3. THE HOLY OF HOLIES

Once inside the Church of Mary Magdalene, my first impression -- and I suspect most people’s -- is how small it is.

And also that it’s dark. (It took this propeller-head two trips before he realized you’re supposed to put a few francs in the meter in order to turn on the lights.)

In the light, the church is way over-decorated, almost confusing, demoralizing. Yet, the entire Rennes mystery, the secret of Jacob’s (or Jesus’) stargate, is believed to be condensed into this church and depicted within these walls.

I felt like I had a strong understanding of it, until now.

I looked around, bewildered. Before I knew it my fifteen minutes were up.

I walked outside and sat beside the church, alone. Sauniere’s heady blend of political incorrectness and gaudy artistry would have to wait till the next hour struck one.

With forty-five minutes to kill I walked about this storybook village on this unusually warm spring day. Stones crunched beneath my feet. Exploring a narrow alleyway, I came upon a silver-haired gentleman supervising repairs on his restaurant.

“Come. Sit down,” the man said.

He sat me on a chair and flicked me a sly glint. He was Rennes resident Jean Luc Stone, a scholarly gentleman with a velvety voice and a contagious smile.

“Just looking after a few repairs,” said Jean Luc shaking his head. “We had an earthquake a few months ago. This building’s been standing 700 hundred years. Now the French want me to put in these steel beams for reinforcement.”

After years of living at Rennes Jean Luc is considered one of the foremost experts on the mystery that every year causes all those 20,000 pilgrims to flock here --gold seekers, archaeologists, religious authorities, world-beating regimes, intelligence agents --and turns them away feeling like they are further away from comprehending it than when they arrived.

Hesitating to inform Jean Luc of my stargate dreams, I explained to him that I was in France on the trail of the Peacemaker, the forerunner or herald of the Christ or Messiah. I was also doing follow-up research on a few of the theories laid out in my book, The Peacemaker and the Key of Life.

“You mean the Teacher of Righteousness or John the Baptist?” he asked, referring to the herald of Jesus.
“Yeah,” I replied, surprised and impressed by his astuteness.

Back home most Americans don’t pick up on the Peacemaker’s role so quickly. They’re usually too deep into the theology of the zealous Church’s commercial version of Jesus as the lone savior to read up on the historical Jesus. If they do, they think he’s the false prophet of the Anti-Christ.

History reveals that much of what we have been taught about Jesus is flawed, inaccurate, and sometimes outright deceptive. When the original Nag Hammadi Scrolls came out of the ground in 1945 they struck the global mind with the force of an atom bomb. Like the early highly political Roman Church, many contemporary Christian leaders condemned these books as ‘heretical’ for the forbidden secrets they held, most notably the relationship between the two saviors, Jesus and John (as well as the third, Mary Magdalene).

In the Dead Sea Scrolls we started to get the clear picture of the cooperation between Jesus and John. We also learn a great deal about Mary Magdalene, who we learn, was not some mere prostitute who played a marginal role in Jesus’ life. She was his financier and was second to Jesus in command of the Jesus revolution. Further, she was his lover and his bridge to the world.

We also learned the Essenes, who are widely believed to be the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls (though they may have simply copied them from earlier Egyptian texts) called themselves the ‘people of the pillar’.² They were anticipating the arrival of a teacher who would build a bridge to transfer their souls to heaven. They fancied themselves as contractors building a gateway of some sort.

Hmmm, I wonder, what kind of gate could that be?
 

INRI
I followed Jean Luc inside his cottage. At the entrance I noticed a peculiar sign. It read “In ri.”

The strange way the letters were spaced made it look like “In ri” was a hush-hush code name which could launch one into the holy of holies of some ancient wizard.

“Jean Luc,” I asked, “why do you have the name of Jesus on the Cross on the outside of your cottage?”

He turned and flipped me a look like I was a bit loony.

“Jesus you say?”

“Yeah,” I cringed. “Doesn’t INRI mean Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews?” I asked. In fact, this was the name Pontius Pilate nailed to the Cross above Jesus’ head.³

“Oh, that. It’s supposed to say Ingrid, but the ‘g’ and the ‘d’ fell off.”

“Oh, Christ,” I thought, embarrassed. Failure and humiliation, I had long since learned, are sometimes the most powerful teachers.

Actually, Jesus scholars now question if Nazareth existed at the time Jesus was alive. This would mean INRI means something completely different.

According to nineteenth century linguist Godfrey Higgins,

“Nazareth, the town of Nazir, or the flower, was situated in Carmel, the vineyard or garden of God.”⁴

Jesus was a flow-er; whence came the adoration, by the Rosicrucians, of the Rose and the Cross. Rose comes from Ras, meaning knowledge or wisdom. This flow-er (wisdom) was stolen from the Garden of Eden. When Jesus was Crucified upon this Cross he was literally the emblem of the Rosicrucians -- a Rose on a Cross.

The Rosy-crucians, with their emblematic red cross and red rose, may have originated from the fable of A-Don-Is, who was crucified (C-Rus-ified) and turned into a red rose by Venus, the Goddess of Love. Rus in Irish signifies a tree, knowledge, science. (A-Don once again links us with A-Ton.) Jesus, who was called Adon, and Mary Magdalene enacted these roles of Venus and Adonis.

It is for this reason that in the wisdom tradition INRI means; “By Fire Nature is Renewed Whole,” pointing to Jesus’ role as a bringer of higher frequency knowledge or ‘fire’.⁵ The Rosicrucians altered the meaning of INRI to IGNE NITRUM RORIS INVENITUR or “the baptism or cleansing power of dew is only discovered by fire.” ⁶

Remarkable insights into the true nature of the teachings of Jesus are to be gleaned when the word Nazareth is replaced by the alternative word Nazorean, the name for a religious sect of which Jesus was a member (but not the founder). In The Pentecost Revolution, noted New Testament scholar Hugh Schonfield observes that ‘Nazorean’ derives from Notstrim which means,

“Keepers or Preservers ... those who maintained the true teaching and tradition, or who cherished certain secrets which they did not divulge to others...”
 

LOST HORIZON
Immediately upon entering his cottage, Jean Luc showed me some of his hundreds of works of art he’s collected from his decades of travels around the world. Some of these objects were Egyptian.

Usually, when one thinks of Egypt the colossal monuments come to mind. However, the tiny statues I held in my hand, some only about 3 inches tall, were just as powerful. Adjusting their perspective from the really big to the really small is an underappreciated hallmark of the Egyptian mind.

To me, this illustrates the concept of the microcosm and the macrocosm. The human body, is literally the bridge or link between the two infinities of the incredibly large and the incredibly small. On a clear night we can see billions of galaxies in the sky. Through a clear microscope we can see billions of molecules, each one comparable to a miniscule galaxy. As the bridge, we realize these are not two worlds, the incredibly large, and the incredibly small, they are One.

Finally, we parked it on the couch in Jean Luc’s living room. On the table in front of me, he pointed to a tattered paperback copy of Lost Horizon and then began talking about Rennes. My “pay attention, incoming message” sensors went haywire.

Lost Horizon is the famous 1930’s novel by James Hilton about the lost sanctuary of Shangrila -- the Buddhist name for the paradisiacal home of Rex Mundi, the King of the World. Like some Christians, the Buddhist’s believe this figure will return to Earth as an ass-kicking savior in Delta Force garb who’ll wipe out the infidels and kick start a new Golden Age.

With the rewriting of a few names Lost Horizon could be the story of Rennes: a hidden valley where a few achieve immortality or respite from an apocalypse.

Then again, I sometimes have a tendency to read too much into things.

As I pondered the Lost Horizon-Rennes connection, Jean Luc implored me to study the context of the Rennes mystery.

He encouraged me not to look at it as an isolated island, but as a part of something grander. He also pointed to the Cathars as a vital part of the Rennes mystery.

In the early 12th century the Cathars appeared in the Languedoc and Midi region. This group of souls called themselves Bonhommes or Good Christians, and ‘the pure ones’. They claimed they possessed the Book of Love (AMOR) the original initiatory and heretical version of the Book of John⁸ (the only gospel the Cathars read) which likely contained the instruction manual for the Key of Life. This teaching, which could transform a human into an angel and once belonged to Abraham, Moses, and Solomon. I believe Jesus gave it to Mary Magdalene.

The Languedoc takes its name from an ancient language, the Language of Oc, Old French for ‘yes’.

I am plenty curious about this Language of Yes.

One fact, in particular, informs us of the necessity of studying the Cathars and this Language. That is, the Cathars mandated that the Book of Love and the Gospel of Jesus be understood in this Language of Yes, which is different from Hebrew. By understanding the Language of Yes we will be able to apprehend the secrets of the Cathars.

We may begin to understand the Cathar’s sacred language by exploring its curious name --Oc. This is phonetically identical to Ak or Akka. The term Akadia or Arcadia has long been associated with the Rennes area. One of the parchments discovered there revealed the enigmatic message:

“I am in Arcadia.” Pan, the devil in the Church of Mary Magdalene, is the King of Arcadian satyrs.

Acca is identical to the Greek goddess Akka, ‘She Who Fashions’, the Mother Akka who brought the gods out of the deep (the cosmic ocean) and created humanity.⁹ She was the same as the Akkadian Akka, the ‘Water-drawer’ who brought the gods to life including Sargon, the king of Akkad.

The Romans called her Acca, and said she was a temple prostitute and one of the Vestal Virgins. According to Roman legend, Acca helped Rhea give birth to Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome, who were drawn, Moses-like, out of their floating basket on the river Tiber.¹⁰

The Egyptian Pharaohs were also masters of Akh, the Pharaonic word for all aspects of light, particularly the ‘transcendental’ light of the transfiguration.¹¹ The Greeks said Amon-Ra was the same as Pan.¹² It is more than likely that the illumination the Cathars received from Oc is related to the Pharaonic word for light, akh.

This word akh is written with a glyph showing a crested ibis bird, which was also called the akh. This bird – interchangeable with the heron – is the bird of Thoth, the inventor of language and god of magic.

This bird’s crest, together with its dark green plumage shot with glittering metallic specks gave rise to the meanings ‘to shine’, ‘to be resplendent’, ‘to irradiate’, of the root akh in the hieroglyphic writing.¹³ Akh expresses all concepts of light. It is also used to designate the ‘third eye’, the uraeus, the fire-spitting serpent.¹⁴

It is due to the ibis connection that I feel the Language of Yes is the same as the Language of the Birds. The Koran says this language gave Solomon wisdom and abundance of all things.¹⁵ According to Lucy Lamey, in the Egyptian cosmogonic myths, akh (‘spirit’) is that aspect of our spirit, which conceives in advance what the object of creation, will be.¹⁶ Akh emanates from a higher realm, ‘heaven’.

The language of Akh is therefore the language of creation. Or as The Pyramid Texts say ‘Akh is for heaven, kha (‘soul’) is for earth’. It is possible this heavenly language system was among the secrets recovered by the Templars from the ruins of the Temple of Solomon, who it is claimed, made the gold for his temple by alchemical means.

The Pharaohs, Solomon and the Gnostics, however, are not the only source of information about the Language of Ak. As Mircea Eliade writes in Shamanism, among the Iglulik Eskimos a sequence of initiations concludes with the angakoq (or L’ang-ak-oq), meaning ‘lightening’ or ‘illumination’.

This angakoq consists of,

“a mysterious light which the shaman (or smith) suddenly feels in his body, inside his head, within his brain, an inexplicable searchlight, a luminous fire which enables him to see with both eyes, both literally and metaphorically speaking, for he can now, even with closed eyes, see through darkness and perceive things and coming events which are hidden from others.” ¹⁷

Through the angakoq the initiate receives the Holy Light. This is exactly what the Cathars claimed they received from the Language of Oc and the Egyptians through the Akh.

The Cathars (as was Jesus during his lifetime) are lumped in with the Gnostics. This is a very general term for an oceanic philosophy fed by streams from Asian and Egyptian mythology, astrological doctrine, Sumerian theology, Jewish tradition and the Greek mysteries of Dionysus.

Gnosticism seeks to unite all traditions in hopes of recovering the Truth. Today, this Truth (Akh) might be labeled Grail or Christ Consciousness.
 

CHNOUBIS
In the Gnostic M-Istery tradition, which forms the backdrop to the Rennes mystery, we find a belief in a winged, radiant and loving Good Serpent who was called ‘the Reconciler’, ‘the Deliverer’, the ‘Angel of the Dawn’ (i.e. the Morning Star), and, like Akh, was ‘the Spirit of All Knowledge’. His name is Nous or Chnoubis.

Chnoubis
 

In his Secret Teachings of All the Ages,¹⁸ Manly P. Hall notes that: “To the Gnostics, the Christ was the personification of Nous, the Divine Mind.” Further, according to the Gnostics, Christ emanated from a higher or hyper spiritual realm. He descended into the body of Jesus at the baptism and left it again at or before the Crucifixion.

The Gnostics were fond of word play. Take Nazarene for example. The words Naaseni and Nazarene are believed by some to have originated from nazar, meaning keep, guard, protect, and from naas or nahash, Hebrew for serpent. The Hebrew word for soul is nashamah. Linguistically, they are similar and therefore interchangeable. Therefore, Jesus is cast as the good guy wise serpentsoul who protects and delivers cosmic knowledge.

It might amaze many people to learn that virtually everywhere the story of Chnoubis appears in the M-Istery tradition, we learn of a sanctuary described in similar terms to the Garden of Eden (which the Cathars called AMOR), including housing a Pillar or Tree of Life. The Vestal Virgins were married to the spirit of Rome by means of an artificial phallus in the Palladium shrine.¹⁹ The Palladium originally belonged to Pan. It signified AMOR.²⁰

Stories say that not only did Chnoubis, or his Pillar, have the phenomenal ability to translate souls from one dimension to another, it could also drill holes in space, creating ‘halls’ or ‘doorways’ linking far-off regions of space to ‘wells’ on Earth!²¹

Today, physicists call these ‘holes’ wormholes or stargates. How in the world the ancients could have known of such technologies is another one of the great M-Isteries of this story. Plato said that if we could see the Earth from a far it would appear as a 12-angled pyramid, or a dodecahedron. In Gnostic tradition, Chnoubis is the guardian of this 12-angled pyramid that surrounds the Earth.²²

The Egyptian scribe of the gods Thoth first introduced the concept of the 12-angled Planetary Grid. He is also credited in Egyptian lore with the invention of magic and writing. Freemasons also say that Thoth possessed all secret knowledge on 36,535 scrolls that were hidden under the heavenly vault (the sky).²³ Thoth is described in the exact same terms as Chnoubis. He is part-man, part-serpent, part-bird.

Thoth as a bird-serpent-man,

with his pillar in the background (left) supported by lions.
 

The Thoth or Thought Sphere is another name for the Nous or Nousphere the Egyptians believed encapsulated the Earth. It is also the source of Ch-nou-bis’ name. This special scientific knowledge was contained within what Dr. Carl G. Jung called “the collective unconscious” of humanity. The collective unconscious may be thought of as the “global brain” of humanity, or the “spiritual Internet.”
 

THE CONSOLAMENTUM
Incredible as it may sound, Gnostics perceived the gateways created by Chnoubis leading to the higher land of love as “holes in space” ala the rabbit’s hole in Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland. Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Oxford mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898). Alice in Wonderland was his masterpiece of occult fiction that tells about the adventures of a little girl in a make-believe world under the ground or in another dimension. Alice lands in this “wonderland” after she falls down a ‘hole’ or pit while following a rabbit or hare.

The Cathars had very specific ideas in regards to how to connect with AMOR, many of them in stark contrast to the Church of Rome. The Cathars believed that the key to making the AMOR connection is to understand the elements, the bread and wine, of the Eucharist and the Holy Grail.

In Christian theology the doctrine of con substantiation states that the substance of the bread and wine of the Eucharist exist, after consecration by an official of the Church, side by side with the substance of the body and blood of Christ, but is not changed into it.²⁴ In other words, imagining the bread and wine are Christ’s body makes it so.

In contrast, according to the Church of Love, eating the communion bread, representing eating the symbolic flesh of Christ, or drinking his blood (represented by the wine) is cannibalism. After all, if you think you are eating Christ’s flesh, you are.

To the Cathars the bread and wine of the Eucharist represented a far more scientific teaching. Transubstantiation was the term used by the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Eastern Churches to describe the Cathar’s transmutation of one element into another.²⁵

This secret, known to the Cathars as the consolomentum (or cons-element-um), was kept occult or hidden by the ‘Church within the Church’. The Cathars believed man enters the kingdom of God through his soul. To achieve this, he had to “ascèse” or ascend by detaching from the material world.

The “ascèse” prepared him for baptism, Salvation was found through “consolament.” The fusing of soul (kha) and spirit (akh). This was the Cathars only sacrament. It signified a voluntary renunciation of the flesh and attachment to the things of this world.²⁶

Interestingly, the word ascend comes from asc or ask, or ascian, to call for, and scandere, to mount or climb.²⁷ The mountain the Cathars assiduously sought to discover through the Gospel of John and to climb was the Mount of Salvation topped by its Ladder to Heaven.

The Church of Love differed from Rome in other ways. Rome maintains the bridge to Heaven is the Crucifix: a bloody Christ on the Cross. The Cathars rejected the ritual of the Mass and reviled the Crucifix as an instrument of torture, saying it was the symbol of Rex Mundi, and not the sign of Life.

The way across to the Land of Amor was through the elements of the Eucharist transubstantiated into the blood of Christ within themselves. Transubstantiation comes from the Latin trans, across, and substantia, substance. This substance turned men into gods, as described by Jesus in his statement: “Is it not written in your law. I said ye are Gods.”²⁸

This substance -- the transmuted elements, caught by the Holy Grail -- took men across the waters of life to the Land of Amor. This substance, I believe, is the Blue Apples.

As one can imagine, for an organization based on the idea that Jesus was the son of God who came to Earth and died for our sins on the Cross, and to be granted eternal life all one had to do is believe in Christ and pay homage to the pope’s priests each week, the teachings of the Cathars posed quite a threat to the fledgling Catholic Church.

While the Church of Rome and the Church of Love used similar terminology --the Eucharist, the transubstantiation, Communion --they clearly meant different things by them. Unlike the Cathars, the Church or Rome clearly did not produce a substance that turned one into a higher being. Or, if it did, it told few about it.

Another name for the Cathars was the ‘Albigensians’ (the white or pure ones). Notably, Al means God or All. Gen is the root of gene, as in DNA, Sian is phonetically Sion or sun.

Condemned by the Council of Tours in 1163 as heretics, a propaganda war was launched by the Church against the Cathar’s competing ideology. Propaganda was not enough to dissuade the Cathars. The Church sought to neutralize the threat posed by them first by dispatching emissaries to debate and convert them.

When its best envoys failed to convert these heretics of the Church of Love the Church of Rome called in the French gun-for-hire Simon de Montford to exterminate these people to guarantee its own survival and put forth itself as the only (blood-soaked) hand of God.

From 1209-1249 the first European genocide was conducted against the Cathars by Pope Innocent III and a coalition force including French Catholics. Promising spiritual rewards in exchange for the blood of the Cathars, he sent 30,000 enforcers into the Midi and nearby Languedoc to eradicate the Church of Love.

The first stop (and most bizarre episode) of this crusade occurred in the town of Beziers where 222 Cathars lived amongst a population of thousands of Catholics. When the Pope’s army arrived the citizens refused to open their gates. The axe-wielding butchers addressed the locals -- all of them Catholics --and with threats of death and burning in hell demanded that they either leave town or turn over the Cathars to them.²⁹

The citizens of Beziers chose to stay put and protect the Cathars. One local commentator writing in 1213 said they would rather ‘die as heretics than live as Christians’. On July 22, Mary Magdalene’s Feast Day, the Pope ordered the extermination of every man, woman and child within the city gates of Beziers.

One crusader of conscience was said to have asked a superior how they were to tell Cathar from Catholic. The reply was direct and chilling:

‘Kill them all. God will know his own’.

At dawn on that fateful summer morning, 7,000 women, children and elderly crowded themselves into the Church of Mary Magdalene for mass. It must have been difficult to hear the word of God over the sound of the Pope’s axes ripping apart the barred wooden door at the back of the church. After more then 700 years the grotesque sounds of swords and axes meeting flesh and bone still reverberate faintly in the ears of the sensitive. 20,000 people were slaughtered to help preserve the Church of Rome’s dominance that day. A hundred innocents were killed for every Cathar.³⁰

For the next forty years the Cathars were hunted, tortured, burned at the stake and savagely murdered by the Church’s hired killers. It used psychological warfare to turn Christian against Christian, neighbor against neighbor, and even brother against brother in a bloodthirsty campaign that continued with the Inquisition. Estimates place the total Cathars and Cathar sympathizers murdered between 300,000 and 1,000,000 men, women and children.

Throughout all the carnage report after report substantiated an amazing testimony. The Cathars rarely displayed fear, terror or even pain even after the most hideous cruelties were inflicted upon them. It was said their example caused many a crusader to undergo profound spiritual transformations. Later, at the siege of Montsegur --the Cathars last stand -- crusaders actually converted to Catharism and fought along side them.

• What could the Cathars have known that caused this spiritual transformation?

• What baptism could possibly transform a cold-blooded, axe-wielding murderer into a saint fighting for a new kingdom?

The answer is in the Blue Apples of Rennes.

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