A New Jerusalem in Bohemia

© Vincent Bridges 2011

In the heart of Prague’s Old Town, just off the main tourist routes and a few blocks southeast of Charles Bridge, is the semi-restored church of St. Anne and St. Lawrence, now a cultural center sponsored by the former Czech President, Vaclav Havel, and his wife Dagmar’s foundation. I had no idea, when I attended a reception there last October, that I was in fact at the center of a fascinating mystery, one that is virtually unknown, even in the Czech Republic.

I was mingling, drinking excellent champagne and making good use of my half dozen or so words of Czech, when I stopped to look at one of the exhibits on the restoration of the church. It contained a timeline of the church’s history, which informed me that it had once been the property of the Knights of the Temple, The Templars, then passed to the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, now of Malta, before becoming the property of the Dominican Order in the mid 14^th century. The arc of that ownership was striking enough, but under the Templar reference was a line about the church as “V Jerusalemu.” Now, even my far from adequate knowledge of Czech could handle that one: In Jerusalem. Why, I wondered, would a church, especially a Templar church in the depths of Prague’s Old Town, be called “In Jerusalem?”

As I considered it, I could remember only two connections between Prague and Jerusalem. The cornerstone of the Old-New Synagogue had supposedly been flown straight from the ruins of the Old Temple in Jerusalem to Prague, making the city something of a second “Mother Israel” to the Jews of the Disapora. Curiously enough, that legend had emerged at the same time the second connection to Jerusalem was established. Charles IV, the Luxemburg Emperor and King of Bohemia in the mid 14^th century, had been somewhat obsessed with building churches modeled on the “New Jerusalem” of St. John’s Revelation. One such model church had stood in the center of Charles’ Square for over 400 years. Neither of these stories, however, had anything to do with the Templars, or the Church of Sts. Anne and Lawrence.

The reception wound down, and, standing in St. Anne Square waiting for my taxi, I tried to put this new idea into the context of Prague itself. Within a few blocks in any direction of where I stood, one could find traces of mystics and alchemists, from Giordano Bruno and John Dee to Jan Kominsky and Jan Hus, scientists, Kepler and Tesla, freemasons, theosophists, spiritualists, musicians and artists. Prague is perhaps the most densely esoteric city in Europe. And that deep substratum of esotericism seems to rest on the bedrock of an unseen web of inter-connected places, thresholds actually, portals in the original mythic sense of praha itself. Could there be one of these energetic portals, doorways, between Prague and Jerusalem?

The idea tickled my fancy and so, a few weeks after my return from Europe, I turned my attention to unraveling the mystery. Within days of my decision, a good friend in the Czech Republic, Radka Slooten, sent me coincidentally a website on Prague Castle that included a whole page on the work of Jan Cihak. Suddenly, it all clicked and a strange pattern emerged, one that I found hard to believe. Think of a Great Cross, centered on a Holy Crossing point, aligned to the winter/summer solstice axis, the Solar Cross, and anchored on what was then the spiritual center of the world, Jerusalem, built, maintained and elaborated on for over a millennium as a great city grew up around it. What was the purpose? And why here, why Prague?

The starting point of any answer, of course, is the curious story about the stones from the Temple in Jerusalem being brought by an angel to the Old-New Synagogue. The story as commonly told is that the angels brought the stones of the Temple to Prague on the condition that they would be returned when the Messiah came. In Hebrew “on condition” is “al tnaj;” which can be divided, incorrectly, to give us the German “alt neu,” or Old-New, according to its sound. While this derivation is unlikely, for many reasons, it does give us a very curious Green Language pun. The old becomes new under certain conditions, the arrival, or return, of the Messiah. It is in this sense that the Jews called Prague the “City and Mother in Israel,” and considered it second in importance only to Jerusalem.

However, no one is quite sure when the Jews arrived in Prague. David Gans, in his 17^th century Branch of David, gives a date of 995 CE for the first settlement, but there surely would have been Jews in Prague long before that date, with or without a fixed settlement. The Old-New Synagogue was built in 1270 CE and there is no contemporary mention of stones from the Temple in Jerusalem. In fact the earliest versions of its origins describe another sort of miracle: the synagogue was supposedly discovered fully constructed under an ancient mound. The Jerusalem story apparently dates to the era of Charles IV, the mid 14^th century, who had a curious interest in connecting Prague and Jerusalem. By the early 16^th century, Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand I could be reassured by the Old Town council that the Jews shouldn’t be banished, as they “had lived in this land before their Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed.”

The Jewish legends are suggestive of some kind of link to Jerusalem, but they depend on other influences. Those influences are mostly Christian and they provide a context in which the legends of a direct Jewish connection to Jerusalem become plausible, if not actually required. And curiously, the era that Gans notes as the beginning of Jewish settlement in Prague is also the era we must turn to next to understand the Christian context of the Prague – Jerusalem connection.

For the first thousand years or so of the Christian era, from the 1^st century to the 10^th, Bohemia was a pagan no man’s land beyond the Danube border of the Old Roman Empire. Dark Age states came and went, built on shifting tribal alliances and trade with the west. Around the turn of the 10^th century, a new dynasty, the Premyslid, gained ascendancy over the other small states by straddling the divide between the newly Christianized civilization of the west and the ancient tribal and pagan culture of the Slavs. From these tensions came the beginnings of the Kingdom of Bohemia. The Premyslids created their own national myth in the story of All-Father Czech, his son Krok and his three daughters. The youngest of those daughters was the mystical Libusse, who traditionally named Prague, foresaw its future and made Premysl the Plowman a Duke, founding the dynasty bearing his name.

In 995 CE, the same year Gans credits the Jews with a permanent settlement in Prague, the Premyslids conquered the last remaining tribal holdouts, the Slavnikovici, to become the uncontested Dukes of the region. Over the next two centuries, they consolidated their power, creating Bohemia in the process. The Premyslids did not become Kings until the later part of that process; the Bohemian region remained under the authority of the church, and indirectly under the Pope. During those centuries, as a sort of undercurrent to the political strife, betrayals and assassinations, a group of small round churches were built across Prague and Bohemia. These vaguely Byzantine small domed rotundas were built by design on the older pagan power places in a conscious attempt to co-opt the sacredness of the landscape into a new Christian pattern.

It began with the early Premyslids. To show the power of his new religion, Duke Brivoj, the first Christian Premysl, had a chapel to the Virgin Mary built on the sacred hill, the pagan Gigi or world center on the plateau where Prague Castle now stands. This chapel, built in the late 9^th century, was also meant as the Premysl family mausoleum. When Duke Vaclav, the future St. Wenceslas, was murdered in the early 10^th century, he was buried in the new rotunda to St. Vitus built on or near the site of the earlier chapel. This rotunda lasted only 140 years or so; it was rebuilt on a much grander scale in 1060 CE, then rebuilt again as the core of St. Vitus Cathedral.

Around this center point, a constellation of Christian institutions developed. On the Hradcany plateau, the St. George Basilica, with its convent, and the lost rotundas to St. Maurice and St. Bartholomew were built near St. Wenceslas’ rotunda. Further out, the Praemonstratensian Monastery claimed the high point of the saddle between Petrin Hill and the Hradcany, calling it Mount Zion. The Benedictines had earlier claimed Brevnov Hill, near the ancient settlement at Sarka to the west, and The Knights of St. John built a monastery and command center on a key location by the left bank of the river. Between the arrival of the Knights of St. John in the mid 12^th century and the arrival of the Templars in the early 13^th century, there was a wave of rotunda building across Bohemia, including the three remaining rotundas in Prague, St. Martin at Vysehrad, St. Stephan in what would become New Town, and Holy Cross near the Old Town riverfront.

By the time of Premysl Ottakar II and the height of Premyslid power in the mid 13^th century, the transition from pagan sacred spots to Christian churches was almost complete. From the Hradcany plateau with its growing cluster of Christian structures, the ancient pagan alignments were maintained. To the north, a line ran through the Premysl stronghold at Levy Hradec to Rip Mountain, which also has its 12^th century rotunda perched on top. The St. Vitus rotunda, and later the cathedral, acted much like the long vanished Gigi; it became a switching point in the web of leftover pagan astronomical alignments and the newly Christianized dynastic alignments. One of the most important of the pagan alignments was the sight line toward the winter solstice sunrise, and this also became Christianized.

Sometime after 1060 CE and the rebuilding of St. Wenceslas’ rotunda on Hradcany, but before 1090, a small chapel was built on the southern end of the Romanesque Old Town, near the river’s right bank. It was originally named the chapel of the Finding of the Holy Cross, after a local miracle involving a Christian girl tied to a cross and thrown into a sacred spring. The cross was returned to the surface by a high wind; the girl drowned however, and the rotten cross was buried in the crypt of the 12^th century rotunda. In this story, we can see the transition from pagan to Christian in stark relief; the pagan virgin spirit of the lake or spring is sacrificed to the new power of the Cross. And, as with the old castle at Vysehrad, there are stories of hidden crypts filled with ancient treasure under the rotunda.

But we are left wondering: what makes this “cross” particularly holy?

Perhaps the simplest explanation is that someone did “find” the Holy Cross spot, the sacred lake and its legends, and by making it the center of a sacred alignment created its own special quality of “holiness.” From the St. Wenceslas rotunda on the Hradcany plateau, the Holy Cross Rotunda is in the general direction of the winter solstice sunrise. A third point is needed is make a clear alignment, and this point is provided by another rotunda, built within a generation of Holy Cross, on another watery sacred spot. The Rotunda of St. Stephan was the center of a small village, Na Rybní?ku (“By the Pond”) just outside the Old Town wall and whose springs would provide the water for the 14^th century expansion of New Town. It falls in line with the St. Wenceslas rotunda and the Holy Cross to point directly toward the winter solstice sunrise.

We can think of this as the vertical axis of a cross, aligned to the winter solstice sunrise. The horizontal axis was also part of the plan. Two other Romanesque chapels, with towers if not rotundas, fall in a line perpendicular to the winter solstice axis; St. Clement in Po?í?í, or “riverside,” the center of an old settlement along the Vltava, and the church of Sts. Phillip and James, on the ancient pagan sacrifice spot dedicated to Petrun, at the foot of the hill named for him, Petrin, on the far left bank of the river. St. Clement, although extensively and heavily rebuilt through the centuries, has at least survived. The church of Sts. Phillip and James was demolished in the late 19^th century, and its place is marked by the modern Arbes’ Square in the lower part of the Little Town. These churches however were built equidistant from the Rotunda of the Holy Cross, at about 2,400 meters, or 7,200 feet, roughly one and a third miles.

Thus the Romanesque Prague of the 13^th century was incorporated within a great Holy Cross aligned to the solstices, winter solstice sunrise and summer solstice sunset along the vertical axis, and anchored east-west by a pair of chapels with towers on pagan sacred spots. Another Romanesque church from the mid 12^th century, St Peter’s on the Riverside, marked the summer solstice alignment from the Holy Cross rotunda through the more distant location of Old Boleslav, an alignment deemed important by the early builders on the Hradcany plateau. But, to the Christians of the 11^th and 12^th century who built the pattern, even a great Cross based on the solstices would not have been considered as a Holy Cross. Unless it also pointed to another, even more sacred location?

Curiously, the winter solstice sunrise at the latitude of Prague is in fact in the direction of Jerusalem, which makes the alignment from St. Wenceslas’ rotunda through the Holy Cross and St. Stephan’s, who was martyred in Jerusalem, even more remarkable. In the era when the western Crusaders were in fact conquering Jerusalem, the builders in Prague were constructing their Great Cross in an alignment with the Holy Cross in Jerusalem. No wonder the Knights of St. John and the Knights of the Temple were attracted to Prague.

These two crusading orders occupied opposite sides of the river, with the Knights of St. John, who arrived first, taking the area near the old settlement below the castle on the left, and the later arriving Templars taking the right bank in Old Town, just north of the Rotunda of the Holy Cross. In that sense, the proximity of the Templar Church of St. Lawrence to the Jerusalem alignment of the Holy Cross line could be said to give meaning to the “In Jerusalem” of the church’s name. The church was in Jerusalem because it was, roughly, within the Prague/Jerusalem alignment. Soon, the idea of “In Jerusalem” would become even more prominent as the last initiated King in Europe, Charles IV, tried to transform Prague into a new version of Jerusalem.

A century after the Templars built St. Lawrence, the Luxemburg dynasty having married into the last of the Premyslids, Prague was in the hands of Charles I of Bohemia, Charles IV in terms of Holy Roman Emperors, and he was an Emperor with a plan. Prague was going to surpass Rome by being rebuilt in the shape of Jerusalem itself. The upper portion of New Town, the region between Wenceslas Square and Charles Square and down to the river, was laid out using a 12^th century map of Jerusalem as template and the major squares and thoroughfares follow the same pattern to this day. The central region of the upper portion of Charles Square corresponded to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, and Charles eventually built a small church there, the Church of the Holy Body, built, like his reworking of St. Wenceslas’ Chapel in St. Vitus, as a model of the New Jerusalem from St. John’s Revelation.

In his Jerusalem template for the New Town, the region near the Rotunda of St. Stephan corresponded to the hill of Golgotha in Jerusalem, and since, as Holy Roman Emperor, he owned the original Spear of St. Loginus, the Roman soldier who thrust his spear into Christ’s side on the hill of Golgotha during the Crucifixion, Charles renamed the rotunda for St. Longinus. This of course fixed the winter solstice alignment with Jerusalem, specifically Golgotha. Jan Cihak, a Czech researcher who has spent years following these esoteric clues, finds that the line from St. Wenceslas, through Holy Cross and St. Longinus, falls almost exactly on the Rotunda Anastasia built in 335 CE on Mount Calvary (Golgotha). Such precision indicates that the early 12^th century cartographers were sophisticated enough to account for the curvature of the earth’s surface.

The mystery is not about Prague’s connection to Jerusalem, but who created the alignment of rotundas that defines the connection? And why?

The best we can do is to suggest an anonymous, or at least unrecorded, organization of monks or clerics, operating with church and state approval and charged with the process of absorbing and transforming the infrastructure of the local paganism. Around the time Jerusalem fell to the 1^st Crusade, 1099 CE, the basic outline of the alignment and the urban Great Cross was in place. And, perhaps, this was the moment when the realization dawned that the winter solstice sunrise line also pointed to Jerusalem. Hence the naming of the third marker in the winter solstice line for St. Stephan, the first martyr of Christianity who was stoned to death in Jerusalem. There is also the connection between St. Wenceslas and St. Stephan, martyrs who shared, early on, the same Feast Day, December 26^th, as noted in the 19^th century Christmas carol: “Good King Wenceslas looked out/On the feast of Stephen…” From the Rotunda of St. Wenceslas one can indeed look out on a winter sunrise over St. Stephan’s on St. Stephan’s Day.

And that is also the best answer to the question: why? To the Dark Age and newly Christianized builders, working to establish a Christian gloss on the local pagan sacred spots and alignments, the accident of the winter solstice’s alignment with the almost infinitely remote Jerusalem, the center of the known universe and the place where the new Dying God of Christianity saved the world, must have seemed the epitome of the miraculous. This allowed the superimposition of Duke Vaclav’s murder over St. Stephan’s martyrdom to create the new patron saint of Bohemia, St. Wenceslas, whose rotunda and tomb marked the sighting point for the line, through the Holy Cross and the Rotunda of St. Stephan to the Holy City.

A thousand years ago, when the pagan sites and alignment were Christianized, the winter solstice sunrise fell half way through Sagittarius, a thousand years from the cusp of Sagittarius/Capricorn, the winter solstice point in Ptolemy’s era, and a thousand years from our present point on the cusp of Scorpio/Sagittarius. To cartographers and astronomers smart enough to create the alignment to Jerusalem with such precision, then the knowledge of the precession of a fixed point, such as an equinox or solstice, through time would have been apparent. And so, in this way, the rotunda builders were also creating a pattern that pointed unerringly toward a very specific moment in time, a thousand years later, our current era.

At the present moment, the winter solstice sunrise over Prague, viewed along the axis of the Holy Cross, presents us with an amazing vision. In the predawn sky, the figure of the 13^th sign of the Zodiac, Ophiucus the Serpent Holder, stands with his left foot on the rising sun, in alignment with the hidden sun of the center of our galaxy, which appears from Prague to be the center point where all these images come together, Jerusalem. Could it be that this is the real mystery of the alignment? Could a thousand years of visionary Emperors and alchemists, magicians and scientists and astronomers, all have been attracted to and working with the energy of Prague as a kind stage in which to glimpse our current era?

This literal sign in the sky also suggests Fulcanelli’s idea, from the Hendaye chapter of Mysteries of the Cathedrals, of aligning the celestial and terrestrial crosses as a way to predict the season of catastrophe. The celestial cross of the solar and precessional year aligns in Prague with the terrestrial cross of the city itself, and the very earthly cross of the crucifixion. Could the creators of this alignment have been aware of this ancient way to time the apocalypse? It seems quite likely and perhaps the most telling piece of evidence is the use of the symbols on the Hendaye Cross, the angry Sun, man in the moon face and the eight rayed star, on the old stained glass windows of the Templar Church “In Jerusalem” and dedicated to St Lawrence. The only change is the four ages have here become an explosion from the sun, the 17^th ray, which echoes the use made of this symbol by the Knights of St. John on Malta.

In 1585 Dr. John Dee, perhaps the smartest man in the world, arrived in Prague to preach the coming apocalyptic new age to the Emperor Rudolph II. Rudolph was perhaps unimpressed by Dee’s angelic warnings, but the choice of Prague as the imperial city had not been by accident. Rudolph had a sense for the larger destiny of Prague, one that definitely included its mysterious alignment with and affinity for Jerusalem, and perhaps had a better idea of its importance to our current era than did Dee.

As I mingled last October, enjoying the ambiance of the restored church and the convivial atmosphere, I knew that I had indeed found some sort of nexus, a crossroads or a doorway, I just didn’t know to what. Turns out it was not only a doorway to a mystery, the Jerusalem alignment, but a portal to our future as well. I plan to be there for the solstice in 2012. Seems like a good place from which to watch the show.

1/17/2011

Vincent Bridges

© 2009 by Vincent Bridges

Presented at the 44th International Medieval Conference,
May 7th, 2009, Kallamazoo Michigan, for the Societas Alchimica

The Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami de Futuri Christi Vicarii ad Cesarem Filium D. I. A. Interprete (The Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus on the Future Vicars of Christ to Cesar his son, as expounded by Lord Abbot Joachim) is a collection of eighty watercolor images compiled as an illustrated codex and a version of the well-known Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus of the 13th-14th century. In this version, and unique to it, is a series of seven images that allow us to glimpse the time period in which the heretical Joachimites believed the Apocalypse would occur. These seven images contain the earliest known representation of the center of our galaxy, and its location between Scorpio and Sagittarius. As Fulcanelli described in the Hendaye chapter of Le Mystere, this is a clue to the timing of the “season of catastrophe,” and the secret of the alchemical transformation of time.

In 1994, an article by Italian journalist Enza Massa in the “Giornale dei Misteri” caught the attention of Ottavio Cesare Ramotti, a former Italian state policeman and encryption expert. The article concerned the rediscovery of a manuscript in the Italian National Library in Rome. Originally uncovered in the 1930s by Vatican University professor Ernesto Buonamico, who used some of the images in an attempt to find a role for Mussolini in Nostradamus’ predictions, the folio had an uncertain origin. Claiming to have been in the Vatican Library, it was sold to the National Library in 1888 by a mysterious and somewhat unscrupulous bookseller. The manuscript languished in obscurity until 1982, after the attack against pope John Paul II, when three journalists from “Giornale dei Misteri” began to study the manuscript and 12 years later one of them, Enza Massa, wrote the article that Ramotti read.

Ramotti was already a Nostradamus “scholar” at that point, having figured out a method of decrypting the quatrains into, of all things, modern Italian. When he began to look deeper into the manuscript itself, he found more and more points of similarity between the images and his interpretations of the quatrains. He explained these connections in his 1998 book, translated into English as The Nostradamus Code. In his zeal to prove that the images were somehow connected to Nostradamus, and therefore prove his new interpretation, Ramotti completely lost sight of the original manuscript.

The manuscript is small, only 83 pages in total. Eighty pages contain illustrations of an obviously allegorical nature; two pages contain notes linking some of the images to figures in the Papacy, from Urban VIII to Alexander VIII. One page was obviously meant to serve as an introduction, but it survived heavily damaged.

This introductory page reads:

To the honest reader,

From the prophetic mosaic of the Roman pontiffs (from Urban VII) (and) those preceding him are missing here by reason of the injuries of devouring time, according to divine will, which is uttered not by possession but in sleep, and not by divine inspiration in the most eminent Abbot Joachim I, but by other ways, for our forebears have sent us a soothsayer of good and scarce possession.

Cino gave this in gift to the most eminent Cardinal Barberini who has beseeched it with the permission of the most reverent Abbot.

The prophecies seen by the venerable Joachim … from Sir Ce … (mus) that which … Abbot foresaw.

Brother Cinus Beroaldus of the Carthusian Librarians at Corati, 6 September 1629

The two pages of notes bear the following heading: Visions of Michele Nostradamus on the future Vicars of Christ to his son, Cesare. This note is signed D.I.A. Interprete, which is likely Dominus Ioachim Abatis. (See appended notes for a translation of this section.)

Also, and most curious, the last page of the illustrations contains a note as well. It reads:

“Apocalyptic predictions by Anito Efesio, prince of painters of his epoch, later clarified by the prophetic inspiration of Abbot Ioachim, Tommaso Guidini of Saint John’s, by approval of the most pious Carthusian Fathers, copied and restored it in the year of our lord 1343 from the corruption of time and corrosion inflicted by the conflicts of this place.”

No Nostradamus there, and a date of 1343 points to a longer history indeed.

Ramotti does make the suggestion that the images are part of Nostradamus’ inspiration, perhaps even one of those ancient books that he supposedly burned after writing his prophecies, but actually passed on to his son, Cesare. This seems at first a likely answer, but it leads to even more significant questions. In his book, Ramotti follows the commentary of the Abbot Joachim, and mixes in the prophecies of St. Malachy, a 12th century Irish mystic, whose enigmatic references to future Popes were discovered and published in the 1590s. While not conclusively, some of the imagery in the illustrations does suggest the mottoes of St. Malachy. Abbot Joachim, who wrote the two pages of interpretation, seemed to think so. However the author of the 1343 note refers only to Joachim of Flores, and not St Malachy.

Can we authenticate the basic manuscript as having been created in the 14th century? Actually we can, and fairly easily. The manuscript, handwriting and ink experts consulted in the History Channel’s special “The Lost Book” agreed that the notes on St. Malachy dated from the 1690s, the introductory note mentioning, possibly, Cesare de Nostradame dates from no early than 1590, and the other 80 or so pages are consistent with an origin point in the mid 1300′s, as stated in the note actually written on the last page of illustrations. All we need to put the “Lost Book of Nostradamus” into its proper context is to find other collections of manuscripts with the same or similar images.

The origin of the work is clearly the 13-14th century Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus, Visions of a Summation of the Papacy, a Latin text that collects portraits of popes and prophecies related to them, which circulated from the late thirteenth to the early fourteenth century in a broad range from Provence to Bohemia, following has been described as the Cathar refuge trail. Originally a series of some thirty prophecies, based on Greek prototypes, known as the Genus nequam prophecies, derived from the Byzantine Leo Oracles, a series of twelfth-century Byzantine prophecies that foretell a savior-emperor destined to restore unity to the empire. Their poems and tempera illuminations mix fantasy, the occult, and pseudo-history in a chronology of the popes. Each prophecy consists of four elements, an enigmatic allegorical text, an emblematic picture, a motto, and an attribution to a pope. The series was augmented in the fourteenth century with further prophecies, written in imitative continuation of the earlier set, but with more overtly propagandist aims. By the time of the Council of Constance (1414–1418), both series were united as the Vaticinia de summis pontificibus and misattributed to the Calabrian mystic Joachim of Flores, actually a pseudo-Joachim. There are close to fifty manuscript versions of this collection.

Most of these collections contain images that are almost the same as those in the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami some even in a similar sequence. One these collections, Marston MS 225, in the manuscript and rare-book library of Yale University, comes from the German areas of Bavaria and Bohemia, probably from within the courts of Emperors Frederick III and Maximilian I, having had an impact on the various sovereigns of the Holy Roman Empire, down to Charles IV and Rudolph II. (See appended note for a list of manuscript collections with similar images.)

The oldest of these folios, Carpentras Bm Ms 0340, dates from circa 1280, just a few years after the crusade against the Cathars in Southern France. The town of Carpentras was a center of Catharist activity, and because of its inclusion within the new Papal enclave of Avignon, it remained such until the late 14th century. The Carpentras version contains most of the same images as the “Lost Book” and most of the Vaticinia material, including some fairly standard apocalyptic images. Another manuscript, Lyon Bm Ms 0189, from just a little further up the Rhone River, has the same core images as the “Lost Book” and the others, but it contains some strikingly apocalyptic images. These images, however, are fairly direct representations of Revelation’s apocalypse without much in the way of occult or arcane symbolism.

In the British Museum Rare Book Collection, there is another rather splendid version of the Vaticinia Summis Pontificibus, Harley 1340 British Library. This collection also has the same core images, all extremely heretical, as the “Lost Book” and it dates from the late 1400′s in Imperial Bohemia. Like the version in the Yale Library, this collection can be said to have had an influence on, or been influenced by, the Catharist survivals in Bavaria and Bohemia. This collection in fact is close to in time or contemporaneous with John Huss, the early Czech “protestant” against the Church of Rome.

There are also the repeated images that reference the famous 12th century mystic Joachim of Flores. The Church condemned his Trinitarian view of time in 1215, but it managed to survive in an underground form until the Renaissance. Exactly how Joachim and St. Malachy overlap, and when, points to a solution to the problems presented by the manuscript’s purported origins.

Thirty years after Nostradamus’ death, in the late 1590s, and about the time Cesare was working on his history of Provence, Dom Arnold Wion discovered and published the enigmatic mottoes of future Popes attributed to St. Malachy. They had been circulating privately for perhaps as much as a decade before Wion made them public. Also, the Trinitarianism of Joachim of Flores was making a come back as part of the new Hermetic movement, which included Giordano Bruno and Dr. John Dee.

Politically, the royal line of France was failing, and King Henry of Navarre, a protestant picked by Nostradamus at age 12 as a future king of France, became Henry IV of France in 1589. Even though he became Catholic to ascend the throne, his supporters saw this as a move toward moderation and even a loosening of the Church’s stranglehold. The emergence of prophecies implying the eventual end of the Catholic Church was an appealing part of this movement.

This suggests that possibly Cesare held onto this part of his father legacy, and then used it to gain favor with the Church at the start of the Counter-Reformation. The future Pope Urban VIII might have found such a document to be intriguing enough to give it to the Abbot Joachim, who seems to have been a scholar of St. Malachy’s mottoes. Perhaps he was looking for clues to his own elevation.

The time line is the key. It is just possible that this manuscript was in Nostradamus’ possession, and that he gave it to his son Cesare, who in turn gave it to Cardinal Barberini for the reasons speculated on above. The possible mention of Cesare Nostradamus from 1629 is damaged and very obscure. The only clear mention of Nostradamus, in the heading of the two pages of St Malachy commentary, can be dated no earlier than 1690, as Pope Alexander VIII is mentioned. By then Nostradamus’ fame had grown to be as great as the ancient seers, and so the last Abbot Joachim used him as reference to confirm the mottoes of St Malachy. The original visions of Joachim of Flores have now long disappeared from the interpretation and the new, and Church approved, visions of St Malachy have replaced them. And they are attributed, strangely enough, to Nostradamus as if that made them somehow more relevant.

What is clear from all this is that whether or not Cesare Nostradamus ever owned it, the manuscript is proof of a very heretical and apocalyptic movement or society that survived at least until Nostradamus’ era. Since the manuscript was in fact produced sometime around the mid 14th century, as the note on the last page says, and that it sums up the apocalyptic tradition of both Joachim of Flores and an obscure group of apocalyptic visionaries with Catharist leanings, then it is likely that if this particular version of the Vaticinia originated in Provence (as seems probable from its similarities to both the Carpentras and Lyon versions) then it passed through the hands of Rene D’Anjou, who was a collector of apocalyptic manuscripts and obscure artists. He also stands at that peculiar junction point in both time and space, Provence in the mid 1400s, where the last gasps of the Cathar heresy could become the tarot cards, the Holy Grail could be openly searched for, and Kings could still found orders of chivalry with esoteric preoccupations. In his last years, one of his physicians was Nostradamus’ maternal grandfather, Jean de St. Remy.

And it is just possible that his first teacher and father figure, his maternal grandfather Jean, did pass on to his bright young pupil an ancient volume of mysterious images of heresy and apocalypse that he had received for his service to Good King Rene. And if so, then it is easy to see why Michael de Nostradame chose not to burn it along with his other books and magical papers, but to pass it along to his son, Cesare.

We will perhaps never really know if this is true. The connections are not solidly historical. There is a letter by Cèsare, written to the French scientist Fabri de Peiresc, in which mention is made of several miniatures painted by Cèsar, and of a booklet that was destined as a gift to King Louis XIII in 1629, however there is no evidence whatsoever of any connection between these and the Vaticinia. The connections to St Malachy appear to be stronger, but, given the dates, the manuscript could have influenced Wion in his “reconstruction” of St Malachy’s mottoes. The influence of Joachim of Flores is just as obvious as St Malachy, but even that could be a misreading.

Looking just at the images themselves, without the struggle to shape them into a prophetic pattern, an outline begins to emerge. Many of the recurring images, Popes as or riding on dragons, burning towers or furnaces and wheels of fortune, viticulture and the slaughter of the innocents, the Three Fates and so on, are clearly heretical and/or alchemical in intent. Others, and these are unique to the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami, appear to have a direct astrological or astronomical meaning. Something is being communicated, but just what is very obscure indeed. If they are the remnants of an almost lost apocalyptic tradition, as seems most likely, then the need is even greater to interpret them on their own terms, and within their historical framework.

When we do that, we arrive back in Provence and the lower Rhone River a generation or so after the end of the crusade against the Cathars. They would clearly have resonated to the Pope as the Beast of Revelation, images of destruction and genocide and slaughter, as well as demons controlling King and Church. However, the component of the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami that makes it truly unique are the series of seven images found in no other version of the Vaticinia.

In the first of these seven images, a seven-rayed sun rises in Leo, above a Lion and a seven-spoke wheel hangs in the sky below a blank banner. The blank banner is a recurring motif in this series of images. The other versions of the Vaticinia have some degree of commentary, while this complete collection has none. From this we might suppose that phrases or sentences were meant to appear on the banners. The next image also has a few blank banners, but here a man sits a book on the Tree of Life, with an eight-spoke wheel above and an archer and two fish, probably meant to represent Sagittarius and Pisces, below.

The next image continues the eight-spoked wheel motif, but the Tree of Life is being attacked by a club-like thing, and arm hold an upright sword, around which another banner entwine while below yet another banner are a scorpion and a ram, again perhaps Scorpio and Aries. Next, the wheel motif continues, except here a crescent moon hangs below it. Beneath that an archer with a blindfold and a mythological woman struggle over a bow and arrow, amidst even more blank banners and a bull and a pair of scales, Taurus and Libra. These first four images then give us seven zodiacal signs: Taurus, Libra, Leo, Scorpio, Aries, Pisces and Sagittarius.

Note that Taurus and Aries share a cusp, as do Sagittarius and Scorpio and Libra and Pisces are opposite each other. Also, Libra and Scorpio have a cusp, as do Pisces and Aries. The traditional spring and fall equinox falls on the cusp of Aries/Pisces and Libra/Virgo. The pattern then points to the equinox moving a whole sign backward, from Pisces/Aries to Aquarius/Pisces and Libra/Virgo to Virgo/Leo. The sun in Leo then is clearly the fall equinox on Leo/Virgo. This gives a rough date for this sequence of events, and that date is now, as the fall equinox began its move into Leo in 1999.

The next image pinpoints the date. From the wheel hangs, like a medallion, a V with three crescents, and suspended from it is what looks an eclipse. In August of 1999, most of Europe experienced a total eclipse, and a lunar eclipse both before and after the solar eclipse. Counting the one in February, there were three lunar eclipses that year. Below the medallion like eclipse image, is what looks like a badly drawn scorpion with an arc and a spiral between its claws. 1999 was also the year when the solar system aligned with and crossed the galactic meridian. Could the arc and spiral represent the center of our galaxy? The simple answer seems to be yes.

The last two images continue and complete the eight-spoke wheel motif; in the last of the series, the wheel is shattered. In the next to last, it remains intact, as a veil is lowered – apocalypsis in Greek means simply that, lowering the veil. A man is studying under a mystic symbol, and below him are three women, divided by another set of blank banners. The last image shows the wheel as shattered, a wild man raving, holding a blank book, and below that, two women and a stag deer. The immediate future, from this viewpoint, doesn’t look that promising.

However, the symbolism itself points to the Great Cross at Hendaye, which uses the same basic symbols and temporal markers to locate the same era, roughly the twenty years from 1992 to 2012, as the traditional date of the apocalypse. (See The Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time, Weidner and Bridges, Inner Traditions 2003 for more detailed information on the Cross.) This somewhat amazing overlap of concepts, between an alchemist of the 20th century writing about a monument created in the 17th century that actually seems to encode the information of a small group of heretical Cathar from Provence, on the other side of France from Hendaye, would seem to be solid proof that some kind of heretical Catharist Chiliasm sect or society survived long enough to pass along the information.

And there is one further intriguing bit of evidence, in, of all places, the Voynich manuscript. This enigmatic text was once owned by Rudolph II, and perhaps was studied in reference to the other astro-alchemical texts of the day, including perhaps versions of the Vaticinia. The Voynich has one image in its collection of stars patterns and peculiar zodiacs that looks very much like a top down view of our galaxy. When compared to a computer-generated image, the similarities are stunning. The very idea of a galaxy wasn’t conceived of until the early 20th century, and even then, with powerful telescopes, no one could see the center of our own galaxy.

Yet the Chialists of Provence knew all about it in the 13th century. The next question to ask is how did they learn this amazing bit of information? Or perhaps that should be, from whom?

Other Vaticinia by Collection

Arundel 117 British Library

Beinecke Marston Ms 225

Bildindex 1

Bildindex 2

Bildindex 3

Bildindex 4

Bildindex 5

Carpentras Bm Ms 0340

Châlons En Champagne

Gnm Hs 86851

Harley 1340 British Library

Lyon Bm Ms 0189

Lyon Bm Ms 0195

NN Spencer 185

NN Spencer 212

NN Spencer 223

Pierpont Morgan Library Ms M 402

Stift Kremsmuenster

Tours Bm Ms 0520

Unknown & Misc.

Vaticinia Siue Prophetiae

Prophesies
Michael Nostradamus’ “On the Future Vicars of Christ to [his] son Cesar”

1st Prophecy
Let he who has ear[s] hear what the spirit says to [or ‘in’] the Churches, receive the book, and I consumed it, and it was like sweet honey in my mouth, and when I had consumed it my stomach became bitter, and lo a powerful lion, from whose mouth a long-lasting sweetness came forth, and a voice was heard in the city weeping over its citizens [literally ‘city men’], the sun was made dark, the stars were scattered, the Holy City will call it [it looks like someone wrote ‘called’ and then changed it to ‘will call’], and then death will come. Urban VIII Barbernius [i.e. his original name was ‘Maffeo Barberini’].
2nd Prophecy
At length the peacemaking dove will fly in the Vatican [or ‘on the Vatican hill’] __ed by a shrewder witch, when [or ‘as’] the eagle consumes, when [or ‘as’] the raven lives, when [or ‘as’] the solitary sparrow dies on the roof, peace will cry out on all sides, and [he/she/it, the dove?] will dedicate a temple to peace. Innocent X. Pamphilius Romanus [i.e. his original last name was ‘Pamphili’ and he came from Rome].
3rd Prophecy
The plant-bearing guard of the mountains will send down its roots in the Church of God, will de-feather the eagle, and more quickly [or ‘more rapaciously, more greedily’] than a she-wolf will the winged messenger of day be raised up over the wings of the hunter [the Latin looks like ‘ventoris,’ which is not a word. But ‘of the hunter’ is ‘venatoris.’ Perhaps a copying error has been made.]. Alex: VII. Chisius [?] Senensis [? It’s not clear to me what these last two adjectives are. Alexander VII’s last name was ‘Chigi’ and he came from Siena. Based on the endings of the other sections, I am guessing that ‘Chisius Senensis’ maps on to these facts.].
4th Prophecy
Turbot, and Toad, Toad, and Turbot [the Latin is ‘Rhombus’ and ‘Bufo’ for ‘turbot’ and ‘toad’ respectively. ‘Rhombus’ also means ‘a magician’s circle’ and ‘rhombus’.] will rule the Roman citadels. In his days the bloody muzzle will flow to the winged lions, and he himself will die from the pain more [or ‘rather’] un-praised. Clement IX. Rospigliosus Pistoriensis [his name was ‘Rospigliosi’ and he came from Pistoria, which apparently as a Latin adjective is ‘Pistoriensis’].
5th Prophecy
The new stars above the highest hills will rouse a certain fox, the seed will become haughty, in their councils my spirit will not enter. Clement X. Alterius Romanus [‘Alterius’ does not make good sense: it looks like it should literally = ‘another Roman’ (vis-à-vis Innocent II in section 2?), but that should be ‘Alter Romanus’ or ‘Alius Romanus’. His family was ‘Altierir’. Perhaps some confusion has occurred.]
6th Prophecy
The most cunning serpent under the appearance of the lion, will both drink six cups to the eagle, and spread the [or ‘his’] poison in [perhaps ‘through’] the whole world, he does not come to send peace, but the sword, he will stir up all the leaders [or ‘Princes, first men’] to war, he will conceal [or perhaps ‘overpower, check’] the moon, but during his days a beast, whose number is 666, will boast that he is the scourge of God. Innocent XI. Odescalius Comensis [His family was ‘Odescalchi’ and he came from Como].
7th Prophecy
Iron plants at the crossroads will be adorned over the winged horse, while the lion, and the eagle run, let us crown ourselves with roses, before they begin to droop, many run, but flowers have appeared in our land. Alexander VIII. Ottobonus Venetus [his family name was ‘Ottoboni’ and he came from Venice].
8th Prophecy
Light of terrible aspect to the one rising, a dragon [or ‘serpent’] a crown… [Presumably this section will have ended with the name of Innocent XII]

© 2009 by Vincent Bridges and Teresa Burns

In 1921, The Occult Review, a British illustrated monthly journal, ran an insightful article entitled “Shakespeare and the Occult” that quite plausibly concluded that many of his plays were unintelligible without an understanding of the esoteric subjects they featured. Today, if you google the words Shakespeare plus Occult, you’ll find over half a million hits. Included are modern Rosicrucian claims that: “No one familiar with esoteric doctrines can have any question as to Shakespeare’s familiarity with the wisdom of the Illuminati.” You’ll also find Jewish community groups studying “Shakespeare, Kabbalah and the Occult.” Dozens of books explore similar connections. From this, we can be fairly safe in concluding that the consensus on Shakespeare’s knowledge of esoteric wisdom is almost unanimous, from scholars to the public.

But that agreement raises the vexing question of how did even a well-educated young provincial with a definite gift for language come by such a wealth of occult knowledge? This question opens the door to the issue of Shakespeare’s identity; and, while it doesn’t prove that the Bard was really someone else (Bacon, or de Vere or even Marlowe) it does suggest that Shakespeare had some kind of secret life, one that brought him into contact with a mentor who could provide him with sources from Holinshead to Aggripa. If we follow the trail of Shakespeare’s esoteric themes and their sources we come to the conclusion that only one library, one knowledgeable teacher, existed for the necessary range of subjects: that of Dr. John Dee.

John Dee was the Einstein of the era, a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and occultist, who collected the largest library in England and one of the best in Europe. Dee occupied that middle ground in the history of science where mathematics and magic had not yet split into widely different disciplines, and much of his life was devoted to alchemy, angelic communication and Hermetic philosophy. Beginning in the early 1580s, Dee, along with his “scyer” or clairvoyant Edward Kelley, conducted a years long series of communications with angelic intelligences. In 1583, Dee, Kelley and their families embarked on a kind of apocalyptic missionary journey in which they attempted to enlisted both Stephen I and Rudolph II, the rulers of Poland and The Holy Roman Empire. Dee returned to England in 1589, leaving Edward Kelley behind in Prague, and found his library ransacked and his reputation wrecked. Elizabeth I eventually made him Warden of Christ College, Manchester, where lived until a few before his death in 1609. Kelley apparently died in Prague sometimes during the mid 1590s while attempting to escape from one of Rudolph II’s prisons.

From the work of Joy Hancox, who concluded that Dee was the most likely channel for the sophisticated geometry of the original Elizabethan theatres, we can place Dee and Shakespeare roughly in the same milieu, that of the Burbages and the Globe Theatre. However, even though Dee was in London during Shakespeare’s meteoric rise to fame in the early 1590s, and kept many journals and diaries of visitors and events, there is no mention of the name Shakespeare. If Dee knew Shakespeare, then he knew him under another name and from very different circumstances.

Curiously, some kind of oral or family tradition connecting Edward Kelley and Shakespeare seems to have survived long enough for Elias Ashmole, in the mid 17th century, to pick up on it and in his 1652 anthology dedicate Edward Kelley’s poem “Concerning the Philosopher’s Stone” (Ashmole’s title as well) to Kelley’s “especiall good Friend, G.S. Gent.” Calling William Shakespeare “G.S.” would not be much of a stretch; especially since Shakespeare’s baptism records in Stratford-upon Avon, from April 26, 1564, list his name as “Gulielmus Shaksper.” But if Shakespeare was the “G. S.” of Ashmole’s dedication, how did he become the “especiall” friend of Edward Kelly?

The original title of the 1589 poem was simply: “The praise of vnity for frendship’s sake made by a stranger/ to further his frende his Conceyts.” Since the poem itself is an instructional piece, designed to give insight into a kind of alchemical theatre, then we suppose that the “conceyts,” or conceits in the sense of personal creative endeavors, involve both the theatre and alchemy. Clearly, Kelley is writing to someone who knows the secret, has perhaps actually witnessed the art of transmutation. And just as clearly, that someone is a poet, “nature’s sower,” and a member of the “schoole” mentioned in the poem’s last line.

In Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, the same collection that includes Kelley’s poem, we find an important clue. Ashmole’s commentary on Dee and Kelley’s continental adventures contains a description of Kelley’s transmutation, performed to “gratifie Master Edward Garland and his Brother Francis.” Garland is a name that appears in the same collection of Danish documents that contains the original of Kelley’s Philosopher’s Stone poem. And both brothers turn up in Dee’s diary; indeed Dee refers to several “Garland” brothers; Francis, Edward, and Robert; and a fourth “Garland,” Henry. None have ever been positively identified, even though they’re most frequently described acting as couriers. No archival records in England have ever been found that show a payment to or letter from any of these men; no civic record of any kind lists their names.

Given their roles as couriers, it is quite likely that “Garland” is a code word, and “brothers” meant in the sense of members of an exclusive organization, such as a fraternity or a secret society. So these Brothers of the Garland are lumped together by Dee in his diary as a generic way to refer to these agents, and possibly students. Edward Garland is perhaps the easiest to identify, because his name disappears quickly from Dee’s diary entries to be replaced in the same context with the name of a person we can trace, Edward Dyer.

Dyer was a member of a “schoole,” the “Areopagus” circle around Sir Philip Sidney – whose uncle, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, had been tutored in his youth by Dr. Dee – and as such was certainly known to Dee before he arrived. The transition from Edward Garland, in the early diary entries, to Edward Dyer just over a year later shows how Dee used the concept of the Brothers Garland. They were the couriers, spies and students who were part of a larger group, or school, of poets and playwrights.

Francis Garland continued to appear in Dee’s diaries, including six mentions along with Edward Dyer. In fact a group that included Francis Garland, Joan Kelley’s brother, Edward Dyer, and Dyer’s “man” Rowles left for England just ahead of Dee and his family. If Dyer, an informant for Lord Treasurer Burgley, was indeed one of the witnesses of Kelley’s transmutation, then Burghley’s insistence on getting the now-knighted Sir Edward Kelley away from Rudolph II’s court and back to England becomes clearer. Dyer had seen the trick worked, and had persuaded his superiors so convincingly that when Kelley wouldn’t return, Dyer was dispatched back to Prague to become his student.

But what of Francis Garland? Here’s a man who apparently doesn’t exist outside of his connections to the circle around Dee and Kelley, and mainly appears in Dee’s diary connected with Edward Dyer. As with his “brother” Edward, we can safely assume that his real name wasn’t “Francis Garland.” Could this person be the G. S. or “Gulielmus Shaksper” to whom Ashmole thought Kelley had dedicated his poem on the Philosopher’s Stone? Could Francis Garland, confidant of Dee and Kelley and a witness to an alchemical transmutation, actually be William Shakespeare?

The simple answer seems to be yes.

Comparing the dates when Dee notes Francis Garland in his diaries with the known dates of Shakespeare’s life shows clearly that the idea is impossible to disprove. Most of the dates for Francis Garland fall in what is known as the “Lost Years” of Shakespeare. We know that Shakespeare left Avon around 1585, probably soon the birth of the twins Hamnet and Judith, and we know nothing of what he was doing until the early 1590s when some of his plays were produced. The next firm date we have is April 18, 1593, when his poem Venus and Adonis was registered in London. Francis Garland appears in Dee’s diary from December 1586 through March of 1595, and in all that time we find not a single instance of Shakespeare being somewhere else when Francis Garland was visiting Dee.

In fact, if we assume that Garland is Shakespeare, it appears that he visited Dee before the registration and publication of both Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Francis Garland visits Dee on March 17th 1593, and Venus and Adonis is registered on April 18th. Garland visits Dee on March 28th 1594, and The Rape of Lucrece is registered on May 19th. It is tempting to think that the young pupil, Garland/Shakespeare, was showing his mentor his latest works of alchemical poetry; Venus and Adonis in particular is filled with alchemical symbolism. By Garland’s last visit in 1595 it is possible that both Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream were finished and read with approval by Dee.

If we make the identification of Dee’s “Francis Garland” with the rising playwright William Shakespeare then most of the mysteries surrounding Shakespeare’s life disappear like actors at the end of a play. A sudden light is thrown on the so-called lost years, and a real person, not a cipher or a mask, emerges. The young Will didn’t waste his time holding horses in front of playhouses and apprentice as an actor; he went directly to the source of the national literary Renaissance; the Sidney group. And in that circle he met Dyer, who was perhaps in need of another bright young poet who could write quickly and cleanly. And so, off to Prague as Francis Garland…

Garland, or Shakespeare, was likely a member of Dee’s inner circle for close to nine years. In the later years, he was Dee’s main point of contact with Kelley, and he was, in light of Kelley’s poem, perhaps even closer to Kelley than Dee. During those years, full of adventure and marvels, we can easily see Shakespeare, or Garland, maturing and learning, absorbing everything, from politics and court protocol to intrigue and esoteric insights, that he would later turn to such good use in his plays.

And what of those plays? If we see Shakespeare as a poet who was also a spy and an occultist, then where did the theatre come from? Perhaps he was already interested in acting and playwriting when he met Dyer, and Dee and Kelley, or perhaps the idea came from Dee, who was known from his youth for being interested in the mechanics of stagecraft. Indeed, many of the standard theatrical devices of the Elizabethan stage, such as ending a show with a curtain drop, apparently have their origins in Dee and Kelley’s angelic workings. It is even likely that Dee designed the “sacred geometry” of the theatre space itself.

When Dee returned to England in December 1589, he found that much had changed. But he still had the Queen’s ear and lost no time in heading to Richmond and her court. Elizabeth would stay in touch, including a private visit to Mortlake in December 1590, where Dee apparently wanted permission, and money, for some unnamed venture. Two days later, a visitor, Richard Cavendish, confirmed her agreement with Dee’s venture in “philosophie and alchemie.”

Early versions of both Spenser’s Fairie Queen and Sidney’s Arcadia had been published since Dee’s return, and young playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe were inventing a new form of literature down in Shoreditch and on Bankside. Even Garland/Shakespeare was at work on a play, Henry VI part one. Perhaps part of Dee’s “philosphie” endeavor was the encouragement of the new theatrical art form, which was indeed allowed to flourish over the next few years until the plague closed the theatres. Dee’s role was of necessity behind the scenes, but Shakespeare/Garland took up front and center stage. By 1594, he was a member of The Lord Chamberlain’s Men and one of the most popular of the rising playwrights.

The rise of Shakespeare’s popularity in the mid-1590s represents a watershed for art, politics and occultism. In the best sense of turning the wheel, this was truly revolutionary. Suddenly, very deep and powerful ideas were turned loose in the public consciousness without the control and interference of the Church. The Elizabethan theatre was essentially a magical theatre, from the sacred geometry of the space in which they were presented to the subject matter and language of the plays themselves. And because of Dr. Dee’s influence, this was a Hermetic revolution.

This Hermetic revolution in the theatrical arts served as the starting point for further revolutions, both political and scientific. The Tempest, whose main character Prospero is thought by some scholars to be based on Dee, and by others on Shakespeare himself, , was performed for the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in 1613. Frederick V would go on to become the King of Bohemia and the leader of the Protestant revolution in central Europe until he was deposed in 1622. This was also the years when the Rosicrucian manifestos were circulating, attracting minds such as that of Liebnitz and leading the way toward the Royal Societies in England and France.

Dee’s work, particularly his Monas Hieroglyphica from 1564, was a major influence on Rosicrucian philosophy, and there are echoes of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosencrutz. Dee and Kelley’s alchemical work and the work of their followers can be seen as the origins of modern chemistry and physics. In the same way, Shakespeare’s plays are the origin point of modern psychology.

Once we begin to see Shakespeare in the light of his years as Francis Garland, and begin to appreciate the deep and long lasting influence of Dee on Shakespeare’s life and development, the outlines of a larger plan emerges. Dr. Dee had lost none of his missionary fervor, which had launched the long exodus to begin with, after his return in 1589. It was simply channeled in a different direction, toward perhaps the growing hermetic revolution in the Elizabethan theatre, spearheaded by his old pupil Garland, or William Shakespeare.

One last point: The 1623 collection of Shakespeare’s works opens with The Tempest. His friends who published it must have known his connection to John Dee and gave the pride of place to the play that makes the point most clearly. From Shakespeare’s point of view, the play can be seen both as a nod toward his old mentor, and as a salute and elegy to his own career as a magician and hermetic revolutionary. Dee could expect no less from a friend like Francis Garland.

***

Vincent Bridges is an author and esoteric historian best known as the co-author of Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time and for his work on Nostradamus for the History Channel. Teresa Burns is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Platteville and is the author, along with Vincent Bridges, of Shakespeare, John Dee and the Hermetic Revolution: Alchemy and Espionage in the Magickal Theatre of Elizabethan England.

Okay, so I’m watching Scary Movie 3 on Comedy Central last night when an odd commercial comes on featuring all kinds of signs saying: “The end is coming,” and “the end of the world.” This catches my interest and I un-mute just in time to hear my own voice saying something about the “exact date of the Apocalypse.” Then the logo for Lost Book of Nostradamus, my new History Channel special, comes on; it is a promo spot, done especially for the comedy channel.

This morning, while channel surfing over breakfast, I found a whole three-minute piece on Fox & Friends, featuring one of my segments from the show as a teaser and an interview with my friend Victor Baines, who is also on the show. Who would have ever thought that I would make Fox News announcing the end of the world? Reality is stranger than any fiction. Trust me, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried!

What started as a way to get the History Channel interested in making a follow up to my first Nostradamus special, Nostradamus: Five Hundred Years Later, has blossomed into a gargantuan enterprise, backed by the largest promotional blitz ever done by the History Channel. They even had an hour long Behind the Scenes on the TV Guide channel and a countdown clock on the History Channel itself. This show seems planned to take Nostradamus and the End of the World into the mainstream.

For the first hour, the show’s reenactments and forensic drama are mixed with a few nods to Nostradamus’ prophetic abilities, and lots of teasers that whatever the Lost Book turns out to be, it is going to be very important. The second hour moves deeper into the prophecies, and eventually concludes that the book wasn’t likely to have been created by Nostradamus, although it could have belonged to him. It could even have been one of his sources, one that helped him pinpoint our present time period as one to watch.

And here the show turns into the Vincent & Friends Apocalyptic Comedy Troupe, as Victor Baines and my former co-author Jay Weidner back me up as I interpret the crucial seven images in the series from the Lost Book as pointing to the events happening in the sky right now, culminating just five years from now in 2012. The connections between the imagery in the Lost Book and these celestial events are made even more apparent by the symbolism of a 13th century church front just a few feet away, around the corner, from Nostradamus’s door. I point all this out in the show, and the producers did a fine job of animating it, and it is quite convincing.

So, how did the core of our book, The Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (2003, Destiny Books) end up on television, with a huge media blitz behind it, in a special on Nostradamus?

That is actually a long and complicated story going back more than eight years to our first research trip for Mysteries. We stayed in the 18th century chateau built on the estate of Nostradamus’ brother Bertrand, and some sort of connection was made. The Balkan war insights came less than a month after we returned, and I got my start as an authority on Nostradamus. After the 2003 television show, where I actually did some of my talking head shots on the ground in France, my connection to the Maestro became even closer. But I had no idea what was coming next.

I had seen some of the images in the Lost Book in an earlier book by O. C. Ramotti, The Nostradamus Code. The images in that book were definitely intriguing, and the main reason to buy the book, but Ramotti’s interpretations left much to be desired. I find it far beyond belief that Nostradamus, when decoded, was actually writing in modern Italian. But still, those images were very strange!

Last spring, as the Lost Book was being examined forensically in Rome, I got to see for the first time the complete series of images and I knew very quickly that the core series not only depicted the center of our galaxy, but also was talking about the galactic alignment itself. Here was manuscript evidence, dating from at least the 16th century, that someone had known of the center of galaxy and even its spiral shape, long before modern astronomy discovered it in 1917.

That alone made the Lost Book of Nostradamus a truly unique discovery. Here was solid evidence that a main point of our argument in Mysteries, that an unknown group of initiates or believers had retained sophisticated knowledge concerning the “end of the world” galactic alignment at least since the Middle Ages, was in fact correct. A heretical and possibly chilaist group of initiates kept the knowledge, in the form of images that were eventually perhaps only semi-understandable. These images were treasures, copied and recopied, until finally they disappeared into the Vatican Library.

And now, I get to announce their true meaning and value on nation television!

I told you, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried!

By Vincent Bridges
(©2003, 2007)

I know, myself, that the goddess Isis is the mother of all things‚ and that she alone can bestow Revelation and Initiation.

Le Mystere des Cathedrales, page 136

1 – The Soul-Star Place

Just west of where the Nile begins to widen out into the fan-shaped delta, a rough limestone escarpment rises a few hundred feet and then flattens off into a wind swept plateau. An ancient civilization, perhaps a colony of lost Atlantis, built a complex pattern of structures on the edge of the plateau. Fulcanelli, in Dwellings of the Philosophers, suggests that they were built at the end of the last Ice Age, and Schwaller de Lubicz confirms that it is water erosion that can be seen on the Sphinx and its enclosure, giving us a date of at least 12,000 years ago for their construction. Whatever their age, these monuments have fascinated humanity throughout history.

Consider the tale, first written down in the XVIIth Dynasty from a Middle Kingdom version of a IVth Dynasty original, of Prince Radjedef, the Djedi and King Khufu. The King and his four sons are relaxing at the palace telling stories of famous magicians. Radjedef tops them all by announcing that he knows of a living magician equal to those of the past. Khufu is interested and Radjedef tells him of the Djedi, or stable one, who is apparently ageless and knows many things, including, “the shrines of the secret chambers of the enclosure of Tehuti.” Now Khufu is really interested, because the King “had spent much time in seeking for himself these secret chambers of the enclosure of Tehuti to fashion for himself their likeness for his horizon.” Khufu dispatches Radjedef to bring the Djedi back to the palace.

He returns with the Djedi, who quickly charms and awes the court with his magical abilities. Then the King comes to the point: ‚ÄúNow, as for the rumor that you know the number of the shrines of the secret chamber of the enclosure of Tehuti…?‚Äù Djedi says that he does not, although he knows where that information can be found. ‚ÄúThere is a box of flint in a chamber called the Revision of On: in that box.‚Äù The Djedi claims that he cannot recover this information, but the eldest of the triplets then in the womb of the wife of the high priest of ‚ÄúRe, Lord of Sakhbu,‚Äù will discover the information and found a new Dynasty. (This story comes from a cycle of five magical tales in Berlin Papyrus 3033, paraphrase and translation by the authors.)
Whatever we may think of the miraculous origins of the Vth Dynasty, this tale poses some interesting questions. Just what is the “enclosure of Tehuti?” And what are the “shrines of the secret chambers” whose likeness Khufu wants for his own “horizon?” Why is it that the information concerning these secrets could be found in a chamber called “Revision” in On, or Heliopolis as the Greeks called it a thousand years into its decline?

The so-called Inventory Stele of Khufu, found in the Isis Chapel near Khufu‚Äôs mortuary temple at Giza in the 1850‚Äôs, suggests that the “enclosure of Tehuti‚” is none other than the Great Pyramid complex itself. The stele clearly states that at least the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx were in existence at the time Khufu ascended to the throne. Peter Lemesurier, a pyramid scholar, has speculated that Khufu, which means simply (he) “protects us,” assumed the name of the traditional builder of the pyramid, Knum Khufu, or “Knum protects us” to symbolize his possible reincarnative connection with this semi-mythical builder. One of the earliest artifacts of Egyptian civilization, the Narmer palette, indicates that the pyramids predated the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt. A pyramid in a rectangular enclosure looms over the right shoulder of Narmer/Menes on the Lower Egypt side of the tablet like some relic from a forgotten age.
The Djedi story then presents us with the image of a King who doesn’t know the secret chambers of his own tomb, if we are to believe the Egyptologists. But the enclosure of Tehuti is clearly no tomb, and Khufu was sincerely interested in discovering its secrets. What these shrines of the secret chambers might be is suggested by the archaic title for the ancient Nome or precinct of On, Sakhbu. The literal translation of this word is “soul star place,” and the ancient Egyptians used it to describe the entire plateau at Giza.

According to the Pyramid Texts, the “soul star place,” which contains the enclosure of Tehuti and its secret chambers, is the Duat on earth through which the King travels as he makes his journey toward re-birth in Re‚Äôs Boat of a Million Years. Khufu wishes to know its secret so that his horizon, his transition, might truly result in immortality among the imperishable stars. This was no idle concern for Khufu. The Djedi story suggests that his failure to understand the mystery caused the failure of his Dynasty. It would be the Vth Dynasty Pharaohs who would bring forth or make public the secrets of the enclosure of Tehuti.

But the “soul star place” remains, and its inconceivably ancient monuments continue to haunt us with their mystery. Perhaps, just perhaps, the shrines of the secret chambers, like some time locked vault, have begun to open and we can glimpse through them an awe-filled universe of meaning and connection in which the ancient builders lived.

The secret chambers began to open in 1989 with an article in the Oxford journal, Discussions in Egyptology. Engineer Robert Bauval argued that not only did the pyramids at Giza exhibit a grand unified pattern, but also that pattern mirrored the stars in the constellation of Orion. In ancient Egypt, Orion was the “Place of Osiris,” suggesting a deep connection between the constellation and the myth of death and rebirth. Bauval’s idea made sense, (he would go on to co-author the bestsellers The Orion Mystery and The Message of the Sphinx) and further investigation has shown that the entire pyramid field, from Dashur to Abu Roash, may mirror the stars in the sky above it.

The plan of the Giza pyramids also exhibits an amazing degree of geometrical and mathematical coherence. For example, the three pyramids fit inside a rectangle formed from a vesicia piscis, from which the generative roots (the square root of 2, 3 and 5) are derived. The vesicia piscis also determines the angle of each face and the height of the floor of the King’s chamber. R.J. Cook demonstrated that a geometrical axial system linked the smaller pyramids with the center pyramid. He found that this system of linkages was based on the use of 60 degree and 26.5 degree angles.
Sixty degrees is the angle of an isosceles triangle; 26.5 degrees is the angle of the diagonal of a double square. The floor of the King’s Chamber is a double square and the ascending and descending passages are set at 26.5 degrees; this can hardly be accidental. The entire complex seems arranged to create a pointer indicating the helical rising of Orion/Osiris. Even more fascinating, a line drawn at 26.5 degrees north of east, the indicator point for the pre-dawn rise of Orion, runs from the second pyramid to Bethlehem in Palestine. Given the similarity between the dying god Osiris and the resurrected Christ, this alignment suggests an ancient stellar connection much too significant to be co-incidental.

A number of Giza researchers, including Max Toth, Rocky McCollum and William Buehler, have noticed that the arrangement of the three major pyramids produces a short section of a Golden Mean spiral. Extending this spiral on the ground leads to a small rise in the escarpment a few kilometers to the south-east of the pyramid complex. This area has received very little archeological attention since it covers a portion of the local village’s cemetery. The 1947 survey map notes the existence, near the center of the spiral, of an unidentified ruin of which nothing seems to have survived to the present. Without more research, including on-site inspection, the ground level Golden Mean spiral seems to be a dead end.

But, we wondered, what if we draw the Golden Mean spiral in the sky? If the pyramids are modeled on the stars in Orion’s belt, then they should also describe a small section of the Golden Mean spiral. If we continue the line in the sky, following the yellow brick road of the Golden Mean, we arrive at the heart of the figure of Orion/Osiris.

Visually, this appears to be an empty region of space, but radio and x-ray astronomy reveal a seething area of collapsing stellar material below and to the left of the shoulder star, Bellatrix. Stars are being born in the heart of Orion. Indeed, the general area of Orion has more stellar formation occurring than anywhere else in our local galactic neighborhood.
The complex geometry of Giza, the Sakhbu or “soul star place” was apparently designed to embed and encode certain “truths” about the star fields of Orion. Giza’s monuments function as a cosmic clock, ticking off the ages through cyclical stellar alignments while establishing galactic scale resonance with the regions of energetic star birth far off in Orion. This resonating clock reminds of us who we are and where we came from on a galactic scale. It holds our cosmic memory, the echo of self-awareness that allows us to overcome our monkey body programming.

2 – “The sky has born you with Orion. . .”

The question remains: If the enclosure of Tehuti is the pyramid complex itself and the shrines of the secret chambers are the stellar alignments and geometric resonance points on the Giza plateau, then how can this information be found in a flint box in a storeroom in Heliopolis?
Several authors have suggested that the answer is perhaps a symmetry set of geometric solids, a primitive model of Buckminister Fuller’s icosa-dodecahedral earth grid. From our investigation, it seems more likely to have been The Precious Stone and the astronomical and practical instructions needed to make it work. And this does make sense; the monuments on Giza were there for all to see, no secret there. But how to use them was a secret that could be coded into a text and stored with a few models in a flint box.

Given that the “Book of Coming Forth unto the Light” the core of the Pyramid Texts, appeared near the end of the Vth Dynasty, maybe SahuRe, the eldest of the royal triplets, did indeed find that flint box with the secret operating manual for the “soul star place.” The Pyramid Texts, mankind’s oldest religious writings, were carved on the internal walls of one Vth Dynasty pyramid and four more from the VIth Dynasty. Frozen, like an ant in amber, these inscriptions record the definitive expression of an ancient star religion, whose beliefs included the translation of the dead king into a star in the constellation of Orion. Even the Victorian Egyptologists with their Christian and solar bias agreed that the Pyramid Texts had greater antiquity than the Vth Dynasty. Gaston Maspero, their original discoverer and translator, thought “the greater part were originally written during the pre-historic period of Egypt.”  That is, at least before about 3300 BC.
Professor R. T. Rundle Clark, who had a great respect for the Pyramid Texts, notes that “the rising of Orion in the southern sky after the time of its invisibility is the sign. . . Osiris has been transformed into a living soul.” (Remember, the ability to mark this moment is one of the major design factors involved in the overall plan of the monuments on Giza. This line, indicated by the 26.5 degree angle north of east, points to the summer solstice sunrise at the time of Orion‚Äôs return; it also runs to Bethlehem.) The Texts themselves are quite clear on this:

“Behold he has come as Orion, behold Osiris has come as Orion. . . O king, the sky conceives you with Orion, the dawn-light bears you with Orion. . . you will regularly ascend with Orion from the eastern regions of the sky, you will regularly descend with Orion in the western region of the sky.” (Pyramid Texts, line 820-2)
“O king, you are this Great Star, the Companion of Orion, who traverses the sky with Orion, who Navigates the (Duat) Netherworld with Osiris; you ascend from the east of the sky, being renewed in your due season, and rejuvenated in your due time. The sky has born you with Orion. . .” (Pyramid Texts, line 882-3)
A little further along in the same passage, we find an important clue: “I am a soul. . . I (am) a star of gold. . .” (Pyramid Texts, Line 886-9)
Thus the dead King, as an “Osiris” evolved to inhabit a newly born stellar matrix in the constellation of Orion. The Duat, translated as Netherworld by most Egyptologists, actually appears to be the star birth Bardo field in the heart of Orion. There the newly immortal King must “Navigate the Duat” as a companion of Orion/Osiris. Significantly, the Osiris-king announces: “The sky is pregnant of wine (the dawn-light), Nuit has given birth to her daughter, the dawn-light, I raise myself indeed. . .” (Pyramid Texts, line 1082-3)
In several places in the Pyramid Texts, a curious statement is made: “The (dead) king’s sister is Sothis, (Sirius) his offspring is the Morning Star. . .” (Pyramid Texts, lines 357, 929, 935, 1707) It is easy to see Isis, Osiris’ sister/wife, as the star Sirius, which follows Orion in the sky. But to see Horus, Osiris’ offspring, as the Morning Star, Venus, takes a bit of understanding. Until we remember that Venus, rising against the zodiac of the ecliptic, creates a five-pointed star through time. This symbol, a star made of five lines drawn from a common center toward the points in the zodiac of Venus’ rising, covers the ceiling of Unas’ pyramid where the earliest Pyramid Text is inscribed.

Horus, the son of Osiris, was the prototype of the earthly king; the Egyptian Pharaohs ruled in his name. As such, the symbol of Horus preserves the idea of transcendence and the possibility of stellar evolution. Again, the Pyramid Texts give a flavor of this: “. . .and Har-Sopd has come forth from you as Horus who is in Sothis (Isis). . . and he protects you in his name of Horus, the son who protects the father. . .” (Pyramid Texts, lines 632-3) Har-Sopd, or Horus who is the morning star, is depicted as a hawk-headed human with a Nuit star in a circle above his head.

If the Pyramid Texts are truly the operating manual for the monuments on Giza and their evolutionary resonance with the star fields of Orion, then they deserve much more study than they have received in the century or so since their discovery. Others, primarily Robert Bauval in The Orion Mystery, have drawn attention to these clues, but Egyptologists and archeologists have been slow to respond. No attempt has been made to examine other texts of comparable antiquity, such as the Builder Texts of Edfu and Dendera, for more clues. It is as if this tantalizing evidence of man’s early fascination with this vibrantly creative area of stellar birth leads to a dead end.
Perhaps for the academics, with reputations to make and preserve, it does. But for the group of mystics, scientists and esoteric philosophers interested in ancient wisdom, these clues provide startling evidence of Old Kingdom Egypt’s knowledge of the equivalent of a spiritual unified field theory. For them, the monuments on Giza are reminders of humanity’s galactic destiny.

3. “a star of Gold”

Let’s start with the clue about gold. “I am a soul, I (am) a star of gold‚” Osiris/Pharaoh announces. Before we dismiss this as mere poetry, remember that the Egyptian hieroglyphic language was capable of a dense structure of meaning. The “soul,” sa, has a precise meaning. It is the wave nature, the flow of the breath, of the spirit, the khu. The Hebrew word ruach, breath or spirit, preserves this meaning. In Genesis, we are told that God’s breath, His ruach moved across the waters of chaos to begin the process of creation. The sages of On would have agreed, saying that Re put forth his sakhu as he rose from the waters of Nun.

Therefore, the king is declaring that he has entered the state of being called “soul,” a state where the flow of spirit is self-sustaining, self-referencing and self-aware. To be such a soul is to have the possibility of immortality.
He reinforces this by declaring that he has become a “star of gold.”  This also has a very precise meaning. One of the deepest held secrets of the Egyptian mysteries was how to rearrange the Nuit star, five lines pointing out from a common center, into an interlocked pentagram, the same five lines crossing around the common center to create an infinite nest of Phi ratios. To the Egyptian sages, this symbolized the embedding of cosmic evolution, the Light of the Horus current, into biological evolution.

And indeed, this pentagonal array is a constant in nature, appearing in everything from the petals on a flower to the bipedal symmetry of the human form. The Pythagoreans claimed that the pentagram was the perfect symbol of humanity, and that its extension into space, the Gnostic “light in extension” of the dodecahedron, was the ultimate symbol of spirit. As the crystalline form of DNA actually forms a dodecahedron, the Pythagoreans were more correct than we might suppose.
Just as the pentagram is a nest of phi ratio recursion, gold, by its atomic geometry, is the most fractally recursive element. The outer d/f electron sub-shells exhibit a 5/7 symmetry pairing, which gives gold the shape of the perfect dodeca-icosa fractal. The dodecahedron, the Pythagorean symbol of spirit, nests with the icosahedron, a symbol for water, to create a polygon that is a model of the crystalline structure of our planetary jewel, according to researchers such as Beth Hagen. The planet then is the vessel or container for the unfoldment of The Cosmic Serpent of DNA, “living in water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire,” as Jeremy Narby described it.
So the newly dead king’s statement can now be read as: “I am a self-sustaining, self-aware being, whose fractality, inside and out, is as infinite as the perfect shape of gold.” Suddenly, we are on a different level of understanding. With a flash, we see that the Egyptians were not just superstitious priests worshipping the sky out of ignorance; they were spiritual scientists with deep insight into the nature of reality and the physics of immortality. This insight seems to have come from the original creators of the Giza complex; those ancient sages who wrote down the secret texts and stored them in that flint box in Heliopolis.
But there is another way to interpret “the number of the shrines of the secret chamber of the enclosure of Tehuti…” The secrets in the flint box, guarded by the Brotherhood of Heliopolis, could be an Egyptian version of the Tree of Life or the I Ching, in which the 64 shrines count the moon year of Tehuti, whose name means “the one who measures the moon,” with its 13 months for a total 384 days or moving lines. Whatever the secret, its recovery by the Vth ands VIth Dynasty Pharaohs led to the expression of the soul-star religion on the walls of the later pyramids at Sakkara.

The Pharaoh did not become a soul merely by dieing. He underwent another, internal, process before his transition to a star of gold, a soul inhabiting a stellar matrix in the heart of Orion. The internal process of building a container for the outburst of transformative energies in the body can only be accomplished by the realization of infinite compassion. Literally, the oldest trick in the book Work by Lee Sanella and Isaac Bentov, Kundalini – Psychosis or Transcendence?, has shown that the onset of neural superconductivity, the tantric Kundalini or serpent power, is mediated by the sonic entrainment of the heart’s rhythm. A December, 1996 article by Dr. Irving Dardik in Cycles magazine entitled “Heart Waves as Fractality” confirms that fractal immune identity is a possible solution to chronic illness. Perfect fractality, perfect coherence and self-awareness, produce perfect immunity, or near immortality of the body.

These findings suggest that by meditating on compassion, feeling the feelings of all beings, the sonic entrainment of the heart’s rhythm is braided into more complex and coherent patterns. These complex sound patterns can then contain the super-conductive neural charge of Kundalini onset, which is nothing less than a sudden resonance with the vivid laser-like intensity of the internal DNA light, and the use of this higher charge energy flow to braid a new being, the state of inhabiting a soul, becoming a conscious expression of the DNA. This soul charge can then be used to open a “magnetic wormhole” to the star fields in Orion. Or, it can be used to create a diamond imperishable body for use as a teaching vehicle down here on earth.

From the Tibetan Buddhist tradition comes many examples of the latter use of this implosive soul force. Padmasambhava, who brought Buddhism to Tibet in the 8th century CE, is said to have attained his diamond body in the Asura Cave in Nepal after three years of tantric meditations. Something happened in that cave; the whole hillside is still pervaded with an astral intensity strong enough to grow a image of Tara, the Tibetan Isis, out of solid rock. Padmasambhava himself demonstrated the power of this transformation by melting the rock of the cave wall and pressing his hand into it like Clark Gable in wet cement on Hollywood Boulevard.

The Pharaoh then, as he began his journey to the star fields, should be seen as a kind of Boddhisatva, an enlightened being making a leap of evolution. The Pharaoh would, in theory, have completed a tantric-type compassion realization and then perhaps used a trace of “alchemical” gold to crystallize the process. Done properly, this would result in an enlightened being capable of compassionately inhabiting a newly born star. In other words, a person whose weak laser light from the DNA had suddenly become “pumped” by the feedback of conscious compassion into a powerfully coherent flash of light. If this flash is done consciously, with full mindfulness all the way down the level of the DNA, then the “Diamond Body of Light” becomes stable and perhaps even flexibly tangible.
Carried to its end, the implications of this belief system suggest that a vast compassionate and enlightened being also inhabits our own star, the sun. From this perspective, it is easy to understand the solar influence on Egyptian religion. Even Akhnaton’s insistence on worshipping the sun’s physical body, the Aton, as the only source of divinity makes sense as a way of establishing and strengthening a direct communication with that vast compassionate being whose star body is our sun and whose blueprint lies at the core of DNA.
The monuments of the “soul star place” and their hieroglyphic operating manual, the Pyramid Texts, offer solid evidence of an advanced civilization far back in prehistory that understood both the stellar mechanics of our local galactic neighborhood, the psycho-dynamics of neural superconductivity and the photon emission and absorption of DNA. This alone should make us sit up and take notice. That it does not may have consequences far beyond our comprehension.
What happened to the advanced civilization that designed and built these monuments? Was it destroyed in some cosmic catastrophe predicted by its own cosmic clock? Is that catastrophe point approaching critical once again?
Fulcanelli and the message of the Cross at Hendaye, as well as such distant cultural groups as the Mayan and the Inca, point to a date around 2012 as the crisis point. Terence McKenna, in his “Time Wave Zero” computer program, which uses the permutation pattern found in the primal arrangement of the I Ching’s trigrams, predicts that novelty, or lack of continuity in ideas, will also reach infinite around December of 2012. Keeping in mind what we have discovered about the ability of the DNA to absorb or emit light, then perhaps what has been interpreted as “novelty” is really the ability to absorb and translate the new influx of Light?

Perhaps this cosmic event is meant to be a harvesting mechanism for biologics who have learned to inhabit “souls” through the realization of compassion. If that is the case, then learning to weave your Bardo or transitional body into nicely fractal flows of self-awareness as infinite compassion, in other words communicate directly with your DNA, may just become the ultimate survival skill.
The geometry of Giza’s monuments and their resonance with the star fields of Orion teaches us that human evolution has a cosmic, stellar component. The pyramid complex holds our contiguous memory through the implosion of galactic catastrophe, and offers us hope for our own evolution. The practitioners of the ancient star religion, as shown by the monuments and legends they left behind, believed that sentience was evolving toward ever greater levels of compassionate awareness as a living stellar matrix, coalescing and nurturing the planetary jewels in hopes of nourishing life, which would in turn evolve toward stellar sentience. Perhaps we can think of this as the prime directive of our DNA programming.

As Nuit, the Egyptian star goddess, declared to Aleister Crowley in the first section of the Book of the Law: “Every man and every women is a star.” When we remember that all the matter in our bodies originated in the heart of stars, and that our consciousness, freed from its prison of matter, has the ability to return to the stars, then it is possible that Nuit is describing the literal truth. From the stars we came, and to them, if we learn our lessons, we shall one day return.

4 – The Secret of Light

Is this then the secret of alchemy, the science of Al Khema, and the black land of Egypt?

In part the answer is yes, but we must remember that the Pharaonic science of immortality by re-birth as a star in Orion is but one application of the ancient star-science we have called astro-alchemy. According to Egyptian tradition, the institution of kingship was received from the Hru Shemsu, the semi-divine Company of Horus, so that humanity might have a direct connection with the process of creation. One of the duties of the Pharaoh was to keep the Djed of Osiris properly aligned so that the world participated in the divine or stellar stability.
The Patriarch Abraham, through his knowledge of Egyptian and Indian astronomy, formulated the Djed concept as the Tree of Life, the pattern of divine unfoldment that created the world and formed the basis of human sentience. Hebrew Gnostics, such as Rabbi Nehuniah and the Mercabah traditions of the Bahir, developed this idea into the mystical Path of Return. By experiencing the states of being, symbolized originally by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet and later by the images of the Tarot Trumps, the cabalist ascends by degrees to the Godhead. This pattern was visualized as both internal, as a map to the active Kundalini centers in the body, and external, as the dragon axis of the galactic alignments.

William Stirling wrote in The Canon: An Exposition of the Pagan Mystery Perpetuated in the Cabala as the Rule of All Art: “The process of creation may be expressed by inscribing the cabalistic diagram in the upper hemisphere, so that the apex or crown reaches to the Milky Way, while the tenth step will coincide with earth.‚” Stirling’s “cabalistic diagram” is the ten step pattern of unfoldment known to occultists as the Tree of Life, and according to his explication, it is the basic pattern of the Canon itself.

He writes: “The doctrine of the Cabala was reduced to a geometric diagram, in which ten steps were grouped according to a progressive scheme, so that the emanations of the Spirit of the Elohim issues from the first step called the Crown, and after passing through the whole figure is carried through the ninth step, and finally reaches the tenth or last of the series.” This cabalistic diagram described by Stirling was first elucidated in the 2nd century Sepher Yetsirah. It pictures reality as the intersection of levels of abstraction.
Stirling tells us that “the ideas which the ancients connected and combined into this figure of ten progressive steps, appears to form the basis of all their philosophy, religion, and art, and in it we have the nearest approach to a direct revelation of the traditional science, or Gnosis, which was never communicated except by myths and symbols.” From this we can see that the framework, the Gnostic pattern, behind the universal language of symbolism, the Language of the Birds and the Green Language, is this great word/world tree of geometry.

All of which points to DNA as the source of the imagery. Remember, the ten spheres and the serpent-like entwining of the 22 paths, make for a total of 32 qualities and their reflection, which of course matches the 64 protein synthesis code words of t-RNA. The 22 letters of the paths correspond to the 20 amino acid pairs and the two punctuation marks formed by t-RNA. The 23 chromosomes that each individual passes on in reproduction can be seen as the 22 paths of the language, with the addition of the Malkuth, or earth element that creates both gender and individuality. In essence, the Tree Of Life is an elegant and symbolic way to express the patterns found in the DNA. It is also the Ladder of our western shamanic Gnosis.

Fulcanelli used this Tree of Life pattern to organize his perspective on alchemy. He carefully gives us four Trees, suggesting the projected Tree of Life on the celestial sphere of the Bahir. From this astronomical pattern of alignments comes the Cube of Space, the Precious Stone of the Wise, which eventually became the Holy Grail and the Philosopher’s Stone of alchemy.
The projected Tree of Life pattern also gives us insight into the Pharaonic star-birth process. The projected Tree, whose Tiphareth point falls on the cusp of Taurus/Gemini and includes the Pleiades, contains the constellation of Orion. In this arrangement, the Netzach sphere falls on Sirius, hence its connection to Isis and the confusion with Venus, the planetary attribution for that sphere. On the Tree of Life, developed as the Path of Return, the path from Netzach to Tiphareth is attributed to the Hebrew letter Nun and the Tarot Trump Death. Significantly, it is also attributed to the zodiacal sign of Scorpio, the location of the “stinging” center of the galaxy.

With this in mind, we can see the Pharaoh’s star-birth as part of a larger process. The star fields of Orion, which lie a mere 70 light years away, are the closest area of stellar creation to our solar system. The Pharaoh attained immortality in these star fields as he passed in death along the path of Nun, which in Egyptian is the word for the primeval ether soup out of which all of creation arose, through the area of stellar formation in the heart of Orion. Thus, by being reborn as a star in Osiris’ company, the Pharaoh reenacted on a local level the original creation of the universe.

In order to achieve this, the Pharaoh must initiate the transformational and creative process within himself before or at the moment of death. LaViolette has demonstrated that spontaneous creation of matter and energy from the ether soup is a matter of geometric stressors, symbolized by his Model G reaction pattern and known to the ancients as the Ankh, the image of “universal life” in Fulcanelli‚Äôs words. The Ankh, as we have noted, is the only form of the cross to contain the entire Tree of Life pattern without disturbing its natural order. It is also symbolic of the Southern Cross, visible in the winter sky through most ancient Egypt’s history, and its use as an astral marker of the galactic alignment.

The constellation Crux, the Southern Cross, stands on the galactic meridian, and its vertical axis points to the South Celestial Pole. Its horizontal axis is tilted, at this precessional epoch, to point directly at the galactic center. If we continue the vertical line from the South Celestial Pole through the Cross and on to Centaurus and Corvus and then to the cusp of Leo/Virgo, we see that the Southern Cross is a perfect precessional marker in the sky. The age can be read by its vertical orientation. The Southern Cross connects the South Celestial Pole and the start point of the precessional Great Year in Leo/Virgo. As this axis moves backward through time, the Southern Cross forms the galactic seasons by aligning the celestial and ecliptic poles with the solstice and equinoxes and the galactic meridian.

Since the Southern Cross is now a Southern Hemisphere constellation, we do not realize that it was visible on the southern horizon above the 30-degrees north-latitude line for most of the precessional epoch of Aries. The Greeks, who were too far north to appreciate it clearly, considered it as part of the constellation Centaurus and only learned of its importance, and the idea of precession itself, from the Egyptians. As the epoch of Aries drew to a close, it was obvious that the Cross was leaving the Northern Hemisphere for another 23,760 years. Thus the Southern Cross is the “essential cross [that] salutes the measure of the twelfth part,” or the one precessional epoch of 2,160 years out of the twelve epochs of the complete precessional year, 25,920 years, when it is visible above 30 degrees north latitude.

The Pharaoh then built the Ankh within himself by aligning his subtle bodies or energy fields in this pattern. Dr. Robert Masters, in his book The Goddess Sekhmet, describes the Egyptian theory of the five magical bodies that, when aligned properly, creates a super-sensible or divine consciousness. This is even more interesting when we remember that Sekhmet, as the Great Eye of Ra, is actually a metaphor for the eruption of the galactic core. Masters‚Äô five bodies, the Aufu, the Ka, the Hadit, the Khu and the Sahu, are exact duplicates in function with LaViolette’s five reaction steps in the self-sustaining Model G active ether geometry.

When this alignment is achieved, there is a burst of spontaneous matter/energy creation, which if employed consciously, can be used to generate a “light body” the diamond or imperishable body of the Tibetan tantrics. When it occurs without conscious initiation and control, then a number of dire results can occur, from illness and insanity to death by spontaneous combustion. Indeed, the numerous and well-documented examples of spontaneous human combustion are proof of the process’ reality. Modern physics has no answer for the mystery of such combustion, but if we see it as one end of a spectrum, the other being the creation of an immortal light body, then the mystery resolves itself.

To see this a little more clearly, we need to look once more at the Egyptian magical text mentioned in chapter three. From the Paris Papyrus, it is one of the gems discovered in Egypt by Napoleon’s savants. In papyrus IV, lines 475-830, we find a ritual to attain immortality through inhaling Light. The aspirant is first told to perform seven days of rituals, and then three days of dark retreat. On the morning of the eleventh day, the aspirant is to face the rising sun and perform an invocation: “First source of all sources. . .perfect my body. . .(so) that I may participate again in the immortal beginning. . .that I may be reborn in thought. . .and that the holy spirit may breathe in me.”

With this the aspirant inhales the first rays of the rising sun, and then leaves his body behind and rises into the heavens, filled with Light. “For I am the Son (of the Sun), I surpass the limits of my souls, I am (magical symbol for Light).”

Eleven is the number of the Gnostic sephiroth Daat, and Fulcanelli uses this mystical perspective in his explication of the 46th image in Le Mystere. Whether Fulcanelli knew of the Paris Papyrus and its formula for inhaling light is unclear, but he certainly understood the process. We can see this in his description of the enigmatic credence of Lallemant Mansion, which he assigns to the Daat position in his fourth Tree of Life pattern.

An architectural credence is a false door or window. This immediately suggests the Egyptian false door used in tombs and the Islamic mithrab or prayer niche. In Egyptian architecture, the false door allows the “Ka” or the spirit double that lies within all of us, access to the “Ka” statue, the body’s immortal form, hidden in a chamber behind the door. This is the doorway to the Duat, or the astral realm of the light beings. The spirit, or light within us, lives in this realm after the death of the body. This echoes the Gnostic “spark of light” trying to find it’s way back to the great central light of the universe.
In Islam, the mithrab is the prayer doorway to Mecca and the inner mysteries of Mohammed’s revelation. In many Sufi sects, the mithrab has the geometric pattern of the Tree of Life, without Malkuth, inscribed in its niche. This is usually coupled with the Light Verse from the Qu’ran, Sura 24, verse 35. To the Sufis, this verse exemplifies the very idea of illumination. Idries Shah called the verse “the essence of Sufism” and goes on to suggests that it “conceals the nature of the cognition of the extra dimensions of the human consciousness which comes beyond the intellect.” The mithrab/credence in Lallemant mansion combines Islamic concepts with the even deeper meaning of a door to the Duat from Egyptian cosmology. It has three layers, as does the Egyptian false door. On the inner surface of the niche is a letter rebus that, as we will see, distills the essence of the Sufi Light Verse. We are also reminded of the Abbot Suger: “Bright is the noble work, this work shining nobly/ Enlightens the mind so that it may travel through the true lights/ To the True Light where Christ is the true door.”

In the niche of the credence at Lallemant are the letters RERE on one line, followed by the letters, RER on the next. This is repeated twice more for a total of six lines, hence doubling or crossing: two times three equals six. It looks like this:

RERE
RER
RERE
RER
RERE
RER

Fulcanelli slyly suggests that we break the pattern down into RE, RER, RERE in order to understand its hidden meaning. This kind of binary triplet patterning occurs in the I Ching and in our RNA/DNA codes, significant clues, as we will see. He also suggests that we look at the pattern as a rebus, or word picture. In Hebrew, the letter R, or Resh, was considered the pictogram of the Face, and was attributed to the sun. This suggests Horus Or, the elder sun god, whose Egyptian name, Hru, is the same word as “face.” The letter E, in its aspirated consonant form, is Heh in Hebrew, or “the window.” RE then suggests “The Light of the Face of the Sun” shining through a window. It is also Re, the Egyptian sun god of Heliopolis. Given this, then it follows that one possible meaning of this section of image #46 is “The Light shines in.”

Following the same rebus pattern, RER becomes the Light shining in and generating more light inside. This internal light is the double of the “Light of the Face of the Sun.” It is “the light of the son of the Sun,” that is – the transmutational illumination that is inside of each of us, the spark of the Gnostics.

Continuing the idea, RERE is the generated internal light shining out again on the world. The reversal expressed in the pattern calls attention to this outward projection. Thus the two words, RERE and RER, can be read as: 1) Light shining in, light shining out: RERE; and 2) Light shining in stimulates internal light; RER. This all sounds fairly mystical but what does it actually mean?

The repetition suggests a sequence with six lines, such as a hexagram of the I Ching. If we take the RER to be a yin line and the RERE to be a yang line, then the credence gives us the 64th hexagram of the I Ching: “Before Completion.” If we flip the attribution so that RER is yang and RERE is yin, then we have hexagram #63, “After Completion.” These hexagrams are composed of two trigrams, Li, flame or light, and K’an, water or the abyss. Therefore we have the image of “fire over water; the conditions before transition” and “water over fire, the conditions after transition” as the sages described it in the text. This image suggests the Silver Star of the Wise, rising from the depths of space to signal the completion of the Great Work, and the symbol of both the prima materia and the completed process, the cosmic serpent biting its own tail of DNA itself.

Jeremy Narby, in his book The Cosmic Serpent, describes DNA as “living in water and emitting photons, like an aquatic dragon spitting fire.” This certainly matches the image of the two hexagrams we can make from the pattern on the credence, and suggests that the I Ching and the DNA light language might be the same thing, the same “text.” Researchers, such as Rattemeyer, Popp and Ho, consider this bio-photon emission and absorption as a kind of “bio-communication between cells and organisms” and their work over the last 15 years suggest that this language is used not merely on the cellular level but also as a communication and organization mechanism in macro-organisms such as plankton swarms. Narby presents startling evidence that shamanic states can function as an access way to this internal flow of information in the form of symbols and imagery.

In the early 1970s, a German physician published a small monograph, entitled The I Ching and the Genetic Code, with introductions by a Buddhist and a mathematician. In this work, Dr. Martin Schonberger pointed out the obvious connections between the genetic code as unraveled by Crick and Watson, and the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching or Book of Changes. Dr. Schonberger‚Äôs comparisons can be summarized as 1) Both the DNA and the I Ching are based on polarity, yin and yang in the case of the I Ching, up and down symmetry in the case of DNA’s double helix; 2) Four “letters” are available, A,T,C,G in the case of DNA, resting yin, moving yin, resting yang and moving yang in the I Ching, which are grouped in pairs; 3) Three of these words form either a code for protein synthesis or a trigram; 4) The direction in which the codes are read is strictly determined in both; 5) There are 64 of these triplets or double trigrams, from which all creation, in the case of DNA, and fate in the case of the I Ching, are derived; 6) Two of these triplets have names, beginning and end. In the DNA they serve as punctuation between code sequences. In the I Ching, we have hexagrams # 63 and # 64, which serve the same purpose.

Soon after Dr. Schonberger’s book was published, Fritz Albert Popp began his groundbreaking work on bio-photon emission and communication by the DNA. As soon as Dr. Schonberger learned of Dr. Popp’s early work, he wrote to him and asked his opinion. “Since information and matter cross in the genetic code, it may be expected that evolution has selected the most favorable, i.e. the surest, and at the same time most economical, principle,” Dr Popp wrote back. “The only solution to the problem is to seek understanding of DNA‚ as you have done, from the information theory angle.”

As we saw above, the Tree of Life is also a way to organize the information of the DNA. When viewed as a 3 dimensional object, the Tree of Life becomes a prism-like crystal, which increases its resemblance to the liquid crystal of DNA. We can see these two great information theories as emblematic of the eastern and western approaches. The Ladder-like approach of the Tree of Life complements the language-like structure of the I Ching. What unites them is the realization of the DNA/light, even in symbolic terms, from which they originate.

And there is also a temporal element. The McKenna brothers, Terence and Dennis, in their groundbreaking work The Invisible Landscape postulated that the King Wen arrangement of the I Ching contained a backward and forward flowing pattern of numbers, and that these numbers could be used to construct an interface with similar vital holons, or holistic hierarchies, in the organization of space/time.

The McKennas demonstrated this by overlaying the 384 lines of the 64 hexagrams (6 x 64 = 384) on the 13-month lunar calendar (13 x 29.53 days = 383.89 days). They then used these basic units to develop a temporal lock with the solar/sunspot cycle, the Zodiacal Ages, and the length of the Great Year of precessional motion. With the same increment, 64, they found it was possible to assemble a 26-step model of space/time from the size/age of the universe down to Planck’s Constant. In this view, the I Ching is a fractal model of all that is, was, or will be. It is also hologramic, in that the piece, the I Ching, or the DNA code, contains the information of the whole evolving universe.

Applying this realization to the structure of the King Wen arrangement also produces a model of the holonic nature of evolution. If we think of the time from the emergence of life on earth to the immediate future, roughly 1.3 billion years, as one increment and then begin to divide that by 64, some interesting time periods are highlighted. Our first division, one 64th of 1.3 billion years, brings us to the high point of the mammals, 18 million years ago. The next division by 64 brings us to 275,000 BCE, the dawn of Homo sapiens. Dividing again by 64 brings us to the high point of the ancient cultures such as the Egyptian around 2300 BCE. Another division brings us to the mid 20th century and the last 67 + years of the cycle.

According to this view, all of biological and cosmological time is approaching a point of concrescence in the near future. The McKennas found that a date, the winter solstice of 2012, matched the waveform derived from King Wen’s arrangement to historical events. The end of World War II and the atomic bomb, for instance, fell on 1945, the year of the last division, the beginning of the last 67 + years of biological and galactic evolution which completes the vast hexagram of time which began 72.25 billion years ago.

Perhaps this might be just coincidence.

Or is there really a very sophisticated meme for transformation and gnosis that runs through all religions and spiritual traditions? Is this tradition holding the knowledge of our past for a release some time in the future? Could light, in the form of weak laser pulses from our DNA, be the source of this information? Could the pattern itself, the yin/yang polarity of hexagrams #63 and #64, reveal when understood the ultimate secret?

5. “Light upon Light”

The Sufis certainly seemed to be aware of this same pattern and the secret within it. In fact the pattern is most clearly recognized in the Light Sura of the Qu’ran. Sura 24, verse 35, which reads (in an Egyptianized version):

Re is the Light of the Heavens and the earth,
A light that is like unto a lamp within a niche.
The lamp shines within a crystal like a blazing Star,
Lit from the Tree of Life, the Djed, of neither east nor west,
Its fuel, translucent oil, radiating without the effect of fire
Light upon Light!

The pattern in image #46 and the light verse parallel each other like this:

Re is the Light of the Heavens and the earth, RE is the first line ‚”Light shines through everything. (The luminous “sea” of light generated by all the DNA on the planet.)

A light that is like unto a lamp within a niche.
RER (light) is the second line – The lighting of the inner lamp, the light within our souls, the light within the niche. (The light coming from our DNA in its niche or vase of chromatin.)

The lamp shines within a crystal like a blazing Star,
ERRE is the third line — The inner light blazes out like a star, or a light body. (The resonance or amplification of the DNA light generated by meditative focus or shamanic states of consciousness.)

Then just repeat the pattern for the second three:

Lit from the Tree of Life, the Djed, of neither east nor west,
RER is the fourth line’s the miraculous light of the Djed, which is the galactic center axis, the third pillar of the Dragon axis. (A new stimulus to the DNA, perhaps designed to be received by the long strands of non-sense coding.)

Its fuel, translucent oil, radiating without the effect of fire
ERRE (light) is the fifth line, the oil of the inner light radiating without the effect of fire. This is the inner light that creates the translucent light body. (The new light stimulates the transformation of the DNA, possibly activating whole new sections of code.)

Light upon Light!
RER is the sixth line — Light upon light. The ultimate Gnostic ideal for the perfection of the universe Рall will be one with the Light. (This new light, and its effect on the DNA, allow for a transformation into Light.)

The last ER begins the pattern over again in reverse order, just like the DNA itself. This creates an endless interweaving of meaning. (1)RE/(2)RE – R/(3)ER – RE/(4)RE – R/(5)ER – RE/(6)RE – R/(7)ER/(6) R – ER/(5)ER – RE, and so on to infinity.
This sums it up: The pattern repeats the same information over and over. It seems to be saying that the unfoldment of light and the creation of “light upon light” are of paramount importance, the ultimate secret of alchemy. The secret of how to create light and inhale it until the alchemist becomes pure golden light.

Fulcanelli tells us to seek first the vessel in which to contain the volatile, meaning that a container is necessary for the work to succeed. Without it, we are left only with the uncontrollable fire of spontaneous combustion. He also comments that we should undertake nothing until we “have received the light on this eggshell, which the masters of the Middle Ages called the secret secretorum.”  The inscription on the interior of the credence, which, Fulcanelli informs us, has never been explained by any visitor, reveals this secret of secrets. But once the meaning of this curious inscription has been revealed, the student finds the very heart of the alchemical mystery.
As we saw above, the meaning of this curious inscription can be deciphered by referring to the Light Verse of the Qu’ran.

Its gnostic injunction, “Light upon Light” points us in the right direction. The message of the credence can be summarized as the Light shining into the vessel, sparking an internal light fueled by the translucent oil of brain chemistry. This internal light fills the entire body, converting it into light, which then radiates out as the shining light or star body of imperishable quality.
The fragment of the Paris Papyrus suggests that the original light that shines in is the light of the sun. But what if there is a special kind of light, such as the glow of an exploding galactic center, which triggers this transformation whether we are prepared or not? In addition to a physical disaster, we could also be faced with a spiritual or psychological disaster in which the transformational process is triggered automatically, creating havoc among those who are unprepared for the astro-alchemical transmutation.
The preparation of this alchemical vessel, the vase of Fulcanelli, is the vase of Mary, the Queen of Heaven, which contains the all-healing balm, and is formed from the projection of the Tree of Life on the celestial sphere. When this vase is filled with the mystical fire of continuous creation, the prima materia is transformed into the philosophical mercury, from which the powder of projection, the active form of the Philosopher’s Stone, can be derived.

As Fulcanelli informs us in very clear language: “Therefore make your vase, then your compound; seal it with care, in such a way that no spirit can escape; heat the whole according to the art until it is calcinated. Return the pure part of the powder obtained to your compound, which you will seal up in the same vase. Repeat for the third time and do not give me any thanks.”
In this comment, Fulcanelli has supplied the careful student with all the information required to understand the process. We can do no better than agree with the Master when he says: “I ask for neither remembrance nor gratitude, but only that you should take the same trouble for others as I have taken for you.”

6 – The mystery of the cathedrals is the secret of light.

“Bright is the noble work, this work shining nobly/ Enlightens the mind so that it may travel through the true lights/ To the True Light where Christ is the true door.”

Abbot Suger on St. Dennis Cathedral

From the cathedral builders‚ “Lux Continua of Abbot Suger’s quote all the way back to the ancient Pharaohs of Egypt and their star religion, we find this overwhelming emphasis on light. It is a common factor in spiritual beliefs and practices around the planet, and the art of light, the Green Language of the DNA, is the key element in the science of alchemy.
Cathedrals and other temples through out human history were places designed to aid the successful communication between DNA and human beings. Each step in the initiatory process was designed to further enhance this communication. Using richly coloured light, darkness, music, prayer, invocation and rituals, including when possible the ingestion of psycho-active substances, the alchemist/shaman would drift deeper and deeper into the galactic knowledge that lies at the heart of the photon emission symbolism of the coiled serpent that is DNA. This transmission of knowledge became the starting point for all of human culture.

Until the last decade or so of the 20th century, the Green Language of the Initiates could only be understood symbolically and metaphorically, or experienced as an internal awareness. Now however, the work of a whole cadre of molecular biologists has provided our mystical gnosis with a solidly physical and experimentally verifiable basis from which to understand Fulcanelli’s Ur-language. If the light emitted as weak laser pulses by the DNA of all life is in fact a language or form of communication that uses symbols and imagery, as suggested by the evidence, then the most important secret of all, “the number of the shrines of the secret place of Tehuti” would be the text or informational content of that message.
As we have seen, both the Tree of Life and the I Ching can be considered as ways of translating the text of DNA’s message into a communicable exogenetic form. Both of these versions contain information on the structure of life, the absorption and emission of photons and point to the same specific time, the coming galactic alignment in 2012, as the moment of the apocalypse, in its original meaning of cosmic unveiling.

The increasing graphs of Terence Mc Kenna’s Time Wave Zero point to a maximum of “novelty” at that point. Perhaps this novelty is simply the graph of the DNA’s increasing sensitivity to the new frequencies of light produced by the galactic alignment or the arrival of a galactic core burst? Could the cosmic unveiling be of a new form of Light that forces on us a species wide transformation? Could this already be occurring?
Could the message really be extinction or enlightenment?

“Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, ‘Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?‚’ ‘And the woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; But the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ‘Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day that you eat it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.’” Genesis Chapter Three Verses 1 – 4

DNA is in everything that lives and DNA created everything that lives. But what if DNA is more than just a collection of molecular codes? What if DNA is, itself, intelligent? And what if this intelligence is cosmic, or at least galactic, in nature?

What if life is not an accident, or just a series of adaptations and mutations, as our modern day evolutionists would have us believe? What if life is a universal prerogative? As Nobel Laureate Christian de Duve tells us in his book Vital Dust: ‚ÄúLife was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain. There is hardly any room for “lucky accidents‚Äô in the gradual multi-step process whereby life originated.”

The incredible degree of chance required to explain the “accident” theory of evolution causes the entire idea to collapse. Dr. De Duve and other biologists are moving swiftly towards the idea that DNA has a blueprint, or a map, that guides it towards complexity. This would help to explain the many gaps and holes in the theory of evolution. From the very beginning of its origins here on Earth, it appears that DNA has been on a constant course towards increasing complexity, from bacteria to one-celled creatures, from aquatic to land, from plants to flowers, from animal to human, from nature to culture.

But why does DNA seek complexity?

Nature, in the form of DNA, seeks to propagate itself. It is highly likely that this propagation is not limited to our small planet but that it stretches throughout the entire universe. Is it possible that DNA is occupying and populating billions of worlds with a vast multitude of forms and shapes, creating more vessels in which complex life can evolve?

If propagation of itself is its number one goal, then how might DNA achieve a high degree of efficiency and success in this act? Could there be a link between DNA’s inner design towards complexity and its own desire to propagate itself? We might even think of these as twin drives, the need to evolve complexity arising out of the need to propagate. Complexity by its very nature would insure survival.

Perhaps DNA is continuously rolling the dice, recombining itself on each new world always seeking greater complexity. It continues this process until it creates the most complex organism in the universe: a Conscious Being. This is a Being that can examine the DNA itself, understand it and perhaps communicate directly with it. This is a Being that can gaze out into the cosmos and know what it is seeing. The reason for creating this Conscious Being would be so that the DNA could successfully pass on its intergalactic knowledge to such a creature. The Conscious Being would not only learn this vital and unique information, but would also be in a position to do something with it. And one of the first things such a Conscious Being attempted would be to translate the information received from the DNA into a symbolic framework that could be shared.

Using its own inner photon emission as its way of transmitting the knowledge, DNA generates light, and therefore image and symbol, as its language. As the Conscious Being learns more from the DNA, it also increases its chances for success and survival. It is therefore in the DNA’s interest to create ever more conscious beings with which to communicate.
The art of Alchemy was born from this understanding. The coiled serpent has always been an alchemical symbol for cosmic knowledge. Alchemy, “the science of light” sought to establish a direct line of communication with the Intelligence that lies at the heart of matter. Therefore, alchemy seeks, and has always sought, the means of direct communication with the DNA. Once this communication was firmly established, the doorway to a vast array of information and knowledge opened. The wisdom of a million worlds became available to those who had realized, understood and transmitted the secret of Alchemy.

Through many centuries this ancient wisdom, in true communication with the DNA, revealed that certain sounds, architecture, lights and plant substances enhanced the experience and made the communication between human and the DNA more pristine. The initiations into this wisdom were a preparation for the advance into the light of pure knowledge, the experience of Gnosis. As the initiate advanced through the degrees of this illumination, the communication with the DNA became clearer and less garbled.

This knowledge eventually became a tradition. The tradition implies that the DNA in human beings can be altered by any shift in the quality of light that strikes our eyes and affects our pineal gland. This subtle alteration in the quality of light changes the way that we perceive time. Therefore the quality of light dictates the quality of time.

The successful alchemist is in close communication with the DNA. This line of communication is dictated by the quality of light that is measured and predicted by the cube of space. As our planet and solar system pass through the galaxy the quality of light changes, sometimes dramatically. Changes, in the nature of light, causes changes in the nature of time, sometimes catastrophically.

Once, all over the world, there was an initiatory tradition that understood this and much more.

“If a person has eyes that know how to see, he will look upward to the heavens and he will see the beautiful image of the serpent coiled there, at the place where the great sky begins. Then he will understand that no being in heaven, or on earth, or in hell was formed without the serpent.”
The Gnostics by Jaques Lacarriere

The Emerald Tablet, itself a glyph for the Green Language of the DNA, insists that the great secret is “As above, so below.” From the perspective of the DNA, this is nothing less than the literal truth.
Let us imagine for a moment what it would be like to see the world from the view point of a successful shaman/alchemist, a 46th degree Ophiuchus serpent holder so deeply absorbed into the DNA Light that, as David Ovason suggests, one is literally dressed in the skin of the dragon. Looking out into space, one sees the great dragon coiled around the still point of the sky. Looking inward one sees the great serpent of fire encircling the life force itself.

It is as if the universe is one infinite fractal hologram where the same patterns and images repeat no what the scale, and that fractal universe is also within us, within every cell of our body, radiating light and information just like the greater universe of stars and planets.

To the ancient Egyptians, one would then be ready for translation into an imperishable body in the heart of Orion. In the Tibetan tradition, one might, as did Padmasambhava, create a Diamond Body from this realization here on earth as a way to fulfil the boddhisatva vow of infinite compassion. Either way, the process is virtually the same, and, most important, it is available to all of us. All it takes is sentience.

In closing, we can do no better than to leave the last word to Fulcanelli himself:

“The mysterious science requires great precision, accuracy and perspicacity in observing the facts, a healthy, logical and reflective mind, a lively but not over-excitable imagination, a warm and pure heart. It also demands the greatest simplicity and complete indifference with regard to theories, systems and hypotheses, which are generally accepted without question on the testimony of books or the reputation of their authors. It requires its candidates to learn to think more with their own brains and less with those of others. Finally, it insists that they should check the truth of its principles, the knowledge of its doctrine and the practice of its operations from nature, the mother of us all.”

I/74

After tarrying they will move forward by rowing for Epirus.

The great relief effort will be toward Antioch:

The black curly-haired one will strain hard for the Empire,

Brazen Barb(arossa) will be roasted on a spit.

This is one of those quatrains just on the edge of becoming intelligible as events happen. It has had other close possibilitites through the years, the Barbary pirates, the Battle of Lepanto, even Hitler is suggested. But the attack toward Syria from the Balkans, the black curly haired leader under the double eagle of the Hapsburg, struggling for the Empire, sounds alot like Milosovic and his plans. Roasted on a spit suggests hoisted by a rocket, perhaps.

II/3

Because of heat like that of the sun upon the sea,

Around Negroponte the fish will become half cooked:

The inhabitants will come to make the first slice into them.

When (in) Rhodes, and Genoa their (food) will fail.

This could be describing the effect of an asteroid strike in the Aegean, or it could be the effect of an act of nuclear terrorism in Yugoslavia. The first five quatrains of Century II seem to be related and point to the same scenario, that of the aftermath of the last Balkan war. II/1 suggests WWI-like conflict in Turkey; II/2 also focuses on the Islamic holy war; II/3 is quoted above, and relates to the nuclear terrorism; II/4 is a suggestion that Libya will be involved; and II/5 points to a time period between march 1998 and February 2000. II/6 is the famous quatrain on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if to make the point sharper.

II/52

For several nights the earth will shake,

In the spring two great efforts together:

Corinth and Ephesus will swim in two seas,

War set in motion by two valiant in combat.

This is another quatrain in the process of emerging. The earth of this spring has shaken with the bombs of NATO; the two great efforts could be the Balkans and the situation in Iraq. Greece and Turkey would indeed be on opposite sides in the conflict, and Ephesus is the first church mentioned in Revelations, giving the whole thing an apocalyptic twist. The two valiant fighters could be Milosovic and Saddam.

II/32

Milk, blood, frogs prepared in Dalmatia,

Conflict given, pest near Balennes

The cry will be great from all of Slavonia,

Then will be born a monster near and inside Ravenna.

This quatrain falls in the midst of others of great significance. II/29 tells of the teacher from the east; II/30 describes the third anti-christ; II/31 relates an ecological disaster; and II/32 is a caution about terrorism in the Balkans. The 1st line points to biological agents being prepared and released in the Balkans or along the Dalmatian coast. The monster born in Ravenna is obscure, but could have significance as events develop.

II/84

Between Campania, Siena, Florence, Tuscany,

Six months nine days without a drop of rain:

The foreign tongue in the Dalmatian land,

It will overrun: devastating the whole world.

This quatrain suggest that events in the Balkans could effect the weather, possibly through the green house effect, and thereby devastate the whole world.

II/96

A burning torch will be seen in the night sky,

Near the end and the source of the Rhone,

Famine, weapons: the help provided is late.

When Persia turns to invade Macedonia.

This key quatrain is also listed as one of the thirteen quatrains in the so-called apocalyptic sequence. It suggests either an asteroid strike or a rocket attack in conjunction with an Iraqi involvement with the Balkan conflict. The rocket strike seems to be aimed at Provence and the mouth of the Rhone, echoing other quatrains about the destruction of the maritime city, Marseilles.

III/3

Mars and Mercury and the silver (Moon) in conjunction.

Towards the south there will be a great drought:

From the bottom of Asia an earthquake will be reported,

Corinth (Greece) and Ephesus (Asia Minor) then in a troubled state.

Another quatrain in the process of revealing itself. The astronomical window is March 1998 to the summer of 2000, and the events are already taking place. Sub-Saharan Africa is fast disappearing in a great drought and plague, last month’s severe earthquake in the Himilayas qualifies as the bottom of Asia, and Greece, the Balkans, and Ephesus, Turkey (and that old apocalyptic referrence), are definitely in a troubled state.

III/7

The fugitives, fire in the sky on the pikes,

Next conflict will be that of the frolicking ravens,

From earth they cry for aid and heavenly assistance,

When near the walls (borders?) will be the combatants.

Here we have a quatrain that could be taken from this week’s newspapers. The fugitives, the fire in the sky on the pikes of Cruise missiles, all describe the events of the past week. The 2nd line identifies the place of the next conflict, perhaps indicating the start of WWIII, as Kosovo, where, on the Field of Blackbirds, the Turks slaughtered a Serbian army in 1389. The Kosovar Albanians are crying to heaven (the NATO air-strikes?) for aid, and the referrence to the borders suggest the latest flash-point of the captured soldiers on the borders of Kososvo and Macedonia. Altogether too close for comfort.

IV/55

When the crow on the tower put together by bricks,

For seven hours will continue to squawk:

Death presaged, by blood the statue is stained,

Tyrant murdered, and to the gods the people pray.

If the last quatrain could be filled in out of last week’s headlines, then this one could be fulfilled in the next few weeks. The battle monument outside Pristina is suggested by the crow on the tower. For seven hours, (days, weeks?) a warning will sound, presaging the death of the Tyrant. The stained statue could relate to despoiling religious sites in the area, while the Tyrant’s death could be caused by a missile strike or a commando raid. (See I/74)

V/48

After the great afflication of the scepter,

Two enemies will be undone by them:

The fleet from Africa will appear to rise up before the Hungarians,

By sea and land horrible deeds will take place.

This quatrain and the one before it, V/47, suggest an attack by Saddam Husein in conjunction with Libya during a Balkan, Greece/Turkey, dispute.

V/70

The regions subject to Balance,

Will trouble the mountains with a great war:

Both sexes made captive, beholden to (their liberators) and all of Byzantium,

So that at dawn they will cry out from land to land.

Another really close one. The region subject to Balance, or adjustment, is the Balkans under scrutiny by NATO, the EU, and so on. The mountains are at the moment troubled by a great war. The people of Kosovo are made captive by the situation, and cry out from land to land, from mosque roof at morning prayers and by internet, around the world.

V/91

At the great market (European Community?) called that of the liars,

Of all Torrent and the field of Athens:

They will be surprized by the light horsemen,

By the Albanians — Mars, Leo and Saturn in their signs.

This quatrain follows V/90, a prediction of Nuclear Terrorism, and suggests the time period of the late 1990′s. (Best guess astrology for last line equals 3/23- 27 1999, the start date of the current Kosovo Crisis.) The Balkan powers all see the EU and NATO as liars, and perhaps they are, rushing into the fields of Athens, the battle fields of north eastern Greece, Macedonia and Kosovo. The light horsemen could be the guerillas of the KLA or the Serbian death-squads, with a suggestion of the pale horsemen of Death in the Apocalypse.

VI/21

When those of the Northern pole are united together,

In the East will be great fear and dread:

The newly elected man is upheld — the great one trembles,

Rhodes, Byzantium will be stained with Barbarian (Libyan-Arab) blood.

Again this quatrain follows one of significance on another, somewhat parallel track. VI/20 relates the importance of Pope John XXIII in reforming the church by accepting the vessel of the “enduring race.” Here we see the basic agreement of the Northern powers, NATO and Russia, causing fear, or perhaps pretend fear, in the East. Clinton and Saddam are contrasted in line 3, and the outcome of the current Kosovo situation suggested in line 4.

X/58

At the time when (in) mourning the feline monarch

Will make war upon the young Macedonian:

Gaul to stagger, the bark (of St. Peter) to be in jeopardy,

To try Marseilles in the West entreaty (negotiations).

This quatrain suggests that Clinton, our Leo President, will, in a time of mourning, perhaps for the captured and possibly executed soldiers in Kosovo, make war on the young Macedonian leader of the KLA. This, as we saw above appears to be the trigger incident that brings the wider Islamic world into the picture. Gaul, southern France, will be staggered by terrorism and the Church itself will be threatened, as well the secret indicated by the “bark.” Only some kind of entreaty, or negotiations, in Marseilles has any chance to break the deadlock

In the Cyclades, in Perinthus and Larissa,

In Sparta, all of Peloponnesus:

A great famine — plague through false dust (fallout?).

Nine months it will last and through the whole peninsula.

Some sort of nuclear disaster is clearly foreseen, one that causes Europe to be evacuated or lifeless for nine months. Given this quatrain’s close association with V/91, which dates with precision the start of the current Kosovo Conflict, this event is a probable outcome likely to occur soon after, perhaps even within a matter of months.

VI/98

Ruin for the Volcae (of Languedoc) with fear so very terrible,

Their great city (Toulouse) stained, pestilential deed:

To plunder Sun, Moon and violate their temples:

And the two rivers to redden with gushing blood.

This quatrain is considered part of a treasure hunt theme woven around the idea of lost ancient gold of a people here called the Volcae. The Volcae are a legendary tribe of Celtic Freebooters said to have hidden their treasure near Toulouse. This quatrain could also relate to the disaster predicted for southern France as part of the Balkan terror campaign. (It may also be a retro-active prophecy flashing back to the mysterious destruction of Glanum in the late 3rd century.)

VII/6

Naples, Palermo and all of Sicily,

Will be uninhabited through barbarian hands,

Corsica, Salerno, the island of Sardinia,

Hunger, plague, war, the end of extended evils.

This quatrain, like II/96, is part of the so-called apocalyptic sequence. It points to the widespread destruction caused by nuclear terrorism in the Balkans. It suggests that is the end of the extended evils, or this is as bad as it possibly gets. On this we must agree with the prophet.

And at present, we are conducted by the Moon — by means of the total power of the eternal god — when she will have completed her entire cycle, the Sun, then Saturn will come. According to the celestial signs the reign of Saturn will return a second time so that as it is all calculated, the world then approaches its final death-dealing revolution.

According to the visible judgement of the stars, although we are in the seventh number of the millenary — which finishes all — we are approaching the eighth cycle which is in the firmament of the latitudinary dimension of the eighth sphere, whence the great eternal God will come to complete the revolution and the heavenly bodies will return to their motions and the superior movement will render the earth stable and secure for us. . . so that men coming after will see them, knowing the events to have occurred infallibly; such as those others we have noted, speaking more clearly – for although they were written under a cloud the meanings will be understood. When the time comes for the removal of ignorance, the situation will be cleared up still more.

I/44

In short sacrifices will be returned,

Transgressors will be put to martyrdom:

No longer will there be monks, abbots or novices,

The honey will be much more expensive than wax.

I/62

A great loss, alas! there will be of learning,

Before the cycle of Latona (the moon) is completed:

Fire, great flood more through ignorant rulers,

How long the (lunar) cycle will not see itself restored.

II/65

The sloping park, great calamity,

Will be done through the land of the West and Lombardy:

The fire in the ship (the Papacy), plague and captivity,

Mercury in Sagittarius, Saturn’s scythe will cut.

II/81

Through fire from the sky the city is almost burned by the sun,

the urn menaces Deucalion once again,

Sardinia vexed by the Punic vessel,

After that Libra will abandon her Sun.

III/46

The sky (concerning Lyons) we presage,

Through clear signs and by fixed stars:

Suddenly the age of change approaches,

Neither for its good, nor for its evils.

V/24

The realm and law under Venus raised up,

Saturn will have empire over Jupiter:

the law and realm raised by the Sun,

Through the Saturnian ones it will endure the worst.

V/31

Through the Attic land, source of all wisdom,

Which presently is the rose of the world,

The Pontiff ruined, and his grans preeminence,

Will be subjugated and a shipwreck in the waves.

V/41

Born in the shadows and a dark day,

He will be sovereign in rule and goodness:

He will cause his blood to be born again in the ancient urn,

Renewing the age (century) of gold for that of brass.

V/79

The sacred pomp will come to lower its wings,

At the coming of the great legislator:

He will raise the humble, he will vex the rebels,

None of his like will be born on (this) earth.

VI/8

Those who were in the realm for knowledge,

By a royal change will become impoverished:

Some exiles without support, or gold to possess,

The learned and learning will not be of high value.

VII/17

The prince rare in pity and clemency,

Will come to change through death great knowledge:

Through great tranquility the kingdom fashioned,

When the great one soon will be fleeced.

EP 166

will long endure, and beginning this year will be greater persecution of the Christian Church than it has ever experienced in Africa, and this will last.

EP 215

affliction of his people will command that Satan be cast into the abyssal depths of the bottomless pit, and be bound there; and then will commence between God and men

VIII/56

The feeble group will occupy the earth,

those of the high place will make horrible cries,

The large flock of the outer corner will cause trouble,

It falls near D. nebro the calling papers discovered.

X/75

The father and son will be murdered together,

The count within his pavilion:

The mother at Tours will have her belly swollen with a son.

Herb chest with little leaves of paper.

X/99

The end of the wolf, the lion, bull and the Ass,

Timid deer will be with the mastiffs:

No longer will fall upon them the sweet manna,

More vigilance and guarding for the mastiffs.

As I sit this Saturday morning watching to the news and pondering my week’s work on the prophecies of Nostradamus, I am left with the eerie sensation that 445 years ago the Seer of Provence watched the headlines unfold just as I am now watching his prophecies unfold. Never mind what the 16th century philosopher thought of the marvel of Television (“Good Heavens, what changes!” he exclaims in one quatrain), he would have understood the name and perhaps even the ubiquity of its images. The prophetic news from the past, Nostradamus’ quatrains, are deciphered by the images on the magic mirror of our television screens. As I watch this, I am struck with a strange sensation, not deja vu exactly, but more like a deja tu, a shared experience of a temporal moment outside of its space/time frame. Nostradamus in the past comments on his future is such a way as to explain my present.

Michel de Nostredame was born in 1503 to a prominent family of recently Christinized Jews in the small village of St. Remy de Provence. His father was a prosperous grain dealer and notary named Jacques, or perhaps Jaume, and both his grandfathers were learned men, court physicians to Good King Rene of Provence and his son, the Duke of Calabria. Michel was something of a prodigy and at 14 his paternal grandfather Pierre de Nostredame sent him to school at Avignon, Provence’s Papal enclave. At 19, Michel left for the ancient medical college of Montpellier, his grandfathers were probably alumni, where he passed his baccalaureate examinations in 1525.

And then came the plague. Successive waves of the Black Death, le charbon, still swept through Europe, and Michel’s schooling was interrupted for four years when the University closed and sent its students off to fight the plague as best they could. In the midst of this emergency situation, the young Doctor Nostredame honed his skills by focusing on what really worked, and learned from any source that seemed promising. By doing this, he leaped beyond the confines of medieval medicine and incorporated the ideas of the whole range of the Renaissance’s underground stream, from alchemy to Sufi healers, from the remnants of pagan traditions to the inner teaching of the cabalists. By 1529, when he returned to Montpellier for his doctorate degree, and Latinized his name to Nostradamus, Michel was already far beyond his peers.

He stayed at Montpellier for a while, then, when his conflicts with the establishment grew too profound, he departed for Toulouse, and after that Agen. He seems to have established a friendship with the alchemist and hermetic philospher Julius-Cesar Scaliger, and even married a relative of his wife’s. But the plague struck again in 1537, and this time not even Nostradamus’ skills were enough. His young family died, and he departed on a seven year odyssey for which there are no solid records.

What is certain is that by 1544 he had set up his practice in Marseilles, the ancient port of Provence. When the plague broke again in 1546, he was summonded to Aix, the capital of Provence, where he fought the disease with such success that the grateful citizens gave him a pension for life and showered him with awards and gratuities. The story remains that he gave these gifts to the families and dependents of those he had not been able to save. The Hero of Aix was next called to Salon, and then to Lyons, where a mass of pharmacist’s prescriptions document his success.

Nostradamus returned to Salon in 1547, and soon after married a young widow named Anne Ponsard Gemelle. For the next eight years, Nostradamus concentrated less on medicine and more on his cosmetics recipes, and started a successful cottage industry based on them. At the same time, he began to seriously study the occult and the practice of prophecy. In a secret room at the top of his house in Salon, he began to compose an annual astrological almanac which contained a few cautious stabs at prediction. When this was well received, he embarked on an ambitious project, a future history of the world written in the Green Language of the adept.

He began work on Les Propheties on Good Friday, 1554, almost exactly 445 years ago as I write this. The first three Centuries, or groupings of 100 four line quatrains written in a ployglot of French, Provencal, Latin, Italian, Hebrew, Arabic and Greek, were published in May of 1555 and become an instant hit. By 1556, they were the rage of the French court, perhaps because one of them seemed to predict the death of the King in a jousting accident. The Queen, Catherine de Medici, summoned Nostradamus to court for an explanation. Nostradamus not only explained, he converted the Queen, who from that moment on became his most noble follower.

Centuries 4 through 7 came out in 1557, along with a wildly psychedelic letter to Henry II himself. The final three Centuries were composed during this period, but withheld from publication until after Nostradamus’s death. Meanwhile, Nostradamus had become famous.

In 1559, Henry II was killed in a jousting accident that followed the scenario in quatrain 35 of Century I to the letter. Overnight, Nostradamus became one of the most famous, or infamous, men in Europe. On the night of Henry II’s death, crowds gathered to burn Nostradamus in effigy and to urge the Inquisition to burn him in earnest. His friendship with the Queen saved him. Through the turbulent years ahead, Nostradamus relied on the support of royal and noble patrons to stay ahead of both the Catholic Inquisition and the Calvinist mobs.

From the early 1550′s to his death in 1566, Nostradamus published a series of yearly Almanacs, of which only fragments remain. In the Almanac of 1566, he predicted his own death. On July 2 1566, he was founding sitting with his foot propped up in his secret study at the top of the house in Salon. His wife Anne had him buried standing up, as he had wished, and inscribed on his tomb an epitaph that declared that “Michel Nostradamus, alone of all mortals judged worthy to record with his near divine pen, under the influence of the stars, the future events of the entire world.”

The notoriety gained by his correct prediction of the death of Henry II has hardly dissipated through the centuries. In our time, he is recognized as the popular Seer of the masses, with his image splashed across the tabloids advertising the latest Nostradamus prophecy on the end of the world or the winter’s snow storms. One recent publication even trumpted that Nostradamus had foreseen the latest diet fad. (Personally, I’m still waiting for Nostradamus’ Guide to Your Cat’s Love Life.)

However, in the course of researching a book on that other master of the Green Language, the mysterious 20th century alchemist known as Fulcanelli, my partner, Jay Weidner, and I blundered into the heart of the Nostradamus mystery. Without going into too much detail here, suffice it to say that if the secret of alchemy, as Fulcanelli suggests, is really the secret of time, then Nostradamus, the man who saw through time as one famous biography styles him, must be a master of the astro-alchemical process. In that case, the question becomes: what can we learn from him?

The answer, as I discovered in the last few weeks, is mind-boggling in its implications. First of all, let’s do the math on this question of accuracy.

If I were to write 4000 random sentences, including basic plots, happenings, disasters, and so forth along with plenty of proper names, both common and strange, and a smattering of pure whimsy, then I might statistically expect 4 to 6 incremental hits, that is, descriptions that match reality in my present, of say one year. This means that one line might reflect fairly closely something that was happening that year. This random hit rate goes down over time, so the chance of making a hit, in say 445 years, is about one in 1,776,000. That’s one hit, like a name or an event in the right place. The chance of a whole line being correct is something like one in 8,880,000, and so on.

But of course, Nostradamus wasn’t writing pure randomness. He had some sort of knowledge, some gnosis, that allowed him to actually chart the future, or rather, the possible futures. The fact that he got one whole quatrain right within five years, at odds of better than half a million to one, is fairly conclusive proof of this knowledge. The fact that the quatrain describes an accident makes the fact even more astonishing because it precludes prior warning through political channels. It could only have been described with such accuracy by means of clairvoyance. As the Foundation for Research into the Nature of Man, the former Rhine Institute at Duke University, uses the same statistical analysis for its ESP studies, we may be fairly confident with our conclusion.

OK, so if Nostradamus is actually seeing the future, no matter how he achieves such a goal, then what is he telling us about that future? From his long Epistle to Henry II, we can glimpse how Nostradamus’ mind worked. On fire with the significance of his visions, Nostradamus is also cautious. Not because he is afraid of being understood, he can speak plainly enough when need be, (he gives the exact date of the French Revolution in the letter) but because of something inherent in the process, something that Nostradamus had discovered through insight and initiations.

(I must pause here and note an unusual circumstance. I have been struggling over the next few paragraphs for almost an hour now as my computer inexplicably freezes up when I go to copy/paste a quote from the Apocalyptic Sequence explaining the secret of inter-active time and our discoveries about Hendaye. I can only conclude that Nostradamus himself, who seems to have been hanging around since our visit to his birthplace a few weeks ago, doesn’t want me to reveal the secret that openly. I hereby concede to his wishes and direct anyone interested to the apocalyptic sequence itself, and I/16 & III/46.)

To protect the secret he had discovered, Nostradamus created his oracle of the future in such a way as to make sure it couldn’t be understood and used ahead of time. Each quatrain is designed to be inexplicable until the moment when it begins to unfold on the world’s stage. At the present, we have an unusual opportunity to watch the process of prophetic unfoldment happening right before our eyes. If the events themselves weren’t so scary, the process itself would be fascinating.

In the enclosed sections, Balkan War and Balkan Terrorism, we present a selection of emerging quatrains all having to do with the current Balkan crisis and its connections to the start of a possible third world war. As you read through our translation, closely based on John Hogue’s stupendous work, and our interpretations, you can actually see the future unfolding from the words of a man far in the past.

But why? Why go to so much trouble in writing a predictive history of the future that can’t understood before the event which it predicts actually happens? It contradicts all logic, and seems so irrational that there must be another explanation.

And there is. Nostradamus predicts that his prophecies will be fully understood only as the Aquarian Age dawns. Only then will his secret be revealed. However, in Nostradamus’ view, the Aquarian Age’s beginnings are shrouded in dire prophecies and grim alternative futures. To create a true golden age requires participation, the true participation that comes from seeing the broad patterns of history as Nostradamus did. Therefore Nostradamus is cleverly telling us that his prophecies will be understood when they are most needed to effect a shift in the flow of time. To choose, when the moment arises, between extinction or enlightenment.

Watching a crop of quatrains hatch into historic fruition this week has led me to believe that the moment is now or never. If we can understand Nostradamus’ hidden message, then, when the time is right, we can change history. With Nostradamus’ help, it just might be possible to surf this monster probability wave and arrive at the golden age described in X/99, which points to 1999 as the shift point, and IV/25, which suggests the spirtual potentials of a species wide alchemical transformation.

Let me close with these two quatrains as a point of reference as you wade through the other prophecies examined in the inclusions below. These quatrains delineate a future that is possible, if we make the right choices, right now.

Vincent Bridges

X/99

The end of the Wolf, the Lion, Bull and the Ass,

Timid deer will be with the mastiffs:

No longer will fall upon them sweet manna,

More vigilance and guarding of mastiffs

IV/25

Bodies sublime and infinite, visible to the eye,

Will become clouded over by their own reasons,

Body, including the forehead, senses, head and invisibles,

Will diminish the sacred prayers.

Index of Pertinent Quatrains:

Apocalyptic Sequence of Events: I/16 – I/30 – I/55 – I/69 – I/70 – II/19 – II/46 – II/62 – II/96 – III/19 – VI/6 – VI/10 – VII/6 – VIII/17

Aquarian Age: PF/83 & 106 – I/44 – I/62 – II/65 – II/8 – III/46 – V/24 – V/31 – V/41 – V/79 – VI/8 – VII/17 – EP 166 – EP 215 – VIII/56 – X/75 – X/99

Axis Shift: II/41 – II/54 – II/81 – II/95 – II/10 – III/12 – X/67 – X/72 – In the Spring: VI/88 – EP 88-90 – IX/31 – IX/46 – IX/83

Third Balkan War in the 1990′s (Bosnia): I/47 – II/32 – III/7 – III/18 – III/23 – III/81 (Mostar bridge) – IV/55 – IV/70 – IV/91 – IV/95 – IV/99 – V/85 – V/91 – IX/55 – IX/60 – X/63

Dayton Peace Accords: II/22 – III/7 – III/23 – IV/95 – V/70 – V/91 – IX/60

Next Balkan War, late 1990′s: I/74 – II/3 – II/52 – II/32 – II/84 – II/97 – III/3 – III/7 – IV/38 – IV/55 – IV/98 – V/48 – V/70 – V/91 – VI/21 – VI/62 – VIII/4 – IX/75 – IX/99 – X/58

Balkan Nuclear Terrorism: V/90 – VI/98 – VII/6

SOME QUATRAINS: Aquarian Age / Apocalypse / Balkan War / Balkan Terrorism

©1999 Vincent Bridges

Kicked off by Enochian Apocalypse Working in Sedona in September of 1996, which formed the etheric structure of a multidimensional geometry of intelligence. The Apocalypse working completed, perhaps for the first time since its transmission in the 16th century, the Enochian or Ophanic astral communication device. This structure included the basic forms necessary to harmonize the on-coming galactic alignments. Nick showed up for the working, and helped align it to galactic center. He was the first to make a major point of the Great Cross, but had the dates wrong. Many other major problems with Nick, but his presence is a factor in the mix. A little more than a year later, the Ophanic Intelligences announced that projecting the Tree of Life on the Celestial sphere on the equinox for the next ten equinoxes was the simplest way to align with the energy shift of the Great Cross. At the time they announced this, I was still unaware of how the Tree of Life related to our discoveries about Hendaye. It was indeed the OI angels that gave me the clue. From this realization came the idea of the Gnosis Gnomon and its connection with the labyrinth. That basic idea led to a complete unraveling of Hendaye’s message. Not just the moment of celestial alignment, but a hidden indication of the process itself.

Remedial Sacred Interdimensional Geometry 101

Five Platonic solids: tetrahedron, octahedron, cube, dodecahedron and icosahedron, organized in a single, tetrahedron, and two duals, cube/octahedron and dodecahedron/icosahedron, or mutually defining forms. That’s in 3D of course. In 4D, we find six regular solids, two pairs of duals and two self-duals, or self-defining forms.

Our singular solid, the tetrahedron, is the basic 3D minimal form, as the triangle is in 2D. Its stability comes from the fact that its center of gravity is defined by diagonals of the center point of the edges, making it non-dual, or a unique boundary forming the sharp demarcation between 2D and 3D. All higher forms and dimensions seem to emerge from this singular seed of form.

Regular truncation of the tetrahedron only produces more smaller tetrahedrons. New forms emerge by adding tetras and allowing them to merge. Two tetras form an interlocking star-like pattern that can be truncated to form the next Platonic solid, the octahedron. The octahedron duals into the cube, point to face, and the cube spins into the dodecahedron, which stellates into its dual, the icosahedron. 3D emerges from the tetra, but what of 4D?

It also emerges from the tetra. If we take five tetrahedrons and merge them according to their bilateral symmetry we form the 3D shadow of a pentatope, the simplest 4D figure. Each of its five dimensional faces is a regular tetrahedron. If we think of these five tetrahedrons and their merge symmetry as two loops of five plane faces, then the folding and unfolding of the pentatope through 3D space forms a Moebius strip. This creates the pentatope’s self referencing duality. The shadow of this self-referencing in 2D is a pentagram inscribed in a pentagon.

Just as the tetra acts as a boundary form between 2D and 3D, the pentatope acts a boundary between 3D and 4D. Except the boundary between 3 and 4D is permeable, by the self-referencing Phi ratio pentagram, whereas the boundary between 2D and 3D is singular and non-permeable. This suggests that the flow of energy/information is from higher dimensions to the lower, with the tetra as the ultimate packing form of that energy/information stream. We can think of this flow as centropic, or anti-time, as opposed to the entropic flow of evolutionary time. The switch plate, from entropic to centropic, for our local space/time is the conscious use of the pentagram’s dimensional doorway, the Moebius strip of packing and unpacking tetrahedrons.

The other 4D solids emerge from their 3D analogs by the same process of adding dimensional cells. The 16 cell hyper-octahedron adds another face to each 3D face to become an octahedron inside an octahedron. The same happens with the cube. Just as the cube is formed from the square by duplicating the square, moving them apart and connecting the corresponding edges, so too the hyper-cube by separating duplicate cubes and then joining the edges. Counting the two original cubes, this gives the hyper-cube eight dimensional cells, each of which defines two cells of its dual, the hyper-octahedron, making the 4D pair of duals the reverse of the 3D pair.

Adding another eight cells to the hyper-octahedron produces the second 4D self-referencing solid, the 24-cell polytope. It is formed by truncating the hyper-octahedron, making each dimensional cell a 3D octahedron. We can think of the 24 cell as the super hyper-octahedron. Its self-referencing packing and unpacking pattern unfolds as a Mobieus strip of 23 pairs of plane faces of the unilateral spin symmetry of the octahedron. The 24 cell can also be constructed from two hyper-cubes by cutting one into its eight cubical cells and attaching these cells to the dimensional cells of the other hyper-cube. The 24 cell also embeds within it all the lower 3D and 4D solids, making it a sort of master form for 3D/4D interaction.

There are two more 4D solids, the 600 cell and the 120 cell, which are duals and are developed from the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. Like the cube/octa – hyper-octa/hyper-cube reversal, these higher 4D duals are also reversed from 3D. These higher 4D solids have the same relationship with the lower solids as in 3D. Five icosahedron merge to form the 120 cell polytope, and fifty dodecahedrons form Phi ratios within the 600 cell figure, just as five cubes form a dodecahedron and the vertices of the icosahedron appear within the octahedron when its edges are divided into a Phi ratio.

The basic arrangement of 3D/4D interaction is best described by the Kabbalistic Tree of Life pattern. In this diagram, formed from the centers and intersections of four interpenetrating circles, we find the progression of related solids, in both dimensions. At the bottom is the tetrahedron, our singular physical form in 3D, and its counter-part, the pentatope, the 4D self-referencing switch plate that provides access to the other 4D solids. Above that is the cube/octa and hyper-octa/hyper-cube grouping. This coalesces into a matrix form, the 24 cell 4D polytope with no 3D analog, which mediates the upper part of the Tree, the dodeca/icosa and the 600 cell and the 120 cell 4D polytopes. The 24 cell polytope takes the Daat or gnosis position on the Tree.

The Geometry of the Earth Grid and its Connection to the Tree of Life

The earth is a dodecahedronal crystal. While the crustal plates no longer match the dodeca pattern, an indication of the planet’s age, the basic crystal structure survives. Each face is defined by the top point of one of twelve prism-like 3D Trees expanding outward from the earth’s core. This point becomes the center of the dodecahedron’s pentagonal face and one of the vertices of its dual, the icosahedron. If we project all five platonic solid onto the surface of a sphere, they nest perfectly within the pattern defined by the icosa-dodeca. This pattern has been called the earth grid and there is much evidence that it was used by the last pre-catastrophe civilization.

Just how did they use it is the question. If we think of these twelve Kether or crown points on the surface of the earth as the center point of the vast dimensional doorway created by the pentagonal form, then we can see them as mediating this flow of centropic energy out through the resulting icosa-dodeca grid geometry. This grid also contains the spherical patterns of the other Platonic solids, which act as seeds for their 4D counterparts. The earth through its grid sustains life by creating a resonant oscillation between dimensions. Sentience itself maybe an artifact of the grid, because as we saw, self-referencing, a pre-condition of awareness, occurs only when 3D folds into 4D, five tetrahedrons interlocking to form the pentatope and its pentagon/pentagram shadow. To the Pythagoreans, the pentagram was the symbol for humanity, an indication of their understanding of the self-awareness that makes us human.

If the earth grid mediates the Platonic solids and their 4D analogs, where do we find the 24 cell polytope, the Daat/gnosis master solid?

We might look for something that makes the earth unique, such as the orbit of its satellite, the moon. Thinking in terms of the Tree of Life, we can collapse the middle pillar, Kether, Daat, Tiphareth, Yesod and Malkuth, into two concentric circles, Kether/Tiphareth/Malkuth and Daat/Yesod. This helps us see the identity between the sphere of Daat/Gnosis and the sphere of the moon as well as the collapsing focus from galactic center to the sun and then onto the earth, Malkuth, the kingdom. With this in mind, we can place the 24 cell polytope in space, within the sphere of the moon. When we do this, we notice that the cubical center of the 24 cell forms within the sphere of the earth. When Daat/Gnosis is properly aligned, then the earth becomes a cube of space where dimensions overlap.

The Great Cross and the New Jerusalem

In preparing for the Apocalypse working, I discovered that the Tablet of Nalvage unfolded into the 24 cell polytope. I placed this in the sphere of the moon for the reasons noted above. At that point, I did not notice the importance of the central cube. But as our understanding of the Great Cross and its connection to the New Jerusalem/Cube of Space developed, it became apparent that the central cube formed by the 24 cell 4D figure was indeed a key component.

The Great Cross is the moment coded on the monument at Hendaye, the moment when the cube of space is actually formed in the heavens by the appropriate alignments of the sun, moon and galactic center. The monument also tells us that the Cube is formed over the period of twenty years, from the summer solstice of 1992 to the winter solstice of 2012.

The ancient Abrahamic astronomy tells us that the Cube of Space is formed from the three dragon axis of the universe, the ecliptic axis, the galactic axis and the planetary equinox axis. In projecting the Tree of Life on the Cube of Space, we find that the ecliptic axis connects the top and bottom face of the cube while the galactic and the planetary connect opposite edges on the horizontal plane.

If we also think of each axis as uniting a pair of faces on the Cube of Space, then our three celestial axis, the ecliptic pole, the galactic pole and the equinox sunrise, form a perfect cube within a cube on the mid-point of the twenty year cycle, the fall equinox of 2002. We can see this by remembering that the earth cube is formed on each equinox. As the equinoxes precess backward against the fixed stars, the earth cube slowly rotates. The fixed locations of the Cube of Space form a space/time constant with which the earth cube comes into alignment once every 13,000 or so years.

This twenty year period of alignment is the window of opportunity, the eschatological moment when the New Jerusalem descends to earth. In Revelations 21:16 we are told that the New Jerusalem is a vast cube, one that fractally encompasses the entire planet. Since the embedded cube is a key component in the earth grid, then we might think of it, and its analog, the central cube of the 24 cell 4D polytope, as the resonant core in this cascade of hyper-cubes. Thinking in terms of our collapsed middle pillar of the Tree of Life, we can see the galactic center, Kether, as a 5D hexatope, seed form of higher dimensions, mediating energy/matter in the form of 3D/4D packets. The sun acts as a hyper-cube step-down transformer for the galactic flow, mediating explosions of light and matter. The cube of the earth mediates this through the earth grid.

New Jerusalem then becomes the unitary model which allows the earth cube and the solar hyper-cube to nest within the higher dimensional flow coming from galactic central. It would mediate the centropic to entropic collapse of light into matter by stabilizing the oscillation between 3 and 4 D, in other words, a virtually eternal reality constructed from mind mirroring matter with its own light.

The window of opportunity to create this is very narrow, and the results of failure seem to be dire. The resonant alignment would seem to produce an implosion of energy/information from the galactic core. The New Jerusalem Cube is the switch box, and, to follow the analogy, if it is wired wrong or not at all, then it explodes when the juice is turned on. The current is already running, and the sparks are popping all over the planet.

The Radical Implications

In my examination of the Enochian system, I discovered that the core of the system, the tablets of the elements, form an unfolded hyper-cube/hyper-octa matrix. Since the Enochian alphabet itself develops out of an octa/hyper-octa language crystal we might suspect that the entire system is designed to translate the hyper-dimensional energy cascade created by the alignments of the Cube of Space.

This means that the Enochian system might just be the best way we have of dealing with the influx of energy/information form the galactic core.

Since the spring equinox of 1998, we have been doing regular equinox alignments of the Cube of Space by projecting the Tree of Life on the Celestial sphere. Spring ’98 took place at the Newport Earth Institute in Newport, New Hampshire. Fall ’98 and spring ’99 happened at Temple Strange in Mt. Gilead. Fall ’99 was on a mountain top in east Tennessee, and the mandate for the future is to travel. Each alignment has been exponentially greater in energy than the one before. This past equinox, strange eruptions from the sun were noticed and photographed by the SOHO satellite and the earth’s magnetic field went haywire for a few days. We can expect this activity to increase, with spikes on the equinoxes, until the cube goes exact in 2002.

The moment of maximum resonance, the fall equinox of 2002, is the mid point in an alignment pattern that started with the summer sunrise in 1992 and reaches completion with the winter solstice sunrise of 2012. In 2012, when the sun rises in conjunction with the center of the galaxy, the hyper-cube cascade reaches critical and the Cube crystallizes or fragments. We can think of 1992 to 2002 as the period when the wave front of the cube takes shape. It goes into resonance in 2002, and depending on the feedback modulation from the earth cube, crystallizes over the next ten years, or begins to break-up immediately, dissipating entirely by 2012.

Therefore we only have six equinoxes left to create our Enochian transformer cube within the projected Celestial Tree.

©1999 Vincent Bridges