Mysticism

Snakes Alive!

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Serpent worship in some form has permeated nearly all parts of the earth.

Manly P. Hall

The 20th century author and mystic, Manly P. Hall then cites these examples of ‘serpent worship’ in his best known book, ‘The Secret Teachings of All Ages’.

Serpent mounds of the American Indians

Python; the great snake of the Greeks

Druids; sacred serpents

Scandinavia; Midgard snake

Burma Siam Cambodia; Nagas

Jews; brazen serpent

Orpheus; mystic serpent

Greek; snakes at the Oracle of Delphi

Egyptian Temples; sacred snakes, Uraeus coiled on foreheads of Pharaohs and priests

But clearly, from this general idea, there is plenty of detail to fill in. For ‘worship’ and ‘the use of symbols to express something greater than words’, are very different things. None of above list, in my view, are examples of worship of snakes as minor or major deities. They function rather as ‘tools’ for expression of energy and ‘symbols’ of natural law in some way.

Perhaps if we examine the snake as a symbol first, it will help us understand the root and branch of what universal and cultural expressions are being made.

The snake is of course a reptile and different from the mammalian kingdom by laying eggs and having cold blood. We know that reptiles are one of the earliest forms of life and are quite distinct from homo sapiens sapiens. However there is a ‘reptilian’ part of our brains that organises our most basic instincts and therefore we are not so far apart.

The snake moves in a most compelling way that even today makes human jump out of their way instinctively. Most snakes are poisonous and this memory is both in our bodies and our minds.

We should not be surprised that this poisonous aspect of snakes gives them power beyond their size, in fact the smaller snakes are often the most dangerous to humans. Alternatively the snakes that outsize humans several times are able to coil their bodies around us and crush us to death.

We should expect them therefore to be associated with ‘evil’ in our minds.

In addition the shape of snakes and how they move is fascinating to watch. They move on land and water as a ‘standing wave’, the tail taking exactly the same path as the rest of the body and the head.

Waves express energy as static and active states. We watch alternating current on our instruments as a sine wave and are immediately reminded of a snakes powerful and scintillating shape. They appear to move without moving and like energy have an ‘invisibility’ about them.

On a grand scale we see snakes represented in the landscape as rivers curling through flat plains and underground as coiling springs rising to the surface or plunging into the ‘underworld’.

Most compelling of all is the way in which this ‘earth energy’ or ‘chi’, ‘ki’ or ‘prana’, is coiled at the base of the human spine. Through yogic practices (the path to union with the Divine) as described by Arthur Avalon in his classic book ‘Serpent Power‘, human beings can experience the uncoiling of this energy vertically through the chakras and nadis associated with the spinal column and it’s rampant tower of nerves.

When we have ‘spine tingling’ experiences through realisation or fear, we can feel this primal energy and experience being intensely alive.

Not only in these peak moments but also the every day health of the body depends on the balance and even flow of prana as expressed in our every breath. Becoming unwell may have many causes but the return to health involves re-balancing of the powerful creative and destructive processes of living beings.

When we watch waves building and crashing on a beach we are able to tune to this understanding of a most basic truth of nature. Life is given and taken away. The caduceus is a rod entwined by counter coiling serpents is a symbol of this used even today in medicine.

Perhaps the most intriguing and unspoken parts of the human body in which the serpent is expressed, is the male penis which is able to coil and stand erect like a cobra. In it’s standing moments it is able to literally express Prana in the life creating process as a most god-like creative experience of the human body. It literally creates the life of a new being and gives a surge of energy (experienced as ecstasy) so powerful that it enables a soul to be ‘kick started’ into this physical world.

The Ancient Egyptians depict the standing penis unselfconsciously in their wall paintings, but certain prudish visitors to these depictions chose to deface and remove them whenever they could! Perhaps they were influenced by the story in Genesis told in gilded form to wide eyed children.

The story of Old Testament the serpent in the Garden of Eden perpetuates the negative associations of the serpent as a symbol.

But the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat from it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. Genesis 2:17

And the argument of the serpent made to Eve giving her reason to disregard God’s command is clever (and reminds us of the ‘fake news’ of today!)

For God doth know that in the day that ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Genesis 3:5

Interestingly the first example we are given of knowing good and evil is Adam and Eve realising they are naked and feeling this as an ‘evil’ to be redressed by ‘doing good’. They make ‘aprons’ to cover their genitals – a tradition echoed in the Masonic symbols of modern times.

Certainly Adam’s ‘serpent’ is so banished as rapidly as is tried today to the ‘fake news’ distributor.

We might also interpret that this sacred ‘knowledge’ is both a curse and a blessing. For accompanying the descent of human beings from eternal life (Heaven) into the physical world (a garden), they do indeed acquire the awareness of duality represented by the two extremes ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

The dualistic form of thinking is a serpent with so many heads, humans cannot work out which one is real and we are turned to stone; made useless. This understanding is contained in the Greek myth of the goddess Medusa with her head made of serpents.

Psychologically we have descended from the bliss of ‘oneness with God’ to a psychotic state in which we cannot determine the difference between dream and reality, happiness and sadness, toil and rest, gain and loss, good and bad. Our lives are lived in this constant confusion created by a dualistic outlook; believing all things are polarised.

We have to look to the Eastern religions for the veil of this dualistic perception to be lifted. In Zen Buddhism they would only see the whole serpent, not it’s head or it’s tail or it’s body. The real world is a cosmic Unity; a place described as the original Garden of Eden or state of bliss.

Some alchemical gnostics in the West knew this truth and the symbol of the serpent swallowing it’s tail is the expression of this truth, as not told in the Bible.

The serpent’s tale is then one of great complexity throughout history, well beyond what Manly P. Hall describes as being an ‘object of worship’. It appears as a figure holding two serpents in the manner of a pair of scales, with as much regularity as any other. The scales represent objective judgment; the giving of balanced views and feelings which we call wisdom.

It tells us we are not necessarily ruled only by our heads and the compulsions that we imagine derive from our thoughts, but rather we are a function of the coiling energy paths and nexuses in our own bodies. These are neither right nor wrong, good nor bad, but merely the experience of being neither an unborn human being, nor a dead one.

The Cave of Light

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Roman Barcelona – picture Eportfolios@McCaulay

There is a city plan used by the Romans which is a circle divided vertically and horizontally into four sections. The divisions form streets aligned to the four points of the compass.

The circular form aligned to the cardinal directions had been used by many other cultures before, most notable being the great Henge’s found around the world. Research into these has revealed their astronomical alignments predicted precisely the solar, lunar and stellar cycles. The motivation for understanding these cycles was to appease the instinctive and intuitive desire to be in harmony with nature. Ancient civilisations depended on the cycles of nature for their next meal and their most holy festivals.

There are four principle solar annual events; the equinoxes and solstices. Using the solar calendar the winter solstice occurs in December, the summer solstice in June, the spring equinox in March and the autumn equinox in September; on around 21st and 22nd days of these months.

These correspond with four sacred festivals that originate in ancient times and are celebrated to this day, even if they have morphed from their origins.

In the most simple way we can divide the six months from September to March as being ‘winter’ and the subsequent months as ‘summer’. There are six months of ‘darkness’ and six months of ‘light’ in the broadest of terms.

In the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, the goddess Aphrodite or Venus lived in the light or ‘Heaven’ and Persephone in darkness or ‘Hades’. Both were in love with Adonis and appealed to Zeus to decide how they could share him. His decree was that they should have him for six months of each year.

Aphrodite – picture Smithsonian Magazine

The figure of Adonis is in this way critical to understanding the importance of the movement of the seasons in ancient times. Nature lived and died quite literally, as did their harvests, from these forces. If the harvests failed, famine turned nature and cities into wastelands.

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory and desire, stirring

dull roots with spring rain

The Wasteland – The Burial of the Dead – (opening lines) by T.S. Eliot

This uncertainty placed enormous importance for people to give proper respect to the ‘gods’ and nature through ritual worship.

Within the solar year are overlaid the twelve ‘moons’ or months within each solar cycle. The phases of the moon and sun combined were known then and to this day, to govern the process from seed to harvest. This is naturally between spring and autumn, the exact length of this season being determined by latitude. Nevertheless, the spring equinox is a date used today to fix the date of the festival of Easter. This is the Sunday after the first full moon after the 21st or 22nd March, proving the importance of the moon combined with the sun in their influence for humans and everything on earth.

We know this because of the plethora of ancient gods and goddess whose lifespans fitted into these celestial cycles. Because spring is the ‘rebirth’ of nature there are corresponding stories incorporating the ‘death and resurrection’ cycle. In the Christian calendar this is known as ‘Easter’ but it is known that that the goddess Astarte preceded this in the ancient Near East. Much later Ostara ( medieval Germanic) gave rise to the traditional Easter symbols of the moon gazing hare and eggs.

Ostara by Johannes Gehrts

What is less well known in our current times is the antithesis of this ‘spirit of new life’. There is a tradition of the deaths of various ancient gods and goddesses at this time; the goring of Adonis by a boar, Dionysus with the first leaves from grape vines, the rape of Persephone and the death of Hyacinthus. Each of these however is given a heavenly reprieve by a resurrection. Adonis was turned into a Myrtle tree, Persephone released from Hades for six months of the year and Hyacinthus turned into a spring flower, the Hyacinth by Apollo – the Solar deity.

Apollo and Hyacinth – picture Wikiart

It was natural therefore when the Roman Church fixed the date for the death and resurrection of the Christ Jesus, to choose the beginning of spring in the celestial manner described above. The church fathers did not need to know about the strong and balanced influence of the sun and full moon at this time of year, but relied upon the old method of supplanting old ways with a new religion using the previous festivals.

Adonis is an interesting mythological character as for many scholars his festival occurred in spring. In the city of Byblos (in modern Lebanon) where he was born and worshipped, the river ran red each year with the spring rains mixed with red earth. This fertility symbol and literal fertility for the fields, remind us of the menstrual cycle in women, bearer of eggs; nature’s cycle is the same as the human cycle.

And yet, according to Rudolph Steiner in his lecture on Easter*, the ‘Festival of Adonis’ was celebrated at the time of the autumn equinox rather than spring.

(*available on You Tube)

Numerous ancient temples (the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, Egypt) and dolmens (New Grange, Ireland), are aligned to allow the solstice rays of sun to penetrate an entrance passage into a womb like chamber and fill it with life giving light.

Abu Simbel solar solstice – picture La Vanguardia

Steiner describes the ‘Feast of Adonis’ as being conducted by women in pagan societies. They would sow seeds like cress, on a thin layer of soil in a broken pot shard. After tending them during the spring, the summer drought would kill the plants. After two days of ceremonial mourning, these were ceremonially processed on the third day to the sea or a nearby lake to be immersed as an ‘image’ of Adonis. Adonis is therefore a tragic god who is ‘born to die’ as much later was written into the story of the Christ Jesus. Further evidence is contained in Sir James Fraser’s prodigious work The Golden Bough (an anthropological study of Mediterranean religions) claiming the Jesus is a fertility god in the lineage of Adonis.

The Entrance Stone to the Garden Tomb – picture Inspiration Cruises and Tours

The references to dying processes taking three days, is described by Steiner as being a reference to an ancient understanding of the human dying process which also takes three days. The first day completes the death of the physical body, the second the ‘ether’ body and the third the ‘astral’ body. This is an theosophical categorisation similar to the ‘body, soul and spirit’ of the Hermeticists or ‘animal, vegetable and mineral’ of the Idealists. Either way, man and nature take three days for the process of dying or ‘transitioning’.

It is a fact that the dying sun the during winter solstice, stops moving on the horizon for three days, before the days lengthen again. The circular stone rolled over the tomb in which the body of Christ Jesus was moved after a similar number of days, referencing him to be a solar deity; a ‘sun of God’.

The true dates of the life of Christ are not stated in the Bible, although there are a few clues. If we are persuaded to imagine the nativity to take place in the winter, then there are suggestions that state otherwise. The first is that shepherds were out in the fields at night, indicating that they were ‘lambing’ – a season that all farmers know. A ‘census’ of people is unlikely to be held in the dark and cold winter months for practical reasons; the Romans were practical administrators. The ‘star in the east’ is likely to be Venus which is well known by agricultural communities, to rise in the early morning in the East in the spring.

Nastrium Egg – picture The Ornament Emporium

Finally, it is curious how men travelling east were following a star appearing in the east. It is probably, in my view, that this information is coded and the direction east indicates a time of year rather than direction of travel; after all, their direction of travel is not important information to progress the story and a good story teller would omit this. It is only included to complete the sub-narrative.

The east road of the city is of course corresponding to spring on the solar calendar and the time of year you would expect a ‘sun god’ to be born. So, whether the ‘Christ Mass’ is held in the winter, spring, summer or autumn is open to interpretation and would not be contradicted by the Bible.

What modern observers would do well to recognise is not the dogma but the symbolism of the Christian churches. The ‘mass’ is confidentially encouraging congregations to drink blood and eat human flesh on the solar day of the week whilst facing the rising sun.

For me, the symbols are only partly transcendent, as we feel in the energy of spring, while carrying more than a hint of the macabre death and the dying sun/son.

That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

poem: The Wasteland 1922 – The Burial of the Dead – T.S. Elliot

Seeing is Unbelieving

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Seeing is Unbelieving

There is an intriguing eye test in which the subject looks at a cross and black dot spaced out on a sheet of paper. As the paper is drawn closer, whilst staring at the cross, the black dot disappears.

The explanation we know to be the ‘blind spot’ in the retina where the optic nerve enters and fans out. What is intriguing is that the brain is constantly filling in this ‘blind spot’ with information that we are not aware of.

It is the same with white ceilings. If there is a blemish or a stained patch, the brain will ‘see’ the ceiling as perfectly white. What we see is therefore, in some degree, doubtful.

Perhaps it will help us if we define ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’. Most of the time we ‘look’ without discernment. If however we focus our mind on what we are looking at, more information and understanding will become apparent. Artists learn to ‘see’ in order to render every aspect of the subject they are describing to an extraordinarily high degree.

The visual apparatus of humans can be trained, but we should also realise that what the brain does with the information is highly selective.

When two soccer teams play a match, the supporters identify with their own team. If there is an incident where the referee has to make a decision in favour of one side or the other, both sets of ‘witnesses’ i.e. supporters, will be highly biased towards their own side. They will talk about the incident and the injustice of the referee’s decision for weeks afterwards, based on their own biased view.

picture credit;
The Nutmeg News

Witnesses in criminal cases are notoriously biased and the justice system has to record what they saw as objectively as possible. When two witnesses present differing versions of events, which is the truth?

In one extreme case when people on a bus witnessed an incident in Israel, the police used a hypnotist to access what they saw in extraordinary detail. Our brains retain most of what we see, it is just that we blank most of it out unconsciously. Hypnotism retrieves this information in an unbiased way, so that for instance, car registration plates will be remembered.

Unfortunately, we do not have hypnotists to solve our family arguments about who said what to whom and how long this has been going on. Neither do whole nations have access to truthful descriptions of what is going on in the world and dictators exploit this.

It is possible to create a narrative so extreme that it can even be used to start a war with a neighbour. Witnesses to events in the war, even professional reporters, are today regarded as suspect in their reporting because even the media can either intentionally or unintentionally, select the truth according to their editor’s wishes.

picture credit; World Press Freedom Index

Even the photographs and videos are no longer able to be trusted as software is available to alter them.

All of this happens in what we call ‘the physical world’ but of course what we see is not always physical. Take an audience watching a film in a cinema. They are certainly not watching anything ‘real’ in the conventional sense, but they will be completely transfixed by the narrative being played out before them. There may be some self awareness retained as the popcorn in handed around which is similar to the way hypnotised subjects experience what they are viewing, but their focus is mainly in a virtual reality.

Hypnotised subjects reveal much about the complexity of how visual information reaches the mind and how it is interpreted. There is one case referred to in Michael Talbot’s book The Holographic Universe, in which a man is hypnotised and told that his teenage daughter is invisible to him. She stands in front of him and much to the delight of the audience and his giggling daughter, he swears he cannot see her. Then the hypnotists takes out a unique watch and presses it against the back of the young lady. He asks the father details about the watch which he squintsat and reports correctly everything he is asked about the watch.

There is no explanation for this phenomenon, but clearly it shows us that what we see is far more extensive and complicated in it’s mechanics than the diagrams of the eye that we study at school, explain.

In a lifetime a person may experience visual ‘discontinuities’. These generally fall into the concept of ‘extra sensory perception’ such as seeing ghosts, spirits, poltergeist events, psychokinesis. Lorna Burne is a modern mystic who has written books about how she has seen and interacted with angels and archangels since she was a child. Her whole visual world includes angels and spirits which the ‘ordinary’ observer is completely unaware.

picture credit; Southerbys

Is it right to dismiss those with ‘second sight’ and their experiences or should society be more tolerant and inclusive towards people who in historical times would be regarded as either saints or witches?

Ironically, history has always taught us not to believe our eyes. The whole concept of an invisible God enables us to ‘look inward’ into our hearts and minds. A God who is never revealed is not open to be disproved or proved and yet, humans have sustained the experience of the ‘godhead’ across aeons and continents. The ancient Greeks experienced a world in which minor gods revealed themselves to mortals, and their stories, artefacts and architecture give vivid and consistent accounts of each and their powers to help or obstruct human endeavour.

The Ancient Greeks also believed in the idea that the eye ‘sees’ by projecting energy at the subject in the manner of a torch in a darkened room. Mind was an integral part of the process of seeing to the extent that the observed physical world is capable of being created by the observer.

Quantum physics has rested it’s gaze on exactly this probability; that the observer alters the events that take place right before our eyes. It supports the ‘idealistic’ philosophy in which mind has control of the material Universe. We understand that the Creator or Mind initially created the Universe by thought alone. Now scientists can step down through the different scales in which energy and matter perform their visual effects, and conclude that they personally are part of the experiment.

It is intriguing therefore as ordinary people, to become more sceptical about the ‘reality’ of our world of physicality and factor in our dreams, memories, intentions, ideals, beliefs, expectations, preconceptions in an attempt to grasp the slippery fish we call our world.

Prayer and Miracles

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Most people have some idea of what a prayer is. They will either pray on the basis of this belief or not. In the West young people are encouraged to pray in school and in some families at home as well. But as common as prayer is, I believe the question is rarely asked, ‘how does it work?’


I do not believe that prayer is a method of ‘getting things’ for yourself. It might be appealing to keep ‘requests to God’ as a back stop to failure in life, but that was never part of the deal with the Almighty. If we remember Genesis, part of the punishment for obtaining knowledge is freewill. That is, if we foul up it’s entirely our fault.


The Arabs have a saying; ‘Trust in God but tie up your camel first’. So when people ask the question, ‘how could God let this happen?’ they are imagining a perfect universe in which God is an autocratic ruler. That would be simple, but turning oneself into a victim and apportioning blame outside of oneself is a philosophy doomed to disatisfaction. It should be comon sense that camels will walk off on their own if not tied to a palm tree. We are responsible for our own actions and that was always the deal.


If you can agree with this philosophy of personal account and blameworthyness, then it is easy to adjust to the reality that God will not respond to prayers asking for earthly personal rewards.
To an intellectual where words are all that there is, this is an unsatisfactory state of affairs. They might become so frustrated by the lack of answers that they form the conclusion that ‘there is no God’. It’s logical but of course, logic does not run the Universe. If it did there would be no access to and need for spirituality.


In my own view and probably others, prayer does create change but an inward change, not outward. If you examine the palmed hands and prostration and kneeling common to many religions, it is obvious that a submissive posture and quiet mind is paramount to effective prayer. The effect of this is like plucking a guitar string in one room and somewhere else another guitar string chimes in sympathy. This is the resonant universe in which all things are connected quiet naturally and without effort. In this way, I argue, we are connected to the all powerful Creator God however you imangine that ‘Mind’ to be.


If you look at sacred imagary throughout history, minor gods and angelic forms are depicted carrying and playing musical instruments. The classic example is angels with harps, flutes and even reeds in the wind are metaphors for resonance between God and the physical world.


Prayer, in any religion, can have the effect of stilling the human mind and spirit to become in harmony with the God-self, that is the tiny part of the Creative Mind within ourselves. This is hidden reason why Muslims are required to pray five times a day, to keep the inner Divine strings humming constantly.


Resonance, to paraphrase the prophet of Islam, Mohammed, (sas) can move mountains.


Tibetan monks in 1939 were recorded by Kjellson levitating huges rocks up a mountainside to build a monastery. They used the power of their long musical horns arranged in a specific pattern and backed by rows of humans in prayer.


By becoming One with the Universe we can create events that we want.
This is part of the paradoxical nature of being alive in which a human with freewill can direct that freewill to union with the Creator of freewill and thus a ‘connection’ that is not connected…as in two strings vibrating in harmony.


So we move on to miracles. I said at the begining that prayer is not a means to get what we want. That was not quite true because there is an exception and that is miracle making.
There are rare moments (and by that I mean very rare) where Divine intervention at a resonant level as described, can make a humble individual ‘all powerful’.

Jesus the Christ was revered for his miracles, some of which are described quite literally in the Holy Bible and some allegorically. An example of a literal miracle is raising Lazarus from the dead, something Jesus was taught to do by the gnostics of the time. An example of an allegorical miracle would be turning water into wine.
In the old testament we have the Israelites being chased by the mighty Egyptian army and trapped by the Red Sea. One faithful follower entered the waters and started to walk. At the point where his head went under water the seas parted.


So if we ignore the allegorical stories about miracles as having another purpose, we can see the common theme that real miracles happen when an individuals or a collective’s very existence is in danger of extinction. It may not happen at a time and in accordance with human desire.


Delay and misdirection are caused by the impurity of our human resonance with God, not the other way around.
As the old saying goes, ‘the pot always calls the kettle black’. So the sooner we stop ignoring or doubting His prescence within each one of us, the sooner our lives will change.

Slay Your Dragon

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Males Gain the Reward of Understanding Feminity and Visa Versa

To understand this essay you have to acknowledge the possibility, at least, of reincarnation. If it cannot be proved it can, at least, not be proved to be untrue.

To my mind you only have to observe natural processes to see that nothing is ever lost or thrown away. All the survival lessons learnt by plants, insects, reptiles, fish and animals are locked away in the DNA locker so that they will ‘rise again’ in the next generation.

In a period of knowledge where the physical is given preference over the energetic, it is understandable that some people think when their bodies expire, so does their consciousness. But because the events are concurrent, there is no reason for your energy body to expire with the physcial body. Why should it, when it has so many lessons gained in it’s lifetime?

Such lessons are like the oak tree that has learnt how to warn neighbouring oak trees of the presence of a root disease in the area. This skill will become part of what all oak trees are able to do. So with humans. Our souls learn lessons and ‘evolve’ naturally for the individual and collective.

If you think this is a ‘fairy story’ then prepare for more bad news. You see, there do be Dragons! When the scientists tell you that dragons are a mythical creature, they are themselves relaying a myth that they have accepted without proof…other than the empirical absence of dragons.

But in the reality of our energy bodies, we all carry a dragon or two. Imagine a soul awaiting rebirth onto this planet. This soul will have been ‘judged’ on arrival in Heaven and certain ‘flaws’ targetted for removal. For an abbreviated list of flaws there are seven known as ‘the deadly sins’…deadly because they can kill you, but more of that later.

To remind you they are; pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

The timing of the rebirth of the soul in need of ‘correction’ is key. The arsenal of personal strengths is contained in the twelve astrological sun signs. Each sign gives a new soul the strength of personality that they did not have in a previous life, such as being overwhelmed by lustful thoughts or greed. Such a soul might be reborn under the restraining discipline of Capricorn ruled by Saturn, governor of time and order.

The subject is huge and the examples examined in great depth but for the purposes of this short essay I shall suggest that you make friends with your astrological strengths and weaknesses and observe both in action as you live your daily life.

It will probably be some quirk or weakness of character that has been apparent since childhood. Perhaps you were spiteful as a child and always hurting other children, so that you had few friends. This is your dragon, alive and well and carried over from your previous lifetime. It is not created by family and social influence, it is not even your ‘nature’ but part of your previous life’s failure to learn.

The good news is that you have an ally. This ‘saviour’ has entertained and lifted the hearts of children in their stories for millennium, it is the ‘knight in shining armour’. This man or woman, has the inner strength of nobility, enshrined in the code of honour of the knight. They also have a suit of armour that protects the soul of the knight from harmful ‘slings and arrows’ that the enemy will send their way. But most useful of all is the proactive tool of the lance. With the aid of speed provided by a fast horse and accuracy provided by training, the lance has the power to penetrate the heart of the dragon and pin its dying body to the ground.

Children understand these ‘fairy stories’ in a manner that many adults do not.

They remember this ancient battle that that have played out over and over in recurring births. They are back on earth because in every previous lifetime the dragon has breathed fire on the knight and cooked him or her until death.

The ‘deadly sin’…the sin that kills a soul’s life chances…is often more powerful, than the noble knight. And yet, and yet, we will eventually prevail because we have as many chances as we need to use the strength of our planet and our birth date, to rise above the flames of the dragon’s breath.

That lifetime is ideally this moment. It may seems strange to you that there is an unusual amount of uncertainty at best, horror at worst, in the world right now. This is the battle field of old Medi-evil times that is the human condition. It has ‘speeded up’ our collective and personal evolution because the controlling power over us which we perceive as ‘time’ is losing it’s grip.

We have to adapt to survive quickly in difficult times and the greatest journey any of us can make is to adopt the knight’s noble code of honour, armour and spear to hunt down our inner dragon.

Once slain, our souls will experience a release that they have never experienced before. Perhaps another dragon will emerge, but hopefully not. Hopefully you will be able to join the line of noble souls that guard the Portcullis of Heaven and all things which have a value beyond the physical world.

Dragons live in the heavy physicality of Earth. Knights live in shining energetic light of Heaven. Where do you want to be?

The Alchemical Dual Gender Dragon –
it is already happening in you

Ancient Light Part Three

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In Part One of this trilogy entitled ‘Ancient Light’, I have described the curious electrostatic qualities of many ancient monolithic structures. They appear to be designed principally to concentrate weight upon piezoelectric rocks. This produces subtle effects that can be sensed by the human body and mind, even to the present day.

I have also examined the unique design of the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Cheops as an example of use of this same principle. The highly selective construction techniques suggest that static electricity was intentionally generated, stored and exploited in the pyramid. The Arc of the Covenant operates as a capacitor potentially discharging static electricity as an ‘arc light’ and even lightning from the pyramid’s peak.

In this final section I shall describe the ancient knowledge of the production of monatomic gold shared (and possibly inherited) with the Mesopotamian civilisations.

There are depictions of gold mined by humans for the Anunnaki ruling Mesopotamia in ancient times. Humans were possibly created as a slave race mining gold for their rulers. Even as far away as South Africa, Zulu legends speak of a time when “visitors of the stars” came to dig gold and other natural resources.

For more insight into the mystery of the ancient gold mining across Earth the work of Michael Tellinger is the authority on the subject.

Interestingly there is little in the Mesopotamian drawings to suggest a use for their gold. What there is however is a remarkably common theme in visual representations of two ‘demi-gods’ standing either side of ‘the tree of life’ holding a bag and cone shaped object.

When examined closely the ‘cones’ appear to be made of many spherical objects which have been formed together into the shape of a cone. It is always held at mouth level as if in the gesture to eat. It is surely no coincidence that this same image appears in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.

Akhenaten Offering / Honouring Bread to the Sun god Ra and the life giving ‘solar energy*’ symbolised by the Ankh at the end of the ray.

The best line of investigation that allows modern readers to penetrate this mystery, comes from a renowned Egyptologist Sir Francis Petrie of University College London. He produced a report for his sponsors on a trip he made in 1904 to Mount Horeb in the Sinai Peninsula.

The full story is described in detail by Sir Laurence Gardener in the excellent video below;

Gardener describes Petrie’s discovery of an ‘alchemical laboratory’ in an Egyptian Temple on Mount Horeb ( later Mt. Sinai), dedicated to the goddess Hathor. Within the temple store rooms, is found 50 tons of a mysterious white powder, conical stones, metallurgists crucibles, tanks and basins. Much of the design stylisation on these and other objects is Mesopotamian. Inscriptions mysteriously refer to ‘Mfkzt’ (pronounced Muf Khut)’ and ‘bread’ and ‘light’.

Petrie decided that the use of this laboratory went back to the very first Ancient Egyptian Dynasty and continued in production until the final 18th Dynasty. Laurence Gardener describes the story of the flight of Moses and the Israelites. Moses famously went up Mt. Horeb (or Mt Sinai, as it was later called) where there was seen fire and smoke at night. We are told that this came from an Alchemical Laboratory where Moses would have observed the transmutation of gold into a powder. Exodus describes how Moses burnt the golden calf in the fire and ‘ground it to a powder’.

We should be aware that Moses was trained as a priest by the Egyptians. His great grandfather was Thutmoses 3rd, who reorganised the ancient mystery schools of Thoth and founded the ‘School of Master Craftsmen’ at Karnak. They were called ‘The Great White Brotherhood’ because of their preoccupation with a mysterious white powder.

Hathor picture credit Worldhistory.org

In the tradition of the goddess Hathor, a cow and a nursing goddess, came the ‘powdered milk that;

‘…gave the Pharaohs their divinity’.

It is no secret today that gold can be transmuted into a white powder in a furnace and this powder confers good and longevity, (common to Royal families even to this day!). It is called ‘monatomic gold’ or ‘ormus’ and can be even purchased on E-bay!

‘There is nothing new under the sun’ – King Solomon

Is it possible that in large quantities over long periods of time, this powder may alter human consciousness to a higher ‘god-like’ level? Clearly the Mesopotamians and Ancient Egyptians thought so, to the extent that they must have processed large amounts of precious gold to deify the Pharaoh. After all, the role of the Pharaoh was to be both man and a god, and achieving this status whilst living, was his or her aim.

Just to explore the Old Testament, Moses story a little more, there is the narrative of ‘Mana’ appearing on the ground like dew ‘from Heaven’. This mana could be made into cakes and consumed and appeared when the Israelites had run out of food. Can we conjecture that this substance was also powdered gold placed there overnight by priests for the people, until we consider a clue from Mesopotamia. Here the name for powdered gold was Shemana and it is more than tempting to take this as being identical to Mana.

There is a discrepancy in appearance – or perhaps it appeared in two forms. The ‘mana from heaven’ described in Exodus as feeding the Israelites, is described as being ‘like a coriander seed in size and shape’. This appearance resembles the ‘seeds’ that make up the cone shapes in Mesopotamian reliefs.

Corriander Seed – picture credit Wiki

And thou shalt set upon the table shewbread before me always’

Exodus 25:30

This extract from Exodus show us firstly how important ‘shewbread’ (or white powder cakes) was. The cone shaped stones found by Petrie in the Temple of Hathor on Mt Horeb, may well have been moulds with which to make cone shaped vessels to hold or mould the shewbread.

Laurence Gardener tells us that the 4th Dynasty was the era of the pyramid building where Hathor is always depicted with representations of the Pharaoh. We can imagine a society in which the workers drank beer, the middle classes and aristocrats used a narcotic derived from the blue water lily and Pharoahs ate Monatomic gold.

With the Ark present in the King’s Chamber of the Great Pyramid, I have described in part two how high voltages and plasma could have been generated between the wing tips of the Cherubim. Such a high temperature might have been used as a furnace to turn gold into the precious white powder but I do not believe there is any evidence for this. Such a process would have produced smoke and waste materials and the interior of the King’s Chamber is remarkable for being clean.

The alchemical creation of white powder was in furnaces in the Temples, not in the pyramids, in my view. But there is another cleaner method for producing monatomic gold, which could have been one of the functions of the pyramids.

As a clue, one of the contents of the Ark of the Covenant, as well as the tablets on which the commandments were inscribed, was some Mana. According to the Book of the Epistles, this was possibly held in a pot made of gold.

Modern pyramid experimenters have found many extraordinary characteristics even in scale models of pyramids. Modern experimenters Mary and Dean Hardy of Allegan, Michigan took a gold coin and hung it at the King’s Chamber level of a Great Pyramid model. After some time the gold coin got a clear “oil” on it and the gold was etched away under the drops of oil. This oil can be reduced to the white powder known as Orm or Monatomic Gold.

From my own personal experience I once worked for an architect in Australia who described himself as a ‘modern alchemist’ and had a laboratory over our work place that he regrettably never showed me. I remember him telling me however, that it was possible to produce oils from metals, a fact that struck me at the time, as worth remembering.

An unlikely scientist in this story is Sir Isaac Newton. He was an alchemist for the second part of this life and deeply interested in the Bible and the pyramids. The following extract is from a recent sale of some manuscript belonging to the great scientist.

“He was trying to find proof for his theory of gravitation, but in addition the ancient Egyptians were thought to have held the secrets of alchemy that have since been lost. Today, these seem disparate areas of study – but they didn’t seem that way to Newton in the 17th century,” Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s manuscript specialist, told The Guardian.

The traditional quest of alchemists is that they tried to turn ‘lead into gold’. Such a ‘story’ in my view, is yet another example of a ‘red herring’ to hide the truth. The transmutation of gold using a ‘secret fire’, is the true ‘secret of alchemy’. Chemists such as Nicolas Flamel called the Shemana, Mana, white powder, Ormus – the Philosophers’ Stone.

Oil of Gold – picture credit Kymiaarts.com

The ‘secret fire’ may not be actual fire but the concentrated energy within the pyramid at the location of it’s inner chambers, where gold transmutes by the action of invisible fire or ‘energy’.

The findings and analysis of his ‘white powder’ by Sir Flanders Petrie where never published. This may have been because it contradicts some elements of the Old Testament. It may also be that the knowledge of the philosophers stone and it’s effects was desired to remain secret by those in powerful positions who already knew about it…such as the Freemasons and other Societies in possession of and trusted with guardianship of ancient secrets.

There is a twist in the story, because the white powder has been analysed in modern times by the physicist Andrei Sarhakov. He describes it as ‘exotic matter’ because one of it’s characteristics was that it weighed less than nothing! In other words it was not affected by gravity. It’s ability to levitate itself could be transferred when placed on other matter.

These gravitational effects remind us of the interest that Sir Isaac Newton took in developing a theory of gravity that has advanced civilisation to this day! Was he also exploring the possibility of ‘anti-gravity’?

Even more extraordinary is that Sarhakov found Orm could move into another dimension if we want it to, a concept familiar to Quantum physicists and modern mystics, but which the general public find hard to comprehend.

Interdimensional Travel – not new to mystics and of greater benefit than physcial space travel…

This three part story is one with many ‘loose ends’ as a pessimist would describe them or ‘exciting paths to explore’ for optimists. If we accept the possibility of knowledge, nay enlightenment, in the ancient past that is but a memory today, the narrative becomes just slightly easier to tie together.

The great unknown remains the ‘energy’ associated with the monoliths and large buildings from our past. We know that these buildings are found all over the world and were inspired by known effects on human consciousness . All of this was enhanced to a superlative level by the ingestion as ‘bread’ of a mysterious white substance which today is called monatomic gold.

I conclude with a quotation from the rear cover of John Michell’s classic book;

‘The View Over Atlantis’;

*’The entire surface of the earth is marked with traces of a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering, the remains of a once universal system of natural magic, involving the use of a polar magnetism together with another positive force related to solar energy’.

There remains a great mystery about this energy known as ‘Chi’ and many other names. What we can be sure of, is that there is no smoke without, fire.

Ancient Light

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Throughout the period known as the ‘Stone Age’ we find a variety of structures made with massive stones called ‘monoliths’.

Stone Henge Monolith

Exactly why so much time and effort was expended to create them is uncertain, however I shall endeavour to cast some light on a subject that has fascinated me for a lifetime.

Some of the very earliest such structures have recently been discovered in modern Turkey, what was earlier known as Anatolia, at a place called Gobleki Tepe. I shall draw your attention only to the large vertical monoliths which are unusual for both their ‘T’ shape and incised decoration. The question is; why the T? This shape is clearly top heavy but perhaps that was the intention, to make the stone as heavy as possible. Let us look at some later examples.

One of the most iconic stone circles is Stonehenge in Southern England. The giant horizontal stones in the ‘trilathons’, again place extra weight on the vertical uprights for no obvious reason. They could have stood upright and detached as is more commonly found.

Stone Henge in Wiltshire England picture credit pw.com

Many standing stones exist in the landscape on their own rather than in circles or lines. The standing stone pictured at the begining, is interesting in it’s shape and sheer size. It is pointed at the top which is so common must not be accidental. There are two clues here then which are scale and shape of monoliths.

There are also ‘balancing rocks’ and here the shape at the base brings enormous pressure onto the base of the rock.

An inversion of this principle of high localised pressure, is seen where a huge monolith is balanced on top of three vertical stones that have been deliberately pointed. This creates enormous pressure at the point of contact.

None of these structures was intended as shelter or domestic reasons. They are clearly ‘sacred’ in purpose leaving two monolithic questions why this stone why this type of rock and why this shape?

Modern archaeologists have been very successful in analysing the material found at these sites, but because of a materialistic bias, ignore further ways of interpretation. For instance most ancient structures are aligned to underground terrestrial currents as evidenced by the dowser Guy Underwood in his book The Patterns of the Past. In this book he proves that studying the stones as energetic as well as material, opens the mind to new possibilities.

When a stone containing quartz, such as granite, is compressed, a static electric charge is created. This is called ‘piezoelectricity’ and is used today in quartz watches, lighters, even ink jet printers. In order to create the enormous compressive force required for this effect, a large pressure is needed. This just happens to be what is found in ancient monoliths as already described.

It is an extraordinary fact that a 1 cm cube of quartz with a 2KN (500 lb ft) force correctly applied, can produce a voltage of 12500 volts! This is not then a imperceptible effect in nature. Remember that lightning can produce millions of volts in the atmosphere and is both common and natural.

The human body works partly by electrical stimulation in nerves. The heart and brain would not function without volts. It is not surprising that dowsers, such as myself, have experience strong energetic patterns at ancient sites. We can trace energy associated with underground water courses, fissures in rock, caves, volcanic plugs, sacred buildings and many other common landscape features. Animals are responsive to this energy as well with cows selecting underground spring sites to give birth as an example.

There is an effect on the human psyche and emotions for which there is not the possibility to prove here as it is experiential, however the reader is encouraged to explore ‘dowsing’ as most human beings have this additional sense. I contend that we are sensitive to this energy because our body mind unity can be ‘charged’ by it so as to produce beneficial effects such as healing, calming of body and mind and at it’s highest level, enlightenment.

It is therefore reasonable to propose the ancient structures were constructed to produce a natural ‘spiritual’ experience. Sitting in or near such structures for a period of time and or sleeping overnight, can produce ‘supersensory’ experiences such as dreams and visions of extraordinary significance.

The Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece for instance, gave the female seers their supernatural visions directly because of their location in the underground caverns.

The strength of the terrestrial energies found in these ancient sacred places, is dependent on the size of the structure or series of structures, the unique formation of the location within the landscape, alignment astronomically, geometric proportions and shapes, time of day and season, solar and lunar alignments, sensitivity of the seer or aspirant.

The system of alignment of the human consciousness with nature in order to bring the clarity of mind known as ‘enlightenment’ is therefore highly complex and libraries have been written on the subject.

I highlight the effects of piezoelectricity above as little has been recorded about this and my observations suppositions are largely original and or from the collective unconscious. I include it in particular because I believe that it plays a significant part in one of the most famous sacred buildings, the Great Pyramid of Giza, in Egypt.

A Kirlian Photograph of model pyramid geometry

I shall present my next blog as an in depth study of this last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World and still our best clue as to what ancient people did and believed and what we are still capable of doing today, perhaps even more so.

Is There Anybody There?

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A ghost walks into a bar and asks, ‘do you serve spirits?’

Humans have currently been obliged to believe in invisible beings, viruses. We believe that the Corona virus is everywhere as if it were a spirit. The only difference is that with a microscope you can see viruses and know that they exist.

The similarity of this belief to the ancient understanding of the spirit world is uncanny. Modern science has not been able to prove ‘spirits’ exist, therefore we are encouraged to believe that they do not. But logically, not being able to prove something exists, does not prove it does not exist. Perhaps the observer has the wrong sensing equipment or it is not sensitive enough, or too sensitive?

If we take a more rational approach, based on the acceptance that what the ancients believed, may still be true today, we can explore the existence of spirits further.

A friend of mine found himself, many years ago, in a monastery in Tibet. He casually opened a cupboard and was shocked to be staring at a human skull. He closed the door hurriedly and moved on. He returned the next day but the skull had been removed. Had he been seen by a spirit in the skull? The Sumerians of 3250 B.C kept a spirit in their homes, tempted there to occupy a statue, figurine or sometimes – a human skull.

I recently watched the ‘Magic Flute’ by the Master Mozart. The music is wonderful but my principle interest is the story. The first scene in Act One shows three witches destroying a serpent that has captured the hero, Tarantino. The opera sends him through an initiation process from darkness into light. He is able, when necessary, to annul the influences of evil spirits by playing a magic flute.

My own interpretation of the flute is that it symbolises the energy centres of the human body known as seven chakras. The flute plays a seven note scale by vibration of a column of sound and is similar to the hollow human spine in it’s construction.

Such control of energy within the human chakras affects our moods, feelings, physicality and state of mind. When mastered the adept in Tantric Yoga completes the journey from darkness into light.

Tarantino’s companion is a humble bird catcher. He represents the ‘ordinary’ man who goes through live mechanically. He fails the initiation tests preferring wine, women and bird song.

Let us move on to consider spirits outside of the story book, real live spirits. They love to do human things and are generally envious of the joys humans have from living in a physical world. The ancient Greek gods appeal to us because they behave as badly as humans. Lepricorns and other nature spirits adore dancing in rings in the moonlight to fairy fiddles. They look into our dimension with envy for they too enjoy nothing more than ‘wine women and song’.

Just as the ordinary human is enslaved by the five senses, so are spirits enslaved to us. The Genii in the story of Aladdin is in service, not a master. But secretly they long to occupy our living bodies for the same reason that God created the physical world – experience of physicality.

Sometimes they do – when someone is intoxicated for instance; which is the esoteric reason for alcohol being forbidden to Muslims. An intoxicated person often changes character quite noticeably and their bodies have super human strength, causing the North American Natives to name alcohol ‘fire water’.

Carl Jung concluded at the end of his life, that psychological complexes were outside of the human mind. When someone is ‘not themselves’ we should take this quite literally. Many Shamanistic rituals such as Voodoo, concern the removal of malign spirits or the placement of unwanted spirits for malign effects. Even modern Christianity has continued belief in the efficacy of exorcism and certain sensitive priests are trained in it’s practice. If it did not work, surely it would not have continued into the present day.

When a spirit is invited into a body as a Faustian ‘pact with the Devil’, the human party assumes magical powers. They may use these powers for entertainment as a magician or more worryingly, to gain political power. Should we accept the extraordinary rise of Adolf Hitler in 1930’s Germany as at least in part, being due to his thirst for occult powers? Why else did he send expeditions into Tibet and Antarctica, if it was not to gain occult power?

You might wish to believe that the modern psychiatric view that external beings are manifestation of our own minds. A vision of an etheric being by a single observer may occur when there is a conflation of the inner and outer worlds in that persons perception.

‘That way madness lies’

To which my reply is both yes and no. Yes, because all of our perceptions are no more than stimulus, decoded by bodily senses, into electrical pulses which are streamed into the brain. They are no more real than the images on our television sets are real. No, because the Universe is so large that there must be consciousness outside of human minds.

Part of the vanity of humans is the conscious or unconscious belief that we are alone. If we have never seen a spirit then it does not exist, is the false logic. It is false because there are many things we do not see that we use everyday. Our eyes only perceive a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. We use infra-red ovens in the kitchen without a thought of whether infra-red energy exists. We use the effect and that is proof enough.

So it will come as a shock to humans when beings from other planets in our galaxy, appear on Earth, shaking the hands of heads of State. In doing so they will also shake the belief systems of every society, family and individual to the core. Present dogmas of belief whether in religion or politics or science, will be realised to have been at fault all along. For this reason governments seek to manage the time and place of this information. But it must be revealed and I sense that the present pandemic is building a global consciousness of cooperation that has never existed in history.

Accepting that consciousness exists outside of the human body, whether in spirit form or in another corporeal body, is the next step for humans.

The Old Testament describes how our forefathers experienced gods thousands of years ago but like the magic of the micro wave oven, they did not understand the causes of the manifestations.

Ping

Carrying the Sky

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Question: how many stars can you see in the daytime?

Answer: One

That star is, of course, our sun and yet sometimes we overlook it’s splendour and magnificence. It becomes one of those many blessings that we take for granted when we consider ourselves poor.

The thief left it behind

The moon at the window

Basho

This poem was written by a mendicant monk in Japan after a thief took his only possession from his cave – his begging bowl.

Both the sun and moon represent powerful forces in our lives. They dominate our lives and loves in the most subtle of ways.

If you live in a part of the world where the appearance of the sun is unusual, then a ‘nice sunny day’ is one for being outside, perhaps even ‘sunbathing’. Deep in our beings we have a natural dependency and love of the healing rays of the sun that we wish only to be in it’s presence.

So strong was this connection in ancient times, that the Sun was regarded as a god by many cultures. The ancient Egyptians named him ‘Ra’. In their paintings and hieroglyphs, Ra is depicted spreading rays down to human figures, usually the Pharaoh. At the end of each ray is a hand sometimes holding an ‘Ankh’ or symbol of life.

One pharaoh called Akhenaten, ordered that the old Egyptians gods should no longer be worshipped expect for ‘Aten’. He referred to himself as the ‘son of God’ and is depicted with his wife, Nefertiti and children as a ‘holy family’, a theme later echoed by Christianity. Akhenaten even moved the capital city called Akhentaten. The temples had no roofs to allow in Aten’s rays.

He was not the last to conceive of a ‘sun city’. Louis 14th bathed in the name of ‘The Sun King’ and adopted the sun as a symbol of his reign. He moved his royal court and government to the Palace of Versailles in 1682, from where his presence shone for all the gaze and wonder, at least until the solar eclipse which was the French Revolution.

The tradition continued into modern times when the French-Swiss architect, Le Corbusier designing a ‘radiant city’ or ‘Ville Radieuse’.

He too was had Utopian ideals but this time it was the common man who would bath in the all powerful rays of the sun. High rise buildings would be aligned in straight lines and wide spaces to allow light to spill into living spaces through large windows. All rooms were designed according to the proportions of the human body, as did the Ancient Egyptians, evidenced in the works of the mystic and scholar, Schwaller de Lubiz.

My point is that the Sun God has shone on mankind for thousands of years and it should not be hidden in ‘plain sight’.

If mankind needed a reminder, then the moon makes a perfect counter balance to the sun’s majesty. It has no light of it’s own yet can reflect with great brilliance in the night sky. The moon has an enduring power over humankind as a symbol of our ability to ‘reflect’ on ideas. This enables us to absorb and process ‘light’ as what we call ‘inspiration’ and underpins most of human development.

At some point in time, after the belief of Royalty being the sun God’s representative on earth, modern humans accept the reality that they, ordinary people, can do this as well.

Not only have we internalised the moon, but so may we swallow the sun.

‘The sun is in my heart

and I am ready for love,’

So sang Gene Kelly in the famous film, ‘Singing in the Rain’.

The place of abode for the sun is traditionally in the heart. The Indian Hindu mystics place the sun just below the heart in the ‘solar plexus’ chakra and it’s proximity is significant. The essence of ‘life’ is contained in the chambers of the heart muscle. It’s protein molecules are designed never to stop working – like the nuclear fission process in the sun; at least for the length of life of the human body. If a heart ever stops it can be powered back to life with a large charge of electricity from a defribilator.

Go sweep out the chamber of your heart.
Make it ready to be the dwelling place of the Beloved.
When you depart out,
He will enter it.
In you,
void of yourself,
will He display His beauties.

Mahmud Shabistari

I have quoted this beautiful verse before in my blogs as these lines, in my view, give humans all the information they need. They tell us that something is wrong in our hearts; they need to be swept out. Just as the skies fill with clouds and obscure the sacred sun the sacred moon, so too our hearts become obscured.

We get an idea of the size of the cleansing required in the psychological story of Hercules and his fifth labour;

The fifth labour (0f Hercules) was to clean the stables of King Augeas. This assignment was intended to be both humiliating and impossible, since these divine livestock were immortal, and had produced an enormous quantity of dung. The Augean stables (/ɔːˈdʒiːən/) had not been cleaned in over 30 years, and over 1,000 cattle lived there. However, Heracles succeeded by re-routing the rivers Alpheus and Peneus to wash out the filth.

Excerpt from Wikipedia

Note how the livestock are described as having ‘divine’ and ‘immortal’ qualities normally reserved for Kings. It is clear that even the cattle knee deep in their own dung, can aspire to being divine. Naturally, the cleaning takes place using the power nature, in this case water, a symbol of clarity, purity and power. Would it be too speculative to suggest they are the powerful arteries and veins of the human heart?

The Ancient Egyptians believed that Ra, the sun, was present in the heart of every human being; each human contained a small sun. They carried this divine power until death when the soul or Ra, departed the earthly body and returned to heaven and the afterlife.

This tradition is remembered in the Christian tradition as the ‘resurrection’ and in Islam as the ‘Mi raj’ or ascent of the Prophet Mohammed (s.a.s.) to heaven.

Note in this early painting the human headed horse on which the prophet (s.a.s.) sits. It is called the Buraq which means in Arabic ‘lightning’ or ‘bright’ with thanks to Wikipedia.

So we may reasonably conclude that we have revered the sun and the moon as symbols of our interior lives. We sometime express these divine principles in our buildings, our cities and our environment.

The sky is the most unchangeable, immutable presence in our lives and deserves contemplation and absorption where it can spin and shine for ever, if we let it.

Bring me sunshine
In your smile
Bring me laughter
All the while
In this world where we live
There should be more happiness
So much joy you can give
To each brand new bright tomorrow

lyrics by Sylvia Dee for Morecombe and Wise’s theme song

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Symbols – unlocking the key

When human beings learn the language of symbolism, a great veil will fall from their eyes

Manly P. Hall

At the end of October each year, there is a flurry of excitement. The night of the 31st October is when the veil between the apparent physical world and the spirit world, opens wide. Across much of the western world the people are encouraged to make light of it. Children dress in demonic costumes and roam the streets knocking on stranger’s doors. This one night is when the ‘stranger danger’ thought bomb does not explode in parent’s minds. Local neighbourhood spirits offer treats to entice and draw children in. It’s viewed as all ‘quite normal’, by people who see the world through the great veil to which Hall refers.

‘Good Christian families’ ( or at least those millions in the United States of America who label themselves so ), engage in this most Pagan of all festivals as if they were celebrating a night with Mickey Mouse.

Few people pose the question, ‘what if All Hallows Eve is real?’.

I use Halloween as an example of the state of consciousness of our current civilisation in the West. Whilst it is true that many Hindus and Tibetan Buddhists for instance, have a powerful understanding of symbology, in the West ancient symbols are ‘not real’ and are treated at best as fantasy and at worst, entertainment.

In the present day, many people have retreated into a safety zone of ‘agnosticism’. They just do not believe in gnosis or ‘union with God’. The gods they trust are thier senses. There is no question when demon possessed magicians achieve the impossible on their television screens. People stare in disbelief as if, for the first time, they cannot trust their own eyes. Scientific reasoning has a lot of undoing to do, for it denies us thoughts beyond the information received from the senses. Western education has worked hard to achieve this.

In an hypnotic ‘Dance of Shiva‘ the technologies of information have built a wall between the soul and senses. To be ‘sensible’ in the English language means to be straight cut – down to earth, whilst also meaning, able to use the senses. So strong is this blockage, that thoughts of the collective soul remain a distant social memory. It is not that the memory is forgotten, although some politcal regimes desire that, it is that our perception is deceived so that reality becomes merely a fantasy and explained away as ‘just a bit of fun’.

We are educated to believe that every effect has a cause; to be rational. From childhood, westerners have been taught that coincidences happen for no reason, ghosts are tricks of the imagination and objects do not move on their own; if you tread on a crack in the pavement the bear will not really eat you…it can all be explained. Sigmund Freud wrote an essay called ‘Determinism, Belief in Chance and Superstition’ in which it was claimed rational explanations cleared the unconscious mind of irrational interpretations of the world and life. According to June Singer in her book Boundaries of the Soul, this view has changed the course of education – a process which aims beningly to turn the light on in a darkened mind.

Freud’s belief that rational explanations clear the unconscious, in the words of June Singer, ‘translated into psychological term the voices of the Enlightenment that called for the elimination of superstitions, the mystical and the non-rational in the Western intellectual tradition.’ As a Jungian psycologist Singer is sceptical to this view and I would agree. Where will we be when we have explained away everything in conclusions that are just interpretations? If you are prepared to believe in the power of the unknown you will never ‘educate away’ the unconscious and the irrational. When symbols link us to these ‘Neverlands‘, our spine should tingle.

David and Goliath retold centuries later

A trip to an ancient Egyptian temple by a group of Europeans straight from breakfast on the Nile river cruise ship, enters world for the merely curious. The guide will lead them through heavy doors into a new world where extraordinary people, long ago once trod. More than that they left for us beautifully designed and constructed buildings encoded from floor to Heaven with cartouches and pictures in relief. The entry into the Holy of Hollies in Karnac’s great halls will make them pause merely to check their camera settings and what time the taxis pick them up for the boat.

Of course this small group should be given credit for making the effort to be there but how sad they make little effort to ask ‘what went on here and what is left of it now?’ Few will entertain the idea that Temples represent a journey for mortals into their body, soul and spirit.

picture credit: Flying Carpet Tours

There is a temple in a New York museum which was transport block by block from Egypt. A modern mystic, Lorna Burne who is familiar with angels from early childhood, reports that there is a spirit in this temple in great anguish. The spirit circles in endless frustration that the temple has been moved and needs to be returned. Tell archaeologists that and they are likely to do little more than laugh.

Just as Halloween is reduced to a social joke, so are most experiences of those who make sense of things without using their senses. It’s as if modern cultures need a way of holding off the forces which they distrust, like an ancient DNA memory of a fear of spiders, rats and snakes. It is as if we have repressed our fears into two rationalisations labelled good and bad, then explore one but not the other.

Many modern religionists express this dichotomy firmly with descriptions of the works of Satan on one hand and the love of Jesus on the other as if it was that simple. All mystics get to know Satan very well so as to overcome those elemental forces. Even when countries are at war, such as during the First World War, each hold their field services imploring favour to the same God! No contradiction is acknowledge since ‘the other side are Devils’, not us. Then both sides engage in mass slaughter, explained in their own minds as being on behalf of God. The killing is certainly not the work of the Devil. This is ignorance at it’s most extreme and most harmful.

Soldiers returning from war find it incredibly difficult to face ‘civilian life’ after this madness. Sometimes their families and that world have become so alien to them that many choose never to return, like the character of Colonel Kurtz in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Soldiers have their eyes opened by Mars, the God of War and enter a reality that has been skinned of fantasy. It is truely horrific, but is more real than anything ever experienced.

I firmly believe that by getting to grips with the ancient mythical descriptions of ‘mind’ and the human condition through the powerful symbols of the past and present, the possibilit open now for western culture to embrace our personal and collective unconscious.

A series of books by the author Dan Brown bears testament to this popular mood to understand symbols and the hidden worlds to which they allude. Albeit he shrouds his messages as ‘entertainment’, he perhaps knows or hopes that many an ‘agnostic’ might be moved by the power of the non-rational. In an age when even the scientists are building their theories of the contradictory laws of quantum physics, we should at least be open to the wealth of knowledge contained in the improbable.

Symbols are a massively important language for the mind. In a subtle way, the power of poetry is the same as symbols. Poets hint sideways at realities with few words, just as symbols point us to new understandings with no words.

Carl G. Jung was perhaps the most famous psychologist who opened up symbols as a reputable field of study and in particular dream interpretation. He used the study of his own dreams as well as patients, to gain insight into the personal and the collective psyche, the latter which he termed the ‘collective unconscious’.

Symbols dig deep into this unconsciousness, of which modern man was once most fearful but today, in my view, needs to be less so. Symbols not so much ‘explain’ as knock down row after row of balanced dominoes in an unexpected way to produce unintended effects that you might call ‘realisations’.

The plots of the Dan Brown novels are just such a cascade of ‘clue solving’. Through the broad knowledge of symbols by the character Professor Robert Langdon, mysteries are revealed in rapid twists and turns of the plot.

If psychosis is a surfacing of unconscious fears, then symbols enable that to happen as well. Perhaps the fear of that is the process most inhibiting understanding today. Ancient wisdom is wrapped up and scurried away by people of religion, so that it’s power is denied the possession of the people. We are told how damaging such knowledge is and how it is ‘the work of the Devil, aliens and Satanic cults, not for popular consumption and well past it’s sell-by date’.

The Vatican Secret Archives are themselves a symbol of this sublimation of sacred wisdom deemed never to surface into the minds of the common people. Beyond the political secrets and records of shameful past and present actions, you would like to think that mankind will benefit more, that be caused harm, by revealing the archive’s contents to the public.

Unfortunately, the battle between the Angels and the Demons takes place right before all of our eyes, if we looked. Even such things scientifically real as the present Covid virus is demonic in character. Viruses are hidden and not understood but powerful and with the ability to kill innocent humans. In this description we can see the description of the malign demi-god of ancient myth, the dragon that inhabits the cave and eats villagers, Count Dracula who enters a country and seeks it’s vulnerable female victims blood, Sleeping Beauty who falls under the spell of the witch and is put in a coma like a hospital patient.

The V1 and V2 rockets of Nazi Germany were powerful killing machines and inspired by the occult secrets of the ancients, as much as by likes of team of rocket scientists.

All of these encounters with demons and angels are happening and as real today, in my view, as they were in the past. The ancient Greeks saw the sun and the moon just as we do. The only difference is that we see them as a nuclear explosion and an empty rock rather than giving them respect for the way they command our every waking moment. The joy of life is dependent entirely on the gift of the sun’s rays depicted by the ancient Egyptians as a straight line from the sun, with an Ankh symbol at the end of each life giving ray of light.

Such symbols may never totally be understood by modern man because historical cycles move in spirals, not circles, but we do have symbols of our own that echo insignts from our ancestors. Understanding our own selves and our environment is key to the sustainability of our technological societies. Modern life is an Odyssey into a world of Sirens and Whirlpools, just as real as it ever was for Odysseus. Hold tight!