In this article, I would like to discuss something disturbing when it comes to ancient legends and history. It seems there is a new type of racist attitude when it comes to local legends of various gods.
Local legends around the world attribute various achievements to gods and giants. But modern thinking ignores these local legends and attributes these achievements to the ancestors of the people living there now.
But in some ways isn’t that worse: to ignore the voices of indigenous peoples around the world and project Western scientific values onto them in the name of anti-racism? By not listening to the voices of indigenous people when it comes to the attribution of past achievements, are we projecting a new type of racism onto them instead? Do we have a case of ancient legends, racist projections?
Preserving the memories of the gods
A few years ago I was visiting the ruins of Tulum on the Yucatan peninsula. There, literally carved in stone, are figures carved in the sides of temples that depict the gods returning to Earth. Our guide told us some of the accompanying stories that the gods were supposed to one day return to earth having lived amongst humans in the distant past.
By El Comandante (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
We see a similar motif around the world. Local legends about mysterious structures say that giants or gods built something them in the distant past. This applies to everything from The Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland to the legends around Puma Punku which say that the god Viracocha and his giant servants created much of the world. A lot of myths such as those from Sumerian cultures speak of how the gods gave human beings skills such as metallurgy and even makeup.
Yes, there might be some actual white supremacists amongst them but I would argue that it is actually racist to dismiss the voice and agency of the local peoples and cultures that have so carefully preserved this heritage. Just because it does not suit the current Western scientific paradigm to accept that gods and giants lived amongst us in the distant past and built certain monuments doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen and it is insulting to the people whose histories contain such stories.
Dismissing indigenous agency and science
What is worse is that people who do believe the local legends are accused of being racist because they are not giving the credit for these great feats to the local people. But by dismissing the voice and agency of local people I think it is actually another offence. It is yet another projection of the way we want people of other cultures to be, but may not reflect who they actually are. In a way, it is yet another colonialist, paternalistic attitude which yet again removes the agency from people.
When I was in Japan in 2008 at the Hokkaido summit for Shifting the Assumptions in Science, one of the main points we discussed was that the science of various indigenous peoples of the world needs to be respected. Too often their scientific ideas are dismissed as primitive, when they may actually be more in tune with how the universe actually is: not how we are projecting it to be.
So for example when aboriginal legends discuss the Dreamtime as an aspect of the universe with no end or beginning – that sounds very much like higher dimensions beyond space and time. Just because it sounds different from modern physics doesn’t make it any less real when it comes to how the universe works.
I have made a little video to illustrate the issue of this new type of projection. By writing this article and making this video, I hope that more people can become aware of this and move through it. Please leave your comments below and tell me what you think.
In a year that sees the opening of yet another Hollywood movie that depicts Mary Magdalene, I would like to reflect on a bit of a disturbing aspect of what we have seen so far about her and ask the question was Mary Magdalene just a vessel for the Holy Blood?
The Biggest Secret?
The Da Vinci Code book and film were groundbreaking. Their huge popularity showed that the general public has an appetite for moving beyond the church narrative of Mary Magdalene and Jesus to finding out the truth.
Yet you could come away from the film and the novel thinking that the big secret that the church was trying to hide is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had children and there was a bloodline of descendants. This was at least a change from Mary Magdalene being associated with prostitution. She was being placed back into her seemingly rightful position as Jesus’ wife and the bearer of his children.
The book was partially based on the blockbuster non-fiction book of the 1980s Holy Blood Holy Grail. Whether either project had intended this, you could be left with an impression of Mary Magdalene as just a vessel. In fact, in The Da Vinci Code, Mary Magdalene is called, ‘the Holy Vessel’. She is likened to the Holy Grail at times – the chalice that held the holy blood. This places her womb as a receptacle for the blood of Jesus, meaning his child, and emphasises that this is why she is important.
This is a progress, I guess, as it has moved Mary Magdalene from the status of sinner to that of wife and mother. And yes, that is something to celebrate, but it could also be seen as hiding other demeaning attitudes which I will discuss. It is also totally at odds with the vision of Mary Magdalene that I witnessed back in 2001.
The status of motherhood in today’s society
Bringing Mary Magdalene’s status up to mother and vessel for a Holy Baby and seeing that as the ultimate elevation does tie in with social attitudes that still prevail that say that no matter what a woman does, her ultimate purpose is to be a mother.
Although motherhood is, of course, a state that is highly important that often goes unrewarded in society, to say that it is the only ‘purpose’ of a woman is an insult to mothers and all women.
This is a highly complex issue and I do not want to go into it fully in this article. Suffice to say that when we honour a woman just because she is the oven that the bun goes into, we do women a disservice. We are saying that the only purpose for someone as a human being is that they can reproduce and take care of another human being.
The Oven for the Bun
I certainly witnessed whilst working on labour wards that women are suddenly given care and attention that they have probably never received before but ultimately it is not about them and who they are but their ability to bring another person into the world which really is out of their conscious control. A woman cannot consciously force herself to conceive as the scores of infertile people in the world can corroborate.
So to say that motherhood is the ultimate purpose for women is to actually honour something that is coming through them, not from their conscious thoughts. We are actually saying that they do not matter as a person, just this process of conception that is not under their conscious control. (The job of raising children is another matter – I am discussing the act of becoming a mother.)
By saying Mary Magdalene is the grail and vessel that receives the Holy Blood we reduce her to being the oven for the bun. It seems to me like yet another taming of a woman to conform to what is expected in the lens of the society that we have now.
If you want any proof of this you only have to look at the reams of press given to the status of Jennifer Aniston’s womb. It seems that no matter what success a woman has, she can only be truly acceptable if she has a child. High Profile women such as Jennifer Aniston and Kylie Minogue who do not have children seem to provoke nervous twitching from many quarters of society.
A lost feminine power
What I saw in my visions of Mary Magdalene in 2001 was a woman like nobody I have ever met because such a woman would not be possible now. She was a learned person but not in the way we would recognise because she had knowledge of a nature that existed before science and spirituality split off from each other – when it was just knowledge of the universe.
The closest we have to this sort of knowledge is what we call sacred geometry but the very fact that we have to add the term ‘sacred’ to it shows just how far removed we are from the unity of knowledge that used to exist. It used to be just knowledge: it didn’t need the ‘sacred’ title.
She also combined the science and spiritual, the male and female and an inner power in a way that women today would find difficult to embody. This is because we have a lot of the sense of feminine power in our society. For many years now, in Western culture, feminine power has been extinguished to the point where most people don’t even know what that is.
So when we see female empowerment in our culture today it is when a woman takes on what has traditionally been a man’s role – fighting for example as seen in the film Kick-Ass.
This is what passes today as female empowerment but it is not necessarily an expression of feminine power. That is a muscle that is so disused in many Western societies that it is just unfamiliar. It is still present in some other societies around the world and you can see it if you witness women elders of tribes being honoured for their wisdom.
This lack of feminine power hurts both men and women – when men are told that being emotional or vulnerable is weak, they end up suppressing their emotions. This could be a factor in the higher suicide rates in young men.
What I saw of Mary Magdalene was that she didn’t just bring her womb to the table but the whole person. She was powerful and learned in her own right. The research I have done and guidance I have been given in the terms of visions has led me to a conclusion as to who she might have been as a historical figure. If you would like to see my full insights on this check out The Magdalene Mystery School.
Was Mary Magdalene a teacher in her own right?
We see glimpses of what I think is the real Mary Magdalene in what is known as The Gnostic Gospels. The Gospel of Phillip and indeed the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, have sections that suggest that Mary Magdalene has special knowledge given to her by Jesus, something that caused protests from the other disciples.
There are also many traditions around the world that say that Mary Magdalene was a teacher – one of the most popular ones is that she ended up in France. Usually, this assumes that she was teaching the information that Jesus had passed on to her and this could well be. But there is a hint in Luke’s gospel that she could have had her own independent life as it says that she was one of a group of women who were funding Jesus’ ministry.
It is still taboo in our society to think of a woman as independent with her own opinions today. I think this sketch puts this across rather well.
Hence when we think of Mary Magdalene we are still seeing her through our lens which is that ultimately a woman’s purpose is motherhood.
Conclusions and visions for the future
In my visions, Mary Magdalene was both a mother and a person in her own right with her own ideas. Wouldn’t it be radical if we saw Mary Magdalene like this today? Maybe with the shifts in society happening at the moment, we may even start to see all woman in this way: as people in their own right whether married or not, mothers or not. We may, at last, recognise women as more than just vessels for another’s teaching or bloodline and see Mary Magdalene in a new light.
People often say that The truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. When it comes to the Holy Grail, it is the subject of much fascination. Is it a cup used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper? Is it is a stone as some traditions assert or could it even be a person with Royal Blood?
The concept of the Holy Grail has inspired many writers and since the success of the book, The Da Vinci Code, interest in subjects such as The Holy Grail, Mary Magdalene and even the Cathars have soared.
But there is a story that has not reached the headlines and has been hidden away in a sleepy corner of England, pretty much ignored. It is the story of how a heretical sect seems to have escaped persecution in France and established itself a few miles north of London.
They carried with them an object of veneration and founded their order upon this relic. What was this object and its significance? Could this be the object secreted from France after the sect was persecuted? If so we have to ask the question – Is the Holy Grail Hidden in Hertfordshire?
The History of Ashridge
My interest in the story began around 2001 when I had just moved to the town of Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire UK. At the time I was still working as a medical GP. I also had acquired a dog that year which led me to go for long walks in the National Trust Land which lies just behind Berkhamsted called Ashridge Estate and today it is mainly famous for its business school.
Ashridge House. Image: wikicommons
So I got to know the local landscape including the business school which is on the site of much older settlements going way back to 1283 when a monastery was built on the site. When King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, this became the home of the young Princess Elizabeth before she was announced as the Queen. It then passed into the hands of aristocratic families before becoming a business school in the 20th century.
The house is rarely opened to the public but I have visited under special circumstances. I have even been underneath the house to the well that the monks used. It is the monastery and the order that founded it which is of interest to us in this article as they may hold the key to a mystery that has been plaguing people for some generations; what was removed by the Cathars at the siege of Montsegur?
The Cathar Connection
To understand why this is a mystery we need to back up a bit to explain who the Cathars were and how they can be linked to Ashridge. In Southern France in the 12th Century, a sect of Christianity arose that the church would go on to call heretical and wipe out completely. They are known today as the Cathars. By a modern mystic’s standards, the Cathar ideas that remain with us are very appealing.
They believed in living humbly and focusing instead on direct spiritual experiences. Some of the sect lived a life of chastity and poverty. They were known as ‘Perfect’ people or Bonhommes – good men. Obviously, this direct access to spiritual realms was threatening to the power of the church and they were systematically wiped out in one of the worse genocides in history.
Some Cathars held out for months in a stronghold fortress on the top of a hill called Montsegur. After a while, their supplies would have become depleted and they supposedly gave themselves in and perished in the fire but with little struggle in 1244. A persistent mystery is that members of the sect supposedly scaled the perilous fortress and hill to escape with something.
We don’t know if it happened and what the object was, but it has sparked speculation ever since. Some say it is the Holy Grail which may be a cup but may be the blood of Christ. This could be an actual vial of blood or a person who was a member of the bloodline of Christ. We don’t know for sure if it happened or even what the Holy Grail was supposed to be.
Castle at Montsegur. Image: wikicommons
The Bonhommes
Whilst I lived in Berkhamsted, I came to hear about the monastery originally at Ashridge and started to research it. That’s when I discovered that a few years after the Cathars gave themselves up in Montsegur two monasteries were established with the order of Bonhommes and one of them was at Ashridge. Apparently, they believed that they had a sample of the blood of Christ which some would call The Holy Grail.
It is highly unlikely that whatever relic they had was actually the blood of the man, Jesus Christ. It may not even have been blood which would have been difficult to store. As you probably know, having a relic in the Middle Ages was big business and indeed a local resident of a nearby village uncovered a load of wall paintings in their house dating back to the time when it was used as a rest for Pilgrims coming to Ashridge to see the supposed Blood of Christ.
But even without a genuine vial of the Blood of Christ, we still are left with the fact that a mysterious order of Bonhommes established two monasteries in England shortly after the Bonhommes were wiped out in France. They had support from members of the Royal family who may have had some Cathar connections and were therefore possibly sympathetic.
In one of the few book written about the history of Ashridge called A Prospect of Ashridge (Phillimore 1980), Douglas Coult disagrees that the Bonhommes of Ashridge have anything to do with the Cathars in the south of France. However, he gives no explanation as to who they were, why there were only two orders in England and why they were called Bonhommes if they were not French Cathars.
Just wild speculation?
It is entirely possible that the during the persecution of Cathars in France in the 1200s, members of the sect who remained, who may have even possessed whatever it was that was smuggled out of Montsegur, were able to come to England under Royal patronage to set up a monastery in the 1280s. We do know that a vial of supposed holy blood was kept by the monastery at some point – whether this was THE object or not we don’t know.
It is also plausible that these were the same Good Men or Bonhommes that originated from the South of France in the Cathar community. The dates fit for a group of the order to flee the persecution and begin again in England.
If we believe that whatever was smuggled out of Monstegur was indeed an object known as the Holy Grail as many a speculative theory has suggested then it is possible that the Holy Grail is hidden somewhere in Hertfordshire.
Even without the Holy Grail aspect, it was fascinating to live so close to an aspect of the Cathar story that few know about. Many people focus on France but the Ashridge Bonhommes may have opened another chapter in the Cathar story.
Like with many other monasteries, this too was dissolved by King Henry VIII which ended the Order of the Bonhommes. Who knows – whatever it was that they were protecting could be still there, perhaps buried and hidden in Hertfordshire!
Is there a link between the Shroud of Turin and The Black Hole Principle? In this video lecture I explain how I think they might be connected.
But how did I get interested in this subject in this first place? On lazy Sunday afternoons by the fire, James and I watch tend to watch documentary channels. In the late 2000s a number of these featured the object called the Shroud of Turin.
Over the years, I had never really paid attention to this particular object. I had assumed as many other did that the object was a medieval fake.
But gradually, the Shroud gradually seeped into my consciousness and my curiosity was aroused.
From a scientific perspective, The Shroud of Turin is a fascinating object. I started to do talks on the subject and the response was immense. One of the talks has gone up on YouTube. I will link to it here.
In this talk I cover
What the Shroud of Turin is and some of its history
What properties does the Shroud have
Why nobody can explain how the Shroud was made
The story of the Shroud – what happened to the man who is depicted on there.
How new evidence published in a peer-reviewed journal is pointing to the Shroud not being a fake
My own ideas of how we can link the Shroud of Turin to the Black Hole Principle.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
For the updated information about The Shroud of Turin and The Black Hole Principle plus many other subects like this, check out The Magdalene Mystery School.
A Shakespeare by any other face would be even more lucrative it would seem.
You couldn’t make it up…except they seem to be doing just that. William Shakespeare is obviously the most famous playwright and poet in history. But we have very little in the way of biographical details of the man from Stratford upon Avon to whom the greatest literary works of all time have been attributed.
There are no letters that we know of – this alone is quite interesting as you would have thought, at least, that he wrote to his family in Stratford whilst he worked in London. He left none of his books in his will when he died and we have no portraits of him when he was alive, despite him being present at court and a successful playwright. The famous balding image we have of William Shakespeare is from the first folio that was created after his death.
So it is no wonder that when a portrait emerged that could have been a portrait of Shakespeare that was created during his lifetime, people from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust were interested. After a few years of examination, they announced to the world in 2009 that it was indeed genuine.
Yet there was immediate opposition from academics and critics. The portrait was said to be of courtier and poet, Sir Thomas Overbury and other portraits of him exist.
These seem to have been mostly ignored by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust which has prominently used the controversial image as their favourite Shakespeare pinup. It is easy to see why this is a much preferable image for the author of Romeo and Juliet as the man in this image is more handsome than the image in the first folio.
Some are even reporting that any critique of the Trust’s behaviour on this matter is being met with the threat of litigation. At the end of the day, it is all about money; a handsome, young, full-colour Shakespeare looking a bit like Joseph Fiennes, who played Will Shakespeare in the film ‘Shakespeare in Love’, is going to bring in more money for the Stratford tourist machine than an older, plump balding one. This article from The Guardian newspaper website suggests that the new portrait was worth around £15 million to the Trust in terms of tourism.
This may turn out to be one of these cases where the untruth becomes so widespread that it simply becomes the truth. What are your thoughts? Are you shocked that The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is presenting a controversial portrait as Shakespeare? Do you dismiss it as just yet another lie that we are told on a daily basis by people in power? Or do you think the portrait is genuine and this is the true likeness of William Shakespeare? Please leave your comments below.
In this article we will be looking at the connection between String Theory and The Bible and asking the question, “Were the Biblical Patriarchs entering Higher Dimensions?”
Modern scientific theories, such as String Theory, have given us the concept that the universe could consist of many dimensions.These are levels of the universe that we are not normally aware of but are supposedly all around us.
It works a bit like a radio; unless you are tuned in to that particular frequency you are not aware of that radio station and all the stations can exist together in parallel.
Physicists themselves are divided as to whether we can actually experience these dimensions. Some wonder if the experience would be like a carp lifted from a fish pond and being taken into a new and seemingly fantastical world seeing new sights, hearing new sounds and experiencing different beings. What would they say to their carp friends once they returned and would they even be believed? (More about Michio Kaku’s insight into carp and hyperspace can be found here.)
What would happen if carp escaped the pond? Image: Pixabay
The experience of the carp leaving the water can be compared to a multidimensional experience in humans. Interestingly, there is evidence to suggest that this sort of experience has been happening throughout human history. For example, what happens when we substitute the word ‘dimension’ for ‘heaven’ in certain religious texts?
What happens when we substitute the word ‘dimension’ for ‘heaven’?
Let’s look at the apocryphal Book of Enoch. This was an old biblical text that we know was very popular at the time of Jesus because there are several copies of it in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Enoch lived at the time of the patriarchs, according to the Hebrew Bible and was Noah’s Great Grandfather. According to the book under his name, he was visited by beings who show him various ‘heavens’.
Although the language is different, a lot of people today who are mystics or practice astral travelling will recognise these types of experience. Because experiences of other dimensions are really hard to explain, people of different eras attempt to explain them in terms of what they do know, using analogies from their own culture.
String Theory Image: Shutterstock
But despite the differences in language, accounts such as these are essentially similar to those experienced by people today. When somebody in our present era has an intense multidimensional experience they tend to want to record it, just as people have throughout history.
In the past, we called these recordings of multidimensional experiences complete with angelic and/ or even alien encounters – the Bible, The Koran, the book of Mormon etc. The language and interpretations may be different, but the experiences show definite similarities.
One thing certainly has changed – in most cultures instead of hailing people who have multidimensional experiences as prophets or holy people, we are more likely to think that they need psychiatric treatment.
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