The Secret of the Holy Grail
What is the Grail?
In truth the Grail did not emerge strongly into the popular
culture until around the 12th and 13th centuries with the
familiar poems and stories written by Chretien de Troyes,
Wolfram von Echenbach and others, but traces of its idea in
Celtic cauldrons and various legends can and have been found. It
is believed basically and originally to be the cup that caught
the blood of Christ as he hung from the cross or was even used
by him at the last supper. The most recent beliefs are in stark
contrast to this and yet still back up the Christ mythos and
even various royalist propaganda as we shall see. Ever since the
publication of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail by the authors,
Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln in the early 80's we have had a
constant barrage of "bloodline" theories thrown at us,
culminating in The Da Vinci Code hysteria we see today. This
recent concept gives us the idea that the original word or words
used for the Grail; san graal in reality means 'Holy Blood'.
However, Walter Skeat (1835-1912 AD) was one of the greatest
investigators of the roots of the English language and in his
English Etymology, he points out that the etymology of the Holy
Grail:
' . . . was very early falsified by an intentional change from
San Greal (Holy Dish) to Sang Real (Royal Blood.)'
Skeat claims that the word was a corruption of the Low Latin,
cratella, a "small bowl," or "crater" which actually and
originally meant a bowl in which things were mixed, from the
Greek kpa - "I mix."
Of course, before the evidence in The Serpent Grail is released
then this etymology makes little or no sense, but as we shall
see, all shall become clear. But, there was more than the actual
etymology of the 80's theory that we needed to look at, in-order
to "prove it to be incorrect" as we believed it was. In the
first place and most strongly we have shown in the new book that
Christ, as a literal man, and in all likely-hood all those
surrounding him, may never have in fact existed and were created
elements of a much older mystical language of enlightenment.
Therefore both existing theories on the Holy Grail would fall.
There can be no chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper or a
vessel which caught his blood. There can also be no "children"
of Christ spawning the Merovingian lineage. There is in fact no
Bloodline at all and Christ is in reality an ancient serpent
archetypal deity, as too are St. John, Horus, Aesculapius and a
thousand others. In-order to disprove the bloodline theory we
also have to look at the infamous Priory of Sion nonsense. For
those who know nothing of this Priory, it is simply a
re-creation of a supposed secret organisation said to protect
the bloodline of Christ by the fraudster Pierre Plantard. Indeed
we even got hold of his early "Newsletters" and found that they
were nothing more than a kind of 'neighbourhood watch'. We shall
reveal in our new version of The Shining Ones (due Sept 2006)
that the whole thing was a complete fraud to bolster the ego of
Mr Plantard and make money for the local hotelier at Rennes.
Three levels of our Grail re-analysis.
So, with all this in mind we needed to completely re-appraise
the whole mythos of the Grail and what we were to find was
startling. There is the obvious tradition that the Grail is a
journey, a method of self improvement and we looked into all the
texts we could find with this Gnostic viewpoint in mind. We
found that this was completely correct and that Grail literature
was in reality hiding the Gnostic traditions of the "mixing of
the opposites". This is in essence where the split personalities
of the "mind" are re-joined repetitively in-order to "make the
perfect man" - symbolised by alchemists as the Androgyne or
Hermaphrodite (Hermes and Aphrodite, man and woman united within
us). The process is of course much deeper than this and would
take too long to explain in full, suffice it to say that this
mixing procedure occurred in the "brain" and therefore the
skull, and was envisaged in colours symbolically as red and
white. This brain or skull location became apparent in other
cultures from where the European Gnostic ideas had also arisen,
one of these being the Tantric Skull cups of India and even in
the story of Christ as he spills his sacrificial blood at
Golgotha - the place of the skull. In essence the whole mystical
process was virtually the same the world over and is commonly
known today as the Kundalini. This is an Eastern tradition of
attaining enlightenment and means coiled serpent. It is the
method of raising up twin serpents through a specific
psychological process until one is completely illuminated -
obtained the Grail. In each case, from around the world, this
process related to the serpent or snake or dragon, each one
being for this mythical purpose the same thing. It can be seen
clearly today in the infamous image of the Caduceus upon medical
insignia, ambulances, hospitals and elsewhere. It can also be
seen in the powerful representation of the Uraeus serpent, which
emerges from the forehead of the Egyptian pharaohs. Now what we
discovered during the course of our research was the amazing
occurrence of the serpent in myth, folklore and religion across
the entire world and in every period. We can see its origins
even as far back as ancient Africa where even today the serpent
is pinned to a tree or cross as a sacrifice for the community.
This is a continuance of a system, which stretches back in time
for thousands of years. It is a symbolic element but it also has
a practical level, as we shall see. Even as late as the 16th
century there were German coins caller Thalers with Christ on
the cross on one side and a snake on a cross on the reverse. The
image was said to depict the "all-healer." We can also see the
serpent influence in the Bible as early as Adam and Eve. Believe
it or not, Eve actually means female serpent, coming from the
root hawwah or hevviah, and is derived from, amongst others, the
goddess Ninlil the Sumerian serpent deity also associated with
the goddess Asherah, who was seen in the Temple of Jerusalem as
a tree entwined with serpents. Even the constellation "serpens"
was called "little eve" by certain Arabs. Adam was fabled to be
the father of Seth, who was called the "Son of Serpents". The
serpent was not bringing mankind down at all - he was making
Adam and Eve like "God", he was bestowing the ultimate
knowledge. This is Gnostic language for the very knowledge to be
found within oneself via the union of the male and female
opposites and a whole process of psychological growth imaged as
the Kundalini. We even see the ultimate image of Godhead or
enlightenment in the aura or halo seen around the heads of
saints. This image we show derived from the hooded cobra of
India as a symbol of immortality and divine serpentine wisdom.
In Malta we uncovered elongated skulls of certain priests dating
right back to the Temple building era. These skulls were created
using planks of wood on the heads of babies, in-order to make
the individual appear serpent headed, with long drawn eyes and
stretched skin. These people were known as serpent priests and
the elongation of the skulls made the glands in the brain
secrete certain mind or conscious altering inducing hormones,
beneficial to the enlightenment experience and altered states of
consciousness. Of course Malta itself is overrun with serpent
folklore, the latest being that of St. Paul. This is a story
created in the 13th century whereby St. Paul is said to have
shipwrecked on Malta and subdued the vicious serpents and then
to have gone on and healed people with his new found serpentine
power. Of course none of this happened, but you can't knock the
Christians for their marketing skills. Having now, we believe,
sufficiently proven the fact of worldwide serpent worship, and
basically reinforced what certain Victorian scholars had failed
to bring full weight to because of Christian fear, we moved on
and into each and everyone of these traditions. In each case the
serpent or snake was a symbol of wisdom and immortality. The
wisdom element of the serpent could now be explained via the
"awakening" of the "coiled serpent" or Kundalini process, but
this did not entirely explain the immortality aspect of the
serpent symbolism. For an explanation of this we had to turn to
science, and it was really here that the whole process had
started in the first place.
The Elixir
Before I had ever thought about writing a book on the Grail,
Elixir or Philosophers Stone, I had released The Shining Ones
and had just finished doing lots of publicity and radio. I was
now, at this stage, looking around for something else to have a
go at. Well, one night I lay in bed reading some fusty old book
about alchemy. I know others might have different ideas about
what to do in bed, but this is my normal nightly routine - I am
a real life Casanova. It was about 1:00 am and I was having a
cup of tea, when my wife, who was reading her medical journals,
said something about snake venom and T-cells. It didn't make any
sense so I asked her to elucidate. She explained that scientists
had found that certain elements of snake venom had been recently
found to help T-cell replication. T-cells she said were the
things that helped our immune system - keeping us alive. Well,
my mind went into overdrive as I already even at this stage knew
a lot about serpents, dragons and their symbolic elements in the
legends of Arthur and others. I instantly knew or was
"enlightened" to the fact that this was a physical side of the
symbolic immortality of the snake and so two years of research
began into the snake, its myths and now, science. What I found
following an awful lot of scientific research and cross checking
was that the unique proteins, peptides, polypeptides and enzymes
found within snake venom had in fact been used by ancient man
for thousands of years in all kinds of medical applications and
that it was even amazingly mixed with the snakes or a hosts
blood. This was the red and white mixing together to aid the
health and boost the life of the individual. We amazingly found
that this was mixed within a "mixing bowl" or skull and then
drunk as an Elixir of Life and that this had then come down to
us as one of the elements of the Holy Grail. As snake venom is
by dry weight 90% protein, the substance was also made into a
"stone" or pill. We also found that snake venom has psychoactive
properties which induce altered states of consciousness and
mystical experiences, much akin to those needed for the true
enlightenment experience. It was therefore seen physically as a
method of meeting with the "gods". In both ways then, as a
serious vitamin pill and as a key to the mystical world, the
venom of the snake was a unique product. To add to this we then
found that the same "Christ" who it was said provided the blood
of "everlasting life" in the chalice, was seen originally in
early Christian and Gnostic cults, such as the Ophites or snake
worshippers, as nothing more than a serpent himself! "Just as
Moses lifted up the brazen serpent in the wilderness, so too
must Christ be lifted up" - says the Bible and so he was. Early
Christians even had a Eucharist of the Agathodemon or "good
serpent", enacted with live snakes and a special chalice, and
this became the fabled Holy Grail we all know so well today. In
the early years of Christianity Jesus was even imaged as a snake
on a Tau cross. Going back to ancient Africa though, we noted
the similarity even here of the crucified Christ and the serpent
pinned to the tree. But what we also found was that these same
people were then actually taking the various parts of the snake
and using them for healing, with the saliva or venom producing
glands being the most treasured. Another side effect of taking
the snake venom is the genetic malformations created by the huge
amounts of protein and one of these malformations is cranial -
thereby elongating the skull, just as those we found on Malta.
Conclusion
Although we do not have the space to explain the Philosophers
Stone in this short article, we did find that this truly
represented both the Gnostic and duality aspect of the wisdom
side of the serpent and also was used as a cover for the true
mixing of the venom and blood within alchemical texts. As the
infamous grail author Wolfram von Echenbach himself claimed that
the stone and the grail were one and the same, we indeed found
this to be the case. Basically then, the whole Grail mythos is
wrong. Not just the latest "bloodline" theory, but also the
original concept of it being the literal cup which caught the
blood of Christ. In fact this element of the myth is symbolic
and should remain as such, for Christ as the good serpent did
provide his true Elixir of eternal life, in both Gnostic
psychological concepts such as the Kundalini and also in the
literal venom and blood of the snake. An indication of Christ as
the serpent was also found in the sloughing of skin. Snakes
regularly slough their skin and the ancients saw this as a
re-birth. This was copied with Christ entering the cave and
sloughing his shroud. Arthur, as a literary figure, was chosen
as the modern "saviour" to re-discover this chalice because he
was the Pendragon. Pen means head and therefore Arthur is the
head dragon or serpent, just as Jesus was. What we also find in
the book is that every single royal lineage on the globe has
claimed descent from the serpent. Whether it be the Merovingian
or the Chinese Dragon Emperors - they are all claiming to be
descended from the "bloodline" of the serpent! The history of
the world is certainly not as we once thought.