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Message: 10
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:00:38 -0800 (PST)
From: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Book Review: Genesis of the Grail Kings (part 1)
All views in this review are those of the writer only, and not those of
the PoS mailing list, which has no corporate views.
All views are In My Opinion. This phrase should be taken as read before
any and every assertion herein.
'Genesis of the Grail Kings' by Laurence Gardner - a review
The publication of this book, the follow-up to 'Bloodline of the Holy
Grail', has been delayed at least twice, for reasons to which this
reviewer is not privy; but it's at last available, in the UK at least,
from Bantam Press (ISBN 0593 044304, 16.99 UKP).
In some ways, all you need to know about the volume is contained upon
the cover. The book's subtitle is given there: 'The Pendragon Legacy of
Adam and Eve', and it is accompanied by a design which combines the
female/Venus symbol used in the biological sciences, with a golden
dragon, crowned and devouring its own (blood-red) tail. If you were
expecting words about the Dragon Order, antediluvian extraterrestrial
activity a la Sitchin, and the immortality-bestowing properties of the
Lunar Menstruum, you will not be disappointed.
Gardner's thesis is essentially that ancient Egyptian royalty and
priesthood were not only descended from extraterrestrials - the ophidian
Watchers (nephilim) of the Bible and elsewhere - but possessed knowledge
of advanced technology which enabled them to prolong their lives for
hundreds of years, cure all known diseases and even practice antigravity
(handy for journeys to Sirius). Naturally, this knowledge has since been
lost, or more likely 'covered up' by the Established Church and other
wicked bodies, and is now known only to the few enlightened souls that
Gardner and his followers represent.
A vast congeries of disparate learning has gone into the writing of this
volume. The author displays knowledge of biblical criticism, of ancient
Hebrew, of ancient Near Eastern texts in many languages, and of the
latest, cutting-edge developments in genetics and cancer research.
Unfortunately, the _level_ of knowledge displayed in these different
areas is akin to that which might be gathered by browsing a few related
websites, or reading an undergraduate-level text with a certain amount
of haste and bias. Thus we find Gardner at one point stating, as if it
were a proven fact, that the Old Testament as we have it has all been
rewritten in their own interests by post-Babylonian Exile Hebrew
priests, thus modifying, misrepresenting or just plain omitting all of
the interesting stuff contained in the Enuma Elish and the Epic of
Gilgamesh; and in the next moment presenting the reader with the
staggeringly precise date of 3882 BCE for the birth of Adam.
This date is, of course, taken from the very same Old Testament text
(and calculated therefrom, as many of you will already have realised, by
Archbishop Ussher, of King James Version marginal notes fame) that
Gardner elsewhere rubbishes as secondary and barely worth the paper it's
written on, because it's been so heavily edited by the 'establishment'.
Despite this, for the birth of Adam and Adam's temporal relationship to
other developments in the Ancient Near East, the text is reliable,
apparently. It soon becomes all too evident that it has to be, because
without this superbly accurate - Ussher - date, quite a bit of Gardner's
argument falls to pieces.
The Usual Suspects put in their expected appearances. Antediluvian,
extraterrestrial (Blavatskyan/Lovecraftian) Serpent People, who came
from the stars (Sirius is strongly implied) and are those really
responsible for kicking off human evolution. The prehistoric Flood, and
the universal civilisation that preceded it. Alternative Egyptology,
which dates some Egyptian stuff - the Sphinx, for instance - so early
that it becomes part of the antediluvian civilisation theory. These all
take their place, and to be fair to Gardner, he does at least
acknowledge his sources in these fields. Akhenaten is identified with
Moses (begging all kinds of questions about the exodus of the Hebrews
from Egypt, and who led them - if it wasn't Moses, perhaps it was
another man of the same name?) and the supposed title of the Bloodline
Brides, Meriem, despite having a perfectly reasonable Hebrew meaning, is
_really_ derived from the Egyptian syllable Mery, meaning Beloved, which
recurs amongst the royal women of the Amarna Age.
Much of this will be familiar to many readers, both of Gardner's earlier
book and of Sitchin, Velikovsky and the more recent Alternative
Egyptology writers. Where Gardner differs (the only respect, really, in
which he displays originality) from all these writers, some of whom are
on the fringe even of a fringe field, is in his tying-in of all these
things with the Grail bloodline and the Princes of the House of David.
Moses/Akhenaten was the real forefather of the Grail bloodline, although
earlier Egyptian Kings bore the blood of the Watchers and had known the
secrets of longevity and immortality. It was Moses who became a
monotheist, and who led to the rejection of idolatry by the Hebrew
people and their settlement of the Promised Land. From the family of
Moses, David was descended, and from him descends Jesus, who, with his
(first of two, according to Gardner!) wife, Mary Magdalene, had the
children who became the forefathers of the Merovingians and transmitted
the Divine Bloodline to the royal houses of Europe. The reason Moses was
so special was twofold: first, he was the direct descendant of the
ancient Watchers, and had the divine blood in his veins. Second, he was
an initiate of the secrets of the Starfire and the White Gold, and
transmitted them to his descendants, including Joseph, Jesus's father;
for according to Gardner, 'tekton' doesn't mean 'builder', let alone
'carpenter', but 'Master Metallurgist'.
This despite the fact that every Greek lexicon in the whole world gives
the meaning of 'tekton' as, precisely, 'builder', because that is what
the word means. A minor quibble, of course.
This, I guess, will be the main reason a lot of people will read this
book. There's been a certain amount of publicity - not least from
Gardner himself - about 'starfire' and 'white powder gold', and it's
been suggested several times that this book would reveal the secret.
Well, it does. Sort of.
First, there's the 'starfire', which, as a number of listmembers will
not be surprised to learn, is equated to a certain product of the
menstrual flow of the 'divine bloodline' women, acting as priestesses to
transmit this elixir of life, 'liquid intelligence', to the initiates.
This is far from original. Writers on the subject of Sex Magick have
been making similar claims, not of any particular bloodline but
potentially of _all_ men and women, for decades, both within and without
the OTO. Peter Redgrove's 'The Black Goddess and the Sixth Sense'
contains an explicit description of such a ritual, even including the
phrase 'liquid intelligence', and it was written by someone who's not -
consciously! - an initiate of _any_ 'mystical tradition'.
Then there's the white gold - allegedly gold atoms propelled by some
smelting process (!!) into a 'high-spin state', where they are not
capable of forming chemical bonds, remaining separate and having the
appearance of a white powder. Aside from the inherent implausibility of
the idea that effects can be had upon the spin of electrons within an
individual atom through a _smelting_ process, no matter at how high a
heat (such effects do not occur even within the sun's nucleus - did the
Egyptians have furnaces capable of reaching a higher temperature than
that?), Gardner is curiously reticent both about the relationship of
this powder to the starfire menstruum, and to the other
fringe-scientific notions he invokes. It's not clear, for instance,
whether the Egyptian priesthood were smelting (smelting! Geez, I love
this!) monoatomic gold from metallic gold, or from some product of the
priestesses' bodies, or both.
Also, while he clearly thinks it's important, he doesn't seem entirely
certain what this white powder _does_. He hints at fantastical powers
possessed by metals treated in this way, and presents some extremely
'unusual' theories about the usage of such metals in the making of, for
instance, stained glass (where the monoatomic minerals returned to the
glass, in the form of light-energy, the 48% of their mass that they lose
to 'another dimension' in their manufacture; this is why certain stained
glass is so lustrous, and needless to say the secret of doing this was
possessed only by certain Master Masons who were guardians of the
Ancient Secret..._No_, Sir Laurence; metals were used by manufacturers
of stained glass because certain metals when oxidised and baked with
silica create coloured glass of various shades), but doesn't manage to
tell us of any single benefit that 'monoatomic' gold might have for
human beings, nor of what all this has to do with the menstruum.
I should add at this point that I'm not a chemist, nor an alchemist, and
am not qualified to comment on the existence or otherwise of
'monoatomic' materials. None the less, the method of manufacture
proposed by Gardner, which appears to produce cyclotron effects from
smelting-oven causes, appears, shall we say, implausible to me. As does
the idea that monoatomic metals, should they exist, might be good for
anything, let alone good for people. A monoatomic metal is, according to
Gardner, one whose atoms have been transmuted in some way, making them
incapable of forming chemical bonds. This is part of the definition, and
the reason why these metals are said to resemble a white powder, because
the individual atoms cannot bond with each other to form a solid mass.
But...if they can form no chemical bonds, they can't react with anything
- and so they can't interact with anything. _By definition_. By
Gardner's own definition, these substances are not capable of
interacting in any way with the human body, which is a biochemical
machine; in fact, they are even more chemically inert than the normal
metallic forms of gold, or whatever. He doesn't explain how it is that a
completely chemically inert substance can have the properties he
implies.
But rather than expand upon the properties of white powder gold,
Laurence goes on to invoke unusual qualities possessed by other metals
in the 'monoatomic' state; including rhodium, iridium and platinum. Here
we seem to be getting somewhere toward what so many hoped to see in this
book. Platinum, it appears, possesses unusual properties in this form
which are related to cancer treatment; can in fact provide a cure. But
this fact is being deliberately suppressed by big drug companies.
Again, I can only say, 'No, Sir Laurence'. If such a substance existed,
the drug companies wouldn't want to suppress it; rather, they'd be
falling over one another, kicking and gouging and generally fighting
dirty to patent and then market it, because anyone who discovers a
cure for cancer will make the biggest fortune in the whole world ever.
Cancer isn't going to go away. Even if someone were to come up with a
'magic bullet' cure which made cancer about as fearsome as the common
cold, someone would still have to manufacture that cure, and
therefore untold amounts of money would be made from it by the
patentee. The notion that
commercial companies might deliberately suppress such a thing is quite
absurd.
(It's true that there are cancer treatments around which are based upon
platinum. One of them, cisplatin, is widely used in the treatment of
late-stage ovarian cancer. Despite Gardner's claims, it is most
definitely a cytotoxic, with all the side effects and unpleasantness of
any cytotoxic drug. And what any of this has to do with his white powder
gold in the first place is completely beyond this reviewer.)
______________________________________________________________________________
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Message: 11
Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 19:05:39 -0800 (PST)
From: La Colombe <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Book Review: Genesis of the Grail Kings (part 2)
There's another strange claim in here, related both to cancer
treatments, and to other claims of Gardner regarding the secrets of the
Dragon Bloodline and its ancient longevity. Apparently, If a 'high-spin'
atom of platinum is attached - oh, so they can form chemical bonds with
things then! - to each end of a DNA strand within a cancer cell, the DNA
will be 'straightened out' and the cell containing that strand will be
restored to normality, curing the cancer. This is nonsense on several
grounds, not least that cancer is not caused by an abnormality within
the DNA of an individual cell, but even within the context of the book
it is strange. In fact, it conradicts what Gardner himself says earlier
in the book.
Gardner invokes the very recent and controversial research about DNA and
telomeres in his argument that the ancient Egyptian priesthood possessed
the secrets of immortality. Telomeres are regions at the end of DNA
sequences which break down with time and reproduction, and which
eventually cause the death of a cell line. When the telomere is gone,
the cell cannot reproduce, and will die. Cancer cells seem to have
immortal telomeres, apparently because they possess an abnormal quantity
of an enzyme called telomerase, which prevents telomere breakdown.
There's a whole lot of research going on at the moment, much of it from
commercial companies, on the subject of telomeres, telomerase, cancer
and the ageing process (it's an interesting exercise to enter
'telomerase' into a search engine and see what comes up; I guarantee
that at least two of the top ten hits will be on commercial sites,
probably concerned with anti-ageing). And telomerase is related somehow
to the Dragon Bloodline as well, though yet again Gardner doesn't make
it at all clear how. He merely implies that the Grail families, who
descend from the Watchers, have always known this stuff. Telomerase,
according to Gardner, is the secret behind both cancer cures and ageing;
in the first instance, one has to learn how to turn off cancer cells'
telomerase; in the second, to prevent ageing, one has to turn _on_ the
telomerase of normal cells.
So the cure for cancer is in telomerase, not in attaching high-spin
platinum atoms after all. Duhh.
Throughout his disquisition on the subject, Gardner writes as if we
would all be using telomerase _now_ to control ageing, if it were not
for the wickedness of commercial drug companies. He fails to realise
that most research on the subject is being carried out not by drug
companies (nor even by those sponsored by drug companies) but by
postdocs in universities; nor does he tell the reader what is the
factual state of research in this area, which is that absolutely nobody
has so far managed to work out how telomerase might be persuaded to
prevent the ageing of cells without causing them to become cancerous.
I find Gardner's claims in the health field in particular to be
ill-informed and potentially dangerous. He fails to convince about the
efficacy and indeed about the existence of 'monoatomic gold', failing
most notably to explain how a substance that's chemically inert by
definition can do anything at all within a human body; while telomerase
is not going to be available for clinical use for at least fifteen years
- if it ever is available. No lab has even reached the animal experiment
stage yet; everyone's still doing in-vitros. Clinical trials currently
look like a pipe-dream. He wriggles out from under the charge of
implausibility in the 'smelting' of monoatomic gold by refusing to
divulge the secret of the process, supposedly for safety reasons -
though he does imply it involves extreme heat. (I still don't understand
how this is supposed to affect the spin of electrons within individual
atoms.) And, faced with the facts about the true state of telomerase
research, he falls back on the old canard that 'big drug companies' are
'suppressing' vital data about miracle cancer cures. This charge is as
old as the hills, going back to the laetrile scandal and beyond (the
usual reason 'miracle cures' are 'suppressed' is because, like laetrile,
they, uh, _don't work_). I don't find this method of argument either
helpful or honest. Better to go to that search engine, enter
'telomerase', and have a look for yourself.
There's lots of other stuff to pick on. There is enough fake etymology
to keep a professor of philology in work for a year; the alleged
linguistic derivations of 'adam' and 'human' alone are worth a few
minutes for a boggle and a giggle. A certain lack of candour is visible
in his quotation of sources; at one point (p. 206) he appears to be
quoting Andrei Sakharov (intensely respectable mainstream physicist and
Nobel Prize winner) on monoatomic materials, but if the paragraph is
read carefully, it is apparent that the work he is quoting was actually
done by Hal Puthoff (well known in New Age fringe science circles) and
published through a lecture in Nexus magazine, not in any physics
journal. And while Sakharov's work on gravity is certainly mentioned, it
has nothing to do with 'monoatomic materials' - save that the word
'gravity' appears in Puthoff's definition of these substances!
As part of his argument that the Hebrews _really_ worshipped the
Egyptian deities (before the wicked editors got at the texts), Gardner
cites the bit from Exodus where Moses comes down from the mountain for
the second time, with the Tablets of the Law, and has 'horns' on his
head. These 'horns', Gardner alleges, indicate that Moses was actually a
priest of Hathor, whose symbol was the crescent moon.
Unfortunately, the concept of Moses having 'horns' is a touch old
fashioned. It's been known for at least two centuries that the King
James version of the Bible mistranslated the description here, relying
too heavily on the Vulgate. In the Hebrew, 'the skin of Moses's face
shone' because he had seen the Lord. Some oldish Bibles have
illustrations which provide a compromise between the two versions,
showing Moses with 'horns' made of light; but even schoolchildren's
retellings of Bible stories did away with Moses's horns in Victorian
times. That Gardner doesn't know this, with all the spectacular
assertions that he does make, is deeply worrying.
I could go on (and on, and on), but probably shouldn't. Instead, to
summarise: with Gardner, and especially with the publicity that has
surrounded the approaching publication of this book, I suspect that one
will get what one expects. If you like Sitchin-style speculation, and
fringe science, you will probably love this book, and consider it good
value for money at its moderately high price. If, on the other hand, you
are more interested in either the nuts-and-bolts historical research
side of the PoS mystery, or in the religious implications, you will
probably be driven to distraction by Gardner's careless-to-irresponsible
use of his many sources, by his pretension, and by his pompous,
no-argument-will-be-brooked literary style.
Spotting his political agenda, if there is one, is not easy. Presumably
he envisages the restoration to some type of rule of the ancient Dragon
Line, the Pendragons, descendants both of King David and of Jesus
Christ, but whether these rulers will have anything more to offer than
their ancient ancestors did (who noticeably failed either to reach the
stars or to become immortal; all this would be a tad more convincing if
King Akhenaten regularly stood beside Garder on his lucrative New Age
lecture platforms), is anybody's guess.
And of course, there's the other question, which is exactly who Gardner
considers to be the genuine Pendragon Heir today. This book doesn't tell
us explicitly, though the presence of an introduction by 'Prince'
Nicholas de Vere may give a clue; and it seems as though he's changed
his mind at least once in the past year. We may yet find out, though.
The preface to 'Genesis of the Grail Kings' describes the book as 'the
second in a proposed Grail-related series'. I'd make plans to leave the
planet now ;-)
v.
PS Yes, there really is a whole appendix about Vlad Drakula.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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