Vincent Bridges

Genesis 1: 18 - “. . .to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness. And God saw that it was good.”

Psalms 118: 27 - “The Lord is God, and he has made his light shine upon us. With boughs in hand, bind the festal sacrifice with ropes to the horns of the altar.”

The Revelation of St. John 1: 18 - “I am the Living one. I was dead and behold I am alive for ever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and hell.”

On Christmas Night, 1996, in an upper class neighborhood of quintessentially yuppie Boulder, Colorado, six year old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was murdered in her own home. The crime was made to look like a botched kidnapping, and the fumbling of the local police created an unsolvable problem. Over three years after the murder, after endless investigations by police, the district attorney’s office and a grand jury, it looks as if there will never be enough physical evidence to make an arrest.

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coherence, consciousness and the kabbalah

“One of the greatest scientific achievements imaginable would be the discovery of an explicit relationship between the waveform alphabets of quantum theory and certain human states of consciousness.”Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality

The works of such modern day Kabbalists as Stan Tenen, in Light in The Meeting Tent and J.J. Hurtak’s Keys of Enoch suggest that we have indeed found the pivotal point where consciousness, quantum mechanics and the Kabbalah intersect. The question then becomes: Is that point the origin of the alphabet?

Although humanity has spawned thousands of languages, fewer than a dozen instances of the invention of writing are recorded in human history. Most of these occurred in or around the ancient Near East. Cuneiform script in Sumer, Proto-Elamite in Caanan, and hieroglyphs in Egypt appeared roughly at the same time, around 3000 BC. Cretan pictoglyphs and the Indus Valley scripts are dated to around 2000 BC. Hittite hieroglyphs and Chinese pictograms developed between 1700 and 1500 BC, as did the Semitic alphabet which would eventually become, with the Chinese alphabet, the form by which all living languages are written.

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PART ONE

“One Law for the Ox and Lion is Oppression.”

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Imagine a hawk circling high above the edge of the desert, a dark speck against the faint blue of the pre-dawn sky. The hawk soars higher, striking the first rays of the rising sun, and its feathers flame suddenly — glint and flash, harbingers of the sun’s arrival — transforming the bird of prey into an omen or a message from Re-Harrakte, phoenix soul of the sun itself. Dawn becomes myth; and morning in Heliopolis, as the Greeks called it a thousand years into its decline, was the time of worship. The sun, in all its forms and effects, had always been the “one” god of the ancient Egyptian city of Anu, “The Place of the Pillar of the Sun.”

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Sex Crimes, Celebrity and Sainthood in the Wasteland of the Technological Collective

One

The metaphor of the grail maiden

The “Eludcidations,” an anonymous prologue to Chretien de Troyes’ Le Conte del Graal, relates a curious tale about how the Land of Logres lost the “Voices of the Wells.” This Land of Logres, Merlin’s Isles of Greater Britain, is a curious place, a Celtic kingdom where the inner world and the outer world overlap and intermingle. Beautiful maidens live by the sacred wells and offer travelers sustenance from golden cups; the realm is at peace and life flourishes.

This Celtic paradise was destroyed by a sex crime, we are told. Evil King Amangons (his name suggests “a man of stones,” or a man with balls, an alpha-male deep in the throes of testosterone poisoning) ravished one of the maidens, held her captive and stole her golden bowl. This set an example and soon all the males were out raping the sacred maidens and before too long the peaceful and fertile realm became a wasteland. The springs and wells dried up, the land became infertile, the animals disappeared, flowers withered and the people faded away.

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By Vincent Bridges, co-author of A Monument to the End of Time

Perhaps the most famous necropolis of the medieval era, the Alyscamps (from Elisii Campi or Elysian Fields) owed its fame to St. Trophimus. Built outside the city walls, as were all Roman cemeteries, and along the Via Aurelia, the main road to Italy and Rome, the Alyscamps was a perfect location for secret meetings. St. Trophimus soon attracted a following and in the year before he died, probably 52 CE, he invoked a blessing on the cemetery. Christ himself attended the ceremony and left the imprint of His knee on a sarcophagus lid. Burial at Alyscamps became so desirable that bodies were shipped from all Europe for burial in its holy grounds. The 12th century chronicle of the Pseudo-Turpin informs us that the peers of Charlemagne, Roland and the other fallen heroes, were transported with great difficulty to the Alyscamps.

Arles therefore is ground zero for whatever version of Christianity it was that swept the region in those early years. If we are looking for the origin of those seditious pages in stone, then Arles is a likely place to look. In Mystery of the Cathedrals, the enigmatic alchemist Fulcanelli directs us here, to Arles, the Alyscamps and to the Cathedral of St. Trophime in particular, with several tantalizing references. He points out to us a rose cross ankh on a sarcophagus lid at St. Honore in the Alsycamps and bids us pay close attention to the tympanum on the Great Portal of St. Trophime.
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by Vincent Bridges

Joseph Campbell, in his epic study The Masks of God places Wolfram’s Parzival squarely on the dividing line between ancient and modern. Emma Jung, whose psychological insights are invaluable, identifies the Grail cycle as the beginning of the immanent spirituality of Christianity, in opposition to the more ancient transcendent view. Adolf Hitler considered the Hallows of the Grail to be an important component of his plan for world conquest. Sort of a psychic equivalent to a Panzer battalion.

The Grail would seem to be the ultimate slippery idea. Even the word itself has a half-dozen different derivations: from gradual, gradulis in Latin, to a wide plate or dish, gradule in Old French, to the really strange meanings such as Sang Real or royal blood. A persistent whiff of Sufism lingers on, along with traces of other arcane undercurrents, such as Goddess worship, “witchcraft,” and contact with such megalithic concepts as landscape zodiacs.

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by Vincent Bridges

Part One - The Fall of Rome

By the late fourth and early fifth centuries of our Common Era, the Roman Empire in the west was collapsing under the weight of its own decadence. Every historian has their own opinion about what happened to bring about this “decline and fall” of the great empire, but however it happened, by the turn of the fifth century Rome was no longer the Imperial City. Constantinople reigned as the capital of the eastern portion of the Empire, and most western Emperors preferred Milan or Ravenna to the slums and pestilence of the Eternal City.

To her official poets, Rome remained very much the city “whose beauty no imagination can picture, whose praise no voice can sound, who raises a golden head under the neighboring stars, and with her seven hills imitates the seven regions of heaven; mother of arms and law, who extends her sway over all the earth, and was the earliest cradle of justice: this is the city which, sprung from humble beginnings, has stretched to either pole, from one small place extended its power so as to be coterminous with the light of the sun.”
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I. Notes on the Great Myth

We see the religion of ancient Egypt through the filters of the royal cult and the theology of immortality. Consequently, much of the marginally related, but nonetheless significant, material has been lost or overlooked. The Great Myth, the mythological framework in which Egyptian Theology functions and gains expression, was unstated; perhaps because it was secret, jealously held by the temple initiates, or possibly because it was so well known as to be universal. Recovery of this lost Great Myth supplies a pattern in which the chaotic pieces of Egyptian mythology can be comfortably accommodated.
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In the theology of the priests of Heliopolis, we catch a glimpse of mankind’s earliest spiritual understanding of the nature of light. Those clever theologians managed to describe its relativistic quality — nothing with any matter at all can go faster than light — in terms of a mythological unity of great depth and philosophical complexity, the “operative and creative power” imagined by the Egyptians as the great god RA.

This powerful archetypal image was crafted by the rehket-sa, or “assembly of sages,” of Heliopolis, with the help of a group of beings known as the Henmemet, or “The Shining Ones.” From earliest times, (the spelling of the name of the city itself, Annu — a finned spear-head, a jar and the symbol for city — suggests the place where the space-ships land their cargo). Heliopolis seems to have been a very cosmopolitan place, one where several races and a few interplanetary species mingled freely. The spelling of the name Henmemet suggests a group of physical beings, definitely not spirits, who are “filled with light.” This phrase re-occurs as the priests of RA try to describe life for the departed believer in the Boat of a Million Years; in a sense, the followers of RA would become like the Henmemet and travel the stars fed and clothed with light. Perhaps it is these celestial voyagers who educated the sages of Annu in the arts of mathematics, geometry, physics, astronomy, and so on through the familiar list of the early dynasties’ unexpected sophistication. Wherever they learned or discovered the information, the priests of Annu were the first humans to code these physical constants, clues to the structure of the universe, into a mythical theology that is descriptive of the actual nature of both physical and psychological reality.

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By Vincent Bridges

Far up the Nile in Upper Egypt, sometime during the fourth millennium BCE, three great confederations, formed around the cult centers of what our earliest references call “the living gods,” unified to create the first great Egyptian kingdom. Eventually, this federation would spread north and south to conquer the Two Lands of the Nile and become the 1st Dynasty. In the south, a cult of Horus the Elder formed around Edfu and Neken and grew into its own state. Just north of Neken, in the bend of the great river, the living god was a goddess, Hathor, the consort of Horus. Since time immemorial, far back into the mists of Egyptian prehistory, the Lady of the House of Heru sailed down the river each year to meet her mate, Horus the Elder, at the ancient mound of Behdet at Edfu and celebrate the sacred marriage.

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