On 27 February 2026, Oman’s Foreign Minister Badr Al-Busaidi told the world that peace was “within reach.” Iran had agreed to full IAEA verification, permanent limits on uranium stockpiling, and irreversible downgrading of its enriched uranium to the lowest possible level. Talks were set to resume on 2 March.

The bombs started falling on 28 February.

The United States and Israel launched a joint assault that killed the Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, flattened military facilities, and also tore through schools, hospitals, and cultural sites across the country. Iran struck back with missiles and drones aimed at Israel and US bases in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The Strait of Hormuz was shut. Oil prices spiked to levels not seen since the 1970s. By early April, with thousands dead, the conflict was dangerously widening.

The stated reasons from Washington shifted by the day. Regime change. Self-defence. Nuclear prevention. Securing oil. No single story held for more than a news cycle.

That drift is the tell. When the reasons for a war change by the day, the real reason must stay hidden. And the real reason reaches far beyond any nuclear programme.

The Western ruling elite knows its era of unchallenged global dominance is closing. The economic centre of gravity is migrating eastward. The dollar’s monopoly over world trade is eroding. BRICS is expanding. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is weaving the Eurasian landmass into a single integrated economic zone.

In a desperate, last-ditch bid to preserve their grip on global power, Western elites are racing to build a Techno-World Order, a system of control founded on artificial intelligence, digital currencies, biometric tracking, and rule by algorithm.

That system requires the physical world to stay in their hands. And the physical world runs through Eurasia.Anglo-American strategists have understood this for over a century.

The Blueprint

To see this clearly, you need to look at two texts that most people have never heard of. One was a lecture delivered in 1904, later published as an article. The other was a book published in 1997. Taken together, they read like a blueprint for modern empire, so candid in their strategic vision that they feel like an architect’s own drawings for a structure you have been living inside your whole life.

Sir Halford John Mackinder was a man who acted on his ideas. A British geographer who directed the London School of Economics from 1903, he built his career on a single argument: the age of sea power was fading and the real prize was land.

In 1904, before the Royal Geographical Society, he proposed that the vast interior of Eurasia, stretching from the Volga to the Yangtze, held the resources and the position to command the globe. He called it the “Heartland” (see map on page 11) Around it lay coastal states he termed the “Inner Crescent,” and beyond them the maritime fringe of Britain, Japan, the Americas, and Australia.

His dictum, refined in 1919, still runs Western strategic thought. “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island commands the world.”

Then he tested it. In late 1919, the British government sent Mackinder to southern Russia as High Commissioner during the civil war. His mission was to unite the White Russian forces of General Denikin against the Bolsheviks and prevent a hostile power from consolidating the Eurasian interior. He returned to London and proposed to the Cabinet a “cordon sanitaire” of buffer states running from Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan through Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltic provinces. The Cabinet ignored him. Britain withdrew its troops. South Russia fell to the Bolsheviks.

Mackinder’s proposed buffer states were swallowed by the Soviet Union for the next seventy years. The same states he named in 1920 remain flashpoints in 2026. Georgia. Armenia. Azerbaijan. Ukraine.

Ninety-three years after Mackinder’s London lecture, Zbigniew Brzezinski picked up his thesis and fitted it for American use. The Grand Chessboard, published in 1997, is a startling book. Brzezinski, a former US National Security Advisor and co-founder of the Trilateral Commission, laid out American imperial strategy with a bluntness unthinkable in any official document. (He misspelled Mackinder’s first name as “Harold” throughout. The American heir to British imperial geostrategy got his own master’s name wrong.)

The core argument was simple. Eurasia holds seventy-five percent of the world’s people, sixty percent of its economic output, and three-quarters of its known energy. Control Eurasia and you control everything. America’s task was to prevent any rival from locking that landmass together.

Brzezinski identified five states whose fate would decide the balance. Ukraine. Azerbaijan. South Korea. Turkey. Iran. He warned that one scenario above all would threaten American power. A grand coalition of Russia, China, and Iran, joined not by ideology but by shared hostility to Western hegemony.

He was blunt about what lay beneath the surface. The Caspian Basin and Central Asia hold reserves of oil and gas that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea. Iran, with its own massive reserves and its position astride every proposed energy corridor, was the lock on the door.

Selling the project to voters would be hard. “Democracy is inimical to imperial mobilisation,” Brzezinski wrote. The public would back foreign wars only if given a “sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”

In Iran’s case, the nuclear bogeyman served that function for two decades. When diplomacy threatened to remove it, the bombs fell anyway.

Everything Brzezinski described in theory, Iran embodies in geography. The country is the gateway to Eurasia. No other nation bridges the Indian Ocean to the Caspian and Central Asia in a single overland corridor. The Iranian coastline commands the Strait of Hormuz, through which close to a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil flows. The country shares land and sea borders with fifteen nations. Iranian oil and gas reserves rank among the largest on Earth.

Western strategists see a strategic position on a map. Iran is something else.

Persia, as it was known for most of recorded history, is one of the oldest continuous civilisations on the planet. Five thousand years. When the first stones of the Persian Royal Road were laid, connecting the Mediterranean to Central Asia, Rome did not exist. When the Silk Road began threading through Iranian territory, Christianity had yet to be born. Zoroastrianism, one of the earliest monotheistic faiths, emerged from this soil. The mystical traditions of Sufism flowered across the Persian cultural world, producing a spiritual literature, including the Persian-language poetry of Rumi, Hafez, and Omar Khayyam, that still crosses every border of language and belief.

This is a land where the seen and the unseen have coexisted for millennia, where philosophy and statecraft and spiritual practice grew from the same root. The men in Washington see pipelines and chokepoints. What they fail to see is a civilisation with roots strong enough to outlast any empire that tries to uproot it.

The West has been trying for a long time. In 1953, when Iran’s elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh moved to nationalise the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the CIA and MI6 engineered a coup that toppled him and installed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The stated reason was Cold War containment. The operating logic was older. Keep the resources and corridors of the Inner Crescent under Western-aligned control.

Iran’s 1979 revolution ejected the Shah and with him the Western strategic presence. The Islamic Republic has been targeted by Anglo-American policy ever since, through decades of sanctions, proxy conflicts, covert operations, and now direct military assault. The nuclear question has always been the public face of a strategic interest that predates Iran’s nuclear programme by half a century.

In the years before the 2026 war, Iran was doing what Mackinder and Brzezinski had both warned about. Tehran was fast becoming a key player in Eurasian integration. Iran joined the Belt and Road Initiative. In May 2025, the first direct freight train from Xi’an, China, pulled into the Aparin dry port, cutting transit from a month by sea to fifteen days by rail. The North-South Transport Corridor, linking Russia through Iran to India, was turning Iranian ports into the spine of a new Eurasian trade network. India had poured investment into the Chabahar port on Iran’s southeastern coast, giving Delhi a route into Afghanistan and Central Asia that bypassed Pakistan and sidestepped the Strait of Hormuz. Iran was connecting east to west and north to south at once. The keystone was locking into place.

Look at the map in 2026. The coalition Brzezinski described has arrived. The alliance runs through BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the Belt and Road Initiative. What Brzezinski feared on paper now moves in steel, rail, and pipeline. And the gateway holding it all together is Iran.

The Techno-World Order

This is where the century-old Mackinder doctrine meets the twenty-first-century endgame.

The Western elite policymakers can read the trends. American debt is spiralling. The move away from the dollar is picking up speed. China’s economy has overtaken the United States in purchasing power terms. The BRICS bloc now represents a larger share of global GDP than the G7. Military bases, dollar hegemony, arm-twisting through the IMF and World Bank, the old tools of Western control are losing their grip. The world that Mackinder and Brzezinski sought to manage is slipping away.

The ruling class has chosen a different path. Instead of accepting a multipolar future, it has set about building a new architecture of control, one founded on something beyond aircraft carriers and trade agreements.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, January 2026, the shape of that architecture was plain to see. AI-driven governance. Digital currencies. Biometric identity frameworks. Machine-run control of whole populations. These were working agendas backed by people who hold state power.

Technocracy researcher Patrick Wood (see New Dawn Special Issue Vol 20 No 1), who has tracked these developments for decades, calls key figures in the Trump administration “arch-technocrats” building a system of global digital dominion. He names Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Howard Lutnick among the architects. The stated US policy goal, laid out in an AI strategy co-authored by senior officials, is to export America’s “full AI technology stack” to every country willing to join its digital alliance.

By early 2026, the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial had launched a dollar-pegged stablecoin backed by US Treasury securities, and the GENIUS Act had created the federal regulatory framework to legitimise it. The merger of state power and private digital finance was no longer theoretical.

This Techno-World Order has material demands. AI runs on rare earth minerals and vast energy. Digital currencies need compliant banking systems. Surveillance needs cooperative states. All of this depends on controlling the trade corridors and energy routes of the physical world, the same corridors that Mackinder mapped in 1904 and that converge at Iran.

If Russia, China, and Iran build their own digital and financial systems outside Western reach, the technocratic project fractures beyond repair. And that is what has been unfolding.

BRICS states have moved toward de-dollarised trade. China’s rail links to Iran skip every Western-controlled sea lane. After the Strait of Hormuz was initially closed, Iran offered safe passage to BRICS members and blocked American-allied ships. A multipolar world with independent tech freedom is the one outcome the architects of the Techno-World Order are determined to prevent.

A stable, integrated Iran at the heart of Eurasian trade poses a greater danger to this project than any uranium centrifuge. The centrifuges made for a good story. The real target was the gateway.

The war itself had been building for years. In 2024, Iran and Israel exchanged direct attacks for the first time. In June 2025, Israel struck Iran and the United States later joined the 12-day war with attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. In January 2026, Iran was shaken by its worst domestic unrest since 1979. By late February, Washington had assembled one of its biggest regional military deployments since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Oman-mediated indirect nuclear talks, which had resumed in early February, showed progress. The 28 February assault ended that diplomatic opening. What followed stripped away whatever remained of diplomatic language.

A Whole Civilisation

On 21 March, Trump posted on his internet platform ‘Truth Social’ that if Iran did not “FULLY OPEN, WITHOUT THREAT, the Strait of Hormuz, within 48 HOURS,” the United States would “hit and obliterate their various POWER PLANTS.” Twelve hours before that deadline expired, he postponed it. On 26 March, he extended the deadline again, writing that negotiations were “going very well.” On 30 March, he expanded his threatened targets to include oil wells, Kharg Island, and “possibly all desalination plants.” Each deadline arrived and was pushed back. Each postponement came with louder threats.

On Easter Sunday, 5 April, Trump posted what may be the most unhinged statement ever issued by a sitting US president. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F****** Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.” His Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth had already threatened to send Iran “back to the Stone Age.”

On 7 April, Trump told reporters the US had a plan “where every bridge in Iran will be decimated by 12 o’clock tomorrow night, where every power plant in Iran will be out of business, burning, exploding and never to be used again.” Hours later, on Truth Social, he wrote the words that Amnesty International’s Secretary General called “apocalyptic” and members of Congress called “genocidal.”

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

A whole civilisation. The president of the United States was threatening to extinguish one of the oldest continuous civilisations in human history. Five thousand years of philosophy and poetry and spiritual seeking, reduced to a target in a social media post sandwiched between threats about power plants and boasts about a rescued airman.

Iran’s response told a different story. Across the country, young Iranians formed human chains around power plants to shield them with their bodies. President Masoud Pezeshkian wrote that more than 14 million Iranians had registered to sacrifice their lives defending their homeland. “I too have been, am, and will remain devoted to giving my life for Iran,” he said. Iran’s foreign ministry called Trump’s threats “a sign of ignorance.”

Ninety minutes before his own 8 p.m. deadline on 7 April, Trump backed down. A two-week ceasefire was announced after mediation by Pakistan, where Washington’s traditional allies had failed to act. Iran agreed to allow passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the ceasefire period. Oil prices dropped eight percent within minutes. But Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, accepting the ceasefire on 8 April, issued a pointed clarification. “This does not signify the termination of the war. Our hands remain upon the trigger.”

The power that threatened to wipe out a civilisation failed to make its own deadline stick. Three ultimatums were set and withdrawn before the fourth produced a pause. The off-ramp was negotiated by a country that Brzezinski would have classified as a secondary player on the chessboard.

A confident hegemon behaves differently. The pattern of escalation, bluster, retreat, and re-escalation reveals an establishment that knows its position is eroding and is lurching between force and negotiation with no coherent strategy beyond buying time.

The war on Iran makes full sense when we consider Mackinder’s 1904 lecture and Brzezinski’s 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. Hold the Eurasian gateway or lose the world. In 2026, add the final layer. Lock the planet into a Western-built digital grid before any rival bloc can raise its own.

The desperation with which that project is being pursued, the expletives, the shifting deadlines, the threats of civilisational annihilation, tell you everything about how the architects of that project assess their own chances.

Iran, the ancient mystical land of Persia, has held this ground for five millennia. Every empire that tried to seize it, from the Macedonians to the Mongols to the British, paid a price too heavy to sustain. The land outlasted them all. Persia endures as a living civilisation, rooted in traditions older than any Western institution now claiming the right to reshape the world.

The question hanging over 2026 is whether an empire armed with cruise missiles, blockchain ledgers, artificial intelligence, and a social media account can break that record.

The accompanying article “The View From the Other Side of the Chessboard” can be read here.

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

When we talk about the ancient wisdom, at least in Western cultures, what we’re discussing is a vast heap of wreckage left behind by three savage campaigns of destruction.

The first of these hit in the twilight years of the ancient world, carried out by religious fanatics after Christianity was hijacked by the Roman elite and turned into an instrument of social control. The second came in the late Middle Ages when the Church hierarchy panicked at the rising tide of independent thought and created the Inquisition to stop free inquiry in its tracks. The third and most recent arrived with the Scientific Revolution when the rising mercantile-capitalist class embraced scientific materialism as its ideology of choice and used its power and wealth to crush alternative viewpoints. It’s a long and bitter story.

There’s another side to the tale, however. During each of these orgies of violence and oppression, there were people who risked everything to preserve what they could for the future. Afterwards, in turn, small groups of independent thinkers rejected the orthodoxies of their time and set out to recover some of what was lost. In the teeth of outraged resistance from the established institutions of the day and blind hostility from the masses, these succeeded in preserving some of the core teachings and practices of the old mystery traditions and reassembling others from the surviving fragments.

Imagine for a moment that some immense machine of glass and bronze was battered to pieces by a furious mob and the fragments trampled underfoot so that all that remained were fragments scattered through the gutters of a great city. Imagine that every record of the machine’s structure and function had been destroyed to keep anyone from figuring out how to rebuild it. Now imagine that many years later, you learn of the machine. Inspired by the old stories, you prowl the streets of the city, and when you find something that might once have been a piece of it, you pick it up, take it back home with you, clean off the grime, and then try to figure out how it might fit together with the other pieces you’ve already gathered, and what the shape of the whole machine might have been. This metaphor, taken from John Crowley’s visionary novel Aegypt, may give you some sense of the labour involved.

That work is still ongoing. Some parts of the ancient wisdom – some pieces of the machine, in terms of the metaphor – have been restored to full working order. Astrology and ceremonial magic, for example, were brought back into use in the nineteenth century, the former pioneered by Alan Leo and the latter by Eliphas Lévi; both can now be learned from many books and teachers, and practised with good results. Other elements of the tradition, such as alchemy and sacred geometry, are still only half-understood. Then there are fragments of the ancient lore that were destroyed so completely and lost for so long that they survive only as hints and whispers or as gaps where something once existed.

The Lost Word

One of those gaps lies at the centre of modern Freemasonry. Down through the years, there has been a vast amount of chatter about the secrets of Freemasonry, but there’s a detail that generally gets left out, though it can be found in plenty of publicly available sources: the Freemasons don’t have their original secrets any more. When a member is raised to the sublime degree of a Master Mason, he is told that the words and signs he is given are substitute secrets because the real secrets have been lost. To this day, every Master Mason is, at least in theory, pledged to the quest for the Lost Word.

What is this Lost Word? Nobody knows – not even the Masons. Of course, there’s no shortage of speculation. Devil worship, political conspiracy, kinky sex, the relics of a prehistoric civilisation on Mars, you name it, no matter how lurid or absurd, somebody has identified it as the Lost Word. Some of the other Masonic degrees pass on words that are supposed to be the Lost Word, but none agree on what it is or why it is so important.

Let’s go deeper. The Master Mason degree ritual used in regular Masonic jurisdictions today derives from an original that appeared around 1720, three years after the founding of the first Grand Lodge in London. There is no record of who introduced it or where it came from; it simply shows up. It tells a story about the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that story includes – indeed, centres on – the disappearance of the Lost Word and the invention of the substitute secrets, which are to be kept until the real secrets are recovered.

Thus, it is clear that in 1720, three linked ideas were so important to the most influential Masons of the time that they put them into the Craft’s most important ritual. The first of these ideas was that Masons of some earlier period had known some important secret; the second was that the Masons of 1720 no longer knew what the secret was but thought they had some hope of recovering it; and the third is that it had something to do with the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, one of the most famous buildings of the ancient world.

Power of the Temple

There’s plenty of information about the Temple of Solomon in ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish sources, as well as a vast modern scholarly literature on the subject. Most of it is fairly straightforward, but one very odd detail runs through the old sources. This is the claim that while the Temple stood, it caused a remarkable increase in agricultural fertility in the land around it. The Jewish sources go into quite a bit of detail about this: from the time when Solomon built the Temple to its destruction by the Babylonians, the weather and the soil fertility of the region were different. After the destruction of the first Temple, that stopped, but when the second Temple was built by Jewish refugees returning from Babylonia, the effect returned and stayed in place until the Romans destroyed the second Temple in 70 CE.

The Temple of Solomon isn’t the only ancient temple about which that same claim was made. You can find it in legends surrounding temples over much of the ancient world. Where it occurs, you find certain other things reliably associated with it. The temples are built above underground water sources and their sites have to be chosen by special means. A flurry of odd taboos govern who can or cannot enter and under what conditions. Usually, though not always, they are surrounded by at least a narrow green belt of natural vegetation. Above all, certain rules of alignment and sacred geometry govern their placement and design.

Geographically, this is a weirdly selective tradition. It doesn’t appear in Africa outside of Egypt, except in a few northeastern African countries that absorbed a great deal of ancient Egyptian culture. It is found all over the ancient Mediterranean and extends east to India and some, but not all, of the island chains further east. Then, it appears in Japan, where it plays a central role in Shinto shrines but not Buddhist temples. Finally, it crops up in the Christian churches of medieval western Europe but is absent from Orthodox Christianity, Islam, and post-temple Judaism.

Knights Templar

Western Europe in the Middle Ages apparently knew nothing about it until the time of the Crusades, where the tradition shows up first in churches built by the Knights Templar and spread from there. That turned out to be a clue of immense importance. The Templars – the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, to give them their original name – were founded in 1118 by nine French knights who had gone to Jerusalem with the First Crusade. They were dissolved by Pope Clement V in 1311 amid a flurry of charges of heresy and sorcery.

The Templars got their name because the original nine knights were housed on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, atop the ruins of Solomon’s Temple; by the time of their abolition, they had landholdings in most of the countries of Europe. When the Order was destroyed, some of the members were burned at the stake and others were transferred to monasteries of less militant orders where they lived out their lives as ordinary monks.

There were two exceptions to this. In Portugal, King Dinis created a new order, the Knights of Christ, and had all the Templars in Portugal transfer into it; the Knights of Christ proceeded to play a remarkably active role in the great age of Portuguese navigation, sailing straight to islands in the Atlantic that (in theory) nobody in Europe knew about. Then there was Scotland, where the Pope’s rulings had no force because the whole country just then was under an interdict, and where Robert the Bruce was leading a war of independence against the English and needed every competent soldier he could get.

The Knights Templar had a significant presence in Scotland at that time; the village now called Temple, located next to the mysterious Roslyn Chapel, was their headquarters in the kingdom, but they also had many other properties and plenty of knights and officials to supervise them. Masonic tradition insists that the Scottish Templars promptly made a deal with Robert the Bruce. They fought for him at Bannockburn and elsewhere, and in return, he protected them from the Church and let them go quietly to ground.

The tradition proceeds to claim that since the Templars had their own master builders and stonemasons – they had to since they themselves built the castles, churches, and other structures on their landholdings – some of these Scottish Templars ended up supporting themselves as master masons in the original sense of that term, and from that source, certain Templar legacies found their way into Freemasonry. It’s a matter of historical record, finally, that Freemasonry as we now know it, was in existence in Scotland most of a century before it appeared anywhere else.

All of this is familiar ground to most people aware of alternative history. What deserves attention here are the charges levelled against the Templars when the order was dissolved. Much of it was the same sort of canned libels that would be used later in the witch trials; some of it had intriguing parallels to the actual practice of heretical Christian sects in ancient and medieval times, which deserve more attention than they’ve gotten in the historical literature to date; but then there was the claim that they worshipped a mysterious idol named Baphomet, which made the crops grow. There was the issue of agricultural fertility again.

Holy Grail

That issue pops up again in another place at precisely the same time. The oldest known version of the story of the Holy Grail was written around 1190 by Chretien de Troyes, who claimed he’d gotten the story from Count Philip of Flanders, a Crusader who had close connections with the Knights Templar and the royal house of Jerusalem. Between 1190 and 1250 – that is, during the golden age of the Templars – the Grail got massive play in popular literature. They were strange stories, these legends of the Grail; they spoke of a secret passed down through the centuries by hidden guardians, which could only be revealed to those who asked the right question.

What is the Grail? That was one of the questions those who sought the Grail had to ask. A later generation of authors, heavily invested in mainstream Christianity, insisted that the Grail was the cup Jesus of Nazareth used at the Last Supper and redefined the secrets of the Grail as those of ordinary Christian theology. Go back to the earliest surviving Grail stories, those by Chretien de Troyes or Wolfram von Eschenbach, and you land in a far stranger world where the Grail could take many forms, and its ultimate secret was the power to make the fields flourish. That was why King Arthur’s knights went out in search of the Grail: it alone could restore the barren wasteland to fertility.

All this happened as sacred geometries and other traditions that were part of the temple tradition elsewhere in the world found their way into medieval European religious architecture. In its wake, monasteries were founded all over western Europe in desolate areas, which promptly became burgeoning agricultural regions capable of supporting not only monks but thriving villages. To this day, all across Europe, you can visit the ruins of long-abandoned settlements from the Middle Ages in barren upland regions that nowadays barely produce enough grass for sheep; old records and archaeological remains alike show that these villages once had thriving fields of grain and other crops – and in the centre of each is a church laid out according to the sacred geometries of the temple tradition.

Temple technology

Up out of the darkness of the centuries, like a shape in the mist, rises the dim shape of a forgotten technology – the temple technology, as I came to call it – that was once used by priests and priestesses across much of the Old World to make the fields flourish. Long before the beginning of recorded history, perhaps by sheer chance, perhaps through other means, people in certain parts of the world noticed that buildings of specific shapes built and aligned in particular ways affected the crops grown in nearby fields. Over millennia of trial and error, that original insight gave rise to two kinds of structures.

One of them uses structures shaped more or less like a stair-step pyramid: large ones, like the ziggurats of Babylon or the pyramids of the Mayas, or small ones, like the earth-deity altars that used to be found in every village in China before the 1949 revolution. The other uses square or rectangular buildings, usually oriented to the rising sun, which seems to have functioned as a resonance chamber. Both kinds of structures were built over certain specific geological features that create electrical discontinuities in the ground.

This matters because there are currents of electricity and lines of magnetic force, closely associated with one another, moving through the body of the Earth. Back in the 1920s, before the chemical industry got a stranglehold on corporate agriculture with their toxic fertilisers and pesticides, experimenters working with these earth currents developed a system called “electroculture” which sent a slight electrical charge through the soil; this resulted in sharply improved harvests. A building properly sited atop an electrical discontinuity in the earth, as it turns out, can build up a substantial charge of telluric electricity, which then streams outward through conductive areas in the soil.

This was one of the secrets of the Templars, one of the reasons that their landholdings in Europe produced bumper crops year after year to help pay for the Order’s castles in the Holy Land. In past ages, it had been a secret kept by many priesthoods and played a role in many ancient mystery initiations. (The Eleusinian mysteries, to cite only one example, centred on the fertility goddesses Demeter and Persephone, and at the climactic moment of the initiation ceremony, the new initiates were shown a newly reaped ear of grain.) It is one of the secrets of the Grail, and it – or more precisely, a word or phrase passed down from the Templars, probably in garbled form, that once communicated it – is the original Lost Word of the Freemasons. That, at least, is the most likely explanation for the tangled web of evidence that surrounds the old temple technology.

Like so many of the legacies of the ancient wisdom, the temple technology has been lost. The monasteries that once preserved it in Europe were destroyed in Protestant countries and subjected to the rigid ideological discipline of the Counter-Reformation in Catholic countries, breaking the links by which the knowledge was once transmitted from generation to generation. Elsewhere in the world, three centuries of colonialism, breakneck modernisation, and global warfare have left little intact, though it’s possible that even today, oral traditions at some isolated Indian temple or documents in a remote Shinto shrine might record some of the secrets of the lost temple technology.

One way or another, however, it is still possible for the Lost Word to be restored and the Holy Grail found. There are plenty of reasons why the global corporate monoculture might want to hide every surviving trace of a simple and scalable technology that uses natural energies and practices linked to traditional spirituality to make gardens thrive and fields bear bumper crops. Every one of those is also a reason why independent thinkers and researchers in today’s rising alternative culture might be interested in finding those traces and following them.

In terms of the metaphor introduced earlier, this is an important part of the lost machine and one that might be rebuilt and put to work. I can only hope that others will hear the call and join the quest for the Word that once made the fields flourish. 

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

The religion of Thelema, founded by British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947) last century, proclaimed a new “Aeon of Horus” based on “force and fire.” According to its ‘bible’, Liber Al vel Legis (The Book of the Law), it is a stellar or star-oriented religion. 

In his introduction to Liber Al, Crowley states that Liber Al “explains the universe.” The Thelemic dictum, “every man and every woman is a star,” places humanity in a stellar context, with each ‘star’ having its own ‘orbit’ through which it expresses its own ‘will’ (Greek = Thelema). The opening lines of Liber Al proclaim Nuit, the Egyptian sky goddess representing space, “invoking the company of heaven.” Nuit is to be “invoked under the stars.” 

Crowley claimed to have received his ‘revelation’ astrally from a ‘praeterhuman’ intelligence – Aiwass – representing the gods of a certain equinox. There are three aeons in Thelema based on three Egyptian gods: Isis (goddess worship), Osiris (dying and resurrected god – including Christianity), and Horus, the hawk-headed god that presides over the new (incoming) aeon. 

While stellar references are used allegorically, Crowley wondered whether there is also “some real connection between a given persona and a given star.” 

Among the sundry bohemians and intellectuals attracted to Thelema, including artists, poets, and academics, was one John (Jack) Whiteside Parsons (1914–1952), a seminal figure in setting humanity on the exploration of outer space. 

As we will explore later, Parsons attempted to invoke Babalon, the ‘Scarlet Woman’ of Thelema, as the manifestation of Nuit. He also penned what he proclaimed to be the ‘fourth chapter’ of Liber Al (given to Crowley in three chapters), ushering the Aeon of Babalon. 

Thelemic ‘War Machine’

The Aeon of Horus was to be ushered by cataclysmic events. As a sign of the times, Crowley referred to “war, the atrocities which occur on a daily basis and leave us unmoved and hardly worried.” 

Book III of Liber Al, relating to the Aeon of Horus, is a martial doctrine that refers to Horus as “a god of war and of vengeance,” stating that he would deal harshly with his enemies. Next, a “war machine” is referred to as something to be given to Thelemites. Liber Al states, “With it ye shall smite the peoples; and none shall stand before you.” 

Such apocalyptic visions of creating a “war machine” for Thelema would motivate Parsons. 

Crowley refers to another aeon after that of Horus and the emergence of “another prophet” to assume Crowley’s “throne.” He refers to this new prophet who would “bring fresh fever from the skies.” 

There were several claimants to this mantle while the current aeon and Crowley were still around. Parsons declared himself and that his aeon was Babalon. Crowley did not like the idea of a prophet emerging while he still lived. Crowley considered Parsons dangerously foolish, and Parsons broke with Crowley. 

Both Crowley and Parsons based their magickal workings on Enochian. Beginning in 1581, Dr John Dee and his assistant Edward Kelley devised a system of astral communication with so-called ‘angels’ using a system of ‘Calls’, inscribed tablets, and the Enochian alphabet and language. The eighteen ‘Enochian Calls’ are full of fiery imagery. The ‘Tenth Call’ refers to the Earth “burning day and night, and vomit out the heads of scorpions, and live sulphur mingled with poison.” 

In a magickal ritual performed in the Tunisian desert on 7 November 1923, Crowley “quizzed a discarnate intelligence about what The Book of the Law’s third chapter meant by a ‘war engine’, described as a gift of Ra Hoor Khuit, the Sun in its martial aspect.” In a note, Crowley wrote that the ritual brought a vision “not incongruous with my idea of the new Energy.” 

Crowley sent the material drawn from the ritual to Thelemite mathematician Prof. Norman Mudd for interpretation. Crowley biographer Tobias Churton comments: “The notes show drawings, images, and algebraic concepts suggestive of nuclear fission. Extraordinarily striking for a North African vision in 1923, the notes, with hindsight, suggest the ‘war engine’ was nothing less than an atomic bomb.”

Founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratory

In 1945, Crowley wrote to the novelist Louis Umfraville Wilkinson, a Thelemite, that “The Atomic Bomb is interesting, not only because of Liber Al, chapter III, verses 7 and 8, but because one of the men who were working on it was for some time at the Abbey in Cefalu.” For a period, Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema (in Cefalu, Sicily) was where his community of disciples practised the doctrines of Thelema and performed magickal rituals.

In 1936, Dr. Theodore von Kármán, director of the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), founded the Aerojet rocket motor company with Frank Malina, a Communist sympathiser, and Jack Parsons. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) emerged from GALCIT in 1943 after the project came under the auspices of the US military. 

Kármán was a descendant of the famous Hasidic (Cabalistic) Rabbi Yehuda Loew ben Bezalel, the 16th century ‘Exalted’ Rabbi of Prague, astronomer, and, according to Jewish legend, creator of the ‘Golem of Prague’. Kármán was the great-grandson of Moses ben Menachem Mendel Kuntitz, a scholar of the Zohar, the main body of Cabalistic mysticism. 

Parsons, Malina and several others became known as the ‘Suicide Squad’ for their dangerous use of explosives and were subsequently moved from the CALTECH campus. From 1941, the US military lavished funding on GALCIT, and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation was founded in 1942 to meet its expanding requirements. 

Parsons’ contributions to solid propellant rocketry led to the development of the solid motors on the Space Shuttle and the motors in the Minuteman missile. A crater on the Moon’s dark side is named in his honour. After World War II, the work that Parsons undertook on liquid and solid-state fuel led directly to the US space programme. 

Liber 49 

Parsons became a devotee of Crowley in 1939. He joined Agape Lodge, the Los Angeles branch of Crowley’s organisation, Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and was initiated in 1941. After his first wife left him for the lodge’s head, Wilfred Smith, he assumed leadership in 1943. The OTO temple was moved to Parsons’ mansion in Pasadena. 

When Parsons undertook his ‘Babalon Working’ in 1946, Crowley responded by stating, “I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these goats.” With artist, poet and actress Marjorie Cameron as his ‘Scarlet Woman’, they intended to evoke Babalon to worldly manifestation by creating a magickal child, although Parsons later considered Cameron to be that incarnation.

According to Kenneth Grant, Crowley “wrote Parsons off as yet another failure,” and Parsons resigned from the OTO in August 1946. 

As a result of the Babalon Working, Parsons proclaimed himself “Belarion Antichrist” and issued a new revelation, Liber 49 – a fourth chapter of Crowley’s Liber Al – ushering the Age of Babalon.

Like the ‘Enochian Calls’, Liber 49 is reminiscent of the Apocalypse of St. John. While John’s Revelation announces the return of Christ after an apocalypse, Parsons believed that an apocalypse would bring forth a New Aeon of the Antichrist and Babalon. 

In martial spirit, continuing the legacy of Horus, Babalon proclaims that she will come via her daughter as a “penelous (sic) flame,” “a trumpet in judgement halls,” “a banner before armies,” to “judge nations” with “force and fire.” Those who resist will be destroyed: “None shall resist thee, whom I lovest. Though they call thee harlot and whore, shameless, false, evil, these words shall be blood in their mouths, and dust thereafter.” 

Parsons, as Antichrist, had undertaken his “black pilgrimage” in the Mojave Desert on Babalon’s command. He swore that he would fulfil Babalon’s rule on Earth and published his manifesto: “And in my name BELARION shall they work miracles, and confound our enemies, and none shall stand before us.”

Enochian 

The occult scholar Donald Tyson writes of the Enochian workings that John Dee believed the ‘angels’ he was evoking were servants of God, whereas Edward Kelley thought they might be deceivers. Tyson says these ‘angels’, by fooling Dee, used him to introduce a ritual working that would usher the Apocalypse. The working was aimed at opening the gates of the Watchtowers that guard against the intrusion of satanic powers into this universe. Tyson states that Dee was blind as to the true function of the ‘Enochian Keys’. He also claims Crowley failed to complete the entire apocalyptic Enochian Working despite his exuberance for the subject and his claim to be the Antichrist.

Parsons took on that mantle, broke with Crowley, and aimed to bring forth the Apocalypse by more direct means. Parsons is said to have recited Crowley’s poem ‘Hymn to Pan’ and danced at the launching of rockets by the JPL. It seems that he regarded each rocket launch as a ritual working.

Babalon

An academic study has been written on Babalon. Manon Hedenborg White references the Enochian magickal working of Crowley and Victor Neuburg in the Algerian desert in 1909, in which Crowley had a vision of the apocalyptic Whore of Babylon. He rendered this as “Babalon,” and incorporated it into Thelema as the primary goddess, who had been prophesied in Liber Al five years previously. In origin, Babalon is a generic name for ‘wicked’ in Enochian and related to the word ‘babalond’ meaning ‘harlot’. Apparently, she also communicated through her ‘daughter’ in the form of “a spirit called Madimi” to Dee and Kelley.

Chapter 5 of White’s study is devoted to Parsons’ interpretation of Babalon. After rituals with Cameron during January and February, Parsons went alone into the Mojave Desert, where he evoked Babalon and transcribed Liber 49 as the fourth chapter of Liber Al. Of course, Crowley had already disowned Parsons. 

While the Aeon of Babalon was intended to balance the “force and fire” of the martial Aeon of Horus, Parsons’ conception of Babalon nonetheless gloried in the biblical image of the Great Whore of Babylon foretold in the Revelation of John, “drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs.” 

Where the biblical Whore of Babylon is generally considered to describe a corrupt system, to Crowley and Parsons, Babylon rendered as Babalon describes a terrible goddess bringing apocalyptic desolation to the world before ushering a new aeon. Hence, Parsons describes Babalon as “the dark mother of anarchy and abominations,” which he compares to Kali and Lilith. 

Parsons & Israel

Parsons drew the attention of the FBI. He was noted as a bohemian living with various other suspect characters, indulging in orgies and black magic rites at his mansion. 

In September 1950, Parsons was identified as having removed restricted, confidential and classified documents on jet propulsion motors and rocket propellants from Hughes Aircraft Company, California. Parsons had worked there since 1949 as “group leader” in charge of propellants, propulsion and launching systems. In a statement to the FBI dated 27 September 1950, Parsons declared that he had taken the classified material for the purpose of preparing proposals for work in Israel.

In his astral visions, Parsons “arrived at Chorazin in the dominion of the Antichrist.” Manon Hedenborg White writes that in Parsons’ astral vision, he emerges as the Antichrist at Chorazin. 

Located near the Seas of Galilee in present-day Israel and now in ruins, Chorazin is mentioned in the Bible as one of three villages cursed by Jesus for failing to accept his teachings. Some medieval theologians believed that the Antichrist might come to be born in Chorazin. This notion clearly influenced Parsons, who explicitly calls the location “the city of the Anti-Christ” and believed that his astral journey marked his transition into the figure. 

Here, we begin to see why the State of Israel might have assumed central importance in Parsons’ belief he was the Antichrist at the inauguration of the Aeon of Babalon. 

The FBI files state that Parsons had read in technical magazines about research in Israel. In September or October 1949, that is to say, the year of his assumption to the role of Antichrist, he made contact with an Israeli agent who requested him to prepare a proposal “regarding the building of an explosives plant in Israel and data concerning rockets and other armaments which Parsons would be able to conduct research work on in Israel.” In August 1950, he was asked to submit costs for “a jet propulsion development program on which Parsons could do research work in Israel.” The initial contact with what Parsons said to the FBI was a “business consultant,” whom the FBI identified as “a representative of the Israeli Government” living in North Hollywood, came through the American Technion Society. 

The FBI report states that the Technion Society was designated officially by both the Israeli Government and Israeli industry as the “American body” through which the latest in US technology was conveyed to Israel. The Technion Society was another name for the “American Society for the Advancement of the Hebrew Institute of Technology in Haifa, Palestine, Inc.” (Los Angeles File, a-27-49). The file states that “this organisation publishes the Technion Yearbook and the society is also known as the ‘American Technion Society’.” A statement dated 2 December 1950 in the FBI files mentions that Dr. Theodore von Kármán had recommended Parsons contact what seems to be (the words are blacked out) the American Technion Society. It seems that Kármán, Parsons’ mentor and one of the most distinguished names in rocket science, had facilitated his communication with Israel for the purposes of espionage. 

Parsons had his security clearance suspended in 1948 because of his involvement with a “cult” and associating with an “alleged Communist Party member.” This suspension was removed the following year. US Assistant Attorney General McEachen declined to prosecute due to a lack of evidence that taking classified documents for use by Israel was “injurious to the USA or to the advantage of another nation,” but Parsons’ security clearance was again revoked on 9 January 1952.

As the self-declared Antichrist who would usher the Apocalypse, Parsons was uniquely positioned to do so as one of the fathers of US rocketry. It is significant that he intended to settle in Israel and sought to persuade the Israelis that he could establish a missile programme. In his role as Antichrist, it seems credible that Parsons envisaged settling in Israel at the location where the Apocalypse is supposed to unfold from the battle of Armageddon. 

It also seems likely that Parsons saw a vision of nuclear devastation in the fiery Apocalypse described by St John in The Revelation. One of the world’s most eminent experts in rocket chemistry, someone with such a mission as Parsons, was uniquely placed to complete the Enochian Working with the benefits of modern apocalyptic science that he helped in large measure to create.

Parsons’ hopes of going to Israel did not eventuate. It is debated as to whether the enormous explosion that killed Parsons on 17 June 1952 when he was handling chemicals on his property was an accident, murder, or suicide. 

Or perhaps it was a self-immolation rite to Babalon, a final fiery embrace intended as a sacrifice to inaugurate the Aeon?

Footnotes

1. Crowley, Liber Al (York Beach, Maine, 1976), 1: 1-3.

2. Ibid., 1: 57. 

3. Aleister Crowley, The Law is for All (Arizona: Falcon Press, 1985), 72-73. 

4. Crowley, Introduction to Liber Al, IV: The New Aeon, 13. 

5. Ibid., 3: 6-8, 39. 

6. Ibid., 3: 34, 42-43. 

7. Donald C. Laycock, The Complete Enochian Dictionary (London: Askin Publishers, 1978), The Tenth Call, 257. 

8. Tobias Churton, Aleister Crowley: The Biography (London: Watkins Publishing, 2011), 274. 

9. Ibid.

10. Crowley to Wilkinson, 7 August 1945, cited by Kenneth Grant, Cults of the Shadow (London: Frederick Muller, 1975), 115. 

11. S. Goldstein, ‘Theodore von Kármán’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 12, November 1966, 334-365. 

13. Kenneth Grant, The Magical Revival (London: Frederick Muller, 1972), 166. 

12. Henrik Bogdan, The Babalon Working 1946: L. Ron Hubbard, Jack Whiteside Parsons, and the Practice of Enochian Magic, Numen, No. 63, 2016, 28. 

14. Jack Parsons, Liber 49, The Book of Babalon (1946) v. 10, sacred-texts.com/oto/lib49.htm

15. Ibid., v. 40.

16. Ibid., v. 41. 

17. Jack Parsons, Liber 49, Part II: The Manifesto of the Antichrist. 

18. Donald Tyson, The Enochian Apocalypse, Gnosis Magazine, Summer 1996, bibliotecapleyades.net/bb/bluebook418.htm

19. Geoffrey Landis, The Three Rocketeers, American Scientist, July-August 2005, americanscientist.org/article/the-three-rocketeers

20. Manon Hedenborg White, The Eloquent Blood: The Goddess Babalon & the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2020)

21. Donald C. Laycock, 83. 

22. Revelation 17:6. 

23. Manon Hedenborg White, 136. 

24. Manon Hedenborg White, 138.

25. Ibid., 139. 

26. ‘John Whitside Parsons’, FBI File No. 65-59589, 2 November 1950, ia902704.us.archive.org/27/items/marvel-whiteside-parsons/John%20Parsons%2001_text.pdf

27. Ibid., 29 September 1950. 

28. Ibid.

29. Ibid., McEachen to Parsons, 13 November 1951. 

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Time appears to march on at what seems a constant rate. In this way, time has two opposite directions, the somewhat known past and the largely unknown future. However, events in the sky repeat and so they can be predicted as seasons within a year or lunar phases within a month. Even before modern calendars, Stone Age humans counted the days in a month to understand the recurrence of the menstrual period and know when moonlight would be strong again at night. 

Stone Age Origins of Time

Two months happen to equal 59 whole days: a lunar month is 29.53 days long, just over twenty-nine and a half, which is half of 59. In the artefact shown at the top of Figure 2, each day was carved upon a flat bone, each mark appearing varied in shape and depth to show the Moon’s changed phase on a given day. The flat bone enabled a cyclic shape to be used, of 59 marks, which “ate its own tail,” showing there was always the same number of days in two “moons.” This sameness emerges from dividing the recurring time of the solar day into the time of the month’s phases over two months to give the recurring whole number of 59, then forever useful as a knowledge object.

The solar day clearly has the same duration every day, and two lunar months clearly repeat twice after 59 days. But our modern life is the extended straight line of day numbers belonging to unequal months of the Sun so that the loops that recur are lost in the framework of man-made time. The Stone Age “lesson from nature” was that events in the sky largely run according to a definite schedule along cyclic paths, most of these being along the path of the Sun, along which the Sun, Moon, and planets follow their own cyclicities, seen from the Earth. 

This reliable cyclicity shaped our notion of an unchanging realm of Eternity, different to Life upon the Earth as our ever-developing present moments within Existence. In this way, knowledge from the sky came to be considered sacred and interconnected through numbers when counted as days and months, especially through counting the often identically sized discs of the Sun and Moon and their respective years.

While astronomy started as a Stone Age hobby, it later became a tribal science quite unlike our own astrophysics. Only later would farmers support city specialists who assimilated this prehistoric science by forming religious sciences and cosmologies in the East, such as Egypt, Babylonia, India, China, and so on. 

Millennia later, the 16th century altogether discarded this geocentric view-from-the-Earth and adopted a new heliocentric view of the solar system, which enabled the planetary orbits of the Sun to be clearly seen as mathematical ellipses by Kepler. This system was soon seen to be held together by Newton’s newly intuited force, gravity, of the central Sun’s large mass.

If counting the Moon had synchronised both female fertility and male hunting, then this shaped the format we call the hunter-gatherer who foraged for food before there was farming. Their women formed a naturally less-mobile core for the tribe and its children, the men hunting over extensive ranges. All adults worked together for the greater good, and since they were in-common descended from the women, a matrilineal society was an effective format for problems requiring larger groups. 

Stone Age art of the goddess seems to have been varied and geometrical (see Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas). In Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, myexperience in analysing megalithic sites caused me to question whether the megalithic monuments were the work of Neolithic or a New Stone Age farming revolution moving west from the Middle East where it started. Because the farming revolution only advanced slowly through central Europe and towards the Atlantic coast (see Figure 3), it pretty much avoided the Mediterranean. 

The megalithic revolution largely took place within the islands and hinterlands of the Mediterranean and Atlantic Coast of Europe between 5000 BCE and 2500 BCE. It was, therefore, much more likely to have been carried out by the late middle Stone Age (Mesolithic) people before the farming way of life arrived. The indigenous culture of old Europe was Mesolithic – well-established and centred around women, foraging, and matrilineage (using your mother’s name) rather than the neolithic norm, led by men – farming and patrilineage (using your father’s name). 

Clash of the Titans

Being indigenous, matrilineal tribes were far more likely and able to innovate megalithic astronomy, which was effectively inherited from the long tradition of day counting seen on Stone Age tallies like the Blanchard plaque. 

This continuity of interest in the sky conflicts with today’s model of history and our foundation myth for modern science – as the grandchild of ancient Near Eastern civilisations and exact sciences, fuelled by farming on fertile soils using irrigation. 

By comparing day counts, sky time could be given geometrical forms such as circles, squares, and rectangles/triangles, and these were rightfully considered sacred by the coherent megalithic culture on Europe’s shores. The civilisation was numerate and intelligent, but not Stone Age in the vernacular sense, of having no ability to reason. 

Having an extended family of adults and no urgent need to seasonally grow crops, conserve seeds or tend their animals, nature already provided food through foraging. There was a natural collaborative workforce, perhaps explaining the dearth of neolithic settlements alongside the earliest megalithic monuments. 

Having overcome this misnomer that megaliths were automatically neolithic, further work is required to see why modern science cannot understand sky phenomena like the Stone Age did. Today, we do not study the synodic periods of the planets because they are seen as merely an incidental composite of the planetary orbits and our solar year. 

Quite unexpectedly, the view from the Earth is supremely important since the structure of time on Earth is a phenomenon reflecting the form and structure of the numerical world. This suggests that the Earth was, in some way, influenced by the abstract world of numbers to form this type of time environment. It might also suggest that the evolution of Life was an intended outcome for the third planet. 

Having discarded the Earth-centred model of the universe and ridding ourselves of the religions and gods proposed to explain this phenomenon, modern humans are free to live in an accidental universe where one is simply alive on an existential line-of-time with no end except for death, and without any appreciation of the deeper structural recurrences implicate within the sky. Instead, there is a hotch-potch Roman calendar whose roots were largely man-made.

The Greek myths referred to women but in ways designed to put matrilineage norms in a bad light. The patriarchal farmers of Jupiter-Zeus had defeated the religion of the Goddess whose representatives had snakes (perhaps the dreadlocks of the Medusa or knowledge of the snake-shaped ecliptic) or had kept men sexually enslaved on an island (as in the Odyssey) or sacrificed a sacred king after “a year…” (of 364 days) “…and a day” (making 365 in all). Our 7-day week derives from this Saturnian year of 364 days (52 weeks), named because the synod of Saturn is exactly 378 days (54 weeks) while the synod of Jupiter is 57 weeks. 

In this, one is seeing through a series of invisible filters – the ancient Greeks were against the tribal age that preceded farming and cities, when women rather than men were most important to that way-of-life. 

The Enlightenment adopted the heliocentric planets as a binary, removing the foundations of a vast past cultural corpus of religious and pre-scientific thought that had quite reasonably shown something special about the world that modern science never chooses to see. 

If we fathom megalithic astronomy, its uniquely powerful discoveries reveal what the religious texts were about: Earth’s favourable environment is no accident; it is a planet for the evolution of Life. 

Megalithic discoveries were transmitted subconsciously into the cultural subconscious of later civilisations. This impulse still informs and infects our arts and the classical form of numeracy called mathematics. 

This diffusion benefited from the clash of the Titans, namely between the matriarchal and patriarchal ways of life in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant. It was recorded in the intellectual life of the Greeks and Hebrews, thus informing the Islamic and Christian world views as a code of numbers and stories often agreeing with those of the East. 

Continuity in Sacred Building 

If you know how to look, one finds the units of measure and geometries of the megalithic repeated in later sacred buildings, built under disparate religions, as if the design of sacred buildings had some sort of megalithic origin. 

The Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Minoan, Classical Greek, Romanesque, Islamic, South Asian, Amerindian, Gothic, Sufi, and Renaissance buildings draw upon common geometric and metrological blueprints relating, for example, to the relative size of the Earth and Moon, and the sophisticated celestial time cycles such as eclipse phenomena, as if to celebrate the cosmic environment even though many religions conceptualised the heavens as if not found in the sky. 

For this reason, my books explore buildings of the historical period in the same way as megalithic buildings to demonstrate this continuity of an invisible language, as if there are people with megalithic knowledge behind the construction of buildings without the outer religion officially acknowledging this fact. 

In some strange way, others and I are recapitulating ancient works in terms of their meaning by employing skills belonging to the past. For example,

In Cappadocia, Turkey, stone-cut churches inexplicably contain high levels of meaning in their dimensions and definition of circular apse and rectangular naos occupied by hermit monks. 

Angkor Wat is shown to be a massive statement of astronomical cyclicities alongside an outer meaning of Vedic mythological carving and Indian temple design. 

St Peter’s Basilica was a Renaissance rebuilding involving many great architects, including Michaelangelo, who displayed sacred geometrical skill in translating a Greek square-cross basilica design into a Latin cross cathedral design through the golden mean relationship of a square to such a rectangle (see Figure 5). St Peter’s tomb is in the centre of a model of the Earth and Moon.

Chapter 11 of my 2024 book Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures: The Divine Science of the Female Priesthood demonstrates that the equal perimeter model of the Earth and Moon had been related to the now-abandoned geocentric model. 

The Earth is at the centre, and a system of growing square areas for each planet’s synod grows to embrace the whole figure, revealing that it was the archetypal form taken as the norm for Buddhist Mandalas. Jungian therapists and others use Mandalas to enable interaction with the subconscious mind. This suggests that our very being, as microcosmos, is part of the Earth and its planetary Sky environment of time. 

Celestial time appears to be a carrier wave for reality, not just a straight line.

The author’s book Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures: The Divine Science of the Female Priesthood is available to purchase.

Images courtesy of Richard Heath and the publisher Inner Traditions International. 

References

Barry Cunliffe, Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC to AD 1000, Yale 2008. 

Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess, Thames & Hudson 1989.

Richard Heath, Sacred Geometry in Ancient Goddess Cultures, Inner Traditions 2024. 

Richard Heath, Sacred Geometry: Language of the Angels, Inner Traditions 2021. 

Richard Heath, Tragic Loss of the Geocentric Arts and Sciences: When Poetry was the Language of Cosmology, New Dawn #185 (Mar-Apr 2021), sacred.numbersciences.org/2023/06/03/tragic-loss-of-the-geocentric-arts-and-sciences.

Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man’s first Art, Symbol and Notation, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1972.

Bettina Schulz Paulsson, Time and Stone. The Emergence and Development of Megaliths and Megalithic Societies in Europe, Archaeopress 2017. 

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Best known to the wider world through the Hollywood interpretations of his works Blade Runner (from the book Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?), Total Recall, Minority Report and others, Philip K. Dick was certainly not a typical ‘science-fiction’ writer.

Although his early books might indeed have featured ‘zap guns’ and ‘androids’, they generally did so only as ironic props in stories of bewildered human protagonists displaced by emergent technological absurdities and hostile bureaucracies.

Often plagued by relationship breakdowns (he had four wives) and an adventurous attitude to drug use, Dick wrote an extraordinary series of novels across the 1970s (and early 1980s) that have come to be known as his metaphysical or theological canon.

Inspired by a chain of otherworldly and mystical events in February and March of 1974 – Dick had often previously written of the fragile nature of what we perceive to be ‘reality’ – he now manifested a cogent and strikingly timeless alternate cosmology.

In essence, beginning with his novel Valis (originally written in 1978 but not published until 1981), Dick argued that the Roman Empire had never truly ended but instead transformed and adapted, continuing to dominate human civilisation through different masks and institutions.

In his view, what we perceive as historical progression – the fall of Rome, the rise of Christianity, the development of modern nations – was largely illusory. Beneath these surface changes, the same imperial power structure or spirit remained intact, continuously subjugating humanity.

That concept was deeply rooted in Gnostic philosophy, which Dick encountered (largely through the Nag Hammadi scriptures) during the intense metaphysical period following his transformative 1974 experiences. In Gnostic thought, the material world is ruled by a false god (or Demiurge) which keeps humans trapped in ignorance. Dick mapped this onto his understanding of the Roman Empire, seeing it as the earthly manifestation of this malign cosmic force.

Described as “The Empire That Never Ended,” it was one of Philip K. Dick’s most profound and complex philosophical concepts, central to these theological works and his sci-fi-tinged personal spiritual perspective.

The “Empire,” in Dick’s view, had constructed a “Black Iron Prison” – another key concept in his work – a metaphysical cage that traps human consciousness. This prison operates through multiple vectors, often hidden in plain sight:

• Deception and illusion: Making people believe they are free while actually being controlled.
• Information control: Manipulating what people know and believe.
• Psychological oppression: Creating systems that make resistance seem impossible or pointless.
• Spiritual blindness: Preventing people from recognising their true divine nature.

Dick argued that the Empire’s continuation could be traced through various historical periods:

• Early Christianity: Rather than defeating the Empire, Christianity was co-opted and became another tool of imperial control. The institutional church became a new form of Roman authority.
• Medieval Period: Feudalism and the Holy Roman Empire represented direct continuations of Roman imperial structure.
• Modern Era: Contemporary governments, corporations, and institutions all serve as manifestations of the same underlying malevolent imperial power.

The methods may have become more sophisticated – psychological manipulation rather than direct, brute force – but the essential structure remained unchanged.

In Dick’s universe, the Empire is opposed by a divine force he sometimes called “VALIS” (“Vast Active Living Intelligence System”), represented, in the book of the same name, by a self-aware satellite that orbits Earth, shooting Gnosis (divine knowledge) through a blinding pink laser beam. This plot device presented authentic divine consciousness attempting to break the illusion and liberate humanity.

Dick believed that around 70 CE, with the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, time itself became corrupted or trapped. This wasn’t simply a historical event but a cosmic catastrophe that fundamentally altered the nature of reality. In his cosmology, we are all living in a kind of temporal loop or stasis, where the same imperial patterns repeat endlessly under different disguises.

This temporal imprisonment means that what we perceive as progress – technological advancement, social evolution, political change – is largely illusory. The essential power structures remain unchanged because time itself has been hijacked by the imperial force. We experience the sensation of moving forward while actually trapped in the same historical moment.

While couched across the novels Valis (1981), The Divine Invasion (1981), The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer (1982) and the astounding Radio Free Albemuth (originally written in 1976 but published posthumously in 1985) as a kind of quasi-hallucinogenic science-fiction mysticism, it should not be difficult to see Dick’s vision as hauntingly prescient and direly accurate of our historical and current circumstances.

According to Dick, the Empire now maintains its power through increasingly sophisticated methods:

• Information Warfare: Rather than crude physical oppression, the Empire now operates primarily through the manipulation of information and perception. People are controlled not by chains but by false beliefs about reality itself.
• Psychological Programming: The Empire creates mental patterns that make resistance seem impossible or pointless. People become complicit in their own oppression by accepting the Empire’s version of reality as natural and inevitable.
• Institutional Capture: Every institution that might oppose the Empire – religion, education, media, government – is eventually captured and turned into another tool of control. Revolutionary movements are co-opted before they can pose any real threat.
• Temporal Confusion: By keeping people trapped in the false timeline, the Empire prevents them from recognising the true nature of their situation. People cannot resist what they cannot perceive.

His “Black Iron Prison” also represents the metaphysical structure that enforces the Empire’s control. It was Dick’s most powerful metaphor for the nature of oppression itself. Indeed, the Black Iron Prison is not a physical location but a state of consciousness – or rather, unconsciousness. The Prison functions through:

• Perceptual Limitation: The prison limits what people perceive and understand. Reality appears solid and unchangeable because the prison prevents people from seeing its constructed nature.
• Ideological Constraint: The prison functions through belief systems that make alternatives seem impossible. People remain trapped not because they cannot leave, but because they cannot imagine freedom.
• Temporal Imprisonment: Like the Empire, the prison operates through time distortion. People experience the illusion of temporal progression while actually being held in stasis.
• Collective Delusion: The prison is maintained through shared false beliefs. It’s a consensus reality that people collectively create and maintain, even as it oppresses them.

Directly intersecting with contemporary descriptions such as Matthias Desmet’s concept of “Mass Formation Psychosis” and the heaving totalitarianism that surfaced during the COVID Operation, there seems little doubt that Philip K. Dick’s ‘paranoid’ cosmology presents a vital roadmap for attempting to understand what passes for the spiritual, political, philosophical and informational landscape of the 21st century.

In classical Gnostic thought, the Demiurge is a false creator god who has trapped divine sparks (human souls) in the material world. Dick identified this figure with the “Empire That Never Ended,” seeing the Demiurge as the cosmic principle behind all earthly oppression.

While traditional Gnosticism often portrays the Demiurge as a cosmic principle, Dick historicised it, seeing it as actively manifesting through specific human institutions and historical periods. The Roman Empire wasn’t just influenced by the Demiurge – it was the Demiurge’s most successful Earthly incarnation.

The Archons, in Gnostic cosmology, are the Demiurge’s agents who maintain control over the material world. Dick saw these as manifesting in various forms such as political leaders, religious authorities, and institutional powers, who serve the Empire’s interests, often without realising their true role.

Furthermore, Dick identified Psychological Archons, internal forces that keep people trapped – fear, despair, conformity, the desire for security over truth. These are the ‘guards’ of the Black Iron Prison. And in Dick’s more modern interpretation, Information Archons are the forces that control information flow – media, education, propaganda systems that shape perception and belief.

Dick’s Gnostic perspective led him to a radical critique of institutional Christianity. He believed that Christianity had been co-opted by the Empire almost from its beginning, turning the revolutionary message into a tool of control. Orthodox Christianity promises salvation in another world, which Dick saw as a way of preventing people from recognising their potential for liberation in this world. And, Dick suggested, much of institutional Christianity actually worships the Demiurge while believing it worships the true God. Indeed, orthodox Christianity emphasises faith over direct knowledge, which Dick saw as keeping people dependent on external authority rather than developing their own direct divine consciousness.

In earlier Dick novels (such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? from 1968), he subtly presents questions about consciousness and the true nature of what it means to be human, blurring and shifting the lines between the ‘androids’ of the title and their ostensible human creators.

John Carpenter’s 1988 film They Live shared many settings and themes with Dick’s sublime novel Radio Free Albemuth. In the book, a scattered resistance battles the treacherous Archonic infection represented by President ‘Ferris F. Freemont’ (obviously, FFF is numerologically 666), as underground culture furtively keeps hope alive – situations loosely mirrored in the film. Similarly, the iconic 1999 film The Matrix presents ‘Dickian’ and Gnostic concepts wrapped in an action/sci-fi garb.

From 1974 until his untimely death in 1982, Dick produced a multitude of research, journals and letters that dealt with the events of “2-3-74” and his place in the great cosmic mystery. Condensed from over 8,000 pages of material, The Exegesis Of Philip K. Dick runs to more than 900 published pages and explores, in depth, Gnostic and unmistakeably Lovecraftian perspectives – indeed, “the Demiurge is still under the waters, dead but dreaming.”

While Philip K. Dick clearly and knowingly presented timeless Gnostic themes in a modern form, it is hard to imagine a time and place more necessary (than here and now) to examine concepts such as the constructed and manipulated nature of ‘reality’, the cancerous, imprisoning scourge of materialism, and the industrially designed death of the soul.

Indeed, it really is Philip K. Dick’s world… and we live in it.

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Every July, thousands gather in Queensland, Australia, for one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest medieval festivals. But past the jousting and pageantry lies a far stranger reality: the site was originally built as an esoteric sanctuary. Founded by Cambridge scholar and mystic J.S.M. Ward, the Abbey was created to safeguard sacred relics and ancient stained glass rescued from a collapsing Europe. Decades on, the Abbey stands as a rare, tangible link to preserved ancient wisdom.

On a 135 hectare property 60 km north of the Queensland state capital Brisbane, a religious community maintains a museum, church and college. Many Brisbane residents are familiar with the annual Medieval Tournament and Banquet held on its grounds every winter, and the Abbey Museum is well-known and loved by school students and local history buffs alike. While the small Abbey Church, boasting windows that contain imported historical stained glass panels (including fragments from Winchester Cathedral), is a popular choice for weddings, baptisms and funerals, not all of its admirers are aware of its fascinating heritage.

Known today as the Orthodox Catholic Church of Christ the King, the Confraternity is linked to the Great Schism of the Western and Eastern Orthodox Churches in the 11^th century, thus featuring a blend of Eastern and Western Rites. However, the Abbey represents something more than just an East/West mix, having been established by the followers of J.S.M. Ward, an enigmatic Englishman who drew his inspiration from Christianity, Freemasonry, Spiritualism and a number of other esoteric traditions.

JSM Ward – A Complex Character

The Abbey owes its existence to the vision and dynamism of John Sebastian Marlow Ward. This snippet taken from his autobiographical recollections less than two years before his death, and quoted in the final pages of Geoffrey Ginn’s insightful book on Ward’s life, captures a glimpse into his background:

I was born in Belize, British Honduras in Central America on Dec. 22^nd 1885. What terrible changes have taken place, since I was born, in world affairs. My lifetime has seen the decline and fall of Europe and her leadership in the world, particularly is this true of her loss of control in Asia.¹

He referred, of course, to the two World Wars and he especially lamented the apparent unravelling of the British Empire. He enjoyed a stint as a headmaster in Burma just as World War I broke out, and was saddened at its independence from Britain in 1948, the year before he died.

John’s father, an Anglican minister, had returned to England from Belize with his wife and young son in 1888, just prior to the birth of their second child, Rex. Growing up in the culturally stimulating atmosphere of Victorian times, John developed a love of history and heritage buildings, amassing a large collection of artefacts and natural curiosities during his boyhood. 

His dutiful Christian upbringing gave rise to a sense of enquiry, which would later broaden to encompass Mysticism, Spiritualism, Theosophy and Metaphysics. It was during his time at Cambridge University, at the age of 20, that he was initiated into Freemasonry, which was considered quite a respectable step to take for a modern middle class man, in what was by then the Edwardian Era. This would provide valuable introductions into the social and professional arenas, while also satisfying Ward’s attraction to the intrigue of the esoteric underground of the day. Soon after graduating in 1908, he took up teaching history and literature, and also married his cousin Carrie.

Psychic occurrences, which were to guide John throughout his adult life, first began five years later with the regular visitation of his late uncle (also Carrie’s father), Henry Lanchester (HJL), to him during lucid dreams. The visions would occur at regular times of night on set days of the week and provided personal messages as well as information about the afterlife. Contact with the astral plane expanded to include his brother Rex who died in 1916 (identified in John’s writings as RLW); it later became a dominant feature of his life and work, with his introduction to the angelic ‘Master of the Work’.

Carrie, although a believer in her husband’s visions, did not share his preoccupation with spiritual matters and this led to their separation in 1923. John had already met the woman who would prove to be his soul-mate, the schoolmistress and Theosophist Jessie Page, with whom he had co-founded a publishing imprint to promote his own works a couple of years earlier. The couple married soon after Carrie’s death in 1926, embarking on a lifelong partnership during which they shared their prophetic visions. They actually began to participate in one another’s dreams when, it is claimed, “they both dreamt that they were summoned into the presence of a great Angel, told that Christ was about to begin His Descent through the Celestial Planes to the Earth and asked to help in the Preparation for His Coming. This great Angel, of the order of the Thrones, was to become their constant Guide and helper in the years ahead.”²

John Ward’s beliefs and practices comprised elements that many Christians today would feel uncomfortable with. We should keep in mind that Spiritualism was popular in England a century ago. During the onset of World War I, Ward spent time teaching in Burma where he took a keen interest in Buddhism, Hinduism and Eastern traditions, strengthening his own convictions about reincarnation. It was these esoteric influences, combined with his sometimes turbulent association with Freemasonry, that paved the way for what he came to consider his life’s mission.

Freemasonry Woven into the Rich Tapestry

John Ward was born into a world of blossoming spiritual exploration and experimentation. The esoteric landscape of late Victorian England was dotted with communities devoted to Eastern mysticism, the Kabbalah and Hermetic texts, as well as scores of Rosicrucian and Theosophist groups. Geoffrey Ginn points out: “Although Freemasonry was not generally seen as occult, initiates were able to use its lodge meetings and reading groups to pursue esoteric topics and interests. Consequently, active Freemasons were in the vanguard of the occult revival at the end of the nineteenth century.”³ A number of Masonic researchers argued that the symbols and rituals of the Craft derived their roots from ancient Egyptian mystery cults. With the objective of establishing this claim, John became the founding secretary of the Masonic Study Society (MSS) in 1921. It was a pursuit he relished, continuing to attend the MSS meetings even after he later severed other links to Freemasonry and delivering more than a dozen papers to them over the next fifteen years.⁴

Not only did Ward appear untrue to his Christian origins as he delved deeper into ancient mysticism, he also succeeded in alienating many of his fellow Masons. He saw in Freemasonry the characteristics of, “The ancient Egyptian Mysteries, the Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, the Mithraic Mysteries of Persia, the Adonaic Mysteries of Syria, the Cabiric Mysteries of the island of Samothrace, the Druidic Mysteries of primordial Britain, and the Gnostics of the early Christian era…”⁵ For him, these mysteries concurred with the knowledge of the afterlife imparted to him by his beloved departed relatives, HJL and RLW.

It was in 1929 that John and Jessie Ward began their ‘public work’ as religious leaders, establishing the original ‘Confraternity of the Kingdom of Christ’ and setting up an altar in a spare room in their house. John adopted the title ‘Reverend Father’ and celebrated communion in the traditional Christian manner, at the same time conducting a group of devotees in prayers and hymns that he had written himself. Jessie would come to be known by their followers as ‘Reverend Mother’. Notwithstanding the use of Christian titles, their practices continued to embrace the essence of Hinduism and Buddhism, mingled together with the doctrines of Spiritualism and reincarnation. 

The small band of founding members – some of whom stayed in the Confraternity for the rest of their lives – pooled their assets and, when John resigned his job of twelve years and could add his generous separation bonus of seven hundred and fifty pounds, they purchased Hadley Hall on London’s northern outskirts. This mansion had been designed as two houses under one roof and sat on three acres of gardens. One of these dwellings now became The Abbey of Christ the King.

The Original Abbey in England

Life at London’s Abbey in the 1930s could best be described as monastic, with a strict daily routine of work and prayer. In addition to Father Ward’s study and library, the basement became a gallery for his treasured collectibles: antiquities, rare books and artefacts, tapestries and paintings. A small private school was set up on the estate and named St Michael’s College – a forerunner of today’s school bearing the same name alongside the Abbey in Queensland, Australia. And, like the modern-day Abbey complex, the founding members put their greatest effort into establishing a substantial and well-respected museum. As the Wards continued to add thousands of items to their collection, the exhibition extended out into the gardens in the form of replica historic and prehistoric buildings, eventually christened as the Abbey Folk Park. It proved extremely popular with the public, providing much-needed income for the community. 

Surviving site plans of the Folk Park reveal how far the Confraternity went in not only entertaining but educating students and adults alike. It included a Roman Villa, African Bazaar, Chinese Temple of Initiation, Japanese garden, a conservatory, greenhouse, a forge and smithy shop and even a witch’s cottage. 

John Ward had another motivation for developing the site that was not well known to the general public: he believed the world was in the ‘End Times’ and expected the imminent return of Christ, making The Abbey Folk Park an ‘ark for the ages’, a kind of time-capsule to preserve part of the old civilisation for the coming New Age. He envisaged it as the ‘Kingdom of the Wise’.

The Threads of Christian Traditions & Western Orthodoxy

One challenge to be met was the fact that neither John Ward nor any of his followers were ordained clergy, making their celebration of communion and other sacraments technically invalid. Soon after moving into The Abbey, ‘Father Ward’ managed to secure an endorsement as an affiliate of the Church of England from the Bishop of St Albans, on the recommendation of a mutual friend who was an Anglican Canon and fellow Freemason. However, this was only meant to authorise him as a lay preacher to his own community and the Anglicans made it clear it did not allow him to ‘minister the word of God’. A rift between them was inevitable and, after it occurred at the start of 1935, Ward would go on to have himself ordained in no less than three different religious organisations.

John Ward was what church officials called an episcopi vagantes, meaning ‘wandering bishop’ or ‘bishop at large’. His first affiliation outside the Anglicans was with the Autonomous African Universal Church when he was consecrated as a bishop by its London-based Primate, Mar Kwamin. Soon after that, when doubt was cast over Mar Kwamin’s authority to hold office in England, Father Ward sought advice from the elderly Archbishop John Sibley of the Orthodox Catholic Church. The two men clicked and agreed that the Abbey of Christ the King should be incorporated into the Orthodox Catholic Church, contributing much needed numbers to Sibley’s congregation, while at the same time granting Ward’s Abbey Church the institutional affiliation it craved. His second ordination is recorded by Geoffrey Ginn thus: 

Ward was baptised and re-confirmed, ordained deacon and, finally, solemnly admitted to the Sacred Office of the Priesthood by the authority of Archbishop Sibley’s hand and seal. In further ceremonies the following day, Ward was solemnly consecrated as a Bishop in the Church of God and commissioned as its Chancellor of the Province (England).⁶

During World War II John and Jessie Ward struggled financially and were dragged through a court case brought by the parents of a teenage girl in their community, the charge being enticement of a minor. This resulted in damages of five hundred pounds being awarded against them, taking a toll on their funds as well as their health, reputation and confidence. Wartime saw membership numbers and income of many other itinerant English bishops flounder too, leading to an initiative to unify the various strands of the episcopi vagantes – and to the third ordination of Father Ward.

A group of six autonomous Christian churches merged under the leadership of Hugh George de Willmot Newman, who had recently been disavowed by the Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite) Patriarch on whose authority he depended. Forming a council, they declared the Syrian Church to be in schism and re-constituted themselves as a Western Orthodox Church. This was in contrast to Eastern Orthodoxy, which sprang from the first century Christian missionaries in the Eastern, Greek-speaking part of the Roman Empire. Newman took for himself the title Mar Georgius, Archbishop of Glastonbury, which he called the Occidental Jerusalem. Thus Father Ward received from this new church his third consecration as its ‘Archbishop of Olivet’, thereby bringing his Orthodox Catholic Church into its fold.

“Orthodox Catholicism offered itself to Ward as a religious vehicle that was necessarily flexible in matters of formal doctrine, but charged with a sense of history and a living heritage of faith,” writes Geoffrey Ginn in his departmental journal, Crossroads, adding, “In the first instance, then, Orthodox Catholicism appealed to his sense of historical drama. Ward took seriously the claims of Orthodox Catholicism to be an historic rapprochement between Christianity’s two great warring factions: ‘the Orthodox Catholic Church in itself’, he wrote, ‘marks the reunion of the Eastern and Western Churches, which mutually excommunicated each other in the 11th century, since when Christendom has been divided into camps’.”⁷

This refers to the mutual excommunication of the Eastern and Western Orthodox Churches in 1054. The identity of today’s Orthodox Catholic Church at the Abbey in Caboolture can be further linked to a later separation in 1870, when a number of Roman Catholics renounced their allegiance to Pope Pius IX following his declaration of infallibility. Having no bishops of their own, the breakaways could not be confirmed or ordained, so they contacted the Old Catholic Church of Holland, which had already become disassociated from the Vatican but retained valid Orders. Another historical figure, the priest Francis Xavier Alvarez and his followers in India, severed ties with the Papacy and obtained consecration by turning to the Syrian Christians, whose bishops on the Malabar Coast were under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Antioch, thereby adding to the bewildering melting pot of ‘bishops at large’.

Thus these ‘Old Catholics’ (the breakaways) could claim two possible lines of ordination: the first from St Peter and the Western Church in Rome via St Augustine, the fourth century Bishop of Hippo; the other from the Eastern Church, this lineage tracing itself back directly to the church founded in Antioch in 34 AD by St Peter himself. 

Stations on the Journey

By 1945 the effects of the war and the legal proceedings against them left the Wards disillusioned with Britain, and it occurred to them that their Kingdom of the Wise might be destined to emerge in a foreign land. Fortuitously, John Ward’s old friend Gerald Gardner, who had designed the witch’s cottage for him, expressed an interest in taking over the cottage and its artefacts in exchange for a piece of land with a farmhouse he owned in Cyprus and wanted to offload. Cyprus held great appeal for the Confraternity – it was an English territory in the Eastern Mediterranean with a pleasant climate and, most importantly, it already embraced the tradition of Orthodox Christianity. The following year, after selling off the more valuable of their antiquities and library books, the small community packed up whatever they had left and made the two-week voyage from Southampton to Cyprus.

Disappointingly, Gardner’s farmhouse turned out to be derelict and sat on barren land but, undeterred, they simply walked away from it and immediately purchased a more suitable property on the coast close to Limassol. This land was more than a hectare and boasted an orange orchard with a furnished two-storey house plus gardener’s cottage, outdoor brick oven and a chicken house with poultry. At a cost of two and a half thousand pounds, it was a drain on their funds, so they were relieved a few months later when they received over four thousand pounds from the sale of Hadley Hall back in London. Here they would stay for more than eight years, earning their living from farming and handicrafts they produced.

For the Reverend Father John Ward, Cyprus was to be the last station on his life journey. Before his passing due to a stroke in mid-1949, he fathered a child with one of the ladies among his flock, Ursula Cuffe, and their son John was raised by Jessie Ward as her own. Growing up with Father Ward’s tradition and principles, the mature son would go on to be known as Bishop John Cuffe, presiding over an off-shoot of the present-day Orthodox Catholic Church in Queensland. A number of the older members of the original Confraternity were to pass away soon after Ward and the remaining followers had become restless by the mid-fifties, scouting around for a new home base. After looking first at Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and India, they decided to head for Australia where they settled briefly in Sydney and then in the Blue Mountains. When Jessie suffered a bout of pneumonia, she decided to head to the warmer climate of Queensland to recover, accompanied by a few others, including the nine year-old John Cuffe.

The influence of John Sebastian Marlow Ward lives on and the depth and diversity of his legacy can be gleaned from the titles of some of his books: Gone West: Three Narratives of After-Death Experience; Freemasonry and the Ancient Gods; The Hung Society; The Kingdom of the Wise: Life’s Problems; The Psychic Powers of Christ; and articles: ‘The Hindoo Symbol of the Point Within the Circle’, ‘The Knights Templar’, ‘The Aims and Ideals of Freemasonry’, ‘Chinese Secret Societies’.⁸ Author Geoffrey Ginn neatly sums up his character in the final paragraph of his book: 

In J.S.M. Ward we find, indisputably, a man of many parts. A historian with a strong sense of the romantic, a visionary with heightened spiritual sensibilities, he was a questing soul, curious until his last days about the human past, how we might comprehend its mysteries, and the life beckoning beyond that of everyday sense experience.⁹

The Ongoing Legacy in Queensland

The community began settling at its present site of the Abbey at Caboolture, Queensland, half a century ago, and Jessie Ward survived until three years later, providing a clear link back to the organisation she co-founded with her husband in the late 1920s. What makes today’s Orthodox Catholic Church stand out from other Christian sects are their teachings on the afterlife, their representation of the Holy Spirit as the feminine aspect of the Godhead, and how at the very core is their belief in the imminent return of Christ. Concerning reincarnation they say, “that the journey of each Soul encompasses many lives to complete its journey back to God”; and concerning Catholic traditions, they affirm their church “holds to the tenets of the Christian Faith as enunciated in the Nicene Creed.”¹⁰

Its followers seek spiritual development, both on a personal level and also collectively as a Confraternity. According to their publicity material:

Community members strive to live a balanced life that revolves around attending Church Services, devotion and personal prayer and the practicalities of everyday life. The four main areas of the work of the Confraternity include the Church, the Farm, the College and the Museum. Holding public services, visiting the sick, undertaking works of charity and giving public lectures form part of the ongoing work of the Confraternity members.¹¹

In keeping with the values established at the original Abbey Folk Park in England over eighty-five years ago, the tranquil setting at Caboolture is also home to the Abbey Museum, as well as the independent co-ed school, St Michael’s College. Describing itself as a welcoming community, their church and museum at The Abbey Place are open to the public.

Further reading: Archangels & Archaeology: J.S.M. Ward’s Kingdom of the Wise by Geoffrey Ginn

Footnotes

1. Geoffrey Ginn, Archangels & Archaeology: J.S.M. Ward’s Kingdom of the Wise, Sussex Acad. Press 2012, 261 

2. ‘Orthodox Catholic Church of the New Age, Life of J. S. M. Ward’, http://orthodoxcatholicnew.tripod.com/id7.html

3. Geoffrey Ginn, Op. cit. 29

4. Ibid 106

5. Ibid 109, quoting from Secret Societies by Noel Gist, 1940

6. Ibid 197

7. Crossroads, Special Issue 2006, AEN Conference (page 11) www.uq.edu.au/crossroads/Archives/Vol%205/Issue%201%202010/Vol5Iss110%20-%207.Ginn%20%28p.45-57%29.pdf

8. For full catalogue of publications, see Archangels & Archaeology, Op. cit., 297–310

9. Geoffrey Ginn, Op. cit. 265

10. http://abbeychurch.com.au/history-of-the-church/ 

11. http://abbeychurch.com.au/history-of-the-confraternity/

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“A patient cured is a customer lost.”
– Unknown

On January 9, 2025, actor and director Mel Gibson appeared on the popular podcastThe Joe Rogan Experience (episode #2254). One of the most-watched clips from the discussion began at 1:37:16, when Mel Gibson spoke about three friends who all had stage 4 cancer. 

“They don’t have cancer anymore,” Gibson stated. When Rogan asked what treatments they had undergone, Gibson mentioned four medications: ivermectin, fenbendazole, hydroxychloroquine, and methylene blue. These medications are often dismissed as quackery by Big Pharma. However, they have allegedly been effective in treating not only COVID-19 but also a variety of other diseases, including cancer. 

“This stuff works, man,” Gibson asserted, explaining that the methods he and others use for optimal health do not profit Big Pharma and are therefore vilified.

“There’s a lot of stuff that does work, which is very strange, because when you hear about things that are demonised and then turn out to be effective, you always wonder, ‘What is going on here?’ responded Rogan.

In fact, substantial research is being conducted into these treatments, many “repurposed” or “repositioned” because they were not originally intended to treat cancer or COVID-19. But you won’t hear anything of it in mainstream media or from so-called government “health” authorities.

“How have our medical institutions failed us so badly that treatments which can actually cure us aren’t promoted simply because they’re not profitable or can’t be patented? Whether it’s vitamin D, K2, or magnesium – there’s clearly something wrong,” Rogan added.

The Power of Repurposing

Using a drug for a purpose other than its original intention is not a new concept. This is often a powerful and effective method to cure disease and treat various ailments. 

According to the article “Drug Repurposing: An Effective Tool in Modern Drug Discovery,” published in the National Library of Medicine, “Drug repurposing is the technique of using an existing drug or drug candidate for a new treatment or medical condition for which it was not previously indicated. It was initially developed to treat a different medical condition. This process is often described as serendipitous, as it happens unexpectedly. In this case, the undesired side effects of drugs can signal the possibility of their effectiveness for an entirely different medical condition. Generally, these drugs have already established safety in humans and have undergone testing for efficacy against a different disease. This approach allows for a more direct path to preclinical and clinical trials, bypassing many traditional drug development processes, thus reducing risk and costs.”

The benefits of repurposed drugs have proven to be instrumental in treating diseases that lack current treatments or cures. They can also be valuable for common illnesses where approved treatments may result in significant side effects, be too costly for patients, or may not be covered by insurance for similar reasons.

Ivermectin

Known as a “miracle drug,” ivermectin is a member of the avermectin family of medicines. It has a long history of use in addressing various health issues in underdeveloped countries. It has been pivotal in the battle against deadly tropical diseases and parasitic infestations in animals. 

Discovered in 1975, ivermectin was initially used primarily in veterinary medicine and was approved for human use in 1987. It is effective against infestations such as head lice, scabies, trichuriasis, ascariasis, river blindness, and lymphatic filariasis. For their roles in the discovery and development of ivermectin, William Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015. Since then, ivermectin has been approved by the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) as an antiparasitic and has become one of the most widely prescribed medications in the world. 

However, this changed with the onset of COVID-19.

The COVID-19 years were marked by alarming headlines of mass deaths, leading many people to accept the situation without question. They lined up repeatedly to receive the mRNA vaccines and boosters, sought out officially approved treatments in hospitals, and took prescribed medications that the “experts” claimed would ensure recovery. Unfortunately, these approaches did not work as intended.

Yet, there were effective alternative drugs and remedies. Why didn’t doctors embrace them? 

Under US federal law, new vaccines and medications can only receive Emergency Use Authorisation (EUA) when “no adequate, approved, and available alternatives” exist. Because the introduction and wide distribution of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and expensive new treatments relied upon obtaining this emergency designation, inexpensive, already-approved medications like ivermectin posed a significant obstacle.

In August 2021, retail pharmacies reported a sharp rise in ivermectin prescriptions, prompting an intense public campaign labelling it as a dangerous “horse dewormer.” This portrayal minimised ivermectin’s long-established human uses, Nobel Prize-winning legacy, and extensive research history, effectively sidelining it from mainstream consideration. Had ivermectin been widely recognised as effective, the pharmaceutical industry’s ability to market COVID-19 as a persistent emergency would have diminished significantly, threatening substantial financial incentives.

As a repurposed medication, ivermectin was overshadowed by a medical industry that benefited from keeping it in obscurity. Doctors who suggested its use for COVID-19, especially in its early stages, found themselves on “disinformation lists,” faced license suspensions, and endured bans and censorship. Nevertheless, many brave physicians continued to prescribe it as part of treatment protocols for the virus and later for vaccine side effects, risking their careers and lives.

Ample research indicates that ivermectin works effectively as an antiviral and aids many individuals in their recovery from COVID-19. The Independent Medical Alliance (formerly known as the FLCCC) provides an in-depth look at ivermectin on their website. They feature a comprehensive meta-analysis of 105 studies involving 220,423 patients across 30 countries, demonstrating that ivermectin significantly reduced risks related to mortality, ventilation, ICU admission, hospitalisation, recovery time, case numbers, and viral clearance. Additionally, a thorough 31-page review of trial data was published in Frontiers of Pharmacology in June 2021. A search on PubMed reveals over 700 studies on ivermectin, confirming that the research is readily available.

But can ivermectin cure cancer?

According to over 360 research papers found under a search for ivermectin and cancer on PubMed, evidence suggests that ivermectin can inhibit the growth of cancer cells and downregulate cancer cell expression. Research conducted by the IMA indicates that ivermectin “may inhibit the growth of various cancer cells by disrupting multiple signalling pathways essential for cancer cell survival.” For instance, a study titled “Ivermectin as an Inhibitor of Cancer Stem-Like Cells,” conducted in February 2018, aimed to demonstrate that ivermectin preferentially inhibited cancer stem-like cells (CSCs) in breast cancer, downregulating the expression of “stemness” genes.

Another study, “Anthelmintic Drug Ivermectin Inhibits Angiogenesis, Growth, and Survival of Glioblastoma Through Inducing Mitochondrial Dysfunction and Oxidative Stress,” published in November 2016, found that “the inhibitory effects of ivermectin are significantly reversed in mitochondria-deficient cells or cells treated with antioxidants.” This further confirms that ivermectin acts by inhibiting mitochondrial respiration and inducing oxidative stress. Importantly, the study indicates that ivermectin suppresses phosphorylation of Akt, mTOR, and ribosomal S6 in glioblastoma and human brain microvascular endothelial cells, suggesting its inhibitory role in deactivating the Akt/mTOR pathway. Overall, this research underscores ivermectin as a valuable addition to the treatment options available for various health conditions.

Many studies are conducted using animal models, typically mice, and they show great promise for human applications. However, it would be beneficial if the medical industry allocated more funding for human studies. Big Pharma often finances medical research, which can cost millions of dollars, leading smaller research studies to be overlooked. As a result, these smaller studies may or may not gain acceptance in medical journals, which are also influenced by the interests of Big Pharma.

Additionally, it’s important to point out that an increasing body of research has established significant links between certain bacterial and parasitic infections and the development of specific cancers. A landmark study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases (2006) titled “Infectious causes of cancer: a global perspective” estimated that 15–20% of global cancers may have an infectious origin, with the burden particularly high in developing countries. 

Hydroxychloroquine

Hydroxychloroquine has faced scrutiny similar to ivermectin, despite numerous studies demonstrating its efficacy as a potent tool in the fight against COVID-19. This less toxic derivative of chloroquine has been proven effective in inhibiting SARS-CoV-2 infection. 

Regarding cancer treatment, several studies have explored its applications, including the paper titled “Hydroxychloroquine: Key Therapeutic Advances and Emerging Nanotechnological Landscape for Cancer Mitigation,” published in the December 1, 2023, edition of Chemical Biological Interactions by the National Center for Biotechnology Information. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) is classified as a unique medication widely used in cancer treatment. HCQ plays a dual role by inhibiting autophagy induced by the tumour microenvironment (TME). Preclinical studies support the use of HCQ for anti-cancer therapy, especially when combined with conventional treatments, as it can sensitise tumour cells to drugs, enhancing therapeutic effectiveness.

Fenbendazole

Another drug of interest is fenbendazole, which Mel Gibson cited in his interview. Fenbendazole has been used to treat rodent pinworm infections due to its ease of use and minimal side effects. Research has been conducted in animal models, such as in the November 2008 Journal of the American Association of Laboratory Animal Science, which reported the “Unexpected Antitumorigenic Effect of Fenbendazole When Combined with Supplementary Vitamins.” This study found that combining vitamins and fenbendazole in a diet resulted in “significant inhibition of tumour growth,” but this effect was observed only in mice that received both treatments, not in control groups that received either only vitamins or only fenbendazole.

In terms of human studies, “Oral Fenbendazole for Cancer Therapy in Humans and Animals,” published in the September 2024 issue of Anticancer Research, indicates that the anti-cancer activity of fenbendazole has been investigated across various cell lines, showing anti-tumour effects against multiple cancer types. Ongoing research suggests that fenbendazole may disrupt microtubules, which are structures involved in cell division and growth. By interfering with microtubule function, fenbendazole may inhibit the division and proliferation of cancer cells.

Another anthelmintic medication, mebendazole, is specifically formulated for human use and has demonstrated anti-cancer effects. Previous studies indicate that when mebendazole is used in conjunction with other targeted therapy drugs, it may be effective in treating advanced colorectal cancer and pancreatic cancer.

Vitamin C

Another promising cancer treatment, high-dose intravenous vitamin C (HDIVC), has been around for some time, and new studies continue to support it. However, most doctors and nearly all hospitals avoid using it. Why is that? 

In an article titled “Cancer Treatment and High Dose IV Vitamin C” on NatureMed.com, a study from the University of Iowa found that when combined with chemotherapy, high-dose intravenous vitamin C doubled survival rates for patients with late-stage metastatic pancreatic cancer. The article references studies dating back to the 1950s that highlight the positive effects of HDIVC on cancer treatment. Additionally, the US National Institutes of Health has awarded nearly 2,000 grants for research on this treatment.

A single but highly significant issue is that pharmaceutical companies cannot patent vitamin C, which means that, like many other potentially groundbreaking treatments, its use is suppressed and restricted. This denial of access affects not only patients who have exhausted other treatment options but also those who are willing to try anything for a chance at survival.

The Big Blue Powerhouse: Methylene Blue

Mel Gibson and Joe Rogan also discussed the increasing use of methylene blue for various health issues, particularly its role in enhancing mitochondrial health in cells. 

This synthetic compound, available both over the counter and by prescription, was originally created in the 1870s as a textile dye due to its vibrant blue colour. Its other beneficial properties soon became apparent, including its therapeutic effects against malaria. Methylene blue also shows promise as an antibiotic and antipsychotic, and since the 19^th century, it has been repurposed to treat cyanide and carbon monoxide poisoning.

In recent years, methylene blue has been associated with improved brain function, enhanced memory, elevated mood levels, and potentially reduced risks of cognitive diseases such as Parkinson’s, various forms of dementia, and Alzheimer’s. 

According to Dr. Eric Berg’s article “Methylene Blue: Benefits, Uses, and Risks,” this remarkable drug operates by improving mitochondrial energy metabolism. It acts as an artificial electron carrier in the electron transport chain (ETC) – a series of proteins embedded in the inner membrane of mitochondria. These electron carriers help shuttle electrons between molecules for energy conversion. By increasing mitochondrial respiration and facilitating electron transport, methylene blue can enhance energy production, thereby linking it to positive effects on mood, energy levels, cardiovascular health (by improving blood circulation and lowering blood pressure), neurodegenerative diseases, and gastrointestinal issues.

Methylene blue also possesses antimicrobial properties that inhibit the growth of Candida species, staph bacteria, and even E. coli. Research suggests it may offer liver protection by activating SIRT1, enhancing fat metabolism, and supporting hormonal balance. Additionally, it may aid in increasing fat-burning and activating AMPK, known as the “metabolic master switch.”

In cancer treatment, several studies have indicated that combining methylene blue with photodynamic therapy can reduce tumour sizes in various cancers, including carcinomas, colorectal cancer, and melanoma. A systematic review published on September 28, 2023, in Frontiers in Pharmacology, found evidence supporting the effectiveness of photodynamic therapy with methylene blue against multiple cancer types. While there was a modest decrease in tumour size in breast cancer and HeLa models, the results for colorectal tumours, carcinomas, and melanomas were particularly promising. The findings encouraged continued pharmaceutical development of a dosage form based on methylene blue and further investigation into its therapeutic applications.

A study, “Methylene blue in clinical practice for cancer identification,” published on July 26, 2022, in Precision and Future Medicine, found that methylene blue could improve tumour detection with minimal error. This study demonstrated the feasibility of utilising methylene blue-based imaging during surgery to identify tumour lesions, such as diagnosing solitary fibrous tumours in the pancreas and identifying parathyroid adenomas and paragangliomas. An intravenous injection of methylene blue at a dose of 1.0 mg/kg, either immediately before surgery or three hours prior to surgery, produced fluorescent signals in 20 out of 24 patients with breast cancer.

Despite its benefits, methylene blue has some drawbacks, including interactions with SSRIs, potential harm to fetuses for pregnant and breastfeeding women, and drug interactions that can lead to anemia. 

It’s essential to discuss the use of this powerful compound with a doctor or pharmacist to ensure its safety and determine the correct dosages. Typical side effects may include nausea, vomiting, confusion, and headaches. Additionally, it can cause your tongue, urine, and faeces to turn blue.

DMSO (Dimethyl sulfoxide)

Midwestern Doctor, in his Substack article “Hundreds of Studies Show DMSO Transforms The Treatment of Cancer,” discusses a remarkably cheap but overlooked treatment for cancer: DMSO (Dimethyl sulfoxide). Several studies demonstrate that DMSO effectively treats various conditions, including cancer, by inhibiting tumour growth and reverting cancer cells to their normal state. Additionally, DMSO may help mitigate some of the damage caused by chemotherapy and radiation, as well as relieve pain from metastatic cancer. DMSO can enhance the treatment’s effectiveness for those undergoing chemotherapy, potentially reducing the number of sessions required.

Midwestern Doctor asserts that DMSO has the potential to revolutionise cancer care when combined with other natural therapies. However, he noted that few people are aware of DMSO’s existence, and doctors rarely incorporate it into treatment plans. 

“[S]ince so much money is involved (e.g., 65% of oncologists’ revenues come from chemotherapy drugs, and cancer medications represent the most profitable drug market), there is significant pushback against anyone who attempts alternative cancer therapies making it very difficult to practice unconventional cancer care – particularly since no alternative treatment works all the time,” notes Midwestern Doctor.

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The Future is Personalised medicine

As alternative treatments gain acceptance, perhaps driven by movements like MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), there is hope that the research community will produce more well-funded and unbiased studies on these options. 

Moreover, there is optimism that artificial intelligence (AI) can contribute to the future of medicine by personalising treatment based on individual needs and potential effectiveness rather than aligning with the interests of pharmaceutical corporations. The integration of AI in medicine requires rigorous public oversight to prevent its misuse by powerful entities seeking to steer research toward their financial interests.

Personalised medicine has the potential to ensure that we, as patients, do not fall into the trap of “one drug fits all,” where a single medication is prioritised and alternatives are sidelined. AI-driven medicine can identify ALL the most suitable treatments, including repurposed medications, that align with how nature and biology function in each individual, proposing the best healing protocols rather than relying on the latest trend in pharmaceuticals. After all, we humans are not “one size fits all,” so why should our medical treatments be?

In the meantime, individuals are taking on the role of their own medical detectives, uncovering truths that have historically been obscured by those profiting from misinformation and deception.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not replace professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before self-treatment.

Sources

youtube.com/watch?v=1rYtrS5IbrQ (Joe Rogan Experience)

alternativemedicine.com/cancer/facts-you-might-not-have-known-about-fenbendazole/

drberg.com/blog/fascinating-health-benefits-of-methylene-blue

x.com/DrJesseMorse/status/1887928040929534294 (Dr Jesse Morse explains the benefits of methylene blue)

media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2024/October/PDF/methylene-blue-benefits-side-effects-pdf.pdf

imahealth.org/an-approach-to-the-use-of-repurposed-drugs-in-patients-with-cancer/

journals.lww.com/americantherapeutics/fulltext/2021/08000/
ivermectin_for_prevention_and_treatment_of.7.aspx

midwesterndoctor.com/p/hundreds-of-studies-show-dmso-transforms

osti.gov/biblio/22696697

pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.73.10.3685

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9945820

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10631450

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19049251

sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1572100024000863

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The ongoing conflict between the US and Iran makes “The Grand Chessboard Endgame” essential reading for anyone willing to understand the strategic design behind the shifting headlines. Exclusive to New Dawn #216, this investigation traces the struggle back to Mackinder and Brzezinski, revealing why Iran’s position at the heart of Eurasian trade, energy and emerging multipolar alliances matters far beyond the official explanations.

For a gripping preview, read “From the Other Side of the Chessboard” (full text below), where Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin argues that the assault on Iran marks the final, dangerous struggle of a fading unipolar order. Readers who already have #216 have seen through the Establishment narrative and understand the larger agenda. The latest developments come as no surprise to them.

Share the following or pass your copy of New Dawn #216 to anyone who dares to question the official approved version. If you haven’t already done so, you can still order New Dawn #216 here and discover what the nightly news leaves out.

In 2005, Alexander Dugin sat across a chessboard from Zbigniew Brzezinski in Washington. The Russian philosopher asked the American strategist whether chess was a game for two players. Brzezinski’s answer was immediate. “No, it’s a game for one.”

The author of The Grand Chessboard saw a single player at the table of world geopolitics. Two decades later, as American bombs fall on Iran, the man on the other side of the board has a different reading of the game.

Dugin, the most prominent theorist of Russian neo-Eurasianism, has been sanctioned by the European Union and the United States. His daughter Darya was killed by a car bomb in Moscow in 2022, an act widely attributed to Ukrainian intelligence. None of this has slowed him down. 

On the 6 April 2026 Russian Sputnik programme ‘Escalation’, Prof. Dugin delivered what amounts to his most comprehensive analysis of the war on Iran and its place in the global contest between unipolarity and multipolarity.

In Dugin’s analysis, the American-led global order established after the Cold War is expiring. The assault on Iran, Trump’s expletive-laden threats, the shifting deadlines, the bombing of cultural sites, all of it registers as the desperate flailing of a system that can feel the ground giving way beneath it.

His central concept is the “agony of the unipolar world.” He means the word in its classical sense, the final struggle before death. Trump, in Dugin’s analysis, has been chosen by the Western ruling elite as the instrument of that agony. There is no longer time for liberal illusions, for humanitarian rhetoric, for talk of human rights. 

Dugin reads Trump as the unwitting agent of this collapse. Where previous American presidents wrapped imperial policy in the language of human rights and international law, Trump has stripped that language away. The liberal mask is off. What remains is raw force, openly declared. 

Dugin identifies a four-stage strategy behind what looks like chaos. First, reassert control over Latin America through pressure on Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico and Colombia, a renewed Monroe Doctrine. Second, destroy the main pole of sovereignty in the Islamic world through Israel, with Iran as the primary target and Turkey next in line. Third, pressure Russia into vassalage, using European NATO as leverage, interpreting Moscow’s willingness to negotiate as weakness. Fourth, full-scale strategic war with China before the end of Trump’s term.

Each target, Dugin argues, is told the next stage “does not concern you.” Iran is stage two. The war is already underway. Each stage is designed to clear the path for the final confrontation with Beijing.

“Trump does not need negotiations,” Dugin says. “His ultimatum to Iran is a clear warning to China and to us: ‘this is what will happen to you if you dare to resist’.”

Dugin frames Iranian resistance as civilisational, drawing on the Shia tradition of accepting earthly defeat for spiritual victory. When Trump attacks Iranian society with open cruelty, Dugin argues, he receives in return the opposite of what he expects. 

“The heroic Iranian people today stand united against pure, unalloyed evil coming from the West.” The human chains around power plants in April 2026 and the millions of Iranians who registered to sacrifice their lives are, in Dugin’s reading, expressions of a civilisational depth that brute force cannot reach.

The American president is attempting to complete this programme before the 2026 midterm elections, ignoring all obstacles, burning through allies and generals alike. Dugin points to Trump’s dismissal of loyal figures, combat generals removed mid-campaign, his own attorney general thrown out, as evidence of a leader operating under extreme time pressure in a system that knows its window is closing.

Two years before the war, Tucker Carlson warned Dugin during a private conversation that “Trump will not accept multipolarity.” Carlson, who helped bring Trump to power, is now in open opposition. “He believed in him, shared his ideas,” Dugin says, “but Trump betrayed the MAGA movement and his supporters.”

Dugin closes with a formulation that leaves no room for ambiguity. “Many of us believed that Western dominance was already in the past and that multipolarity was an accomplished fact. But it seems we were just as premature as Francis Fukuyama was with his ‘end of history’. The multipolar world has not yet arrived. The struggle for it is happening now.”

Brzezinski told Dugin in 2005 that chess was a game for one player. The board in 2026 tells a different story. Iran has refused to be swept from the squares. Russia and China stand behind their own pieces. The “single player” Brzezinski imagined is running out of moves.

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Even the greatest thinkers are uneven. They have areas of brilliance and other areas where they cannot avoid showing their weaknesses. Immanuel Kant, for example, one of the most admired philosophers in Western civilisation, is known for The Critique of Pure Reason rather than for Dreams of a Spirit Seer, his intemperate and embarrassing rant against the visionary Emanuel Swedenborg.

René Guénon is no exception. An esoteric philosopher of uncommon brilliance, he has become increasingly influential since his death in 1951. But he, too, has areas where his views seem poorly reasoned and out of accord with known facts.

Born in Blois, France, in 1886, Guénon was educated as a mathematician. As a young man, he was drawn into the occult revival that was sweeping France at the turn of the twentieth century. He was befriended by Gérard Encausse, better known by his pseudonym Papus, the celebrated occultist who, among other accomplishments, founded the Martinist Order. But Guénon soon became dissatisfied with both Papus and occultism and drifted into other esoteric circles.

The years between 1906 (when Guénon began to explore occultism) and 1912 were the critical points in his development. After breaking with Papus, he received initiations in lineages connected with Taoism, Freemasonry, and Sufism. He also began exploring what he came to call “Tradition” – meaning not merely what has been handed down from antiquity, but a body of universal esoteric doctrine that, he contended, underlies all the great world religions.

Guénon’s explication of this Tradition, set out in many books and articles he published up until his death in 1951, has a number of curious features. In the first place, it is strongly oriented toward Hinduism, although the sources of Guénon’s contacts with Hinduism, both in the Paris of the Belle Époque and later, are mysterious in the extreme. Indeed his first book, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, was submitted as a dissertation to the Sorbonne but was rejected partly because, violating academic norms, it contained almost no references.

In the second place, although Guénon converted to Islam in Paris in 1910, and was initiated as a Sufi, before moving to Cairo in 1930, neither Sufism nor Islam plays any great role in his ideas. At the time of death, he had been living in Egypt for over twenty years, but his 3,000-volume library still contained four times as many books on Hinduism as it did on Islam, according to Mark Sedgwick in Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, an important study of Guénon and his followers.

Rather, for Guénon, the Traditional doctrine is most fully expressed in Hinduism. It is also focused on metaphysics. Today metaphysics – usually described as the philosophical study of being – is among the least sexy of intellectual pursuits. In Anglo-American academic philosophy, it is moribund. For Guénon it is central. Not surprisingly, his discussion of it is among the most masterful aspects of his work. But comparatively few of Guénon’s admirers give much attention to metaphysics.

Despite its failure to impress the Sorbonne, Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines was published in 1921. It is one of Guénon’s most important works and provides the best introduction to his thought.

Metaphysics – “Knowledge of the Universal…”

In it Guénon says that metaphysics, or metaphysic, in the singular, “is essentially the knowledge of the Universal, or, if preferred, the knowledge of principles belonging to the universal order… but in making this statement we are not really trying to propose a definition of metaphysic, for such a thing is a sheer impossibility by reason of that very universality which we look upon as the foremost among its characteristics.” Metaphysic stands above “that which changes or which is subject to the influences of time and place; the contingent, the accidental and the universal belong essentially to the individual domain.” Metaphysic deals not with this individual domain, but with the universal.

Although metaphysic “cannot contradict reason” of the conventional kind, “it stands above it.” Nor is metaphysic grasped with reason, but by the “intellect… that faculty which possesse[s] a direct knowledge of principles.” Intellect, in this sense, is not what present-day thought understands by that term. As Guénon describes it, intellect is a type of higher cognition – a direct experience of principles. And it is “infallible” because “its operation is immediate and, because, not being really distinct from its object, it is identified with the truth itself.” This, he adds, is exactly how Aristotle and his heirs, the Scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, understood the concept of intellect – in Greek, called nous, intellectus in Latin.

Intellect may be infallible, but the ways of expressing it are not. “Since all expression is bound to be imperfect and limited, error is inevitable in its form, if not its content: however exact one tries to make its expression, what is left out is greater than what is included.”

Symbolism of the Cross

One of the central themes of this metaphysics is what Guénon calls “the multiple states of being” (the title of one of his books). The best way to understand this concept is to picture it as Guénon does in what is probably his masterwork, The Symbolism of the Cross, published in 1931.

For Guénon, the significance of the cross goes far past its meaning in Christian symbolism. As he says, it is a virtually universal symbol. His explication of it magnificently illustrates not only his metaphysical system, but many otherwise obscure points in the symbolism of the world’s religions.

To begin with, the cross (pictured in its Greek, or equal-armed form) symbolises the juncture of the supernal with the mundane. The latter is represented by the horizontal line, which, Guénon says, represents the possibilities of manifestation at any given level of existence (such as human incarnation). The vertical line represents the ascent possible from one of these levels to another, and thus to “the indefinite series of states of the total being.”

Guénon expands this cross into a three-dimensional form. There are now two crosses, one perpendicular to the other, both with the same centre. The horizontal cross defines a plane – the plane of manifestation at any given level of being. This plane is not the only one there is. In fact at every point on the vertical line, another horizontal cross can be drawn, defining another plane and signifying another, different realm of being. The number of these realms is infinite, or, as Guénon puts it, “indefinite.”

Thus our human existence, complete with all the possibilities (both physical and spiritual) latent in it, comprises just one plane of this three-dimensional cross.

It’s not possible to go further into this schema here, which is sort of a Cartesian coordinate system of the levels of being (a comparison Guénon would have loathed; if he ever wrote a kind word about Descartes, I have not read it). But it masterfully ties together symbols and ideas from a wide and disparate range of traditions. One symbolic version of this cross is the World Tree, which is found almost universally.

In any event, these three books define the core of what he calls the Traditional doctrine:

Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines
Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta
The Symbolism of the Cross

I would read them in the order given to get a comprehensive view of Guénon’s doctrine. They are not necessarily easy reading, but Guénon takes pains to write clearly and precisely. At any rate his style is free from the jargon-infested prose and pretentious neologisms favoured by many twentieth-century philosophers, particularly those on the European continent.

Spiritualism & Multiple States of Being

After Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines, Guénon published two books on more narrowly defined topics: Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion and The Spiritist Error. These are the works in which his thought is the weakest. They aim to demolish the Theosophy of H.P. Blavatsky and her successors on the one hand, and, on the other, to combat the spiritualist, or spiritist,* movement that had reached its heyday in the nineteenth century. At the time Guénon was writing, in the early 1920s, many were drawn to spiritualism in the wake of the First World War. Bereaved survivors of dead soldiers often turned to it to be reassured of their loved ones’ continued life beyond the grave.

* The term applied to those who try to communicate with the dead is, in the English-speaking world, “spiritualism.” In French, it is spiritisme, “spiritism.” Guénon naturally uses the latter more often. There is some difference between these movements as they manifested in France and in the English-speaking world, but for convenience in this article, I will for the most part use the word spiritualism to apply to both.

Guénon did not believe that spiritualists genuinely contacted the dead, even in the cases where there was no fraud involved (and there were many in which it was). One of his main points has to do with the manifestations of spirits in séances. He did not think these “phenomena,” as he called them, were illusory. But he denied that they were actually appearances of the dead people in question. In his view, the essential core of the dead individual – the spirit – went on to another of the multiple states of being, and did so necessarily and without exception.

So who or what were the ghosts who appeared in séances? These, he claimed, were “simply those inferior elements that the being has in a way left behind in the earthly realm after the dissolution of the human complex that we call death. These are… what the ancient Latins called the manes. This is also what the ancient Hebrews called the ob, which is invariably the word used in biblical texts in regard to evocations” (cf. Deuteronomy 18:11; 1 Samuel 28:7). The root meaning of the Hebrew word ob (more correctly, ’ov) is “wineskin,” which suggests how the ancients conceived of these subtle remains. He explains:

It is, if you will, like a subtle form that can only take on an illusory corporeal appearance when manifesting under certain circumstances. This is the origin of the name the ‘double’ [ka] given to it by the Egyptians. For the rest, in all respects it is only an appearance. Separated from the spirit, this element cannot be conscious in the true sense of the word. Nevertheless, it possesses a semblance of consciousness, a virtual image, so to speak, of the living being. And the magician, reviving this apparition by lending it what it lacks, temporarily gives it enough of a reflexive consistency to obtain responses when he asks questions of it.

These astral remains thus are a kind of shell that the dead person has left behind, and which can be activated under certain conditions. They can even appear to answer questions.

This explanation does not cover all of the phenomena that take place in séances. Guénon also talks about materialisation, “perhaps the rarest of all phenomena.” In these cases a spirit actually appears to manifest palpably to participants. “A kind of substance, at first unformed and nebulous, seems to separate itself from the [medium’s] body, then gradually condenses. These entities often can be seen, touched, and even photographed (thereby excluding the possibility of hallucination).” In these cases, Guénon claims, the form arises from the mind of either the medium or of one or more of the participants. This is why there have been apparitions of people who turned out never to have existed. “Cases have been noted in which the ‘materialised’ forms quite simply copied portraits of fantastic figures borrowed from pictures or designs seen by the medium,” he writes. The energy is supplied by the medium or the participants or both.

Why does Guénon take such great pains to refute the ideas of the spiritualists? To return to his metaphysical system, in which each plane in the three-dimensional cross represents one level of manifestation – even, one could say, of reality – Guénon holds that an individual goes through each level exactly once and then passes on to another. He does not remain in connection with the previous level. It is to refute these fallacies that he makes his elaborate case in The Spiritist Error. One could even say that, in essence, this is the spiritist error.

His arguments are successful up to a point: they seem to fit in well with descriptions of the spiritualistic phenomena of his time and earlier. Furthermore, they help explain why most encounters with the dead take place in the few days after death, when presumably these residual elements have not had the time to break down fully. But Guénon’s claims stop short of explaining all such phenomena. There are instances in which the dead person appears much later than the time of death. Moreover, it seems to be in full consciousness and aware of things that were not known by the person to whom it appears. Such are the cases with warnings sometimes given by the dead to avoid certain voyages or plane flights.

One difficulty here, as with many of Guénon’s arguments, is that he holds rather rigidly to an extremely precise schema that is logical and consistent in its own terms but does not completely square with manifest reality. Indeed, even by his own theory, there must necessarily be some dissociation between the world of pure principle and the imperfect world of manifestation. But sometimes he does not seem to grasp the implications of this fact.

Guénon on Reincarnation

Guénon also takes great pains to refute the teaching of reincarnation. “The idea of reincarnation… like that of evolution, is a very modern idea; it appears to have materialised around 1830 or 1848 in certain French socialist circles” (Guénon, Theosophy, 104). Regarding the transmigration of human souls into animals, he says:

In reality, the ancients never conceived of such transmigration, any more than they did of a human into other humans, which is how one might define reincarnation. There are expressions, more or less symbolic, that could give rise to such misunderstandings, but only when one does not know what they are really saying, which is this: There are psychic elements in the human being which separate themselves after death, and which can pass into other living beings, human or animal, although this has no more importance than the fact that, after the dissolution of the same individual, the elements that made him up can be used to make up other bodies.

Unfortunately, the ancient accounts of reincarnation say nothing of the kind. At the end of the Republic, Plato tells the myth of Er, a soldier who has a near-death experience in which he learns the fates of individuals after death (Plato, Republic, 614b-621d). In one famous passage, Er sees the dead choosing their lots for new incarnations. Odysseus, the shrewdest of men, refuses lives of riches and honour and instead chooses the existence of an ordinary citizen. However “symbolic” this story might be, it is hard to see how it might accommodate itself to a theory like Guénon’s. One could make the same point about the teachings of the Pythagorean mysteries, to the extent that we know anything specific about them.

Guénon’s own views about the fate of the spirit after death are complex. Defining transmigration in what he considers the true sense, he contends, “It is not a matter of a return to the same state of existence… but on the contrary, the passage of the being to other states of existence, which are defined… by completely different conditions from those to which the human being is subject… Whoever speaks of transmigration is essentially speaking about a change of state. This is what all the traditional doctrines of the East teach, and we have many reasons to believe that this was also the teaching of the ‘mysteries’ of antiquity; it is the same thing even in heterodox doctrines such as Buddhism.” The last remark indicates that when he was writing The Spiritist Error, in the early 1920s, Guénon believed that Buddhism was not a pure reflection of the “orthodox” Traditional doctrine. Later in life, he granted it a certain grudging acceptance.

As we have seen, Guénon conceives of existence as a kind of three-dimensional grid, with a vertical axis transecting an infinite number of horizontal planes. The vertical axis represents the Self, the true essence of a given being; each of the innumerable horizontal planes constitutes a separate plane of manifestation. Human life on earth is only one of these planes. A given being can manifest itself only once on any particular plane. Therefore you cannot be born more than once as a human.

Like much of Guénon’s thought, this is rigorously precise and would seem to be irrefutable except for one thing. Guénon assumes that any given plane – such as earthly human life – is static. But in fact there is nothing to prove that this is so. On the contrary, the earth and earthly life are changing form ceaselessly, whether we look at them from the perspective of geological ages or even of human history. The possibilities for human life on earth today are not the same as they were in the year 1000 or will be in 3000. You can never be born onto the same earth twice, any more than you can be born as the same person twice.

At that time Guénon could get away with saying that Hinduism and Buddhism did not teach reincarnation. The number of Hindus and Buddhists in the West was insignificant, and many of those were Western converts. It is much harder to make such claims now, when the West has access to teachers from high levels in these traditions. The Dalai Lama, for example, the supreme authority in Tibetan Buddhism, has written: “There have been and are found at the present time, many incidents illustrating rebirth, from many countries in the world. From time to time small children talk about their work in a previous life and can name the family in which they lived. Sometimes it is possible to check such cases and so prove that the facts remembered by the child are not at all nonsense but are indeed true.”

And of course the Dalai Lama’s credentials as an authority of “Traditional” teaching are far more solid than Guénon’s own.

For a Hindu perspective, we might turn to Paramhansa Yogananda’s classic Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda quotes his guru, Sri Yukteswar, as saying, “Beings with unredeemed earthly karma are not permitted after astral death to go to the high causal sphere of cosmic ideas, but must shuttle to and fro from the physical and astral worlds only.” The process of shuttling to and fro from the physical world would suggest that physical incarnation is not a once-only option. And again, the credentials of both Yogananda and Sri Yukteswar as transmitters of traditional teaching are far higher than Guénon’s.

A follower of Guénon’s might try to argue that all of these Eastern teachers have been somehow corrupted by Western views – but that comes very close to begging the question. If you are trying to determine whether “Traditional” Hinduism and Buddhism teach reincarnation, you cannot categorically say that any Hindu or Buddhist teacher who holds to such a doctrine is therefore “untraditional.” You are assuming the very thing you are trying to prove.

Why should Guénon work so hard to deny the ideas of both the spiritualists and the Theosophists (the leading proponents of reincarnation in the West in his time)? Because, in his view, they are corruptions of Traditional ideas that date, at the earliest, from the eighteenth century. And if you read both Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion and The Spiritist Error, you will see that he has an almost convulsive aversion to such concepts as “progress,” “evolution,” and reincarnation.

Guénon believed that the early nineteenth-century utopian French socialists Charles Fourier and Pierre Leroux invented the concept of reincarnation in order to explain inequalities among the human race. For Guénon, such inequalities are inevitable and even, one suspects, uninteresting. Every individual is different from every other; if it were otherwise, they would not be individuals at all. Thus of necessity all humans have different capacities and fates. Guénon accepts this eventuality with more equanimity than, I suspect, most readers would.

In an article on Guénon’s views of reincarnation, scholar Joscelyn Godwin points out the likely basis of Guénon’s reasoning. “In an infinite series, such as that of integers, each term appears but once. Likewise, in the infinite variety of the Universe, experienced in its totality by every being, no single state need or can be repeated.” By such reasoning reincarnation would be impossible.

Of course that would be true if the states of being were exactly analogous to mathematical integers, but there is no reason to accept such a thing a priori. In fact much of Guénon’s arguments against the failings of modernity have to do with its obsessive interest with number above all things – what he calls the “reign of quantity.” He quotes Thomas Aquinas, who wrote, Numerus stat ex parte materiae: “Number is on the side of matter.” This means that number, or quantity, has to do with matter, not with the world of the spirit. Number, as Guénon so intricately argues, does not apply to the higher, spiritual realms. There is, then, no reason to suppose that the laws of mathematics, however apparently inexorable, would apply either.

Every thinker has his own dynamic – meaning the tensions between two ideas or types of ideas that he struggles, more or less successfully, to reconcile. For Guénon it is the tension between the world of multiplicity, of number, of quantity, of matter on the one hand and the realm of the intellect, of the spirit, of what he calls “quality” on the other. This dynamic, as he understands, is a powerful, perhaps an all-powerful one. And he intuits – correctly, I believe – that the modern world is balanced far too much in the direction of matter and quantity. But I am not sure that he himself manages to step past this imbalance completely. He himself may be prone to the fault that he so readily sees in others: applying quantitative principles to realms where quantity does not apply. He is no doubt right in saying that the states of being are infinite, or virtually so. But then its possible combinations would be infinite as well, and it would not be wise to jump to conclusions about what is and is not possible within them.

Sources

The Dalai Lama XIV, The Opening of the Wisdom-Eye, 2nd ed., Quest Books, 1991

Joscelyn Godwin, “The Case against Reincarnation,” Gnosis 42 (Winter 1997), 28–32

René Guénon, L’erreur spirite, 2d ed., Éditions Traditionelles, 1952

René Guénon, Theosophy: History of a Pseudo-Religion, Translated by Alvin Moore Jr. et al., Sophia Perennis et Universalis, 2003

Richard Smoley, “Against Blavatsky: René Guénon’s Critique of Theosophy,” Quest 98:1 (Winter 2010), 28–34; www.theosophical.org/publications/quest-magazine/42-publications/quest-magazine/1696-against-blavatsky-rene-guenons-critique-of-theosophy; accessed March 28, 2016.

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I believe that some of us dedicated to experimental spirituality and mind metaphysics must attempt to theorise the mechanics and delivery systems behind what we experience and observe. There exist, of course, manifold risks of personal bias toward a favoured thesis. But to limit the wish to “know thyself” to clinical study is to eviscerate the principle itself. This is my effort to describe “what happens” in the process of thought causation or what is popularly, though inadequately, called positive thinking or manifestation.

Everyone hates The Secret. Mainline cultural commentators and “serious” spiritual seekers routinely resurrect the nearly 20-year-old work for excoriation, presumably allowing H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) to sleep undisturbed after writing the first “take down” piece on mind metaphysics more than a century ago. In 1910, the Bard of Baltimore wrote in “Mental Vibrations”:

The New Thought, that fantastic magic, goes marching on… There is, in brief, little if any truth in the belief that good wishes may be transformed into objective phenomena, that mind influences matter – and little, even, in the belief that mind influences mind.

To today’s cutting-edge rationalists who would lift our spiritual blinkers: we’ve been there.

Mapping a Theory of Thought Causation

My task in this article is neither to defend alternative spirituality nor enumerate its flaws – of which I write often – but rather to consider why, from a spiritual or extra-physical perspective, positive thinking, “manifestation,” or the “Law of Attraction” just might work. Before you cry confirmation bias! (materialism’s equivalent of lock her up!), take a beat.

I venture to map a seeker’s theory of mind causation – but one that also stands defensible within parameters of accepted (if not always understood) knowledge. My theory may be wrong. It may be grossly incomplete. But I believe that those of us engaged in the search for practical spirituality must at least attempt to theorise from the intersection of testimony, science, and experience. Each generation owes the labour of verification to the search of the next, which will have its own ideas and critiques.

Indeed, today’s seekers must move beyond inherited decisions and templates. We need our own experiments and results, including failures. Those of us who care about New Thought, or mind causation, owe the spiritual culture – and ourselves – a supportable hypothesis of how it works. We must be equally willing to discard cherished hypotheses. In that vein, I conclude this essay with articles of personal experimentation.

I start by quoting mystic Neville Goddard (1905–1972) from a 1948 series of lectures in Los Angeles:

Scientists will one day explain why there is a serial universe. But in practice, how you use this serial universe to change the future is more important.

It was a striking observation. The mononymous Neville is, I believe, the most penetrating voice to emerge from New Thought tradition – because it was not until years later that quantum physicists began discussing the many-worlds theory, devised by physicist Hugh Everett III (1930–1982) in 1957.

A Short Overview of Quantum Physics

Everett was attempting to make sense of some of the extraordinary findings that had been occurring for about three decades in quantum mechanics. For example, scientists are able to demonstrate, through various interference patterns, that a subatomic particle occupies a wave state or state of superposition – that is, an infinite number of places – until a sentient observer or automatised device takes a measurement: it is only when measurement is taken that the particle collapses, so to speak, from a wave state into a localised state. At that point, it occupies a definite, identifiable, measurable place. Before measurement is taken, however, the localised particle exists only in potential.

Now, I have just about squeezed all of quantum physics into a couple of sentences. I think it is an accurate description, but obviously I am reducing huge complexities into the dimensions of a marble. I believe I am faithfully stating what has been observed in the last ninety-plus years of particle experiments (as well as emerging experiments on larger objects, such as hydrogen molecules). We are seeing that on the subatomic scale matter does not behave as we are conditioned to expect.

Measurement & Observation: The Role of Mind

Starting about twenty years ago, it became fashionable for New Agers and laypeople, like me, to put quantum theory at the back of cherished spiritual principles. It became equally fashionable for professional sceptics and mainstream journalists to pushback, crying B.S. and sophistry. That position, while still heard, has quieted. Not because sceptics have grown more pensive or attenuated to media-speak, but because the proposition of mind-over-matter, strange as it may seem, now resounds in debates on theoretical physics in mainline journals and magazines.

In 2009, I attended a presentation on the “quantum measurement problem” delivered by parapsychologist Dean Radin before an audience of scientists, social thinkers, and scholars of religion. I asked Radin to address the 800-pound gorilla in the room: If observation and perspective alter material on a micro level, in the world of waves and particles, might that say something about the legitimacy of the New Thought or mind-power thesis? “It’s not complete bullshit,” Radin replied. “There may be an inkling of something to it.” Another physicist and longtime military researcher was also present. “As the resident sceptic,” he said, “I concur.”

Our understanding of matter in our macro world generally comes from measuring things through our five senses and experiencing them as singularities. There is one table. It is solid and definable. It is not occupying an infinite number of spaces. But contemporary quantum physicists have theorised that we may not normally see or experience superposition phenomena because of what is sometimes called information leakage.

This means that we gain or lose data based on fineness of measurement. When you measure things with exquisitely well-tuned instruments, like a microscope, you see more and more of what is going on, i.e., actual reality. But when you pan the camera back, so to speak, your measurements coarsen and you see less and less of what is actually happening. To cite the most basic example, to all ordinary appearances, a table is solid. The floor beneath your feet is solid. Where you are sitting is solid. But measuring through atomic-scale microscopes, we realise that if you go deeper and deeper, space appears within these objects. Particles make up the atom and still greater space appears. We do not experience that; we experience solidity. But no one questions that space prevails among particles composing an atom.

Furthermore, we possess decades of data demonstrating that when subatomic particles are directed at a target system, such as a double slit, they appear in infinite places at once until a measurement is made; only then does locality exist. But we fail to see this unless we are measuring things with comparative exactitude. Hence, what I am describing seems unreal based on lived experience – but it is actual.

In any event, my supposition is this: if particles appear in an infinite number of places at once until a measurement is taken; and if, as we know from studying the behaviour and mechanics of subatomic particles, there exists an infinitude of possibilities; and if we know, as we have since the inception of Einstein’s theories, that time is relative, then it is possible to reason – and it is almost necessary to reason – that linearity itself, by which we organise our lives, is illusory.

Linearity is a useful and necessary device for five-sensory beings to get through life; but it does not stand up objectively. Linearity is conceptual – a subjective interpretation of what is really going on. It is not reflected in Einstein’s theory of relativity, which demonstrates that time slows for an object approaching the speed of light. (The individual travelling in a metaphorical spaceship at or near light speed experiences time slowing, not from their perspective but in comparison to those not at near light speed. And this is no mere thought exercise: space travellers in our era, although they are obviously approaching nowhere near that velocity, experience minute effects of time reduction.) Nor is linearity reflected in quantum mechanics, where particles appear in an infinitude of places and obey no orderly modality. Linearity is not replicated when measurement of a particle serves to localise the appearance or existence of the object.

This begins to clarify why Einstein famously wrote in a letter of March 1955:

People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

If we pursue this line of thought further – and this is where Everett’s many-worlds theory comes into play – the very decision to take a measurement (or not take one) not only localises a particle but creates a past, present, and future for that particle. Hence, an observer’s decision to log a measurement creates a multidimensional reality for the particle.

There exists debate over whether a device represents a method of measurement distinct from an observer, as well as whether the “collapse” from wave to particle results from an observer’s individual psyche or “transpersonal mind behaving according to natural laws,” as observed by Bernardo Kastrup, Henry P. Stapp, and Menas C. Kafatos in a May 29, 2018, Scientific American article “Coming to Grips with the Implications of Quantum Mechanics.” This transpersonal mind, the writers continue, “comprises but far transcends any individual psyche,” a description similar to the Hermetic concept of Nous or an over-mind. The authors compellingly argue that even if a device is used for measurement – and thus localisation – perception and intent, either of the individual, the meta-mind, or both, remains the determining force.

Schrödinger’s Cat

Multidimensional reality is implied in the famous thought experiment called Schrödinger’s Cat. 20^th-century physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) was frustrated with the evident absurdity of quantum theory, which showed objects simultaneously appearing in more than one place at a time. Such an outlook, he felt, violated all commonly observed physical laws. In 1935, Schrödinger sought to highlight this predicament through a purposely absurdist thought experiment, which he intended to force quantum physicists to follow their data to its ultimate degree.

Schrödinger reasoned that quantum data dictates that a sentient being, such as a cat, can be simultaneously alive and dead. Here is a variant of the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment: a cat is placed into one of a pair of boxes. Along with the cat is a collar fitted with a device which, if exposed to an atom, releases a deadly poison. An observer then fires an atom at the boxes. The observer subsequently uses some form of measurement to check which box the atom is in: the empty one or the one with the cat and the poisoning device. When the observer goes to check, the wave function of the atom (the state in which it exists in both boxes) collapses into a particle function (the state in which it is localised to one box). Once the observer takes his measurement, convention says that the cat will be discovered to be dead or alive. But Schrödinger reasoned that quantum physics describes an outcome in which the cat is both dead and alive. This is because the atom, in its wave function, was, at one time, in either box, and either outcome is real.

Of course, all lived experience tells us that if the atom went into the empty box, the cat is alive; and if it went into the box with the cat and the poisoning device, the cat is dead. But Schrödinger, aiming to highlight the frustrations of quantum theory, argued that if the observations of quantum-mechanics experiments are right, you would have to allow for each outcome.

To take it even further, many-worlds theorists in the 1950s posited that if an observer waited some significant length of time – say, eight hours – before checking on the dead-alive cat, he would discover one cat that was dead for eight hours and another that was alive for eight hours (and now hungry). In this line of reasoning, conscious observation effectively manifested the localised atom, the dead cat, and the living cat – and also manifested the past, or in other words, created a history for both a dead cat and a living one. Both outcomes are true.

So, whatever a particle is doing, the very fact that a sentient observer has chosen to take a measurement at that time, place, moment, and juncture creates a whole past, present, and future – an infinitude of outcomes. A divergent set of outcomes would exist if that measurement were never taken. A divergent set of outcomes would also exist if that measurement were taken one second later, or five minutes later, or tomorrow. And what is tomorrow? When particles exist in superposition until somebody takes a measurement, there is no such thing as tomorrow, other than subjectively.

Consider too: the cat, from its perspective, is local; the observer, from its perspective, is local – but both, in fact, are in a wave state or superposition. We can speak of them as concrete, singular beings only from their personal perspective. From the quantum perspective, they are infinite. Expanding on this idea, research physician Robert Lanza, adjunct professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, argues that death itself is ultimately a mental phenomenon: we “die” only insofar as an observer perceives demise; the consciousness of the “deceased” branches off into one of Everett’s many worlds. (This begs the question of who experiences these effects if there’s no such thing as “one” person/life. I consider this in my book Daydream Believer.)

And what, finally, are our five senses but a technology by which we measure things? Are our five senses anything other than a biological technology, not necessarily different in intake from a camera, photometer, digital recorder, or microscope? So, it is possible that within reality – within this extra-linear, super-positioned infinitude of possibilities in which we are taking measurements – we experience things based upon our perspective. This is why in considering mind causation I use the term select rather than manifest.

Neville Goddard: Thoughts Have Wings

Here, we return to mystic Neville Goddard. His instinct was, I believe, correct in the schema just considered. Neville taught that you can take a measurement by employing the visualising forces of your imagination. You are taking a measurement within the infinitude of possible outcomes. The measurement localises or actualises the thing itself.

In the 1948 lectures quoted earlier, Neville further noted:

Man can prove the existence of a dimensionally larger world by simply focusing his attention on an invisible state and imagining that he sees and feels it. If he remains concentrated in this state, his present environment will pass away, and he will awaken in a dimensionally larger world where the object of his contemplation will be seen as a concrete objective reality.

I feel intuitively that, were he to abstract his thoughts from this dimensionally larger world and retreat still farther within his mind, he would again bring about an externalisation of time. He would discover that, every time he retreats into his inner mind and brings about an externalisation of time, space becomes dimensionally larger. And he would therefore conclude that both time and space are serial, and that the drama of life is but the climbing of a multitudinous dimensional time block.

Again, note how foresightful Neville’s ideas and language proved of the many-worlds theory.

Aleister Crowley, the confounding and brilliant British occultist and artist, made a statement related to Neville’s. Writing in the introduction to his 1904 channelled text The Book of the Law – later published in a general edition in 1938 – Crowley observed:

Each of us has thus an universe of his own, but it is the same universe for each one as soon as it includes all possible experience. This implies the extension of consciousness to include all other consciousnesses. In our present stage, the object that you see is never the same as the one that I see; we infer that it is the same because your experience tallies with mine on so many points that the actual differences of our observation are negligible… Yet all the time neither of us can know anything… at all beyond the total impression made on our respective minds.

Neville’s formula is simplicity itself: an assumption, if persisted in, hardens into fact. But the assumption must be persuasive; it must be convincing. That is why emotions and feeling states must come into play. And Neville observed that you can use hypnagogia – the state of cognizant pre-sleep or drowsy relaxation – to help facilitate that process.

Hypnagogia naturally occurs twice daily: just prior to and following sleep. It is a period of hallucinatory sentience during which we are nonetheless capable of controlling attention; what’s more, your rational defences are lowered. This can be considered “prime time” to visualise a desired end. (Hypnagogia is also a period of heightened ESP-related activity, as recorded in academic psychical research.)

Another way of using Neville’s approach to mental creativity is to enter an inner state of theatrical or childlike make-believe. Not childish but childlike: a state of internal wonder and pretending. Children excel at this. We grow embarrassed about this quality as we age, but Neville spoke ingenuously about walking the streets of Manhattan imagining that he was in the treelined lanes of his native Barbados, boarding a ship to some desired destination, or in a location where he wanted to be.

He would say: “Unfoldment will come. You will see.” Again, he argued that an assumption, although false, if persisted in, eventually hardens into fact. He further advised, “Assume the state of the wish fulfilled. Live from the end.” Remember, the teacher reminded listeners, you are not in a state of wanting; you are in a state of having received. Your aim is simply to occupy the emotional and mental condition that you would experience following fulfilment.

Of course, you must also continue to go about your adult life in this world of Caesar, currency, and commerce – fulfilling your obligations and remaining accountable. You must cooperate with the world. You must do the normative things that life requires. The crisis of the New Age is the inability of an outsized number of its adherents to abide this. In my observation, until a person demonstrates accountability, competency, and agency in outer life, the spiritual path is a diversion, possibly a disastrous one.

Should you accept this challenge, how long will it take to witness your desired changes in outer life? How long is required for outer life to conform to your internal focus, your act of living “from the end” of your ideal? The question of time intervals is deeply fraught because with all the stresses that life throws at us, it is very difficult to adopt a feeling state and stick with it for weeks. At times, psychological barriers and stresses make it impossible.

Neville noted that there could fall a substantial time interval between your visioning and experience of the wished-for state or thing. He would point out that the gestation period of a human life is nine months. The gestation period of a horse is eleven months. The gestation period of a lamb is five months. The gestation period of a chick is twenty-one days. There is almost always going to be some time interval. You will find that naturalness of persistence comports with depth of passion for your aim. It can appear more a matter of the aim holding you than you it. This is one reason why clarity of aim and self-honesty are essential: we follow emotions, acknowledged or not.

Careful What You Wish For

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) made an interesting observation in this vein. We have all heard the expression, “Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.” It is rooted in Goethe. Taking a leaf from the philosopher and dramatist’s play Faust (c.1772–1775),Ralph Waldo Emerson noted this dynamic in his 1860 essay “Fate,” which led to the popular adage. Emerson wrote:

And the moral is that what we seek we shall find; what we flee from flees from us; as Goethe said, “what we wish for in youth, comes in heaps on us in old age,” too often cursed with the granting of our prayer: and hence the high caution, that, since we are sure of having what we wish, we must beware to ask only for high things.

We are being warned to act with perspective: what we wish for when we are young will visit us in waves when we are old.

Goethe’s observation relates to Neville’s remarks about the perceived passage of time and the gestation between thought and actualisation. Many people would reasonably object that they have all kinds of unfulfilled wishes. But unlocking the truth of this observation requires peeling back the layers of your mind and probing formative images and fantasies from when you were very young.

What is the earliest dream you recall from when you first gained conscious memories, maybe at age three or four? What fantasies occupied your earliest recollective years? Children lead very intense fantasy lives, even at ages four or five. If you take Goethe’s counsel, you might be surprised – barring extreme countervailing events (to which I return) – to discover remarkable symmetry between things you are living out today and concepts you harboured when very young. These can be positive, negative, or numerous stations between.

Neville recommended against thinking in terms of, “It will happen this way” or, “I’ll do something to make it happen.” His attitude was that the event will unfold in its own natural manner. In his system, your job is not to draw the map – it is to live from the destination.

I must, finally, add a word about suffering on both an intimate and global scale. New Thought has proven woefully inadequate in addressing matters of implacable tragedy and catastrophe, a topic on which I’ve written widely.

My contention is that even if awareness or consciousness is the ultimate arbiter of existence, we still experience many different laws and forces within the physical framework we know. I used to say that we live under many different laws and forces; I’m not sure if that’s entirely right. But we certainly experience diffuse laws and forces, and these experiences are hard-baked into us.

So, it stands to reason that even if emotive thought, perspective, and awareness are determinative of what reality gets concretised into our individual experiences, there exist different laws and possibilities that are also playing out at the same time. There are physical facts which also form part of the nature of our experience within the framework that we find ourselves. And it could be that there are other frameworks in which our psyches are much freer. There may be frameworks in which we experience fewer laws and forces that seem to interrupt a sense of continuity between you, the individual – you, the seeker – and that which you experience.

That said, suffering and catastrophe must, for every ethical being, be understood as fundamental, urgent, and, where possible and according to personal conviction, requiring of amelioration and solidarity.

I believe that Neville is going to be remembered – and is already seen today – as having created the most elegant mystical analogue to quantum physics.

When I started writing about Neville in 2005 – the first journalistic coverage of his life since the 1940s – he was a figure of obscurity even among most New Thoughters. But today Neville’s voice and work net millions of results in search engines. At a 2022 tech conference, I was floored by the number of programmers and engineers (not the usual suspects) who approached me to talk about him.

As seen, Neville espoused a variant of the many-worlds theory long before the popularisation of quantum physics. Indeed, he had a series of remarkable instincts in the 1940s that have since been tantalisingly, if indirectly, reiterated by quantum theorists – most of whom have not (yet) heard his name.

Indeed, it would not surprise me if, within a generation, some physics students begin to read Neville as a philosophical adjunct to their work. That may seem a stretch, but remember that many of today’s senior cohort of physicists, people in positions of academic and grant-making authority, were inspired by Star Trek, Arthur C. Clarke,and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There is visibly greater openness in the field today to matters of perspective and thought causation.

Living by the Inner Light of Conviction

As I’ve suggested, you can use several different techniques in connection with Neville’s ideas, including those of your own devising: I challenge you to try them and see what happens. You are entitled to results. I believe that every therapeutic, ethical, or spiritual philosophy should produce some concrete and desired change in your life and conduct; if it does not, then such an idea warrants no hold on you.

I feel similarly that the ability to observe and note an outcome in your life is vitally important. Testimony forms a critical source of ideas, a meaningful record, and a warranted inducement to others.

We all live by philosophies, spoken or not. Even if we say we do not have an ideology, we obviously harbour assumptions by which we navigate life. When I look back on figures like Neville or pioneering parapsychologist J.B. Rhine (1895–1980), I realise that their greatness is that they lived by the inner light of their ideas. That is rare. We are a world of talkers. People are sarcastic or cruel over Twitter and think they are taking a principled stand. Is it courageous or honourable for a keyboard warrior (often under a pseudonym) to call out people online? That is no victory. It is make-believe morality.

When we look back on iconic figures in the social, cultural, artistic, or spiritual milieu, we remember those few who lived by the inner light of conviction; who struggled to comport their ideals with conduct. Such private philosophies are the only ones that last. Indeed, if you cannot keep your word, apologise, demonstrate solidarity or loyalty, then write nothing of an ethical or spiritual bent. You’ll be writing on sand.

I must state the following and I mean it in my heart: if you sincerely attempt what I am theorising in this article, I believe that you will find greatness; because, if nothing else, you will be attempting to live by the inner light of an idea. Try.

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