by Philip Gardiner
Author of The Ark, The Shroud and Mary
from Scribd Website

 

Contents

  1. Blood Ritual - The Ark and The Shroud

  2. What is The Real Truth of the Ark and Mary?

  3. The Ark, the Shroud, and Mary

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blood Ritual - The Ark and The Shroud

 

A Sacred Ritual at the Heart of the Secret World of The Ark

 

In my new book and DVD, The Ark, The Shroud and Mary I set about revealing the inner wisdom traditions we know as the esoteric. This inner wisdom is at the heart of the world’s religions and often due to oppression by the Orthodox Church this mystical element of our psyche has been forced underground. This underground stream has occasionally surfaced throughout time and we can see from these trickles that the elements of truth were in fact widespread and ancient.

 

This water of wisdom has in fact given life to the plants that have grown on the surface and sometimes even great trees have emerged and have refused to be chopped down by intolerance or bigotry. These trees are the great mysteries we know today such as the Holy Grail, Great Pyramid and Ark of the Covenant. If we grasp these growths firmly and pull hard enough we uproot the hidden secrets that first gave life to them. One of these roots I found was to branch off into Islam and it would reveal a mystical world that was connected so firmly and so obviously to the main trunk that almost everybody had missed the connection.

 

This root had a name – baraka.

The term baraka is a Sufi one and from which our French barque and Italian barca is derived. Indeed in contemporary France the term baraka, of Algerian origin, still has connotations of luck or blessing and this would eventually make complete sense.



Egyptian Mystics

The ancient Egyptians believed that everybody was a unique individual. The people were said to have two distinct parts, the ba and the ka. These are not simple concepts and have in fact baffled and amused Egyptologists for over two hundred years. But we need to break them down, for within the names of these two human domains attributed by our Egyptian ancestors lies the truth of the term baraka.

The ba is close to what we would call the personality, the traits and acts of the man or woman developed over the course of life. The ka was the life-force or soul. It is the first, or in number, one. This is found to be true in the Indian concept of the word as well where ka means supreme and together with ar means the ‘supreme light’ or ‘one light’ (arka) and ‘essence’.

 

The ka itself came into being when a person was born and was often depicted as the person’s twin or double. This is of course ancient Egyptian alchemy at play, whereby both the ka and ba must be united to become one and the twin element has come down to us through the centuries in our Tarot cards, fables and of course the twin riders of the Templar symbol.

Because the ba was the personality of the unique individual, it too was unique, whereas the ka, as the life-force was the same for everybody – it was the creative force running through us. The ka itself was made by the god Khnum on a potters wheel – hence it was an energy vortice exactly like the vortices found within the very atom. This energy is required for life and is also raised by the efforts of the processes in the mind - akin to the kundalini chakra - in raising enlightenment.

 

The kings or pharaohs had many ka’s due to their own immortality like the Gods. In fact the goal of every individual was to remain united, or fused with the energy of the life-force, ka, and the personality, ba, after death and to join Ra (sun) on his journey of perpetually re-creating creation itself. In this way the individual wanted to return to the creative point, the alpha and omega, at the same time and same place. In essence they wanted to reside in that perfect state. This perfect union comes down to us in the uniting of the three principles require, ba, Ra and kabaraka.

In fact, this is most likely the reason for mummification after death – to keep the body and the symbolic representations of the personality in place for the ka to unite with Ra and reinvigorate life. Should the body rot away the coffin and in fact the very death shrouds or bands of cloth would act as the spare body. Now we are beginning to see the value of the Shroud, as the body of Jesus joined his father (Ra) leaving behind his personality infused with the energy of his ka. It is itself a baraka or Ark.

Ra himself as the personification of the sun of the one-Egyptian God is in essence wishing a reunification. This is described as the ‘greatest of mysteries’ by the ancient Egyptians and it occurs at precisely midnight – the middle hour, the in-between state. Ra in fact must reunite with his body by midnight in-order to be resurrected as the morning light of the sun. This is personified as the body of Osiris, who is the Underworld personification of the Egyptian one-god.

 

You see, I tend to agree with the writer, Egyptologist and researcher, Alan Alford, that Egypt was a monotheistic culture, but that different personalities and aspects of the one God were given different, but meaningful, names. In the Underworld state, the ka and ba of Ra was Osiris and Osiris once reborn is Horus, who became Jesus in the Christian mysteries.

 

These great acts of the deities are not just re-enactments of the sun, moon and stellar cycles, they are also deeply held esoteric truths and I am not alone in this statement:

“The mystical character of these ‘books’, in the sense of a codification of an esoteric and secret knowledge…” [1]

It is indeed a secret knowledge and one that has remained so for generations, so much so, that we still search for literal treasures, when we truly encompass them all ourselves.

In fact Osiris personified the old self or the old creation and Ra was the new birth, the new man. Just like medieval Alchemy, creation was made from a mixture and through transformation.

“The Egyptians did not believe in creation ex nihilo. On the contrary, the religious texts state clearly that the cosmos was created from pre-existent materials, namely primeval water, matter, and air. Creation involved the transformation of the materials from the state of chaos into a state of order. It involved the construction of a new cosmos from the remains of an old cosmos.” [2]

This mixture required the reduction of the self (ba and ka) and the reformation in the midnight hour of the parts to create the true trinity of the ba Ra ka.

The Egyptians believed that when the ka left and the body died, it returned to the divine but remained close to the body. In fact even false doors were created in tombs for ka’s called ‘ka doors’, so that the ka could access the earth at will. Now the ba could roam the earth, but only when Ra, the sun-god, was in ascendance in the sky. When Ra returned to the underworld, so too did the ba. This is in fact the Egyptian explanation for ghosts.

In symbolism the ka was represented by two upturned arms and the ba by a human headed bird. Offerings of food were given to the ka and it was believed that the ka did not eat the food, but instead drew off the life-force from the offering.

The union of the ba Ra ka is indeed a true blessing and this is where the Arabic barakah and the Hebrew Barach takes the word – both different versions of the Sufi baraka. Blessing of course is now an English word derived from Old English bleodsian or bletsian meaning to ‘sprinkle with blood’, being derived from the blood rites called Blots and from where we get the term ‘to blot out ones sins.’

The Blot rite is Old English or Old Norse and is even followed today by modern pagans or ‘heathens’. The origins of the rites are supposedly lost, but the term means ‘sacrifice’ or ‘feast.’ The term Blota means ‘to worship’ or ‘to sacrifice’. Indeed in the Hakanor Saga gooa from Heimskringla, Snorri describes how at these Blots, blood was sprinkled on the altar and temple walls, just as they were in Egypt and indeed in the Jewish Temple. In fact there also appears to be an extrovert use of the term for fusion:

“The meaning of the sacrificial feast, as Snorri saw it, is fairy plain. When blood was sprinkled over altars and men and the toasts were drunk, men were symbolically joined with the Gods of war and fertility, and with their dead ancestors, sharing their mystical powers. This is a form of communion.” [3]

Again here we see that this union is found with each other in society and not just with the Gods:

“When an article of value is passed across the boundary of frith and grasped by alien hands, a fusion of life takes place, which binds men one to another with an obligation of the same character as that of frith himself.” [4]

This is the true offering of the life-source spoken of above and I had one of those wonderful moments of excitement when I realised that the Ark of the Covenant, in-order to ‘work’ properly also had to be sprinkled with blood. It had to in effect have a ka offering. This was the same as the Shroud, which was to be ‘sprinkled’ with the blood of the Christ, himself seen as the offering by the pagan’s who converted to Christianity and who had previously practised the Blot rituals.

The blessing then, seen here to be entirely related to the term barach or baraka, is to infuse something with holiness or the divine will (which is also another word for ka.) The blessing has always been officially given by the priest of the orthodox church and so is the same as the baraka of the Sufi’s - a blessing or word of will passed from the master to pupil.

Of course I could not miss the fact that to the Sufi, the term baraka was symbolized by a boat and itself became fused with the symbol of the dove. The dove itself was the Christian and Gnostic symbol of the word or spirit of the Lord and hence it was the baraka. The later Gnostic Christian Heretics, the Cathars took this symbol and with their own links within Islam fused the two devices together:

“… One important Cathar symbol was the dove. It represented for them then, as it does for us today, the idea of ‘peace’ or, more accurately the more subtle concept of ‘grace’, that state of being in God’s love. After the first crusades, when the European Cathars in the entourage of Godfroi de Bouillon established some contact with the Sufi mystics of Islam, the symbolism of the dove sometimes became linked iconographically with the Islamic mystical idea of baraka, which also means ‘grace’ and with the idea that a person can be a ‘vessel of grace’…

 

In some instance, the Cathar dove flying with its wings outstretched was rendered in an artistic motif very similar to the stylized ship meaning baraka in Sufi calligraphy, with the feathers of the dove and the oars of the vessel alike representing the flight and freedom of the soul.” [5]

Orthodox Christianity could not allow these ancient esoteric truths to be spread abroad as it had built its power base upon the literalism’s of the Bible and so they persecuted the Cathars and burnt them out of sight. However it does seem that these Cathars did hold the secret of the Temple of Solomon. They were the ‘perfecti’ who protected the esoteric wisdom of the Ark, for they were the Western version of the Eastern Sufi who themselves protected the ba-ra-ka. The only ‘vessel’ that they spirited away from their ill-fated Montsegur was the vessel of grace – knowledge.

In essence the term baraka is an original term for Ark and is thought by many to be derived from the ancient Egyptian b’arque or boat. The Sufi’s have often been said to have originated or at the very least to have origins in Egypt, and so having some knowledge of Sufism I embarked upon a journey into the term, knowing full-well that what lay before me was an often contradictory and argumentative subject matter.

 

I had spent many hours listening to a Sufi master and I often recall his methods – which to many would seem offensive, but to me were esoteric teachings. I once asked him where my path might lay and he replied that the only path I had no longer existed. This path of course was the one behind me, for the path in front had not yet been made. He told me that if I concentrated on my only path I would stumble and fall over and I quickly worked out that this was because I would always be looking behind me, whilst trying to walk forward.

 

There is only now, between yesterday and tomorrow – again, it was the place between.



Sufism

Sufism, for those who may never have heard the term, is called ‘the way to the heart’, which of course means the centre. It is the way of the pure, as Sufi may derive also from the word Sata or saaf meaning cleanliness or pure. Another viewpoint has the word being derived from the Arabic word for wool – suf - thus implying the cloak worn by the Sufi or the fact that every Sufi was seen to be a shepherd. It may also come from the Ashab al-Suffa or Ahl al-Suffa, meaning ‘companions of the veranda’ or ‘people of the veranda’.

 

The veranda spoken of is the one on the Prophet Muhammad’s mosque, and these ‘people of the veranda’ were said to spend their days in prayer and meditation during the Prophets lifetime. These special adherents were from many lands, including Persia, Ethiopia, Egypt and even Rome, bringing a great many diverse beliefs and interests with them. There is, however, a more telling term from which the word Sufi may be derived – Sophia.

 

This is the concept of wisdom spoken of again and again in esoteric literature and which has come down to us today via all-manner of faiths and creeds, even into secret societies such as the Freemasons. This version of the name was espoused by Abu Raihan Niruni, a Persian mathematician, astronomer, scholar, philosopher, historian and much more, of the late tenth and early eleventh century – a veritable Renaissance man before his time.

 

The fact that a Persian stated this belief relates to something Springett said in his book Secret Sects of Syria:

“the Sufees are a secret society of Persian mystic philosophers and ascetics, whose original religion may have been that of the Chaldeans or Sabeans, who believed in the unity of God, but adored the hosts of heaven (Tsaba), especially the seven planets, as representing Him.” [6]

Whatever the true origin of the word Sufi, it cannot easily be summed up in just a few words due to its mystical mix. For sure, this is an Islamic cult, much akin to the likes of the Albigensians or Cathars of the Christians, who were known as the pure ones. However, absolutely nobody is sure of the true origins of the movement and indeed it could and probably does even pre-date Islam in many respects and could even have influenced Muhammad himself.

Sufism then, is this mystical side of Islam continued, and this is why it is so important to the Sufi’s to keep this baraka, this continuance, so strong, because the base instincts of man will steal the truth and turn it to profit and gain. This is why the baraka seems so strange to those outside of the loop, because it is the mystical world that is unknowable. To be a true mystic, one must know oneself and ones own unconscious world. Not everybody has the will and the time to do this and others can do it as if by accident.

 

The Sufi’s see themselves as moving through this world of ours as if they are part of it and all the time knowing there is so much more. They feel at all times the divine presence and yet look upon mankind with an eye of mercy. At least, that’s the story. To them each one of us has a spirit or Ruh, which originates from the Alam – a creation of the divine light itself. The food of the spirit is therefore more light and not that of the external sun, but the inner sun of Allah.

 

To mirror and reflect this wisdom of the light is all that can be asked – to be like the moon, and we all know, the crescent moon is a symbol of Islam. The one who truly reflects this light of Allah, does not take the light away from Allah, but instead glorifies His name. The one who does this can give divine blessings via the baraka – the baraka is therefore not himself, but the light and wisdom and power of God. One becomes the crescent moon, the Ark.

One of the literal reasons that baraka has become our barge, b’arque, barca, Ark and of course bark, is because it is involved in the art of ship building. This kind of ship building though involves no floating upon real water, it is more to do with the water of the mind. By having baraka, one is able to access divine information and to be able to pass this on. But, before being able to do this, one must learn how to build a decent ship.

In some Muslim traditions if the baraka (or b’ark-at) is strong then when the wise Sufi dies it will remain with his non-decaying body and may even transmit wisdom to his successors. This is the reason that shrines are so important to the Muslim traditions – because the shrines are seen to be infused with this divine essence from the Almighty Allah – via the Sufi master who is to all intents and purposes the Ark. In this way, we can now see why the kaaba at Mecca should be so important – as this is a location of this universal baraka energy.

These sacred relics were only thus sacred due to the fact that they were seen to contain the baraka, just as Christian relics held a similar power or latent energy following the crusader invasions of the Muslim lands. It became therefore spiritually important and esoterically aligned for the father to pass down these baraka filled items – thus continuing the process of baraka, through the ages physically as well as esoterically.

My question now was simple and yet complex: Was the Shroud of Turin a kind of Blot offering? Infusing power in a divine relic? And who’s blood was it?



Notes

1 Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt, Jan Assmann, Cornell University Press, 2005.
2 The Midnight Sun, Alan Alford, Eridu Books, 2004, page 95.
3 Myth and Religion of the North, Gabriel Turville-Petre, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964, page 251.
4 The Culture of the Teutons, Vilhelm Gronbech, Vol 2, page 55. Out of print, publisher unknown.
5 Holy Grail Across the Atlantic: The Secret History of Canadian Discovery and Exploration, Michael Bradley, Hounslow Press, Canada, 1998.
6 Secret Sects of Syria and the Lebanon, Bernard H. Springett, Kegan Paul International Ltd, 2005.

Back to Contents




What is The Real Truth of the Ark and Mary?
 

Wisdom of the Ark and Mary

The Ark of the Covenant was supposedly kept in the centre of the Temple, what is known as the Sanctum Sanctorum. Sir Isaac Newton related this to a perpetual fire of light, radiating in a circular fashion and yet also falling back towards this sacred centre.

“In line with this thinking, a point within a circle was indeed a symbol for Light in ancient Egypt and, in the lodge ritual of Freemasonry, there is a related conversation which takes place between the Worshipful Master and his Wardens concerning the lost secrets. The Master asks the Question: ‘How do you hope to find them?’ Answer: ‘By the centre’. Question: ‘What is a centre?’ Answer: ‘That point within a circle from which every part of its circumference is equidistant’. … a point within a circle is the most important of all masonic devices.” [1]

This dot within the centre of the circle is said to be symbolic of the sun from the very earliest of times and some would have it that the dot is the sun in the centre of the solar system. This would of course pre-date the knowledge of the sun being at the centre of the solar system and there is much debate over this. The symbol in fact can cover a great many things and I have personally seen it used in rituals for both physical and metaphysical purposes.

 

The standing pole from which with a string we may draw a perfect circle on the ground and hence begin our sacred geometrical structure is but one perfect union of both the esoteric and exoteric. Seen from above this would of course become our dot in a circle, as would a conical hat, so often seen in the ancient world to be symbolic of enlightenment and wisdom and seen today as the wizards hat.

The dot could also represent the inner sun, the enlightenment within. This is itself seen as the centre point of all things, collecting all to a singularity, like a black hole drawing in all knowledge. It is the place seen to possess all the energy required for the creative spark, like the very atomic structure itself, which mirrors our own solar system. And the dot itself resides in the void or empty space from which our ancients believed derived all thought. This inner concept of the self, of the deity and of all knowledge is clearly seen upon the mark our Hindu friends place upon their brow – this is the dot at the centre of the true Temple. The symbol in fact became so important due to the fact that it was symbolic of so many perfect things.

The very fact that this symbol is so old and is seen so widely to encompass all-manner of physical and metaphysical concepts reveals one thing – that our ancestors were not fools and that they understood a great deal more than they have previously been given credit for. We are only just beginning to comprehend the true wisdom of the ancients and I want to concentrate upon this aspect in this article so that we may get to the centre of the Temple ourselves and look outward instead of always trying to look in. First we must erect the temple and in modern times this is the role of the Freemasons.



The use of the number 7 to get to the centre

“The Liberal Arts were, in effect, perceived as routes towards personal enlightenment in the finer things that were the keys to harmony and justice. In the 2nd degree of Craft masonry (the Fellow Craft degree), it is explained to the candidate that there are seven levels to the winding staircase that leads to the middle chamber of Solomon’s Temple. They are important aspects of the journey to wisdom…” [2]

In this extract from Laurence Gardner’s book The Shadow of Solomon, we find that the centre point is accessed via a spiral staircase. This spiral itself is seen across the globe in visions brought on via altered states of consciousness, linked inextricably to the process of divine wisdom. The processes, known by different methods and names across the world, send the adept into a vision trance whereby he or she believes they are actually contacting the spirits or the divine in another world.

 

The spirals are seen across the world upon rock art, carved into stone and in the drawings and fables of our ancestors, sometimes appearing as serpents. In this the Freemasons are physically depicting the inner and thereby esoteric concepts, creating art, texts and even structures to manifest this ‘fire’ and hence God appears within the pillar of smoke, just as he does above the Ark. They also reveal another level of truth, the number seven.

In my previous work I have pointed out the number seven and its importance again and again, and we must revisit the symbolic truth of this number one more time. In truth there are a great many reasons for the number to have been used by our ancestors. One thing we will always find when researching the past is that unlike us, the universe and life in general is not separated into dogmatic sciences.

 

Religion is not different to astronomy or astrology; it is not separate from plants and animals and nature itself is in harmony with our own internal and mental world. All things were and indeed should be seen as being interrelated. So, whether the number seven indicates the planets, the days of the week or the levels of heaven they are also related to a process that man developed in accordance with these things for enlightenment and access to what he saw as the divine. In the kundalini system of the Hindu’s the number seven became the number of chakra points which reside upon the axis of the body from the sacral regions to the brow and even above that to the bindu point above the head.

 

By raising energy levels within the body and by a process of self-improvement one could supposedly achieve enlightenment. Reaching seven was seen as achieving this. If the Ark is at all related to the wisdom traditions of the globe, then it will also reveal the use of this number, just as many other fables and folktales from across the globe with esoteric truths do also. The kundalini is just another one of these processes – but all use the universal numerological concept of seven.

When speaking of a tale from Ethiopia regarding the Ark, the authors Roderick Grierson and Stuart Munro-Hay relay in their book The Ark of the Covenant, a moment when the Emperor Iyasu displays his devotion towards the object called the Ark of the Covenant and states that nothing can prepare the reader for the events of the next morning when the emperor enters the sanctuary again commanding the priests to bring forth the Ark of Zion. Of course the priests have no choice but to comply, but the Ark is encased in a chest with seven seals and which can only be opened by a special key, in a special manner.

The keys are brought in and the priests start the task of unlocking the seals. The chronicler explains how each of the seven levels is opened. However when they reach the seventh they struggle in vain and the seal cannot be broken. They struggle and in the end they have no choice but to bring the chest to the emperor with the seventh seal still unopened.

 

But, as they stand before him the seal opens as if by magic and everybody is astonished, believing it to be an act of the God of the Ark of Zion, who himself resides above the Ark itself.

“He knows that the emperor is pure in spirit and devoted to the Orthodox faith.”

The Ark of the Covenant,

by Roderick Grierson and Stuart Munro-Hay [3]

Here we have similarities with the Grail and hence wisdom lore, in that only those who are pure of spirit can access the wonders of the Grail. In this case it is the Ark and the wonder is ‘simply’ connection to the divine. It is of course extremely interesting to note that the level that our ‘emperor’ accesses the divine is of course the seventh level, meeting the symbolic elements of the Grail and the various enlightenment processes perfectly head on.

 

But we must be ready, we must prepare ourselves – the true temple.

“According to 1 Kings 6:1, it was 480 years after the Exodus that David’s son Solomon began to build his temple on Mount Moriah. Seven years later the temple was ready to receive the Ark.”

Stuart Munro-Hay,

The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant [4]

Again what we find here is that the Temple will take seven years to erect – the Temple of man will take seven stages to be perfected, like the Alchemical perfect man. And once made perfect this Temple will hold the truth, the secret, within the Holy of Holies, the very centre of the Temple.

As with all things, we cannot simply strive for perfection and hope that it will arrive. We cannot just know that there are seven levels and follow the path laid out in the various wisdom traditions, we must always remain balanced. In many traditions and especially Indian, this balance is perceived as two serpents – symbols of opposites. This union of opposites is spoken of again and again in Gnostic and esoteric schools and is to be found on every level of our lives. The male and female opposites are obvious physical dual natures, but these opposites were also seen to be within us. Opposite sides of the mind continually struggle unless they find common ground, which is in fact to be found in a neutral state. We cannot strive to find the Grail, we must be neutral.

The Ark itself is in this centre, this neutral ground known as the mid-point in the Holy of Holies. It is a spiritual realm or substance.

“This spiritual substance is neither heavenly nor hellish, but an airy, pure, and hearty body, midway between the highest and lowest, without reason, but fruitful in works, and the most select and beautiful of all other heavenly things. This work of God is far too deep for understanding, for it is the last, greatest, and highest secret of Nature. It is the Spirit of God, which in the Beginning filled the earth and brooded over the waters, which the world cannot grasp without the gracious interposition of the Holy Spirit and instruction from those who know it, which also the whole world desires for its virtue, and which cannot be prized enough.

 

For it reaches to the planets, raises the clouds, drives away mists, gives its light to all things, turns everything into Sun and Moon, bestows all health and abundance of treasure, cleanses the leper, brightens the eyes, banishes sorrow, heals the sick, reveals all hidden treasures, and, generally, cures all diseases. Through this spirit have the philosophers invented the Seven Liberal Arts, and thereby gained their riches. Through the same Moses made the golden vessels in the Ark, and King Solomon did many beautiful works to the honour of God. Therewith Moses built the Tabernacle, Noah the Ark, Solomon the Temple.” [5]

In the above statement by one of my favorite alchemists, mystics and philosophers, Paracelsus, we have the absolute conviction that whatever it was that allowed Solomon to build the Temple or Moses to construct the contents of the Ark – it was something that was in balance. It was something that was neither good (heavenly) nor bad (hellish) – it was neutral. He also tells us that this is the highest and most concealed of God’s secrets. No wonder then that mankind has sought this truth ever since he became aware of it.


But this neutral position is also to be found in architecture, placed there by the Freemasons who understood the concepts once. Graham Hancock, speaking of his sight of the Ark at Chartres Cathedral sees this duality standing on the front porch as the columns, which he explains were situated midway between Melchizedek and the Queen of Sheba:

“Indeed I found that I could draw a neat triangle connecting up all three pieces of sculpture – with Melchizedek and the Queen of Sheba at either end of the long base and the Ark of the Covenant at the apex of the two shorter sides.” [6]

Hancock sees here the sacred geometry of the Freemasons at play, revealing the divine balance at play in physical structures given form by the Freemasons. The Ark is seen between the old male wisdom of the Old Testament, Melchizedek (the Lawgiver or True Teacher) and the young female Queen of Sheba, who would go on and give birth to the Ethiopian ‘messiah’ king from a union with Solomon. The triangle Hancock could draw was a sacred symbol of the divine trinity, which will become all the more important.

 

It will also be revealed to be the esoteric shape of the Tablets of Stone that Moses placed within the Ark. This left Hancock with a more exciting outcome to think about. Perhaps, he says, the people who were responsible for the north porch of the cathedral had drawn a “cryptic map” for the future generations to follow? Indeed, as Hancock asserts, this north porch was also known as the “door of the initiates.” [7]

Indeed, the door of the initiates had been giving guidance, but Gnostic guidance, for even the Latin inscription he found there, which Graham Hancock says was incorrect even with his “schoolboy Latin” was not incorrect at the time of its carving. At this Medieval time, Latin was often misspelled and this has caused many misinterpretations to occur throughout history. The original Latin as Hancock points out of Archa Cederis and which very roughly translates as ‘you are to work through the Ark’ is in fact what those Medieval Masons were trying to get across. The Ark, as the centre point, between male and female opposites, is the place where we must be to produce the ‘good work’. It is the centre of the void and is access to the Otherworld where peace and heaven lay – within the mind of the adept.

The true union is also often portrayed as being divided or split in two. This is an indication of the truth, the enlightenment itself and the access to the divine, being lost.

Graham Phillips in his book The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant tells us about the Ark and reveals this symbolism:

“As there is no further mention of it [the Ark] being used again, either as a weapon or for communing with God, the general inference among biblical scholars is that its power was lost when the Israelites displeased God by dividing into two separate kingdoms after Solomon’s death.” [8]

Of course, this is true, and yet not. It is true, the Ark does disappear here and we almost never hear of it again. It is not true to say that it was lost because God was displeased at the division of the tribes. The tribes, symbolically, were divided because the one power holding them together had been the last vestiges of the wisdom of Solomon. Without this final strength the tribes could no longer hold together and division set in.

None of this happened and it is pure Gnostic language speaking to us across the pages of ‘religious’ and not ‘historical’ teaching. The truth of course is that the connection to God (our true self), imaged here by the Ark, is lost when we divide our minds and lose balance. This internal balance I spoke at length upon in Gnosis: The Secret of Solomon’s Temple Revealed. However I am not the first to come to these conclusions regarding the Ark and the esoteric links.

 

Philo of Alexandria, born around twenty years before Christ, was a Jewish philosopher and he is one of the only non-biblical sources to mention the Ark at all [9] implying it was not widely known as a Jewish concept. Although coming from a wealthy family, Philo was keen to see the inner and almost pagan traditions of spiritualism come to light. He did not remain focused on the fate of the Ark, but instead developed his belief that the Ark was a true key to real enlightenment.

Philo spent a considerable part of his life attempting to reconcile the differences that had emerged between Judaism and the Greek philosophers in the Greek cultural mixing bowl of Alexandria. He veered more strongly to pagan viewpoints and believed that one day his spirit would escape the flesh and return once more to the deity – in the same fashion as the Egyptians as we shall see. He said that the very Ark itself was the essence of the presence of God and everything sacred to the Jews.

 

It was the answer to the mysteries of divinity itself. Amazingly, because of Philo’s cosmopolitan religious viewpoint he even saw the Ark as having seven parts:

  1. The Ark itself

  2. The Law

  3. The mercy seat

  4. The two cherubim

  5. The voice of the divine

  6. The presence of the divinity

Each of these parts had mystical significance to Philo and each level ascended until it reached the actual presence of the Absolute Being which itself in Greek beliefs radiated the same divine light to which the Ark itself was said to radiate.

The Ark then was seen as the symbol of union or access even to God. It was a Gateway, just as Mary was the portal for Christ into this world, so too the Ark was a portal for God to speak to us from the Otherworld. In a return fashion, we could also ascend to the Otherworld via the Ark. Our ancestors would use this Ark, this boat to heaven, as a method of esoterically reaching the divine with all manner of requests and sacrifices. The dead were placed upon sacred boats and floated out to sea, either literally or upon the sea of the Otherworld.

In Ethiopia, where many claim the Ark to reside still, the dabtara are the lay clergy and they have many esoterically implied ways as we see in the book. The tabernacle of the Law (Ark) represents many things to these esoteric dabtara and one of these things is the Gateway:

“It is the mercy seat, a place of refuge, the altar, a place of forgiveness of sins, salvation, the gate of life….” [10]

Again in another of Stuart Munro-Hay’s works, The Ark of the Covenant, we find confirmation of the gate to God aspect:

“What are we hoping to find as we begin our search for it? What should it look like, and why should it matter? In even the most austere accounts of it, the Ark is the moral heart of the universe, containing the Law given by God. In more mystical or cosmic visions of it, the Ark is the navel of the earth, a microcosm or universe in miniature. It is a door to a higher world, an assurance of the presence of the divine.” [11]

Here we have the term “a door to a higher world” and even the “presence of the divine.” This is of course no different to the vesica piscis, Mary, the Grail and so many other esoteric devices. In fact the Grail itself has even been equated to the Shroud of Turin, due to the link between Joseph of Arimathea, who was involved with the burial of Jesus and who supposedly caught the blood of Christ from the Cross.

 

However as Ian Wilson in The Blood and the Shroud points out that researcher Dan Scavone looked into the earliest roots of the Grail legends and came away with some remarkable results. He first asked the question as to why Joseph of Arimathea was also associated with the Grail legends in the 12th and 13th centuries.

 

He found:

“…a little-known Georgian manuscript of the sixth-century that quite specifically and unmistakably described Joseph as collecting Jesus’ blood, not in any chalice or dish, as in the later stories, but in a shroud. In the words of the manuscript, in which Joseph speaks in the first person: ‘But I climbed Holy Golgotha, where the Lord’s cross stood, and collected in the headband and a large sheet the precious blood that had flowed from his holy side.’” [12]

It seems the Shroud, the chalice – often seen as a crescent moon and the Ark – itself imaged as the crescent moon – are all related. The crescent moon is the point between visible and invisible; between empty and full; it is between the opposites – like the Gateway, which is between gate posts.

The Gateway of course is between the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end, the creation and destruction, the way in and out. And yet it is also the very centre or navel of all things, because the true Gateway lies at the very centre of ourselves; at the centre of the atom or indeed the universe. Jewish Rabbis themselves attest to this fact:

“the Ark was in the exact centre of the whole world… standing on the starting point of the creation” [13].

The Ark was at the very centre of Eden and the Tabernacle or later on the Temple were representations of Eden, wherein would lie the Ark – the knowledge and Gateway to God. If we are indeed at the centre, we can see all things by simply looking around. Our vision is flawed if we have to look from opposing sides. From a psychological point of view, being centered is the same as being balanced and the same is true of our ancient Gnostic and esoteric beliefs.

Another clue to the Gateway struck me when I was reading Graham Phillips entertaining book The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant. Phillips points out that King David had ordered the Ark to be kept in a house of a Levite priest by the name of Obed-edom and where it remained for three months. The authors previous knowledge of Obed-Edom had lead him to assume that the four supposedly separate men named Obed-Edom in the Bible, were in fact all one man and were in fact the Levite priest.

 

Phillips points out that this priest was a Gittite or a Philistine of the city of Gath, to which the Ark in 1 Samuel 5:8-9 and 6:17 had brought disaster.

“King David conquered Gath (2 Samuel 8:1) and probably brought these Gittites with him back to Jerusalem. These Gittites worshipped Dagon who was the son of El, the Shining One and Asherah, the serpentine goddess found again and again in the Temple of Jerusalem throughout the Bible. Dagon of course is Odakon, Jonah or Oannes – all of which are fish-deities from which the Christian fish symbol, Bishop’s hat and associations of the Jesus with the fish, originates.

Even Herman Melville mentions Dagon in his infamous Moby Dick chapter LXVIII, “In fact, placed before the strict and piercing truth, this whole story will fare like that fish, flesh, and fowl idol of the Philistines, Dagon by name; who being planted before the ark of Israel, his horses head and both the palms of his hands fell off from him, and only the stump or fishy part of him remained.” [14]

Of course what Melville reveals here is the stark fact that the Ark stripped away all the ‘additions’, all the parts of the deity which were not ‘him’ and revealed the true fish deity beneath – whatever we wish that to be. The Ark then, can see straight through you and get to the truth- it is at the centre. Moby Dick is a tale full of symbolic language and reveals the journey of the ‘ark’ to capture and kill the nemesis of the Captain only to discover it is the self that is the true enemy. The fish is the animal our ancestors saw that could journey into the Otherworld – water – the same water that a boat or b’arque could sail upon.

So, what is it about Obed-Edom that is so remarkable that only he could be the one to guard the Ark?

Well, we do know that in 1 Chronicles 13:13-14 the Ark is said to have brought great blessings to the house of Obed-Edom and that afterwards David was able to move the Ark with great ‘gladness’ to Jerusalem where it remained in the tabernacle pending the erection of Solomon’s Temple. So Obed-Edom’s house was obviously something that was seen as beneficial to the Ark, and house generally meant whole family and tribe, rather than mere dwelling place.

 

In 1 Chronicles 16:5 and 16:38 Obed-Edom is called a Levite musician who ministers before the Ark and is given also another important role:

“And he [David] appointed some of the Levites to minister before the ark of the Lord, to commemorate, to thank, and to praise the Lord God of Israel: Asaph the chief, and next to him Zechariah, then Jeiel, Shemiramoth, Jehiel, Mattithaiah, Eliab, Benaiah and Obed-Edom.”

16: 5-

“… and Obed-Edom with his sixty-eight brethren, including Obed-Edom the son of Jeduthun, and Hosah, to be gatekeepers.”

16:38-

And of course this last role, of ‘gatekeeper’ is one of the most important roles for any Levite. According to the standard biblical dictionaries the gatekeeper was nothing more than somebody who collected offerings and generally cared for the temple grounds. But this denies the esoteric meaning and also neglects to wonder whether any of this was literally meant.

 

The truth is, that the temple, meaning ‘place of time’, was the ‘gateway’ to God and as the gatekeeper Obed-Edom was the guardian of the gateway to God and in this respect there is no wonder that he was able to protect the Ark, which was the portable gateway itself. The Ark somehow disappeared in Babylon, which means Gate of God – it went back. Later on in the reign of King Amaziah (2 Chronicles 25:24) another one by the title of Obed-Edom was the treasure keeper at the temple, a similar role.

These beautiful esoteric devices we find in the Bible and elsewhere are then not surprisingly re-used in Freemasonry:

“..the Lodge itself is perceived as a bridge between the material and spiritual worlds.” Laurence Gardner, The Shadow of Solomon [15]

 


The Coptic (Egyptian Christian Church) Clue to what’s in the Ark!


The Copts believed the Ark to be a wooden container for a chalice containing itself wine mixed with water during the liturgy. Called the maqta’, this chest occupies the central position on the altar and is known as the throne for the crucified Christ and as a saving device like the Ark of Noah or the blood of Christ himself. It also represents the Ark of the Covenant and the Virgin Mary, thus encompassing all three symbols of the “carrier” – the chalice (carrying the blood of Christ), the Ark (carrying God) and the Virgin (carrying the Son of God). [16]

The contents of the Ark then, whether New or Old Testament are divine power, energy, food, all of which equate to life. They are the food of the Otherworld, the nectar of the Gods, sustaining us both physically and spiritually – like the ba and ka of the ancient Egyptians. It was the very essence of life. But there was a New Testament Ark and she was known as Mary, the mother of Christ. And Christ himself was seen as the food of God presenting us with the new body and blood offering.



Mary as the vessel and Ark

Mary as the “Theotokos” was the God-bearer. She was the sacred vessel of the Son of God. In the Litany of Loretto from the sixteenth century she was known as the “spiritual vessel” or the “vessel of honour”. More importantly she was seen as arca foederis – the Ark of the Covenant.

“In the twelfth century, the redoubtable Saint Bernard of Clairvaux had also explicitly compared Mary to the Ark of the Covenant – indeed he had done so in a number of writings.”

The Sign and the Seal,

Graham Hancock [17].

Of course this very same Bernard is richly interwoven in the historical tapestry of the Knights Templar, who, whether we like it or not, seem to crop up in almost all of the Medieval mysteries and will do so again in spectacular fashion in my book. I also knew from my other works that Bernard certainly understood the Gnostic and esoteric elements of the many folk tales and even biblical traditions, the most profound of which were his connections to the ‘re-creation’ of the Grail myths, something Graham Hancock also points out on page 61 of The Sign and the Seal.

This association with Mary, also reveals why the Ark in Chartres Cathedral was seen by Hancock to be “moving towards Sheba”, as Sheba is nothing more than the pre-Marian female principle to Solomon’s male principle.

But I wanted to find some original texts speaking of Mary as the Ark or in similar fashion, just to convince myself that what Hancock and others were stating was true and so I searched. After hours of hunting and several coffees later I came across some liturgical texts (Menaia) translated by the Monastery of Saint Andrew the First Called in Manchester, England. These texts speak of the Mandylion, the image of Christ or Shroud, which we speak more of in the book, but are here amazingly related to the Ark and Mary. At Vespers, tone 2 is spoken “With garlands of praise” and it goes something like this:

“With what lips shall we, poor and worthless, call the Mother of God blest? She is more honored than creation and holier than the Cherubim and all the angels; she is the unshaken throne [mercy seat] of the King, the house in which the Most High made his dwelling; the salvation of the world; the hallowing of God, who on her Godly feast richly grants the faithful his great mercy.

What songs of awe did all the Apostles of the Word offer you then, O Virgin, as they stood around your death-bed and cried aloud with wonder: The Palace of the King departs, the Ark of hallowing is exalted. You gates be lifted up, that the gate of Gate may enter in great joy…The company of the Disciples is gathered from the ends of the earth in Gethsemane’s field, Mother of God, to bury your body which held God. Arise, O Lord, to your rest: you and the Ark of your holiness…”

Here, in this Greek text taken originally from the Apostoliki Diakonia in Athens we have confirmation that Mary is indeed seen as the Ark of holiness. And why was this Menaion written? To commemorate the moving of the cloth of Edessa (Antioch), the Mandylion or Icon of Jesus Christ. The words for Mary spoken in commemoration of the image of Christ, whom she had carried, as the Ark of holiness.

Mary then was the vessel of Christ, the enlightenment. She is not enlightenment itself, but the vessel of it, just as we ourselves are vessels of the light too; we just need to give birth. Mary was to pass the light of the Old to the New. She is the womb of wisdom, and if we are to follow the Bible and believe that Christ ‘is all and in all’, then we too should manifest our own Mary, our own vessel of grace and let Christ as the enlightenment, be born within us.

Christ is the light aspect, the shining element of the sun, like Horus of Egypt who is both the son of Isis (Mary) and Osiris (who is both the father of Horus and Horus reborn). This light must be reborn as Ra – the sun - each day in-order for the creative spark to continue and for life to carry on. This is the light of wisdom, not just the solar rays of the sun in the sky. We must find the creative spark within us to enable life to be born anew each day. It is a concept older than the Gnostics themselves and it is related to the sun because the sun gives life to everything on earth.



The Ark as the light of wisdom

“In this day, they that are submerged beneath the ocean of ancient Knowledge, and dwell within the ark of divine wisdom, forbid the people such idle pursuits.” [18]

The Ark is a symbol for the light of wisdom, so say certain key philosophers from our past. It is for this reason that it sheds light so bright that all shall be blinded. In the following Rosicrucian text we find the Ark explained from this perspective on many levels.

“In the westernmost end of this apartment, the western end of the whole Tabernacle, rested the "ARK OF THE COVENANT." It was a hollow receptacle containing the GOLDEN POT OF MANNA, AARON'S ROD THAT BUDDED, AND THE TABLES OF THE LAW which were given to Moses. While this Ark of the Covenant remained in the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, TWO STAVES WERE ALWAYS WITHIN THE FOUR RINGS OF THE ARK so that it could be picked up instantly and moved, but when the Ark as finally taken to Solomon's Temple, the staves were taken out.

 

This is very important in its symbolical significance. Above the Ark hovered the Cherubim, and between them dwelt the uncreated glory of God. "Three," said He to Moses, "I will meet with thee, and I will commune with thee from above the Mercy Seat, from between the two Cherubim which are upon the Ark of the Testimony.”

The glory of the Lord seen above the Mercy Seat was in the appearance of a cloud. The Lord said to Moses,

"Speak unto Aaron thy brother that he come not at all time into the Holiest Place within the veil before the Mercy Seat which is upon the Ark, that he die not, for I will appear in the cloud upon the Mercy Seat."

 

This manifestation of the divine presence was called among the Jews the Shekinah Glory. Its appearance was attended no doubt with a wonderful spiritual glory of which it is impossible to form any proper conception. Out of this cloud the voice of God was heard with deep solemnity when he was consulted on behalf of the people.

When the aspirant has qualified to enter into this place behind the second veil, he finds everything DARK to the physical eye, and it is necessary that he should have another light WITHIN. When he first came to the eastern Temple gate, he was "POOR, NAKED, AND BLIND," asking for LIGHT. He was then shown the dim light which appeared in the smoke above the Altar of sacrifice, and told that in order to advance he must kindle within himself that flame by remorse for wrongdoing. Later on he was shown the more excellent light in the East Room of the Tabernacle, which proceeded from the Seven-branched Candlestick; in other words he was given the light of knowledge and of reason that by it he might advance further upon the path.

 

But it was required that BY SERVICE he should evolve within himself and around himself another light, the golden "wedding garment," which is also THE CHRIST LIGHT OF THE SOUL BODY. By lives of service this glorious soul-substance gradually pervades his whole aura until it is ablaze with a golden light. Not until he has evolved this INNER illumination can he enter into the darkened precincts of the second Tabernacle, as the Most Holy place is sometimes called.” [19]

So, what we hear from this little piece is that the Temple and the Ark are in reality a kind of initiation into the deeper mysteries of God and that this results in our own inner illumination. What point is there then in searching for the real thing? In truth, even those authors who have claimed to have discovered the Ark itself have stumbled upon this ancient wisdom tradition. As Graham Hancock points out in his book, he was excited to find that a number of ancient Jewish traditions had “asserted” that the Ark itself was the “root of all knowledge.”

 

He points out that the golden lid itself, surmounted by the Cherubim, revealed the gift of knowledge, for:

“…the distinctive gift of the cherubim was knowledge…”

The Sign and the Seal,

Graham Hancock [20].

This of course is reference to the words of the philosopher and writer Philo of Alexandria (30 BC – 45 AD) who did not know what these cherubim looked like, but that they must somehow be symbolic of knowledge.

Because the existence of the Ark is taken literally, as if it really existed, the elements of light emissions have brought all manner of wonderful theories regarding their origin and intent. Graham Hancock, however, in The Sign and the Seal was much closer to the truth when he hit on the inspirational notion that the Ark was in fact no different to the Holy Grail. What Hancock discovered was that the image of the Ark and that of the Grail were said to give off a luminescence and when lost the holy of holies or even the land were plunged into darkness [21].

Chretien’s Grail was fashioned from ‘pure gold’ and the Ark overlaid with ‘pure gold.’ However, it seems that the gold was not the reason for the glowing light, which seems to have been down to the contents of the Grail as blood of Christ, or the Ark, being the tablets of the Law – both elements of the testament. It is supposedly the power and energy of God and nothing short of that. It was God’s hand, which inscribed the tablets and it was God’s blood in the chalice.

 

It was God’s power that made Moses face shine and it was the God within that made Mary the light bearer – not forgetting that this radiant Moses was himself “carried upon the Nile in the ark of bulrushes”. It was also the brilliant ‘shining’ light of Christ resurrected that imaged the Shroud as we shall see. In truth, the secret of the Ark, the Grail, Mary and the Shroud is nothing more, nor nothing less, than the power of the divine within. And we are told where to find this divine, within ourselves, in the midst, between man and woman, positive and negative in balance.

The fact that these are all esoteric devices does not however remove the fact that man has cleverly manifested real objects to portray the inner divine and so the search for the actual physical relics was not over. In fact it was just begun and the trail would lead me into the heart of an ancient and very secret society that claimed to hold the secrets. It would also lead me into the world of the Shroud…



Notes

1 The Shadow of Solomon, Laurence Gardner, Element, 2005, page 18
2 Ibid, page 24
3 The Ark of the Covenant, by Roderick Grierson and Stuart Munro-Hay, Phoenix, London, 2000, page 2
4 The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant, Stuart Munro-Hay, page 17
5 The Book Concerning The Tincture of the philosophers Written Against Those Sophists Born Since the Deluge, In the Age of Our Lord Jesus Christ, The Son of God by Ph. Theophrastus Bombast, of Hohenheim, Philosopher of the Monarchia, Prince of Spagyrists, Chief Astronomer, Surpassing Physician, and Trismegistus of Mechanical Arcana. Taken from Note 3 at the end of the book regarding The Book of the Revelation of Hermes as translated by Paracelsus.
6 The Sign and the Seal, Graham Hancock, Arrow, 1992, page 51
7 Ibid, page 55
8 The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant, Graham Phillips, Bear & Co, 2004 page 23
9 Philo, by F.H. Coulson, 12 volumes, Cambridge
10 The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant, Stuart Munro-Hay, page 47
11 The Ark of the Covenant, by Roderick Grierson and Stuart Munro-Hay, Phoenix, London, 2000, page 10
12 The Blood and the Shroud, Ian Wilson, Orion, 1998, page 197
13 Tanhuma, Kedoshin 10.
14 The Templars and the Ark of the Covenant, Graham Phillips, Bear & Co, 2004 page 22
15 The Shadow of Solomon, Laurence Gardner, Element, 2005, page 16
16 The Quest for the Ark of the Covenant, Stuart Munro-Hay, page 29
17 The Sign and the Seal, Graham Hancock, Arrow, 1992, page 59
18 Kitab-i-Iqan (Book of Certitude), part one.
19 Ancient and Modern Initiation by Max Heindel (1865-1919) The Rosicrucian Fellowship International.
20 The Sign and the Seal, Graham Hancock, Arrow, 1992, page 333.
21 Ibid, page 69

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The Ark, the Shroud, and Mary

The journey to discover the Ark of the Covenant has been taken by a great many people over time. It is a quest that does not differ from the search for the Holy Grail or the lost city state of Atlantis, and the reason for this is apparent in that nobody has yet discovered any real archaeological artifacts to prove its existence. This is about to change.

 

Please keep in mind that I cannot explain the full extent of the research in the book in this short article, but here is a taster.



My own journey began some time ago…

I was in Winchester, England and was taking in the wonderful medieval cathedral before giving a speech. I had my new digital camera clutched firmly in my grasp and was walking around like some kind of zombie, staring at the floors, walls, windows, ceiling and trying desperately not to miss anything.

I noticed a beautiful stone image of Prudence with the face of a woman on the front and a bearded male head on the back. I silently smiled and told myself that this was down to the wisdom of the union of opposites – whereby our Gnostic ancestors believed that true understanding could only be found in uniting the two elements of our psyche. Then, nearby I noticed another beautiful carving, this time with Moses leading his people out of Egypt. In the centre the people of Israel were carrying the Ark of the Covenant on large poles, in the background were the pyramids at Giza.

 

The Ark looked almost like a small reliquary box I had previously photographed at Kykkos Monastery in Cyprus – even though hundreds of miles and years separated the two. On the other side of this beautifully carved mausoleum was another wonderful image. This time Jesus is emerging from a coffer – again looking exactly like the Ark itself. He held the cross and was flanked by two praying angels as the Vesica Piscis or almond shape radiated light from behind him.

It struck me that the whole design was interrelated and was telling a story of the New Covenant or Testimony. The Ark was the old Covenant, now lost and Jesus was emerging from the Ark as the resurrection of the Testament. At that point, that singular moment in time I suddenly realized the truth of the Ark, the Shroud and indeed Mary. The rush to my head made me feel nauseous and it was all I could do to take a few photographs before making for the exit to get some air.

It is moments like this that make the role of the author and researcher worthwhile. It is like uncovering ancient and sacred treasure that has been lost for centuries. Ok, there are no fires, rats, rolling balls or guardians with guns trying to take a shot at you, but during the research for this book and DVD I uncovered truths which brought me closer to secret societies like never before. There were moments when I feared for my life and others of pure elation; moments when I became unnerved by power and others when I thought I was at a dead end. In each case, something would happen to alter my course and always around the corner I was to be completely surprised, whether pleasantly or not.

I also had a shock when I read the various books on the subject. You see I scoured the book shops, the internet and even had “my man” from a little old book store in the medieval streets of Lincoln pass the word around. Eventually I had gathered around me every book ever written on the Ark and most of those on the Shroud and Mary. As I sat in my little office I looked like some crazy ancient wizard surrounded by piles of fusty old books. Where to begin? Which book to read first? I closed my eyes placed out my hand and came back with an old book about sacred geometry that my book shop friend had recommended. And so, I settled back with a cup of tea and a cigar – my journey was about to begin.

The facts were so startling, so at odds with the base, cultural and current popular beliefs. I would often scream inside my mind at the lack of understanding shown by the one level perceptions of almost everybody I spoke to. Even many authors seemed to want to view the world according to how many books they could sell, regardless of the truth, which once shown stared them in the face.

 

Sadly, I could not tell the whole story to any one person short of my own wife for fear of giving too much away myself. The torment of the tale of the Ark is one I am sure I share with a great many researchers, authors and thinkers out there in the wide world – but I can now rest my soul and say, I am happy with what I have discovered.



The Ark

To almost the whole world the Ark of the Covenant is the sacred relic discovered by Indiana Jones in the infamous movie. It is a relic that has found links with the Knights Templar, the Cathars and Graham Hancock [1] claims exists in Axum in Ethiopia.

I searched through all these theories and found some truth in most. I trailed through Ethiopian lore, Egyptian b’arques and Templar intrigue and found the Ark in the mystical interpretations, rather than the physical form. In Ethiopia the tabot held sacred by the priesthood were copies of the tablets of the Law brought down from Mount Sinai by Moses and placed in the Ark. These tabot are then wrapped in shrouds, mimicking a mystical Ark.

 

In these sacred relics I found links with the ancient cabiri – the worship of stones fallen from heaven. But they were not the Ark of the Covenant and so I moved on and into India where my research led me on a trail into the heart of the cult of the Jagganath (Juggernaut) and the massive Ark that is processed through the streets still to this day. At last, this was a true physical form that mirrored the ancient Egyptian and Judaic concepts of God being carried in procession.

As I moved on I found more and more evidence for the actual Ark, let alone the re-produced versions made real by the Freemasons.



Mary

The contents of the Ark whether New or Old Testament are divine power, energy, and food, all of which equate to life. They are the food of the Otherworld, the nectar of the Gods, sustaining us both physically and spiritually – like the ba and ka of the ancient Egyptians. It is the very essence of life. But there was a New Testament Ark and she was known as Mary, the mother of Christ. And Christ himself was seen as the food of God presenting us with the new body and blood offering.

Mary as the “Theotokos” was the God-bearer. She was the sacred vessel of the Son of God. In the Litany of Loretto from the sixteenth century she was known as the “spiritual vessel” or the “vessel of honour”. More importantly she was seen as arca foederis – the Ark of the Covenant.

I travelled to Abu Gosh in Israel. There I found the overlaying of Mary on one of the very locations that the Ark resided. We also have a distinct correlation between Mary as the Christ carrier and the Ark as the carrier of God via the pamphlet Sister Josephine and the Ark of the Covenant (Sisters of St. Joseph of the Apparition and sold on site):

“.. the Church looks to Mary, Ark of the New Covenant… she like the Ark, was the repository of God’s presence… Mary… became the repository not simply of the tablets of the Law, but of the Law-giver Himself; not simply of the desert manna, but of the Living Bread from heaven.. Hence they called her by such titles as Abode of the King, Tabernacle of the Lord, Ark of Holiness, and Ark of the Covenant… as the David danced before the Ark, so the child in Elizabeth’s womb leapt for joy… She is the Inmost shrine, the Holy of Holies..”

What we have here clearly laid out and unopposed by the Catholic authorities is the statement that Mary is the new Ark of the Covenant – in that she represents the exact same thing – the connection to and gateway to God.

So the Ark and now Mary are God-carriers. They are the method of accessing the Divine. But the Shroud itself was also shown on the statue and of course, this too was a device to carry the slain God – it too was an Ark.



The Shroud

The Shroud of Turin is a pale yellow linen cloth that has been fought over both physically and textually for centuries. It is claimed by the ardent believers that the image, almost photographically imprinted on it, is that of Jesus Christ. To others it is a Medieval forgery carried out by Leonardo da Vinci [2]. In the 1980’s carbon 14 dating launched the Shroud once again onto the world headlines with so-called evidence that it was of a medieval date. However, ever since that fateful day there has been even more arguing and the latest ideas throw the dating backwards in time and refute the carbon 14 dating, which has been shown by several researchers to be highly flawed.

With this history and with the knowledge of the meaning behind the Shroud I marched headlong into a world of dispute. What I found was that the Shroud is highly likely from the first century; that it was the image of a high-adept or enlightened one, probably later known as Jesus, and that it was formed via an amazing science of sub-atomic radiation. It was in fact the result of a profound and sacred human physical reaction brought on by the mind.

I then discovered that this had been known for a very long time and then I made contact with an ancient Brotherhood who claimed to know who was behind the it all…



Notes

1 Hancock, Graham, The Sign and the Seal, Arrow, 2001
2 Picknett, Lynn, Prince, Clive, Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Truth Behind the Centuries-Long Conspiracy of Silence, Harpercollins, 1994

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