FREEMASONRY AND RELIGION

Alexander Piatigorsky's Who's Afraid of Freemasons¹ is a welcome and highly commendable contribution to the long-running debate² about the nature of the relationship, if any, between Freemasonry and religion.³

• ¹ London: Harvill Press 1997.
• ² By his Apostolic Letter In eminenti apostolatus specula of 28 April 1738 Pope Clement XII, after noting that membership of Masonic Lodges was open to men of any religion or sect but had already been forbidden by several governments which considered it a threat to their own security, prohibited all Catholic participation in Masonry, condemning it under suspicion of heresy, partly because of its already notorious secrecy, but also "aliisque de iustis ac rationabilibus causis Nobis notis" - an expression some commentators have interpreted as relating to Jacobite political machinations at that time. Pope Benedict XIV renewed this condemnation in his Bull Providas Romanorum Pontificum of 18 May 1751, and as recently as 6 November 1983 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Vatican's Supreme Sacred Congregation for the Defence of the Faith, issued a Declaration that "the negative judgement of the Church is unchanged with regard to masonic societies, because their principles have always been considered incompatible with the doctrine of the Church."
• ³ On the evening of Saturday 17 May 1997 the Italian television channel RAI-DUE transmitted a studio discussion partly devoted to this theme between Professor Giuliano Di Bernardo (Grand Master of Italy's Regular Grand Lodge in Rome), various other high-ranking Masons, a number of senior government representatives, and Monsignor Luigi Bettazzi, Roman Catholic archbishop of Ivrea.

Several already available studies express the viewpoints in this respect of committed Christian writers who are not themselves Masons, although they may have several close friends and acquaintances who are.⁴ Two recent especially valuable contributions to the debate from among the many books written by Freemasons themselves within a hermeneutic perspective may be regarded as especially authoritative, since their author is a professional philosopher, the youngest ever life member of the Masonic Supreme Council for Italy, and currently Grand Master of all Regular & Accepted members of the Craft in that country.⁵ The outstanding merit of Professor Piatigorsky's historically based, meticulously researched,6 and phenomenologically focussed contribution results from the considerable care with which he distinguishes between emic and etic approaches to this theme.

• 4 Cf., for example, George A. Mather and Larry A. Nichols, Masonic Lodge, Carlisle: OM Publishing 1995, by arrangement with Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
• 5 Giuliano Di Bernardo, Freemasonry and its Image of Man - a philosophical investigation, Tunbridge Wells: Freestone 1989; La ricostruzione del Tempio - il progetto massonico per una nuova utopia, Venezia: Marsilio 1996.
• ⁶ Most unfortunately one of very few errors in the author's published text is that although Pope Clement XII's Apostolic Letter (mistakenly called a Papal Bull) is, when first mentioned (in a note on p.112) correctly assigned to 1738, in the subsequent discussion it is uniformly attributed (on pp.121-2) to 1737, which obstructs the reader's appreciation of this document's situation vis-à-vis other contemporary and near-contemporary relevant events.

"The phenomenological method in the study of religion depends on the application to religious phenomena of the principle of discrimination between two basic, and equally necessary, approaches - emic and etic. This distinction, introduced into modern social sciences in the late 1950s by the outstanding American linguist and priest Kenneth Pike, is of fundamental importance to our attempts to understand any religious phenomenon, as well as our own understanding of these attempts. The division is a relative, not an absolute one; within a given religion some statements reflect an emic position and some an etic. The former represents the inner perspective, when something is allowed to speak for itself, and the latter an external viewpoint, descriptive, analytical or critical. The division corresponds roughly to the subjective and objective positions with regard to the object of investigation..."⁷

• ⁷ Who's afraid of Freemasons, pp.21-22.

As well as acknowledging that the emic/etic distinction corresponds only roughly to that between subjective and objective standpoints, Piatigorsky is aware that no such distinction should ever be pressed too far: "The opposition of logical or scientific thought to mythological thinking is as historically conditioned and phenomenologically deficient as the opposition of theology to mythology, or any other such binary divisions to which our ideologies are so addicted."⁸

• ⁸ Ibid.,p.312, note 12, italics mine.

Other binary "divisions" (to use Piatigorsky's term) employed extensively by the author include those between fact and fiction, history and legend, legend and myth, history and historiography, history and meta-history, empirical and hermeneutic, concrete and abstract, religious and symbolic, exoteric and esoteric, public and private, synthetic and syncretic, individual morality and social association, British and American, English and French, Antient and Modern, operative and speculative, serious and unserious. In applying these distinctions Piatigorsky helpfully draws our attention both to the seriousness of the unserious and to such truths as that the existence of fictions is itself a fact, that legends and myths have a history, and that where we draw the line between the empirical and the hermeneutic is itself a matter of interpretation, etc.

However, despite the impressive range of data he so skillfully marshalls in the service of what is invariably a fascinating and insightful survey of relevant public facts and private opinions, his own chosen phenomenological position labours under what appears to me to be the very serious defect of failing to advert even once to what I regard as a most important distinction, viz., that between what is logically "transcendental" (he does employ this term) and "transcendent" (he has not used this word even once) actuality. That, I believe, is why he mistakenly always affirms a "division" instead of simply a "distinction" between "subject" and "object".⁹ Take this for instance:

• 9 Thus, in referring to John A.'s quoted view (p.285) that being an Anglican "gives me and those around me a certain form. It shapes our social context, so to speak, and to me personally it simply does not exist outside that context," instead of simply reporting it as a sincere emic avowal, he appends what purports to be an etic comment: "His candidacy [for Masonry] was rejected for he did not believe in the objective (that is, non-contextual) existence of any entity or power of supernatural character." Had Piatigorsky appreciated that all that is subjective necessarily has its own objectivity (and I would also argue that no objectivity is possible unless it be grounded in subjectivity), he would not, I believe, have mistakenly supposed that what is "objective" is ever "non-contextual". Although, therefore, I have no special quarrel with his opening paragraph to Chapter 11: "The Ritual of Freemasonry possesses its own objectivity…" (p.267), I am personally convinced that, strictly and properly speaking, his description of the Ritual as "an absolutely objective thing" (line 14) betrays an underlying failure to understand either the meaning of absolute objectivity or the nature of things. For "things" and "absolute objectivity" cf. B. Lonergan, Insight - a study of human understanding, revised students' edition, London, Longmans 1958, chapters 8 & 13. Note, by the way, that Giuliano Di Bernardo's phenomenological position differs from but is closer to that of Lonergan than it is to Piatigorsky's.

"This threefold composition of Masonic legend - the subjectivity of the ritual of initiation, the objectivity of the ritual of the Foundation Sacrifice and the Knowledge of the Word that knows the subjective in the objective ... determines the gnostic character of Masonic philosophy and the central element of it, the conception of double truth, a conception from the point of view of which not only the myth or the Ritual of Freemasonry but Freemasonry in its entirety should be understood as a phenomenon which is one thing for itself and quite another to those who know its objective meaning."¹⁰

• ¹⁰ Op. cit.,pp.330-1. Piatigorsky's intended meaning may be more readily discerned by also reading his note 2 on p.289: "All that William James (in Variety of Religious Experience) called 'states of consciousness', and considered as basic and generative factors in each and every religious experience, can be subsumed under the heading of the 'psychological' or 'subjective'. So, for James ritual figured as derivative from, and secondary to, the actual mental states of its collective or individual performers. What an appalling mistake for a great thinker! No state of mind can generate even its own content (religious object, myth, situation, plot), let alone a ritual, because all mental states are 'empty' unless intentionally directed towards some concrete object existing apart from, or other than, those states. For instance, a state of religious ecstasis until it has focused on a particular pre-existing thing - an icon, prayer or incantation, ritual, etc." I regard Piatigorsky's patently sincere claim here as utterly wrong-headed. Following Aristotle, Aquinas, Newman, Brentano, Lonergan and others, I so affirm the objective intentionality of human knowing that the relationship between the mind of the subject knowing (intellectus in actu) and the object of that knowing (intellectum in actu) is one of identity - not one of subject-object confrontation… In other words, in company with the thinkers just named, I would entirely deny what Piatigorsky affirms (p.292, note 30): "My understanding of the religious objectivity in Freemasonry implies the hermeneutical rule, that to understand a thing or a phenomenon, I should become it, which is entirely impossible without suspending my objective knowledge of it. Objective here means that which at the moment of knowledge is not (and cannot be) me."
• Piatigorsky is quite correct in noting that since "belief in the existence of a Superior Being" is a prerequisite of admission to Masonry it cannot be equated with the Mason's post-initiation relationship within Masonry to the Great Architect of the Universe, but it is far from obvious that he is right in describing this latter as "the Masonic Religion" (Who's Afraid of Freemasons?, p.273).
• Referring on p.223 to Fred L. Pick & G. Norman Knight, The Pocket History of Freemasonry, revised by F. Smyth, 7th edn, London, 1983, p.132, he writes: "The problem of the relationships between Freemasonry and religion is dealt with cursorily... They start with a quotation from the definition, itself idiotic enough, of the Board of General Purposes, that 'Masonry is neither a religion nor a substitute for religion... nor a competitor with religion... though in the sphere of human conduct it may be hoped that its teaching will be complementary to that of religion.' Their comment on this passage is still more idiotic: 'But it requires a man to have some sort of religious belief before he can be admitted... and expects him thereafter to go on practising his religion.'..." Although Piatikorsky's ensuing remarks contribute helpfully to our understanding of this whole complex tangle of questions, he has obviously failed to notice the difference (an important one, surely) between denying that Masonry is "a religion" and denying that Masonry is "a religion."

Piatigorsky's mistake throughout this book, if I am correct in judging it to be a mistake, is neither trivial nor irrelevant to his main theme. Indeed, I recommend his readers to consider all he has written in the light of this question, since I am convinced that it is precisely by so doing that each will be best equipped eventually to arrive at his or her own individually matured position in respect of the various important problems Piatigorsky has so patiently and challengingly explored.

Freemasonry and Catholicism - An Exposition of the Cosmic Facts Underlying These Two Great Institutions As Determined by Occult Investigation, Copyright © Mrs. Max Heindel 1919; Copyright © The Rosicrucian Fellowship 1931: Mount Ecclesia, 2222 Mission Ave, Oceanside, CA 92054-2329, U.S.A. 10th Edition Revised - Reprinted 1995:

Summary:

"The term Catholicism as used in this work does not refer to the Roman Catholic Church alone, but Catholic is taken in the sense of Universal, so that the term includes all movements inaugurated by the Sons of Seth, the Priestcraft.

The origin of the temporal and spiritual streams of evolution are as follows:

Jehovah created Eve, a human being.

The Lucifer Spirit Samæl united with Eve and begat a semi-divine son, Cain. As he left Eve before the birth of the child, Cain was the son of a widow, and a Serpent of Wisdom.

Then Jehovah created Adam, a human being like Eve. Adam and Eve united and begat a child, human like themselves, whose name was Abel. Jehovah being the Lunar God is associated with water, hence there was enmity between Cain, the Son of Fire and Abel the Son of Water. So Cain slew Abel and Abel was replaced by Seth.

In time and through generations, the Sons of Cain became the craftsmen of the world, skilled in the use of fire and metal. Their ideal was male, Hiram Abiff, the Master workman.

The Sons of Seth, on the other hand, became the feminine ideal, the Virgin Mary, and ruling their people by the magic water placed at their temple doors.

Various attempts have been made to unite the two streams of humanity and emancipate them from their progenitors, Jehovah and the Lucifer Spirits.

With this end in view the symbolical Temple was built according to the instruction of Solomon, the Son of Seth, and the Molten Sea was cast by Hiram Abiff, the Son of Cain, but this effort was frustrated, and the attempt at unification proved abortive.

Later Moses, the divinely appointed leader of the old dispensation, who was reborn as Elijah, guided humanity through its ages of infancy, and was finally embodied as John the Baptist, the herald of the new dispensation, the Christian Era. At the same point in time the other actors in the World Drama were also brought to birth that they might serve their brothers.

At the casting of the Molten Sea Hiram Abiff had been given the baptism of fire by Cain, which freed him from the Lucifer Spirits, also a new Hammer and a new Word. When the new Era dawned he was born as Lazarus, the widow's son of Nain, and raised by the strong grip of the lion's paw to the rank of Immortals as Christian Rosenkreuz.

Solomon, the Son of Seth, was reborn as Jesus. The baptism of water administered by John as representative of Jehovah freed him also. He yielded his body at that moment to the descending Christ Spirit and ranged himself with the new leader.

Religion has been terribly tarnished in the course of time, its pristine purity has long since vanished under the regime of creed, and it is no longer Catholic, that is to say, Universal. Sects and isms have branched out in one direction and another, but still Jesus from the invisible worlds enfolds in his love all the Sons of Seth who call upon his name by faith, and will eventually unite the scattered churches in the Kingdom of Christ.

Christian Rosenkreuz was given charge of the Sons of Cain who seek the light of knowledge at the sacred fires of the Mystic Shrine. As the creative energy implanted by their divine ancestor Samæl caused Cain to work and originate, so this same spiritual urge prompts his descendants to work out their own salvation through the fire of tribulation, and fashion for themselves the Golden Auric Wedding Garment, which is the 'Open Sesame' to the Invisible World. And though the cleansing blood of Jesus is an absolute necessity to millions of weaker brothers, there can scarcely be any question when we assert that the more men and women who engage in Mystic Masonry to consciously build this Temple of the Soul, the sooner we shall see the second advent of Christ, and the stronger will be the race which He shall rule by the law of love."

Enochian Chess of the Golden Dawn

"Chris Zalewski was born in 1956 in Hastings, New Zealand, She is a keen amateur artist and bodybuilder, has a diploma in herbal medicine, runs an herbal clinic and is president of the Wellington Astrological Society. In early 1980, she was initiated into the Golden Dawn with her husband Pat, by ex-members of the New Zealand temple, Whare Ra. Her study of the Enochian chess game for the last 14 years was acknowledged by the late Isræl Regardie as taking the game to an areea that was quite beyond him. Her other interests include alchemy and other forms of esoteric healing. She resides with her husband in Wellington, where she has a long-standing tradition with the Golden Dawn through their Thoth-Hermes Temple:

The four elemental boards are broken down into: the large Central Cross which binds the four quarters together represents the refined power of the planets in the astrological signs. The cross bar of the Central Cross then gives the Holy Name or controlling influence or force of the entire tablet. The four smaller crosses in each quarter mainly represent the energies of the planets, while the four squares above each smaller cross are the incorporeal elements. The squares below the small crosses are dubbed the Servient Squares and relate to the 12 signs of the Zodiac and the four elements proper [black/white Earth lower left, yellow/mauve Air upper left, blue/orange Water upper right, red/green Fire lower right]. These are the squares used to construct the Enochian chessboards... The Air and Water Boards are read from right to left horizontally in the upper quarters and left to right horizontally in the lower quarters (mirror image the Fire and Earth Boards)... To get the vertical order of Tetra-grammaton, the corner letter of the active angles (Fire and Air Angles) goes to the fourth square down and the rest of the letters from the angle are read in duplicate to the horizontal towards the corner. The corner letter of the passive angles (Earth and Water Angles) goes to the corner square and the rest of the letters are read duplicate to the horizontal out from the corner." Reading each square clockwise, triangle 1's colour relates elementally to the Tetra-grammaton column letter but the Major Arcanum named relates astrologically to triangle 4 which is itself coloured to indicate the nature of the Board in use; triangle 3's colour is that of the quadrant in which it occurs; triangle 4's colour varies with the Tetragrammaton rank letter. As regards the colour of the pieces, one may simply match bases to Angles of play and the back of the figure is White for the King (Spirit), Red for the Knight (Fire), Blue for the Queen (Water), Yellow for the Bishop (Air), Black for the Rook (Earth), but more detailed colour is far preferable!.... "'What you are given here is in fact the methodology of magic and of Enochian chess. The real impetus and concepts must come from the individual, and rather than impose my own magical philosophy on this particular area I would seriously suggest some experimentation along the lines of the magical framework to which you are attuned. Although I have written this book from a Golden Dawn perspective, I would actively encourage you to apply and experiment with your own inner concepts.'"

• The Enochian Tarot by Gerald and Betty Schueler, ISBN 0-87542-709-X. Llewellyn Publications, P.O. Box 64383-895 St. Paul, MN 55164-03283, U.S.A.
• The popular deck of cards known as the Tarot has been used for many centuries for divination, fortune-telling and self-initiation through meditation. The Enochian Tarot, an 86-card deck, has 8 extra cards because, although there are only 22 recognised Paths on the Qabalistic Tree of Life, 30 Aethyrs are acknowledged within Enochian Magick, a system revealed to John Dee, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I of England, and his associate, John Kelly, by Enochian Angels resident in various Watchtowers in these subtle regions of cosmic space.
• Further information is available from: Ra-Horakhty Temple, Hermetic Society of the Golden Dawn, 31849 Pacific Highway South, Suite 107, Federal Way, Washington 98003, U.S.A.
• Qabalah Tree of Life: Copyright © Paul Guess 1996 - This colourful and convenient laminated reference-chart is distributed by New Leaf, 401 Thornton Rd, Little Springs, GA 30057-1557, U.S.A.

Gematria

A Preliminary Investigation of The Cabala

Materials for the study of The Apostolic Gnosis Part Two

The Glastonbury Giants or Zodiac

Rediscovered after centuries of oblivion by Katharine Maltwood FSA in 1925, this is said to be a natural configuration; Avalon's hills contour the effigies, thus the rivers flowing round them outline them in parts. Roads and paths complete the outlines. The circle is 10 miles across, with Glastonbury in the North, Somerton in the South. Langport's Dog (5 miles long) lies South-West. The effigies are in proportion to each other, in correct Zodiac order, heads facing West, Winter Signs in the cold North, Summer Signs in the sunny South. Scale a star-map face down over the Ordnance Map; the Zodac stars will fit over the effigies. As above, so below.

Could chance form such a complex, well-ordered pattern? Surely not. Did prehistoric men recognise and develop Avalon's geological shapes into a Zodiac, as Mrs. Maltwood thought, or does Nature form the Earth into hitherto unsuspected Zodiac patterns? Since several remarkably similar Zodiacs have now been found, such as the well known Kingston Zodiac geologically formed by the Thames and its tributaries and researched by Mary Caine, many incline towards the latter theory.

Either way, much evidence shows that the natural pattern was developed by ancient Man. Earthworks define Glastonbury's figures at nodal points - the head and wing of the Tor's Phœnix are terraced, as are Taurus's horns and Leo's jaws; Capricorn's horn is a rampart nearly a mile long; Virgo's breast is a huge barrow.

About 100 place-names (like Wagg on the Guard-Dog's tail, Earlake Moor on his ear, Loll-over-Hill by Gemini's lolling head) and several local folk-tales re-member this Zodiac - but it is, above all, a source of Arthurian and Grail legend.

Mrs. Maltwood viewed this circle as Arthur's original Round Table - with Merlin, Guinevere, Arthur and his chief Knights still seated round it as the Zodiac Signs and our familiar seasons. In their Grail-Quest they were seeking themselves, their own Signs, and so obeying that ancient precept: Man, know thyself!

No ordinary banqueting-board, this, but a time-table of Sun, Moon and star movements - a table of measurements of man and the universe wherein we too may quest the Grail and learn our true nature and purpose.

Ancient Britain saw this as Ceredwen's Cauldron of Wisdom & Inspiration; Arthurian legend Christianised it into the Cup of the Last Supper brought into Britain by Joseph of Arimathea in 63 A.D. Joseph was taken to be the ancestor of Arthur and his chief Knights, notably Lancelot and Galahad. In Glastonbury legend Joseph landed on Wearyall Hill, preaching Christianity and planting his staff, which thenceforth flowered magically both at Christmas and East. It is strange but true that the Holy Thorn (a mediterranean species) still does! Strange, too, that Joseph chose Wearyall, one of the Zodiac's Fish, to preach Christianity, whose earliest Sign was the Fishes, as The Faith of the Piscean Age. Strange, too, how Arviragus, the local king, is said to have given 12 hides of land there to maintain him and 11 followers. Twelve hidden Zodiac figures? Twelve animal hides? According to the Domesday Book they never paid tax. Is this how "hide" became a land-measure?

Within Mrs. Maltwood's Gemini Babe appears a crucified, Christlike figure, beautifully drawn by Nature herself on Dundon and Loll-over-Hill. The Arthurian concept of Galahad as a Christlike Knight may stem from this. Only Galahad and Perceval (the Gemini Twins) were allowed to see the Grail - significantly in Solomon's Ship (Cancer) at the city of Sarras (which means Star- City)…

Legend also tells how Joseph hid the Grail in Chalice Well on Glastonbury Tor. This is the Sign of Aquarius, symbol of a dawning Aquarian Age. How many dawns of enlightenment, long forgotten or as yet to come, are properly associated with this intriguing synthesis of fact and myth? What heightened streams of consciousness still flow from this ancient, mystic Spring?

• REFERENCES: K. E. Maltwood, A Guide to Glastonbury's Temple of the Stars (London: James Clarke & Co., 1964); Mary Caine, The Glastonbury Zodiac and The Kingston Zodiac (Torquay: Græl Communications, 1978)… A Treasury of Books offers several more helpful suggestions.

Covenant of the Heart

Meditations of a Christian Hermeticist on the Mysteries of Tradition

"Valentin Tomberg was born in St. Petersberge, Russia in 1900. Born in a Lutheran family, he entered into the Russian Christian esoteric tradition at an early age, strongly influenced by Soloviev and a personal experience of the Sophia at a Cathedral in Holland. Under the auspices of the Anthoposophical Society, which he left around 1940, he lectured in Holland and England. He later converted to Catholicism. He resided in England, working for the BBC and devoting his time to meditation and writing. He died on the Isle of Majorca in 1973... 'This work is neither a theological treatise nor a contribution to the science of history... It is written - and could only be written - for those who have the capacity and disposition to make use of the faculty of intuition as the direct sense of truth. Thus, it is addressed to those "who have ears to hear and eyes to see"... Everything in the Gospel is event, sign, parable, and teaching, i.e. everything is fact, miracle, symbol, and revelation of the truth... While Genesis depicts the divine creation and the Fall, the Gospel of St. John describes the divine work of salvation: the transformation of this fallen world, its healing, in accordance with its divine archetype. The thesis of the Gospel of St. John is the following: that the same divine Word, which created the world in seven acts of creation, become flesh: and that the Word-made-flesh accomplishes the healing of this fallen, distorted world through seven acts of healing, these being the seven miracles of the Gospel of St. John... The healing miracle work of the Word-made-flesh, as portrayed in the Gospel of St. John, takes place in the reverse sequence to the creative miracle working of the divine Word depicted in Genesis. The divine magic of the seventh day becomes the first healing miracle of the Word-made-flesh, that of the wedding at Cana. This reversal is understandable if one considers that creation and healing have to take place in reverse sequence... Each of the seven "I am" sayings is an aspect of the divine Word, the Logos, and each refers to a stage of his work - both of creation and of regeneration (healing)...'"

DAVID OVASON

The Secrets of Nostradamus

"It is one of the characteristics of all great initiates who are called to prominence in world history that they help form the cultural or political life of their age, yet seem almost not to belong to that age. Just so with Nostradamus. What is of importance in the life impulses of Nostradamus do not really belong to sixteenth-century France: these impulses - indeed, his literary style - seem to well up from a distant past. The more one looks sympathetically into Nostradamus, the more one is forced to recognize that what was really important in his prophetic impulses and literary style, he brought over into the sixteenth century from a previous lifetime. All the writings of Nostradamus - and specifically the unique style of the Prophéties - are permeated with poetic qualities which have been carried into the sixteenth century from what we now call the Hibernian Mysteries. When we gaze on the formative initiate life of Nostradamus - at his mastery of the Green Language, at his use of gnomic prophetic utterance, at his grasp of the grand sweep of the history of north-west Europe - we are gazing into the mind of an initiate schooled in the ancient wisdom centred in Ireland, and serving the life of the Celts.

When we seek for the roots of the Prophéties, then, we find ourselves in the rich poetic loam of sixth-century Ireland. For good esoteric reasons, during the first centuries of our era, Ireland had remained a backwater in European history. There is even some indication that the mystery schools of Imperial Rome had ordained that Ireland should remain untouched as an un-Romanized periphery on the edge of the map of the Imperium. It was intended by the initiation schools that this map would correspond to the future Christian world. It had been part of the destiny of Rome to establish the ground for the development of the spiritual mysteries of the future - which was to be the new initiation school of Christianity. Although the Roman soldiery did reach Ireland, they did not take over its cultural life, nor destroy its Druidic priestcraft, in the way they seem to have destroyed that in England, Scotland and (to a lesser extent) Wales. Thus, something of the great pre-Christian mystery wisdom survived in Ireland, and it was for this reason that it continued as the main esoteric centre of European cultural life. This is why Ireland became a refuge for esoteric Christianity - for what we might even term pre-Roman Christianity. What we now tend to see romantically, through the eyes of later poets, as the twilight of the Celts was really the dawn of esoteric Christianity, which has yet to speak in the future of Europe. The ancient Druidic wisdom which had served the soul-life of the North, had already begun to give way to, or integrate with, the Christian Mysteries - to those mysteries which we would probably now call Celtic Christianity.

By the eighth century this impulse would, through the reforming zeal of the York-born Alcuin, re-enter the mainstream of European history. Following the ancient pathway of initiate knowledge, it would work back to its origins, its fons. It would move back from the periphery, which was Ireland, where it had gestated during a particularly chaotic period on the European mainland. From this periphery, it would move first to a mid-point, which was Charlemagne's Aachen, and thence back to Rome. The conflict between the esoteric Christianity and the Christianity of the Roman Empire would then begin, to be formally settled at the synods, and informally unsettled through the proscription of opponents as heretics, until the final break with Rome occurred almost 800 years later, when Nostradamus was once again in embodiment in Europe." (pp.382-3.)

"More important to our own theme of the initiation archetype, is that Myrddin was a prophet, who saw and wrote of the future of Britain, especially of Wales. The legend that he was a prophet - a legend which, in any case, later materialized into a considerable literature - was an acknowledgement that Myrddin (by now widely known as Merlin) had second-sight, or the Vision. As with the prophecies of Nostradamus, these Welsh prophecies were obscure. Like those of Nostradamus, the main corpus of predictions - especially those in The Black Book of Carmarthen - became famous, even though few could interpret them, and most were assumed to have been restricted to the twelfth century. It is hardly surprising that the French writer Wace (who was canon of Bayeux in that century) decided to omit most of the prophecies of Merlin from his own work because he could not understand them!

In that same twelfth century the commentary on the prophecies of Merlin, which had been made by Alanus de Insulis, was very popular. It remained sufficiently popular to be published as late as 1603. Other versions, bereft of intelligent commentaries, had been published earlier, and were widely available in manuscript form. So well-entrenched was their popularity in both England and France that, in the mid-sixteenth century, a serious attempt was made to put them on the Index of forbidden books.

There has been some inclination among historians to draw an unconscious parallel between Nostradamus and this proscription of Merlin's prophetic writings... It is, of course, of considerable importance that, in the same period that Nostradamus was writing his prophecies, those stemming from the initiation school to which he had previously belonged were being proscribed. This was, and is, the pattern of initiate involvement in history, that as one impulse dies out, another is designed to take its place...

In a very real sense, initiation works against nature. It is one of the tenets of initiation that ordinary history can be little more than an account of degeneration: if the world were left to itself, then it would rapidly fall into chaos. This is one reason why the great initiates are charged with giving regenerative impulses to the historical process. Historical events manipulated by the initiate schools seek to introduce a redemptive element, to counteract the degenerative force of ordinary history (one might even write, natural history). Our insights lead us to suspect that Nostradamus was the sixteenth-century guardian of that prophetic stream in which he participated in Ireland or Wales in the fifth or sixth centuries, and which was, by his day, in dire need of redemption." (pp.385-6.)

"Francesco Patrizi, who studied at the astrological centre of Padua, and whose books were put on the Index because of his forthright astronomical views, not only recognized that the universe was infinite, but that each star was a separate world." (p.88.)

"In esotericism, Adam was the name given to the future humanity that first descended into physical bodies. The name denotes the first spiritual entities who clothed themselves in the red of flesh and blood. The Hebraic word, Adam, means 'Earthling' - a further reference to the notion that prior to the creation of Adam, man was a spirit being not of the earth. Like most esoteric ideas, this has been thoroughly debased in modern times, by the superficialities of such writers as Van Däniken, and demoted to the notion of alien invaders. However, the genuine esoteric teaching about the 'red earthling', the 'red hermaphrodite', and so on, is not in conflict with the Bible. The account in Genesis is quite clear that, long before God created Adam, He created 'Man-woman'. Genesis (1:7): Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam; ad imaginem Dei creavit illum, masculum et feminam creavit eos. The creation of Eve did not take place until Genesis 2:22." (p.141.)

David Ovason who in his excellent above quoted The Secrets of Nostra-damus - the medieval code of the Master revealed in the age of computer science (London: Century 1997, but more recently published in paperback as The Nostradamus Code) demonstrates that Nostradamus has so far never been shown to be a false prophet, wisely acknowledges that it is seldom easy to understand the precise meaning of his revelations. Century X (quatrain 72) is agreed to be especially significant:

Ovason interprets the third line as a reference to the Archangel Michæl, identifies AD 3977 as the final year to which any of Nostradamus's prophecies are intended to refer, and considers AD 2087 to be the date cryptically mentioned in line one of the above quatrain.

Claims that Nostradamus believed the world would end in "1999" are, therefore, utterly without foundation.

This is not to say that Nostradamus's prophecies lack current relevance. An excellent copy of the 1566 edition of his master-work may be read on microfiches in Valletta, in the National Library of Malta, and Maurice Zammit's The Secret of Nostradamus Revealed is undoubtedly our best available guide to the true chronology of events alluded to in the quatrains.

This quatrain, as interpreted by Maurice Zammit, refers to Pope John-Paul II's vigorous upholding of the Roman Catholic tradition of priestly celibacy. His Holiness's second visit to Malta for the beatification of Father George Preca on 9 May 2001 occurred only 9 days before his own 81st birthday (and 9 nines make 81) - "Now the G-d of hope fill you with all joy and peace" (Romans 15:13).

C = 3     A = 1     R = 17     I = 9    S = 18     S = 18     I = 9     M = 12     I = 9
The Secret of Nostradamus revealed by Maurice Zammit 
(Copyright © Maurice Zammit, 16a Nicholas Copernicus Street, Il Qortin, Mellieħa, Malta, 1995) 

The numbers here tabulated, exhibit how Maurice Zammit advises interested readers to arrange this set of 1000 of Nostradamus's quatrains immediately before re-ordering them by a repeated application of the key-numbers contained in the key-word Nostradamus has himself provided - as shown above. Note that "801" as here used means "Ninth Century, Quatrain One" ( for further details, please refer to Maurice's book). Quatrains 1 and 2 which are methodological, not prophetic, are replaced by 1090 and 1097. Erika Cheetham's The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus (Futura Publications 1990) purports fairly to reproduce the text of the 1568 edition, but omits its Preface and the Epistle to Henry II - both may be read in English translation in Chas. A. Ward's Oracles of Nostradamus (New York: Dorset Press 1986). Maurice Zammit has not specified any particular order for 1101-1111.

Table 2 

The numbers here tabulated exhibits what Maurice Zammit believes to have been the true and original, whether or not an actually chronological sequence of Nostradamus's quatrains and sixtains. "3" signifies "Century One, Quatrain 3", "100" means "Century One, Quatrain 100", "101" represents "Century Two, Quatrain 1", etc.; quatrains 1 &d 2 in Century One, being methodological rather than prophetic, are replaced by the only posthumously released quatrains 91 & 97 of Century Eleven - the sixtains 1-58 in which serve to complete Century Seven. Maurice Zammit did not specify any particular order for Century Twelve, 1-11.  

The esoteric section of our Links page offers easy access to a number of other Nostradamus-related websites, none of which, however, have as yet taken Maurice Zammit's important above-mentioned research findings into account. Further details of this are readily available in Malta; a number of related documents are also housed at Creativity House, Exeter, where they may be consulted by arrangement.

"The transition from ape to human was not a gradual process... we know that by the different numbers of chromosomes in the cells of each species... Nobody tells our children and students that the females of the three anthropoid apes - the gorillas, orang-utans and chimpanzees - do not have a clitoris... The occurrence of this part of the female anatomy in humans had far-reaching consequences and cannot have evolved by coincidence."

"The unique lack of penis bone in the male... is in complete contrast to other mammals, which use the penis bone to copulate at short notice." Other peculiarly human features include "the enlarged breasts of the female, the sensitive ear lobes and lips, and a vaginal angle that encouraged intimate face to face copulation."

"The Vatican view that there is a relationship between contraception, divorce and abortion... stems from the development of the basic position that every sexual act should be open to the transmission of life. This view is fundamentally in error... In the natural course of events a woman is open to becoming pregant only for a very few days in each month."

"Pastors have a duty to foster the charisms, ministries, and different forms of participation by the people of God, without adopting notions borrowed from democracy and sociology which do not reflect the Catholic vision of the Church and the authentic spirit of Vatican II."

"The Christian is not concerned really with a life divided between this world and the next. He seeks the Face of God, and the vision of Him Who is eternal life (Jn 17:3)."

"We live, says Heidegger, 'by putting into words the totality-of-significations of intelligibility. To significations, words accrue.' Authentic language is Rede... but... in the phenomenality of the everyday, of the 'oneness' and the 'theyness', Dasein's understanding and self-interpretation comes to pass not in Rede ['speech'], but in Gerede ['talk']… This latter heading has a corrosive ubiquity. It embraces not only the floodtide of trivia and gossip, of novelty and cliché, of jargon and spurious grandiloquence, 'but spreads to what we write, where it takes the form of "scribbling"'. Overwhelmingly, 'talk' has lots 'its primary relationship-of-being towards the entity talked about, or else has never achieved such a relationship' (a devastating anatomy of journalism and the idiom of the media). Thus it cannot communicate 'in such a way as to let this entity be appropriated in a primordial manner'" (pp.92-3).

"We overlook the all-determining centrality of our being-in-the-world because the everyday actualities of this inhabiting are so various and seemingly banal... having to do with something, making use of something, giving up something and letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing, evincing, interrogating, considering, discussing, determining and knowing something" (p.83).

"'Nature' is vorhanden to the physicist, and rocks are vorhanden to the geologist. But this is not how a stone-mason or a sculptor meets up with a rock. His relationship to stone, the relationship crucial to his Dasein, is that of Zuhandenheit, of a 'readiness-to-hand' (observe the formidable gap which separates at from to in the two instrumental terms)… 'The process of hammering does not simply have a knowledge about [um] the hammer's character as a tool, but it has appropriated this tool in a way which could not possibly be more suitable'... Appropriate use, performance, manual action, possess their own kind of sight. Heidegger names it 'circumspection'… Theoretical vision, on the other hand, looks at or upon things non-circumspectively: 'It constructs a canon for itself in the form of method'... Methodological abstraction replaces the immediate authority of 'readiness-to-hand'. Heidegger's differentia-tion is not only eloquent in itself; it brilliantly inverts the Platonic order of values which sets the theoretical contemplator high above the artist, the craftsman, the manual worker" (pp.87-8).

But "because Dasein is always Dasein-with and a being-in-the-world into which we have been thrown, 'inauthenticity' and 'fallenness' are not accidents or false choices. They are the necessary components of existence, of the existential facticity of the everyday. Being-in-the-world 'is itself tempting'. To accede to the temptation of mundanity is, quite simply, to exist. 'Falling' is, therefore, 'existentially determinative'. How, indeed, could one 'fall out of the world'? Verfall is a positive in that it makes manifest 'an essential ontological structure of Dasein itself. Far from determining its nocturnal side, it constitutes all Dasein's days in their everydayness'… If social reform or revolution will not eliminate inauthenticity, neither will therapy and psychological amendments of personality. Heidegger has no room for any Freudian scenario of original crime and complex. 'Fallenness' is the inevitable quality which characterizes an individual's involvement with others and with the phenomenal world. There can be no cure for being.

But 'fallenness' is positive in another, deeper sense. There must be inauthenticity and 'theyness', 'talk' and Neugier, so that Dasein, thus made aware of its loss of self, can strive to return to authentic being… [O] felix culpa... 'Authentic existence is not something which floats above falling everydayness. Existentially, it is only a modifed way in which such everydayness is seized upon'... In the necessary condition of inauthenticity, we 'fall away from ourselves'. The phenomenology of the everyday which results from this cadence is one of frenetic inertia... As we flail about emptily, the familiarity of the everyday shatters. It is as if we had been caught, all of a sudden, in the interstices of the busy mesh of being, and stood face to face with the ontological, with the Daseinsfrage... Uncanniness triggers those key moments in which Angst brings Dasein face to face with its terrible freedom to be or not to be, to dwell in inauthenticity or strive for self-possession... Under stress of the uncanny, Dasein comes to realize that beyond being Dasein-with and Dasein-in - which are the ineluctable modes of the everyday - it must become Dasein-for. Sorge, signifying 'care-for', 'concern-for and -with', is the means of this transcendence. It can and must take myriad forms: care for the ready-to-hand, for the tools and materials of our practice; a concern for others which can be defined as 'solicitude'. But principally, and in a sense yet to be expounded, Sorge is a concern with, a caring for, an answerability to, the presentness and mystery of Being itself, of Being as it transfigures beings" (pp.95-7).

"Dasein is always a not-yet, an unripeness (the term is precisely that of the great Expressionist metaphysician of hope, Ernst Bloch). To be is to be incomplete, unfulfilled. But at the same time, all authentic being is a being-towards-its-own-end. 'Death is a way to be, which Dasein takes upon itself as soon as it is'…" (p.101).

"With the new understanding of the dignity of woman, and her place in society, there has been an appreciation of the value of love in marriage and of the meaning of intimate married life in the light of that love... Husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, in order to co-operate with God in the generation and education of new lives... Commitment to responsible parenthood requires that husband and wife, keeping a right order of priorities, recognize their own duties towards God... they are not free to act as they choose... nor are they free to decide for themselves what is the right course to follow... Any use whatever of marriage must retain its natural potential to procreate human life... The reason is that the marriage act, because of its fundamental structure, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, actualizes their capacity to generate new life, - and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman... Man does not have unlimited dominion over his body… Human life is sacred... From its very inception it betrays the creating hand of God..." (§§ 2,8,10-13 italics added).

"Freud naïvely assumes that libido is an evenly-distributed, unvarying human universal. It does not occur to him that libido might be a social and economic variable and that the concept of libido and its dynamics that emerged from his self-analysis and clinical practice might be highly relative. The human sciences reveal that sexual awareness and activity are learned responses to patterns of stimulus and degrees of opportunity... As Jung understood it, the psychological and sexual union of marriage conveys 'a genuine and incontestable experience of the Divine, whose transcendent force obliterates and consumes everything individual; a real communion with life and the impersonal power of fate'... There is a logic of incarnation to be identified in the juxtaposition of sexual and mystical ecstasy. Scruton suggests that the aim of desire is union - not the disembodied union of pure spirits but the union of persons in and through their bodies... Identification of eros with procreation rather than personal communion is clearly the product of a male, patriarchal perspective. The sexuality of men is inherently procreative. Men are fertile for most of their lives; sexual intercourse almost always brings orgasm and emission of semen. In men nearly all sexual activity has procreative potential. Women, on the other hand, are fertile for a limited part of their lives; and during that part for a brief moment every month. The release of ova is unrelated to sexual activity and sexual activity is unrelated either to the fertile period in every month or to the fertile proportion of their lives. The most vital organ of sexual pleasure, the clitoris, has no procreative function. Thus in women, sexual activity has no necessary connection with procreation" (pp.119-24).

"Man only is to the extent that he stands open to Being, in what Wordsworth would have called a 'wise passiveness'... Patient in the forest-clearing of Being (now almost invariably hypostatized through its capital letter), dwelling in a house of which he is, at his rare best, a custodian, but never architect or proprietor, the thinker must be prepared to speak seldom, to speak fragmentarily when he speaks at all, and to suffer constant misunderstanding and contradiction…

To think fundamentally is not to analyse but to 'memorate' (Denken ist Andenken), to remember Being so as to bring it into radiant disclosure. Such memoration - again Heidegger is strangely close to Plato - is pre-logical... It is that 'bending towards' of spirit and intellect and ear so uncannily rendered in Fra Angelico's 'Annunciation' in San Marco... True art, true knowledge, true technique are a 'vocation', a 'calling forth' which impose upon man his native 'calling'. Since Roman engineering and seventeenth-century rationalism, Western technology has not been a vocation but a provocation and imperialism... Things, with their intimate, collaborative affinity with creation, have been demeaned into objects... The debate over the atom bomb… is a journalistic footnote to a crisis whose real source is 'the forgetting of Being' at the ambiguous inception of Western intellectual history... Yet to understand this... is to realize also that salvation is possible... It is time we turned to the poets." (pp.123-4; 132-4).

"Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops like the universe itself only by perpetual discovery. Little by little, love becomes distinct, though still confused for a very long time with the simple function of reproduction. No longer only a unique and periodic attraction for purposes of material fertility; but an unbounded and continuous possibility of contact between minds rather than bodies; the play of countless subtle antennæ seeking one another in the light and darkness of the soul; the pull towards mutual sensibility and completion. When the maturing of its personality is approaching for the Earth, humans will have to realize that it is for them not simply a question of controlling births, but of increasing to the utmost the quantity of love liberated from the duty of reproduction. Enforced by this new need, the essentially personalizing function of love will detach itself more or less completely from 'the flesh' which has been for a time the organ of propagation. Without ceasing to be physical, in order to remain physical, love will make itself more spiritual. Man and woman for the child, still and for so long as life on Earth has not reached maturity. But man and woman for one another increasingly and for ever. Because the world is always growing and always unfinished and always ahead of us, to achieve our love we are engaged in a limitless conquest of the universe and ourselves. In this sense, we can only attain each other by consummating a union with the universe."

Nexus magazine regularly adds a notice advertizing Zecharia Sitchin's 1996 paperback Divine Encounters to its announcement of the continuing availability of his earlier Genesis Revisited and of his 6-volumes The Earth Chronicles series.

Members of The Truth Seeker society in the U.S.A. recently had the opportunity of sharing an evening with Zecharia when he delivered a most interesting two-hour lecture and slide presentation reviewing all seven books, and the only bad news about the related two-part video-set, "An Evening with Zecharia Sitchin" (introduced by the society's President, Bonnie Lange) is that it is currently available (from The Book Tree, price $34.95 + $3 p.& p.; tel: 1-800-700-8733/ fax: 760-489-5222) only in NTSC-format, so that these tapes cannot be played back on old PAL-format machines (though some new models do permit simulated-PAL play-back of NTSC recordings).

An even more fascinating event was the first Sitchin Studies Day, opened by John M. Cogswell and held in Denver, Colorado, on 6 October 1996, which was the final day of the 1996 International Forum on New Science held by the International Association for New Science of Fort Collins, Colorado.

Father Charles Louis Moore, a well-travelled Benedictine- and Jesuit-educated Roman Catholic priest and one time District Attorney with an understanding of more than sixteen languages, explained why he shared Sitchin's conviction that the ancient gods are real and that the Bible has to be understood in the light of this.

Doctor Marlene Evans argued that in the light of Sitchin's findings the debate about human origins needs to be transposed into the framework of a debate about other terrestrial origins.

Madeleine Briskin, Professor of Geology at the University of Cincinnati, gave strong support to Sitchin's claim that the Anunnaki first came to Earth some 432,000 years ago (and not only 272,000 years ago as Alan F. Alford has alternatively hypothesised in Gods of the New Millennium, Hodder & Stoughton: 1997) when she explained by reference to a number of independent paleo-oceanographic and geophysical parameters derived from the Atlantic and Pacific ocean sediments a now well-recognized 430,000± years quasi-astronomical cycle hidden in the variable amplitudes of our Earth's eccentric orbit, demonstrating, in other words, a cosmic connection between the dynamics of astronomical events and Earth-bound systems.

The metaphysician and painter V. Susan Ferguson, author of Inanna Returns (Thel-Dar Publishing Company, 1995) and Inanna Hyper-Luminal (1996) very strikingly illustrated the degree of coherence between Sitchin's interpretation of surviving ancient texts and artifacts and her own living experience in altered states of consciousness of the persons and events to which that material evidence relates.

Neil Freer, a philosopher and poet with a special interest in the history of religion and author of Breaking the Godspell (New Falcon Publications 1994), reiterated his support for Sitchin's belief that we humans are a product of genetic engineering, and briefly explained his vision of our dawning racial maturity within a new planetary civilization.

The distinguished science writer and UFO investigator Antonio Humeeus expressed his conviction that Sitchin's hypothesis regarding planet Nibiru and its Earth-visiting inhabitants, the Anunnaki, and his suggestion that they have in the past used and continue today to use androids for their own purposes, dovetails neatly with the overall reported findings of ancient and contemporary ufologists.

All these papers together with their accompanying notes and references are now available in book form as Of Heaven and Earth, introduced and edited by Z. Sitchin, The Book Tree, PO Box 724, Escondido, California pz 92033: ISBN 1-885395-17-5; 1996, price $14.95 + $3 p.& p.

Jonathan Gray is also the author of the recently published 600-page book: Ark of the Covenant. [But please don't neglect Charles E. Sellier & David W. Balsiger, The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark, New York: Dell Books, 1995, which is both well documented and persuasive as regards actual remains of Noah's Ark itself.]

In October 1978 Ron Wyatt, an American amateur archæologist, had come to believe "that the golden Ark would be found in Jerusalem, beneath old Mount Moriah in the vicinity of the cliff-face that is sometimes called the 'Skull Hill' escarpment, since it contains the 'Skull Face' that many Christians believe was where Yeshua (Jesus) was crucified... In January 1979 Ron Wyatt and his team began excavation in Jerusalem. Given the broad nature of the clues, they had little idea where to commence digging. The site that Wyatt selected was being used as a rubbish dump and offered very little promise visually...

Digging began along the escarpment, as planned, straight down. As the face of the cliff was exposed, a large, shelf-like niche was noticed, cut into the cliff-face. Further digging exposed two more niches cut into the cliff, and another small niche to their right. Their appearance suggested that they had been cut to hold plaques or signs. Wyatt's team was digging close to the Skull Face, a place that was known for its executions. As for the three niches, Wyatt hypothesised that they were for placing notices, stating the crime of the crucifixion victim, in the three languages of the day (Hebrew, Greek and Latin). The exploration vicinity, Skull Hill, is believed by many to be the site of the most famous Crucifixion. Although not the objective of the excavation, Ron Wyatt sensed that they might find evidence to support this contention" (p.50).

Before quoting further, I remind myself of the importance of that verb, "sensed", especially when applied to an experienced researcher; Wyatt has also excavated for Noah's Ark in Turkey, and not without some degree of success, even though the Turkish government prevented his completing his search - you may have seen the related TV documentary?

I also note the careful language used throughout. The Anglicans, as we know, locate their holy sepulchre or garden tomb in quite a different place than Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Not all Catholics accept as true the claim inscribed immediately outside the sepulchre in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that it is positioned directly over the tomb of Adam, and it is not a dogma of the Faith that the nearby altar in the same church actually marks the location of Christ's death on Calvary - which is not to deny that it is now certainly at least a spot hallowed by the prayers of countless pilgrims across the years.

As regards Wyatt's eventual discovery of the original Ark of the Covenant: "In 1990, the Isræli authorities decided to test public reaction to an announcment of the 'possible discovery' of the Ark of the Covenant and to a 'possible building' of a new Temple. The result was a bloody clash and many deaths. The morning of Monday 8 October 1990 will survive in history as the Temple Mount Massacre. Eleven Isræli worshippers and eight policemen were injured, while 21 Arabs were shot dead and 125 seriously injured in a clash between Zionists and Arab Moslems" (p.52).

"I am now often asked, 'How do the Isræli authorities react to the find?' Speaking frankly, from the information I am able to acquire it is evident that the authorities do not know how to handle this discovery. They have a right to be nervous... The al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, together named the Haram al-Sharif, comprise the third most important place in the world for the Moslem people... but some Isrælis want to demolish the Moslem Dome of the Rock to build a Third Temple on the site. Possession of the Ark could encourage extremists to wage war" (p.53).

One of my own maps of the Holy Land is arranged vertically: The Mediterranean is at sea-level. The sea of Galilee is almost 685 feet, and the Dead Sea almost 1,247 feet below sea-level - and Golgotha stands almost 2,494 feet (i.e., 2 × 1,247 feet) above sea-level. What is widely believed to be the tomb in which Jesus was buried and from which he rose to New Life is almost 60 feet lower, which makes it almost 2,433 feet vertically above sea-level and almost 2,433 feet horizontally west of Old Jerusalem's eastern wall separating the city from the Kidron Valley and the Mount of Olives. Half of Golgotha's above sea-level height of 2,494 feet is, as already mentioned, 1,247 feet, and that is the height above sea-level of Banyas, i.e., of the New Testament's Cæsarea Philippi, where Simon became Peter…

But without forgetting St. Bernard of Clairveaux's "G-d is number and measure and weight", let's not only look at numbers...

Since liquids naturally tend to flow downwards and cannot flow through impermeable rock, their descent is not always vertically straight down. In the Culbone valley near Porlock on the Somerset coast two natural springs of delicious drinking water bubble up. These waters' source is in the Brecon Hills in Wales - the nature of the intervening rocks obliges them to make their way deep down below the Bristol Channel before the pressure from the Brecon heights forces them upwards again close by Culbone's ancient church, the smallest in England. Since Jesus was buried somewhere lower than where he was crucified and somewhere higher than the Temple-platform on Mount Moriah, and since the Ark is - despite a continuing and understandable Isræli government embargo on publication of the full details of its discovery - known to have been found within a cave accessed via excavations and tunnels at least in part going downwards, the horizontal relationships of the different places inside the diggings will obviously not entirely coincide with those between either the original or the present-day entrances to and exits from the various places researched!

"Ron Wyatt has pursued his search for the original access tunnel since 1982 and has followed many leads. He and his team have used sub-surface interface radar to search for voids crossing from the Old City to the excavation. They have followed hopeful trails, only to be met with disappointing rock barriers. In 1992, in desperation, Ron even attempted to reach the cavern [where the original Ark still is] by digging straight dowwn from above with pneumatic hammer drills. Unforunately, over several trips to the site, he and the team had managed only to get through three metres (10 feet) of solid limestone and incur thousands of dollars in expenses, so they abandoned the attempt" (p.53).

Ron found the Ark at 2pm on Wednesday 6 January 1982. The passage immediately leading to the cavity containing it (and the rotten wooden box in which it had been placed) was only 18 inches high, so that even crawling towards it was difficult, and this place is "just a very small part of an extensive honeycomb of natural caves and tunnels inside the mountain" (p.51) - a mountain whose base may be said to be at sea-level towards the west but, obviously, very far below that to the east!

By the way, if determining the authentic site of Jesus's death is problematic, deciding where exactly the original Mount Sinai was is even more difficult. One of Zecharia Sitchin's books (The Stairway to Heaven, St. Martin's Press, 1980; Bear & Co., 1992) contains a detailed review of several of the better rival theories and also presents additional findings of his own which illuminate the entire question. Certainly the Holy Land still contains many secrets.

The placement of the twinned circles David Furlong has identified on the Marlborough Downs differs significantly from the usual Vesica Pisces arrangement.

When a superimposed cross-section of the Great Pyramid of Giza is rescaled so that its perpendicular height TM equals the horizontal distance WE between the geometrical centres of the two Marlborough circles, the St. Michæl alignment or ley proposed by John Michell passes precisely through the floor of the King's Chamber and the Grand Gallery is aligned to centre (cf the relevant diagram in David's book).

Consider too:

• Principal sites on the St. Michæl ley, as proposed by John Michell Marcus

Also: Mason & Caroline Wyndham, Awakening The Rose: The Solar Landscape Temple of Stonehenge (Tavistock, 1995):

• (1) The integration of the Earth and Venus orbits viewed from the direction of Midsummer Sunrise
• (2) The seven-pointed Star of the Mercury orbit

cross + words

Truth - The Triumph Of Beauty & Deceit?

Discernment

Zecharia Sitchin affirms in The Wars of Gods and Men - The Third Book of the Earth Chronicles (Santa Fe: Bear & Company 1992, pp.135-6): "The theory of nineteenth-century Egyptologists, that the Egyptian pyramids, including the unique three at Giza, were erected by a succession of Pharaohs as grandiose tombs for themselves, has long been disproven: not one of them was found to contain the body of the Pharaoh who was their known or presumed builder. Accordingly, the Great Pyramid of Giza was supposed to have been built by Khufu (Cheops), its twin by a successor named Chefra (Chephren), and the third, small one by a third successor, Menkara (Mycerinus) - all kings of the sixth dynasty. The Sphinx, the same Egyptologists presume, must have been built by Chepren, because it is situated next to a causeway leading to the Second Pyramid.

For a while it was believed that proof had been found in the smallest one of the three pyramids of Giza and the identity of the Pharaoh who had built it established. The credit for this was claimed by a Colonel Howard Vyse and his two assistants, who claimed to have discovered within the pyramid the coffin and mummified remains of the Pharaoh Menkara. The fact, however - known to scholars for some time now but for some reason still hardly publicized - is that neither the wooden coffin nor the skeletal remains were authentic. Someone - undoubtedly that Colonel Vyse and his cronies - had brought into the pyramid a coffin dating from about 2,000 years after Menkara had lived, and bones from the even much later Christian times, and put the two together in an unabashed archæological fraud.

The current theories regarding the pyramids' builders are anchored to an even greater extent on the discovery of the name Khufu inscribed in hieroglypics within a long-sealed compartment within the Great Pyramid and thus apparently establishing the identity of its builder. Unnoticed has gone the fact that the discoverer of that inscription was the same Colonel Vyse and his assistants (the year was 1837). In The Stairway to Heaven [the Second Book of The Earth Chronicles] we have put together substantial evidence to show that the inscription was a forgery, perpetrated by its 'discoverers'. At the end of 1983, a reader of that book came forward to provide us with family records showing that his great-grandfather, a master mason named Humphries Brewer, who was engaged by Vyse to help use gunpowder to blast his way inside the pyramid, was an eyewitness to the forgery and, having objected to the deed, was expelled from the site and forced to leave Egypt altogether!

In The Stairway to Heaven we have shown that Khufu could not have been the builder of the Great Pyramid because he had already referred to it as existing in his time in a stela he had erected near the pyramids; even the Sphinx, supposedly erected by the next-after successor of Khufu, is mentioned in that inscription.

Now we find that pictorial evidence from the time of the Pharaohs of the very first dynasty - long before Khufu and his successors - conclusively shows that these early kings had already witnessed the Giza marvels..." (pp.135-6.)

Despite this evidence, not only school and university textbooks and tourists' handbooks but a numerical majority of egyptologists in England, Italy, Egypt and elsewhere still cling to the familiar falsehoods. This is not to the credit of education at any level, and certainly cannot be good.

Context

CARL NYLANDER writes in The Deep Well - Archæology and the Life of the Past (Pelican Books 1971, pp. 13-21): "When a person devotes himself to a study of the past… he senses more and more strongly the existence of a vertical axis in the scheme of existence. When one thinks about it, what vertiginous depths there are in every ordinary action, in every thought, every movement of love! What an accumulated debt of gratitude behind our thoughtless enjoyment of comfort, a thought, a picture or a note, at every turn of a page in a book! What accumulated ancient difficulties, disappointments and conquests! How many fears are not in our fear, griefs in our grief, loves in our love! It is as if voices surround us and everywhere is full of footsteps, movements, tears, caresses and laughter. The story of the past becomes more personal and glides over into the present tense. Finally, the borders between the living and the dead begin to seem blurred and illusory.

The past has been likened to a deep well. By looking over the edge, and by drinking from it, one is constantly drawn towards a renewed sense of the dimension of depth in our immense horizontal world. One feels more strongly the burden of gratitude to the past, a solidarity and sense of affinity with that which so many want to see as something once and for all outstripped and gone. The study of what lies behind us gives a deeper awareness of the value of man and of the tangibles in his long, erring but never futile efforts towards some kind of fulfilment. Above all - apart from all that is mysterious and irrational - this experience of the past gives great security, a widespread sense of communion with the living and with the dead...

Written records often lack information on many of the essential matters which interest us most when we try to understand the conditions of the past. Texts rarely mention trade and economics, social structure, technology, architecture, art, the life of the people and much else. In this, archæological research can often offer a certain clarity...

What we find is... not the word in the air but the theatre stage and the speaker's rostrum; not the music but the flute; not the movements of armies over the battlefield but the weapons, armour and the wounds of the fallen; not the anxiety and struggle against the storm but the sunken ship; not the merchant's calculations or his joy over a good bargain but the exported vases; not the athlete's strenous run and pride in victory but the starting line and the monument of honour; not the terrors of conquest but the burnt-out dwelling; not the grief but the grave...

By carefully recording during the actual excavation where and in what relation the objects and remains of buildings appear, much that is important can be found. On the one hand, we can distinguish what is earlier and what later, in that it appears in a lower or higher stratum or layer. On the other hand, we may record horizontally and see which different types of object and construction can be considered roughly contemporary, as they appear in the same stratum. From finds of a special type, known from other sites, relationships with contemporary but separate communities may be established, and by stratifying a certain type of object, we can identify other objects, of a similar kind found loose or in an obscure context, with the same chronological strata...

Excavation can also provide a great deal of other evidence of great import to the understanding of the past, evidence which does not primarily fall directly within the scope of archæological research. I mean such things as remains of animals and human beings, which are of primary interest to anthropologists, osteologists and zoologists. Or the remains of varieties of corn and other plant life, bits of ore, slag and so on, the investigation of which is the concern of botanists, chemists and geologists. But their results later become an asset to archæology, which has to summarize all observations into a whole picture and try to re-create the lives of vanished people from as many aspects as possible...

It is self-evident that excavations should be carried out with the utmost care. Every excavation involves not only gaining evidence, but also an irrevocable destruction of evidence. An excavation can never be carried out twice, neglected observations can never be retrieved and mistakes cannot be repaired. It is therefore a great responsibility to put one's spade into the earth and then to transfer in a faithful and satisfactory manner the reality of the field to genuine and equally expressive existence on paper."

Relatively to those contexts in which the lessons to be drawn from the above are more analogical than immediate, it may also prove helpful to consider two books by Howard Blum: "Out There" (Simon & Schuster 1990) and "The Gold of Exodus" (Hodder & Stoughton 1998 - subsequent field-studied, however, have invalidated Blum's claim to have located the true Mount Sinai).

Myth

Zecharia Sitchin, introducing himself on screen in 1992 to viewers of Paradox Media Ltd. & Why Not Productions of Switzerland's 1-hour video-film, Are We Alone? (In the Universe), which "is licensed only for non-commercial, private exhibition in homes, stated: "I am Zecharia Sitchin, I devoted a life-time to the study of ancient civilizations, ancient languages, their beliefs, and the knowledge that they had, and the question is, when you study, when you look at all that: Is it myth? Is it mythology? Or did it really happen? [emphasis added] I believe that it all really happened."

José Argüelles is more discriminating, and acknowledges in The Mayan Factor - Path Beyond Technology (Bear & Co., 1987, pp. 149-54): "Of course, it is heretical to voice the thought that the sensory awakedness of the aborigine is preferable to twentieth-century technological comfort, which, in actuality, is a closing off of the sense fields and a narrowing of the perceptions we have of life.... Myth defines the capacity for simultaneous, multi-referential resonance that merges being with being; history is the tendency to limit, measure, and materialize in a uni-referential direction that separates being from being....

The mythic condition constructs from... experience a sacrament or ritual that affirms the bond between light and the greater forces, ultimately the forces of light. The historic mind uses... experience as information that determines practical creature-comfort goals. However, the creature-comfort-seeking aspect of historic consciousness is in actuality the feedback effect of the impulse of DNA to extrude technology. Hence historic consciousness is but a by-product of the larger technological bridging process, moving us from one natural symbiosis to another - from one realm of light to another.

To gain an even deeper level of understanding, let us put forth one more equation: Myth = DNA x Light. In this equation, myth or the mythic condition is the self-sustaining capacity of DNA to directly utilize light - the spectrum of radiant energy - to attain its ends. In the mythic condition, therefore, the psychic resonance between organism and radiant energy is direct and provides both primary nurturance and primary reality. This resonance is dependent upon and intensifies a superior sensory capacity for radiant interactiveness. The experience of the senses - eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body - is not only primary, but attuned to nuances that both convey information and expand delight. In this condition, the need for artificial inducements to pleasure become obstructions to the untrammeled purity of sensory experience per se.

History and the historic condition, by contrast, represent the counter-spin capacity for DNA to artificially maximize its potential in relation to the totality of its host body, the planet, in our case, Earth. This accounts for the extrusion of technology - artificial extensions of the sense organs - to facilitate completion of the larger DNA circuit.

Naturally, to the individual cells of the larger organism, humankind, the greater purpose of the DNA circuit is, at best, dimly perceived. Consequently, most of the individual members tend to rely upon and become addicted to the sensory feedback that depends solely on the artificial technological extensions and environment. For this reason, at the far end of history where we find ourselves today, nature is hard-put to compete with television.... There is a profound need to reawaken the sense fields to their own natural capacities....

The critical tension which we are experiencing in our morphogenetic field is due to the inner contradictions of a paradigm bound by its own beliefs. Dominated by a white, male, neo-protestant priesthood defending its scientific 'objectivity' through planetary political power plays - this paradigm paralysis is in reality a reflection of the dissonant shifting of the Earth...."

Myth according to Jean Chevalier & Alain Gheerbrant's A Dictionary of Symbols (translated by John Buchanan-Brown, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994, pp. 689-90) can be understood as "a dramatization of the inner life. Other interpreters... have regarded myths as the past life and history of peoples, with their heroes and their exploits being in some sense restaged symbolically on the level of gods and their adventures. Myth, therefore, becomes a dramatization of social life, poeticized history. Other commentators, especially philosophers, 'regard them as a collection of very ancient symbols, originally intended to enfold philosophic dogma and ethical ideas, of which the meaning has been lost'... For Plato they were a means of translating what derived from opinion and not from scientific certainty. Whatever the system of interpretation, they help to enlighten one dimension of human reality and show the symbol-making side of the imagination at work..."

G. A. (S.) Gaskell explains in his Dictionary of Scripture and Myth (New York: Dorset Press, 1988, p.522) that Mythology "contains the symbolism of Divine emanation from the Absolute, and manifestation of Spirit and Matter in Time and Space throughout the cycle of Life: the symbolism of the origin and growth of the Soul, the descent of Spirit into Matter in the process of Involution, followed by the ascent of Spirit from Matter in the process of Evolution: the symbolism of the five planes of being, and of the higher and lower natures, and of the four soul-bodies: the symbolism of the struggle in the soul between the Divine principle or Self and the lower principle or not-Self; and also of a great variety of unapparent activities."

Compare:

^{Shakespeare, King John, Act III, sc.iii.}

As Robert Browning expressed it:

Symbol

"Thou newly illumined One, a share in the resurrection has fallen to thee, through this initiation into the mysteries of grace... May what thou hast beheld I+N symbol now become thine in reality." (Pseudo-Athanasius, De Pascha, quoted by Hugo Rahner in The Christian Mystery and the Pagan Mysteries, in The Mysteries, Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, 1971 printing, p.398.)t

A Coherent Pattern of Relations

DANTE ALIGHIERI, The Divine Comedy, A New Translation and Introduction by James Finn Cotter (New York: Amity House):

"The journey Dante offers us in his Divine Comedy stretches before us from the dark wood¹ of its beginning, down through the chasm of hell, up the terraces of purgatory, and into the spheres of heaven, as a record of a living experience. Opening in bitterness, mounting through hope, and ending in vision, the poet insists that the person he is now, fashioning the poem, is the person who then walked into and out of that other world. His work is more than fiction - the poet insists on this acceptance - it is a literal recapitulation of what happened to him.

• ¹ The forest of Broceliande comes to mind.

What happened to him, in turn, is meant to happen to the reader - otherwise, why write the poem? The 14,320 lines are the poet's free gift to the reader: what Dante has already experienced awaits each one who sits down with this journey in words before him or her. He challenges each one to be the wayfarer here and now that he was then and there...

^{Inferno XX, 19-20}

... Two problems confront us today in reading the Divine Comedy as an account of a real inner experience (Dante's contemporaries did not have these problems): the prejudice that poetry like myth is purely fictitious and the shocked feeling that many scenes of the Inferno are too cruel and even mean-spirited. The first misunderstanding dates back to Plato's dismissal of poets from his ideal Republic because they imitate illusions rather than reality. Plato himself expressed the true possibilities for poetic myth in his Phædrus - and he was a poet himself - when he shows that myth, rightly inspired, may embody the archetypal Good... The creative self [in Dante] had to overcome the dynamic and practical, or orient that activity back to the East, the moment of dawn when his life moved out of the dark woods and into the light. The right-side of his brain, the image-making and intuitive force, had to dominate in this most reasonable and methodical of men - or rather, the two sides had to fuse and answer the higher call, the summons of the Muses, his muses, the three female spirits of his original vision.

In Canto II of the Inferno, Dante reveals the eternal origin of his historic journey. He has his guide Virgil say that Beatrice - the poet's love of his younger and idealistic years - came to him on the poet's behalf at the request of Saint Lucia, patron saint of light and seeing, who in turn was responding to a plea from the Virgin Mary. Dante quotes Virgil who quotes Beatrice who quotes Mary and Lucia - a quotation within a quotation within a quotation - as circles inside circles take us to the heart of the poem. At the beginning we touch the end: in an instant there becomes here.

The inspiration of the moment is already complete before it comes to the poet's listening; he has been called before he answers. Notice that the links are all conversations, for the poem itself progresses in a series of interviews, face to face, until the final encounter with G-d in the human person of his Son. Notice, too, that this trinity of feminine requests begins and ends after the poem itself has opened, when panic has already driven the pilgrim back from the barren slope, thwarted by the three beasts that blocked his way: the leopard of greed, the lion of violence, and the she-wolf of intemperance...

What sustained him to attempt such a poem?

The answer lies in the beginning of the poem in the triple summons Dante received on that Good Friday of 1300, a Jubilee year of graces and blessings. Only when the poet rediscovered Beatrice - not as the innocent fascination of his childhhood and adolescence, but as the mature, life-in-death wellspring of his own deep inner life - when he found in her the way to symbolize and express the visionary journey, only then could he resolve to write as a poet and to live as a man the power of the original vision. The second canto, then, really does reveal the origin of Dante's quest through the intercession of Mary, Lucia, and Beatrice. At last he was able to answer the invitation and begin to write the poem, the whole work before him already known and possessed, just waiting to be told, flowing from him like a river of words.

The wellspring of Beatrice held the sources of the mystical life. She possessed the beatific vision since she was already in the presence of the light seen here only through a glass darkly. She lived in Dante now - his higher, deeper self. He had known her in life and loved her: now he would know and love her in death, beyond death, in herself as a mirror of divine Light. With this consciousness -crystallized at the deepest level of being - of spiritual realities, of the individuality of G-d discovered in another human being, and of the three divine persons ever present within his one soul - the trinity of women reflecting the Trinity of G-d - the mystic becomes sensitive to spiritual beings of all sorts. An awareness of evil grows with an appreciation of the Good. After one has been swept into the third heaven, the earth wears a darker look...

We have to discover the communion of sinners if we are to reach the communion of saints. It takes a visionary to see the wealth of wicked transfigurations that permeate any given culture - and some eras, as Dante suggests, are much worse than others...

Not only does Dante's poem have a circular structure... but reading the poem must be a circular experience. Since Dante the poet only started to write after Dante the man had looked into the Circle and Centre of G-d, so the reader has no linear work to read in order to get through and finish the poem. The Comedy intends us to find our way through its labyrinth in as many ways as there are readers, by returning to the beginning at the end, by studying one sin or one virtue or one saintly example intently, by comparing one canto with its parallel in another canticle, by turning back as well as forward, by moving around within the poem until we know every stone and leaf of the landscape and every intonation of the human voices that call out to speak to us.

Such is the ideal reader Dante has in mind. In a sense, James Joyce in our century expected the same dedication and response. Amazingly, both authors have received such readership. But Dante does not have the specialist or scholar in mind as, perhaps, Joyce must, given the nature of his temperament and times. No, Dante wanted the Tuscans of his day to see as he had seen the distortions sin causes in our makeup as human beings, the beauty that the practice of virtue fashions in the human spirit, and the joy that peering beyond our small world into the vast rose of the universe brings to the beholder...

The way to vision is a negative way, as the mystics have shown us, a journey into not-knowing, isolation, error and trial. No one wrote the poem for Dante, and no one will read it in your place. The other side of gnostic insight, guidance, and assurance is the absence of all these as we go:

^{Inferno XXIII, 1-2}

... This sense of solitude in life is the hidden secret of the poem…

Dante reminds us that it is the world of our own seasons and living that concerns him and that the memory he has of these events is now to be ours. Out of his own solitude, he speaks to ours, reminding us that the only difference between the people here and there is death.

The damned are never alone and they have been denied the greatest privacy of all - that of their own death: 'These people have no hope of again dying.' Dante's poem, then, is the mystic's experience beyond death, the glory of vision and the agony of not yet being partaker completely in that beatitude. It is the most Christian of poems because it is grounded in the resurrection, and not simply as life after death but as the presence of the risen life already in lives transformed by grace. There has become here, then is now.

'Halfway in the journey we are living' - each reader sets out on the same road. Dante begins his poem not with 'I' but 'we'. The darkness and light take shape within each self, the voices reach only these ears, and the images form only to these eyes. After writing the Comedy, the poet himself became another reader like the rest of us. We join him in meeting that world he left behind him..." (pp.1-10)

"The spirituality of Purgatory is decidedly modern in its emphasis on the individual as the focus of G-d's salvation plan. Humanity, not in the abstract but in the person of Dante, must change if history is to cease its threshing tumult of upheaval and selfish pursuit. Dante must first set his own house in order before leading his readers to straighten out their lives. He has already done so, and the poem now universalizes the experience of one man so that all may come to the same transformation of life, making the crooked straight and turning the reader around in conversion.

Through overt and hermetic teaching, Dante wants the reader to discover his or her own humanity in the poem. In his letter to Can Grande della Scala, the author states that the subject of his work is 'man as he is subject to the reward or punishment of Justice in the exercise of his free will with its merits and demerits.'...

Three definitions of man may be seen operating in the Divine Comedy: the Aristotelian view of man as a rational animal, which explains how those in hell have allowed the beast in them to prevail; the Platonic approach to man as embodied spirit, which explains how those in purgatory struggle to let their souls direct their lives; and the psalmist's claim that man is a little less than the angels, which prepares us for the place the blessed assume beside the angelic choirs. Of the three definitions, the middle one contains the most appealing balance between extremes, for it emphasizes the transcendental aspirations which Purgatory describes with such rich variety and striking originality...

Christian gnosis or knowledge, according to Clement of Alexandria, involves 'a perfecting of man as man.' This gnosis of divine things conforms to human nature and to the word of G-d inspiring the mind and heart. It comes through the senses or directly from above through intuitive inspiration:

^{Purgatory XVII, 13-18}

An inner guiding light gives gnosis its spiritual character and destination so that what is learned outwardly through the examples and experience forms an interior image which can take the form of a dream. The pilgrim learns his way by both outer and inner imaging. The Purgatory is a mystical school of instruction, scholastic in its structure, practical and psychological in its application. Divine and human art are brought together..." (pp. 230-32)

"Greater than the power to see visions is the gift of interpreting them, Saint Augustine claims. Pharoah has dreams but Joseph gives them meaning; Belshazzar sees the hand-writing but Daniel tells him its significance. Dante's vision of Holy and Easter Weeks in 1300 raised him to mystic heights, but how was one to re-visit such an apex of human consciousness and make it real to others? In the opening of Paradise the poet sounds a note that he will ring often again in the lines that follow:

^{Paradise I, 4-6}

... Dante's task is to put the transcendent into speech until G-d grants others the similar grace of rising, here and now, above the human condition:

^{Paradise I, 70-72}

Dante employs the verb 'transumanar' to express the action of 'transhumanizing' or moving above the earthly state into the heavenly realm. Like Saint Paul, the wayfarer does not know how he ascends, 'whether in the body or out of the body' (2 Co 12:2).

... The earth? It recedes into insignificance.

The poet has turned the pilgrimage upside down and inside out, from a universe that takes the earth as its starting-point to a universe that offers an Archimedean point outside space and time, a total change in gravitation from the Satanic pull of the Inferno to the divine attraction of Paradise. This other-worldly reorientation takes place in human consciousness - Dante's mystical vision intends to transform his readers in the here and now, in the course of moving through the Comedy... Dante has moved the earth with the fulcrum of his vision: first it moved him as an actual turning around of his life in 1300 and then it moved him again to write the poem...

Three visions of Christ occur in the journey through paradise: the cross seen in Mars in Canto XIV, the triumph of the risen Lord in Canto XXIII, and the vision of the human Jesus in the centre of the circle of G-dhead in the final canto. These experiences complete the initial sight of the divine and human natures of Christ shining in the eyes of Beatrice as she gazes on the half-eagle, half-lion griffin at the climax of Purgatory XXXI. Seen against the ruby-red glow of Mars, the white light of the cross within the circle, traced by the radiant spirits glittering as they procession through the sky, surely forms one of Dante's most brilliant configurations:

^{Paradise XIV, 103-105}

... Just as Lucia prepared Dante for the ascent of Mount Purgatory by raising him to the threshold during his first night of sleep on the mountain, so Beatrice introduces the poet to the Queen of Heaven who with them made up the trinity of women, in Canto II of the Inferno, responsible for Dante's salvation.

Three moments of vision make up the movement of the final canto, climaxing in the last face-to-face meeting with the Incarnate Son. In the first moment, Dante views the world as composed of numerous pages bound together in a single volume within the eternal light:

^{Paradise XXXIII, 85-87}

The image is all important because, the poet states, he believes he saw in it 'the universal pattern of this knot' that makes the whole cohere in one. The famous metaphor, in fact, contains a meaning too often missed. The volume here is a sacred text: in the book of nature we are to read the Word of G-d, the Lord revealed in the book of the Gospels.

A codex of the Gospels commonly began with a depiction of Christ in glory, Alpha-Omega, seated on the throne of majesty and circled by an oval mandorla around which stood the four figures of the Apocalypse, here representing the four evangelists. In his hand Jesus holds the book of the Gospels which is himself. The cover is studded with precious jewels. Each individual page inside shares in the beauty and unity declared from without, but each makes up only one part of the whole. Thus the meaning of what is revealed cannot be grasped in one passage or in one human life; it is gathered up in one volume, the person of Jesus. Like the cover nature too glitters in earth and sky with the variegated light of the maker. The book then is not a static symbol for Dante but alive with colour, speech, and motion; it is a portal into the real and a container of the treasury of heaven.

The second moment of vision comes in the form of the three circles of Light; they are of 'one dimension and three different colours':

^{Paradise XXXIII, 118-120}

The poet confesses that his words fail to match his conception of the Trinity. All he can manage is to exclaim in the form of a prayer:

^{Paradise XXXIII, 124-126}

... The face the poet sees at the end of the poem is the true image of G-d... The whole appears illuminated by a divine effulgence suffusing the countenance and by a harmonious inner light radiating from within the G-d-man. Around him the halo is inscribed with the revealed Name: 'The Being.' Dante's last face to face meeting sums up the eternal art made human by the Artist Himself." (pp. 436-44)

^{Paradise XXXIII, 1-75, 121-123}

"We are the company we keep in our reading... Dante creates a new conversation with each reader he meets, speaking of things unmentioned in his lines, but part of what reading does is to impart such secrets to each person setting out in solitude along that winding path.

May this translation, reader, help you to read more carefully and clearly the lines - and between the lines - of the Divine Comedy" (p.10)...

And don't fall for the old excuse that you already have enough reading material. Life is too short to play it safe... J. F. Cotter's Introductions and Notes to each part of the Comedy provide an outline account of Dante's life but, of course, much more remains to be said:

"In Dante's Beatrice, and especially in the general symbolism of the Love's Lieges (an organization to which Dante belonged), we find again the theme of the supernatural woman; and in love, which motivates her to help Dante from heaven, we can detect a similarity with the theme of predestination or election." (Julius Evola, The Mystery of the Grail - Initiation and Magic in the Quest for the Spirit (translated from the Italian by Guido Stucco, Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International 1997, p.51) However, "Dante's purification process was less informed by the spirit of a heroic tradition than by the spirit of a theological-contemplative tradition... When he accuses the Church (more or less like Luther, a few centuries later) he blames her for her corruption, namely, for her being mundane and for fostering political intrigues; he doesn't accuse her with the assumption that even if the Church had remained the pure and incorrupted representative of Christ's original teaching she would still have been an obstacle, since Christianity's essence would have amounted to a lunar spirituality (ascetic-contemplative at best, unfit to be the supreme reference point for an integral traditional restoration." (op.cit., pp.51-52) That is true, less evident is Evola's associated claim (loc.cit.) that "Dante's view is limited by his Christian faith."

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