The legend of the Grail, explains the Chilean mystic Miguel Serrano, “reappears forcibly Christianised in the Middle Ages. The Templars disseminated it. It is centred on the legend of the court of King Arthur (who is the King of the Grail and is also called Amfortas). It is interesting to point out that Arthur is Arthos, Bear, that is to say Arctic. By which the exact geographical position of the lost continent of the first Solar Age is pinpointed: Hyperborea, seat of the Grail. In the Middle Ages, it became a cup, when the myth was Christianised, the one from which Christ was said to have drunk at the Last Supper, or else the one in which Joseph of Arimathea received the blood of Christ as it spurted from his side as he hung on the cross.”

Otto Rahn believed it was possible to trace the Cathars, who guarded the Holy Grail in their castle at Montsegur, back to Druids who converted to Gnostic Manichaeism. The Druids in Britain were forerunners of the Celtic Christian Church. He saw in the culture of the medieval Cathar stronghold of Languedoc strong resemblances to the Druids. Their priests akin to the Cathar Parfaits. The Cathar secret wisdom being preserved by the later Troubadours, the travelling poets and singers of the medieval courts of France.

Most Troubadours, according to Rahn, were secret Cathars. Their apparent yearning and longing songs only seldom dedicated to a special woman, their feminine symbolism referred to the Cathar community, the Sophia, the Wisdom of the Gnostics. Julius Evola explains in The Mystery of the Grail: “To make this doctrine inaccessible to the profane, it is hidden in an erotic symbolism, similar to the Grail cycle where it is represented by a heroic symbolism.”

When Otto Rahn first studied Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival he noticed remarkable similarities with names and places in southern France, and he suspected that Parzival’s Grail castle Munsalvaesche (Richard Wagnar called it Montsalvat) was none-other than the Cathar solar-fortress Montsegur. In Eschenbach’s work he discerned the influence of Cathar poetry. Otto Rahn adopted from the research of Cathar enthusiast Antonin Gadal the probably incorrect assumption that the persecuted Cathars had retreated under the earth and celebrated their mysteries in subterranean churches. Gadal gave Rahn the freedom of his library and private museum. In letters Rahn called him his “Trevrizent” (the uncle of Parsifal in Eschenbach’s work) and developed the propositions laid out in Gadal’s Au Chemin du Saint Graal.

Antonin Gadal believed that the Cathars or ‘Good Christians’ derived from the original ‘Johannite’ form of Gnostic Christianity. ‘Johannite Christianity’ was based on the teachings of St John the Evangelist, the disciple whom Jesus loved and personally instructed in the Mysteries. The Cathars were said to possess the original version of John’s Gospel.

The tale that Otto Rahn actually found the Grail and kept it until the end of World War II in the Wewelsburg, the SS castle near Paderborn, is easily disproved. There was a Grail in Wewelsburg but it was just a huge rock crystal. Rene Nelli, an important scholar of Catharism, maintains that existing Cathar texts do not mention the Grail, while Julius Evola did not think much of the Cathar Grail thesis.

Return to Germany

Otto Rahn left France in September 1932 and returned to Germany to devote himself to further studies of the Grail. In 1934, following on from his library research and his various expeditions, Rahn completed Kreuzzug gegen Gral (“Crusade Against the Grail”).

Rahn showed that the heroes of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Grail romances were modelled after real personalities. The pure knight Parzifal was a Carcassone Cathar, one of the foremost and heroic victims of the Crusade. The hermit Trevrizent was the Cathar Bishop Guilhabert de Castres; the King Anfortas, Raimon-Roger de Foix; and Montsegur was Montsalvage. Moreover, Montsalvage is protected by a Fountain “Salvage” in which Rahn believed he recognised the intermittent fountain of Fontestorbes, a few kilometres from the Pog, Montsegur’s promontory. Also, the forest around Montsalvage is called the “Briciljan” and close by Montsegur is Priscilien Wood. Rahn firmly concluded that the Fortress Castle of Montsegur was the Temple of the Grail.

Rahn associates the Cathar Church with the Church of the Grail, with the mystical group Fideles d’Amour of Dante. He believed that the Templars after their enforced dissolution found refuge in the Pyrenean caverns. Rahn wrote of the many indications that the white tunic with octagonal red cross of the Templars was to be found with the black cassocks and yellow cross of the Cathars in the dark grottos of Sabarthes.

Rahn believed that the Grail consisted of several tablets of stone engraved with runic or even pre-runic inscription. He believed that it was either one perfect emerald with 144 facets or 144 tablets of stone engraved in emerald. This emerald would have graced the Crown of Lucifer, symbolising his third eye, and which fell to earth, precisely on the Montsegur.

Soon after its publication Kreuzzug gegen den Gral came to the attention of Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler. The SS hierarchy were eager for Otto Rahn’s collaboration in SS-sponsored research. After first joining the SS heritage bureau, the Ahnenerbe, as a civilian, his superiors quickly recognised his talents. Persuaded to formally join the SS in 1936, Otto Rahn became member 276 208 of the Allgemeine-SS.

Paul Ladame, a friend of Rahn’s, insists that Otto joined the SS because there was no option. Ladame says Otto was no Nazi or racist. Himmler offered him a salary and the freedom to conduct his own academic research. To refuse may have resulted in Rahn’s eventual imprisonment anyway.

In September 1935 Rahn was writing excitedly to the chief of the Ahnenerbe about the places he visited in his hunt for Grail traditions in Germany, requesting complete confidence in the matter with the exception of Himmler.

Otto Rahn is even rumoured to have founded a neo-Catharist circle within the SS. In the summer of 1936 he undertook, by order of the SS, an expedition to Iceland. Intriguingly, the ship that sailed for Iceland flew a flag with a blue swastika on white background (in sharp contrast to the official standard of the Third Reich). Highlights of this journey formed part of some chapters in his second and final book Luzifers Hofgesind (“Lucifer’s Courtiers”), published in 1937.

Rahn’s second book reads quite differently from his first. Arnaud d’Apremont writes in the preface to Luzifers Hofgesind that its style is more ideological, to all appearances ‘national-socialist’. However, more perceptive critics see Rahn in a quandary, having to toe the nationalist party line, negotiate the censor, and be able to write the full objective text he would have liked. He may even have indicated the irony of his position in the book’s title.

But it is clear from Luzifers Hofgesind that Otto Rahn did not see Lucifer as synonymous with Satan, the Adversary, or the Devil. To Rahn, Lucifer was the Pyrenean Abellio, the Celtic Belenos, the Nordic Balder, the Greek Apollo. These are the Light-Bearers, an attribute Rahn, himself, wanted recognition for: a Lucifer.

For Rahn the primordial Light came not from the East but from the North. He travelled around the ancient sacred places of Europe: Externsteine, the site of Irminsul, sacred symbol of the Saxons; Thingveillir, place of assembly of the ancient Icelanders, and Reykholt, birthplace of Sturlusson, the Nordic Homer and author of the Edda.

One reviewer describes Luzifers Hofgesind as “an expedition through the ‘garden of roses,’ Rahn’s affectionate term for the Kingdom of the Asgardian Elfin, and a realm closed to non-believers or the uninitiated. Rahn dreams of a return to Thule, the primordial centre of the European Hyperboreans. He pines for a return to the Golden Age.”

For Rahn the Holy Grail was an emblem set up in opposition to the Catholic Church — indeed it was a truly Luciferian [Light-Bearer] symbol. Lucifer stood in opposition to the god of Darkness, the god of the Church of Rome. Thus Otto Rahn wrote in his final book:

“There is much more [Light] than in the houses of god — cathedrals and churches — where Lucifer neither is able nor wishes to enter due to all the sombre, stained glass windows whereon are painted the Jewish prophets and apostles, the Roman gods and saints. The forest, that, that was free!”

During his time with the SS Rahn noticed that his telephone was tapped and that he was being spied upon.

We know that Otto Rahn fell into disgrace with the Nazi hierarchy in late 1937 and for disciplinary reasons was assigned a tour of duty at the SS run Dachau concentration camp. In the winter of 1938/39 he wrote to the SS Reichsfuhrer requesting immediate dismissal from the SS. A few months later he was dead.

Rumours abound concerning Otto Rahn’s departure from the Nazi SS. Some claim that he was a homosexual or of Jewish ancestry, but evidence is lacking. In a conversation Rahn claimed that he had been betrayed and that his life was in danger. In a letter to a friend he openly expressed his concern about the Third Reich:

“I have much sorrow in my country. Fourteen days ago I was in Munich. Two days later I preferred to go into my mountains. Impossible for a tolerant, liberal man like me to live in the nation that my native country has become.”

Col. Howard Buechner, the author of the Emerald Cup, says that Rahn “let it be known that he opposed the war for which Germany was obviously preparing in 1938. In place of war, he believed that Germany and then Europe, should be transformed into a community of ‘Pure Ones’ or Cathars. In other words, Rahn’s long association with the history of the Cathars and their unjust persecution by the church and the throne of France, had led to his conversion to the Cathar faith. He was also proposing a ‘New Order’ in which the states of Europe, and perhaps all other nations, would adopt the Cathar beliefs in the interest of world peace.”

Otto Rahn gave his last public lecture-based on Luzifers Hofgesind- in January 1938. A local newspaper reported on his talk:

“The Albigensians [Cathars] were exterminated. 205 leading followers of the Light-Bearer were burnt on a huge pyre by Dominicans in the South of France after a large-scale priestly Crusade in the name of Christian clemency. With fire and sword, the Lucifer doctrine of the Light-Bearer was persecuted along with its followers. The Albigensians are dead, but their spirit lives on and has an effect today through new devotion and rejuvenated enthusiasm. The Vicar of Christ could truly burn men; but he was mistaken if he believed that he burned along with them their spirit, devotion and longing. This spirit became alive again before many men yesterday, powerfully and visibly, in Otto Rahn, a descendant of the old Troubadours.”

A little over one year later, on 13 March 1939 — almost on the anniversary of the fall of Montsegur — Otto Rahn died in the snow on the Tyrolean mountains. “In the manner of the Cathar heretics,” says Nigel Pennick, “Rahn voluntarily left a world he saw disintegrating.” A few years earlier Otto Rahn had written in Kreuzzug gegen den Gral (“Crusade Against the Grail”):

“Their doctrine allowed suicide but demanded that one did not put an end to his life because of disgust, fear or pain, but in a perfect dissolution from matter. This kind of Endura was allowed when it took place in a moment of mystical sight of divine beauty and kindness…It is only one step from fasting to suicide. To fast requires courage but the final act of definitive ascesis requires heroism. The consequence is not as cruel as it may look.”

The story of the enigmatic life and work of Otto Rahn, symbolising as it does a greater mystery, will always fascinate both students of the Holy Grail and seekers of the Cathar tradition. This mystery can be discerned in the following quote from Miguel Serrano’s Nos: Book of the Resurrection:

“When we talk about the religion of love of the troubadours, of the initiated knights of the Grail, of the true Rosicrucians, we must try to discover what lies behind their language. In those days, love did not mean the same thing as it does in our day. The word Amor (Love) was a cipher, it was a code word. Amor spelt backwards is Roma. That is, the word indicated, in the way in which it was written, the opposite to Roma, to all that Rome represented. Also Amor broke down into ‘a’ and ‘mor’, meaning Without-Death. That is, to become immortal, eternal, thanks to the way of initiation of A-Mor. A way of initiation totally opposed to the way of Rome. An esoteric, solar Kristianity. The Gnostic Kristianity of Meister Eckhart. And mine. Because I have tried to teach western man to resurrect Kristos in his soul. Because Kristos is the Self for western man.

“This is why Roma destroyed Amor, the Cathars, the Templars, the Lords of the Grail, the Minnesanger, everything which may have originated in the ‘Hyperborean Blood Memory’ and which may have had a polar, solar origin.

“The love talked and written about so much in novels, poetry and magazines, the love of one’s neighbour, the universal love of the churches, love of humanity, has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘loveless love’ (A-Mor, Without-Death), which is a harsh discipline, as cold as ice, as cutting as a sword, and which aspires to overcome the human condition in order to reach the Kingdom of the Immortals, Ultima Thule.”

This remains a fitting tribute to Otto Rahn.

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MEHMET SABEHEDDIN is a long time contributor to New Dawn magazine. He is conducting research into ancient wisdom traditions.

The above article appeared in New Dawn 43 (Jul-Aug 1997)

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

By ALAN CANTWELL, JR, MD—

When AIDS officially began in 1981 the public was told that anal sex, drugs, and homosexuality were at the root of the new “gay plague.” The first cases were all young, predominantly white, and previously healthy homosexual men from Manhattan who were dying mysteriously from “gay pneumonia” and “gay cancer” in the form of Kaposi’s sarcoma. The association with homosexuality was so remarkable that the disease was initially termed GRID (“gay-related immune deficiency”). To this day, gays are still blamed for the spread of AIDS into the U.S. population.

When the disease first broke out, a new virus was suspected, but officials reassured “the general public” there was nothing to worry about. Of course, the health experts were wrong. Now most of the world’s AIDS cases are heterosexuals. The AIDS virus (HIV) can also be transmitted vaginally; and one does not need to be a drug abuser, a promiscuous person or a homosexual to contract AIDS.

The Green Monkey Theory

Where did HIV originate? Prominent cancer virologists and government epidemiologists have theorised that HIV originated in African green monkeys. Purportedly the monkey virus “jumped species” and entered the black population. From there it migrated to Haiti and Manhattan. After the virus entered the black heterosexual population in the late 1970s, it rapidly spread to millions of blacks because of transfusions with HIV-infected blood, dirty needles, promiscuity and genital ulcers — or so the experts said.

Not all scientists believe the official monkey story, although it is rare to find people who express this view publicly. One persistent underground rumor is that AIDS is biological warfare. Proponents of the AIDS conspiracy theory believe that AIDS has nothing to do with green monkeys, homosexuality, drug addiction, genital ulcerations, anal sex or promiscuity, but that it has to do with scientists experimenting on blacks and gays: in short, AIDS is genocide. Most African-Americans have heard the story that HIV is a manufactured virus genetically-engineered to kill off the black race. Thirty percent of New York City blacks polled by The New York Times (October 29, 1990) actually believe AIDS is an ethno-specific bioweapon designed in a laboratory to infect black people.

Despite the general acceptance that HIV came from monkeys and the rain forest, there is no scientific evidence to prove that HIV and AIDS originated in Africa. What is true is that the first AIDS cases were uncovered in the U.S. in 1979, around the same time that AIDS cases were discovered in Africa. In addition, no stored African tissue from the 1970s tests positive for HIV. And scientists have a hard time explaining how a black heterosexual epidemic centered in Africa could have quickly transformed itself into a white homosexual epidemic in Manhattan.

The Gay Hepatitis-B Vaccine Experiment

Conveniently lost in the history of AIDS is the gay Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment that immediately preceded the decimation of gay Americans. A “cohort” of over a thousand young gays was injected with the vaccine at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan during the period November 1978 to October 1979.¹ Similar gay experiments were conducted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis, and Chicago, beginning in 1980.² The AIDS epidemic broke out shortly thereafter.

The experiment was run by Wolf Szmuness, a Polish Jew born in 1919. He was a young medical student in eastern Poland when the Nazis invaded the country in 1939. His entire family perished in the Holocaust. When Poland was partitioned, Szmuness was taken prisoner and sent to Siberia.

After the war, he was allowed to finish medical school in Tomsk in central Russia. He married a Russian woman, had a daughter, and in 1959 was allowed to return to Poland where he became an expert in hepatitis.

According to June Goodfield’s account of his life in Quest for the Killers, Szmuness defected from Poland with his family in 1969, arriving penniless in New York with $15 in his pocket.³ Through scientific connections he found work as a laboratory technician at the New York Blood Center. Within a few years he was given his own lab at the center and was also appointed Professor of Public Health at Columbia University. By the mid-1970s, Szmuness was a world authority on hepatitis, and was invited back to Moscow in 1975 to give a scientific presentation. As a defector he was terrified to set foot back in the Soviet Union, but his colleagues assured him he would have the full protection of the U.S. State Department. His return to Russia was a scientific triumph.

In the late 1970s, Wolf Szmuness was awarded millions of dollars to undertake the most important mission of his life: the Hepatitis-B vaccine experiment. Szmuness specifically wanted to use gay men to avoid “serious legal and logistical problems.”⁴ For his study he did not want monogamous men, nor men with lovers. He chose only healthy, young, responsible, intelligent, and primarily white homosexuals. The experiment was costly and he didn’t want any uncooperative or hard-to-find gays messing up his experiment. Involved in the experiment were the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Abbott Laboratories, and Merck, Sharp & Dohme. Szmuness’ experiment was hugely successful, and his vaccine was hailed as having tremendous global implications.

The Gay Plague

The links of the gay experiment to the outbreak of AIDS are obvious to anyone who wants to see the connection. Three months after the experiment began, the first cases of AIDS reported to the CDC appeared in young gay men in Manhattan in 1979. The first San Francisco AIDS case appeared in that city in September 1980, six months after the Hepatitis-B experiment started there.⁵ In June 1981 the AIDS epidemic became “official.”

Were gay men given experimental vaccines contaminated with the AIDS virus? The government says no, but government agencies have a long history of covert and unethical medical experimentation, particularly with minorities. Was it simply a quirk of nature that a virus “out of Africa” would suddenly decimate the most hated minority in America?

Why did the U.S. government choose Wolf Szmuness, a Soviet-trained doctor and a recent American immigrant to head this dangerous experiment? Goodfield, who has written the definitive account of the Hepatitis-B experiment, claims Szmuness has a painful life. Confined as a political prisoner in Siberia during World War II, he was repeatedly interrogated and beaten by the Russian KGB for refusing to cooperate in spy activities. When he could not be broken, they warned him: “Say nothing of this to anyone, but remember. We will reach you anywhere in the world. No matter where you go, no matter where you try to hide, you will never be out of our grasp.”⁶

The experimental Hepatitis-B vaccine was primarily manufactured by Merck. However, during the experiment Szmuness was concerned about possible vaccine contamination. Goodfield writes, “This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one vaccine batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck’s.”⁷

After the Hepatitis-B experiment ended, Szmuness insisted that all thirteen thousand blood specimens donated by gay men be retained at the Blood Center for future use. Due to space requirements, it is highly unusual for any laboratory to retain so many old blood specimens. However, several years later when this blood was retested for the presence of HIV antibodies, government epidemiologists were able to detect the “introduction” and the spread of HIV into the gay community.

When asked why he was keeping so many vials of blood, Szmuness replied, “Because one day another disease may erupt and we’ll need this material.”⁸ A few months after the Hepatitis-B experiment began at the Center, the first AIDS cases began to appear in gay men living in Manhattan. And the retesting of gay blood at the Blood Center proved that HIV was first introduced into the gay population of New York City sometime around 1978-1979, the same year Szmuness’ gay Hepatitis-B experiment began.⁹

Was Szmuness psychic in his prediction that a new disease would appear in the gay community? Or did he actually know or suspect that a new, deadly virus was being introduced into the gay volunteers? Unfortunately, the answers to these questions can only be surmised. In June 1982 Szmuness died of lung cancer. In his eulogy, Aaron Kellner of the Blood Center wrote: “It is the rare physician who, like Wolf Szmuness, is given the grace to touch the lives of billions of people; those living on this planet and generations yet unborn.”¹⁰

The African Origin of AIDS

Was HIV introduced into millions of Africans in the late 1970s during the smallpox vaccine eradication programs sponsored by the World Health Organisation? It is known that animal and human cells harbor all sorts of viruses, including viruses not yet discovered, and animal tissue cell cultures are often used in the manufacture of viral vaccines. Therefore, the possibility of vaccine contamination with an animal virus is a constant danger in the manufacture of vaccines.

Despite the most meticulous precautions in production, contaminating animal viruses are known to survive the vaccine process. For example, during the 1950s, millions of people were injected with polio vaccines contaminated with “SV-40”, a cancer-causing green monkey virus. Such vaccine contamination problems are largely kept hidden from the public. Yet in spite of the known danger, drug companies and physicians always pooh-pooh any suggestion that AIDS could have arisen from animal virus-contaminated vaccines. Animal cancer viruses are also contained in fetal calf serum, a serum commonly used as a laboratory nutrient to feed animal and human tissue cell cultures. Viruses in calf serum can be carried over as contaminants into the final vaccine product.

The problem of vaccine contamination by fetal calf serum and its relationship to AIDS is the subject of a letter by J. Grote (“Bovine visna virus and the origin of the AIDS epidemic”) published in the Journal of the Royal (London) Society of Medicine in October 1988. Grote discounts the green monkey theory and questions whether bovine visna contamination of laboratory-used fetal bovine serum could cause AIDS. Bovine visna virus is similar in appearance to HIV. Grote, a London-based AIDS researcher, writes:

The seriousness of this becomes apparent when we consider the manufacture of vaccines requires the growth of virus in cell cultures using fetal calf serum in the growth medium. The contamination of vaccines with adventitious viruses has been of concern for many years and the presence of virus-like structures in ‘virus-screened’ bovine serum has been reported. It seems absolutely vital that all vaccines are screened for HIV prior to use and that bovine visna virus is further investigated as to its relationship to HIV and its possible causal role in progression towards AIDS.

Millions of African blacks are reportedly infected with HIV. This large number could never have been infected by the simple act of a monkey virus “jumping” over to infect one African in the late 1970s. If that were the case, why don’t we now have millions of AIDS cases in the U.S.? One logical explanation for the millions of Africans infected is that the vaccines used in the World Health Organisation’s mass inoculation programs were contaminated. Was the contamination accidental or deliberate? It is well-known in vaccine circles that the vaccinia (cowpox) virus used in the manufacture of the smallpox vaccine works well in genetic engineering. Charles Pillar and Keith Yamamoto, authors of Gene Wars: Military Control Over the New Genetic Technology, state: “Researchers have been able to splice genes coding for the surface coats of other viruses, such as influenza, hepatitis, and rabies into vaccinia virus DNA. The result: a ‘broad spectrum’ vaccine with a coat of many colors.”¹¹

In 1985, the Russians caused an international furore by claiming that AIDS was caused by experiments carried out in the USA as part of the development of new biological weapons. Responding to this Soviet accusation, Pillar and Yamamoto admit that “although no evidence has been presented to support this claim, manipulating genes to defeat the body’s immune system is quite feasible.”¹²

In Magic Shots, Allan Chase claims that during the years 1966-1977, the WHO utilised “200,000 people in forty countries — most of them nondoctors trained by seven hundred doctors and health professionals from over seventy participating countries — spent $300 million, and used forty million bifurcated vaccinating needles to administer 24,000 million (2.4 billion) doses of smallpox vaccine.”¹³

On May 11, 1987, The London Times, one of the world’s most respected newspapers, published a front-page story entitled “Smallpox vaccine triggered AIDS virus.” The story suggests that African AIDS is a direct outgrowth of the WHO smallpox eradication program. The smallpox vaccine allegedly awakened a “dormant” AIDS virus infection in the black population. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV, was quoted as saying, “The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a dormant infection such as HIV (the AIDS virus).” The Times story is one of the most important stories ever printed on the AIDS epidemic; yet the story was killed and never appeared in any major U.S. newspaper or magazine.

Despite covert human experimentation, vaccine contamination problems, and the genetic engineering of new and highly dangerous viruses, the medical establishment ignores the AIDS bio-warfare issue. For example, in the prestigious British Medical Journal (May 13, 1989), Myra McClure and Thomas Schultz wrote a paper on the “Origin of HIV” and quickly disposed of the idea that AIDS is connected to germ warfare. They simply state: “Lack of supporting evidence precludes serious discussion of such a bizarre hypothesis. This review deals with the theories on the origin of HIV that are scientifically plausible.”

Thus, medical science ignores evidence suggesting AIDS originated as a secret experiment. Most physicians and microbiologists steadfastly hold on to the illogical and improbable green monkey theory of AIDS. And the major media remain silent, often dismissing the bio-warfare theory as communist propaganda of the most malicious sort. Forgotten is the connection between the National Academy of Sciences and the military bio-warfare establishment in the development of biological weapons for mass killings.

Creation of a Super Germ

A decade before the first cases of AIDS, Dr. Donald M. MacArthur, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Defense, told a Congressional Hearing that a “super germ” could be developed as part of our experimental bio-warfare program. This genetically engineered germ would be very different from any previous microbe known to mankind. The agent would be a highly effective killing agent because the immune system would be powerless against this super-microbe (Testimony before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, House of Representatives, Department of Defense Appropriations for 1970, dated July 1, 1969). A transcript of this meeting on “Synthetic Biological Agents” records the following comments of Dr. MacArthur:

1. All biological agents up to the present time are representatives of naturally occurring disease, and thus are known by scientists throughout the world. They are easily available to qualified scientists for research, either for offensive or defensive purposes.

2. Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.

3. A research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately 5 years at a total cost of $10 million.

4. It would be very difficult to establish such a program. Molecular biology is a relatively new science. There are not many competent scientists in the field, almost all are in university laboratories, and they are generally adequately supported from sources other than the Department of Defense. However, it was considered possible to initiate an adequate program through the National Academy of Sciences — National Research Council (NAS-NRC). The matter was discussed with the NAS-NRC, and tentative plans were made to initiate the program. However, decreasing funds in CB (chemical/biological) research, growing criticism of the CB program, and our reluctance to involve the NAS-NRC in such a controversial endeavor have led us to postpone it for the past two years. It is a highly controversial issue and there are many who believe such research should not be undertaken lest it lead to yet another method of massive killing of large populations… Should an enemy develop it, there is little doubt that it is an important area of potential military technological inferiority in which there is no adequate research program.

Was the AIDS virus, or other so-called “emerging viruses” such as Ebola and Marburg viruses, created in bio-warfare laboratories during the 1970s? During the 1970s, the U.S. Army’s bio-warfare program intensified, particularly in the area of DNA and gene splicing research. Renouncing germ warfare except for “medical defensive research,” President Richard Nixon in 1971 ordered that a major part of the Army’s bio-warfare research be transferred over to the National Cancer Institute (where HIV would be discovered a decade later by Gallo). That same year, Nixon also initiated his famous War on Cancer, and offensive bio-warfare research (particularly genetic engineering of viruses) continued under the umbrella of orthodox cancer research. Cancer virologists learned “to jump” animal cancer viruses from one species of animal to another. Chicken viruses were put into lamb kidney cells; baboon viruses were spliced into human cancer cells; the combinations were endless. In due process, deadly man-made viruses were developed, and new forms of cancer, immunodeficiency, and opportunistic infections were produced when these viruses were forced or adapted into laboratory animals and into human tissue cell cultures.¹⁴

As predicted by the bio-warfare experts, new cancer-causing monster viruses were created that had a deadly effect on the immune system. In one government-sponsored experiment reported in 1974, newborn chimpanzees were taken away from their mothers at birth and weaned on milk obtained from virus-infected cows. Some of the chimps sickened and died with two new diseases that had never been observed in chimps. The first was a parasitic pneumonia known as Pneumocystis Carinii pneumonia (later known as AIDS); the second was leukemia.¹⁵

Monkey Business

Almost two decades after the first U.S. AIDS cases were diagnosed, most people still believe the government’s green monkey story; and AIDS educators teach that HIV originated in Africa. However, a few cracks in the monkey theory have appeared in print.

A story entitled “Research refutes idea that human AIDS virus originated in monkey,” appeared in the Los Angeles Times (June 2, 1988). In the process of decoding the genetic structure of the monkey virus and the human AIDS virus, Japanese molecular biologists discovered that the gene sequences of the two viruses differed by more than 50% — indicating absolutely no genetic relationship between the green monkey virus and HIV. The Japanese investigators specifically criticised Myron Essex and Phyllis Kanki of Harvard Medical School, who “discovered” a second AIDS virus in African green monkeys that was widely heralded in the media. Essex and Kanki’s “second” AIDS virus was later proven to be a contaminant monkey virus traced back to the Harvard researchers own laboratory.

More than a decade earlier, in 1975, Gallo reported the “discovery” of a “new” and “human” HL-23 virus he cultured from human leukemia cells. Eventually the virus was proven to be three contaminating ape viruses (gibbon-ape virus, simian sarcoma virus, and baboon endogenous virus). Gallo claims he has no idea how these animal viruses contaminated his research.¹⁶

If HIV is not related to a green monkey virus, what is its origin? On November 13, 1988, The Orange County Register devoted an entire section of the newspaper to AIDS in Africa. Several African officials were interviewed; all were adamant that AIDS did not originate in Africa. The theory “is false and has never been scientifically proved, so why should Africa be the scapegoat?” declared Dr. Didace Nzaramba, director of the AIDS prevention program in Rwanda. The Register commented:

From early on, scientists have speculated that the disease might have begun in Africa. Researchers in Africa tested old blood samples and said they found HIV-infected serum that went back years. In 1985, Harvard researchers, Phyllis Kanki and Myron Essex, announced the discovery of a new virus isolated in green monkeys that seemed similar to HIV. Eventually, researchers concluded that early blood tests used in Africa were not reliable, and Kanki and Essex said their blood tests probably had been contaminated and that their results were invalid. But the perception of an African link was established.

Media Disinformation

With the publication of And The Band Played On in 1987, the media became obsessed with author Randy Shilts’ “Patient Zero” story. In the popular, award-winning book, a young Canadian airline steward named Gaeton Dugas is portrayed as the promiscuous gay man “who brought the AIDS virus from Paris and ignited the epidemic in North America.” Shilts, who later died of AIDS, never explained where or how Dugas got his infection.

After a year of swollen lymph nodes and a rash, Dugas was finally diagnosed with AIDS-associated “gay cancer” in June 1980 in New York City. What Shilts probably did not know is that when Dugas was diagnosed in 1980, over twenty percent of the Manhattan gays in the Hepatitis-B experiment were HIV-positive. This 20% infection rate was discovered after the HIV blood test became available in 1985, and after the stored blood at the New York Blood Center was retested for HIV antibodies (JAMA, Vol. 255, pp. 2167-2172, 1986). Remarkably, these gay men had the highest recorded incidence of HIV anywhere in the world for that time! Even in African populations, where AIDS has been theorised to exist for decades, or even millennia, there were never reports of such a high incidence of HIV in 1980.

Shilts’ sensational Patient Zero story quickly became “fact.” Even the AMA-sponsored American Medical News (October 23, 1987) fell for the ludicrous story, claiming that Dugas “may have brought AIDS to the United States.” The media continue to promote unlikely stories about the origin of AIDS, always avoiding discussion of the idea that HIV came out of a laboratory, and always pointing the finger to black Africa.

In late 1987, the media widely reported an “old AIDS case” dating back to 1968. DNA testing of the blood and tissue was reported as HIV-positive.¹⁷ For the last year of his life, “Robert”, a 15-year-old black boy from St. Louis, wasted away with a bizarre disease that severely bloated his legs and genitalia. His sexual preference was unknown, but his doctors tried hard to insinuate the dying boy was gay. At autopsy, internal Kaposi’s sarcoma of the rectum was discovered, along with anal warts and lacerations. And after fingering the dead boy’s rectum, the pathologist noted “a lax anal sphincter.” When newer viral identification techniques were reapplied to Robert’s blood in 1990, his blood retested HIV-negative, proving that Robert never had AIDS.¹⁸

In 1990 the media sensationalised another “old AIDS case,” this time an unmarried English sailor who died in Manchester in 1959. When his stored tissue remains tested positive for HIV, major newspapers throughout the world used this case to again discredit the persistent rumor that AIDS was a man-made disease. The New York Times (July 24) declared:

The case also refutes the widely publicised charges made by Soviet officials several years ago that AIDS arose from a virus that had escaped from a laboratory experiment that went awry or was a biological warfare agent. The human retrovirus group to which the AIDS virus belongs was unknown at the time. Nor did scientists then have the genetic engineering techniques needed to create a new virus.

In a letter to the medical journal Lancet in January 1996, this 1959 case was ruled not to be AIDS because the DNA tests were found to be contaminated due to a laboratory error.

Despite the denial of the Times regarding the laboratory creation of new AIDS-like viruses, it was common practice during the early 1970s for virologists to alter animal viruses by inserting them into other animal species and into human tissue cells in culture. Experiments performed at Harvard in the mid-1970s by Max Essex and Donald Francis (two of the best-known AIDS experts) produced AIDS in cats with the feline leukemia retrovirus. In addition, a decade before the outbreak of AIDS in the U.S., Robert Gallo was engineering cancer-causing retroviruses and studying the effects of viral mutants and their ability to suppress the immune system. A full description of Gallo’s animal retrovirus research activities dating back to 1967 is chronicled in Emerging Viruses, AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident or Genocide? by Dr. Leonard Horowitz.¹⁹

Secret and Covert Biological Warfare Research

It is difficult, if not impossible, to determine the truth about global biological warfare capabilities and their possible effects on world health. The American taxpayer is kept ignorant about U.S. chemical and bio-warfare programs. Scientists involved in bio-warfare research are sworn to secrecy and silence. Thus, “classified” and “top secret” medical experimentation continues to be promoted by powerful government agencies, such as the CIA, the CDC, the Department of Defense, the military, and other institutions.

Recent revelations of horrific radiation experiments conducted on unsuspecting U.S. citizens during the Cold War years up until the 1980s have shocked the nation. Some of this research was conducted at the most prestigious medical institutions in our country. None of the perpetrators have been brought to trial. In light of these revelations, it is inconceivable to think that leading AIDS scientists would be unaware of the connections between their institutional research and the bio-warfare establishment.

Currently, strange and unprecedented diseases are mysteriously appearing in various parts of the world. The peculiar Persian Gulf War Syndrome has sickened over 50,000 of our vets who served in Desert Shield/Storm. Their illnesses have been largely dismissed by health experts as due to “psychological stress,” even though there is evidence that this new disease is contagious and sexually-transmitted. Nevertheless, government health officials remain silent on these issues.

A few scientists insist that some cases of Gulf War Syndrome are related to biological warfare agents. Dr. Garth Nicholson and his wife Nancy, formerly scientists at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, have discovered in the blood of some sick reservists a new infectious microbe (a mycoplasma) that has part of the AIDS virus spliced into its genetic material! The Nicholsons say: “The type of mycoplasma we identified was highly unusual and it almost certainly didn’t occur naturally. It has one gene from the HIV-1 virus — but only one gene. This meant it was almost certainly an artificially modified microbe — altered purposefully by scientists.” (National Enquirer, April 2, 1996).

By censoring certain aspects of AIDS history, particularly the origin of HIV, we allow dangerous medical experimentation to continue. The New York Blood Center is now testing a new vaccine made from a “harmless” canary-pox virus that has been genetically engineered to carry parts of HIV, the AIDS virus. The Center is recruiting HIV-negative gay men by funding Project Achieve, an organisation designed to test and sign-up young men for the new vaccine experiment. Homosexual men are lured into the program by posters that feature cute, multi-ethnic gay boys. According to Timothy Murphy of HX magazine, there is a waiting list for the Center’s vaccine experiment. Gay men are urged to sign-up with Project Achieve at (212) 388-0008.

The enigmatic Dr. Szmuness has been erased from AIDS chronicles. His name does not appear in Shilts’ Band, nor in Mirko Grmek’s History of AIDS (1990), or in Laurie Garret’s massive tome on emerging viruses, The Coming Plague (1994). Although his untimely death went largely unnoticed in medical journals, he was remembered and honored on May 11, 1984, by a small coterie of medical power brokers and distinguished scientists who convened at a landmark symposium in the U.S. capitol. The meeting entitled “Infection, Immunity, and Blood Transfusion” was sponsored by the American Red Cross.²⁰

Paying tribute to Szmuness were top government scientists in AIDS and cancer research, the most well-known researchers in animal experimentation, the heads of the most prestigious biomedical establishments in the country, and the chief executives of drug companies tied to genetic engineering, vaccine production, and biological warfare research. Dr. Robert Gallo, who had announced the discovery of the AIDS virus to the American public three weeks earlier, was one of the most distinguished attendees.

There is an ominous link between cancer and AIDS, between animal experimentation and the genetic engineering of viruses, between biological warfare technology and drug companies, between gay experiments and AIDS, between vaccine programs and the contamination of the nation’s blood supply. Why else would all these people from diverse areas of science be attending this high level government conference?

There is also a connection between Szmuness’ gay experiment and the outbreak of AIDS that cannot be denied. This connection is not coincidental or a paranoid fantasy. It is time for a serious study of the link between covert biological warfare research and the initial outbreak of the “gay AIDS plague.” Ignoring evidence pointing to AIDS as a man-made disease makes a sham out of AIDS education.

References

1. Szmuness W, Stevens C, Harley E, et al: Hepatitis-B vaccine; Demonstration of efficacy in a controlled clinical trial in a high-risk population in the United States. New England J Med 303: 833-841, 1980.

2. Francis D, Hadler S, Thompson S, The prevention of Hepatitis-B with vaccine. Report of the Centers for Disease Control multi-center efficacy trial among homosexual men. Annals Int Med 97: 362-366, 1982.

3. Goodfield J: Vaccine on trial. Goodfield J. Quest for the Killers. Birkhauser, Boston, 1985, p. 51-97.

4. Szmuness W: Large scale efficacy trials of Hepatitis-B vaccines in the USA; Baseline data and protocols. J Med Virology 4: 327-340, 1979.

5. Cantwell, A: The Hepatitis-B vaccine trials (1978-1981). In AIDS & The Doctors of Death. Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, CA, 1988, pp. 65-80.

6. Goodfield, Quest for the Killers, p. 57

7. Ibid, p. 86

8. Ibid, p. 92

9. Stevens CE, Taylor PE, Zang EA, et al: Human T-cell lymphotropic virus type III infection in a cohort of homosexual men in New York City. JAMA 255: 2167-2172, 1986.

10. Kellner A: Reflections of Wolf Szmuness in, Progress in Clinical and Biological Research 182: 3-10, 1985.

11. Piller C and Yamamoto K: Gene Wars: Military Control over the New Genetic Technologies. Beech Tree Books/William Morrow, New York, 1988, p. 103

12. Ibid, p. 97

13. Chase A: Magic Shots. William Morrow and Company, New York, 1982, pp. 81-82.

14. Cantwell: Biowarfare. In Queer Blood. Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, 1993, pp. 31-40.

15. McClure HM, Keeling ME, Custer RP, et al: Erythroleukemia in two infant chimpanzees fed milk from cows naturally infected with the bovine C-type virus. Cancer Research 34: 2745-2757, 1974.

16. Connor S: AIDS science stands on trial. New Scientist, February 12, 1987, pp. 49-58.

17. Garry RF, Witte MH, Gottleib AA, et al: Documentation of an AIDS virus infection in the United States in 1968. JAMA 260: 2085-2087, 1988.

18. Cantwell: AIDS: New or old? In Queer Blood. Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, 1993, pp. 61-69.

19. Horowitz LG.: Emerging Viruses, AIDS & Ebola: Nature, Accident or Genocide? Tetrahedron, Inc, Rockport, MA, 1996.

20. Dodd RY, Barker LF (Eds): Infection, Immunity and Blood Transfusion. Prcdngs of the XVIth Annual Scientific Symposium of the American Red Cross, Wa. DC. Alan R Liss, Inc, NY 1985, pp. xiii-xv.

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Dr. ALAN CANTWELL is the author of two books on the man-made AIDS epidemic: AIDS and the Doctors of Death and Queer Blood, both available from www.amazon.com and Book Clearing House in the US @ 1-800-431-1579. Email: alanrcan@aol.com Website: www.ariesrisingpress.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn 66 (Jan-Feb 1998)

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