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Human beings are not only the funniest monkeys: they are the sexiest ones as well. In many ways we are a species singularly devoted to sex. We talk, write, read, joke and argue about it; we dress and undress for it, and, given favourable circumstances, we perform it regularly. More importantly, and sometimes lamentably, we have innumerable laws and commandments to organise, punish, curb, repress and otherwise influence sexual actions and feelings and have devised psychological penances of guilt and shame which we come to attach to our sexuality.

Because of these and related circumstances, most people are confused and bewildered about sex much of the time, and those who profess not to be thus flummoxed tend to take umbrage under clichés and half truths which they have consciously accepted, but which are not in harmony with either their instinctual or their spiritual natures.

It goes without saying that if the Gnostic worldview is any kind of a worldview at all, it must be able to address itself meaningfully to this predicament and thus to suggest spiritually sound ways in which men and women might successfully extricate themselves from the same. The present essay is an attempt to suggest some Gnostic ways of viewing and dealing with sexuality, and in offering it to the reader, the author is not unmindful of certain hazards.

Psychoanalyst Edward Glover once suggested that writing on psychologically charged subjects should be classified as a dangerous occupation. When in the course of such writing one happens to expose the unconscious motives of some persons, pandemonium is certain to follow. The psychologically exposed individuals frequently relieve their anxiety by attacking the writer who has presumed to disturb their precarious and cherished peace of mind. Martyrdom is surely not an uncommon experience to the Gnostic, and if some form of it befall the author, the risk will hopefully have been worth taking!

The ancient term “Gnosis” has two very useful modern analogues; they are the words “consciousness” and “meaning.” Both of these are vitally important to any useful consideration of sexuality. Without consciousness, in the psychological sense, sexuality is a mere expression of instinct: Useful in its domain, but unrelated to the enhancement of life, to the experience of the fullness of being. With the coming of consciousness, all experiences, including the sexual ones, acquire meaning. As consciousness adds a greatly needed component to experience, so meaning brings us the experience of totality, of the fullness (Pleroma) extolled by the Gnostics.

Between the reality of our lives lived in time and the quality of life’s timelessness, between our personal and mundane experiences and the realm which transcends the tangible world, there exists a creative tensional relationship of opposites. The Apostle Thomas, reporting the words of Jesus, reminds us that the saving, or Christ principle, always comes to us to make the two into one, to unite the above and the below, the left and the right, the inner and the outer, and the male and the female into a single one.

The reconciling agent of all such opposites is meaning. When, on the other hand, the tension between the poles of existence is lacking, then, as C.G. Jung has expressed it, human beings “have the feeling that they are haphazard creatures without meaning, and it is this feeling that prevents them from living their lives with the intensity it demands if it is to be enjoyed to the full. Life becomes stale and is no longer the exponent of the complete human being.” (Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung).

Sexuality is one of the most important tensional relationships of the opposites in life. It is therefore evident that it must have, it does have, great meaning. To leave such a rich mine of meaning, of Gnosis, unexplored would be a grave omission indeed. Let us then proceed with our exploration. As it is useful in such cases, we shall proceed from the ground upwards, as it were, and begin with the evidence of the physical aspect of humankind by reviewing the evidence of biology.

The Gnosis of Biology

The human species is a unique one in many ways, and not the least claim to such uniqueness is to be found in the sexual sphere. The human is the sexiest animal on earth. No other sexually reproducing species makes love with such frequency, and consequently, sexually toned behaviour saturates a large portion of the individual and social life of every man and woman. There is a biological reason for this. Unlike the female of every other species, the human female is capable of constant sexual arousal. She is biologically capable of copulating every single day of her adult life. She can make love during pregnancy, and she can become sexually active shortly after having a child. In fact, she can engage in sex whenever she pleases.

Animals are far less sexy than humans. All female animals have a period of heat (the estrus) during which they copulate, and when this period is over, neither the females nor the males of the species engage regularly in sex. (Among caged baboons and chimpanzees one may observe some sexual activity outside of the period of heat, as one may among free chimps and orangutans, but their sexual activities at “unusual” times are minimal when compared to the human.) Unlike humans, female animals do not accept males while menstruating, they do not initiate sex during pregnancy, and they do not resume their menstrual cycle before their young are weaned.

Due to the so-called “silent ovulation” (the absence of the signs of heat) of the human female, her fertility is never dramatically announced as it is among the animals. The result is that human couples do not know when a woman is ready to conceive. In order to insure the conception of offspring, humans thus must make love regularly, even past the time when conception has occurred. Similarly, especially where breast-feeding is not prolonged, human mothers are capable of resuming their ovulation about six weeks after delivering a child. There seems to be an unmistakable conspiracy of nature directed toward motivating human beings to make love daily, for the human female, alone of all other females, is uniquely designed to do so!

Anthropologist Dr. Helen Fisher, in her book The Sex Contract (William Morrow and Co., 1982) traces the evolutionary development of the unique human sexual situation. She tells us that the genetic evolutionary process which led to the present condition of humanity in regards to sex began about 8 million years ago, when humans became accustomed to walking upright. Protohominid females who delivered their young in a relatively immature state had a better chance of surviving childbirth, because the smaller birth canal, developed as the result of walking, made the delivery of large, developed infants hazardous. The mothers, now forced to care for their children for a long period, were more prone to engage in sex outside of their limited periods of fertility than they were wont to do earlier in their evolution. Since the most popular females were fed and protected most adequately, they tended to survive in greater numbers and thus passed on their genetic traits to more offspring. Thus our present patterns of biologically unlimited sexual intercourse came into being.

Dr. Fisher writes: “With the stimulus of constantly available sex, protohominids had begun the most fundamental exchange the human race would ever make.” The fundamental exchange consisted in bringing males and females more closely together than hitherto would have been possible. The bond of constant sexual interest kept them together in each other’s company; it made them divide their labours, to exchange food, to share the daily work and joys of living. Men and women became aware of each other emotionally, and eventually mentally and intuitively as the result of the sexual force which tied them together, creating a never abating forcefield of dynamic tension between them. Sex has become the progenitor of affection, love, relatedness, and above all, consciousness. From purely biological data we may thus infer with some justification that the coming of unlimited sexual expression became the fountain and origin of vast achievements of human consciousness which otherwise could and would not have come to pass. The implications of this insight for past, present and future are large indeed, and should be apparent to all.

The Gnosis of Psychohistory

Human biology has its history, and so does the human mind, or psyche. As one might expect, the importance of sexuality and of its influence on various aspects of human life are very much part of this history of the mind. Psychohistorians, whose theories contain elements relevant to the concerns of sexuality, are numerous. Among those inspired by Freud, singular distinction belongs to G. Rattray Taylor (Sex in History), while among C.G. Jung’s followers one needs to refer to Erich Neumann (The Great Mother and The Origin and History of Consciousness) as well as to Esther Harding (Psychic Energy; Its Source and Goal.) The considerations which are to follow here utilise the theories of these authors, and amplify their views by way of certain insights of the ancient Gnostics.

The protopsychology of the ancient Gnostics (as well as of others in the Hellenistic culture) perceived three main divisions of the human person. The first of these is matter, or body (hyle, soma); the second mind, or soul (psyche); and the third spirit (pneuma). The existential point of gravity of a person’s life moves according to certain patterns from one of these three to the others, and an individual’s type (today called psychological type) would be determined by which one of these three principles acts as the primary focus of his or her consciousness. All people are capable of experiences of body, soul and spirit in some measure, but the seat of their principal identity is located within one only. Thus, there are people whose outstanding concerns are invariably material, while others function chiefly from a centre of consciousness lodged in their mind, while yet others look at all things from a point of view that is primarily of a character that we might call spiritual.

The presence of any individual within one or the other of these three categories is not a matter of accident, but rather of a transformational growth and development or consciousness, which begins with the material plane and rises eventually to the spiritual.

When we apply this Gnostic idea to the matter of human sexuality we may find some useful insights. There is, first of all, what we might call a hyletic (matter oriented) type of sexuality. To persons of this type sexuality is primarily a bodily urge, largely unrelated to any feeling or regard for the partner in sex, and originally even quite unaware of the possible results of copulation in reproduction. In a sense, we might say that persons in this stage of development are not participating in a sexual act, but they are identified with it. An interesting phenomenon connected with this is the identification of persons with their sexual organs, as evidenced by works of much primitive art, where men and women are represented with disproportionately large sexual organs. Similarly one may note the use of words denoting sexual organs when describing an individual in the idiom of obscene slang. All of these are evidences of the identification of the entire person with sex. Men are merely phallus bearers and women vagina-carriers; they are not persons, but embodiments of their sexuality. Hyletic sexuality in its later stages also becomes involved in the idea of offspring. Men thus come to look upon their mates not as persons but as the potential or actual mothers of their children, and women look upon men as beings capable of giving them children. In each case we are dealing with a primitive phenomenon, a manifestation of hyletic or biological urges. (It needs to be recognised that the urge to have offspring is just as primitive and unconscious an urge as the one moving to sexual intercourse. The notion that the desire for children is somehow more moral and refined than the desire for sex is nonsense!) Freudian psychohistorians tend to call the hyletic phase of sexuality “matrist,” by identifying it with the archaic domination of children by the Mother. Matrist sexuality is quite permissive, even promiscuous and polymorphous, and leads to the formation of “shame cultures” and the development of the incest taboo. The term “oral” is applied to its quality by Freudian writers.

In the next stage of development, sexuality becomes linked with emotion and thinking. Ego-development having taken place, consciousness now wishes to subdue the unconscious and thus develops numerous devices for the control of impulse. This is the greatest period of sexual repression and the phase when issues of law and commandment take on a great importance. The Gnostic terminology calls this phase the psychic, for it is here that the mind-emotion complex called “psyche” (soul, or mind) becomes dominant. Mythologically and symbolically this ego or mind is frequently connected with the masculine principle, and thus we find that psychic humanity tends to be patriarchal and masculine in its orientation and consequently a negative view of femininity and of female sexuality predominates. Men in their desire for impulse control begin to view women as temptresses, as instinctual creatures who have to be subdued and controlled. Jungian psychology calls this the “patriarchal phase” while Freudian writers refer to it as “patrist” or father-identifying, and its predominant tendency is said to be “anal.” It is obvious that the dominant cultural influences of Western society are predominantly of this variety, and that most of these influences stem from religious roots within the semitic religiosity of Judaism, Islam and non-Gnostic Christianity. This phase of the development of consciousness is greatly attached to the institution of marriage, and its chief taboos are against adultery and homosexuality. Its result is the so-called “guilt culture.”

The third, or pneumatic, phase is the most difficult to discuss, because it denotes a form or state of consciousness that is as rare today as it was in the second and third centuries A.D. There is little doubt, however, that several ancient Gnostic teachers, most notably Valentinus, envisioned this spiritual condition as a union of the masculine and feminine aspects of the human being with a consequent androgynation, which undoubtedly would have its reflection in the sexual sphere also. While the anti-Gnostic church fathers with fierce inconsistency accused the Gnostics of excessive asceticism and licentiousness in the same breath, the more recent discoveries of Gnostic writings indicate that the Gnostics were intent upon a mysterious pneumaticisation of sexuality, which process was embodied in the Valentinian sacrament of the bridal chamber. One of the chief results of the pneumatic state of Gnosis is the ability of the Gnostic to rise above the law (antinomianism) and to be motivated no longer by the external commandment of so-called revelation, but rather by the internal command of the indwelling divine spirit. This might be envisioned as the highest form of situation ethics, inspired by intuition, rather than by any rational considerations. The principle is compatible both with the ethics of existential philosophy and with Jungian psychology. The pneumatic Gnostic can no longer rely on any external commandment but must live by the existential courage of daily moral decisions. In Sartre’ swords, “he is doomed to freedom.” C.G. Jung also envisioned a condition within the individuation process where in the moral laws of society and church are relativated and indeed rendered meaningless by the spiritual growth of the individual. Right and wrong become a matter of personal choice based on spiritual insight, rather than standards derived from a code delivered by god or by society.

The sexual implications of the pneumatic phase of the growth of consciousness are considerable. With the fusion of the masculine and feminine attitudes in the psyche, a fully mature sexuality may be expected to arise. Love becomes the fulfilling of the law, and it goes without saying that this love will have sexual expressions as well. Neither will the expressions of this love be in any way limited by human institutions and prejudices whether they concern marital status, the gender of the beloved or the permanence or impermanence of the love relationship. The spirit bloweth where it listeth; human institutions and earthly considerations must pale before the pneumatic love. The accusation of libertinism hurled against the Gnostics by Irenaeus, Hypolitus and others is thus revealed as the sort of misunderstanding the contemporary Gnostic might face also. The intuitive morality of the pneumatic can be readily confused by the uncomprehending with hyletic, immorality and amorality, while it is nothing of the sort. The pneumatic phase bears, incidentally, all the hallmarks of what Erich Neumann called the “integrative phase,” and its characteristics are to some extent identical with what Freudian psychologists envision as “genital” sexuality.

Different Strokes for Different Gnostic Folks

The above noted psychohistorical considerations raise important issues which might be of concern to contemporary Gnostics. Are all Gnostics obliged to follow the pneumatic ethic at all times? Is psychic morality, especially in the sexual area, still relevant to the Gnostic? Have we all successfully outgrown hyletic modes of behaviour? And how are the answers to these questions likely to affect the sexual behaviour of the contemporary Gnostic?

Our situation might be summed up as follows: We live in a culture which ostensibly follows a psychic system of morality in sexual matters, but which is in practice more often than not composed of persons whose character is hyletic. Pneumatics are far and in between, and usually hidden away in the secret corners of contemporary life. Moreover, all persons possess hyletic, psychic, and pneumatic components in their character, with one or the other predominating. It is thus evident that most persons, including Gnostics, will express their sexuality sometimes in ways that are hyletic, at other times they may be attached to attitudes that are predominantly psychic and in some instances they may be capable of behaviour that may be properly recognised as pneumatic. Most people may also go through these phases in their own lifetimes. It is by no means unusual for early youth to be sexually quite hyletic (a sort of adolescent sexuality, as it were), for young adulthood to be involved in the marital and societal ambiance of a psychic sexual morality, and for the middle-aged person to achieve a matter-of-fact and liberated attitude toward sexuality, without serious inhibitions and guilts; in short, an attitude that approximates that of the pneumatic.

Since it would be reasonable to say that modern Gnostics may thus find persons of all three orientations in their midst, it might be helpful to present here a few brief guidelines for all three types regarding sexuality.

The hyletic needs to be reminded that, while hyletic sexuality is no more sinful or less virtuous than any other kind, it is still limiting and limited. Indiscriminate sexual behaviour is characterised by unconsciousness and this is a condition one ought to outgrow. Still, no one can be equally conscious of all aspects of life at all times, and a relatively high level of consciousness in one area may be accompanied by a relatively low level in another. The key concept must always be authenticity. If our behaviour has adduced to it as much consciousness as we could muster under the circumstances, this should be enough. There should be no judging of anyone for his or her sexual mores. Authenticity by nature is a highly personal issue. One person may be far more authentic and conscious while associating with multiple sexual partners than another locked into a rigid psychic cage of so-called monogamy. Striving for consciousness will inevitably bring its own reward and is far more useful than blind obedience to external rules.

The psychic person may prove more troublesome within a Gnostic context than either the hyletic or the pneumatic. Unlike the happy-go-lucky hyletics, psychics tend to be rigid personalities with a strong proclivity for projecting their own shadows, especially their sexual shadows on others. They tend to be judgmental, intolerant and self-righteous. In short, they are a mess, or at least they appear as such. Psychics ought to remember that goodness, by anyone’s standards, including their own, is never enough. Wholeness, not goodness, is the objective of the Gnostic life. Jung was fond of saying in truly Gnostic fashion: “It is only the fullness of being that counts.” Rules exist in order to be outgrown. We may not always be ready to outgrow them yet, but the desirability of the prospect must always be kept in mind. When following rules after the fashion of the psychic we but see through a glass darkly, and we should aspire to the clear vision face to face with authentic reality. While we must be careful not to judge the hyletic, we must often dissuade the psychic from judging everyone. Psychics may also be reminded that it is the psychic law alone that creates sin. “I had not known sin but by the law” said a Hebrew prophet. The harsher our own standards of judgement the greater will be our own guilt and spiritual impotence and the more our potential for liberation will diminish. Sexual guilt has been the greatest single curse the demiurge and his minions have hurled against humanity; it has been the blight of our culture, the stifler of creativity and the enemy of Gnosis. It must be recognised and its suggestion rejected at all times.

That rare bird known as the pneumatic, must above all, be discreet. Pneumatics have a divine right to their freedom, including their sexual freedom, but they have no right to bad manners. The spiritual nobility of the world must maintain decorum and discretion while exercising its prerogatives. The humourous adage often attributed to the British aristocracy of some time ago may be remembered here: “Do what you wish, but don’t do it in the road and frighten the horses.” Politicised sexuality, such as we have experienced in the era of the various liberation movements often comes under the heading of bad manners. Rigid psychics will not be converted to a pneumatic point of view by being confronted with sexual behaviour inappropriate to their level of consciousness. Ill advised action inevitably creates reaction. Pneumatics need not be apologetic about their liberated state, and they need not dissimulate or be guilty of hypocrisy. At the same time they must extend to the unliberated the same freedoms they demand for themselves. Persons who flaunt their sexual unconventionality and wish to force everyone to bear their sexual foibles without complaint are usually hyletics putting on the mask of pneumatics. “By their manners and their discretion ye shall know them” could be said of the true pneumatics.

Conclusions for Daily – and Nightly – Life

It is a cliché that we live in an era of great sexual confusion. Clichés, however, are not usually untrue, they have merely become clichés by excessive repetition. Can the Gnostic point of view bring some clarity into this confusion? Can the contemporary Gnostic offer meaningful suggestions on the sexual topics and perplexities of our times? We shall answer such questions by stating our Gnostic position regarding individual issues of sexual significance.

Sex in general. Biology, psychology and Gnosticism indicate that sex is a beneficent, consciousness-enhancing factor in human life. Sexually active persons are healthier, more balanced, and generally more pleasant members of society then the sexually inactive. There is every indication that sex is good for you physically, psychologically and spiritually. All sex that is not injurious to anyone and does not violate the sovereignty of any person is good, although some kinds of sex, such as those among loving, concerned, compatible partners are no doubt better than others.

Sex and the Sacred. In many religions, both pre-Christian and contemporary, sexual practices play some part. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the notion that sexual acts and religious acts can converge, one must exercise considerable care when trying to apply such principles within a contemporary context. Such magicosexual practices as one finds in the Hindu Tantras, in the “great rite” of the witches, and in the sex magic of the late Aleister Crowley, all suffer from the shortcoming that they tend to depersonalise the individuals who participate in them. Joseph Campbell in his splendid book Myths To Live By has pointed out that beginning with the mysticism of the Troubadours, the West came to espouse love-magic as against mere sex magic. C.G. Jung’s commentaries on the Rosarium Philosophorum indicate that a similar principle of love-magic was present in the system of Alchemy. The Gnostic tradition indicates that the early communities of knowers, particularly those attached to the teachings of Valentinus, practiced a supreme rite of pneumatic union, sometimes called the “mystery of the bridal chamber” which may have served as the prototype of many later rites of love-magic, symbolising the union of the lower personality with the heavenly pneuma, which may be envisioned as being of a contrasexual nature (female for men and male for women). The development of a conscious personality is one of the great achievements of Western spirituality. Persons love, unconscious beings merely copulate. Both actions are magical, but the former is preferable to the latter. There is no doubt that the magic of the sexes needs to be re-incorporated into religion, but we must take care that in attempting to do this we will not resort to archaic practices which were useful in periods of history when consciousness and personality were minimal compared to contemporary conditions.

Marriage. The Christian sacrament of matrimony was the last to be formally accepted; it did not come to be generally used in the church for hundreds of years. The reason for this may be found in the unacknowledged fact that the early Church, along with the Valentinians, knew only one true marriage: the heavenly marriage of the personality to the spirit. The contractual relationship of two earthly personalities within the context of property, inheritance, and so forth, the church initially left purely to the state. Only when the Church allowed itself to become an agent of the secular power did she uniformly come to practice marriage as a sacrament. Thus the present practice of the sacrament of marriage is a deficient sacrament, a mere shadow of the mystery of the bridal-chamber. There is no reason why the church, even the Gnostic church, should not bless the contractual relationships of men and women when asked to do so, but it must be kept in mind that this is not a mystery of the same order as the Eucharist, or Holy Orders, or the other true mysteries. The notion that sexual congress without the benefit of such a contractual relationship is sinful cannot be accepted within a Gnostic context.

Homosexuality, bisexuality, and androgyny. It is generally understood that at the non-physical level, people are not limited to their bodily gender. Jesus declared in the Gnostic scriptures that he “came to make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female.” We may take this to mean that in order to attain to the Wholeness of the Pleroma, all persons are striving toward a spiritual androgyny. In the hyletic phase of development this often manifests as polymorphous bisexuality, in the psychic phase as homosexuality, and in the pneumatic phase it moves increasingly into the area of a spiritually based androgyny. None of these are sinful or should be condemned in Gnostic thinking. The idea of a “crime against nature” is meaningless to the Gnostic, for our nature is not merely physical nature, such as our gender, but our total nature within which all dualities exist. When asked about homosexuality, the great modern Gnostic C.G. Jung merely said: “Well, they are the only people who are trying doing something against over-population.” The attraction of persons of the same gender toward each other meets with the most powerful taboos of the patriarchal-psychic phases of cultural development and is therefore encumbered by many unnecessary ideas and apprehensions.

Birth control and abortion. Anthropologists have noted that agricultural societies tend to be opposed to the limiting of births, while nomadic-pastoral societies encourage the same. Many great religions came to adopt the mythos of the agricultural societies and have proscribed birth control and abortion. The theological justification brought forth in support of the position of these religions is more or less to the effect that the prevention of birth is a contravention of the will of God. Many religions believe that a distinct soul is attached to every foetus at conception and that therefore the destruction of the foetus is murder. This idea is highly speculative and, like all theological notions, not subject to any evidence. The Gnostic traditions hold that the soul’s connection with the foetus is minimal until the seventh month of pregnancy. The obsessive fury of various religionists in our days against both birth control and abortion ought to elicit no sympathy from Gnostics. It is obvious that the more conscious humanity becomes, the more it will exercise conscious control over the size of families and the less it will be inclined to place innumerable offspring heedlessly onto an overpopulated earth. That people simply ought to become sexually inactive when not desiring offspring is a notion that is as silly as it is unrealistic.

Monogamy, celibacy, and chastity. While often confused, these three terms have very distinct meanings. Monogamy denotes sexual exclusiveness in favour of only one partner; it is an idea that acquired much importance in the psychic phase of psychohistory. Even today it may have merit for some, but it ought not be advocated or enforced generally. As consciousness expands, the affectionate and emotional needs widen also. It may be counterproductive to be attached to rigid ideas of monogamy in such instances. Celibacy is the unmarried state, as is customary among the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church. Gnostics make no rules about whether their clergy ought to marry or not, and thus the issue of celibacy is of no great import for us. Chastity implies abstention from sexual activity of any kind; it is a practice that puts a very heavy strain on the psyches of persons, and its benefits are minimal, if any.

Family. Whenever this term is used today, it tends to denote the nuclear family unit of industrial society, which means, really, a phenomenon of the last hundred years. In the time of Jesus or even in that of Louis XIV the concept of family differed radically from the one of today. To go along with the moral reactionaries of our time and to hold up the nuclear family of recent vintage as the divinely decreed paragon of all virtue and goodness and the best possible cornerstone of society is, to say the least, unrealistic. While some sort of family structure is likely to continue to exist in humanity, we must possess an elastic vision regarding its future contours and character. Some modern research indicates that radical changes in the present family image would be highly beneficial to the psychological well-being of people in our society. Dr. David Cooper, existential psychiatrist, and associate of R.D. Laing, in his fine work The Death of the Family (Penguin Books, 1971) has built a convincing case for the need to develop alternatives to the nuclear family of conventional society. Once again it must be remembered that as human consciousness grows, the importance of ties and roots based purely in blood and soil tend to diminish. Relatively primitive, traditional societies are often so constructed that the individual is tyrannised and dwarfed by the family. In contrast with this, modern urban societies are moving more and more in a direction where the family loses its hold over individuals who thus need to develop their own lives and resources. For practical purposes it may be noted that the less closed off, the less insular and nuclear the family is, the less likely it is to destroy the sexual and social independence of the individual. A family ought to act as a springboard to life and to people and not as a fortress wherein a small nucleus of persons shuts itself in, while shutting the greater world out.

Sex and the procreation of offspring. As one may deduce from various foregoing statements, the Gnostic cannot endorse the teaching that sex exists purely for the purpose of procreation. Such a view, even though held by theologians, is utterly un-spiritual and smacks of the worst kind of materialistic myopia. By this we mean that parenthood is but one of life’s functions, and it ought not to obtain ascendancy over all others. Children require “parenting” for only a certain period of their lives, and when parents fail to recognise this, untold unhappiness may result. Women, particularly, have been shunted by culture and religion into the over sentimentalised and inflated role of motherhood, and while starring in this role, have often forgotten how to be women. Monkish prudery being unable to accept the feminine in any other aspect but the maternal, the feminine ideal in Christendom became the mother, which condition in turn limited and constricted the psychic and physical lives of women.

One of the great tasks of modern Gnosticism is to restore the dignity and importance of the feminine within a spiritual context and this task includes liberating the feminine from such confining expressions as “mother” and “virgin” (not to speak of the biological absurdity of “virgin mother.”) As motherhood and fatherhood are but one of the possible by-products of human sexuality, so it is obvious that sexuality has far more and vaster functions in life than merely serving as a vehicle for procreation. Love, affection, relatedness, spiritual bonding; all of these are facilitated and enhanced by sex. Sex, we need to state again, is beneficial to humanity physically, psychologically, and spiritually. Procreation, on the other hand, is assuredly not always beneficial to the human race. Gnostics ought to add their urgent voice to the ever swelling chorus calling for effective programs and concentrated action against the population explosion. It is obvious that what the world needs is not less sex but less offspring.

Sexual Libertarianism

Modern Gnostics are not antiquarians. It is not our purpose to try to resurrect the Gnostic tradition in its ancient form, rather we strive to retranslate the available elements of Gnostic wisdom into forms appropriate for the present. One of the most relevant features of ancient Gnosticism is what might be called the libertarianism of the Gnostics. The available documents authored by or attributed to such lights of the Gnosis as Valentinus, Basilides, Marcion, Carpocrates, Epiphanes and others are all thoroughly libertarian in spirit. All of these Gnostic teachers and leaders would have no difficulty in agreeing with the following example of libertarian reasoning: “You as a person are better able to control your life than I am. Your life is your personal affair, for· better or for worse, except as in the living of your life you may impair or endanger the life and livelihood of others. No person nor set of persons on this earth has any logical right to interfere with you except as you may do injury to them.” (A Libertarian’s Platform by James C. Ingebretsen). Even as the political, economic, and religious lives of people are their personal affair, so are their sexual lives. The talons of the authoritarian demiurges of this world must be made to retract from the bedrooms of free men and women. Sexual relations which do not harm or injure anyone should be of no concern to legislation and to the police. Vague conjectures, based on private prejudice, and masquerading as statements about the “public good” and the “moral health” of the body politic ought never to serve as the basis for laws and ordinances.

It must be kept in mind that Gnostic libertarianism is not a mere matter of political or economic expediency. In reality this libertarianism is rooted in the most fundamental features of the Gnostic mythos, which has as its central theme the liberation of the incarcerated divine spirit from all bonds imposed upon it by the false cosmos of the demiurge. Early Christian leaders, even when not manifestly of the Gnostic fold, have often echoed the libertarian expressions of the Gnostic attitude. St. Paul the Apostle’s bold statement: “All things are permissible unto me,” as well as St. Augustine’s adage: “Love God and then do as you please” indicate that the Christian message was intended to replace the law of Jehovah, with the sovereignty of the individual soul restored by the new covenant of love. The relationship between freedom and love has been noted by many wise souls in many traditions, including in that of India, where we find a formulation of the five degrees of love through which the worshipper receives increase in what in our own tradition we might call Gnosis. The first degree of love, we are told, is the love of servant for the master, the second of comrade for comrade, the third that of parent for child, the fourth that of spouses for each other, and the fifth, or highest degree, is defined as passionate and illicit, that is, not sanctioned by any rule of society or of reason; a love totally unrestrained by any limitation whatsoever.

This fivefold system of varieties of love shows not only an increase of intensity from stage to stage, but also, and most importantly, an increase of freedom. What began as servitude ends in total freedom. As restraint gives way to freedom, the force of love increases, until it becomes the supreme liberating influence of being. Now this concept, or rather reality, is not unknown in Western mysticism. Even as we may rightfully assume that the Gnostic mystery of the bridal chamber was a spiritual rite, which yet was not without the physically sexual concomitant, so we know that from a certain time onward the alternative mystical tradition of the West came to abrogate the dualism of orthodox Christianity regarding love, and came to replace it with a unitary experience which was at once spiritual and physical. Medieval Christian orthodoxy insisted on the duality of eros (fleshly, or sexual love) and agape (spiritual love, or charity). The Gnostic tradition, whether expressed by Valentinus in Alexandria, or by the troubadours in medieval France has as its objective to “make the two into one” by uniting eros with agape and replacing both with the higher synthesis, called by troubadours amor. Amor is neither fleshly nor ghostly, neither sensual nor spiritual, but partaking of both qualities represents a totally new quality. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. This whole, or rather wholeness, is none other than the terrestrial epiphany of the Pleroma. Sexual and non-sexual love combine to bring forth the ineffable greatness in human life.

Here then is to be found the royal secret of sexuality. As consciousness frees itself of the thraldom of the unconscious, and with it from the taboos, fears, and guilts inculcated by society and exoteric religion, the liberating force of eros joins the inspiring energy of agape. This mystic union then produces an explosion of freedom, a leap of liberty of unbelievable power. The sexual libertarianism of the Gnostic has now born its aeonial fruit, the great dénouement of the age long process has come. Sex is important because it liberates, and in order to liberate sexuality itself must possess an optimum degree of freedom.

Humans are sexual and spiritual beings at once. When one or the other of these dualities is repressed or neglected, disunity and torment prevail. When both are united in freedom, true liberation and joy manifest. Therefore we must be free: Free to live intellectually, emotionally, and indeed sexually. We must be free to experiment, to fail and to succeed, to be perplexed and to be enlightened. The day of the old law of restriction must be declared defunct and the dawn of the new law of freedom must be ushered in. In stating this we are not proclaiming a novelty. We have the words of St. Paul to the Romans saying: “God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may show his mercy to all.” Jesus said: “Judge not that you may not be judged.” And Heraclitus the Greek sage wrote: “To God all things are fair and good and right, but men hold some things wrong and some right. Good and evil are one.” The great and terrible truth is: That we must be free, lest we perish; that we are condemned to freedom, that the undying obligation of self-liberation has been imposed upon us before the world began, yea, even before the creator of this world came to be. We were not born to abide by the dark laws, and to wear the blackened chains of the rulers of this world, but to be free, liberated consciously divine children of the light. As a Gnostic hymn put it: “Ours is the voice of awakening in the eternal night.” Due to the design of heaven this voice is uttered not by one, but by two; not by man alone or by woman by herself but by both in unison. The voice of awakening is at least in part a sexual voice; the hymn is not merely one of praise but of passion. Today as ever the words of Goethe remind us of the Gnostic truth:

“Mann und Weib, Weib und Mann,

Reichenandie Gottheit an.”

(Man and Woman, Woman and Man,

Together they reach Divinity.)

The above essay first appeared in Abraxas 84, published by Ecclesia Gnostica, 1984, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

.

STEPHAN A. HOELLER, Ph.D., is an author and lecturer on Gnosticism, Jungian psychology, Theosophy, and other esoteric subjects. He is also presiding bishop of Ecclesia Gnostica (www.gnosis.org) and director of studies of the Gnostic Society in Hollywood, California. His works include Gnosticism: New Light on the Ancient Tradition of Inner Knowing and Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society (both published by Quest Books). Dr. Hoeller’s lectures are also available for download from www.bcrecordings.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 121 (July-August 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 121 (PDF version) for only US$5

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

—

Imagine being a parent taking your 10-year-old daughter to the doctor where she gasps for air and suddenly dies in your arms. You are informed afterwards that a toxic dose of prescribed medication caused her death.

Imagine leaving your house to have lunch with friends, while your husband and 11-year-old daughter are happily cuddled together watching your daughter’s favourite TV show Animal Planet. You return home hours later, walk upstairs to her bedroom and find her hanging from the valence of her bed.

Imagine your teenage son is prescribed a medicine because a teacher said he needs it to curb his disruptive behaviour. Months later he is diagnosed with severe diabetes – a known but covered up side effect by the makers of the medicine. He dies shortly afterwards from complications.

These are not isolated incidents. They are representative of those thousands of children and adolescents who died while taking prescribed psychotropic (mind-altering) drugs in the United States. In the above cases, the drugs were prescribed to treat anxiety experienced while sitting for exams or for so-called “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” (ADHD), the symptoms of which include fidgeting, losing your pencils, not sitting still, running about or excessively climbing, and butting into other’s conversations.

Australian Child Deaths

An estimated 1,900 Australians under the age of 19 have died while on antidepressants and antipsychotics. More than 30,700 under 18-year-olds were prescribed antidepressants in 2007-2008, including 550 aged 5 and under. Side effects include hallucinations, hostility, psychosis and suicide.

During the same period, more than 9,300 children under 18 – some as young as one – were prescribed antipsychotics, costing the government $3.4 million. Of the 477 deaths reported to the Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) linked to antipsychotics, 15 were for ages 0 to 19, including intrauterine deaths. Experts estimate only 1 percent of Adverse Drug Reactions (ADRs) are reported to the TGA, so deaths could be as high as 1,500.

Common side effects of antipsychotics include excessive weight gain, life-threatening diabetes, and an irreversible neurological effect called Tardive Dyskinesia that manifests in uncontrollable twitching of the muscles and extremities and tongue movements. Another adverse effect, Neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) can cause sudden death.1 Statistics the Citizens Commission on Human Rights obtained from the TGA in 2009 revealed 14 incidents of 10 to 19 year olds experiencing NMS were reported to it.

The psychiatric drug abuse of young Australians prompted one Western Australian MP recently to call for a national inquiry into the use of psychotropic drugs in children. To date, the federal government has yet to act.

Instead, it has potentially exacerbated the situation, handing over more than one hundred million taxpayer dollars to Patrick McGorry, Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, Executive Director of ORYGEN Research Centre, and founder of the youth mental health centre chain, headspace.

Psychosis Risk Syndrome Creates Harm

McGorry’s Australian of the Year Award hardly had time to settle on the mantelpiece before the psychiatrist demanded millions more for his brand of youth services.2 Established in 2006 and funded by the Commonwealth Government of Australia, McGorry’s headspace, the National Youth Mental Health Foundation, are one-stop-shops that have a range of health professionals covering in addition to general health, mental health and counselling, education, employment and alcohol and other drug services.3

It sounds reasonable. Some of the services are undoubtedly valuable. However, there is an ominous side. McGorry not only promotes youths being put on antipsychotics and antidepressants, he goes a giant step further: He promotes drugging them before they’ve even developed a “psychiatric” disorder.

It’s based on an invented disorder called “Psychosis Risk Syndrome” (PRS) – a subjective checklist of symptoms that psychiatrists claim to be predictors of early onset psychosis or schizophrenia, called prodormal (early symptoms). It’s speciously marketed as “preventive medicine” or “early intervention.” The upshot of it is that youths are drugged for mental disorders they don’t have.4

The US group Association for the Accreditation of Human Research Protection Programs (AHRPP) likens this to “performing mastectomies on women who are at risk of – but do not have – breast cancer.”5

As Richard Gosden, Ph.D., a highly respected Australian author and academic pointed out in 1999, “Apart from the risks involved in the prophylactic [protective] use of neuroleptic drugs, so-called preventive medicine might be variously seen as an unnecessary expansion of social control, a threat to human diversity through the enforcement of hyper-normality, a violation of human rights, and a marketing ploy for the new generation of atypical [new] neuroleptic drugs.”6

PRS is proposed to be included the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The American Psychiatric Association (APA) developed the DSM in 1952 and since then psychiatrists around the world have and continue to use it to obtain insurance reimbursement for treating patients. There are already 374 “disorders,” including, depression, ADHD, caffeine-related disorder, disorder of written expression, conduct disorder, mathematics disorder, nicotine use or withdrawal, sibling rivalry disorder and the all-encompassing “Phase of Life Problem.” Proposed new disorders include Internet addiction and compulsive shopping disorder. Psychiatrists refer to it as their “billing bible.”

The DSM is driven not by science, but instead caters to the pharmaceutical industry. Disorders are voted into existence, not discovered as in real medicine. Medical conditions can be substantiated with blood work, urine or other tests, x-rays and brain scans. There are no such tests for any psychiatric disorders. In fact, Andrew Witty the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) announced the company was dumping future antidepressant research as it was too hard to prove the drugs worked because “patient improvement is measured by subjective mood surveys” – based on DSM – “not by any blood or biological test” used to confirm medical diseases.7

A study published in the April 2006 edition of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics determined that 56 percent of the psychiatrists who decided which “mental disorders” were included in the DSM-IV edition had undisclosed financial ties to pharmaceutical companies. One hundred percent of those sitting on DSM-IV panels overseeing so-called “mood disorders” (including “depression,” “bipolar”) and “schizophrenia/psychotic disorders” were financially involved with drug companies.8 For the DSM-V, a study found that 18 of the 20 members overseeing the revision of clinical guidelines for treating three “mental disorders” alone had financial ties to drug companies.9

Dr. Irwin Savodnik, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, says: “The very vocabulary of psychiatry is now defined at all levels by the pharmaceutical industry.”10

Big Pharma & Australian Psychiatrists

The conflicts of interest between the APA and the pharmaceutical industry were the subject of a US Senate Finance Committee investigation in 2009, an action the Australian Federal Government would do well to follow.

McGorry has received unrestricted research grant support from Eli Lilly, Janssen-Cilag, Bristol Myers Squibb, Astra-Zeneca, Pfizer, and Novartis.11 He is a paid consultant for, and has received speaker’s fees from, most of these companies.12

His research arm, ORYGEN, with its Early Psychosis Prevention and Intervention Centre (EPPIC) and a “preventive” treatment clinic for young people called Personal Assessment and Crisis Evaluation (PACE), has received drug company funding from Janssen-Cilag, the maker of the antipsychotic drug Risperdal or risperidone.13

EPPIC assumed a leadership role in Australia in the 1990s after winning the government tender to establish the Australian Clinical Guidelines for Early Psychosis (NEPP). These guidelines extend the definition of psychosis to include “the period described as the prodrome.” The list was originally adopted without comment from a publication called the Early Psychosis Training Pack – attributed to McGorry and another colleague, the principal authors being the Director and Assistant Director of EPPIC. However, a British public relations company, Gardiner-Caldwell Communications that specialised in pharmaceutical marketing, produced the document. The training pack was funded by an “educational grant” from Janssen-Cilag.14

As Gosden stated: “This may have paid off handsomely for the company…. It may not be coincidental that a half page of the Clinical Guidelines is dedicated to dosage recommendations for using risperidone in first-episode psychosis. The Clinical Guidelines do not extend these dosage recommendations to include other schizophrenia drugs and the recommendations for risperidone give the appearance of an official endorsement of the drug.”15

In 1996, McGorry and fellow pharmaceutical company-funded researcher Alison Yung set up the clinic in Australia to monitor young people considered at a “high risk” for developing psychosis and McGorry conducted a world-first trial on “early intervention” for this.16 A follow up study was conducted in 2002, funded with an unrestricted grant from Janssen-Cilag and supported by US psychiatric-pharmaceutical front groups National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD) and the Stanley Foundation, as well as several Australian agencies. McGorry and colleagues found that Janssen’s risperidone reduced the risk of “transition to psychosis” in young people.17

The subjective 16-item list of “Prodromal Symptoms and Signs” of psychosis includes: Suspiciousness; Depression; Anxiety; Tension; Irritability; Mood swings; Anger; Sleep disturbances, Appetite changes; Loss of energy or motivation; Memory or concentration difficulties; Perception that things around them have changed; Belief that thoughts have speeded up or slowed down; Deterioration in work or study; Withdrawal and loss of interest in socialising; Emerging unusual beliefs.18

Summarising his paper “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?” Gosden states: “A preventive medicine campaign based on the type of prodromal symptoms and risk factors specified in the Australian Clinical Guidelines for Early Psychosis potentially defines the whole generation of young people as being at risk and in need of treatment.”

McGorry’s Brave New World

The entire concept of pre-drugging children sounds like a page out of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel, Brave New World. In it, Huxley depicts a “utopian” but totalitarian society, one that is insane and bent on control using the “technique of suggestion – through infant conditioning and, later, with the aid of drugs.”19

Psychiatrists took this to heart in 1967 when a group of prominent psychiatrists and doctors met in Puerto Rico to discuss the plan for psychotropic drug use on “normal humans” in the year 2000. The report on that meeting stated that the “breadth of drug use may be trivial when we compare it to the possible numbers of chemical substances that will be available for the control of selective aspects of man’s life in the year 2000.”

Further: “Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society.”20

An online opinion written earlier this year by Melissa Raven, psychiatric epidemiologist and policy analyst, adjunct lecturer in Public Health at Flinders University, South Australia, and David Webb, board member of the World Network of Users and Survivors of Psychiatry, who works with the research/policy office of the Australia Federation of Disability Organisations, reflects this: “McGorry’s campaign is part of a wider push to promote the medicalisation of mental health (for which psychosocial wellbeing is a better term).”

“Further doubts must be raised about McGorry’s agenda when you see the substantial funding his organisation (Orygen Youth Health) receives from the pharmaceutical industry and also from the US Stanley Foundation, which is notorious for its particularly aggressive approach to the detention and mandatory treatment of people labelled with psychiatric disorders,” they continue. He has “personally received funding from many manufacturers of antipsychotics, frequently reports no conflicts of interest, particularly in his many recent Medical Journal of Australia articles, including a supplement on early intervention that repeatedly advocates the use of antipsychotics.”21

Adding controversy to this is the fact that McGorry credits PRS to Dr. Ewen Cameron, the Canadian psychiatrist famous for performing cruel and brain-damaging drug and electroshock experiments on his patients in the 1950s and 1960s with funding from the CIA.22 (Cameron’s victims sued and on October 5, 1988, the CIA settled with the plaintiffs for $750,000.)

The fact that McGorry and colleagues recommend antipsychotics to treat PRS should be raising alarm bells – not further research dollars – with Australian authorities. Even psychiatrists point out the harm of PRS.

Allen Frances, professor emeritus, former chairman of the department of psychiatry at Duke University and chair of the DSM-IV Task Force, wrote an opinion on PRS published in Psychiatric Times and Psychology Today in March. He said PRS “stands out as the most ill-conceived and potentially harmful.” The syndrome fails badly on all three counts: “1. It would misidentify many teenagers who are not really at risk for psychosis; 2. The treatment they would most often receive (atypical antipsychotic medication) has no proven efficacy; but, 3. It does have definite dangerous complications.”

Australian psychiatrist Niall McLaren says the diagnostic criteria for PRS “has no scientific validity whatsoever… it can never be reliable and… will have huge unforeseen consequences.” Essentially, it means “putting large numbers of teenagers and young adults under the long-term supervision and control of psychiatrists” and that “supervision” includes the “aggressive, indefinite prescription of antipsychotic drugs.” It is the “clearest example I know of pseudoscience. Not since [lobotomies] has psychiatry stumbled so far from the principle of Primum, non nocere. First, do no harm.”23

Adds Frances: “Drug company marketing would influence parents and clinicians to be especially alert to any strangeness in teenagers.” False positives could be as high as 70-90 percent. Moreover, “It has not yet been established that antipsychotic medications are effective in preventing psychotic episodes or in improving life course in those who would meet the criteria for ‘risk syndrome’.”24 “Misidentified youths,” Frances wrote in another article, “would receive medications that can cause enormous weight gain, diabetes and shortened life expectancy.”25

No one denies that people experience serious problems in life, that they can be mentally traumatised, even psychotic. But it violates the informed consent rights of all consumers when they are not informed that there is no science to diagnosing psychiatric disorders, that psychiatry’s diagnostic manual is more political than medical, and that even psychiatrists say is a “monster out of control.” Labelling someone with a mental disorder, even depression, can sometimes prevent their searching for non-invasive and workable medical solutions.

Allen Frances is, at least, candid in stating that the, “First draft of the next edition of DSM… is filled with suggestions that would multiply [psychiatrists’] mistakes and extend the reach of psychiatry dramatically into the ever-shrinking domain of normal…. The pharmaceutical industry would have a field day – despite a lack of solid evidence of any effective treatments for these newly proposed diagnoses” (PRS inclusive).

McGorry seems cautious about publicly endorsing the inclusion of PRS in DSM. In an online chat on Schizophrenia Research Forum in July 2009, he said caveats and warnings are needed if a more narrowly defined PRS is included in DSM, otherwise it could lead to “widespread over-treatment with medications which possess many harmful as well as beneficial effects.” It wouldn’t belong in a school or general population setting, he said, but “to those seeking help from an early intervention/early psychosis or youth mental health service.”26

In other words – those in contact with McGorry’s headspace/youth mental health foundation, to which millions of dollars are now being funnelled without, it seems, anyone questioning his Brave New World of pre-drugging kids.

Footnotes:

1. www.coreynahman.com/atypical-antipsychotic-lawsuits.html.

2. Mental Health Update, GetUp! Action for Australia, 21 Apr. 2010, www.getup.org.au/blogs/view.php?id=1936&dc=1086,21560,1

3. www.headspace.org.au/about/

4. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2632176/

5. www.ministryoflies.com/pdf-articles/Yale-Lilly.pdf.

6. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., “Pre-Psychotic Treatment for Schizophrenia: Preventive Medicine, Social Control, or Drug Marketing Strategy?,” Ethical Human Sciences and Services, Vol 1, No. 2, Summer 1999, 165-177, http://sites.google.com/site/richardgosden/ehss.

7. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704041504575044901266169316.html?mod=WSJ_business_MoreArticles

8. Lisa Cosgrove, Sheldon Krimsky, et al., “Financial Ties between DSM-IV Panel Members and the Pharmaceutical Industry,” Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, May 2006, Vol. 75, 154-160.

9. Kent Garber, “Who’s Behind the Bible of Mental Illness Critics say that touted efforts against conflicts fall short,” U.S. News, 20 Dec. 2007.

10. Judith Graham, “Experts involved in mental illness manual linked to drug companies,” Chicago Tribune, 19 Apr. 2006.

11. www.mhanet.ca/documents/2008/Research-Colloquium/0920%20-%20Keynote%20MCGORRY.pdf.

12. www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/aug04_1/a695.

13. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., op.cit., 165-177

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Arch Gen Psychiatry, Vol 59, Oct. 2002, www.meb.uni-bonn.de/psychiatrie/zebb/literatur/mcgorry.pdf.

18. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., op.cit., 165-177

19. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (Granada Publishing Ltd., 1977; first published in Great Britain by Ghatto and Windus Ltd., 1932), 13.

20. Wayne O. Evans, Ph.D. & Nathan S. Kline, M.D. (editors), Psychotropic Drugs in the Year 2000, Use by Normal Humans, (Charles C. Thomas, Publisher, Illinois, U.S.A., 1971)

21. David Webb, Melissa Raven, “McGorry’s ‘early intervention’ in mental health: a prescription for disaster,” Online Opinion, www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10267.

22. Richard Gosden, Ph.D., op.cit., 165-177

23. Niall McLaren, M.D.,”Psychosis Risk Syndrome (PRS),” 14 May 2010 (soon to be published).

24. Allen Frances, M.D., “DSM5 ‘Psychosis Risk Syndrome’ – Far Too Risky,” Psychology Today, www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dsm5-in-distress/201003/dsm5-psychosis-risk-syndrome-far-too-risky.

25. Allen Frances, MD, “Let’s save normalcy from the psychiatrists,” Lacrosstribune.com, 5 Mar. 2010.

26. Patrick McGorry, Comment, Schizophrenia Research Forum, 22 July 2009.

.

JAN EASTGATE is the president of Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a psychiatric watchdog group, established in 1969 by the Church of Scientology and Dr. Thomas Szasz, professor emeritus of psychiatry. She has more than 30-years experience investigating and exposing psychiatric violations of human rights and helped spearhead the campaign achieving a NSW Royal Commission Inquiry into deep sleep treatment because of its deadly effects. For the last 17 years, she has worked at CCHR’s international headquarters in the United States where she has extensively investigated conflicts of interest between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. CCHR has been responsible for the passage of more than 150 mental health reform laws and has been recognised by legislators, officials and United Nations Special Rapporteur.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 121 (July-August 2010).

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 121 (PDF version) for only US$5

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

—

We stand today at an unprecedented turning point in human history. In recent years two versions of ancient history have formed. One, we shall call ‘alternative’ history, the other we shall refer to as ‘official’ history. The former ponders over a variety of anomalies and tries to make sense out of the corpus of evidence, i.e., the pyramids and timelines, why they were built, by whom and when. The latter conducts digs, catalogues pottery shards, and tries to defend its proposal there are no enigmas, and virtually everything is explained.

At one point perhaps as late as fifteen years ago these two camps seem to be engaged in an informal dialogue. That all changed after, 1) the Great Sphinx redating controversy caught Egyptologists off guard and, 2) the impact of Chris Dunn’s book The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt at the end of the last decade.

There is no more dialogue and no more polite, gloves on debate. The proponents of ‘official’ history have taken an increasingly political and ideological approach to the issue. They now do little more than offer pronouncements of the historical ‘truth’ on the one hand, and denounce of all those who dare challenge officialdom on the other.In this context we offer evidence that our ‘scholars’, the gatekeepers who control our institutions of ‘higher learning’, refuse to consider.

The Great Pyramid – Precision Engineering

This colossal structure, the last of the seven ancient wonders and the largest stone building in the world, still provokes awe, controversy and a plethora of theories that inspire bitter debate to this day. Instead of going over the well-established mysteries, we would like to shine new light on this important enigma that appears out of place in ‘Stone Age’ Egypt.

The real challenge the Great Pyramid still poses to us in the opening decade of the Third Millennium is the physical plant itself. Theorists have gone on endlessly speculating about how it was built and the metaphysical, cultural and religious significance and/or symbolism behind its construction. Though several authors have offered tantalising possibilities, none have been conclusively proven.

The mystery remains unsolved.

To begin with, the massive size – the staggering volume and weight of the building blocks – remain problematic. With an estimated 2.3 million blocks with a weight of about 4 million tons, the pyramid is two-thirds the mass of the Hoover Dam. The sheer size and the numbers of blocks that had to be quarried and moved into place, presents numerous architectural, construction and engineering headaches.

These issues have been raised time and again, yet are still unsettled. It is time to move on and define the even more difficult issues. We consider the core ‘hard’ problems to be those that reflect precision engineering and assembly line manufacturing accomplished on a massive scale. The primitive tools scenario concocted by Egyptologists does not explain the following tasks:

1. Creating precision-cut casing blocks weighing 16 tons, fitted together and held by a super-glue mortar that maintained a tight seal forming a nearly seamless shell.

2. Leveling the 13-acre limestone bedrock base to a degree of accuracy only recently achieved with laser technology.

3. Squaring the base to True North with minimal deviation.

4. Excavating the ‘Descending Passage’ 350 feet into solid bedrock at a 26-degree angle while keeping the tunnel arrow-straight for its length.

5. Bringing the massive 48-story pyramid together around complex internal structures, retaining the true shape to enable the builders to form the apex. (These internal structures include four enigmatic ventilation shafts and a coffer in the King’s Chamber that is too large to have been moved through the opening. It shows evidence of having been cut with a jewel-tip saw.)

6. Extensive usage of different types of machined granite inside the Great Pyramid chambers.

The father of modern Egyptology, Sir Flinders Petrie, marvelled at the precision and size of the casing blocks. He carefully measure the blocks and found that “the mean thickness of the joints are .020 and therefore, the mean variation of the cutting of the stone from a straight line and from a true square, is but .01 on length of 75 inches up the face, an amount of accuracy equal to most modern opticians’ straight-edges of such a length.”

The modern international engineering firm of Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Menendhall conducted a forensic analysis of the Great Pyramid. Their findings are evaluated in an article published in Civil Engineering.

The pyramid was oriented with its major sides either north-south or east-west. This in itself was a remarkable undertaking, given the accuracy to which it was done, because the Egyptians had to perform the work using astronomical or solar observations – the compass had not yet been invented. The dimensions of the pyramid are extremely accurate and the site was levelled within a fraction of an inch over the entire base. This is comparable to the accuracy possible with modern construction methods and laser levelling.1

The summary speaks volumes between the lines. The problems with the Descending Passage are numerous. For starters the tunnel is less than 4 x 4 feet, enough for no more than one excavator wielding a hammer-stone at any given moment. How would our proposed digging crew negotiate the space in the suffocating darkness once they had dug down 50 feet and more? In addition how would the 26-degree angle be set and maintained without lights or levels? The lack of carbon deposits on walls and ceiling indicate that torches were not used.

Once again, Petrie measured the passage and found an amazing accuracy of .020 of an inch over 150 feet and a mere .250 inch over 350 feet of its constructed and excavated length. We submit that this passage with its smooth surfaces, squared shape, and accurate angle could not have been tunnelled with primitive tools and methods.

The Great Pyramid remains the world’s greatest wonder and ancient enigma. We suggest researchers should pay more attention to these details and ask about the materials used inside the Great Pyramid, especially near the ventilation shafts. We now have two doors blocking a very important shaft, the one that pointed to the star Sirius in 2450 BCE.

The Origin Of Dogs – Biogenetic engineering

Now we turn to a mystery that nearly equals the pyramid, though it is a little known conundrum hidden in the mists of remote antiquity. Let us start with a simple question that appears to have an obvious answer: what is a dog? It turns out geneticists in the past decade have shown the answer is not so obvious. In fact, generations of anthropologists, archaeologists and wildlife biologists turned out to be dead wrong when it came to the origins of “man’s best friend”.

Prior to DNA studies conducted in the 1990s, the generally accepted theory posited that dogs branched off from a variety of wild canids, i.e., coyotes, hyenas, jackals, wolves and so on, about 15,000 years ago. The results of the first comprehensive DNA study shocked the scholarly community. The study found that all dog breeds can be traced back to wolves and not other canids. The second part of the finding was even more unexpected – the branching off occurred from 40-150,000 years ago.

Why do these findings pose a problem? We have to answer that question with another question: how were dogs bred from wolves? This is not just difficult to explain, it is impossible. Do not be fooled by the pseudo-explanations put forth by science writers that state our Stone Age ancestors befriended wolves and somehow (the procedure is never articulated) managed to breed the first mutant wolf, the mother of all dogs. Sorry, we like dogs too, but that is what a dog is.

The problems come at the crucial stage of taking a male and female wolf and getting them to produce a subspecies (assuming you could tame and interact with them at all). Let us take this one step further by returning to our original question, what is a dog? A dog is a mutated wolf that only has those characteristics of the wild parent, which humans find companionable and useful. That is an amazing fact.

Think about those statements for a moment. If you are thinking that dogs evolved naturally from wolves, that is not an option. No scientist believes that because the stringent wolf pecking order and breeding rituals would never allow a mutant to survive, at least that is one strong argument against natural evolution.

Now, if our Paleolithic ancestors could have pulled off this feat, and the actual challenges posed by the process are far more taxing, then wolf/dog breeders today certainly should have no problem duplicating it. But like the Great Pyramid, that does not seem to be the case. No breeders have stepped up to the plate claiming they can take two pure wolves and produce a dog sans biogenetic engineering techniques.

The evolution of the domesticated dog from a wild pack animal appears to be a miracle! It should not have happened. This is another unexplained enigma.

Mohenjo Daro – Civil Engineering

Since indoor plumbing did not arrive in modern societies to any extent until the 20th century, and urban planning has still not been adopted much to this date in history, what we find in the ancient city of Mohenjo Daro is anomalous indeed.

This city in the Indus Valley was built on a grid system about 4,500 years ago, obviously planned out and drawn up before the first brick was laid. It had houses, some with indoor plumbing, a granary, baths, an assembly hall and towers all made out of standard size bricks. The streets were about eight to ten feet wide on average, and were built with well-engineered drainage channels.

Mohenjo Daro was divided into two parts; the Citadel was on the upper level and included an elaborate tank called the Great Bath that was made of fine quality brickwork and drains. The Great Bath was 40 feet long and 8 feet deep, a huge public facility by any standards. A giant granary, a large residential building, and several assembly halls were also on this upper level.

The Great Bath was made watertight by the use of two layers of brick, lime-cement and then finally sealed with bitumen (tar). The bath included a shallow section for children.

We should wonder how an ancient culture of which nothing is known, not even their language, created this sophisticated city at a point in time many thousands of years ahead of the curve? Civil engineers do not crawl out of thatched-roof huts able to draw up plans for a complex urban environment. We need to address the following question to archaeologists and historians:

1. Where are the cities that demonstrate the path of urban development, social and technical organisation, leading to Mohenjo Daro?

2. How do you explain the sudden emergence of a complex society when 99.99% of the rest of humanity were living primitively?

These issues cannot be brushed aside with some arrogant pretence that the questions have already been addressed and answered by digging up and labelling pottery shards and other artefacts. We have been and are being overly indulgent with our “soft sciences” regarding their cavalier assertions about having all the answers. In fact, they have very few, so why are they throwing stones at independent researchers from behind glass towers?

Extraordinarily little is known about the Indus Valley civilisation that once spanned nearly a thousand miles with other cities matching the description of Mohenjo Daro.

We file this under our list of great enigmas and challenge orthodox scholars to prove differently as with the first two of our mysteries.

We note that the Indus Valley civilisation was contemporary with the Great Pyramid. It is often said this was one of the first three civilisations, having a written script that has never been deciphered. Now we turn next to the mother of all civilisations, Sumer.

Sumeria – The Source Of Civilisation

Are we missing something or are our historians looking at our earliest civilisations through a strange and distorted lens? Like Egypt and the Indus Valley, the biblical ‘Land of Shinar’ – the birthplace of Abraham – was a brutally hot, largely barren, empty desert with a mighty river cutting a swath through it. Does this sound like the magnet that would attract late Stone Age tribes to hunker down and pull wonders out of a hat?

In fact, historians thought Shinar was a piece of biblical fiction until the mid-19th century, but now they know everything about it with complete certitude that we, the unwashed masses, dare not question. Nonetheless, we encourage readers to maintain an attitude of healthy skepticism and dare to question ‘official history’.

As is the case with the culture that built the cities of the Indus Valley, no one knows who the ancient Sumerians were or where they came from. They called themselves ‘the black-headed ones’ and spoke a strange language that was unrelated to the languages of the Semitic tribes in the region. Some linguists note a similarity between the Sumerian language and that of the Basques, another anomalous culture.

We find it curious that any primitive peoples would choose the rigours of a hostile desert environment to settle in and build a civilisation. Why not a gentle river in a forested mountain valley? Especially in light of the fact that Sumeria contained very few resources, no forests, no minerals, not even the rocks that were plentiful in Egypt.

How are we to explain the fact this mysterious culture managed to invent all of the core components of civilisation under such restrictive conditions? It occurs to us that a culture would need minerals like copper, gold, silver and tin immediately available to experiment with over the course of generations in order to create process metallurgy. There is nothing simple or accidental about making the connection between raw ores, the metals they contain, and how to reduce them out of their native state using high heat.

Nevertheless, the Sumerians not only figured out geology, how to obtained the ore, knew the levels of heat needed and how to build kilns to achieve it, they also took very different metals and created the first alloy, bronze. As metal-smiths were performing these feats, other citizens were apparently creating the wheel, building cities, ziggurats, inventing writing, movable type, the ox-drawn plow, cereal crop agriculture, and advanced mathematics, to mention the most notable of their innovations.

Something is wrong with this picture. Most human beings were counting using their fingers, if at all, hunting animals and gathering plants for their meals. Yet, we find the Sumerians in classrooms learning the principles of the sexigesimal math system. Yes, the very same 60-base system we use today to keep track of hours, minutes and seconds. This advanced system was the first to reveal that a circle has 360 degrees and can be subdivided using 60, 30, 15, 12, etc., all fractions of the root number.

Teotihuacán – Anomalous Technical Evidence

Teotihuacán, in Mexico, is an immense, even overwhelming archaeological site, oriented along a twin axis. In the 1960s a team of archaeologists and surveyors mapped out the entire complex in great detail. The resultant map revealed an urban grid centred around two principal, almost perpendicular, alignments.

From the Pyramid of the Moon at the north end, the complex extends south along the Avenue of the Dead beyond the Ciudadela and Great Compound complexes for about 3.2 kilometres. To this north-south axis we must add an east-west alignment that led from a point near the Pyramid of the Sun to a spot of prime astronomical significance on the western horizon.

Anthony Aveni, an astronomer-anthropologist, discovered that on the day the Sun passes directly overhead in the spring of the Northern Hemisphere (May 18), the Pleiades star cluster makes its first annual predawn appearance. It was at this point on the western horizon that the Pleiades set, and the builders aimed the east-west axis.

Additionally, the Sun also sets at this point on the horizon on August 12 – the anniversary of the beginning of the current Mesoamerican calendar cycle (5th Sun) – determined by a consensus of academic and independent scholars to have begun on August 12, 3114 BCE.

It is very clear Teotihuacán was laid out according to a set of alignments that reflected celestial, geographic, as well as geodetic relationships. Walking along the avenue from one pyramid to another, up the steps to the top, and surveying the site from a multitude of angles, one is struck by the sense of being in the middle of some vast geometric matrix.

Teotihuacán was the first true urban centre in the Americas. At its peak around 500 CE, it boasted a population of an estimated 200,000. George E. Stuart, archaeologist and the editor of National Geographic magazine sums up our ignorance:

We speak of it with awe, as we do the pyramids of Egypt, but we still know next to nothing about the origins of the Teotihuacános, what language they spoke, how their society was organised, and what caused their decline.2

As for one the most anomalous of artefacts on the planet, in the 1900s archaeologists discovered a sheet of mica in the upper tiers of the Pyramid of the Sun. This was no ho-hum pottery shard to catalogue and file away in a dusty box, yet that is about how archaeologists treated the find. To anyone with even a smattering of technical knowledge, discovering a large sheet of mica in an ancient pyramid site comes as a shock. In fact, it is one of the great ‘smoking guns’ that turn archaeologists mum.

Mica is an inflammable and non-conductive mineral that grows in fairly weak plate-like structures. It is not at all useful as a structural building material. NASA uses it as a radiation shield in space vehicles. Mica is also utilised in electronic components and microwave ovens, and it is a good shield for electromagnetic radiation, like radio waves. Like the Great Pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun has a subterranean cavity under the middle of the pyramid. A large pyramid with layers of thick mica would be an excellent EMI shield.

Its placement in the complex raises questions that we could only answer today after the development of electronic, atomic and space age technologies.

Thick sheets of mica were also found by archaeologists about 400 meters down the avenue from the Sun Pyramid, these precision-cut sheets were of considerable size: 27.5 meters square. They were located under a rock-slab floor of a complex now called “the Mica Temple”.

What possible reason could the builders have had for including a layer of mica in any structure? It was obviously not decorative. To add greatly to the growing mystery, the particular mica used was traced to Brazil. Now we are getting in deep. How would a supposedly indigenous “Stone Age” culture know that mica existed 3200 kilometres away in the jungles of Brazil? Not only that, how did they transport these large sheets over that long distance intact without wheeled vehicles? Surely not via relay teams on foot travelling overland! No large seagoing boats or ports have ever been found in ancient Mexico.

High Technology In Stone Age Peru

Lake Titicaca borders Bolivia and Peru in the Andes. The highest large lake in the world, there are many signs it was once exposed to the ocean. Megalithic structures like the Gateway of the Sun in Tiahuanacu, Bolivia, also indicate a long lost past. The gateway was carved out of one solid block, the hard way to make a gate.

Moving northward near Cuzco, Peru, we find even more large, impressive and mysterious structures. Here we find walls built with complex jigsaw type megalithic blocks similar to the more familiar walls found at nearby Machu Picchu. Some of the megalithic structures contain complex cut-rocks weighing over 100 tons; a few were joined together by bronze clamps. Some of the bronze had obviously been poured in place, a skill not available in pre-Columbian Peru.

Like Sumer, the high Andes is an unlikely location for Stone Age cities, evidence of advanced technologies, and seminal agricultural discoveries. It is well established that the region around Tiahuanco, at 12,500 feet elevation, had been turned into a highly productive agricultural zone. That was achieved by the building of dikes, dams, canals and raised beds that created microclimates which protected the plants from frost.

We have attempted to show our planet is full of ancient wonders and mysteries that have yet to be solved. You can find more information as well as our theories on who and what created these enigmas in our books, The Genesis Race (by Will Hart) and Ancient Gods and Their Mysteries: Will They Return in 2012 AD? (by Robert Berringer).

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Footnotes:

1. ‘Program Management BC’, Civil Engineering, June 1999, Craig Smith, P.E., www.pubs.asce.org/ceonline/0699feat.html

2. ‘The Timeless Vision of Teotihuacán’, National Geographic magazine, December 1995

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Will Hart is a journalist, photographer, and filmmaker who has investigated ancient mysteries and evidence of extraterrestrial intervention on Earth since 1969. His first book The Genesis Race: Our Extraterrestrial DNA and the True Origins of the Species is the outcome of three decades of research. Robert Berringer is the author of Ancient Gods and Their Mysteries: Will They Return in 2012 AD? which is distributed by Book Clearing House www.bookch.com and available from www.CloudriderBooks.com. He can be contacted at rtberringer@netzero.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 90 (May-June 2005).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 90 (PDF version) for only US$5

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

—

Aquarius will be the new age, the new life. First there will be disastrous events, gigantic upheavals, turmoil and change of all kinds….
– Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov (1900-1986)

The transition to a new zodiacal age is altering the political map of the world. For the last two thousand years much of human history has been determined by events in Europe and the near Middle East. From Greece and Rome, the great power centres of two millennia ago, with their inheritance from ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, a distinct civilisational impulse spread westward into Europe, eventually reaching North America. Decisions made in the grand capitals of Europe and, for much of the last century in New York and Washington, have impacted the lives of millions of people in every part of the planet.

The advent of the Age of Aquarius coincides with the emergence of new world power centres. Just as old Egypt, Babylon and Sumeria were eclipsed by Greece and Rome, so too the ‘old world’ of Western Europe and North America will be overtaken by new geopolitical alliances and fresh centres of global influence. And this will be accompanied by a dramatic change in consciousness, as the worn-out Western values and Eurocentric rationalist thought prevailing for the last few centuries surrender to the new Aquarian thinking.

The current turmoil and conflict unleashed on the planet by the United States and Britain is only the beginning of the climax of a struggle between cosmic influences of which most people are completely unaware. Today, America and Britain embody atrophied and degraded Piscean energies. The Anglo-Americans, as the standard bearers of bankrupt Western materialism, are trying to reorganise the world, imposing their imbalanced, egoistic approach to life on all societies. Yet their latest brutal and insane actions, witnessed in the tragic invasion of Iraq, are part of a frantic effort to prolong their collapsing system. Despite all their apparent power and wealth, Anglo-American universalism is in a state of rapid decline leading to death.

A new era, a new consciousness and a new people are on the horizon, as the planet goes through a turbulent transitional period paving the way to the Aquarian Age.

Aquarian Consciousness

Whether the earth is shaken by natural catastrophes, or nuclear warfare, or both, earth and the life upon it does survive. More than that, however: A New Age emerges and the devastating changes that have preceded it are understood to have been necessary purgations effecting the transformation of humanity into a new mode of being. By analogy, just as the individual near death experiencer may have to endure the pain and suffering associated with the trauma of almost dying before positive personal transformation can take place, so the world may need to undergo a “planetary near-death experience” before it can awaken to higher, more spiritual, collective consciousness with universal love at its core.
– Kenneth Ring, Transpersonal Psychologist

Two thousand years ago, at the time of transition from the Age of Aries to that of Pisces, there were secret schools, most notably the Essenes, trained and taught to align themselves with the spiritual impulses of the incoming age. These small communities worked quietly, in retreats; but with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls we now know they were actually the ‘seedbed’ from which came the original Christian revelation.

These separated mystic communities provided the necessary environment for the message of Jesus the Christ. With their unique synthesis of Zoroastrian, Pythagorean, Egyptian and Israelite spirituality, the Essenes acted as a bridge between the ‘old age’ religions and the unfolding new revelation. Above all, they represent the budding of a new consciousness which would impact history for two millennia. The declining Roman Empire’s embrace of Christianity led to the triumph of the new religion in Europe. With the arrival of the Age of Pisces, Christianity became synonymous with ‘Western civilisation’.

Writing a century ago, the gifted Englishman Edward Carpenter speculated about Man’s evolutionary future and the development of a new humanity imbued with a new consciousness. “We do not know,” he observed, “what possible evolutions are to come, or what new forms of permanent place or value, are being already slowly differentiated from the surrounding mass of humanity.” Carpenter noted that “at the present time certain new types of humankind may be emerging, which will have an important part to play in the societies of the future – even though for the moment their appearance is attended by a good deal of confusion and misapprehension.”

Throughout the writings of the 20th century’s most influential spiritual teachers from Charles W. Leadbeater and Rudolf Steiner, to Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh and Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov, we find numerous references to the immanent emergence of a new human type. With one voice they link this new humanity to the dawn of the Aquarian era, which they warn will be ushered in by a major purging of mankind. In the words of Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov: “The Age of Aquarius is fast approaching, and it is going to overturn and shatter all the old forms and values that human beings thought of as permanent.”

According to all the great mystic teachers and seers, the Age of Aquarius is heralded by a time of immense conflict and turmoil never before witnessed in recorded history.

Writing in his book Love and Sexuality, Aivanhov notes:

Human beings need to suffer before they begin to wish for harmony and peace and the splendour of the new life. If they are not ground down by all kinds of sufferings, they will never understand or make up their minds to work for the Kingdom of God.

John White, a respected New Age author, observes in Science and Spirit that if modern civilisation is destroyed, “some people will survive, according to the predictions and prophecies. The great loss of life will open up niches in the environment where new life forms can emerge. Those most deeply attuned to cosmic processes will become the seedbed from which, it is said, a new race, a higher humanity will evolve in accelerated fashion.”

The survivors of this ‘great tribulation’ ushering in the Aquarian Age will be those men and women who have not been ensnared by the ‘strong delusions’ of the dying old order.

A remnant, who like the ancient Essenes before them, renounce the ephemeral fleeting attractions of the old era, will also live on to protect the law of the truth and lead the survivors in the new era.

Most professing Christians are looking for the return of Christ who they expect to establish a new age. But how many Christians are willing to prepare themselves, after the manner of the Essenes and the Gnostic secret schools, for this new era? Christians are fighting each other over dogmas and doctrines. They are like the Pharisees of Christ’s day, searching the Scriptures in vain, unable and unwilling to see the plain truth in front of their eyes! Christians spend their time serving the very System of Money and Power which crucified Jesus the Christ and persecuted his early followers. The True God is not to be found in any of today’s Christian Churches. Christianity, a religion of the Piscean Age, has chosen to stay with the old order and will invariably perish with it.

A new community is now being prepared in response to the first impulses of Aquarius. They are the ‘seedbed’ of the new era, a Noah’s Ark of Safety and Light in a time of turmoil, confusion and chaos.

New Eurasia

The Truth of Life descends from the world of Eternal Light to illuminate the minds, regenerate the hearts, raise and renew the souls of all the sons of Truth destined to constitute the nucleus of the new humanity of which the Slavs will be the cradle.
– Peter Deunov, Bulgarian Mystic, 1898

The inspired Gnostic Master Teacher Peter Deunov (Beinsa Douno), who lived in Bulgaria from 1864-1944, prophesied the birth of “a new type of man” on Earth to coincide with the astrological Age of Aquarius. According to Deunov, the final stage of the previous Piscean Age, transmitted by the Anglo-Saxons, was passing. In the new aeon the Slavic people are predestined to play a leading role. Speaking to his early Gnostic students, Deunov announced: “You are the chosen children of truth who were preordained to form the seed of the new humanity of which Slavdom as a family, descendants of Judah, will become the hearth.”

The 20th century, in Deunov’s prophetic scheme, was a preparatory period distinguished by the waxing and waning of Anglo-American civilisation. From this perspective the collapse of the British Empire and the rise of the USA at the end of the Second World War marked a key turning point in history. Anglo-American culture having reached its peak is now in its death-throes, and the first light of the new culture is dawning in keeping with the incoming Aquarian influences.

Russia constitutes the largest Slavic nation, and the last hundred years may rightly be said to have been the time of Russia’s ‘Golgotha’ or ‘crucifixion’. A hundred years of incredible human suffering and enormous national sacrifice claimed millions of Russian lives. Within the first five decades of the 20th century the Apocalyptic Horseman of Famine and War ravaged the vast Russian land. Archaic landmarks swept aside and old values overturned only to be replaced by radical new ways which themselves were soon found wanting. Spectacular material triumphs accomplished at the cost of personal liberty and paid for by human sacrifice. Was such collective suffering a preparation for the new era?

Could it be Russia, a land that has endured so much in the 20th century, will finally find its prophetic destiny in this third millennium? Revolutions, civil war, famine, two world wars, political repression…. were these all part of a cleansing process signaling the beginning of a new era in which Russia discovers her true mission?

Alice A. Bailey, who is credited by many as the founder of the contemporary New Age movement, saw a unique role for Russia in ushering in the new era. Writing at a time when Russia was firmly behind the communist iron curtain, she predicted:

Behind the closed borders of that mysterious and magnificent country [Russia], a great and spiritual conflict is proceeding, and the rare mystical spirit and the truly religious orientation of the people is the eternal guarantee that a true and living religion and culture will finally emerge.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), who established the Anthroposophical society, believed the Slavic “folk soul” would play a major role in the future development of a new humanity. He saw the Slavs as a bridge between the Orient (East) and the Occident (West). According to Steiner, the religious thought of the Orient belongs to the past; the Occident’s philosophical-scientific thought to the present; the Slavic soul will bridge the two and create a pathway to a spiritual future. More than any other national soul, claimed Steiner, the Russian group soul strives to realise the world of the spirit. In Russia the synthesis of the highest features of both Eastern and Western cultures would one day be achieved.

“Its geographic location places Russia between two extreme, monolithic cultures – between the materialist countries of the West and the passive, world-denying countries of the East. It is appropriate that Russia creatively unite these extremes,” wrote Nikolai Belotsvetov, one of Steiner’s leading Russian followers.

“Our country is a peculiar country, placed between the hammer of Europe and the anvil of Asia, destined to reconcile them in one way or another,” wrote the world famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. “It is my deep conviction that Russia is called to allay the age-old hostility between Europe and Asia, to reconcile and unite those two different worlds, and find a proper balance between the progressive but proud and inconsequent individualism of Europe and the sense of social and political cohesion of Asia…”

For the last two thousand years of the Piscean Age, civilisation has traveled the course of the Sun from East to West, reaching its apogee in the modern USA. With the end of the Piscean era, history and civilisation is reorienting. We are seeing a return to origins with the emergence of a new power centre at the cross-roads of the East and West, in Eurasia, the great heartland of Russia.

The history of Russia is not the history of a country, but of a world. It is, in fact, the history of a vast organic whole which had for its cradle the immense open spaces of Eurasia. In the words of one author:

The Eurasian world, as such consists of vast plains which extend, broken here and there by low mountain ranges, between the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific, the Black Sea, the Caucasian Range, the Iranian plateau, the heights of the Pamir and the Hindu Kush, and join up, through the tortuous valleys and foothills of the Tian Shan and the Altai ranges, with the plains of Eastern Turkestan and Mongolia.1

According to the Ancient Wisdom teachings, in remote prehistory a spiritual disaster accompanied by a catastrophic shift in the Earth’s axis caused a great migration to Eurasia from the primal northern region of Hyperborea. Theosophical writers believe that millions of years ago Eurasia was the homeland of the people who:

…later descended into the Indian peninsula those peoples who call themselves ‘Aryans,’ the ‘High Caste,’ who later were divided into Four Castes: Brahmanas, Kshattriyas, Vaisyas, and Sudras. From the southeastern parts came later the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes and the Persians; and the peoples of Europe, Greeks, Romans, especially.2

Viewed in the light of the Ancient Wisdom teachings, the appearance of Eurasia on the global stage is not only an affirmation of arcane origins but also of the Shambhala influence in our day. Eurasia, the Russian heartland, has long been called “Northern Shambhala” by Buddhist teachers. Having studied Tibetan Buddhism, Nikolai Roerich developed a deep interest in Shambhala and led a scientific expedition through Eurasia to look for traces of the hidden kingdom.3 He later remarked, “The East has said that when the Banner of Shambhala would encircle the world, verily the New Dawn would follow.”

At this crucial period in world history we see the first signs of a Eurasia-oriented geopolitical alliance between Germany, Russia, India and China, as a counter balance to the Anglo-American order. Russia, together with the former Soviet states of Central Asia, constitutes the Eurasian ‘kernel’. In the West this Eurasian alliance reaches to Germany, while in the far East it includes China and north Korea. Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan make up the southern flank of Eurasia. The geopolitical struggles and wars of the first years of the 21st century are the outcome of not only political and economic factors, but of resistance to incoming cosmic energies. All around us we’re confronted with clear proof of the passing of one age and the dawn of a new era in human history.

Britain and the United States represent the final phase of a Western civilisation which succeeded a decaying Rome at the start of the Piscean Age. And like ancient Rome before its collapse, the Anglo-American rulers are desperately seeking to expand what the writer Philip K. Dick termed the ‘Black Iron Prison’. However, the West at its zenith can only be the ‘evening land’, the place where the Sun sets to rise again in the East. To the ancient Egyptians the western lands were, after all, the kingdom of the dead.

The End & The New Beginning

For as the lightning cometh out of the East, and shineth even unto the West; so shall also the coming of the Son of Man be.
– Jesus, Matthew 24:27

The time in which we now live is charged with cosmic significance as nations and peoples unconsciously struggle to align themselves either with the old aeon influences or the incoming forces of the new Aquarian Age. The prophecies and predictions of so many gifted seers leave us in no doubt – we are right now in a turbulent, even chaotic, transitional period. Nations who cling to the dying old order will fall, to be finally swept away in the coming cataclysm, eclipsed by new global powers, of which Eurasia is preeminent.

Out of this world catastrophe will come a new era attuned to Aquarius. Now is the time of decision, preparation and separation. People who separate from the old order and prepare themselves by harmonising with the rhythm of Aquarius will form the ‘seedbed’ from which develops a new culture and a new consciousness. Those who today place their trust in rampant materialism and the exploitation of the planet, all the while glorying in their wealth, power and might, will be debased.

One hundred years ago the venerable European monarchies looked safe and secure, impervious to change. The British Empire, on which it was said the ‘sun never sets’, straddled the globe triumphant. Less than a century later the British Empire is no more and the traditional European monarchs a vague memory. A similar fate awaits today’s triumphalist powers. The victims of history will soon be the victors as the Earth is bathed in the Great Light of the Aquarian Age.

Footnotes:

1. Before and After Stalin by Cyril Ielita-Wilczkovski
2. Theosophical Forum, June 1937
3. “Mystery of Shambhala” by Jason Jeffrey, New Dawn No. 72, May-June 2002

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MEHMET SABEHEDDIN is a long time contributor to New Dawn. His past articles examined Nazi Occultism, Middle Eastern mysteries and ancient Babylon. He is currently conducting research into the arcane wisdom of Eurasia.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 78 (May-June 2003).

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

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Because the dominant western world view is based on materialism, people who reject that perspective sometimes indiscriminately reject anything having to do with material values, even though such values may be appropriate for certain situations. The attitude toward western medicine of some members of the New Age movement demonstrates this.

Although the movement’s critique of western medicine is desirable, its rush to embrace nonwestern medicine and alternative modes of healing nevertheless needs checks and balances to prevent malpractice by untrained people and to screen out misinformation and pseudoscience. (An example would be the claims for crystal healing, most of which, in my judgment, are founded on magical thinking and haven’t a shred of evidence to support them. Any results are due solely to placebo effect – a subject much more deserving of study than crystals.)

All too often, naive advocates of holistic healing simply reject western medicine altogether, embracing unproven methods and approaches while failing to appreciate the true value of western medicine, which is considerable. Such people make their own version of the mistake they intend to correct. While the western materialistic perspective tends to explain all mental phenomena in physical terms – i.e., it reduces all mind to matter – indiscriminate advocates of holistic health try to explain all matter as mind. Neither perspective is wholly wrong. They are simply incomplete and therefore unbalanced.

This incompleteness and imbalance needs to be corrected; everyone can grow from it. Most of all, a philosophy of holistic medicine for the total human being needs to be articulated for guidance in all situations between physicians and patients, healers and clients, diagnosticians and the ill. It must recognize that conventional medicine knows a lot about the physical domain and that it deserves credit for what it has done with that knowledge to eliminate disease and pain.

Polio, smallpox, yellow fever, bubonic plague, diphtheria, scurvy, rickets, and so forth – the medical establishment merits great respect for ridding the West, if not the world, of these scourges. Likewise, conventional medicine deserves credit for advances such as open heart surgery, prosthetic devices and artificial parts, CAT-scan and magnetic resonance imaging, pharmaceuticals and a host of other inventions and procedures which help restore and maintain health. Finally, a valid philosophy of holistic medicine must also recognize the unfairness of presuming conventional medicine – materia medica – to be accountable for things which simply are not part of its function. Toward that end I offer the following as a contribution to developing an enlightened philosophy of health.

Healing is not always cure. Nor does cure always involve healing. Healing pertains to the spirit, cure pertains to the body-mind. Healing is awakening to God and the Transcendental Domain as Love. That is what the true healer does – and is.

Healing is not a panacea for every human illness and malady. Those conditions might be cured, but that is not the same as healing. Healing removes the state of consciousness which regards illness and malady as problematic – as the basis for suffering and self-contracted emotion and behavior.

Healing may or may not actually cure the physical condition in question; we simply don’t know enough about the human body-mind complex to say with certainty what the outcome of Love/healing will be. On one hand, there have been miraculous cures as a consequence of a person awakening to, and as, Love. For example, when the Dutch psychic-spiritual teacher Jack Schwarz was in a Nazi concentration camp, he lost consciousness during a whipping. At that moment, he had a vision of Christ and felt his radiant love. Upon awakening, Jack said to the guard, “Ich liebe dich,” I love you. The guard was shocked – and even more shocked when he saw the wounds of Jack’s body begin to heal immediately. Jack describes that event as a “re-birthday” for him. He claims he left the camp whole and healthy.

Remarkable as that is, there have been far more instances where awakening to Love hasn’t had noticeable effect upon physical illness. St. Bernadette of Lourdes – she of the healing grotto – had a painful, lingering and fatal case of consumption. Ramana Maharshi, a great yogi-mystic of India, died of cancer; so did another, Ramakrishna. Both yogis were reputed to show such a high degree of divine love that on occasion they literally caused others to swoon in ecstasy. That did not prevent their terminal illness in middle age.

Why hasn’t Love been all-protecting in these instances? Sri Aurobindo, yet another great Indian yogi-mystic, provides the answer. He once broke his knee after a fall. The physician who attended him asked, “How is it that you, a mahatma, could not foresee and prevent this accident?” Aurobindo replied, “I still have to carry this human body about me and it is subject to ordinary human limitations and physical laws.”

On the other hand, there have been miraculous cures due to the operation of Love through a healer which nevertheless left the “cured” person unchanged in consciousness. The story in Luke 17:12ff illustrates this:

And as [Jesus] entered a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices and said, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then said Jesus, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Ten lepers were cured, but only one was healed. That is, only one took the treatment to heart; only one responded to the healer with gratitude and changed behavior. The other nine went their way physically cleansed but still in the self-centered state of awareness which blocks mental and spiritual development and which sullies relationships. Insofar as leprosy is a manifestation of a spiritual condition – for such as Jesus’s and the biblical view – the nine would probably develop other kinds of disease because their spiritual malaise still festered.

All too often the practice of medicine is, as was taught in many medical schools, to “aggressively treat the body in the bed.” That is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. It is not so much wrong as incomplete, and that incompleteness is based on a view of the human being as simply a body. Mind and spirit are unrecognized or ignored, to the detriment of patient and medical practitioner alike, and to society at large.

In simplest terms: cure removes illness; healing promotes health. “Heal” comes from the Old English hal, meaning “whole.” From it also comes “hale” (as in “hale and hearty”) and “health.” (Incidentally, it’s a delightful irony that the name of the crazy computer in 2001 is Hal.)

But wholeness is not to be found in the physical realm by itself. Humans are compound individuals, as transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber phrases it – compounded from the mental and spiritual realms as well. All realms are aspects or manifestations of the One which is Ultimate Wholeness. The One transcends all creation and is prior to all creation, yet paradoxically also is all creation. Transcendence does not merely negate. Rather, it includes that which is transcended in a larger context, correcting imbalances and bringing completeness to it. Thus, healing practice which focuses simply on one realm or another and ignores the rest is incomplete practice.

To state the situation generally, each of the three great realms of manifest existence has its lawful operations which we must learn and adapt to as we ascend in consciousness to the Transcendental Domain. The mental realm is “higher” than the physical and the spiritual realm is “higher” than the mental. Although there is interchange between and among them, it is clear that physical medications are inherently incapable of curing mental and/or spiritual maladies because the latter are senior to the physical realm. The higher contains the lower but cannot be reduced to the lower.

Healing, rooted in the Transcendental Domain which enfolds all creation, must be understood, first, to recognize the reality of the lower realms which it embraces and, second, to include the curative principles and practices which are inherent to them.

Some materialists may object to this perspective on grounds of the evidence of psychosomatic medicine, claiming that it shows an equivalence of body and mind. So I hasten to clarify: symptoms can indeed be treated through physical means, usually quite effectively, but causes are another condition altogether. It is clear, of course, that physical malfunctions can have physical causes and thus should be treated physically. A broken leg doesn’t require psychotherapy; poisoning calls for a stomach pump, not meditation; and kwashiakor indicates the need for proper nutrition, not laying-on of hands. Some chemical compounds (psychoactive drugs) are useful for restoring the mentally disturbed to relatively normal psychophysical functioning by relieving or suppressing symptoms, but only effective therapy can uncover the life-situations which stressfully generated the biochemical imbalance in the first place. On the other hand, no amount of vitamin B12, trace elements or special diets will make such a person more compassionate or even more rational. They may bring that person’s nervous system to finer functioning and boost his energy level, but they are not capable of opening the mental “eye of reason,” let alone the spiritual “eye of contemplation,” which are founded in domains beyond the reach of nutrition, medication and any other physical, electrochemical or “energy medicine” means of treatment.

At present, we in the West have health specialists to whom society conventionally assigns the research and development functions for the three great realms of existence. The specialists are called physicians (for the physical realm), psychiatrists/psychotherapists (for the mental) and clerics/religious (for the spiritual). Now, there is nothing wrong with being a specialist, so long as there is recognition that, first, the human being is multidimensional or compound and, second, there is a hierarchical ordering of those realms or elements from which the person is compounded, with each requiring its own mode of treatment. Advocates of holistic health who criticize conventional medical education and practice because it doesn’t accomplish the things which psychology/psychiatry and religion do, make an irrelevant criticism. If your car needs repairs, you have a garage mechanic work on it; you don’t go to a psychotherapist, shaman or preacher.

Conversely, you don’t go to a mechanic for spiritual counseling or midlife crisis guidance. By and large, conventional medical practice is not wrong; it is merely incomplete – and that is a great difference. There’s no need for holistic health advocates to throw out the baby with the bath water.

The life of the twelfth century Tibetan saint Milarepa offers an instructive example of the hierarchical nature of the compound individual and of the strengths inherent in each realm which are to be cultivated in the name of wholeness. Milarepa spent years meditating alone in a cave. He had forsaken all worldly contact and possessions. He lived as a naked yogi almost without any food except nettles, which he subsisted on for years. In fact, his skin had turned green from the unvarying diet. Yet he remained steadfast and determined to attain the jewel in the lotus – enlightenment. A song he composed to describe the situation says:

Even though my bones have pierced my flesh on this cold stone floor,
I have persevered.
My body, inside and outside, has become like a nettle;
It will never lose its greenness.
In the solitary cave, in the wilderness,
The recluse knows much loneliness.
But my faithful heart never separates
From the Lama-Buddha of the Three Ages.
By the force of meditation arising from my efforts,
Without doubt I will achieve self-realization.1

From whence comes such force of will? Not from even the most healthy diet and exercise program, nor from scholarly study of philosophy and sacred texts. It comes from “awakening at the heart” to the possibility of enlightenment. Of course, Milarepa later learned moderation from such austerity, just as the Buddha had 1,600 years earlier. After all, wholeness is wholeness – not just supreme cultivation of the spiritual realm alone.

Proper care should be given to the requirements of body and mind also; the properties and limitations of each should be recognized and respected, without mistaking any of them – including the spiritual – as ultimate. Wholeness, ultimate wholeness, consists of the manifest and the unmanifest. As Ramana Maharshi put it paradoxically: “The world is illusion; Brahman alone is real; Brahman is the world.” Thus, healing – as distinguished from cure – must properly diagnose the cause of an illness or disturbance and address it, as well as the symptoms.

It is commonly said that the body is the temple of the spirit. True – but again, incomplete. A Course in Miracles adds another dimension to the concept of temple by declaring that relationships are the temple of the spirit. That declaration brings balance and completeness to the body-as-temple concept because all too often, the body is wrongly worshipped by narcissists and spiritual materialists who leap aboard the latest food fad or health product craze as the key to salvation. But neither spirulina nor snake gall bladder, wheat grass juice nor ayurvedic herbal compounds, flower essences nor crystals can restore health to bad relationships.

As Swami Sivananda Radha of Canada puts it succinctly, pure food does not produce a pure mind. The body of relationships is the mystical body of Christ. Only open, honest and loving relationships based on freedom and equality can bring health to that body.

The final obstacle to health is death – or so the materialist believes (whether he is a genuine materialist or a spiritual materialist). But this view is not necessarily true. In fact, it is totally challenged in various quarters ranging from ancient spiritual traditions to contemporary trends in health care, as I show in A Practical Guide to Death and Dying.

The fact that many medical practitioners have such a hard time dealing with is this: death is inevitable. So much of the medical community’s sense of purpose and identity is bound up in a struggle to overcome death. If one’s self-image and self-esteem as a health practitioner are based on staving off death for patients or clients, it is a losing game because death cannot be cured. That is not to deny the value of biomedical research into life extension; I am strongly in favor of it and the immortalist movement. But, as a growing number of medical care providers are coming to recognize, death need not be viewed as The Enemy. In fact, that view leads, ironically, to poorer medical care than a view which acknowledges death’s place in the scheme of things and the need to honestly and caringly help terminal patients deal with their impending demise.

This is precisely the thrust of the hospice movement and certain lines of thantological work. Death may end a life, but it doesn’t end a relationship. From a psychological point of view, that relationship continues among the living, for better or for worse. (Think of how many people still carry a deceased Mommy or Daddy around inside themselves as a heavy load of nagging guilt or scolding self-defeat.) From a parapsychological point of view, it continues between the living and the dead, for better or for worse. (Crisis apparitions are examples of it continuing for the better; emergency aid is extended to the living by the departed.)

Beyond the hospice movement’s perspective is that offered by people such as Ram Dass and Steven Levine, who declare that dying is an opportunity for spiritual practice and that death can be a vehicle of awakening. (To be fair, it should be recognized that many hospice staff members share this perspective and have worked extensively with it.)

The changes of consciousness which the dying go through can lead to tremendous healing of relationships. Instances of deathbed reconciliation among fallen-out family members and friends are not infrequent and they can lead to positively changed lives for those who are left behind. When such transformations of consciousness are deliberately cultivated during the dying process (by oneself or through trained practitioners), dying can indeed be a healing. Furthermore, it can have some degree of healing – through inspiration – on others who simply hear about such experiences.

The most inspiring examples of “dying the good death” come from the final moments of saints and holy people. I recount some of them in A Practical Guide to Death and Dying. Perhaps the ultimate healing-through-death was that offered compassionately by Jesus. As he died on the cross, he said, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” – and the world has never been the same. At that moment, the wall of the temple was rent in twain; symbolically speaking, the true nature of the human being and of relationships was revealed through the redemptive act of Jesus, which tore the “veil of maya” or delusion from our eyes to let Reality shine through.

Body, mind and spirit: any practice of healing must recognize that there are three great realms in creation and that ultimately the three are one – that is, manifestations of the One. Insofar as healing treats disease (dis-ease), it must be understood that there is no ease, no rest, until we rest in God. The leper who turned back to thank Jesus understood this. The lesson of that biblical passage, then, is this: patients/clients must be dealt with in the context of ultimate wholeness and healing practitioners should seek to be whole themselves. “Physician, heal thyself.” (That applies to psychiatrists/psychotherapists and clerics/religious as well.) In the context of ultimate wholeness, conventional healing is not always cure, nor does cure always involve conventional healing.

So long as there is embodied existence, there will be some degree of illness and malady, even for enlightened sages. But the Awakened Heart frees us of the egoic tendency to identify that illness or malady as problematic; it allows us to experience it as Grace or the Play of Consciousness. When someone accidentally bumped into Ramana Maharshi, who was terminally ill with cancer, everyone near him saw a look of great agony flash across his face. His ravaged flesh was extremely sensitive; the pain from the contact was obviously enormous. Yet he made no comment until someone, thinking he was using yogic control, said to him, “Perhaps you don’t feel the pain?” Maharshi replied, “There is pain, but there is no suffering.” His biological functioning was “doing its thing” by producing pain; so was his consciousness’ transcendental perspective on existence, including his own fleshly life, by eliminating the egoic response to pain.

Paul Brunton puts it wisely in his Notebooks series (Perspectives, p. 131): “To pray for a bodily cure and nothing more is a limited and limiting procedure. Pray also to be enlightened as to why this sickness fell upon you. Ask also what you can do to remove its cause. And above all, ask for the Water of Life, as Jesus bade the woman at the well to ask.”

Footnotes:

1. The Life of Milarepa, Lobsang P. Lhalungpa, E.P. Dutton: New York, 1977, p. 124

.

John White is an author in the fields of consciousness research and higher human development. He has published 15 books, including The Meeting of Science and Spirit, What Is Enlightenment?, A Practical Guide to Death and Dying and for children, The Christmas Mice. His books have been translated into nine languages. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Saturday Review, Reader’s Digest, Science of Mind, Esquire, Omni, Woman’s Day and various other newspapers and magazines. He lives in Cheshire, Connecticut. This article was drawn from his book The Meeting of Science and Spirit.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 44, (September-October 1997).

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

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It is remarkable what happens when you abandon your preconceptions about Christianity – hard though that might be, if, like us, you were brought up as a churchgoer – and approach the subject as objectively as possible.

When we began our latest book, The Masks of Christ: Behind the Lies and Cover-ups About the Man Believed to be God, we thought we had already reached certain conclusions in our 1997 The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (which Dan Brown acknowledges as a major inspiration for The Da Vinci Code). But as our research progressed we became enthralled – perhaps even a little shocked – by what we were faced with, but which only served to reinforce and clarify our previous conclusions.

We begin with a great mystery.

The Great Debate

Of the many puzzles surrounding Jesus, perhaps the most fundamental is the clash between the Jewish and pagan elements in his mission.

Certain New Testament passages are unequivocally hardcore Jewish nationalist, such as Jesus’ claim to the title of Messiah, a role which (despite Christians’ later redefinition) only makes sense in Jewish terms. The Messiah – ‘Anointed’, in Greek ‘Christos’ – was to be the great deliverer, who would reassemble and lead the twelve tribes of Israel in kicking out the Romans, before finally fulfilling God’s promise to extend their rule to all other nations.

Of course, Jesus conspicuously failed to fulfil that role. From the Jews’ perspective he achieved the exact opposite, spawning a religion that, in his name, subjected them to centuries of subjugation. That is why his besotted early followers changed the whole emphasis of ‘Messiah’, with Paul initiating the new spin with the notion that has underpinned Christianity ever since: instead of being a hard-nosed Jewish military leader, the new Messiah was a god-man whose redeeming death and resurrection offered eternal life to all who accepted him, regardless of their ethnic or religious background.

Yet the gospel writers still ensured Jesus was associated with the old prophecies of the Messiah, such as entering Jerusalem on a donkey, which was an unequivocal declaration of Messiahship.

Even though by the time of the gospels the Christian movement had adopted Paul’s doctrine that the message was for all mankind, clearly the internal evidence shows that Jesus himself intended to confine the ‘Good News’ to the people of Israel. We see this in the tale of Jesus and the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, where at first he refuses to heal her possessed daughter because she is not one of the chosen people – even calling her ‘dog’, the racist term used by Jews of Gentiles – only changing his mind when she implicitly acknowledges his God’s superiority. As several scholars admit, since this contradicts the gospel writer’s own position, it must be authentic.

Jesus the Pagan

On the other hand, some Biblical passages are hard to equate with Judaism, especially those about Jesus’ more private rituals, most obviously the Eucharist, the symbolic eating of his ‘body’ as bread and drinking of his ‘blood’ as wine that he supposedly established at the Last Supper. Such a rite, even symbolically, was unthinkable for a Jew, for whom ingesting human blood was an abomination. In fact, it resonates much more neatly with the mystery cults of the Romans, Greeks and Egyptians, where gods were symbolically devoured to forge a spiritual communion between the cult member and the deity. Importing such practices into Judaism would have been regarded by the mainstream as blasphemous.

Evidence has also accumulated over the last few decades that Jesus modelled his cures and exorcisms on pagan magicians’, primarily from Egypt, echoing – or perhaps confirming – early Jewish claims that he had been schooled in sorcery in Egypt. And if the suppressed ‘Gnostic Gospels’ are accepted as genuinely representing certain sides of Jesus’ beliefs and teaching – as we do – then they, too, show a thinking not obviously associated with the Judaism of his day, especially where the spirituality of the feminine is concerned, as exemplified in his relationship with Mary Magdalene.

The majority of New Testament scholars simply reject the non-Jewish parts of the gospels as inauthentic, arguing that the Eucharist was invented by the apostles of the new religion – Paul again! – to make it more Gentile-friendly, something familiar from the sects that celebrated dying-and-rising saviour gods who incarnated as a mortal man. The academics assume that this was borrowed from one of many such cults, perhaps that of Mithras or Dionysus, and was applied to the meal that Jesus’ first followers held purely in memory of him (with no mystical connotations).

But in fact, there is no reason to reject these passages except the impossibility of fitting them into a Jewish context. The logic is that, since we know that Jesus was Jewish, and no Jew could possible have entertained such practices, then he couldn’t have done so, and therefore they must be later inventions.

However, the evidence simply isn’t there. It is hard to imagine later followers inventing Jesus using pagan magic in such detail – even down to specific phrases found in earlier Greco-Egyptian magical papyri. And the internal evidence of the New Testament itself points to the Eucharist being one of the earliest Christian practices, going back to Jesus himself. It is the one element that appears virtually identically in all four gospels and Paul’s Letters. (It is generally agreed that Paul’s Letters predate the gospels, although we would argue that Mark’s Gospel might be contemporary with some of Paul’s writings.)

Even odder, as Paul clearly struggled to fit the Eucharist into his ‘revealed’ version of Jesus’ mission, evidently he would even have been happier to ignore the rite entirely, but it was already too well established. His solution was to transmute the rite into a memorial, specifically to dodge the ‘communion’ aspect. So ironically the evidence points to the exact reverse of the conventional position – instead of Paul adding the ‘mystical communion’ element, he tried to get rid of it!

Part of the Christian process of redefining the meaning of the ritual meal was linking it to the Last Supper the night before his crucifixion. However, the evidence of John’s Gospel is that Jesus actually instituted the rite earlier, when he was preaching in Galilee – which led to a mass desertion of disciples appalled by his injunction that they must drink his blood.

It must be stressed that such practices are not merely difficult to reconcile with Judaism – as a would-be Messiah had to be – but impossible. They are totally incompatible.

So, as some scholars are now beginning to argue, could the Jewish parts be the invention? But that solution doesn’t work either, since it means rejecting passages that are strongly evidential – such as the episode of the Syro-Phoenician woman and the entry into Jerusalem.

So we hit an impasse. According to accepted thinking, Jesus could never have been both a Jewish leader and a proponent of mystery school rites. Is there any possible solution?

Enter the Magus

One potential way forward, we realised – with some astonishment – lay in exploring the parallel between Jesus and that flamboyant scriptural bad boy to end bad boys, Jesus’ hugely unconventional contemporary, Simon Magus, whose very name underlines his apparently pagan credentials, ‘Magus’ meaning ‘occultist’ or ‘magician’.

The earliest reference to Simon Magus (or Simon of Gitta, after the town of his birth in Samaria) comes in the Acts of the Apostles, the continuation of Luke’s Gospel that takes the story on after Jesus’ crucifixion. After the first persecution of Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem that began with the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen, some of Jesus’ disciples, led by Philip, fled to Samaria. This was within, at most, ten years of the crucifixion – probably less. Here they find that many Samaritans follow Simon Magus, regarded as the ‘Great Power’ sent by God. Philip not only successfully converts Simon’s followers to Christianity, but also the Magus himself. Some time later Peter and the disciple John go to Samaria to take the Holy Spirit to the community established by Philip, and Simon Magus reveals his true colours by offering them money for the secret of the Holy Spirit, earning a stern condemnation from Peter.

Clearly, as the Simonites found it so easy to switch their allegiance there must have been a marked similarity between the messages of Jesus and the Magus. And Simon himself was, albeit briefly, once a member of the Christian community in Samaria. Although Acts attributes his success there to sorcery, as we now know Jesus himself indulged in pagan magic, so this points up a similarity between them.

Although Acts’ story ends with Simon asking forgiveness, other early Christian sources show he went on to challenge the fledgling Jesus movement, appearing in the writings of the Church Fathers as the ‘first heretic’ who attempted to lead the early Christians astray. Again, the term suggests a basic similarity between Simon and Jesus – heresy being a variation of a religion.

A major source is the related texts known as the Clementina or the Pseudo-Clementine Literature. Written around 150 CE but drawing on earlier material, it describes the struggle between Peter and Simon Magus for the hearts, minds and souls of the Samaritans.

It is crystal clear that the Church Fathers’ big problem was that Simon Magus was far, far too similar to Jesus, performing miracles and healings – even being regarded as an incarnate god. The early Christians were anxious to point out to their flock that, although Simon appeared to be cut from the same cloth as Jesus, this was a ploy by the Devil to sow confusion. Epiphanius of Salamis wrote that Simon “worked under the cloak of Christ” and even hinted that he claimed to be Jesus resurrected. Hyppolytus of Rome said bluntly: “He was not the Christ.” But do they protest too much?

The Magus, too, promoted a seemingly peculiar blend of Jewish and pagan ideas. The Clementina makes the apparently extraordinary statement that, while he taught that there were “many gods,” he was citing the books of Moses (i.e. the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament). This seemed so weird that the Clementina was dismissed as nonsense – but in 1842 a work of Hippolytus was discovered in which he had included (in order to point out the errors) large extracts from Simon’s own treatise, the ‘Great Revelation’, whose one-time existence was known but which was believed to have been lost.

The ‘Great Revelation’ reveals an elevation of the sacred feminine and an emphasis on sexual mysticism that fit awkwardly with the patriarchal character of Judaism, and which caused much outrage among the Church Fathers, to whom Simon’s rituals were obscene and disgusting. Notoriously, he is said to have travelled with one Helen, a former prostitute from Tyre – described as a black woman who danced in chains, and who he claimed was the incarnation of God’s ‘First Thought’, the female power through whom God had created the material world. (Of course there are intriguing parallels between the relationships of Simon and Helen, and Jesus and Mary Magdalene as portrayed in the Gnostic Gospels.)

An even more extraordinary link between Simon and Jesus is that, again according to the Clementina, the two men shared the same teacher: John the Baptist. Indeed, it states that it was Simon Magus, not Jesus, who John chose as his successor.

But what does all this have to tell us about the historical Jesus?

The big clue comes from the fact that Simon Magus was a Samaritan, one of those who, despite an ethnic kinship with the Jews, were detested by them – a feeling that was decidedly mutual.

On the subject of Jesus and Samaria, the gospel writers appear to differ awkwardly. In Matthew, Mark and Luke Jesus is depicted as shunning the land and its people (with some exceptions, notably the parable of the Good Samaritan). On the other hand, John’s Gospel has him extending his mission into Samaria.

There is, in fact, strong evidence that the enigmatic Gospel of John was originally written for an early Samaritan Christian community, which would explain its positive view of the Samaritans. For example, it describes the first person to whom Jesus chooses to reveal his Messiahship as the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s Well in the heart of Samaria, and the first to recognise him as the Messiah are Samaritans. We suggest it was written for Samaritan converts from Simon Magus’ following – after all, some of the gospel’s unique stories, particularly those with an unexpected sexual subtext, seem to have been specifically included (or contrived) to subvert Simon’s teaching.

The key figure of John the Baptist was also active in Samaria. According to John’s Gospel, one of his centres was Aenon (modern Ainûn), in Samaria.

So, Jesus and John the Baptist both took their missions into Samaria – another parallel with Simon Magus. But what is it about that land that explains the Jewish/pagan paradox of both Jesus’ and Simon’s teachings?

The key lies in the reason for the animosity between Jews and Samaritans, which had its roots in the earliest days of Israel. The Samaritans were descended from the Israelite tribes of Ephraim and Manesseh, and still inhabited their lands, between Judea and Galilee. Originally, Ephraim was predominant: Moses’ successor and the conqueror of the Promised Land, Joshua, was from Ephraim and the tribe was given the honour of being custodians of the Ark of the Covenant in its sanctuary at Shiloh. Some historians and archaeologists believe that Ephraim and Manesseh were two of only three tribes (the other being Benjamin) that came out of Egypt, the others being native Canaanites who were converted to the religion of Moses. And intriguingly, legend linked them with the Egyptian religion of Heliopolis, since their progenitors, Ephraim and Manesseh, were sons of Joseph and Asenath, the daughter of the high priest of Heliopolis.

After the creation of the kingdom of Israel a power struggle developed between the tribes of Ephraim and Judah. King David usurped Ephraim’s status by taking the Ark to Jerusalem, the new religious centre in Judah’s territory. After Solomon, the kingdom split in two, Ephraim heading the ten tribes of the larger Kingdom of Israel in the north, with the smaller Kingdom of Judah (which gave its name to the Jewish people and religion) in the south. A new sanctuary and temple, a rival to Jerusalem, was built in Ephraim’s land on Mount Gerizim.

Although larger and more powerful, the northern kingdom collapsed when it was invaded by the Assyrian empire in the eighth century BCE. The Jews later claimed that the Assyrian influence corrupted the religion of the north, a taunt that was returned when Judah underwent its own trauma of invasion and mass deportation in the Babylonian Captivity two centuries later. When the Jews returned to Jerusalem after their seventy-year exile, they set about codifying and reforming their religion, incorporating concepts from that of Babylon. So both the Jews and the Samaritans believed that only they practised the ‘pure’ religion of Moses, and that the other’s version was heretical. Victors’ history decided that the Jews won, but the Samaritans could have been right…

The rivalry reached a climax when, about two centuries before Jesus, the Jews conquered Samaria and destroyed their temple – yet another reason for Samaritan resentment. It was only with the advent of Roman rule that Samaria was freed from Jewish subjugation.

Not unnaturally, by Jesus’ day, the Jews and Samaritans detested each other. The hostility even affected their respective end times speculations: all the prophecies foresaw a re-gathering of the twelve tribes – one of the functions of the Messiah – and a reconciliation of Judah and Ephraim, but opinions differed over which tribe would come out on top. Naturally, the Jews thought it would be them. Moreover, their deeply-ingrained prejudice made the idea of bringing the Samaritans back into the fold deeply distasteful. Meanwhile, the Samaritans believed in a coming saviour, the Taheb (‘Restorer’ or ‘Returner’), who would reassemble the tribes under the authority of Ephraim, restoring the situation that had existed at the very beginning of Israelite history. And part of the Taheb’s function was to overthrow Judah. (The Samaritan woman would therefore have recognised Jesus as the Taheb.)

Many scholars and archaeologists have shown that the Israelites’ original religion was far from the monotheistic and patriarchal institution it was to become, and that it owed much to either, or both, the native, pagan religions of Canaan and Egypt. The classic study is Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess (1967, revised 1990), which argued that, before the split after Solomon’s reign, the Israelites had worshipped a goddess, Asherah, alongside Yahweh, revealing both polytheism and an awareness of the sacred feminine. (Images of cherubim excavated from ninth-century Israel are almost identical to Egyptian depictions of the winged Isis.) Patai also showed that early Israelite tradition incorporated a female figure which manifested God’s power of creation.

And as we know, all of these are characteristics of the teaching of the Samaritan Simon Magus – which makes sense if, as the Samaritans claimed, they really did preserve the original form of the Israelite religion.

But we believe it would also resolve the basic contradiction about how Jesus’ career could incorporate ‘Jewish’ and pagan elements. If, instead of ‘Jewish’ we think in terms of the ‘people of Israel’ – i.e. the original religion and tribes – then much about his mission falls into place.

The Samaritan connection also offers an explanation of the origin of the Eucharist. One of the texts that might include a possible Jewish precursor to the Christian Eucharist is the late BCE or early CE ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’. Normally described as a product of the Jewish community in Egypt, it includes a ritual involving the eating of bread and the drinking of wine – the nearest ceremony to the Eucharist in any Jewish source, and, although the key element of equating the bread and wine with body and blood is absent, some have suggested that it may have influenced either Jesus’ rite or the practices of the first Christians, who added the communion element.

However, as ‘The Book of Joseph and Asenath’ describes the Biblical tale of the union of the patriarch Joseph and the daughter of the Egyptian high priest of Heliopolis, it was clearly written by or for a community to which their marriage was particularly important. As the sons of Joseph and Asenath were Ephraim and Manesseh, the legendary ancestors of the Samaritans – and there was a large Samaritan community in Egypt – it seems the text is Samaritan and not Jewish.

So in the Samaritan connection we find clues to the apparent discrepancy between the Jewishness and paganism found in Jesus’ teachings. And it was against the background of age-old simmering tribal hatred that the extraordinary character of Simon Magus – the ‘bad’ Samaritan – arose, challenging the cult of Jesus with his miracles and claims of divinity.

It is all too easy to accept the rather garbled version of his later life as given by the early Church fathers, in which he is tamed by the apostles and dies in a magical battle with Saint Peter. Yet this is the man who it seems John the Baptist nominated as his official successor – and not Jesus… But that, as they say, is another story…

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Despite often bitter opposition from many vested interests, LYNN PICKNETT and CLIVE PRINCE have fearlessly exposed cover-ups and conspiracies, from the faking of the Shroud of Turin (Turin Shroud), the Rudolf Hess mission (Double Standards), the battle among the Second World War Allies (Friendly Fire), the British royal family (War of the Windsors), the New Age movement and the hijacking of ancient Egypt (The Stargate Conspiracy), the Priory of Sion (The Sion Revelation) – and the origins and history of Christianity (The Templar Revelation) as well as their latest book The Masks of Christ. Their website is www.picknettprince.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 111 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

Lemuria and Mu are interchangeable names given to a lost land believed to have been located somewhere in either the southern Pacific or Indian Oceans. This ancient continent was apparently the home of an advanced and highly spiritual culture, perhaps the mother race of all mankind, but it sank beneath the waves many thousands of years ago as the result of a geological cataclysm of some kind.

The thousands of rocky islands scattered throughout the Pacific, including Easter Island, Tahiti, Hawaii and Samoa, have been claimed by some to be the only surviving remains of this once great continent. The theory of a lost continent in this area has been put forward by many different people, most notably in the mid 19th century by scientists in order to explain the unusual distribution of various animals and plants around the Indian and Pacific Oceans.In the late 19th century occultist Madame Blavatsky reincarnated the idea of Lemuria as a lost continent / spiritual homeland and influenced a host of subsequent occultists and mystics including well known American psychic healer and Prophet Edgar Cayce. The popularisation of Lemuria / Mu as a purely physical place began in the 20th century with ex-British army officer Colonel James Churchward, and the idea still has many adherents today.

But is there any physical evidence to back up these claims of an ancient continent beneath the Pacific or Indian Ocean? Or should these ‘lost homeland’ stories be interpreted in another way entirely, perhaps as the symbol of a mythical vanished ‘Golden Age’ of man?

The Land of Mu

The idea of a lost continent known as ‘Mu’ in the Pacific Ocean does not actually have a particularly long history, neither is it mentioned specifically in any ancient mythologies as some writers have suggested. The title ‘Mu’ originated with eccentric amateur archaeologist Augustus le Plongeon (1826-1908), who was the first to make photographical records of the ruins of the archaeological site of Chichen Itza in Yucatán, Mexico. Plongeon’s credibility was badly damaged by his attempted translation of a Mayan book known as the ‘Troana Codex’ (also known as the ‘Madrid Codex’).

In his books Sacred Mysteries Among the Mayans and Quiches (1886) and Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx (1896) Plongeon interpreted part of the text of the Troana Codex as revealing that the Maya of Yucatán were the ancestors of the Egyptians and many other civilisations. He also believed that an ancient continent, which he called Mu, had been destroyed by a volcanic eruption, the survivors of this cataclysm founding the Mayan civilisation. Plongeon equates Mu with Atlantis and states that a ‘Queen Moo’ originally from Atlantis, travelled to Egypt where she became known as Isis, and founded the Egyptian civilisation. However, Plongeon’s interpretation of the Mayan book is considered by experts in Mayan archaeology and history as completely erroneous, indeed much of what he interpreted as hieroglyphics turned out to be ornamental design.

Lemuria

‘Lemuria’, the alternative name for the lost continent, also originated in the nineteenth century. Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834-1919), a German naturalist and supporter of Darwin, proposed that a land bridge spanning the Indian Ocean separating Madagascar from India could explain the widespread distribution of lemurs, small, primitive tree-dwelling mammals found in Africa, Madagascar, India and the East Indian archipelago. More bizarrely, Haeckel also suggested that lemurs were the ancestors of the human race and that this land bridge was the “probable cradle of the human race.”

Other well-known scientists, such as the evolutionist T.H. Huxley and the naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, had no doubt about the existence of a huge continent in the Pacific millions of years previously, which had been destroyed in a disastrous earthquake that submerged it beneath the waves, much as Atlantis was thought to have been drowned.

Before the discovery of continental drift it was not unusual in the mid to late 19th century for scientists to propose submerged land masses and land bridges to explain the distribution of the world’s flora and fauna. In 1864, the English zoologist Philip Lutley Sclater (1829-1913) gave the hypothetical continent the name ‘Lemuria’ in an article ‘The Mammals of Madagascar’ in The Quarterly Journal of Science, and since then it has stuck.

The Geologists’ View

Zoologists and geologists now explain the distribution of lemurs and other plants and animals in the area of the Pacific and Indian Oceans to be the result of plate tectonics and continental drift. The theory of plate tectonics, and it is still a theory, affirms that moving plates of the Earth’s crust supported on less rigid mantle rocks causes continental drift, volcanic and seismic activity, and the formation of mountain chains. The concept of continental drift was first proposed by German scientist Alfred Wegener in 1912, but the theory did not gain general acceptance in the scientific community for another 50 years.

With this understanding of plate tectonics geologists now regard the theory of a sunken continent beneath the Pacific as an impossibility. They also point out that theories of lost lands in the Pacific mostly originate in the 19th century, when knowledge of the area was limited and well before the Pacific sea floor had been mapped.

Blavatsky’s Lemuria

The idea of Lemuria as something more than a physical place, or at least somewhere which had been inhabited by non-human entities before the appearance of man, derives from the writings of colourful Russian occultist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891). Blavatsky was the co-founder, together with lawyer Henry Steel Olcott, of the Theosophical Society, in New York in 1875. The Society was an esoteric order designed to study the mystical teachings of both Christianity and Eastern religions.

In her massive tome The Secret Doctrine (1888) Blavatsky describes a history originating millions of years ago with the ‘Lords of Flame’ and goes on to discusses five ‘Root Races’ which have existed on earth, each one dying out in an earth-shattering cataclysm. The third of these Root Races she called the ‘Lemurian’, which lived a million years ago, and who were bizarre telepathic giants who kept dinosaurs as pets.

The Lemurians eventually drowned when their continent was submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean. The progeny of the Lemurians was the fourth Root Race, the human Atlanteans, who were brought down by their use of black magic, their continent of Atlantis sinking beneath the waves 850,000 years ago. Present humanity represents the Fifth Root Race.

Blavatsky envisioned her Lemuria as covering a vast area. In her own words it stretched from

…the foot of the Himalayas, which separated it from the inland sea rolling its waves over what is now Tibet, Mongolia, and the great desert of Schamo (Gobi); from Chittagong, westward to Hardwar, and eastward to Assam. From thence, it stretched South across what is known to us as Southern India, Ceylon, and Sumatra; then embracing on its way, as we go South, Madagascar on its right hand and Australia and Tasmania on its left, it ran down to within a few degrees of the Antarctic Circle; when, from Australia, an inland region on the Mother Continent in those ages, it extended far into the Pacific Ocean…

Blavatsky also describes survivors of the catastrophic destruction of Lemuria escaping to become the ancestors of some of the Aboriginal tribes of Australia. She maintained that she took all of her information regarding Lemuria from ‘The Book of Dzyan’, supposed to have been written in Atlantis and shown to her by the Indian adepts known as ‘Mahatmas’.

Madame Blavatsky never claimed to have discovered Lemuria; in fact she refers to Philip Schlater coining the name Lemuria, in her writings. It has to be said that The Secret Doctrine is an extremely difficult book, a complex mixture of Eastern and Western cosmologies, mystical ramblings and esoteric wisdom, much of it not meant to be taken literally.

Blavatsky’s is the first ‘occult’ interpretation of Lemuria, but on one level it should not be equated with the physical continent later proposed by Churchward. What Blavatsky and other occultists since have suggested concerning Lemuria could be partly interpreted as an ideal spiritual condition of the soul, a kind of spiritual-historical vision.

Nevertheless, there are some psychics and prophets who even today regard the existence of ancient Lemuria / Mu as a physical reality. Indeed, there are a few who when ‘hypnotically regressed’ have recalled former lives as citizens on the doomed continent.

Lemuria and Australia

The writings of Blavatsky and other Theosophists about Lemuria, and the idea of Australia as part of this ancient lost continent and the scene of a lost golden age, had a significant influence on mystics and occultists in the country at the end of the 19th century.

Queensland-born novelist Rosa Campbell Praed represented Australia as the last remnant of ancient Lemuria and believed the myth of the lost continent to be based on fact. In Praed’s case, she used the theosophical idea of Lemuria to present an idealised primeval history of Australia, a land very different to the Queensland frontier country wracked by racial violence she had witnessed first-hand as a child.

Other evidence for this fascination with ancient Lemuria comes in the series of Australian adventure of the 1890s known as “the Lemurian novels.” In The Last Lemurian, written in 1898 by historian of Australian exploration and adventure-romance novelist George Firth Scott, the narrator Dick Halwood discovers the remains of legendary Lemuria out in the Australian desert, in a plot involving reincarnation, pygmies, a bunyip-monster, and an occult Yellow Queen.

John David Hennessey’s An Australian Bush Track (1896) calls Lemuria ‘Zoo-Zoo land’, and locates it somewhere in northern Queensland. Its inhabitants, the Zoo-Zooans, are a “remnant of a great nation which came there from some part of the mainland of Asia,” but had lost all the arts of high civilisation they once possessed. The Lost Explorer (1890) by James Francis Hogan has Lemuria as ‘Malua’, located in the centre of Australia, and ruled by the cannibalistic Queen Mocata, the last survivor of a superior race that once lived in “the interior of the great southern continent.”

The idea that Australia was once part of this lost Eden has also influenced those of a more practical bent, and attempts have been made to locate traces of Lemurian civilisation on both the west and east coasts of Australia.

Aboriginal art, artefacts and mythology have also been used to identify the Aborigines as prehistoric remnants of the Lemurians (following Blavatsky again), who somehow escaped the devastation of 20,000 or so years ago. Indeed, in some Theosophical publications of the first quarter of the 20th century Aborigines were described as the last of the Lemurians. However, the Aborigines of Australia had already been established on the continent for at least 30,000 years at the time of the supposed destruction of Lemuria, in fact they have perhaps the longest continuous cultural history of any people on Earth, so the theory of them having a Lemurian origin does not hold water.

Colonel James Churchward

The lost civilisation of Lemuria / Mu was brought dramatically back to public attention in 1931 with the publication of Colonel James Churchward’s bizarre The Lost Continent of Mu, the first in a series of five books by Churchward about the lost continent.

In the book he claimed that the lost continent of Mu had once extended from an area north of Hawaii southwards as far as Fiji and Easter Island. According to Churchward, Mu was the original Garden of Eden and a technologically advanced civilisation which boasted 64,000,000 inhabitants. Around 12,000 years ago Mu was wiped out by an earthquake and submerged beneath the Pacific. Apparently Atlantis, a colony of Mu, was destroyed in the same way a thousand years later. All the world’s major ancient civilisations, from the Babylonians and the Persians, to the Maya and the Egyptians, were the remains of the colonies of Mu.

Churchward claimed he received this sensational information when, as a young officer in India during a famine in the 1880s, he became friendly with an Indian priest. This priest told Churchward that he and two cousins were the only survivors of a 70,000 year old esoteric order which originated on Mu itself. This order was known as the ‘Naacal Brotherhood’.
The priest showed Churchward a number of ancient tablets written by the Naacal Order in a forgotten ancient language, supposed to be the original language of mankind, which he taught the officer to read. Churchward later asserted that certain stone artefacts recovered in Mexico contained parts of the ‘Sacred Inspired Writings of Mu’, perhaps taking ideas from Augustus le Plongeon and his use of the Troana Codex to provide evidence for the existence of Mu.

Unfortunately, Churchward never produced any evidence to back up his exotic claims, he never published translations of the enigmatic Naacal tablets, and his books, though they still have many followers today, are perhaps better read as entertainment than factual studies of Lemuria / Mu.

Nan Madol

It was James Churchward who first posited the theory that the site of Nan Modal, on Pohnpei Island in the North Pacific Ocean, was one of the seven cities of ancient Mu / Lemuria.

The cyclopean ruins of Nan Modal, at one time a ceremonial centre covering 11 square miles, consist of around 90 small artificial islands built up out of a lagoon, and interlinked by a network of tidal canals. These islands, situated on the tidal flats southeast of Temwen Island, Micronesia, contain house foundations, sea walls – thirty feet tall in places, tunnels and burial vaults, all constructed entirely from prismatic basalt columns stacked crisscross like log cabins. These rocks weigh several tons on average, with the largest weighing 25 tons.

What makes the construction all the more remarkable is that the stone had to be transported some distance to the site, as no quarries have been found nearby, though they do exist elsewhere on the island. A clue to how this feat was achieved are crystal basalt columns discovered at the bottom of the lagoon near Temwen Island and on the shores of other islets in the area, which would suggest that the stones were transported by raft.

Modern Pohnpeians, on the other hand, believe the stones were flown over the island using black magic. Radio carbon dates and analysis of pottery from Nan Madol reveal that construction of the site began around 1200 CE, though the area may have been occupied from as early as 200 BCE. Such dates would certainly preclude any connection with Churchward’s Lemurians or their descendents.

At the beginning of the 13th century CE the island of Pohnpei is thought to have been conquered and unified by the mysterious ‘saudeleur’ dynasty, and it was then that the spectacular complex was constructed as a ceremonial and political seat for the new royal line. The saudeleur line was brought to an end in the 1500s by exiled Pohnpeian warrior, Isokelekel. The new chiefs, known as Nahnmwarki, occupied Nan Madol for a couple of hundred years, but by the 1800’s when the first Europeans arrived, the site was deserted. Why this happened remains one of the many mysteries of this incredible site.

The Kerguelen Continent

In the last twenty or so years submerged civilisations have once again been in the news due in particular to a number of intriguing underwater discoveries. In 1999 the Joint Oceanographic Institutions for Deep Earth Sampling (JOIDES) Resolution research vessel made an amazing discovery drilling in an area of the southern Indian Ocean about 3,000 km to the southwest of Australia.

The researchers discovered that an underwater plateau about a third the size of Australia, known as the Kerguelen Plateau, was actually the remains of a lost continent, which sank beneath the waves around 20 million years ago. The team found fragments of wood, a seed, spores and pollen, in 90 million year old sediment, as well as types of rocks associated with explosive volcanism.

One of the many fascinating points about the Kerguelen Plateau is that it contains sedimentary rocks similar to those found in India and Australia, which indicates that they were at one time connected. Scientists believe that around 50 million years ago, the continent may have had tropical flora and fauna, including small dinosaurs. With further research planned, the fascinating puzzle of the Kerguelen Plateau may yet resurrect the Lemuria debate.

Yonaguni Island and the Gulf of Cambay

In 1985 off the southern coast of Yonaguni Island, the westernmost island of Japan, a Japanese dive tour operator discovered a previously unknown stepped pyramidal edifice. Shortly afterwards, Professor Masaki Kimura, a marine geologist at Ryukyu University in Okinawa, confirmed the existence of the 183m wide, 27m high structure.

This rectangular stone ziggurat, part of a complex of underwater stone structures in the area which resemble ramps, steps and terraces, is thought to date from somewhere between 3,000 to 8,000 years ago. Some researchers have suggested these ruins are the remains of a submerged civilisation – and that the structures represent perhaps the oldest architecture in the world. Connections with Lemuria and Atlantis have also been mentioned.

However, some geologists, such as Robert Schoch of Boston University, and others with knowledge of the area, insist that the underwater ‘buildings’ are natural, mainly the result of ocean erosion and coral reef settlements and similar to other known geological formations in the region. Furthermore, archaeologists also point out that no man-made tools or weapons have been recovered from the site, which would indicate human settlement.

In December 2000 a team from the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) claimed to have discovered the remains of a huge lost city 36 metres underwater in the Gulf of Cambay, off the western coast of India. A year later further acoustic imaging surveys were undertaken and evidence recorded for apparent human settlement at the site, which included the foundations of huge structures, pottery, sections of walls, beads, pieces of sculpture and human bone. One of the wooden finds supposedly from the city has given a radiocarbon date of 7500 BCE, which would make the site 4,000 years earlier than the oldest known civilisation in India.

Research is ongoing at this fascinating site, now known as the Gulf of Khambat Cultural Complex (GKCC), which if the dates are proved correct, may one day radically alter our understanding of the world’s first civilisations. However, it must be added that a number of marine geologists believe that the NIOT scientists have made serious errors in their interpretations of the sonar images obtained from the area. The opinion of these researchers is that the supposedly ancient ‘ruins’, shown as geometric patterns on the images, are natural rock formations and there is no evidence that the artefacts discovered in the area of the site, including the radio-carbon dated block of wood, are associated with it. The debate is still continuing among geologists, archaeologists and historians on this controversial discovery.

Whether any of these underwater finds in the Pacific and Indian Oceans prove to be the remains of forgotten civilisations or not, one thing is certain – man will always be searching for a lost homeland or a more spiritually satisfying ancient past. In this sense Lemuria or Mu will always be more than just a physical place.

Sources and Further Reading

The Lost Continent of Mu by J. Churchward, C.W. Daniel Co. Ltd, 1994 (1931).

The Lost Land of Lemuria: Fabulous Geographies, Catastrophic Histories by Sumathi Ramaswamy, University of California Press, 2005.

The Secret Doctrine II – Anthropogenesis by H.P. Blavatsky,  Theosophical University Press, Pasadena, California, 1970 (1888).

Other Temples, Other Gods: The Occult in Australia by N. Drury & G. Tillett, Sydney, Hodder & Stoughton, 1982.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/353277.stm – ‘Lost Continent Discovered’. The Kerguelen discovery.

www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl1905/19050670.htm – ‘Questionable Claims’. The finds in the Gulf of Khambat.

www.morien-institute.org/yonaguni.html – Morien Institue page about Yonaguni.

www.pohnpeiheaven.com/nanmadol.htm – ‘Pohnpei – Between Time and Tide’.

www.uoregon.edu/~wsayres/NanMadol.html – Dr. William S. Ayres’s site about his work in Nan Madol.

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BRIAN HAUGHTON is a qualified archaeologist and researcher with an interest in the strange and unusual. He is author of Hidden History: Lost Civilizations, Secret Knowledge, and Ancient Mysteries and Webmaster of www.mysteriouspeople.com, a site devoted to the lives of enigmatic people. He has written on the subjects of ancient mysteries and unusual people in history for various print and Internet publications including the B.B.C.’s Legacies Website, New Dawn Magazine, Awareness, and Paranormal Magazine in the U.K. His website is www.brian-haughton.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 103 (July-August 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

Do we survive the death of our physical bodies? Is there such a thing as a postmortem continuation of the individual? If there is survival, what survives? Does everyone survive? What does it even mean to survive?

Answers to these questions are central to the dogmas of many religions. These same issues are amongst the most refractory when addressed using the techniques of scientific inquiry: data gathering, hypothesis formulation and testing, logical analyses. Indeed, such topics are generally viewed as outside the scope of scientific inquiry, not worth serious thought. As Bertrand Russell commented, “most people would die sooner than think – in fact, they do so.”

Sphinx Geology

In my youth, I didn’t bother to give the afterlife much consideration. I never needed the threat of future hell and damnation to persuade me to be moral now. I identified with those ancient Hebrews who did not necessarily believe in an afterlife (de Vesme, 1931), yet still found it prudent to pursue an honourable life in this world. In college I pursued a very earthly field – the study of rocks – ultimately earning a Ph.D. in geology and geophysics from Yale University (1983).

My life changed in 1990. At the invitation of independent Egyptologist John Anthony West, I took my first trip to Egypt – specifically to study the Great Sphinx from a geologic point of view. After several more trips, undertaking various tests and analyses, I came to the conclusion that the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx date back to a much earlier period than previously believed by most Egyptologists and historians. Conventional wisdom places the Great Sphinx in the reign of the Pharaoh Khafre (Chephren), circa 2500 BCE. My studies indicated that the oldest portions of the Great Sphinx (the statue has been repaired many times, and the head re-carved) date back to at least the period of 7000 BCE to 5000 BCE, and perhaps 9000 BCE or earlier.

My Sphinx work immediately caused a firestorm and, though the controversy has abated somewhat two decades later, the implications have only deepened. Essentially, sophisticated culture and civilisation goes back much earlier than formally thought; “history must be rewritten.” Over the years I have been pleased to see confirmation of the crux of my work, as other very ancient sites have been uncovered. A good example is Gobekli Tepe in Turkey where a major monumental carved stone building phase dating to the period of 8000 BCE and earlier has been discovered.

Egypt And Its Obsession With Death

Working on the Great Sphinx, I could not help but become fascinated with the pyramids, temples, tombs, and other relics of ancient Egypt. According to the traditional view, what was the overriding preoccupation of ancient Egypt? Death and the afterlife. Say “Egypt” and pyramids (popularly interpreted as giant tombs), mummies, and the so-called Book of the Dead immediately come to mind.

Having studied them in depth, it is clear to me that the pyramids, and the Great Pyramid in particular, were not solely or even primarily overblown mausoleums. Indeed, the Great Pyramid may have served both astronomical/astrological functions, literally being an observatory at one stage of its development, as well as ritualistic purposes. Many modern visitors describe powerful and life changing experiences in the Great Pyramid. One of the most famous is Napoleon Bonaparte. While in Egypt, August 1799, Napoleon visited the Great Pyramid. He entered the King’s Chamber and asked to be left alone. Upon emerging, Napoleon was pale, faint and silent. Asked by an aide what happened, Napoleon refused to say anything of substance, intimating that he had experienced a preview of his own fate. Just before his death in 1821, Napoleon appeared to be on the verge of telling a close friend what had occurred in the King’s Chamber. Then he hesitated. “No. What is the use? You would never believe me.”

I have spent many hours, including several times almost the entire night (but not sleeping, mind you), in the Great Pyramid. And I have spent much time exploring other temples and tombs throughout Egypt, as well as pyramids, temples and sacred places elsewhere in the world. Initially I approached the ancient monuments as a geologist, focusing on the materials from which they were constructed. Soon, however, I became involved in studying not just the stones, but why past civilisations had erected the stones into magnificent edifices. The why behind the monuments, more often than not, apparently included religious beliefs and practices, initiation rites and rituals, which in many cases seemed to have an ostensible paranormal aspect, whether it was clairvoyance, divination or manifestations of higher levels of consciousness. Were, I asked myself, the ancient structures used to genuinely alter consciousness and possibly enhance paranormal phenomena? Or did superstition, perhaps combined with pious fraud on the part of a priest or priestess, account for the tales? Furthermore, I could not help but think about postmortem survival issues, particularly when studying ostensible tombs! Death, transformation, resurrection, union with the gods, attainment of immortality – was all this ritualistic hocus pocus and pure nonsense? Or were the ancients skilled psychic engineers, carefully manipulating the incorporeal with their megalithic stone monuments and occult practices?

My formal training as a physical scientist certainly did not encourage the notion that paranormal and psychic phenomena, much less life after death, were anything other than imagination gone wild or charlatans preying on the gullible. According to a conventional materialistic and secular “scientifically rational” worldview, the paranormal does not exist and death is the final end. It was all too easy, and indeed comforting, to put such issues out of mind. Stick to the hard evidence of the rocks, the domain of the geologist.

Exploring the Paranormal

Issues of the paranormal and questions about survival kept nagging at me. Ultimately, I realised, I must address these topics head-on, if only for the sake of satisfying my intellectual curiosity. For me the first issue was to research various reputed anomalous psychic abilities among the living, such as telepathy (direct mind-to-mind transfer of information without utilising any of the conventional senses) and psychokinesis (PK, essentially the concept of mind-over-matter). I wanted to establish what, if anything, in terms of the paranormal is possible among the living before addressing the issue of postmortem survival.

It took me over ten years from my first visit to Egypt to get to the point where I was prepared to take a serious look at the paranormal. I have taught fulltime at Boston University since 1984, and every year I have a new batch of students. Many simply want to take their courses and get a degree, but then there are those who really strive to go beyond their formal studies. One such student was Logan Yonavjak. She served as my field assistant on research expeditions to Egypt and Peru in 2003 and 2005, and she prodded me to take a serious look at the paranormal. She and I undertook a comprehensive survey of the serious scientific literature addressing psychical research and the paranormal (the field now generally referred to as parapsychology). We read literally thousands of papers, pro- and con-, and we both became involved with the field first-hand. The result of our collaboration was The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research.

Our studies convinced me that, once the fraud, bunk, and self-delusion are eliminated, there is something to the paranormal. The best-documented class of paranormal phenomena is telepathy. There is strong laboratory evidence for telepathy, such as classic card-calling experiments as well as many more sophisticated tests. There is also a large and compelling body of evidence from spontaneous cases (non-laboratory experiments) supporting the reality of telepathy. For instance, crisis apparitions, veridical hallucinations, or “ghosts” are well known. The evidence for PK is also strong, including micro-PK studies at an atomic level using random event generators and similar devices, such as the evidence developed by the PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) labs over more than a quarter of a century, and the carefully studied incidents of macro-PK (affecting larger objects) associated with genuine spontaneous poltergeist cases. Another line of evidence for the reality of paranormal phenomena is research on presentiments or “pre-sponses,” essentially a form of short-term precognition as measured by physiological parameters (heart rate, electrodermal activity and so forth). Numerous replicated experiments have demonstrated the physiological responses of individuals to disturbing photographs, for instance, a second or two before they are actually viewed by the person. According to conventional science, this should not be possible.

My research on parapsychological phenomena among the living continues, but at this point I agree with the following statement made by David Fontana, Professor of Transpersonal Psychology at Liverpool John Moores University and a well-known psychical researcher: “Psychic abilities are a matter of fact not of belief. What they are and what they mean for our view of reality is another matter, but one cannot dismiss them as fiction and yet retain credibility as an unbiased observer.” (Fontana, 2005, pp. 468-469)

But how do we interpret paranormal phenomena? This brings us to the issue of postmortem survival.

Survivalist Interpretations

Serious study of psychical and paranormal phenomena dates back to at least 1882, the year when the Society for Psychical Research was founded. At that time, and right up to the present day, some psychical researchers have interpreted some of the phenomena they study as being communications from deceased persons or discarnate (non-bodily) entities. Indeed, among many people the prime interest in psychical studies is to establish the possibility of an afterlife. To give a classic example, let us suppose you attend a séance. The medium goes into trance and begins to speak in a different voice. The voice claims to have a message from the beyond, a message from your departed grandmother. Through the medium, you are told that your deceased grandmother still cherishes those moments you had with her, and a very private story is related, a story that you are certain you never shared with another person and only you and your grandmother knew about.

So, is this proof that you received a communication from your beloved grandmother? Does she live on in the afterlife? Many people would say yes, absolutely (of course, we are assuming there is no fraud on the part of any involved in the séance). No one other than your grandmother knew the private story, and so it must be her who now relates it (indirectly through the medium). What other explanation can there be?

Indeed, there is another explanation, and it gets to the crux of the arguments for and against postmortem survival. Instead of your grandmother contacting you from beyond the grave, perhaps the medium is telepathically picking up information from your brain, perhaps information that is stored away deep in the unconscious, and then relaying it in a form that is ostensibly a communication from your grandmother? (Granted, the medium is doing this unconsciously, and in no way intends to deceive. The medium truly feels that she or he is communicating with the dead on your behalf.)

Let’s make the situation a little more complicated. What if the supposed communication from grandmother relays information unknown to you, perhaps concerning your aunt when she was young? After the séance you consult your aunt, and indeed the communication is true, and what is more, your aunt is shocked and flabbergasted because the information is something that only she and your grandmother shared, and absolutely no one else had ever known it. So, is this proof of the continued existence of your grandmother in the “ethers”? Some parapsychologists would counter that possibly the medium telepathically raided, if you will, your aunt’s mind to find interesting information that was then relayed to you at the séance, information that appeared to come from your grandmother.

There are well-documented cases that become incredibly complex. For instance, at some séances entities, referred to as “drop-in communicators,” make themselves known (Gauld, 1971). Some such drop-ins are ostensibly deceased souls unknown to any of the séance sitters. The drop-in is simply taking advantage of the séance setting, attempting communication with the still living, perhaps asking that a relative or loved one (a living person unknown to any of the séance sitters) be contacted. Drop-ins can conveniently be dismissed by critics as simply figments of the imagination of the medium and/or séance sitters (the medium may pick up on the imagination of the sitters telepathically, expressing this imagination in the form of a supposed drop-in), except in the cases where the information given by a drop-in is verified later. For instance, a drop-in requests that a message be relayed to so-and-so at such-and-such address, and when a sitter at the séance goes to the indicated address it is found that the address exists, the person named lives there, and the message has significant private meaning for the indicated person. Could, just possibly, the medium have assessed all of the information paranormally and then created, unconsciously, the purported drop-in to “communicate” the information? (We assume that no fraud is involved, and in the best cases it seems clear that fraud is not an issue.) Yes, but to many this would seem a much more elaborate, concocted, and complex explanation than simply accepting that the drop-in was indeed a discarnate entity from the other side.

Super ESP

Basically, much of the evidence that ostensibly supports postmortem survival can conceivably be interpreted, with varying degrees of finesse, as due to the psychical and paranormal functioning (even if masked and at an unconscious level) of living persons. This is sometimes known as the Super-ESP hypothesis (ESP refers to extrasensory perception), but actually can include paranormal phenomena besides ESP, such as the movement of objects. Take poltergeist activity, unexplained movements of objects, such as items falling off shelves or being “thrown” through the air without any physical cause that can be observed, various unexplained noises and disturbances. Having observed a minor, but I believe absolutely genuine, poltergeist incident, I am convinced that such activities can be real.

But is poltergeist activity due to literal ghosts (presumably mischievous departed spirits), or can the Super-ESP hypothesis adequately explain poltergeists? One theory is that many poltergeist manifestations are unconsciously caused by, or emanate from, the person who superficially appears to be the focus of the poltergeist activity. Poltergeist activity may be a method (at the unconscious level) of “working out” unresolved emotional and psychological tensions and conflicts.

There are many other classes of evidence that some claim as support for the reality of survival beyond the grave. Classic séances sometimes include movements and levitations of tables and other items, strange sounds and voices, and even the supposed materialisation of objects and beings (deceased persons?). If, and it is a big if in many researcher’s minds given the amount of fraud documented in such settings, any of these types of phenomena are genuine, are they due to spirits from the “other side,” as is generally claimed by the medium? Or might a Super-ESP explanation be applicable?

Near-Death experiences and Out-of-Body experiences are sometimes cited as supporting evidence for the survival hypothesis, but the counter argument is that many such experiences are subject to conventional (non-paranormal psychological and physiological factors) or Super-ESP explanations.

Some researchers have attempted to utilise modern electronic apparatus as a means of communicating with those beyond the grave, a concept sometimes referred to as instrumental transcommunication. One form, known as electronic voice phenomena (EVP), consists of recording the static of a radio that is tuned to a frequency carrying no transmissions. When the recording is played back, perhaps at a different speed than originally recorded, voices or communications from the other side may be heard, or so it is claimed (Raudive, 1971). Even if such “voices” are independently verifiable, critics of the survivalist hypothesis can claim that the voices were encoded paranormally (and unconsciously) via a form of PK by those involved or associated with the experiments rather than by entities from the spirit world – Super-ESP strikes again!

Reincarnation

What about reincarnation? Isn’t reincarnation a type of afterlife, or the continuation of life after the dissolution of a particular physical body? While many supposed cases of reincarnation and past lives remain unsubstantiated by solid data, there are also a number of cases where something paranormal apparently is involved. The late Dr. Ian Stevenson (1918-2007), a psychiatrist associated with the University of Virginia (Charlottesville) for nearly half a century, collected, scrutinised, verified, and analysed literally thousands of cases of individuals who apparently demonstrated memories of former lives.

Just because a living person claims memories of a past life, does that mean it is the same person inhabiting a new body? Or, is a person who appears to remember a past life (and in most cases it is simply bits and pieces of a presumed past life that are “remembered”) in reality paranormally accessing information about a former person and/or time, perhaps even from still living people? Many cases of supposed reincarnation, some would argue, are nothing more than the latter. That is, Super-ESP is the true explanation. Weakening the Super-ESP hypothesis in some presumed reincarnation cases, however, is the finding by Stevenson that in a few instances marks made on the body of a person after the person died apparently appear on the presumed incarnation of the deceased person. Here is a real example given by Stevenson. A young woman in Burma with congenital heart disease died during open-heart surgery. While preparing her body for burial, a mark was placed on the back of her neck with red lipstick. The woman’s presumed incarnation, born thirteen months later, had a prominent red birthmark at the back of her neck, a line of diminished pigment corresponding to the incision in her abdomen and chest made during the surgery, and when the baby began to speak she seemed to have knowledge of the previous life that she could not have acquired by normal means.

If Stevenson’s data on birthmarks in subsequent presumed incarnations caused by marking or mutilation of a cadaver after death of the previous person stands up to scrutiny, it could have far-reaching implications. It is one thing to hypothesise that fragments or portions, or even the totality, of a personality might be transmitted from a dying person telepathically, including aspects of that person’s death, but to suggest that somehow a lingering discarnate personality is aware of what happens to its former physical body and incorporates marks or mutilations to the body in the next incarnation raises many theoretical and philosophical issues. Is this evidence for the existence of “ethereal beings,” “spiritual entities,” or “soul components”?

Super ESP or Something Else?

To quote Professor Fontana, “Given that the evidence supports the existence of psychic abilities, these abilities are either explicable as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psychokinesis from the living (i.e. as Super-ESP), or as communications in one form or another from those who have survived death and live on in another dimension. There is no way around these two possibilities. The evidence either supports Super-ESP or supports survival.” (Fontana, 2005, p. 469)

In his book Is There an Afterlife?, Fontana is adamant that he believes much of the evidence cannot be adequately explained by Super-ESP. The Super-ESP hypothesis becomes too complex and convoluted, and ultimately so complicated that many prefer, or even find it necessary, to discuss alternative explanations, such as postmortem survival.

Fontana asserts there are two, and only two, ways to interpret the evidence: Super-ESP or survival (to be clear, Fontana leaves open the possibility that Super-ESP may explain some of the evidence while other evidence supports survival). But is it really an either/or situation? Are the only two viable alternatives Super-ESP and survival of humans (and possibly other organisms?) that once inhabited Earth in bodily form? It seems clear to me that there are additional possibilities (even if not actualities). What about the time-honoured notion of discarnate entities that perhaps never inhabited physical bodies: gods, angels, demons, spirits and so forth?

Soul Components

At another level, the concepts of Super-ESP and survival may not be totally distinct from one another. Another time-honoured concept is that of a World Soul, conscious of and remembering its past, that is all the past, and that individual souls may merge with and draw from this World Soul. Related to this is the concept of a spiritual record (sometimes known as the Akashic Records) of all that has transpired, a record that might be accessed from time to time by certain individuals or other beings.

Rather than viewing the issue of postmortem survival as a simple dichotomy, you survive or you do not, I believe the issue is much more subtle, complex and nuanced. It is not simply is their life after death, yes or no? Rather is it a matter of which psychic components of a person may survive, in what states, for how long, and how such components may influence the living (for instance, via communication through a medium, haunting, reincarnation or possession).

The ancient Egyptians took a much more sophisticated approach to afterlife issues than many modern people do. They had a number of terms for various psychic components of a person, not fully understood to this day, but we can list some as follows: ka (life force, vital force, spirit, double), ba (individual personality, soul), akh or khu (spirit form, transfigured spirit, ghost), ib or ab (heart, emotion, thought), sheut (shadow, hidden self), and ren (name, embodiment of power and personality). Upon death and dissolution of the body, the ancient Egyptians believed these components could separate and go their separate ways; part of Egyptian ritual involved reuniting the psychic components. When it comes to attempting to understand the subtleties of the psyche and the possibility of postmortem survival, I believe we can benefit by studying ancient wisdom.

At this point I am not sure what exactly survives, what form or forms it takes, or how long it might survive (for a limited duration? forever?), but I believe the evidence supports the conclusion of the early psychical researcher F. W. H. Myers – something survives:

I hold that certain manifestations of central individualities, associated now or formerly with certain definite organisms, have been observed in operation apart from those organisms, both while the organisms were still living, and after they had decayed. (Myers, 1907, p. 27)

We have the foundation for serious studies of the survival issue, a topic that I will continue to pursue in this life – and perhaps the next.

References:

Caesar de Vesme, A History of Experimental Spiritualism. Vol. 2, Peoples of Antiquity (Translated from the French by Fred Rothwell), Rider, UK, 1931David Fontana, Is There An Afterlife?, O Books, UK, 2005

Alan Gauld, “A Series of ‘Drop In’ Communicators”, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. 55, part 204, pp. 273-340 (1971)

F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (edited and abridged by his son Leopold Hamilton Myers), Longmans, Green, USA, 1907

Konstantin Raudive, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead, Colin Smythe, UK, 1971

Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others: American Essays, 1931-1935, Routledge, USA, 1996 (quote cited originally published in Russell’s The ABC of Relativity, 1925.)

Ian Stevenson, Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect, Praeger, USA, 1997

The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research is available from New Dawn Books. To order, see pages 71-72.

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ROBERT M. SCHOCH, Ph.D., is renowned for his work on re-dating the Great Sphinx. Based on his geological studies, he determined that the Sphinx’s origins date prior to dynastic times. He has also focused his attention on the Great Pyramid and various other temples and tombs in Egypt, as well as studying similar structures around the world. Dr. Schoch is an author and coauthor of both technical and popular books, including the trilogy with R. A. McNally: Voices of the Rocks: A Scientist looks at Catastrophes and Ancient Civilizations (1999), Voyages of the Pyramid Builders: The True Origins of the Pyramids from Lost Egypt to Ancient America (2003), and Pyramid Quest: Secrets of the Great Pyramid and the Dawn of Civilization (2005). Dr. Schoch’s most recent book is The Parapsychology Revolution: A Concise Anthology of Paranormal and Psychical Research (2008, compilation and commentary by Robert M. Schoch and Logan Yonavjak). Website: www.robertschoch.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 7.

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—

In the timeless library of human myths and legends, perhaps none are more primal and disturbing than the biblical story of the Fall. Responsible for everything from the demonisation of women to the Church’s pious horror for nature, sex and the body, there is scarcely a life-hating ideology or barbaric practice it hasn’t been used to justify.

For all that, this strange and unsettling story has lost none of its melancholy power over the centuries, remaining as enigmatic and haunting as a dimly remembered nightmare – and almost no closer to being understood today than the day it was first told.

If “God” is all-powerful, then why did He need to test Adam and Eve at all? Wouldn’t a real supreme being already know what was going to happen? Why did the serpent seem like the only one who really understood what was going on? And who was God talking to when he fretted that Adam had become “like one of us”1?

Observes libertarian “anti-psychiatrist” Thomas Szasz:

Adam’s apple is so named because a piece of the biblical forbidden fruit is supposed to have stuck in his throat… Perhaps this is why the Forbidden Truth so often appears ‘chewed up’, transformed into metaphor, humour, satire, slang (or dream and myth, of course).2

In this essay I’d like to take the unusual step of examining the Eden myth, not through the lens of traditional theology or atheist reductionism, but instead from the perspective of a few fringe phenomena it isn’t usually associated with: alien abductions and the occult “serpent power” of Eastern mysticism.

As we shall discover, these apparent discrepancies aren’t mistakes at all, but instead represent the sole surviving keys to uncovering its true meaning – for the legend of Adam and Eve originally had nothing to do with human sin or divine punishment.

Instead, the story of the “Garden Eden” comes to us as a distorted version of primitive man’s first recorded encounter with uncanny beings from the stars – a botched abduction attempt culminating in the spontaneous illumination of two very confused cavemen.

What this means for religion in general, and monotheism in particular, I shall leave for the reader to divine on their own.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation.
– H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond

UFOs – A Modern Problem?

Since the dawn of the space age, man’s dreams have been haunted by strange visions of cigar or saucer shaped aircraft bearing vaguely foetal (or insectoid) passengers who kidnap, brainwash and even impregnate their human captives before erasing their memories and vanishing into the ether.

Like “out of body” experiences or spirit possession, the UFO phenomenon stands as one of those baffling “psychic” anomalies which seems to exist for the sole purpose of mocking human reason. Claims one “victim”:

I woke up in the middle of the night and everything looked odd and strangely lit. At the end of my bed was a 4 feet high grey alien. Its spindly, thin body supported a huge head with two enormous, slanted, liquid black eyes. It compelled me, telepathically, to follow and led me into a spaceship… examination room [where]… I was forced to lie down while they… implanted something in my nose. I could see jars containing half-human, half-alien fetuses and a nursery full of silent, sickly children. When I eventually found myself back in bed, several hours had gone by.3

French astrophysicist Jacques Vallee studied the alien abduction phenomenon for decades, wondering continually at the arbitrary and illogical nature of most such reports. Why do these supposed “wise explorers from the stars” behave so bizarrely? If they have the advanced technology necessary for interstellar travel, why would they use it to visit this planet, let alone kidnap housewives, farmers and convenience store clerks for the purpose of anal probing? Observed Vallee’s mentor, J. Allen Hynek:

To me, it seems ridiculous that super intelligences would travel great distances to do relatively stupid things like stop cars, collect soil samples, and frighten people. I think we must begin to re-examine the evidence. We must begin to look closer to home.4

Vallee’s Rejection of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis of Alien Contact

Researching hundreds of “contactee” testimonials, folkloric narratives and world mythologies, Vallee eventually concluded that UFOs aren’t what they seem to be. They don’t hail from the Zeta Reticula galaxy, they aren’t here to explore or conduct genetic experiments and their presence on this planet isn’t a recent development at all. Instead, notes Vallee:

Reports of uncanny visitors from the sky have plagued mankind for thousands of years – enough to rule out short-term exploration as a motive.

Witnesses typically describe the “aliens” as humanoid bipeds able to breathe our atmosphere and see in our light spectrum – but wouldn’t genuine extraterrestrials be adapted to a completely different type of environment?

The aliens’ supposedly “scientific” experiments are “crude to the point of being grotesque…. often accompanied by sadistic sexual manipulation [and] reminiscent of medieval encounters with demons” – not the sort of behaviour we might expect from an advanced civilisation!5

Finally, since UFOs seem able to appear and disappear at will, they are probably “not just a bunch of spacecraft” but instead represent “a much more interesting technology that manipulates dimensions. It manipulates space-time. And if it can do that, then [the aliens could] be from anywhere and anytime.”6

Frustrated with the unquestioned assumptions and cultish insularity of contemporary ufology, Vallee instead suggests three alternatives to the “Extraterrestrial Hypothesis” (EH) based on “second level” readings of the UFO phenomenon – speculative scenarios notable less for what they say about UFOs than about the structure of physical reality itself:

The Inter-Dimensional Hypothesis

One possibility is that aliens are not from another planet, but instead represent “evidence for other dimensions beyond spacetime”⁷ – extradimensional entities hailing from an uncanny world which overlaps but only occasionally intrudes upon our own, beings from the future (or a perhaps a ghostly copy of our own earth) using “four-dimensional wormholes for space and even time travel”8 through the “multiverse which is all around us.”9

This “multiverse” could consist of parallel worlds existing alongside each other in different dimensions of space, alternate past and future worlds following one another in time, or even computer-generated “virtual worlds” stored in some vast cosmic database (as in the film ‘The Matrix’); if this latter instance is true, hints Vallee, then the seemingly stable and predictable world in which we find ourselves could be a much more magical (or even whimsical) place than we normally realise:

If there is no time dimension as we usually assume there is, [then] the human brain may be traversing events by association… If we live in the associative universe of the software scientists rather than the sequential universe of the spacetime physicist, then miracles are no longer irrational events… [and the] illusion of time and space would be merely a side effect of consciousness as it traverses associations. In such a theory, apparently paranormal phenomena like remote viewing and precognition would be expected, even common, and UFOs would lose much of their bizarre quality…10

The Electromagnetic Connection

Another promising vein of inquiry originates with the work of Dr. Michael Persinger, a cognitive neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada whose 1975 “Tectonic Stress Theory” holds that UFOs, out-of-body experiences and mystical visions of saints and angels are the byproducts of electrical microseizures (i.e., epileptic episodes) resulting from exposure to electromagnetic fields generated by shifting plates in the Earth’s crust.

Persinger’s experiments include the construction of the “God helmet,” a specially modified motorcycle helmet which uses weak EM fields to stimulate the parietal and temporal lobes of the brain. Shockingly, almost 80% of the 900 subjects thus tested report altered states of consciousness, visions of God and dead loved ones, and even full-blown alien abductions.11

More radical still is Paul Devereux’s 1989 “Earth Lights” hypothesis, in which UFOs appear as some sort of “previously unrecognised terrestrial phenomenon” (think Will O’ the Wisps) which either rely upon or are attracted to the EM fields generated by seismic stress.

Devereux notes that the strange balls of light which appear and hover near or around earthquake fault lines behave at times almost like “inquisitive animals” and speculates that they may be intelligent “macro-quantal” blobs of plasma energy capable of telepathy, mimicry and hypnosis.12

Both theories in turn anticipate the research of Johnjoe McFadden, an English neuroscientist at the University of Surrey whose Conscious Electromagnetic Field Theory (CEMI) locates human thought outside the wet, grey labyrinth of the brain, identifying it instead with a weak electromagnetic field which surrounds and penetrates the skull.13

If McFadden is correct, then the entire sensory environment we perceive all around us could be nothing more than an extremely sophisticated communications broadcast of some sort – perhaps just one of many “channels” available to the human nervous system.

The Control System Hypothesis

Vallee’s final alternative to the EH is his “Control System” Hypothesis, a fringe view in which aliens (or UFOs) appear as a non-human intelligence closely linked to the Earth, but not bound by it – not little green men from far-flung planets but hallucinatory imps from a dreamlike hyperspace who always seem to appear in just about the form we expect to see them.

Once upon a time these interacted and appeared to us as gods, spirits and angels, accepting sacrifices, sending dreams and inspiring mankind’s great religions; then as fairies, goblins, elves and spirits, spreading fear and wonder in the lives of medieval peasants; and finally as space-faring “greys,” reptilian humanoids and noble “Plaeaidian” scientists, bearing cryptic warnings about the environment and seeding new mythologies for the Information age.

So why have these protean tricksters chosen to visit us? Perhaps Vallee’s most controversial claim is that these mysterious visitors are themselves mere epiphenomena, shadows and reflections of a vast (and very ancient) “control system” which has been operating in the background to manipulate human belief systems since time immemorial, guiding our species towards some unknown purpose. Notes Vallee:

If UFOs are having an action at [the level of myth] it will be almost impossible to detect it by conventional methods… because they are the means by which man’s concepts are being rearranged. All we can do is trace their effect…14

This “control system,” Vallee hypothesises, could represent a projection of the collective unconscious, the activity of an unknown species or even some sort of ecosystemic feedback loop.15

Vallee’s Control System and the Origins of Western Religion

If mankind’s long flirtation with gods, ghosts, goblins and grays is anything to go by, Vallee’s alien “control system” has been with us since the very beginning – and for evidence of its influence, we need look no further than the origins of Abrahamic monotheism.

Take, for example, the story of the Garden of Eden, an eerie tale which – with only a little imagination – can easily be read as a coded account of an alien abduction, an extraterrestrial interlude in which speaking primates are tested for obedience and adaptability:

Omniscient keeper(s) create a man (or remove him?) from the “earth”;

Test subject is anesthetised;

Keepers produce a female specimen supposedly cloned from his “rib”;

Test subjects are placed in a controlled environment and forbidden from eating a certain type of food;

A writhing hologram appears (the “shining serpent”) and encourages them to violate the Keepers’ directives;

Subjects are punished and returned to the wild to digest their encounter.

Now, is this all there is to the story – ancient astronauts tampering with primitive man? Admittedly, that would be incredible if true – but wouldn’t alien scientists have been able to conceal even the most elaborate breeding and colonisation program from a pair of cavemen?

What if the real agenda behind the Eden incident was not creation (or obedience testing) but something else entirely?

Remarks Vallee:

If the phenomenon is forcing us through a learning curve, then it has no choice but to mislead us. When Skinner designs a machine that feeds a rat only when the right lever is depressed, this is extremely misleading for the rat. But if the rat doesn’t depress the correct lever, he becomes extremely hungry. Man is hungry for knowledge and power, and if there is an intelligence behind the UFOs it must have taken this fact into account…16

Perhaps instead of looking at the biblical “Fall” as a failed experiment, we should instead think of it as what Vallee calls an “open control system” – a metalogical labyrinth whose participants “graduate” to the next level when the correct sequence of stimuli are triggered – in this case, eating the “forbidden fruit.”

In other words, “Adam” and “Eve” didn’t fail the test when they ate from the “Tree of Knowledge” – they passed it.

Open Control Systems and Mythological Mashups

This alternate reading of the Eden creation myth is reinforced in the scriptures of the ancient Gnostics, an unorthodox (some say “heretical”) movement in early Christianity that competed with the infant Catholic church for several centuries after the birth of Christ.

Often dismissed as a primitive heresy that fell under the weight of its own obscurantist tendencies, Gnosticism was instead a sophisticated system of occult hermeneutics whose acolytes employed special neurolinguistic trance-inducing techniques to engage in a sort of memetic sabotage, splicing, remixing and mutating of biblical stories in a manner seemingly calculated to cause maximum offense and psychological discomfort. But why? Notes one literary critic:

Drugs, sex, and power control the body, but “word and image locks” control the mind, that is, “lock” us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking that determine our interactions with environment and society. The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and the reader of the text.17

For the Gnostics, the biblical creation stories weren’t divine revelations, but the shattered fragments of a monstrous and malevolent spell – the control system. By rearranging and retelling Judeo-Christian myths, the Gnostics sought clues that might allow them to reprogram creation itself, changing the past, seizing control of the heavens, and overthrowing the phony god of the Bible.

The Gnostic Version(s) of the Eden Myth

In the Gnostic view, Eden was not a paradise, but a jungle laboratory where an opportunistic race of alien parasites conducted a series of bizarre experiments in an attempt to produce a compliant strain of biped slaves.

Banished from the stars at the dawn of time, these “archons” (Greek for “rulers”) fled to the Earth where they abducted a caveman named “Adam” and sexually assaulted his mate “Eve,” implanting both with false (or screen) memories:

When they [the archons] saw Eve speaking with [Adam], they said to one another… “Come, let us seize her and let us cast our seed on her, so that… those whom she will beget will serve us. But let us not tell Adam that she is not derived from us, but let us bring a stupor upon him, and… teach him in his sleep as though she came into being from his rib…18

Feared and worshipped as “gods” and “angels,” the Archons depend for their very existence on the energy captured and siphoned from the human nervous system via various control systems – biological and memetic thermostats which allow them to regulate the flow of information and energy through words and images, pleasure and pain:

They say that the soul is the food of the Archons and Powers without which they cannot live, because she is of the dew from above and gives them strength…19

Adam and Eve “fell” when the archons programmed them with prohibitions and commandments, changing them from primates living in the eternal “now” to “soft machines” – biological automata at war with their own instincts, parasitised by selfish replicators and paralysed by double-binds:

….when the Rulers saw [Adam] and the woman who was with him, erring in ignorance… they rejoiced greatly… They came to Adam… [and] said to him, “Every tree which is in Paradise, whose fruit may be eaten, was created for you. But beware! Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge…” [T]hey gave them a great fright….20

Unfortunately for the archons, this strange prohibition seems to have provoked its own violation – for, as the Gnostic scriptures inform us:

[the archons] do not understand what they have said to [Adam]; rather… they said this in such a way that he might in fact eat…21

Pushed to the brink by a mysterious talking serpent, Adam and Eve partook of the fruit and convulsed with ecstasy as the walls of the Garden fell away to reveal the larger world outside the Garden. Like lab rats suddenly lifted out of a maze, Adam and Eve could now perceive their own situation clearly for the very first time:

Then their mind opened. For when they ate… they saw that they were naked, and they became enamoured of one another. When they saw their makers, they loathed them since they were beastly forms. They understood very much…22

Serpent Power Rising

A few more details complete this curious picture: Adam, we learn, was created with “seven souls”23; the “serpent” was actually a “hidden Mother” goddess named “Sophia” who fought against the archons from her secret location inside Adam’s “intestines”(!)24; and finally, when Eve fled from the archons, she took refuge inside the “Tree of Knowledge”25 (in biblical Hebrew, the word for “tree” can also mean “spine.”).

If any of this sounds familiar, it should – for as countless researchers have noted, the entire story seems to be nothing more than an allegorical description of the Kundalini serpent of Buddhist and Hindu yoga:

A Tantric yogi sees the great Mother present within his human body as the Kundalini. She lies hidden by her self-created ignorance, like a snake, coiled and fast asleep… at the bottom of the spinal cord. Through [meditation], the Tantric awakens the Mother and rouses her to go upward… [until he] becomes illumined…26

Theories about the Kundalini Serpent

Frequently misunderstood as an exotic oddity unique to Eastern mysticism, the kundalini instead represents a cross-cultural phenomenon of great antiquity (and plasticity) which (like the UFO phenomenon) has many features in common with OBEs, NDEs, spirit possession and shamanic initiation.

In short, the belief is that the human body possess seven (sometimes more) energy centres called “chakras,” roughly located near or in the anus, genitals, stomach, heart, throat, brow and crest of the skull. Normally clogged with the traumata of everyday life, these “chakras” open when stimulated by a serpentine energy which normally lies sleeping and coiled at the base of the spine.

In dreams, this serpent takes the form of a sleeping goddess who projects the illusion of the world; awakened, she climbs the spine to open the “third eye” at the crown of the head, bringing explosive emotional, psychological and spiritual growth, even ecstasy, enlightenment and the acquisition of occult powers.

Although the scientific study of the kundalini is still in its infancy, there do exist many plausible theories which might some day explain how it works. Here are a few of them:

Reichian/Bioenergetic

Wilhelm Reich was a renegade disciple of Freud’s who discovered a type of libidinal energy called orgone which flows throughout the “seven segments”27 of the body, resembling nothing so much in its “slow undulation[s]” as “the movement of an intestine or snake.”28

In most of us, social and cultural programming cause this elusive life force to become blocked in early childhood so that it pools up in the muscles and hardens into a rigid “body armour.” Thus diverted from life, the stagnant energy becomes a machine-like parody of itself which stunts and distorts human emotions, turning healthy expressions of love and sexuality into addiction, resentment and fear.

In the long term, the suffocating obstacles imposed by this invisible exoskeleton cause untold misery by exacerbating the mind/body split and creating the conditions necessary for the emergence of cancer (in individuals) and fascism (in societies).

Unimpressed with the slow pace and ineffectiveness of traditional talk therapy, Reich favoured a direct, hands-on approach designed to weaken the body armour itself. Over time, Reich and his followers found that unplanned events of great emotional intensity could trigger the orgone to ascend through the seven body segments spontaneously, purging vast reserves of repressed emotional energy and causing the body to vibrate uncontrollably as the noxious “body armour” crumbled once and for all.

Mechanical

Czech inventor Itzhak Bentov dedicated years to the study of human consciousness, eventually developing what is today known as the “holographic model” of the human brain.

In Bentov’s view, the “kundalini experience” is primarily a mechanical phenomenon which arises when the brain begins to vibrate in sympathetic resonance with the heartbeat (7.5 hz), releasing terrific amounts of stored musculoskeletal stress as the nervous system is temporarily transformed into a polarised loop.

This in turn causes the spinal column to oscillate like a tuning fork, allowing it to receive and transmit information directly from the ionosphere – the same part of the atmosphere responsible for bouncing electromagnetic waves back to Earth.29

The Pineal Gland and the Third Eye

Finally, former New Mexico University psychiatrist Rick Strassman hypothesises that kundalini yoga somehow stimulates the pineal gland to secrete larger than normal amounts of naturally-occurring DMT into the brain – making it the true “third eye.”30

DMT is a powerful hallucinogen, also found in ayahuasca, the “vine of souls” used by Amazonian shamans to induce mystical visions; the pineal gland, meanwhile, has its own surprising analog in the photosensitive “third eye” found in many species of reptiles, a vestigial organ with full lens and retina buried under the skin in the centre of the forehead.31

The connections to biblical myth here are many and obvious, so what does it all mean?

Seeking to understand the roots of human religious experience, Strassman injected over 60 volunteers with high doses of DMT, conducting over 400 such sessions from 1990-1995; perhaps unsurprisingly, just over half his test subjects reported blissful visions of timeless, cosmic unity, communion with benevolent deities and “classic near-death experiences” which included flying through tunnels of “radiant light.”32

The other 47% were not so lucky, reporting nightmarish beings drawn straight from the twilight horror-world of the Gnostic counter-Eden: menacing “clowns, elves [and] robots” who threatened and even attacked their human victims. Strassman finally ended his experiments ahead of schedule when one of his subjects reported being “eaten alive” by giant insects.

Dragons in the Darkness

Strassman’s findings here echo the eerie experiences of Michael Harner, an American anthropologist who penetrated the Amazon rainforest forty years earlier to experiment with the “vine of souls” potion himself.

Harner reported seeing “giant reptilian creatures” dwelling in and around his own brain stem, “dragon-like” beings from deep space who colonised the Earth millennia ago; chillingly, these dark beings claimed to have seeded the Earth with life for the sole purpose of creating various host species they could hide themselves in.

“I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside of all forms of life, including man,” claims Harner. “They were the true masters of humanity and the entire planet, they told me. We humans were but [their] receptacles and servants…”33

True to form, when Harner demanded an explanation from the medicine man who gave him the potion responsible for this ominous vision, the old man just laughed and explained that, “…they’re always saying that. But they are only the Masters of Outer Darkness…”34

Conclusion

Clearly Harner is speaking here of beings very much like the archons of Gnostic myth or the manipulative “greys” of modern Ufology – but are these entities nothing more than symbolic projections of the reptilian brain, as Harner’s narrative seems to imply?

Do aliens and archons hail from outer space or inner space? Why is “contact” with aliens (or archons) so often accompanied by vibrations or tremors, either muscular or tectonic? How should we think about the “serpent” now that we know it is probably a dormant evolutionary mechanism of some sort? And are the “big three” Abrahamic religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity really nothing more than hallucinatory control mechanisms employed by alien parasites to enslave and manipulate us?

German Historian Klaus Theweleit has written what would seem to be the last possible word on the subject, noting that:

…[T]he ‘fall of man’ depicts a failed revolution from the victor’s standpoint. For attempting to put into practice their slogan ‘Our bodies belong to us,’ the rebels were sentenced to a life of forced labor… ‘Your bodies belong to your Ruler!’ – that was the response. (The ‘paradise’ they were driven out of was the blissful state of being ruled without realising it. Even today, being driven out of ‘paradise’ is the penalty for trying to create a paradise.)35

Whether the Eden story is really about UFOs or the kundalini, and whether such phenomena are electromagnetic or chemical in origin, I can’t say for sure (I’ve never even seen a UFO!), but I do know this:

I have taken mushrooms and seen great, flying black mantas which pursued me across the desert floor, telepathically overwhelming me with thoughts of paranoia and despair. I’ve taken DMT and left my body to enter a crystalline world of euphoric decahedrons and four-dimensional pyramids, spread out beneath a great vaulted membrane which breathed, and knew at that instant that this membrane was the threshold between time and eternity.

I’ve practiced tantric yoga with a dakini and been bruised and battered as I hyperventilated under the tutelage of a Reichian therapist; and I’ve been in dark rooms lit only by flickering candles, watching friends and family members pant as their eyes rolled back in their heads and their limbs shook uncontrollably, “mounted” by the spirits of the dead and personified forces of nature known to witch doctors the world over.

Whatever the origins of these and related “psychic” phenomena ultimately prove to be – genetic memories, autonomous archetypal complexes, glitches in the Matrix or even the intrusive activities of extraterrestrial civilisations – nothing will change for our species until we finally rise to our feet, shake off the chains of superstition and ignorance and claim our inheritance – not as childlike “test subjects” to be ordered about and punished, but as adults striding forth into the cosmos with eyes wide open, ready to take responsibility for our own evolution.

The Eden myth, like all myths, is meant to be lived; not studied but experienced – so let us treat the Bible with its endless commandments and airless authoritarianism not as the final authority on human life, but as a leaping off point for the rediscovery of the human body as a sacred text in its own right, a flesh and blood book with its own sounds, smells and textures and even wisdom too – for in the end, it may be the only thing we can ever really know anyway.

Or, as the Gnostic scriptures put it:

You are the Tree of Knowledge, which is in Paradise, from which the first man ate and which opened his mind, so that he became enamoured of his co-likeness, and condemned other alien likenesses, and loathed them.36

Footnotes:

1. Genesis 3:22

2. Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue, p.58, pub. 1990

3. Dr. Susan Blackmore, “Alien Abduction: The Inside Story,” New Scientist, November 19, 1994, pp.29-31

4. Dr. Jacques Vallee, Forbidden Science: Journals, 1957-1969, p.426

5. Ibid, p.17

6. “Strange Encounters: An Interview with Jacques Vallee” by Daniel Blair Stewart, excerpted from Green Egg Magazine, Vol. XXTV, No. 95, Yule 1991, republished www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_vallee03.htm

7. Vallee, Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact, p.253, pub. 1988

8. Vallee, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, p.255, pub. 2008

9. Vallee, Dimensions, p.253

10. Ibid, p.257

11. BBC – Science & Nature – Horizon – God on the Brain, www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/2003/godonbrain.shtml

12. Paul Devereux, “Earth Lights: Abstracted from a presentation given at the Dana Center of the London Science Museum,” December 9, 2003, www.pauldevereux.co.uk/new/html/body_earthlights.html

13. JohnJoe McFadden, The Conscious Electromagnetic Field Theory, www.surrey.ac.uk/qe/cemi.htm

14. Vallee, Dimensions, p.246

15. Vallee, Revelations, p.254

16. Vallee, Dimensions, p.246

17. Jenny Skerl, William S. Burroughs, quoted in “William S. Burroughs Cut-ups,” http://languageisavirus.com

18. Willis Barnstone (editor), The Other Bible, “On the Origin of the World,” p.70, pub. 1984

19. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, p.169, pub. 1958

20. Barnstone, Ibid, p.71

21. Barnstone, Ibid, “The Hypostasis of the Archons,” p.77

22. Barnstone, Ibid, “On the Origin of the World,” p.71

23. Marvin W. Meyer, The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels, “The Secret Book of John,” pp.69-70, pub. 1986

24. Barnstone, Ibid, “The Sethian-Ophites,” p.664

25. Willis Barnstone (editor), The Other Bible, “On the Origin of the World,” p.70, pub. 1984

26. Elizabeth U. Harding, Kali: The Black Goddess of Dakshineswar, pp.70-71, pub. 1993

27. Roger M. Wilcox, “A Skeptical Scrutiny of the Works and Theories of Wilhelm Reich as related to Psychiatric Orgone Therapy (character-analytic vegetotherapy)”, pub. July 25, 2005, http://members.dslextreme.com/users/rogermw/Reich/orgone_therapy.html

28. Wilhelm Reich, The Cancer Biopathy: Volume II of the Discovery of the Orgone, pub. 1973

29. Wikipedia Article on Kundalini, www.crystalinks.com/kundalini.html

30. Ibid.

31. Schwab & O’Connor, “The Lonely Eye,” March 2005, www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1772576

32. John Horgan, “The God Experiments: Five researchers take science where it’s never gone before,” Discover Magazine, November 20, 2006.

33. Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman, pp.4-5, 1980

34. Ibid.

35. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, pp.414-15, pub. 1987

36. Barnstone, Ibid, “On the Origin of the World,” pp.67-68

.

REV. ILLUMINATUS MAXIMUS is an occult researcher and visionary artist whose work has been featured in The Independent, New Dawn and Wired. A licensed minister, Rev. Max is widely credited for his role in introducing Gnosticism to the WWW. You can visit his website at www.enemies.com.

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

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 110 (PDF version) for only US$5

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

Since the time of Elizabeth I, British secret services have worked according to the principle of ‘the end justifies the means’. Money, bribery, blackmail – these are their recruitment methods…
– Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), October 2007

It is not really surprising that historically occultism and espionage have often been strange bedfellows. The black art of espionage is about obtaining secret information and witches, psychics and astrologers have always claimed to be able to predict the future and know about things hidden from ordinary people.

Gathering intelligence is carried out under a cloak of secrecy and occultists are adept at keeping their activities concealed from sight. Like secret agents they also use codes, symbols and cryptograms to hide information from outsiders. Occultists and intelligence officers are similar in many ways, as both inhabit a shadowy underworld of secrets, deception and disinformation. It is therefore not unusual that often these two professions have shared the same members.

The ‘father of the British Secret Service’ was the Elizabethan lawyer, politician, diplomat and spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham. He was a Protestant and as a young man during the bloody reign of the Catholic Queen Mary was forced to flee abroad to escape persecution. While in exile, Walsingham learnt Italian and French and became acquainted with the work of the famous Venetian Secret Service that used its spying skills for trade and commerce under the cloak of diplomacy.

When Queen Elizabeth I was crowned Francis Walsingham returned to England. He was appointed as a secretary to the English ambassador to the French court in Paris and also worked as a secret agent reporting back the intelligence he gleaned to Queen Elizabeth’s Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, later Lord Burghley. Between 1568 and 1570 Walsingham, who had become a Member of Parliament, worked in England in domestic counter-espionage exposing Catholic plots against the monarchy.

In 1570 Walsingham was appointed as the new ambassador to France. He proceeded to set up his own network of undercover agents in France, Italy, Spain and the Low Countries. The late Cecil Williamson, who worked for British Intelligence during World War II and later ran a witchcraft museum, told this writer that Walsingham often used witches as spies.

The Mysterious Dr Dee

One of the famous occultists he is known to have recruited was Queen Elizabeth’s court astrologer and the magical architect of the British Empire, the Welsh magician Dr John Dee. Walsingham was involved in the machinations for the proposed marriage of the Duc d’Anjou and Elizabeth. At the spy master’s personal recommendation, the queen dispatched Dee to France with orders to report back on the progress of the marriage negotiations. The magus travelled to the Duchy of Lorraine and drew up the birth charts of both the Duc and his brother, who was also regarded as a possible husband for the English monarch. Dr Dee, probably influenced by Walsingham, diplomatically reported back to London that the stars suggested a political alliance would be far wiser than matrimony and the queen took his advice.

In 1573 Sir Francis returned to London and became a privy councillor. This placed him at the heart of government and he proceeded to set up what amounted to the first organised foreign espionage service to operate from England. In 1566 he had put in place a pan-European network of spies extending as far to the east as Turkey and Russia, where Dr Dee reported on the goings-on at the Tsar’s court. This network mostly gathered intelligence on the military activities of the Spanish, who were England’s primary enemies at this time. Walsingham was also responsible for foiling the Catholic plot whose exposure led to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Using Dr Dee’s psychic powers, he was apparently able to discover that the plotters were passing secret messages to the imprisoned Scottish queen hidden in bottles of wine.

While travelling in Europe in 1562, Dr Dee had come across a book written by Abbot Trimethus of Spanhiem (1462-1516). This was a guide to writing ciphers and secret codes for magical purposes and Dee informed Sir William Cecil about his discovery. On his return to England Dr Dee adapted the abbot’s cryptography and gave it to Sir Francis Walsingham for use by his secret agents. He also passed on the political and military intelligence he had acquired during his travels across Europe. It has been alleged that Dee used the famous Enochian magical alphabet as a code to disguise this information. If he had been arrested his captors would not have understood it and dismissed it as nonsense.

In 1587 Dee even claimed he had received a spirit message from one of his angelic contacts concerning a threat to the English Fleet. The message said that a group of disguised Frenchmen working for the Spaniards was secretly visiting the Forest of Dean. The forest was the centre for English ship-building and the French agents planned to bribe disloyal foresters to burn it down. Dr Dee sent his supernatural intelligence to Walsingham and the saboteurs, who were masquerading as squatters, were arrested.

Information supplied to Sir Francis Walsingham from his European spy network convinced him that a Spanish armada would be launched against England in 1588. He asked Dee to use his knowledge of astrology to calculate the weather prospects for an invasion. The magus told him there would an impending disaster in Europe caused by a devastating storm. When news of this prophecy was leaked and reached Spain, naval recruitment fell and there were desertions of sailors from the Spanish Fleet. In Lisbon an astrologer who repeated the prediction was charged with spreading false information. In an act of psychological warfare, Dr Dee also informed Emperor Rudolf of Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) and King Stephen of Poland that the predicted storm would “cause the fall of a mighty empire.” Rudolf, who was an occultist and Dee’s patron when he stayed in Bohemia, passed on the warning to the Spanish ambassador.

It is a fact that in 1588 a great storm did scatter the ships of the Spanish Armada in the English Channel and aided the English victory. This metrological event was popularly credited to a magical ritual performed by the buccaneer Sir Francis Drake on the cliffs at Plymouth. Superstitious people believed Drake was a wizard and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for success over the Spanish. It is claimed that he also organised several covens of witches to work magically to raise the storm and prevent the invasion. Meanwhile, as a result of scrying in his shewstone or crystal, Dr Dee saw a symbolic vision of a castle with its drawbridge drawn up (England) and the image of the elemental king of fire. As a result he urged the Navy to employ fire-ships against the Armada and they did so with good results.

After Sir Francis Walsingham’s death in 1590, and the ascension to the English throne of the Scottish king James, Dr John Dee fell into royal disfavour. The new king had an unhealthy obsession with witchcraft and his early reign was dominated by this preoccupation. It led him to employ the Secret Service in his own personal vendetta against suspected witches. James I ordered its agents to hunt down alleged practitioners of witchcraft and expose their alleged plots against the monarchy. One of those involved was the Earl of Bothwell, accused of high treason for organising a coven of Scottish witches to work magic against the king in an attempt to seize the throne. To assist his secret agents in their new witch-hunting activities, King James persuaded Parliament in 1604 to pass a new and stronger Witchcraft Act to deal with the problem. The Bill was rushed through and it was made law within three months.

Dashwood & the Hellfire Club

In the 18^th century the Secret Service became concerned at the activities of the so-called ‘Hellfire Club’ founded by Sir Francis Dashwood, later the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a close friend and political adviser of King George III. As a young man Dashwood went on the Grand Tour of Europe that was compulsory for aristocrats and he was initiated into a Masonic lodge in France. While visiting Italy he developed anti-Catholic views, violently broke up a celebration of the Mass and insulted the Pope. Even though he was an aristocrat, Dashwood was disgusted at the vast wealth of the Roman Church compared with the poverty of its devoted worshippers. He also became fascinated by classical mythology and decorated his country house at West Wycombe in Buckinghamshire with murals, paintings and statues of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.

Sir Francis Dashwood founded a secret society called the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Medmenham (more popularly known as the Hellfire Club) named after the abbey he had purchased on the banks of the River Thames where its meetings were held. Rumours circulated in the coffee houses of London that the Friars practised sexual orgies featuring aristocratic ladies and prostitutes dressed up as nuns. There were also satanic rites such as Black Masses where the naked body of a noblewoman acted as an altar. However, according to one senior member of the Hellfire Club, this occult mummery was just an amusing diversion for the dandies. The inner circle of the Order was actually dedicated to the serious revival of the pagan Eleusian Mysteries and the worship of the Bona Dea or Great Mother Goddess. Dashwood’s present-day descendant, also called Sir Francis, confirmed this fact in a BBC radio interview some years ago,

It has been claimed secret agents infiltrated the Hellfire Club because of its many famous members. They included the Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, who was the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Paymaster General Thomas Potter, several members of Parliament, the Lord Mayor of London, a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Earl of Bute, who was the prime minister, and it has been claimed even the Prince of Wales. At least four members of the group were known to be actively involved in espionage. They was a radical MP called John Wilkes, a transvestite French diplomat, Chevalier D’Eon de Beaumont, the American statesman and philosopher Benjamin Franklin, and Sir Francis Dashwood himself. Wilkes had allegedly recruited the chevalier into the British Secret Service.

During his stay in Russia on the Grand Tour Dashwood had spied on the court of the Tsar through his close friendship with the Grand Duchess Catherine. In Italy he gathered intelligence on the exiled Stuart dynasty and their supporters, although the head of the British Secret Service in Rome believed Dashwood was a Jacobite agent. In fact he was only pretending to support the Stuart cause and was passing on information about their activities directly back to London. In later years Sir Francis and Benjamin Franklin were involved in a clandestine plan to reconcile the American colonists and the British government to prevent the War of Independence.

Rudolf Hess & the British Occult Connection

During World War II British Intelligence invited many occultists into its ranks because it needed their specialist knowledge and skills. The assistant director of Naval Intelligence during the war was Lt. Commander Ian Fleming RN, best known later as a thriller writer and the creator of the famous fictional spy James Bond 007. Fleming was also interested in astrology and numerology and he was a friend of the notorious magician Aleister Crowley, who had worked for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) during World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s spying on Germans with occult interests (see ‘The Magus Was A Spy’ by Dr Richard Spence in New Dawn No. 105, November-December 2007).

Ian Fleming conceived an audacious plan to lure a high-ranking member of the German government into defecting to Britain so as to provide a morale-boosting propaganda coup. This idea had been inspired by a novel written by Fleming’s brother, Peter, called Flying Visit (Jonathan Cape 1940). Peter Fleming was a journalist and also worked for both MI5 (the Security Service) and the propaganda section of the clandestine Special Operations Executive (SOE). The novel imagined that Hitler’s plane crash-landed in England and he was captured. The Reichminister and deputy fuehrer himself, Rudolf Hess, was chosen as a suitable candidate for the actual plot. This was because he was a supporter of peace with Britain and was also under the influence of astrologers and occultists. It was believed this could be used against him.

Commander Fleming recreated The Link, a defunct Anglo-German friendship society of the 1930s that had a wealthy membership of Nazi sympathisers drawn from the British Establishment. Ironically, or perhaps coincidentally, The Link had been founded by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, an ex-director of the Naval Intelligence Department (NID), after he retired in 1930. Domville was arrested and interned in May 1940 because MI5 believed he was plotting a fascist coup d’etat supported by aristocratic peacemongers. The admiral was a friend of Major-General J.F.C. ‘Boney’ Fuller CBE, a famous military analyst who designed the tactics for the first tank battle in World War I. Fuller also invented the concept of blitzkrieg used so successfully in World War II by the German Panzers. Fuller was an open admirer of Hitler (he attended the fuehrer’s 50^th birthday party in 1939), a leading member of Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), a friend of Ian Fleming and a leading disciple of Aleister Crowley. In the 1930s Fuller formed the extreme-right wing Nordic League (aka the White Knights of Britain), allegedly established by Nazi agents. However in the 1950s he was a member of a MI6 supported group of Russian émigrés engaged in anti-communist propaganda. It has been suggested that Fuller was not interned during the war with other leading fascists such as Mosley and Domville because he was a MI6 double-agent.

Ian Fleming’s idea was to persuade the German High Command in Berlin, and especially Rudolf Hess, that when war broke out The Link had not disbanded but had gone underground. It had allegedly regrouped and recruited even more prominent pro-Nazi members in the British Establishment including aristocrats and royalty. These were represented by the NID as influential people with the political muscle to overthrow prime minister Winston Churchill’s national wartime government, call a ceasefire and agree to a peace treaty with Germany. Under its terms Britain would keep control of its Empire and Germany would have free reign in occupied Europe. The Nazis also hoped that British troops would be sent to fight alongside the German Wehrmacht and the SS against the Soviet Union in a joint anti-communist crusade.

Hitler did not want to invade and occupy Britain. Instead he would have preferred to negotiate a treaty with a sympathetic new government in London. It has been suggested that the only reason the fuehrer abandoned Operation Sea Lion – the proposed invasion of Southern England – and instead invaded the Soviet Union was to force Churchill to accept peace terms. If the Red Army had been defeated Britain would truly have been standing alone, as Hitler did not believe the Americans had the political will to enter the war. Unfortunately he underestimated the ability and resolve of the Soviets to defend their motherland and also the clandestine support that the US was already offering Great Britain.

The NID plot to ensnare Rudolf Hess used bogus astrological predictions combined with political intelligence. Hess was persuaded that a Scottish aristocrat, the Duke of Hamilton, was willing to negotiate peace terms on behalf of the influential people at the top of British society who wanted to end the war. The duke had met Hess at the Berlin Olympics in 1936 and the deputy fuehrer for some reason thought he was a member of the surviving Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Ian Fleming commissioned an astrologer to produce a faked astrological forecast indicating that 10 May 1941 would be a propitious date for Rudolf Hess to fly to Scotland and meet secretly with the Duke of Hamilton and other members of the so-called British ‘peace party’. Hess’ occult advisors had also told him there would be an unusual planetary conjunction on 10 May. On that day six planets would be aligned in the zodiac sign of Taurus and conjoined to the full moon. At the same time Hitler’s chart showed ‘malefic’ astrological aspects. Hess saw himself in the role of a messianic hero saving Germany from possible future defeat by making peace with the British. All the (false) reports reaching the deputy fuehrer about the political situation in England and the astrological aspects convinced him that his mission would be a success.

Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland on 10 May 1941 in the firm belief that on landing he would be met by the Duke of Hamilton and the Duke of Kent and whisked off to London for a private audience with King George VI. He had been convinced by the misinformation fed to him by British Intelligence that these three men represented a genuine peace movement capable of removing the warmonger Churchill and agreeing to German terms. Hess had also previously met the Duke of Windsor when he had visited Berlin before the war. As a result Hess was persuaded that some members of the German-descended royal family were sympathetic to Nazism. Certainly the Duke of Saxo-Coburg, formerly Prince Charles Edward, a grandson of Queen Victoria and a close friend of the Duke of Windsor, had willingly embraced Nazism. In fact Hitler had appointed him as the head of the German branch of the Red Cross that was responsible for exterminating the mentally sick and physically disabled.

Unfortunately instead of meeting pro-Nazi aristocrats and royals when he landed, Hess was captured by a local farmer and a Home Guard unit. They handed him over to the police and he was transferred to London to be interrogated by MI5. Unfortunately the British government completely mishandled the capture of Hess. It has been suggested that Churchill believed the subterfuge by the NID and SIS suggesting leading members of the British Establishment might be pro-German may have been based on fact. For that reason the government did not capitalise on Hess’ ‘peace mission’. The German High Command had also disowned him and said that his flight had been unauthorised. They also suggested that Hess might be insane so his value for propaganda purposes was undermined and diminished.

Rudolf Hess’ apparent defection caused widespread panic in Berlin concerning the influence of occultism on the Nazi Party. The Gestapo immediately launched Operation Aktion Hess. On the direct orders of Hitler, they rounded up hundreds of occultists, psychics and astrologers, including Hess’s leading occult advisor Ernst Schulte-Strathaus. In June 1941 a decree was issued banning all public performances of clairvoyance, astrology, fortune-telling or telepathy. Anybody associated with Hess and his esoteric interests was thrown into concentration camps and occult secret societies were closed down. Because of staff shortages in the Gestapo, officers from the Naval Intelligence Service were drafted in to interrogate some of the arrested psychics. It has been claimed that they recruited some of them for secret operations using dowsing on maps with pendulums to hunt down British submarines.

It has also been claimed that Ian Fleming and the NID was involved in a plot to silence the Spiritualist medium Helen Duncan, the penultimate person to be charged under the old Witchcraft Act of 1736. She was arrested in 1944 after holding a séance during which allegedly the spirit of a dead sailor from the sinking of the HMS Bolham physically manifested. As the news of the loss had not been publicly released, and the Admiralty was keeping it secret for morale purposes, Duncan became a target for the security services. She and other psychics were regarded as a serious threat to national security and they became the object of a MI5/NID dirty tricks operation to silence leaks. This suggests that the Intelligence Services actually believed these mediums had genuine powers. Duncan’s arrest and subsequent trial, which in fact was condemned by Winston Churchill as a waste of public funds, was allegedly meant to deter other mediums. The War Office was paranoid that military secrets about the forthcoming D-Day landings in Normandy would be revealed at séances and become public knowledge or passed to the Germans.

Bibliography:

Derek Wilson, Sir Francis Walsingham (Constable 2007)

Richard Deacon, John Dee (Muller 1968)

Donald McCormack, The Hellfire Club (Jarrolds 1958)

P. Mannix, The Hellfire Club (Four Square 1961)

M.R.D. Foot, SOE: The Special Operations Executive 1940-46 (BBC publications 1984)

J.M. McKenzie The Secret History of the SOE 1940-1945 (St Ermins Press 2000)

Nigel West, The Secret War: The Story of SOE (Hodder & Stoughton 1992)

Richard Deacon, The History of British Secret Service (Frederick Muller 1979)

Donald McCormick, The Life of Ian Fleming (Peter Owen 1993)

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MICHAEL HOWARD has had a lifelong interest in intelligence matters and the strange links between the occult and politics. Since 1976 he has edited The Cauldron newsletter (http://www.the-cauldron.org.uk/) featuring witchcraft, folklore and Earth Mysteries. He is the author of Secret Societies: Their Influence and Power from Antiquity to the Present Day, published by Destiny Books USA.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 107 (Mar-Apr 2008).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 107 (PDF version) for only US$5

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