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  • Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles

    Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles

    From New Dawn Special Issue No. 2 (Autumn/Winter 2006)

    With the publication of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the mid-nineties and the Gnostic Gospels found in Nag Hammadi, a new perspective on the role of Mary Magdalene in the revelation and dissemination of the esoteric teachings of Christ has emerged onto the public stage. With the release of The Da Vinci Code, she has been placed firmly in the public consciousness, her story awakening both excitement and controversy.

    It is my contention that Mary Magdalene was the carrier of a tradition of respect and reverence for the Divine Feminine, a secret initiatory tradition that leads back through Jesus, Gnosticism, the esoteric teachings of Judaism, and the Egyptian mysteries of Isis to the ultimate ground or source of all religions. By seeking out the alternative roads to understanding, by looking at the Gnostic texts, legends, symbols, and iconography, one discovers the distinct possibility Mary Magdalene was not only first witness to and herald of the Resurrection, but the chief disciple and recipient of Christ’s’ gnosis, as well as teacher and transmitter of these extraordinary Mysteries to the people of France.

    On the shores of the Mediterranean Sea outside Marseilles at Les Saintes Marie de la Mere there is a small chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene and consecrated by Archbishop Roncalli (who later became Pope John XXIII). Given a place of prominence within this chapel are paintings of her arrival from Palestine in a small rudderless boat.According to legend, soon after the crucifixion and Resurrection, Mary Magdalene and her family were expelled from the Holy Land, set adrift on the Mediterranean Sea and made their way to this region, particularly the area around Southern France and Northern Spain. At this time in history, aside from the already established Celts, many Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others lived and travelled in this area. There was even a Jewish city known as Glanum Levi whose ruins can be found today in Provence.

    In the midst of this cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, along with the exchange of goods there must have been an exchange of philosophical and religious ideas. It is very possible that during this period many spiritual and symbolic links were discovered between these diverse peoples and their traditional belief systems that stretched back to the temples of Egypt. Before her arrival in Les Saintes Marie Sur Les Mere, France was riddled with Isis cults. The name Paris etymologically can be linked to the pre-Celtic ParIsis, the grove of Isis. Clearly this region was fertile ground for Mary Magdalene’s mission.Following her arrival in France, she was said to have travelled the land, preaching the authentic Gnostic gospel of Jesus, which had been directly transmitted to her during his time on Earth and in mystic visions after his return to the more subtle dimensions of light. French religious literature from the Middle Ages is filled with legends and stories of the life of Mary Magdalene from this period until her death. Tales abound of her miraculous healings, her performance of the ritual of baptism, her aid in fertility and childbearing and even her ability to raise the dead. There are even reports of a secret tradition of the healing arts that exists today in France and traces its roots back to Mary Magdalene.1

    After this prophetic mission was accomplished, Mary is reported to have withdrawn to a cave in Ste. Baum, where she spent the remainder of her days in pray and seclusion. She is believed to have been buried at Ste. Maximin where her remains were watched over by Cassianite monks from the fifth century until the Saracen invasion. Then in 1058, in a papal bull, Pope Stephen acknowledged the existence of her relics in the church of Vezeley, which became one of the major places of pilgrimage during the Middle Ages.

    But before we look at the evidence for her distinctive role as Apostle of the Apostles and prophetic mission, let us take a look at the hidden history of Gnosticism, the powerful doctrine of Divine grace, healing and illumination that she was said to have transmitted.

    The Gnostic Teachings

    It was during the Hellenistic period that the mystic knowledge of Egypt, the great symbols, myths, astronomical, scientific and metaphysical teachings passed into the heart of the Mystery Schools of Greece and Rome, which included the region of Gaul where Mary Magdalene is reported to have lived and preached. These secret initiatory teachings of the Egyptians were also retained and transmitted through the inner circles of Judaism to Jesus himself.

    At the heart of this lineage of transmission was an extraordinary metaphysical teaching known as Gnosticism. This teaching is believed to be the spiritual basis of his essential message to humanity, a message revealed to Mary Magdalene, his disciples and followers through the vehicles of metaphor, allegory and parable. Unlike the patriarchal, dogmatic, materially based teachings prevalent during this period, Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion.

    The mystic experience of, and communion with, the essential grace and majesty of Divinity, lay at the heart of this Gnostic transmission. The clear and immediate experience of this awakening was known as gnosis or wisdom. Often translated from its Greek root as ‘knowledge’, Gnosticism goes much deeper than mere intellectual understanding. Like a brilliant flash of light arising from the darkness, this understanding arises in the individual as a bright lucid awareness – an intuitive realisation of the pure essence, nature and energy of Divinity as it flows within oneself, the luminous realms and all of creation.

    From the Gnostic viewpoint, the answers to all of life’s mysteries can only be found when one “opens oneself to this divine current and allows oneself to be penetrated by it to the point where one is fully transformed and illuminated by it.”2 From the viewpoint of many early Gnostic communities, this divine current was perceived as the feminine, healing and nurturing energy of God’s Holy Spirit.

    The fundamental doctrine of the Gnostics relates the dualistic nature of the world in which we reside, the eternal struggle between good and evil. They believed that Jehovah, the wrathful god of the Old Testament was a false god and expression of what they called the demiurge. For how could a fully enlightened divinity contain within him the base emotions of anger, jealousy and vengeance? For them, the real God was a loving deity equally and directly accessible to all. This God taught that love, compassion and the true sacrifice and transformation of the self, or ego, was the highest spiritual path.

    The Gnostics believed that the plan of this demiurge, or Satan, was to trap spirit in matter, and the Earth itself was a prison in which souls were exiled from their divine home. For them, the real world was the non-material world of spirit and all of their rituals and practices were designed to purify them and provide them with the means to find their way out of the impure world of matter, darkness and suffering and return to their true home in the Light.

    Clearly, these sacred esoteric teachings were revolutionary. Unlike the fixed, restrictive, hierarchical systems prevalent during this period, these teachings were open to all, female, male, rich, poor Jew or Pagan. This all-inclusive transmission of teachings formerly reserved for the elite was at odds with the practices of Orthodox Judaism and the emerging Church of Rome. For once the seeker had been touched by this Gnostic current, she or he came to recognise their own divine nature and perceive their place in the world from a whole new perspective. No longer did they need the intercession of a priest or rabbi to connect them with their spiritual inheritance.

    Evidence of Mary Magdalene’s primary role as disciple, visionary, mediatrix and herald of these revolutionary teachings can be found in a number of Gnostic texts. These include The Pistis Sophia, The Gospel of Philip, The Gospel of Mary and more.

    Apostle of the Apostles

    The Pistis Sophia is a Coptic Gnostic revelatory work composed and/or compiled in Egypt around the middle of the second century CE. It claims to disclose the “secret teachings of the Savior,” reserved for his inner circle of initiates during the eleven years following his Resurrection. Filled with powerful, poetic imagery, this text reveals the intimate connections between this emerging form of Christianity, Paganism and beliefs and rituals founds in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.3 It also clearly recognises and demonstrates Mary Magdalene’s essential role as foremost disciple, seer and prophetess.

    It appears the teachings found in the Pistis Sophia were created specifically for the apostles who would go forth and spread his gospel. It takes the form of a dialogue between Jesus and these apostles and consists primarily of questions and answers. It is fascinating to note that in this text, out of the forty-six questions asked of him, thirty-nine of them come from Mary Magdalene. Due to her sincerity, astute level of inquiry and ability to comprehend the essence of his words, time and time again she is praised and recognised by him for her clarity and insight.

    For example, after Jesus presents the first part of these mystical teachings concerning the aeons, orders and regions of the “Great Invisible,” he acknowledges Mary Magdalene’s superior capacity for contemplation, insight and revelation.

    It came to pass then, when Mary had heard the Savior say these words, that she gazed fixedly into the air for the space of an hour. She said: “My Lord, give commandment to me to speak in openness.” And Jesus, the compassionate, answered and said unto Mary:

    “Mary, thou blessed one, whom I will perfect in all mysteries, of those of the height, discourse in openness, thou, whose heart is raised to the Kingdom of Heaven more than all thy brethren.”

    Throughout the text, after listening to her interpretation of his teachings, he acknowledges her perceptive abilities,

    Well, said, Mary, for thou art blessed before all women on earth, because thou shalt be the fullness of all fullness and the perfection of all perfections.

    This is only the first of a number of texts that speak of Mary Magdalene’s gifts and unique relationship with Jesus. According to a group of Gnostic Gospels discovered in 1945 in a cave in Upper Egypt near the village of Nag Hammadi, she was said to be an inspired prophetess who continuously experienced the living presence of her Lord within her.

    In The Gospel of Mary, from this collection, Mary Magdalene, the visionary, reveals to the other disciples teachings that were transmitted to her through visionary experience. In this gospel, she clearly takes the lead, not only soothing and reassuring the male apostles who fear capture and death, but relating to them teachings of the Savior that she alone has been privileged to receive. As in the Pistis Sophia, the Savior blesses her for her visionary capacity. When Peter questions her vision, Levi responds with, “If the Teacher held her worthy, who are you to reject her? Surely the Teacher knew her very well, for he loved her more than us.”4

    In The Gospel of Philip, from the same collection, the disciples appear to be jealous of the intimate relationship between the Savior and Mary Magdalene.

    The Companion of the savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” The Savior answered and said to them, “Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.”

    Because I have no reason to doubt Philip’s account or the words found in these early texts, I feel that the Christianity brought to France by Mary Magdalene has a different feel about it because it was closer to the authentic teachings of Jesus. If Mary Magdalene truly was the Apostle of the Apostles, then Jesus transmitted more to her or perhaps she understood this transmission better than the rest of the apostles. Through this lens we can begin to perceive and acknowledge the different understanding and practice of Christianity that emerged in Southern France, one that lasted over 1,200 years and in a sense pervades the place to this day.

    Magdalene’s Legacy

    When one looks at the history of the region one finds evidence that with her arrival, a surge of spiritual awareness, code of ethics and respect for feminine values began, which wove itself into the very fabric of the psychic landscape of Europe. The Order of the Knights Templar was created in this region. The alchemists began their flurry of Cathedral building to preserve the secret metaphysical teachings passed down to them from ancient Egypt. The Crusades and the entire Back to Jerusalem movement began in this area. The mystical Kabbalistic texts the Bahir and Zohar emerged from this region, bringing to the Jewish people knowledge of the Shekhina, or ‘indwelling presence’ and ‘feminine potency of God’. The cults of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene and Black Madonna, symbolically representing the three aspects of Isis in her role as Universal Goddess, arose here and spread throughout Europe.

    It was here the troubadours and poets such as Wolfram von Eschenbach, Robert de Bouron and others sang their songs of devotion to the feminine principle and wrote their fables of the Holy Grail. And it was here in the beautiful mountains and valleys of Provence and Languedoc that the Cathars, as carriers of the Gnostic transmission of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, rebelled against what they considered to be the excesses of the priestly hierarchy, renounced all worldly possessions and fully committed themselves to the path of spirit. Among the Cathars, women as well as men were priests who transmitted divine grace and healing power through the laying on of hands in their sacred initiatory rites that link back to Mary Magdalene, Isis and the healing traditions held by the temple priestess.

    As time marched on, the Church of Rome, threatened by the inroads these powerful Gnostic teachings were making among the local populace, labelled them heretical and moved to suppress them. To cement the rule of the Church of Rome, Pope Innocent III called for a Crusade against this Gnostic Cathar heresy. This crusade, which had as its focus the torture, murder and eradication of these loving and compassionate people was the starting point of a wave of fear, suffering and suppression of the feminine in both her divine and worldly aspects that would spread throughout Europe and become known as the Holy Inquisition.

    Closer to our time, there are the visions of Saint Bernadette and the healing waters of Lourdes, as well as the mystery of Father Sauniere, Rennes Le Chateau and his strange chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene. Then there is the saga of Otto Rahn searching through the hills and valleys of this region for the Nazis trying to find the Holy Grail for the upper echelon of the SS. There are the legends of the secret alchemists who live in a magical castle somewhere in the Pyrenees recently popularised in the Harry Potter series. Finally, emerging from this region, is the mystery of the Alchemical Cross of Hendaye, the prophetic visions of Nostradamus and the Basque legend that John of the Apocalypse still lives in a cave in the Pyrenees and will leave that cave only at the end of time.5

    These events and stories reveal that Mary Magdalene and the Gnostic current may very possibly be the driving force behind the rich history of this region. Whether it is fact or legend that Mary Magdalene actually came to this area is less important than the power and impact her life and teachings had upon the people of France. It is obvious to anyone who opens their eyes to see, that early in the history of this grace-filled tradition, Mary Magdalene, Apostle of the Apostles entered and has remained at the heart of Christianity.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue 2.[/alert]

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    Footnotes:

    1. From a conversation with minister and playwright Lila Sophia Tresemer, co-author of the play and DVD, Re-Discovering Mary Magdalene (written with her husband, David Tresemer), for which I created the choreography. In their travels through France, she discovered a tradition of using the healing oils of Mary Magdalene that was said to have been passed down to healers now living in the south of France.
    2. Sharron Rose, The Path of the Priestess; A Guidebook for Awakening the Divine Feminine (Inner Traditions, 2002) p.104
    3. From the forward by Leslie Shepard to G.R.S. Mead’s, Pistis Sophia (University Books, 1974), p. xvii
    4. From the recent translation by Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene (Inner Traditions, 2002).
    5. For greater insight into these events see Weidner and Bridges, The Mysteries of the Great Cross of Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (Destiny Books, 2003) and the Sacred Mysteries DVD, Secrets of Alchemy: The Great Cross and the End of Time.
    Top image caption: The “Mother of the World” by mystic and artist Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947). Nicholas and his wife Helena taught that the World Mother has manifested many times over the millennia. (Image courtesy of the Nicholas Roerich Museum, New York, www.roerich.org).

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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  • America’s Arcane Origins

    America’s Arcane Origins

    From New Dawn 94 (Jan-Feb 2006)

    Political activists of the so-called “religious Right” in the United States never tire of preaching that their country was founded as “a Christian democracy.” But they are wrong on both counts.

    When Benjamin Franklin was leaving the first Continental Congress, he was asked by one of many anxious patriots waiting outside the courthouse, “What have you given us?” Franklin replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”

    The difference might seem trivial or even non-existent to narrow-minded persons for whom democracy and dictatorship are the only conceivable forms of government. Yet, the very word, “democracy,” does not occur once in the Bill of Rights, the US Constitution, or any state constitution. It was mentioned often by America’s Founding Fathers, but invariably as a synonym for “mob rule,” and, along with obsolescent monarchy, an evil to be avoided.

    Thomas Paine, the American Revolution’s most eloquent voice, summed up his colleagues’ view of democracy when he described it in his world-famous “Rights of Man” as “a species of demagoguery, wherein clever charlatans, making promises as enticing as they are impossible to fulfil, win for themselves unwarranted power and wealth, persuading gullible people to discard their liberties for a secret tyranny masquerading as public freedom.”

    Particularly in the writings of Thomas Jefferson, the historic models held up for emulation did not include Greek democracy, but the Venetian and Roman republics. The difference between these examples most important to men like Paine and Jefferson was the concept of citizenship. Anyone born in a democratic state automatically becomes a citizen with all the privileges that entails, including the right to vote. In a republic, one is not born a citizen, but may only become one when he or she reaches adulthood; can demonstrate at least a fundamental grasp of the workings of their government, and is either going to school or gainfully employed.

    In modern America, all that remains of these basic requirements is a restriction against voting until one’s eighteenth year. Foreigners must, in fact, pass tests proving their basic comprehension of the Constitution before becoming US citizens, which makes them more knowledgeable, discerning voters than native-born Americans, who are supposed to receive the same kind of rigorous Constitutional education, but rarely, if ever, do. In demanding at least some qualifications for citizenship, America’s Founding Fathers believed that responsible leaders could only by chosen by a competent electorate. Today, however, such notions are shunned as “elitist” in most countries described as “democratic.”

    Yet more shocking to bible-beating conservatives, if they were to learn the awful truth, is that the United States was not founded by Christians, at least of the kind they would approve. Instead, that country’s constitutional republic was conceived, fought for and built almost entirely by deists. While the majority of Americans, then as now, were at least nominally Christian, most of their leaders were not. George Washington, John Hancock, Patrick Henry, Paul Revere and virtually all of their intellectual compatriots were deists. The term is not generally familiar today, but signifies a person who believes in a universal, compassionate Intelligence that made and orders Creation, manifests its will through natural law, but requires no religious dogma to be understood, only the faculty of reason with which every human is endowed.

    America’s most famous deists were among the Founding Fathers of the country. Notable deists were the men in this montage, from top right proceeding clockwise, John Adams, Thomas Paine, James Madison, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin.

    Referring to the church of his day, Paine wrote, “The Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue… My own mind is my own church.” Like his fellow deists, who made a clear distinction between church and state, he was convinced that freedom meant being able to speak one’s mind on all subjects, religious as well as political. He did not “condemn those who believe otherwise. They have the same right to their belief as I have to mine.”

    Nor were the deists anti-Christian. They concluded that Christianity had at its theological core the same mystical truth found in every genuine spiritual conception; namely, the perennial philosophy of compassion for all sentient beings as the means by which the human soul develops. This recognition, however, deeply offended mainstream Christians, who insisted their brand of faith alone was correct, all others being heretical at best or demonic at worst.

    As an example of the extremes these defenders of the One True Religion went to demonstrate their piety, hob-nails initialled “T.P.” were sold by the thousands to Londoners who could walk all day on the name of Thomas Paine. His treatment in the land he had done so much to free was more harsh. When he walked through the streets of his hometown in Bordentown, New Jersey, doors and window shutters were pointedly banged shut as he passed by, while cries of “Devil!” followed him everywhere.

    Modern American Christian crusaders would be even more alarmed to learn that not only was their country founded by deists, but its capitol deliberately designed as a metaphor for Freemasonry. In his profoundly researched book, The Secret Architecture of our Nation’s Capital (London: Century Books, Ltd., 1999), author David Ovason offers abundant evidence to show that Washington, D.C. was built by Freemasons who incorporated their arcane, even heretical ideas in the White House, the Washington Monument, the Library of Congress, the Post Office, the Capitol Dome, the Federal Trade Commission Building, the Federal Reserve Building, even Pennsylvania Avenue itself.

    Freemasons laid a cornerstone in most, if not all, of the major buildings in Washington, D.C. (Source: https://blog.philosophicalsociety.org/2019/11/29/freemasonry-design-washington-dc/) 

    But what is, or was, Freemasonry? Like any idea or organisation that persists over time, Freemasonry deviated from its initial purpose until, in the end, it bore only slight, outward resemblance to its origins. By way of comparison with a group alleged without much real foundation to have been Freemasonry’s precursor, the Knights Templar was founded in the early 12th century, ostensibly for guarding pilgrim routes to Jerusalem with a few soldiers sworn to poverty and abstinence, but grew to become a virtually autonomous army richly equipped and armed, finally blossoming into an economic entity so potent it called down on itself the murderous envy of a French king.

    So too, Freemasonry began in 1717 as a fraternity dedicated to humanitarian, deistic principles for Englishmen unhappy with the royal powers-that-be, and so were forced to operate with discretion. By the time early Americans were ready to part ways with the Mother Country, Freemasonry had spread to their shores and was embraced by many revolutionaries as an expression of opposition to everything British, including the Church of England. The secret order continued to grow in membership and prestige, until it was infiltrated and perverted from its high-minded ideals by Spartacus Weishaupt, a demented power-freak who wanted a respectable vehicle for subversion and insurrection. Separated by a vast ocean from the facts, even Thomas Jefferson was fooled by Weishaupt’s duplicity.

    Dressed in full Masonic regalia of a past master, US President George Washington sat for this portrait by William J. Williams, a fellow Mason, in 1794.

    Henceforward, the “Free and Accepted Masons” were lumped together with Communists as the secretive enemies of Western Civilisation, and outlawed in most European countries. Even in the United States, though they were never banned, the Freemasons were under suspicion by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for many years, and condemned by several congressmen. Thus criminalised or under suspicion, their popularity went into a long decline, until today their once numerous, now largely abandoned lodge buildings, some still bearing masonic emblems, testify to an aging, dwindling following. It is wrong, therefore, to parallel the Freemason George Washington, for example, with the likes of Adam Weishaupt, anymore than it is to equate George Washington with George Bush.

    “The very struggle for independence seems to have been directed by the Masonic brotherhood,” Ovason writes, “and, some historians insist, had even been started by them.” Indeed, the War for Independence began in a warehouse owned by a Mason, and a majority of the revolutionaries who undertook the Boston Tea Party of 1773 were Masons. The most famous American Mason was George Washington himself, although some biographers not altogether happy with Freemasonry have tried to minimalise his association with it. In fact, however, he was the first Master of the Alexandria, Virginia lodge (Number 22) from April, 1788 until December the following year.

    On a visit to America in 1784, Marquis de Lafayette presented this Masonic apron to his old friend, former commander in chief, and fellow craftsman, George Washington.

    It was this lodge number that was carried before him on a masonic standard, as Washington, leading ranks of fellow Masons all wearing their emblematic aprons, walked in procession to the founding of the American capital, in 1793. The event was commemorated in a pair of bronze panels designed in 1868. They portray him laying the cornerstone surrounded by masonic symbols, including the square and trowel. Washington was still Master Mason when inaugurated as the first President of the United States on 30 April 1789. After his death ten years later, he was laid to rest at his Mount Vernon estate in a masonic funeral, during which all save one of the pallbearers were members of his own lodge.

    Ovason observes in a companion volume (The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill, CA: HarperCollins, 2004) that Washington’s masonic significance was not only expressed in the city to which he gave his name: “The portrait of George Washington, at the centre of the dollar bill, is highly symbolic.” The President’s image is centrally framed by the last letter in the Greek alphabet, an Omega, for “completion”, or the Ultimate, and implying that the foremost Founding Father represented the apogee of human values. His appearance on the one-dollar bill is by no means the only non-Christian symbol found here.

    Especially cogent is the illustration of a truncated pyramid surmounted by a radiant delta enclosing a single eye beneath the words Annuit Coeptis. A motto on a scroll near the base reads, Novus Ordo Seclorum. Both were derived from the great Roman writer, Virgil. In his classic epic, the Aeneid, he directs a prayer for assistance to Jupiter, king of the gods: Audacibus annue coeptis, or “Favor our daring undertaking!” Novus Ordo Seclorum, “a New Order for the ages,” was taken from one of his famous Ecologues – Magnus ab integro seclorum nascitur ordo, or, “The great series of ages is born anew.”

    Esoteric symbolism is replete on the rear side of the United States one dollar bill. (Top) Front side of the dollar bill.

    “The idea of a truncated pyramid was Masonic,” Ovason writes. It is certainly “pagan,” and generally understood to mean stability and virtue in the 18th century. According to President William McKinley, the twenty fifth president of the United States and himself a Mason, it also meant strength and duration. But these obvious characterisations only represent the figure’s exoteric aspect. Far less well recognised, the pyramid depicted on the one-dollar bill, unlike any in the Nile Valley, has seventy two stones. This amount is hardly circumstantial, because it has been revered by mystics as one of the most sacred of all numerals.

    Since Pythagorean times, in the 7th century BCE, and millennia earlier still in ancient Egypt, 72 has represented the ways of writing and pronouncing the name of the Almighty, not the Christian or even Old Testament Yahweh, but God as represented by the Sun, as it moves through space and time. Ovason explains, “Due to the phenomenon called precession, the Sun appears to fall back against the stars. This rate of precession is one degree every seventy two years.” In other words, the dollar bill’s seventy two stones signify the deist conception of the Supreme Being as rooted in the pre-Christian, non-Biblical Ancient World.

    The single-eyed triangle radiating energy above the truncated pyramid is another Egyptian image, the Utchat, or Udjat, the all-seeing eye of Ra, a sun-god and the divine king of heaven. Esoterically, the Utchat was identified with Maat, the moral law pervading all Creation. Its appearance hovering above the apex of the dollar bill pyramid not only reinforces the solar symbolism of that sacred structure, but embodies the principle of Maat America’s Founding Fathers sought to inculcate in the constitutional republic they designed.

    But the esoteric, deistic, even “pagan” Freemasonry of America’s Founding Fathers is most apparent in the arcane influence that Ovason traces throughout the design and construction of the US capital. These early Americans did not weave this occult symbolism through their country’s foremost city for clubbish reasons, but because their iconological signs were the emblems of a new civilisation they wanted to create in the New World.

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    For New Dawn’s 92nd issue, Jason Jeffrey described in “Washington, D.C.: A Masonic Plot?” how the White House is located at the apex of a five-pointed star – the ancient geometric seal of King Solomon, with which he conjured supernatural powers – formed by the intersections of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont and Connecticut Avenues with K Street NW. But the significance of this urban pentagram is overshadowed by what Ovason has identified as the city’s chief orientation to Virgo.

    He writes that central Washington, D.C. has twenty public zodiacs, with Virgo prominent in each one. The founding of Federal City, as it was previously known, laying the cornerstones of the President’s House, in the wing of the Capitol and the foundation stone of the Washington Monument, all were timed to coincide with the appearance of this astrological figure. Ovason shows that the White House, Capitol building and Washington Monument form a strangely imperfect “Federal Triangle” that only makes sense when we realise it identically resembles a configuration made by the stars – Arcurtus, Spica and Regulus – that bracket Virgo.

    On evenings from August 10th to the 15th, as the Sun sets over Pennsylvania Avenue, the Constellation Virgo appears in the sky above the White House and the Federal Triangle. At that same moment, the setting Sun appears precisely above the apex of a stone pyramid in the Old Post Office tower, which is just wide enough to occlude the solar disc. According to the 19th century Freemason, Ross Parsons, “The Assumption of the Virgin Mary is fixed on the 15th of August, because at that time the Sun is so entirely in the constellation of Virgo that the stars of which it is composed are rendered invisible in the bright effulgency of his rays.”

    Formal ground-breaking ceremonies for the National Archives Building were conducted under Virgo. Two years later, three planets were in Virgo for the official laying of the structure’s cornerstone. The Federal Reserve Building is replete with a five-petaled design motif, the symbol of Virgo. The great clock at the Library of Congress is depicted with a comet in Virgo. Because of its centralised location, Ovason believes that “the Library of Congress was sited in this position and its symbolic program established precisely in order to demonstrate the profound arcane knowledge of the Masonic fraternity which designed Washington, D.C. … the city was surveyed, planned, designed and built largely by Masons.” Indeed, no less than twenty one memorial stones with lapidary inscriptions from various masonic lodges line the inside shaft of Washington Monument.

    But why would they incorporate so many references to Virgo in their capital? As Ovason points out, the construction of Washington, D.C. “marked one of those rare events in history when a city was planned and built for a specific purpose.” He fails to mention, however, that nearly two hundred years before, the first permanent European settlement in North America foreshadowed Virgo’s ceremonial centre on the Potomac River.

    In 1606, Sir Francis Bacon established Jamestown in Virginia, ostensibly named after Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen. But the emblem he chose, and which survives today as the state seal, is the image of Pallas Athene, Parthenos, the virgin goddess of Greek myth, the divine patroness of civilisation.

    Bacon, as Greg Taylor observed in the same issue of New Dawn, prefigured the Freemasons with his vision of a practical utopia based on individual liberty and social responsibility – essentially the same ideals that formed the basis of the US Constitution. When America’s Founding Fathers came to compose that document, they perpetuated the identical sacred virginal symbolism initiated at Jamestown.

    Repeated symbolism in the architecture, astrological timing and the very lay-out of Washington, D.C. to Virgo-Virgin Athene represent homage to the Eternal Feminine, Goethe’s “ewige Weiblicher,” which, in his “Faust,” leads us onward – “zieht uns hinan.” The Freemasons who envisioned and constructed the capital of the United States did so to put their new country in accord with that pure (“virginal”) energy they believed to actually exist as the demiurge of Creation. They worshipped that energy, personified in the goddess, a concept that was anathema to the patriarchal Christians of their time (and ours?).

    As Ovason concludes, “A city which is laid out in such a way that it is in harmony with the heavens is a city in perpetual prayer.” Given so great a distance the present occupants of Washington, D.C. have strayed from the original intentions of its designers, the US capital needs all the prayers it can get!

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  • Where Did Christianity Really Come From?

    Where Did Christianity Really Come From?

    This article is a brief examination of the nature and historical roots of the Qumran community that lived and worked on the western shore of the Dead Sea around 150 BCE to 68 CE and the connections that may be discerned between it and the preaching of John the Baptist, the ministry of Jesus, and the origins of Christianity. It looks through the eyes of scholars like Jozef Milik, one of the first to discover the nature of the Dead Sea Scrolls and to analyse them in depth, back in the 1950s, and the author’s analysis of the latest research now that translations of most of the Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered near Qumran, have been officially published.My previous book The Mystery of the Copper Scroll of Qumran,1 dealt with aspects of the Dead Sea Scrolls and, more particularly, one of the scrolls that had been engraved on copper by the strange community of Essenes that inhabited Qumran. As a trained metallurgist, the use of copper by a devout Jewish sect, living by the Dead Sea around the first century BCE, had aroused my curiosity – especially as the Hebrew text seemed to be a list of buried treasures that apparently had never been found (see New Dawn No. 80, September-October 2003).

    Identifying the location of some of the treasures described in the Copper Scroll was only one of the claims substantiated in that book; treasures I identified as being in various museums around the world. Furthermore, a detailed analysis arose from my reading of the name of an Egyptian pharaoh encrypted in the text of the scroll – an interpretation confirmed as “not unreasonable” by both Professor John Tait of University College London and Professor Rosalie David of Manchester University.

    The profound conclusion was that the Hebrews must have been present at the court of Pharaoh Akhenaten and the origins of monotheism date back to his time.For my next book I had planned to take a closer look at the Qumran community’s beliefs and way of life, examining how these may have influenced the beginnings of Christianity and its emergence as a daughter religion of Judaism. However, while discussing the project with Jozef Milik, one of the scholars who originally worked on deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls back in the early 1950s, my research took a strange and totally unexpected twist. Jozef Milik had been the leader of the team of translators based at the École Biblique in East Jerusalem; he had also been, at that time, an ordained Catholic priest.What Monsieur Milik revealed to me, in the course of many intriguing conversations he and I shared about the Essene community, inspired me to write a new book and informs a substantial part of it.

    During my researches I have come across many further pieces of evidence that confirm a connection between a uniquely monotheistic pharaonic period in Egyptian history and the Essenes of Qumran, who lived a thousand years later and a thousand miles distant. As remarkable as this connection may appear to be, to date the relationship has been criticised but not refuted, and a number of eminent scholars have indicated that it begins to explain some anomalies in their own research. As I progressed further along the “Jozef Milik trail,” many more examples came to light that supported my conjectures regarding this link and these have a considerable bearing on early Judaism and the story of Jesus and his epoch.

    The main thrust of the current search, however, was the nature of the people who lived at Qumran between, perhaps, 150 BCE and 68 CE, when their settlement was destroyed by the Romans, the secrets they kept, their relationship to the earliest followers of Jesus, and the incredible revelations of Monsieur Milik. It was not until my third visit, in October 1999, when I returned to present him with a copy of my book on one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, that Jozef Milik started to talk more freely about his early life and work, volunteered his date of birth as March 24, 1922, and told me why he had left the Catholic Church. Ostensibly it was to marry his rather delightful wife, Yolanta, née Zaluska, but there were other reasons, reasons connected with what he had found and interpreted in the scrolls of the Dead Sea. Two hours into our conversation he quietly and almost casually spoke of certain events near Qumran. It was one of those nerve tingling moments; my mind reeled with the impact of what he was saying.

    Those dramatic words of Jozef Milik started me on a journey of discovery to determine how the circumstances at the time of Jesus might confirm or disprove his revelation. It was a quest that was to take me from the cold dampness of a Parisian autumn day to the remote dryness of Egypt, to the holy places of Jerusalem, to an offshore haven on the Isle of Man, to catacombs in Rome, to Washington and New York, to a Gothic building in Germany, and back to the barren shores of the Dead Sea in Israel. As my journeys and investigations progressed, it became increasingly clear that something extraordinary, as yet not revealed, may have occurred at or near to Qumran, and there were others who were party to this knowledge but were not keen for the evidence to become public.

    Qumran

    The Qumran Essenes, a mysterious Jewish sect that suddenly vanished from its habitat by the Dead Sea in Judaea around 68 CE, was a unique community in Jewish history, and in many ways practiced a form of Judaism very different from that being pursued elsewhere in the Second Temple period. No one is certain of the origins of the strange, reclusive sect that wrote and possessed what are now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nor is there agreement as to the degree of influence the sect had on early Christianity, or its relationship to John the Baptist and Jesus. Such is the intensity of feelings about who exactly these Essenes were that it is not uncommon to see professors shouting across conference rooms at each other as they defend their respective pet theories. Whilst there is consensus on many issues, there are also large areas where there are just no accepted answers. Perhaps part of the reason is there are basic misunderstandings with regard to the origins of the community. As archaeologist Magen Broshi, of the Israel Museum, likes to put it: “There are at least ten different theories about the origins and function of Qumran. By definition, nine of them are wrong.” As our story unfolds, it will become increasingly evident that the activities of the Essenes are central to the plot, and of profound significance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as many other religions. It is useful to set the scene with a Timeline of Events in the period in question. After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s and early 1950s, it soon became apparent that the type of Judaism practiced by the authors/possessors of the scrolls – a minority Essene group that numbered perhaps less than four thousand, or 2 percent of the Jewish population – was far more similar to early Christian practices and beliefs than that of any previous group. Previously it had been assumed Christianity emerged out of Pharisaic Judaism. The worry for modern Christian authorities was not so much that they had got their suppositions wrong, regarding which strand of Judaism had given birth to Christianity, but that it was becoming increasingly difficult to distance Christianity from this previously little-known new slant on Judaism, namely Essenism. The first sensational claim relating the Dead Sea Scrolls to Christianity came from a respected Sorbonne University professor, André Dupont-Sommer who wrote in 1950 that he saw Jesus in the “pierced messiah” mentioned in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls: “The Galilean Master… appears in many respects as an astonishing reincarnation of the Teacher of Righteousness.” When who this Teacher of Righteousness really was becomes apparent, it is clear that Dupont-Sommer was quite wrong in his assumptions about the Teacher as “the exact prototype of Jesus.” As an outsider from the predominantly Catholic translation team (he had once been an abbé), Dupont-Sommer was immediately criticised by his peers for jumping to preposterous conclusions. Nevertheless, Edmund Wilson, a respected American literary journalist and columnist for The New Yorker, picked up the theme and subsequently published a book entitled The Scrolls from the Dead Sea, in which he claimed that Qumran, “with its ovens and its inkwells, its mill and its cesspool, its constellation of sacred fonts and the unadorned graves of its dead, is perhaps, more than Bethlehem or Nazareth, the cradle of Christianity.” A few years later John Marco Allegro, the only Methodist among the predominantly Catholic original Dead Sea Scrolls translation team in Jerusalem, broke ranks and claimed that one of the Dead Sea Scrolls included mention of messianic crucifixion and resurrection. He was undoubtedly a brilliant scholar, but his claims became more extreme with the publication of his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970, which claimed Christianity was born out of Jesus’ followers imbibing hallucinatory drugs. In 1979 he went even farther down this hypothetical trail, claiming Jesus was no more than a fanciful legend developed by the Essenes to extemporise on their own Teacher of Righteousness. Allegro conceived of this Teacher figure as an Exodus period Joshua/Jesus incarnate who was killed, or perhaps crucified, by the Israelite Wicked Priest, Alexander Jannaeus, around 88 BCE. Allegro was pilloried by his peers in an open letter to The Times, of London, in 1956, and never really recovered from the personal attacks on his character that followed. Perhaps the record is put right in his daughter’s recent biography of her father published this year.2 In the mid-1980s Robert Eisenman, a professor of Middle Eastern religions at California State University, published a number of works attempting to relate the Qumran Essenes to characters in the Christian Scriptures. One of Eisenman’s ongoing themes has been the idea that James the Just, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Qumran-Essene community. When more of the Cave 4 Dead Sea Scrolls material became available in 1991, Eisenman, together with Michael Wise, associate professor of Aramaic at the University of Chicago, continued the theme in their book The Dead Sea Scrolls Uncovered. In this work, they also discuss what they believe is a reference in the Dead Sea War Scroll to a suffering, wounded, and ultimately slain messianic figure. Two journalist protégés of Robert Eisenman, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, expanded on Eisenman’s theories in their book The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, published in 1991. In addition, they accused Catholic authorities and the Vatican of a cover-up conspiracy designed to distance the teachings and beliefs of the Qumran Essenes from early Christianity. The controversies were added to dramatically by an Australian academic from Sydney University, Barbara Thiering. She claimed there had been a complete misunderstanding of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Thiering maintains that the Teacher of Righteousness and his rival the Wicked Priest corresponded to John the Baptist and Jesus. For her, Jesus did not die on the cross but lived on at Qumran after his experience of near death. Some other commentators could not even find a real Jesus in historical terms and suggest he was a fictitious figure culled from Greek myths and pagan legends. The overall conclusion, nevertheless, from sources external to the Christian Scriptures, both literary and archaeological, is that someone who fulfilled many of the biblical claims relating to Jesus really did exist. Furthermore, whatever attributes he possessed, divine or otherwise, they inspired a devoted religious following that eventually grew into a movement whose influence swept the entire world.

    The Messiahs of Qumran

    Two central concepts need to be kept in mind when attempting to understand the motivations behind the beliefs and behaviour of the Essenes, and, more particularly, the Qumran Essenes and their messianic hopes. First, although they put immense store in traditional Hebrew teachings, they followed an apparently aberrational form of Judaism that yearned for and echoed the early days of Mosaic Sinai and which, I maintain, dates back even further to the ancient monotheism of Akhenaten and Jacob. Second, if the early Jesus movement owed a powerful debt to the beliefs practiced at Qumran, which I suggest will become even more apparent from the evidence presented in my new book, then it would not be surprising to find that some of Akhenaten’s teachings and imagery would be transferred across and reflected in the early Jesus movement and later Christianity. It is evident from the Dead Sea Scrolls that the Essenes of Qumran considered themselves an elite messianic group; they had retreated from the fray of the Temple and the priesthood and sought refuge in the wilderness to protect their piety. The opening verses of Isaiah, chapter 40, aptly describe their role:

    The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

    For some of the Essenes, the need to retreat was part of their search for a reaffirmation of the divine covenant given to Moses on Mount Sinai, a quest for the purity and essence of Torah and Hebrew teachings. They looked upon themselves as the ancestral custodians of the “light of truth.” Their fundamental beliefs and manner of practicing their special religion were essentially at odds with the rest of the Jewish community, and they followed an extreme form of ritualistic behaviour and strict adherence to their interpretation of the Law. So who were the Qumran Essenes waiting for? The answer is contained in a number of the Dead Sea Scrolls texts that indicate they were waiting for two, and some scholars read three, messiahs. These messiahs, one priestly and one royal, are given various titles in different scrolls:

    Priestly: Interpreter of the Law, the Star; the Messiah of Aaron, who was of princely descent

    Royal: Prince of the Congregation, the Scepter; the Messiah of Israel; the King Messiah

    In addition, they expected the return of a prophet similar to Moses. Fortunately, there are quite detailed descriptions of these messiahs in a number of the scrolls, so one would assume it should be relatively easy to identify who they were talking about. Unhappily, that is not the case, and conventional scholarship makes little attempt to utilise this information. As Joseph Fitzmyer, professor emeritus at Catholic University in Washington, notes: “It is a surprise to see a priestly figure become part of the Qumran community’s messianic expectations, because there is little in the Hebrew Scriptures itself about a future ‘priest’.” He finds no reasonable explanation for this phenomenon. In fact, I believe both the name of Akhenaten, preserved in the text of the Copper Scroll, and a variation on the name Meryra, his High Priest, as a title for a leader of the Qumran community, reflect this priestly connection, among many other indicators. Another clear example comes from the community’s War Scroll: “And on the banner of Merari they shall write… God’s offerings [and the name of the Prince of Merari]” (4QM).

    A Line of Priests

    The Book of Jubilees, which emanated from the Essenes, makes it quite clear the patriarch Jacob passed his teachings on down through the line of Levi, one of his sons, giving rise to the so-called Levitical priests. Yet these hereditary priests were not, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, appointed as priests until the time of Aaron several hundred years later. At the time of Jacob, there was no Israelite sanctuary or temple of worship, and yet the Dead Sea Scrolls repeatedly insist that priests were appointed at the time of Jacob. The only explanation that makes sense is that there were hereditary priests in Jacob’s time, that there was a place of worship, and that it was almost certainly the Great Temple at Akhetaten, modern day Amarna.

    The Messiah(s) Awaited by the Rest of the Jewish Population

    The generalised Jewish view of the awaited messiah can be understood in terms of the messianic age that the messiah would bring about. The End Days eschatology has essentially two elements: one of material restoration and one of a spiritual utopia. The Jewish concepts differ from Christian ideas of redemption in that they involve the visible world, whereas Christianity envisages a spiritual and personal redemption reflected in the soul. Tracing the quotations in the Christian Scriptures to their assumed original Qumran-Essene and Hebrew Scriptures sources is the flavour of the decade and preoccupies hundreds if not thousands of scholars around the world. Texts like the Dead Sea Scrolls; the Genizah Collection – found in Cairo, Egypt, in the late 19th century; and the John Rylands fragment – the earliest example of text from the New Testament dated to c 125 CE, have stimulated endless debate on the origins of Christianity. Despite the fact that large chunks of the Hebrew Scriptures have been shown to have been based on much earlier Egyptian texts, little attempt has been made to investigate these texts in the light of these blazing neon signs. Although early Christian writers could in theory have obtained some of their information from versions of text in general circulation, it seems likely that much of the Qumran Essenes’ literature from which they were quoting was available only to the Qumran Essene membership. The significance of these correlations is that the early Christians must have had access to sectarian texts with limited circulation and had a much closer relationship with the Qumran Essenes than has previously been acknowledged. Ideas and theology exclusively promoted by the Qumran Essenes, that appear in the Christian Scriptures or Christian practice and are not apparent in other Jewish sources, include: • Belial as a personalised incarnation of the powers of evil • The temple as a metaphor for community • Dualism in terms of light (good) and darkness (evil) • Equating righteousness with the Sun • The demand to keep separate from the way of darkness and to walk in the light • Courts of justice at Qumran and Corinth following the same novel judicial system • A conviction of humankind’s hopeless sinfulness • A humble teacher of justification through grace (recognised by Paul as Christ) • Knowledge of mysteries (creational and eschatological) of God is revealed only to the absolutely righteous • The terms wisdom, knowledge, and understanding used in the same sense • Three cardinal sins of fornication, impurity, greed (which leads to idolatry) • Foolishness and silliness as punishable offenses • An imperative for mutual fraternal correction – that is, the urgent need to make people aware they are sinning and bring them back to the light of goodness • The Qumran community and the Christian Church as the “chosen ones” • Liturgical times of prayer, vigils, quarter-tense (days of fasting and abstinence) coming to the church from Qumran • Tendencies toward monasticism and male chauvinism The possibility that John the Baptist had an association with the Qumran Essenes is for most modern and many early scholars much stronger than they would allow for Jesus. The enigmatic last verse of Luke regarding John living in the desert, as pointed out by l’Abbé René Laurentin, a French authority of the Church Council, makes little sense unless it is saying that John the Baptist was, from his childhood, a member of the Qumran community. The verse becomes clear, asserts l’Abbé, when the testimony of Flavius Josephus, the 1st century CE Jewish/Roman historian, is considered, when he says of the Qumran community it was their custom to adopt “children from others, at an age when their spirit is still malleable enough to easily accept instruction.” (Jewish Wars) John Allegro has also pointed out that the Baptist’s parents were elderly, and when his father died he may have been adopted by the community as it is difficult to envisage what he was doing as a child wandering around in the wilderness of Judaea. The only logical deduction, from all the evidence, is that he spent at least part of his early life at Qumran. John the Baptist’s prime activity was baptism, and this too can be linked to the practices at Qumran where initiates were accepted into the Community with a final ‘graduation’ baptism that confirmed their obedience and spiritual commitment to God. The obvious question to ask is: “What were the origins of baptism?” How did it commence as a religious ritual? The required presence of water in the Tabernacle of Moses indicates the importance of water from a very early time in Hebrew history. That it was also used in religious rites across the Middle East prior to this time is also apparent from various pictorial sources. Its use for baptism as an initiation rite, however, appears to have originated in Egypt. The explanation for John the Baptist’s extension of this ritual, I believe, lies in the same thread that connects religious practices of Akhenaten to those of the Qumran Essenes, as can be seen in the above illustration. Here, in a relief discovered at Amarna dating to circa 1350 BCE, one of Akhenaten’s princesses is seen being blessed as purifying water is poured over her head from a jar held in the hand of a projecting ray from the Aten – the name the Pharaoh gave to his God. Only further external proof can confirm this probability of John’s, and/or other members of the early Jesus movement’s connection to Qumran, and that some kind of extraordinary evidence might be forthcoming would seem unlikely on the face of it two thousand years after the events. That evidence is, however, presented in The Secret Initiation of Jesus at Qumran, published by Inner Traditions, in July 2005.
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    Footnotes:

    1. Published by Inner Traditions International, June 2003. An earlier version, The Copper Scroll Decoded, was published by HarperCollins in June 1999, and under other titles in Italy, Holland, and Japan. 2. Judith Brown, John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2005.

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  • The Secret Origins of AIDS: Facts, Fallacies & Conspiracy Theories

    The Secret Origins of AIDS: Facts, Fallacies & Conspiracy Theories

    In 2006 the AIDS epidemic was a quarter-century old. Officially starting in June 1981 as a mysterious and fatal disease exclusively found in several dozen young white gay men from New York City and Los Angeles, the disease has already killed 20 million people with 40 million more currently infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), widely accepted as the sole cause of AIDS. One million Americans are now infected with HIV; and almost half of the new cases are African-American.

    The disease was first uncovered in homosexual men from Manhattan. “Gay cancer,” in the form of Kaposi’s sarcoma skin tumours, was the most striking telltale sign; and drugs, promiscuity, and anal sex were all thought to play a role in the unprecedented suppression of the immune system. It was soon obvious that the disease was not limited to gays: the mysterious agent was in the national blood supply, and an epidemic of AIDS was also uncovered in Central Africa.

    In April 1984 Robert Gallo of the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) announced his discovery of HIV as the cause of AIDS. Subsequently, Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris filed a lawsuit claiming he had first discovered the AIDS virus at Pasteur, and that Gallo had stolen the French virus after it was sent to his lab for study.

    Twenty-five years later, the origin of AIDS still remains a mystery. The disease is widely believed to have originated in Africa when a primate (monkey) virus “jumped species” to first infect Black Africans. However, it is important to note that this belief is theory, not proven fact.

    Montagnier has wisely cautioned that it is extremely important to distinguish between the ancestral origin of HIV and the actual beginning of the AIDS epidemic. The animal virus ancestor of HIV may indeed be centuries old, but it is obvious that the epidemic itself is new.

    The epidemic did not begin in Africa. The first AIDS cases were uncovered in Manhattan in 1979. At that time there were no reported African cases. In fact, the AIDS epidemic in Africa did not begin until the autumn of 1982 at the earliest.

    How was HIV introduced exclusively into the gay community in the late 1970s? The exclusive introduction of HIV into the homosexual population of New York City is an unprecedented event in the history of medicine. This biologic phenomenon has never been fully explained scientifically. There is certainly no evidence to indicate white gay men were the only people exposed to sexual contact with Africans, particularly at a time when the epidemic did not exist in Africa. Furthermore, it is biologically impossible for a purported sexually-transmitted and blood borne “virus out of Africa” to infect only young, white, healthy men in Manhattan! Yet, the impossible did happen. Despite these facts, we are repeatedly told that AIDS began in Africa, even though the American epidemic began before the African epidemic.

    The mixing of AIDS facts and fallacies has long been apparent to researchers like myself who are convinced that HIV did not come from Mother Nature and “species jumping,” but was most likely introduced via contaminated vaccine experiments exclusively targeting the Black African and the American Gay community.

    Before exploring the man-made theory of AIDS, it is important to note a small but highly vocal group who believes the cause of AIDS is still unknown, that the AIDS blood test is worthless, and that HIV is a harmless virus that is not sexually transmitted. This group, headed by retrovirologist Peter Duesberg and other well-credentialed scientific “dissidents,” believes AIDS is a toxic and nutritional syndrome. They blame AIDS on recreational drug use among gays – and poverty and malnutrition in Africa for the disease.

    As a medical doctor and AIDS and cancer researcher, I am certainly not in accord with this group, but they have been quite successful politically, influencing world leaders like President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, much to the chagrin of the World Health Organisation. For more information, go to www.google.com and type in “VirusMyth” or “The Perth Group”.

    Genetic Engineering and the AIDS Epidemic

    There is a close connection between the rise of genetic engineering and mixing of viruses in the early 1970s and the outbreak of HIV in the late 1970s. This connection persists in the form of the many unprecedented “emerging diseases” caused by “new viruses” that continue up to the present time.

    In 1970 the discovery of a cell enzyme, called “reverse transcriptase” by Howard Temin and David Baltimore, allowed molecular biologists to detect so-called retroviruses in some animal cancers. It was soon recognised that retroviruses could be found normally in the genes of many animal cells, and that scientists could manipulated these viruses to produce detrimental effects on the immune system. In “species jumping” laboratory experiments, many viruses were transferred between different animal species and were also adapted to human cells.

    As part of President Richard Nixon’s “War on Cancer,” genetic engineering of viruses became an integral part of the now largely forgotten Special Virus Cancer Program, conducted under the auspices of the NCI. Nixon also transferred part of the Army’s biological warfare unit at Fort Detrick, Maryland, over to the NCI, thereby allowing secret biowarfare experimentation to be carried out under cover of bona fide cancer research.

    All this virus transfer and molecular manipulation was a biologic disaster waiting to happen. What would happen if one of these highly dangerous genetic creations escaped from the laboratory into the public sector? This culminated in a historic conference entitled “Biohazards in Biological Research” held at Asilomar, near Pacific Grove in California in 1973. Despite the biologic dangers, it was decided to continue this research.

    By the late-1970s the War against Cancer and the Virus Cancer Program proved a bust with no cancer-causing retroviruses found in humans. The Program was winding down in 1978, at the exact time when government scientists were also enrolling thousands of gay men in New York City to serve as guinea pigs in the hepatitis B experiment that took place that same year at the New York Blood Centre in Manhattan. In 1979 the first cases of AIDS in gay men were reported from Manhattan. Coincidence? I think not.

    Five years later, Gallo, who had worked for the Virus Cancer Program (VCP), “discovered” the retrovirus that causes AIDS; and Duesberg, who also worked for the VCP, continues to declare that HIV is harmless.

    Is there a connection between the laboratory manipulation of primate retroviruses in the 1970s and the outbreak of AIDS? Or did Mother Nature conveniently pick that exact time to jump monkey genes into gay men to spectacularly revive the science of retrovirology and the careers of virologists like Gallo?

    The Gay Vaccine Experiment and the Outbreak of AIDS

    The earliest AIDS cases in America can be clearly traced back to the time period when the hepatitis B experiment began at the New York Blood Centre. The Centre began injecting gay men with multiple doses of the experimental vaccine in November 1978. The inoculations ended in October 1979, less than two years before the official start of the epidemic. Most importantly, the vaccine was developed in chimpanzees – the primate now thought to contain the “ancestor” virus of HIV. Also downplayed is the Centre’s pre-AIDS connection to primate research in Africa and also to a primate centre in the New York City area. The final experimental vaccine was also made by Merck and the NIH from the pooled serum specimens of countless gay men who carried the hepatitis B virus in their blood.

    The New York Blood Centre (NYBC) is the largest independent blood supplier and distributor in the USA. In 1970, Alfred M Prince, M.D., head of the NYBC Laboratory of Virology, began his hepatitis research with chimps housed at LEMSIP (Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery) in downstate Tuxedo, NY. Until disbanded in 1997, LEMSIP supplied New York area scientists with primates and primate parts for transplantation and virus research.

    Founded in 1965, LEMSIP was affiliated with New York University Medical Centre, where the first cases of AIDS-associated Kaposi’s sarcoma were discovered in 1979. NYU Medical Centre researchers were also heavily involved in the development of the experimental hepatitis B vaccine, and the Centre received government grants and contracts connected with biological warfare research beginning in 1969, according to Dr. Leonard Horowitz, author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola (1996).

    In 1974 Prince, with the support of Aaron Kellner, President of the NYBC, moved the chimp hepatitis research to a new primate centre called Vilab II in Robertsfield, Liberia, in Africa. Chimps were captured from various parts of West Africa and brought to VILAB. The lab also prides itself by releasing “rehabilitated” chimps back into the wild. One cannot help but wonder if some of the purported “ancestors” of HIV in the African bush have their origin in chimpanzees held in African primate labs for vaccine and medical experimentation.

    The hepatitis B experiment, which inoculated over 1,000 healthy gay men, was a huge success with 96% of the men developing antibodies again the hepatitis virus. This high rate of success could not have been achieved if the men were immunosuppressed, because immunosuppressed people do not easily form antibodies to the vaccine. The experiment was followed by similar hepatitis B experiments using gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and St. Louis, beginning in March 1980 and ending in October 1981, the same year the epidemic became official.

    In the mid-1980s the many blood specimens donated by the gay Manhattan men during the experiment were retrospectively examined for HIV infection by researchers at the NYBC. It was determined that 6% of the specimens donated between 1978-1979 were positive for HIV. By 1984 (the end of the study period) over 40% of the men tested positive for HIV.

    The final fate of all the men in the experiment has never been revealed. However, the blood donated by these men are the oldest HIV-positive blood tests on record in the United States. The full story of this experiment and its aftermath are contained in my two books on man-made AIDS: AIDS and the Doctors of Death (1988), and Queer Blood (1993). One fact is obvious: There was no AIDS in America until the exact year the government began experimenting with gay men.

    There is also a suppressed connection between the outbreak of AIDS in Africa and the widespread vaccine programs conducted by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in the 1970s in Central Africa, particularly the smallpox eradication program. On May 11, 1987, London Times science writer Pearce Wright suggested the smallpox vaccine program could have awakened a “dormant” AIDS virus infection in Africa. Gallo was quoted as saying, “The link between the WHO program and the epidemic is an interesting and important hypothesis. I cannot say that it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the use of live vaccines, such as that used for smallpox, can activate a dormant infection such as HIV.”

    This explosive story linking AIDS to African vaccines was suppressed and never appeared in the controlled major American media. The genocidal and depopulation implications of this suppressed story can be found on the Internet by googling “WHO Murdered Africa”, by William Campbell Douglas, M.D.

    Vaccines, Species Jumping and HIV

    There are inherent dangers in vaccine production because vaccines are made on living cells. Contamination with bacteria and viruses are constant problems during the manufacturing process. Laboratory additives used to feed the cell cultures (such as fetal bovine [cow] serum) may also be a source of microbial contamination. Some researchers believe living and killed viruses injected into the body can combine with other viruses normally present in the body, resulting in disease-causing “recombinants.” Vaccines can also contain viral particles, as well as newly recognised tiny bacteria known as “nanobacteria.” Half the 2004 flu vaccine supply was destroyed due to contamination with disease-causing bacteria. The dangers of vaccines are downplayed in an attempt to assure the public that vaccines are safe.

    We are repeatedly told that HIV is the first primate virus to “jump species” and produce an epidemic in humans. But, in truth, the AIDS epidemic is the secondinstance in which a monkey virus has been transferred to humans via vaccines.

    Rarely-publicised is the fact that a cancer-causing monkey virus jumped species a half century ago when contaminated polio vaccines were injected into millions of people, including half the US population of that era. In the early 1960s it was discovered that some lots of polio vaccine manufactured on rhesus monkey kidney cells during the period 1955 to 1963 were contaminated with a monkey virus called SV40 (Simian virus #40). This primate virus was proven to cause cancer in experimental animals. However, to this day, health officials still insist there is no proof that SV40 causes human cancer.

    Despite the lack of government interest, genetic and immunologic studies of SV40 by independent researchers over the past decade indicate this virus is clearly associated with rapidly-fatal cancers of the lung (mesothelioma), bone marrow cancer (multiple myeloma), brain tumours in children, and other forms of cancer.

    A Washington Times report (September 21, 2003) states, “Some of the polio vaccine given to millions of American children from 1962 until 2000 could have been contaminated with a monkey virus that shows up in some cancers, according to documents and testimony to be delivered to a House committee Wednesday. The vaccine manufacturer said such claims ‘don’t have any validity,’ and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) agrees.” (See the website: www.sv40cancer.com.) For anyone who still believes vaccine makers and health officials always act in your best interest, I would highly recommend a recently published book titled The Virus and the Vaccine: The True Story of a Cancer-Causing Monkey Virus, Contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the Millions of Americans Exposed by Debbie Bookchin and Jim Schumacher.

    Medical Experimentation and Biological Warfare

    The idea of man-made AIDS is often considered a paranoid belief. Why would scientists introduce a virus to kill millions of people? AIDS experts routinely blame primates and human sexuality for the origin and spread of HIV, but they never consider the possibility that HIV could have originated in an animal cancer virus laboratory.

    The sad truth is that governments and the military do indeed experiment on unsuspecting citizens. And Iraqi bioweapons of mass destruction was one of the reasons used to justify the current invasion of Iraq.

    It is clear that AIDS started as a “gay disease.” However, yet another downplayed fact is that the HIV “strain” in America is different from the HIV strains found in Africa.

    Harvard virologist Max Essex claims the American HIV strain spreads more easily via anal sex; whereas the African strains spread more efficiently via vaginal sex. This could explain why the American epidemic spreads primarily through homosexual activity and anal sex, while in Africa it is primarily heterosexual and spreads through vaginal sex. The “different” HIV strain in America is further evidence that “American AIDS” did not originate in Africa.

    The Relationship Between AIDS and Cancer

    The relationship between AIDS and cancer is also downplayed, along with the connection between the Special Virus Cancer Program and the ensuing outbreak of HIV. In Gallo’s book he readily admits to a relationship between AIDS and cancer, noting that “many people with AIDS develop one or more cancers.” There is now no doubt that HIV can lead to an increased incidence of cancer, particularly Kaposi’s sarcoma, Hodgkin’s disease, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and cervical cancer.

    The purpose of the Virus Cancer Program was two-fold. First, to discover a virus in humans that could cause a form of cancer. Second, to develop immunosuppressive laboratory viruses useful in “making” cancer in experimental animals.

    When Gallo discovered HIV in 1984, he called it a cancer-causing “leukemia/lymphoma” virus. The name was quickly changed to a “lymphotropic” virus, thus obscuring the relationship between the new “gay disease” and cancer. Virologists were quickly convinced that the virus came from primates, and both Gallo and Essex heavily promoted the readily accepted African green monkey origin of HIV. A decade later, chimpanzees (rather than monkeys) became the more favoured origin. The primate origin of HIV was further obscured by titling the virus as a “human immunodeficiency virus” (HIV) , rather than calling it “primate immunodeficiency virus” (or PIV) in humans.

    Is HIV the Sole Cause of AIDS?

    As noted, HIV is believed to be the sole cause of AIDS, although a few AIDS dissidents believe HIV is harmless. Generally disregarded by both groups is the matter of the origin of Kaposi’s sarcoma, the “gay cancer” associated with AIDS.

    In 1994 it was reported that KS is actually caused by a new “herpes-8” virus. KS cases were first discovered in the late nineteenth century; and before AIDS it was a rare form of cancer. Before AIDS, KS was a non-transmissible disease that was never seen in young American men.

    The finding of a new KS virus indicates that two different viruses were simultaneously introduced into gay men when AIDS began in the late 1970s. No rational explanation has been put forth for this bizarre occurrence; and how this “new” virus could cause a gay epidemic of KS has never been explained satisfactorily. Further complicating the “sole cause” of AIDS scenario is the recent discovery of tiny bacterial forms known as “mycoplasma.” Luc Montagnier believes these microbes are important infectious “co-factors” in the development of AIDS, although most AIDS researchers ignore mycoplasma.

    The “Cancer Microbe” Link to AIDS

    Although the precise cause of cancer is unknown, there is a century of microbial research linking certain tuberculosis-like bacteria to cancer. This research is ignored as medical heresy, but my own reported cancer studies indicate that “acid-fast” bacteria indeed exist in common forms of cancer and in Kaposi’s sarcoma.

    I have written extensively about these bacteria in AIDS; The Mystery & the Solution (1984), The Cancer Microbe (1990), and Four Women Against Cancer(2005). Cancer bacteria have characteristics of both bacteria and viruses. There are also similarities to mycoplasma and to newly-discovered nanobacteria, currently considered to be the smallest forms of life and known to contaminate commercial vaccines. Nanobacteria are ubiquitous and may be involved in the pathology of many diseases currently considered of unknown cause.

    Cancer microbe research has been ignored in AIDS and KS. However, Lawrence Broxmeyer, M.D., in AIDS: What the Discoverers of HIV Never Admitted (2003), concludes that the real cause of AIDS is not HIV, but actually tuberculosis-like bacteria. He thinks Gallo and Montagnier found a retrovirus because that was the only thing they were looking for.

    Unlike Broxmeyer, I believe HIV came out of animal cancer research and dangerous vaccine and biological warfare experimentation – and that HIV made its way into vaccines injected into African Blacks and American Gays. If unrecognised cancer microbes are proven to be an unrecognised infectious factor in cancer and AIDS, as I believe they are, this would certainly add to the dangers of genetic engineering of cancer viruses and new bio-warfare agents.

    I believe HIV is essential to produce the immunodeficiency characteristic of AIDS, but I consider HIV plus unrecognised “cancer bacteria” to be the causes of AIDS.

    The Origin of Gallo’s HIV Virus

    Could HIV be related to reported virus-like forms of cancer bacteria? A careful reading of how Gallo “isolated” HIV indicates possible derivation from cancerous cells harbouring unrecognised bacteria.

    Unlike most bacteria which can be grown on artificial laboratory culture media, viruses need living cells to grow and survive. Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Crewdson provides a detailed analysis of the discovery of HIV in Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo (2002), a highly unflattering portrait of Gallo and an account of the lawsuit initiated by the Pasteur Institute, accusing Gallo of stealing the AIDS virus.

    According to Crewdson, HIV was finally isolated in Gallo’s lab by isolating the virus in pooled blood T-cells from ten patients with AIDS. From that brew, the virus was cultured in larger amounts for commercial purposes by growing HIV on “cell lines” derived from the white blood cells (T-cells) of patients with lymphoma cancer. This particular strain of HIV became the basis for Gallo’s patented HIV blood test and the resulting lawsuit.

    Montagnier claimed that he first discovered HIV at Pasteur and when he sent the virus to Gallo’s lab for testing, he believes Gallo stole the virus and made it his own discovery. Gallo repeatedly declared his virus was not the French virus.

    It was eventually proven that Montagnier’s virus somehow made its way into Gallo’s HIV culture. Just as everyone’s fingerprints are different, so too is every HIV virus. Gallo’s virus was molecularly identical to Montagnier’s in every respect. With the intervention of President Ronald Reagan and the French Premier, the lawsuit was settled out of court in 1987 , with the two researchers agreeing to split the royalties from the AIDS blood test.

    Despite all this, the scientific controversy continued, resulting in additional investigations by the National Academy of Sciences and the NIH Office of Scientific Integrity. In 1991, Gallo finally conceded that Montagnier’s virus had most likely contaminated his laboratory and that his AIDS patented blood test was indeed based on the Pasteur virus. In 1992, the National Academy of Sciences’ panel completed its investigation, producing a report critical of Gallo.

    All these scientific irregularities surrounding the precise lab origin of HIV point to serious problems in virology. For example, for several years Gallo was unable or unwilling to admit his virus was identical to Montagnier’s virus, even though they proved as identical as any two HIV virus strains could be. Furthermore, the controversy proves how easily virus laboratories can be contaminated by “outside” viruses.

    One of the contentions of the man-made theory of AIDS is that the experimental hepatitis B vaccine was contaminated with an immunosuppressive AIDS-causing agent and/or the Kaposi’s sarcoma virus. This theory is condemned as conspiracy theory. Certainly the vaccine was unlike any other in that it was made from the blood of gay men who were hepatitis B virus carriers. During the gay experiment at the NYBC there was concern that something was wrong with the vaccine and that it might be contaminated. According to June Goodfield’sQuest for the Killers, p 86, “This was no theoretical fear, contamination having been suspected in one batch made by the National Institutes of Health, though never in Merck’s.”

    Four years before AIDS in 1975, Gallo also reported a “human virus” (HL-23) that subsequently proved to be three contaminating laboratory cancer-causing primate viruses (gibbon ape virus, simian sarcoma virus, and baboon endogenous virus). Gallo claims he has no idea how these animal viruses contaminated his lab. In 1986 Essex also reported a “new AIDS virus” that eventually turned out to be a monkey virus traced back to his own lab. Despite these contaminations, Gallo and Essex both blamed AIDS on monkeys in the jungle and heavily promoted the “out of Africa” origin of American AIDS.

    After AIDS began there were instances where a strain of HIV isolated from a particular AIDS patient inadvertently contaminated HIV specimens from other AIDS patients – and where HIV strains sent to other laboratories accidentally contaminated additional specimens.

    For years Montagnier insisted that Gallo’s virus was isolated from a French patient named Brugiere. In 1991 the two foremost AIDS experts were astonished to learn that Gallo’s strain of HIV actually belonged to a patient named Laillier. Unbeknownst to Montagnier, the “Bru” culture had somehow contaminated the “Lai” culture at the Pasteur lab.

    Is AIDS Genocide Against Gays and Blacks?

    Why is there a blackout of the man-made theory of AIDS in the scientific literature and in the corporate-controlled media? Although some evidence is presented here, it is a fraction of the documentation presented in my two books on the man-made epidemic, and in books by Dr. Leonard Horowitz, and Professor Robert E Lee, and in Dr. Robert Strecker’s video “The Strecker Memorandum”, and in other sources.

    I do not believe the exclusive introduction of HIV into the most hated minority in America was caused by monkeys in the African bush, particularly when AIDS appeared immediately after the gay experiment. Why are primates in the African wild blamed when tens of thousands of captive primates in virus labs all over the world have been injected with infectious viruses and cancerous tissue for more than a century?

    Why were African Blacks targeted? Many Africans and African-Americans believe AIDS is an experiment to rid the world of Black people, as part of a government-sanctioned world depopulation program.

    American gays were the perfect target to test a new retrovirus. A largely homophobic public would easily accept HIV infection in gays, due to their purported promiscuity and drug use. Few people would believe the US government would secretly test biologic agents on its civilians, although there is a well-documented history of secret unethical experimentation extending back to the Cold War of the 1950s which includes the government’s horrendous “radiation experiments.”

    I cannot explain the silence and apathy on these issues from the Black and the Gay communities. People don’t seem to care much about genocide unless their own group is affected; and even so, most people are in denial and don’t want to know about man-made AIDS. Many AIDS activists simply dismiss the man-made theory as a “distraction” which interferes with HIV testing and treatment, and the search for a cure.

    The Secret History of AIDS

    The history of AIDS has been deliberately white-washed to obscure its man-made origin. Knowledge of HIV and other retroviruses came directly out of the little-known and secret Special Virus Cancer Program of the 1970s. More than one virus was introduced into American gays in the late 1970s, and mycoplasma and “cancer bacteria” are additional infectious agents that have been ignored in proclaiming HIV as the “sole cause of AIDS.”

    Secret bio-warfare research co-mingled with bona fide cancer research at the NCI in the decade before AIDS, and that association continues up to the present time. AIDS in America erupted when government researchers began experimenting with gays, using an experimental vaccine developed in primates – the animals purported to contain the “ancestor virus” of HIV. AIDS in America did not come from Africa. HIV occurred exclusively in the gay community because the virus was put there by the “hand of man.”

    Mother Nature wisely separated the species but, in the decade before AIDS, genetic researchers repeatedly violated the “species barrier” by transferring cancer-causing viruses between various animal species, ostensibly to improve our health.

    The man-made theory of AIDS is not based on conspiracy theory. The theory warrants a full scientific investigation – and the secret history of HIV and AIDS needs to come out of the closet.
    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 91.[/alert]

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  • Earthquakes: Natural or Man-Made?

    Earthquakes: Natural or Man-Made?

    From New Dawn 89 (Mar-Apr 2005)

    Precautions against unconventional arms must be intensified as potential terrorists develop chemical and biological weapons and electromagnetic methods that could create holes in the ozone layer or trigger earthquakes or volcanoes.
    – Former US Secretary of Defense William Cohen speaking at the University of Georgia, 1997

    The devastating tsunami created December 26, 2004 by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people on the shores of the Indian Ocean caught the world off guard. It was the largest earthquake since the 9.2 magnitude Good Friday Earthquake off Alaska in 1964, and ties for fourth largest since 1900.

    The earthquake that struck the Indonesian island of Sumatra occurred in a location geologists know is susceptible to powerful earthquakes. The quake occurred along a “subduction zone,” in which the Indian tectonic plate is being subducted, or pulled beneath, the Burma tectonic platelet. The overlying plate jumped upward more than 4.5 metres, lifting the water above it and setting off the tsunami.

    For some, the finger of blame doesn’t point squarely at nature but at top secret military testing in the waters of the Indian Ocean.

    The Egyptian weekly magazine Al-Osboa claimed the earthquake that triggered the tsunami “was possibly” caused by an Indian nuclear experiment in which “Israeli and American nuclear experts participated”.

    An Australian researcher, Joe Vialls, in his article “Did New York Orchestrate The Asian Tsunami?” analyses how easy it would be to deliver “a multi-megaton thermonuclear weapon to the bottom of the Sumatran Trench, and then detonate it with awesome effect.”

    Days after the disaster, Canadian Professor Michel Chossudovsky wrote an article titled “Foreknowledge of A Natural Disaster: Washington was aware that a deadly Tidal Wave was building up in the Indian Ocean”.1 He noted “the US Navy was fully aware of the deadly tidal wave, because the Navy was on the Pacific Warning Centre’s list of contacts. Moreover, America’s strategic Naval base on the island of Diego Garcia had also been notified. Although directly in the path of the tidal wave, the Diego Garcia military base reported ‘no damage’.”

    “With modern communications, the information of an impending disaster could have been sent around the world in a matter of minutes, by email, by telephone, by fax, not to mention by live satellite television,” he adds.

    Others see the catastrophe as a ‘sign of the times’ in which we live, and a portent of what is to come as the Earth and humanity experience even more changes as part of the end of a world cycle.

    Natural Earthquakes

    Natural earthquakes are caused by the movement of tectonic plates over the Earth’s mantle. Sandwiched between Earth’s crust and molten outer core, the vast mantle accounts for 83 percent of the planet’s volume. It is filled with solid rock but, heated by the core and by its own radioactive decay, it circulates like a pot of impenetrable soup. That circulation is the driving force behind the surface motion of tectonic plates, which builds mountains and causes earthquakes.

    The destructive power of an earthquake comes from the momentum gathered when two opposing “faults” or tectonic plates that may have been locked together for decades, suddenly move apart. The result is that solid rock which normally moves only with the passing of geological ages accelerates briefly to 8000 kmh, unleashing huge quantities of energy and creating a shaking movement of up to a metre a second.

    Most people consider earthquakes to be natural in origin, but what if there was such a thing as man-made earthquakes? Well, there are. There is the official version of what constitutes a man-made earthquake, and then there is a body of suppressed research pointing to a more insidious agenda.

    Artificially-Induced Earthquakes

    Officially, there is an area of research devoted to man-made earthquakes. Geologists and seismologists agree earthquakes can be induced in five major ways: fluid injection into the Earth, fluid extraction from the Earth, mining or quarrying, nuclear testing and through the construction of dams and reservoirs.

    In fact, there are officially recorded instances of earthquakes caused by human activity.

    Geologists discovered that disposal of waste fluids by means of injecting them deep into the Earth could trigger earthquakes after a series of quakes in the Denver area occurred from 1962-1965; the periods and amounts of injected waste coincided with the frequency and magnitude of quakes in the Denver area. The earthquakes were triggered because the liquid, which was injected under very high pressure, released stored strain energy in the rocks.

    Man-made earthquakes may seem like something out of the X-Files, and it’s probably only a matter of time before the idea is picked up by Hollywood.

    The plotline of Hammer of Eden, written by best-selling author Ken Follett, revolves around a terrorist group threatening to level San Francisco with a man-made earthquake. When asked by Salon magazine how real is the idea of a man-made earthquake, Follett replied that, “Some of the seismologists told me, ‘There’s no way this could happen.’ But others gave sad little shrugs and said, ‘It’s hard to say. Who knows? Maybe. It’s within the realm of possibly.’”

    Suppressed Research: Tesla Technologies

    Born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, Nikola Tesla is one of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. A prodigious inventor of electronic devices and pioneer of free energy, Tesla never gained the recognition he deserved because his scientific breakthroughs were deemed too ‘sensitive’ by the corporate and government powers of the day.

    In a book entitled Tesla – The Lost Inventions, a section is headed “Man-Made Earthquake”. It discloses Tesla’s fascination with the power of resonance and how he experimented with it not only electrically but on the mechanical plane as well. In his Manhattan lab, Tesla built mechanical vibrators and tested their powers. One experiment got out of hand.

    Tesla attached a powerful little vibrator driven by compressed air to a steel pillar. Leaving it there, he went about his business. Meanwhile, down the street, a violent quaking built up, shaking down plaster, bursting plumbing, cracking windows, and breaking heavy machinery off its anchorages.

    Tesla’s vibrator had found the resonant frequency of a deep sandy layer of subsoil beneath his building, setting off a small earthquake. Soon Tesla’s own building began to quake. It is reported that just as the police broke into his lab, Tesla was seen smashing the device with a sledge hammer, the only way he could promptly stop it.

    In a similar experiment, on an evening walk through the city, Tesla attached a battery powered vibrator, described as being the size of an alarm clock, to the steel framework of a building under construction. He adjusted it to a suitable frequency and set the structure into resonant vibration.

    The structure shook, and so did the earth under his feet. Tesla later boasted he could shake down the Empire State Building with such a device. If this claim was not extravagant enough, he went on to say a large-scale resonant vibration was capable of splitting the Earth in half.

    An article from the July 11, 1935 issue of the New York American entitled ‘Tesla’s Controlled Earthquakes’, stated Tesla’s “experiments in transmitting mechanical vibrations through the Earth – called by him ‘the art of telegeodynamics’ – were roughly described by the scientists as a sort of controlled earthquake.”

    The article quotes Tesla as saying:

    The rhythmical vibrations pass through the Earth with almost no loss of energy. It becomes possible to convey mechanical effects to the greatest terrestrial distances and produce all kinds of unique effects. The invention could be used with destructive effect in war…

    The January 1978 edition of Specula magazine ran an article describing an incredibly profound phenomenon that could be produced within the Earth by what is called the ‘Tesla Effect.’

    According to the article, electromagnetic signals of certain frequencies can be transmitted through the Earth to form standing waves in the Earth itself. In certain cases, coherence to this standing wave can be induced wherein a fraction of the vast, surging electromagnetic current of the Earth itself feeds into and augments the induced standing wave.

    In other words, “much more energy is now present in the standing wave than the …amount being fed in from the Earth’s surface.” By interferometer techniques, giant standing waves can be combined to produce a focused beam of very great energy. This can then be used to produce earthquakes induced at distant aiming points.

    Tesla expressed grave concerns about the effects of this technology because it is exactly the type of thing that could easily get out of control once it begins vibrating within the Earth – and it could actually cause the Earth to vibrate to pieces.

    Another leading Tesla researcher and nuclear engineer, Lt. Col. Thomas Bearden, lecturing at a Symposium of the US Psychotronics Association (USPA) in 1981, stated:

    Tesla found that he could set up standing waves… in the Earth (the molten core), or, just set it up through the rocks – the telluric activity in the rocks would furnish activity into these waves and one would get more potential energy in those waves than he put in. He called the concept the Tesla Magnifying Transmitter (TMT).

    Bearden goes on to explain how TMTs worked:

    They will go through anything. What you do is that you set up a standing wave through the Earth and the molten core of the Earth begins to feed that wave (we are talking Tesla now). When you have that standing wave, you have set up a triode. What you’ve done is that the molten core of the Earth is feeding the energy and it’s like your signal – that you are putting in – is gating the grid of a triode… Then what you do is that you change the frequency. If you change the frequency one way (start to dephase it), you dump the energy up in the atmosphere beyond the point on the other side of the Earth that you focused upon. You start ionising the air, you can change the weather flow patterns (jet streams etc) – you can change all that – if you dump it gradually, real gradually – you influence the heck out of the weather. It’s a great weather machine. If you dump it sharply, you don’t get little ionisation like that. You will get flashes and fireballs (plasma) that will come down on the surfaces of the Earth… you can cause enormous weather changes over entire regions by playing that thing back and forth.

    HAARP: The Pentagon’s Ultimate Weapon

    In an Arctic compound 450 kilometres east of Anchorage, Alaska, the Pentagon has erected a powerful transmitter designed to beam more than a gigawatt of energy into the upper reaches of the atmosphere. Known as Project HAARP (High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program), the experiment involves the world’s largest “ionospheric heater,” a device designed to zap the skies hundreds of kilometres above the Earth with high-frequency radio waves.

    Why irradiate the charged particles of the ionosphere (which when energised by natural processes make up the lovely and famous phenomenon known as the Northern Lights)? According to the US Navy and Air Force, co-sponsors of the project, “to observe the complex natural variations of Alaska’s ionosphere.” As well, admit the Pentagon, to develop new forms of communications and surveillance technologies to enable the military to send signals to nuclear submarines and to peer deep underground.

    Ever since the existence of HAARP became public, a number of independent researchers have warned the operation has a secret agenda including weather modification, mind control, hi-tech military experiments, and the triggering of earthquakes.

    HAARP transmissions may also be used for the detection and monitoring of electromagnetic or “plasma” phenomena, precursors of seismic activity and tectonic movement. Researchers believe HAARP transmissions are actually being used to activate or trigger exactly the same electromagnetic conditions that can cause tectonic movement.

    Jerry Smith in his book HAARP: The Ultimate Weapon of the Conspiracy, warns many atmospheric scientists working on the secretive military project might be unaware of HAARP’s grave potential to wreak havoc on the Earth. He writes:

    If HAARP is a TMT [Tesla Magnifying Transmitter], and these researchers correctly understand Tesla’s work, we could be in a lot of trouble. It is quite possible that the scientists working on HAARP do not know what they are playing with… Beyond that their ignorance might be compounded if HAARP is indeed a secretive black-ops military project. The military has devised a way of keeping secrets called ‘compartmentalisation’ where each unit knows only what it needs to know… Only the control group knows what’s going on… If there is a control group familiar with TMTs directing the actions of scientists unschooled in Tesla technology, those lower level operatives could be directed to wreak havoc with created weather or manufactured earthquakes….

    The key technology behind HAARP is the brainchild of scientist Bernard Eastlund. Judging from his APTI patent, Tesla was a major inspiration for Eastlund’s ionospheric heater. A New York Times story, dated December 8, 1915, describes one of Tesla’s ideas which are remarkably similar to Eastlund’s.2

    In 1966, Professor Gordon J.F. MacDonald was associate director of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles, a member of the US President’s Science Advisory Committee, and later a member of the US President’s Council on Environmental Quality.

    He published papers on the use of environmental-control technologies for military purposes. MacDonald made a revealing comment: “The key to geophysical warfare is the identification of environmental instabilities to which the addition of a small amount of energy would release vastly greater amounts of energy.”

    World-renowned scientist MacDonald developed ideas for using the environment as a weapon system and he contributed to what was, at the time, only in the wildest dream of a futurist. When he wrote his chapter, “How To Wreck The Environment,” for the book Unless Peace Comes, he was not kidding around. In it he describes the use of weather manipulation, climate modification, polar ice cap melting or destabilisation, ozone depletion techniques, earthquake engineering, ocean wave control and brain wave manipulation using the planet’s energy fields.

    He speculated these types of weapons would be developed and, when used, would be virtually undetectable by their victims. Is HAARP one such weapon?

    In her book Planet Earth: The Latest Weapon of War, renowned scientist and nuclear activist Dr. Rosalie Bertell says such electromagnetic weapons “have the ability to transmit explosive and other effects such as earthquake induction across intercontinental distances to any selected target site on the globe with force levels equivalent to major nuclear explosions.”

    Her book explains that pulsed, extremely low frequency (ELF) waves can be used to convey mechanical effects and vibrations at great distances through the Earth.

    Such manipulation of the Earth, she states, “has the capability to cause disturbance of volcanoes and tectonic plates, which in turn, have an effect on the weather,” creating storms and torrential rains over an area. Anyone notice the world’s weather has been very strange in recent months?

    Beachings and Seismic Tests

    On November 28, 2004, Reuters reported that during a three day span, 169 whales and dolphins beached themselves in Tasmania, an island off the southern coast of mainland Australia. The cause for these beachings is not known, but Bob Brown, a senator in the Australian parliament, said “sound bombing” or seismic tests of ocean floors to test for oil and gas had been recently carried out near the sites of the Tasmanian beachings.

    According to Jim Cummings of the Acoustic Ecology Institute, seismic surveys utilising airguns have been taking place in mineral-rich areas of the world’s oceans since 1968. Among the areas that have experienced the most intense survey activity are the North Sea, the Beaufort Sea (off Alaska’s North Slope), and the Gulf of Mexico; areas around Australia and South America are also current hotspots of activity.

    The impulses created by the release of air from arrays of up to 24 airguns create low frequency sound waves powerful enough to penetrate up to 40km below the seafloor. The “source level” of these sound waves is generally over 200dB (and often 230dB or more), roughly comparable to a sound of at least 140-170dB in air.

    According to the Australian Conservation Foundation, these 200dB – 230dB shots from the airguns are fired every 10 seconds or so, from 10 metres below the surface, 24 hours a day, for 2 week periods of time, weather permitting.

    These types of tests are known to affect whales and dolphins, whose acute hearing and use of sonar is very sensitive.

    On December 24, 2004 there was a magnitude 8.1 earthquake more than 800 kilometres southeast of Tasmania near New Zealand, with a subsequent aftershock 6.1 a little later in the morning that same day.

    Then on December 26 the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck leading to the devastating tsunami that killed more than 300,000 people.

    On December 27, 20 whales beached themselves 180 kilometres west of Hobart on the southern island state of Tasmania.

    Interestingly, the locations of the whale beachings over the previous 30 days correlates with the same general area struck by the 8.1 Australian earthquake. The seismic testing also took place in the same area. Then two days after the Australian tectonic plate shifted, the 9.0 earthquake shook the coast of Indonesia.

    There is strong evidence suggesting oil exploration activities have induced earthquakes in the past, although a link is yet to be established in this case.

    A paper “Seismicity in the Oil Field” by Russian academics admit, “Scientists have observed that earthquakes can be triggered by human action…. Some geophysicists, including the authors of this article, believe that if the natural tectonic regime had been taken into account during the planning of hydrocarbon recovery, the earthquakes might have been avoided.”

    This is a sobering admission when we consider that some geologists say the Australian quake was the likely trigger for the Indonesian quake.

    Sign of the Times?

    The death and devastation caused by major earthquakes around the world can only worsen in years to come, as growing urban development and unprecedented population growth compound the lethal effects of natural and, as some researchers claim, man-made seismic hazards.

    With the world’s population nearing an estimated 6.5 billion, there are fewer unpopulated places for quakes to strike. And with ever more people to accommodate, there is more multistoried construction in vulnerable fault zones.

    Frightening and controversial projects like HAARP, with applications ranging from weather modification to mind control, should be of great concern to us all. And most worrying is mounting evidence the US military now has the ability to create earthquakes – the ultimate weapon of war.

    Was the earthquake of December 26 man-made or the result of natural forces? There are many who believe such events are part of a cyclic period of earth changes. Strange weather patterns, an increase in earthquake activity, and natural disasters across the planet, are anticipated at the end of major world cycles.

    Christians often call attention to the Gospel account where Jesus says a sign of the end of the world age would be “earthquakes in diverse places” (Matthew 24:7). Many believe this verse refers to the times in which we live.

    In traditional Hindu cosmology, we are now nearing the end of the Kali Yuga which is the final and most negative of four evolutionary cycles which are Satya Yuga (Golden Age), Treta Yuga (Silver Age), Dwapara Yuga (Bronze Age), and Kali Yuga (Iron Age).

    Similarly, the ancient Greeks traced the lineage of mankind through five successive “ages” or “races” from the “Golden Age” to the present “Iron Age.”

    The Visuddhimagga, a compendium of Theravada Buddhist philosophy, gives further details about the recurring cycles that destroy mankind and cleanse the Earth. The text relates there are 64 world destruction cycles in which the world perishes seven times by fire, and an eighth time by water. This cycle of eight destructions repeats itself seven times, and then at the end of the eighth cycle the final destruction is by wind rather than water. Then the cycle of 64 begins anew.

    Man’s most ancient traditions tell us these cycles reflect the creative process of the cosmos. The memories of a lost ‘Golden Age’, found in all earthly cultures, point to a time in the distant past when harmony and balance prevailed. This harmony is upset during the Iron Age, which is prophesied to end amid a proliferation of inverted spiritual values and rampant materialism, accompanied by devastating natural disturbances.

    Act of man or act of nature, the recent earthquake and tsunami may indeed be another ‘sign of the times’ signalling the last days of the present world order. We do well to recall the words of the gifted French esotericist Rene Guenon:

    This end only appears to be the “end of the world,” without any reservation or specification of any kind, to those who see nothing beyond the limits of this particular cycle;… the end now under consideration is undeniably of considerably greater importance than many other, for it is the end of a whole Manvantara [world age]… this end will itself immediately become the beginning of another Manvantara… if one does not stop short of the most profound order of reality, it can be said in all truth the “end of a world” never is and never can be anything but the end of an illusion.

    [alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn 89.[/alert]

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    Footnotes:

    1. www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO412C.html
    2. www.rense.com/ufo3/tesla.htm

    © New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
    For our reproduction notice, click here.