Well, this book has proved a great conversation piece in my consulting room lately, as it seems everyone is talking about it, one way or the other.

I am amazed how the earlier books written on this topic are so generally unknown, so on popular request, I mention just a few of them here.

The first book that springs to my mind is Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (yes, the same Charles Kingsley who wrote The Water Babies). Hypatia was a female mathematician and philosopher at the ancient University of Alexandria, and in 415 AD she was torn limb from limb by her students in a mass religious riot which started after the diatribes against women by Tertullian, who preached so nastily against women and started all of this suppression of the divine female mentioned in the Davinci Code.

Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria so inflammed the mob that these early Christians rampaged through Egypt destroying everything they thought could possibly be pagan, including the great Library of Alexandria, thousands of temples, priests and libraries of ancient documents throughout Egypt and the north coast of Africa, hence the burial of the Nag Hammadi documents in the first place.

This was a very violent time and this is where all the repression, suppression of the divine female began. The history of this time is still covered in obscuration and misdirection. This is when the last remaining Egyptian priests who understood the ancient Egyptian heiroglyphs were, most probably murdered in their beds or dispersed, anyway generally got rid of, and it was most probably early Christians who did it.

Imagine, a tradition that reached back to 5000 BCE, maybe further, almost completely destroyed! It was happening all over Europe at this time.

It was never the Council of Nicaea in the 325 AD that removed all those heretic books from the Bible. They were far more upset about the Arian Heresy and establishing the Nicene Creed at the time. The Nicene Creed was only fully accepted in 381 AD at the Council of Constantinople, hence all the mayhem that resulted from Cecil in Alexandria. Tony Robinson’s expose of the Davinci Code misleads the viewer here, as do all of the many other TV programmes on this topic that have flooded out on TV recently.

The next book that came to my mind is Mary Daley’s Gynaecology: the metaethics of radical feminism, wow what a title, written in 1968! These early feminists sure had a problem with the destruction of the divine feminine, long before The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail written 1982, or The Davinci Code!

Check out Karen Armstrong The History of God written 1988, while you are at it!

Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh (writers of the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) have also written the Dead Sea Scrolls Deception and The Inquisition and many more books on these topics, so go check out amazon.co.uk for more!!! In fact, they are the tip of a massive iceberg of controversy that goes very far back in time, and on which I will post more later.

I will end with two books which are now unfortunately out of print, but can be obtained from specialist books shops. The first is the Inquisition Revealed: Its Origin, Policy, Cruelties and History by Reverend Thomas Timpson circa 1856AD, definitely not for the squeamish, and Joseph McCabe A History of the Popes, thought I did find it extensively quoted from in an anthology of his work on amazon. Again, this is not a book for the faint at heart!

One day the truth will all come out and one day we will be able to be free of all of this subterfuge and misdirection and pain and lies and wickedness. However, as long as man wants power, wealth and glory instead of joy, happiness and wisdom, there will always be war and violence and misery and LIES! MORE DAMN LIES!

Oh! And by the way, those who say that Leonardo da Vinci could not possibly have known or been influenced by any ‘esoteric’ stuff, Baigent and Leigh have been kind enough to detail the flood of esoterica coming out of Constantinople as it fell to the Turks, causing a renaissance in France and Italy at just this time. Cosimo de Medici (Leonardo’s patron was a Medici) was influenced by his colleague Rene d’Anjou, the Duke of Lorraine, who was fully conversant with the theories of the time. Cosimo collected a great library that Leonardo had access to.

“It has served us well, this myth of Christ.”
Pope Leo X

“If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.” Karen Armstrong A Short History of Myth

“Fable should be taught as fable, myth as myth, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truth is horrifying. The mind of a child accepts them and only through great pain, perhaps tragedy, can the child be relieved of them.” Hypatia of Alexandria

It is not just New Testament Sacred Females who have disappeared. Laurence Gardner details how all of the Old Testament Sacred Females have been written out of history too!!

With grateful thanks to The Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids for this most fascinating story of Origin.

If it is true that all things come out of Africa, then the discovery of the foundation of our cultural beliefs in this dark subcontinent is surely the most alluring.

Obatala, The King of Whiteness and Light, is the African male creator god, whose function is to form the child in the womb of his feminine counterpart Odudua, the chief goddess of the African pantheon, The Black One. Source quoted is Kenneth Gran’t book Cults of the Shadow now unfortunately out of print.

However, there are plenty of clues to follow in James Fraser’s The Golden Bough happily still in print with amazon This origin is the probable explanation for the widespread reverence of the black madonna images found widely across the Mediterranean area, as this informative article on the Black Madonnas by Michael P Duricy

It has been often noticed that what starts out as feminine often ends up being masculine. By the time these myths get to Northern Europe, the chief goddess is white and associated with the moon, whereas the male deity is transformed into the dying and resurrected vegetation god, the Green Man and then perverted into the devil by christianity the Catholic Encyclpedia and portrayed as red and then black, as described in this article on representations of the devil on Tarot.com.

Of course, when religion gets involved, the original cultural myths of our ancestors will be pushed and pulled around by theologians to suit the current politics of the day to monopolise power. Cultural roots are pulled up and discarded with gusto and abandon as greedy and shallow minds seek to climb to the top of the stack, to my mind demonstrating our tree dwelling ancestors who had some deep seated desire to get to the top of the tree and make the most noise.

However, evolution decreed that we should get down from the trees and walk on the ground, a great leveller if ever there was one! Evolution has also decreed that we develop intellect and wisdom and stop making all this noise.

As we ponder deeply on the origins of our most sacred cultural beliefs, and consider the devotion and the wisdom of shamans who kept us alive over geological epochs, we can see that the twisted machinations of modern hierarchies and their dreadful and dangerous manipulation of sacred tradition, has brought about the most horrific trauma by deforming the sacred and the taboo, see my Three Books of Healing.

Theologians have pushed millions of us down into the dirt as they attempt to elevate their pet doctine up into the light. This surely reflects their superficial nature and their deep seated fear of origin. In order to heal from this most ancient of all miasms psora, we most put aside all that disease and ponder anew on the wisdom of our ancestors.

NB: For further information on miams please consult Ortega, Notes on the Miasms obtainable from Serpetina Books and also described nicely by Hahnemann’s Theory of Miasms.

As Hahneman so pithily puts it ‘The body became corrupt because man’s interior will became corrupt.’ Thus the first and most ancient maism, Psora, sprung into existence.

NNB: Thanks again to Neal Stephenson for a final touch to this deep thought. Cryptonomicon “Over and over again we see the the pattern of Titanomachia (chaos) repeated – the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge.”

I think emotional intelligence is second in intelligence to spiritual intelligence and both are critically important today.

Reading The Jesus Papers by Michael Baigent it is easy to understand the furore surrounding the Davinci Code.

Mr Baigent’s chapter on The Mysteries of Egypt interests me greatly. He describes how the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts concern ‘transfigurations’ – in other words, the techniques of traveling from this world into the ‘far world’, becoming an ‘akh’ or a ‘being of light’, and returning with ‘out of body experience’ – ‘working with’ the divine (theurgy) in order to be guided, or initiated.

He also describes Plutarch‘s experiences of the Mysteries of Delphi, which sound most similar.

It remined me of Shamans visiting the spirit world. It reminded me of Castenada. It reminded me that this practice is as old as we are, and that it underpins a great deal of modern healing techniques.

Mr Baigent continues, describing people spontaneously experiencing the release of trapped emotions, often in floods of tears or in clarity of perception, or even out of body experiences or sudden visions.

He says “it is as if the past is separated by a thin veneer of time that occasionally peels off to reveal what lies underneath”.

This information is very interesting.

There are many within the alternative medicine field who are exploring and using these techniques for healing purposes, and they are indeed most effective. Soul recovery and extraction is a very useful technique, and healers routinely use meditation and chanting to ease a distressed soul.

I look forward to the day when this is mainstream and well understood, loosing its fear factor and again becoming a well trodden path, because there is much healing in it.

Back to Baigent again, his chapter on Initiation reminded me of Minehowe and of Mick Ashton and Tony Robinson’s Time Team attempts to understand the structure. As usual, modern archaeologists interpret everything as a ‘fraud’, but Baigent describes Parmenides and the practice of ‘incubation‘ – ‘awaiting a dream or vision while sleeping…inside the earth’.

After the long description of the underground complex of Baiae, an oracle of the dead, I thought of Minehowe. Maybe this is also an oracle of the dead?

Parminides and Pythagoras were presocratic Greeks who were influenced by Egypt and by ‘mystical and shamanistic currents’ from Asia Minor and from Persia (and from the Druids too?)

All of these ancient people worshiped the god of healing Apollo, who was also the god of incubation. Interesting? Huh?

Also very interesting is the survival of the Egyptian mysteries in the form of the works of Hermes Trismegistus, especially the Poimandres. These works kick started the Renaissance thanks to Cosimo de Medici, of all people. Baigent links the production of the books of Hermes with the rise of Christianity! Very interesting. I read this book with fascination.

Thank you Michael Baigent!

The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates is a fascinating rediscovery of Anglo Saxon shamanism, which together with his new book The Real Middle Earth and Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings allows us to enter the world of our own culture and history to find the underpinnings of our world view, divested of the negativity that the church has strangled it with over the last millenia. (Note: Sidhe ‘Druidic Web of the Wise’).

Shamanism (Jill Purce workshops) is now the fastest growing spiritual practice around the world, as we try and undo the damage of the past millenia and find again our connection to Middle Earth. Each time we plant a tree or try and grow our own vegetables or save some water or turn off a light, we are trying once again to harmonise with the planet and to find our place. Every time we recycle our rubbish and protest against waste, we are paying our respects.

It is well past time that we understood how to plant our gardens and fields to sustain the wildlife all around us, instead of treating everything as if it has been put there for us to use or abuse as we desire. It is high time that we developed respect instead of a high blown belief in our own superiority at the expense of every other living thing. Such a radical change in our perspectives are essential if our children are to have any future on this planet.

To find the magic, wonder and humility of our ancestors will allow us to undo the ravages of unfettered power, rape and pillage that has nearly destroyed our Earth, not to mention the power mad prejudices that have allowed whole peoples to become subjugate to false ideas.

Our pagan ancestors understood their place in the world, and how majestic the forces of nature are, and how worthy of respect. It is about time that we threw off the delusions of later religions and once again find our place in the world, of the world, but not above the world.

As Brian Bates points out, we spend billions every year on fantasy films, books and games for leisure time persuits to reconnect to a dimension beyond, absorbing vivid stories which capture the the imagination, and animate the most ancient depths of our consciousness.

So after a thousand years, Middle Earth is returning, if in fact it every really left? We desperately need the force of fantasy and imagination, intuition and the deeper perspectives to counter the sterile concrete world of power, politics, ruin and war and to allow us to love again, to respect again.

Otherwise, we are only monkeys with delusions of grandeur.

Iain Pears has written a wonderful book called An Instance of the Fingerpost, which gives a fine illustration of how many different truths there can be.

Well worth a read!

Tom Holland in his wonderful book Persian Fire, brings events in the 5th Century BCE to life in dramatic fashion.

Such books teach us history like licking honey off a spoon.

Amazing!

…. of William Shakespeare by James Shapiro is another fantastic history book.

Studying history can never have been easier than today with all these great books about.

Give yourself a treat and buy one today!

Check out this really great book called Freakonomics which is full of fun and thought provoking facts.

For example, 87% of all people are decent and honest, no matter what the media says, and would resist the temptation of evil even if they knew they could get away unobserved with any wickedness. That’s not bad.

Well done humanity!

The Religion by Tim Willocks is an astonishing novel.

It describes the siege of Malta in 1565 AD in gruesome and vivid detail and the author weaves his theme around power, religion, war, greed, fear, madness and absolute cruelty: faith, love, betrayal, obsession, friendship ‘to the end’ – such that you do not know which side to love or hate, which side to admire, which part to take, who is good, who is evil – or are all his characters simply human?

Whipped up by such forces, it is salutary to realise that any one of us could be all of the above or none, but no human can face such a terror and emerge intact, except by sheer folly or bonchance.

Tim Willocks is a fine writer. I would feel blessed indeed if I could write half so well. He can chill the soul:
“The duration of the Church’s war will be measured not in weeks, or even in years, but in millenia …”
as he describes the madness of fundamentalism, yet calm the soul as he describes the best of us alongside the worst of us.

I spent a wonderful holiday on Malta and I have stood in Valletta and looked out on the bay where the Ottoman armies flocked. The Churches are extraordinary, the island is magnificent, the people are amazing. Malta is a beautiful island with a vast history set in a bejewelled sea. I look forward to my return visit, and now I have read this splendid book, it will not be possible to take a single step without hearing words from this incredibly talented authour.

I must recommend Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Trilogy Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World! Wow!

If I could write like this I would feel truly blessed.

What a sweet way to learn history!

Thank you Mr Stephenson!