His
disciples asked of Him, AMaster,
when will the Kingdom come?@ And He answered them, saying:
“It will not come by waiting and watching for it. Be wary of those who say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘Look, there it is.’ Because my Father’s Kingdom is spread out upon the Earth, and people do not see it.”
The Gospel of Judas Thomas the Twin, verse 113
To that inspired reader who has followed me diligently through each twist and turn of my argument to arrive at this juncture ― the stepping off point of the last lap of our mystical marathon― it must seem that we have been navigating a great Labyrinth. Together, we have sought the Center of this Labyrinth ― this thing of which we feel, with a sense of compelling immediacy, that all of our souls are a part. Many are those of our initial company, I am sure, who have not reached this point because they simply cannot comprehend why the path to the Center needs to be so circuitous, why it seems so incessantly to swerve back and forth along tangents rather than to proceed directly to the Heart of the Matter. And for those who ― perhaps despite the same misgivings ― have persevered in this quest of ours, it is doubtless still not very clear where the “Heart of the Matter” lies... much less what we will find when we get there.
While remaining painfully aware of what we don’t know, however, we surely cannot be said to be merely groping our way toward the Center, with only a blind faith as our guide. If we seek the Heart of the Matter, we do so, by now, with a certain awareness of what that Heart signifies. It has a significance which embraces the iconography of Mary’s Immaculate Heart and the Sacred Heart of her Son. It speaks to an Indwelling Glory that does not stand above and separate from the Universe of Matter, but rather abides most deeply within it, rendering it sublime. It is as if the Hearts of the Mother and Son are the two poles of a great spiritual magnet which vitally and totally transforms Matter itself into something divine, weaving its discordant fibers into a resplendent Wedding Garment.
All of this merely reiterates what we already know. But there is something further, something absolutely crucial and indispensable, which we are obliged to consider now in this, the windup of our metaphysical tour. This marvelous transformation, this divinization of the material universe― as Teilhard de Chardin conceived it― is not and cannot be the work of either the Son or the Mother alone. That is to say, the supernal magnetism which compels the sundry particles of Being to align themselves to its field ― this magnetism is necessarily a force that proceeds from the Male and the Female together. Such a radical proposition as this one compels us to re-think a whole host of assumptions that underlie much of mankind’s religious thinking. And as we reconsider these assumptions, we will begin to realize that they form the crux, the axis of a body of Falsehood which has been furtively assembling itself over the past two thousand years.
We have discussed dualism, a heresy which seeks to divide Matter and Spirit and which ultimately leads to the conclusion that there is not one God but two ― one of whom is the malignant creator of an utterly hellish material universe. We have reviewed various prophetic intimations foreshadowing a false Messiah, the False Christ whose teaching will be rooted in a form of this dualistic heresy. Like the storied Hydra, dualism has many heads, a number of which it has reared up over the course of centuries past. As we survey some of these “severed heads” ― those of the Manichees, Gnostics, Templars, Cathars, Rosicrucians, Freemasons ― we may be tempted to eye their unsavory remains as the gestating embryo of the ultimate Man of Sin. But we err gravely and disastrously if we yield to this temptation.
This is because, as prophecy informs us, the Hydra of dualism has yet to rear what is by far its most subtle and seductive head. This one will spawn no mere heretical sect, but will form the basis of a Universal Church in which the major religions of the World will, for a time, merge. What is this more subtle form of dualism, and why will it be so irresistibly seductive? To answer those questions, we must proceed as spiritual physicians, examining the collective Body of Man for signs of the onset of a deadly malady. When we do so, we find the most obvious symptoms of pathology all radiating from one telltale source ― human sexuality. From the very beginning of this eschatological inquiry of ours, we have identified, as a principal cause of the deepening crisis of Faith in modern times, the pathetic incapacity of the Roman Papacy to deal with the “problem” of Man’s sexual nature.
This incapacity is no merely fortuitous, unfortunate shortcoming, but is the inevitable epiphenomenon ― the accompanying fever, if you will ― of infection by the virus of dualism. Like any virus, this one is capable of mimicking Life without actually partaking of it. A virus is the sterile monad that monotonously replicates itself, while Life proliferates in a myriad of ramifications, just as does the Tree, its archetype. Flowing through the stem of Creation, the sap of Life thrusts its branches in all directions... and yet always toward the Center, which surrounds and embraces it. And when we speak of Life on this Earth, we do not speak of anything that is distinct or different from Life Eternal ― because the same Tree of Life extends from its roots in our hallowed soil (which is the dust of our ancestors) to the uppermost mansions of Heaven.
This line of thinking leads us inexorably to the principle that nothing which truly belongs to Life is alien to God. We can no more speak of Life without the Male and the Female than we can speak of the Ocean without water. It follows, then, that the sexual nature of Life is a reflection of the sexual nature of God, and that Male and Female are spiritual, as well as biological, attributes.
It’s significant that, historically, dualists have always taken one of two approaches toward sexuality. Some, like the medieval Bogomils (whose name gives us the term “bugger”), wantonly indulged every conceivable carnal appetite based on the conviction that Man’s “animal nature” belongs to a plane of reality totally cut-off from the “spiritual”. Since no degree of degradation of the Flesh, no matter how extreme, could possibly taint the Spirit ― so they believed ― such degradation is the proper expression of contempt for all things of the Flesh. We can easily discern that this viewpoint is not a bit different from that of the ascetic, who denies himself the slightest enjoyment of the “animal” pleasures, seeking to “mortify” (i.e., “deaden”) the Flesh. And in history we find strict asceticism as the alternate accommodation to sexuality on the part of some dualists ― the Cathars among them.
While the modern Church hierarchy by no means eschews asceticism ― the Opus Dei crowd is quite big on “mortification” ― they don’t prescribe it as the only road to salvation either. After all, the Pope is a temporal sovereign as well as a spiritual leader, and it doesn’t do much for a sovereign’s long-term prospects if his subjects stop copulating. Consequently, with the reassuring ― if dead ― hand of Aristotle resting on their shoulder, the Pontiffs of Rome have taken a quite utilitarian posture regarding sex ― acknowledging that certain otherwise-unedifying behavior must be occasionally sanctioned for the sake of procreation. For the sake of procreation alone ― this teaching implies ― we are Male and Female, with our true spiritual nature presumed to be androgynous, like that of the Angels.
If there are androgynous Angels, however, they are most assuredly those of the Fallen variety, because without the energizing magnetism of the sexual poles there is neither Life nor ascent toward the Godhead. We are created Male and Female ― both natures present within each of us, as they were within our first father Adam ― that we may enjoy a spiritual conjugation with Our Creator. We envision our deities in the bipolar format of Father/Husband/Son and Mother/Bride/Sister, not because of our need to translate transcendent things into a familiar framework, but as a precise visceral perception of the fundamental structure of ultimate Reality.
Our one road back to the bosom of Our Lord lies not in the overcoming of our sexual nature, but in its apotheosis. That is the true nature of the Wedding which awaits us in the Resurrection of the Body.
As my reader surely has already surmised, the true Quest of the Grail comprises the final path to this Divine conjugation, the last portal through which we pass on our way to the embrace of our most beloved Bridegroom, who is the Messiah. Since we are to become one with Him in the Body, can there be any doubt but that His embrace will be not merely sexual, but the ultimate refinement and quintessence of sexuality? And if we are to enter into this sublime union with Him, if we are to be His Bride, must we not only be One among each other, but ― first and foremost ― One within ourselves?
Christ’s principal mission in entering this World as an incarnate Man was to establish his Church as the vehicle for attaining the Oneness of humanity, which is the precondition of his return. Accordingly, our Quest of the Grail cannot proceed without reference to the Church, cannot proceed without engaging her both in her purest ideal ― corresponding to the archetype of the Blessed Virgin ― and in her fallen and degraded state of harlotry in history. As the Virgin, she lovingly guides her children toward the fulfillment of their spiritual destiny. But as the Whore, she blocks the way to their salvation and, ultimately, offers them up in abominable sacrifice to her procurer, the Prince of this World.
I am certain my reader has some acquaintance with the romantic literature of the Grail which vividly portrays the treachery and danger attendant upon the pursuit of that glittering icon. And here we begin to descry the source of this deadly peril, because in this selfsame path to Our Lord, we must inevitably encounter ― within ourselves ― His most bitter and implacable rival. Before we drink from the golden Cup of our celestial Wedding feast, we must first drain the gall of another cup ― the envenomed blood of a dynasty founded by our great-uncle Cain. To the ultimate scion of that damned lineage, prophecy informs us, the Church-cum-Whore must first be joined in a calamitous tryst ― a tryst destined to be “uncovered” in the impending Apocalypse.
If St. Malachy’s epithet “the Eclipse of the Sun” means anything at all, it indelibly marks the Pontiff whom it describes as a bellwether of sorts, destined to lead his flock in the most profound shadows of spiritual opacity. It is as though the final scenes enacted by the erstwhile Polish actor are meant to set the stage for the much-anticipated entrance of the Persona around whom the entire drama of human history revolves. Throughout its length, the skein of Time fairly bristles with intimations of His Coming, as if the World were His shroud unraveling before our eyes. Considerably more difficult to fathom, however, is the provenance of His antagonist ― the Man of Sin ― whose sinister approach signals to us less in our dreams and visions than in the instinctive wrenching of our viscera. It is not so much that he comes upon us from our blind side, as that he is our blind side, the product of our truncated humanity. Like an amputated limb, he causes us pain while remaining inaccessible to our will.
Because temporal existence is a transient bifurcation of nullity, its only operative principle is symmetry. Therefore, if the World has been preparing itself for the Advent of the Messiah these past six thousand years, then it must be true that it has equally ― albeit more covertly ― been readying itself for the parousia of Antichrist. This helps explain why the panorama of human existence presents to us such a pitiable and disgraceful spectacle of inequity and gratuitous malice. Yet we are given this spectacle to observe, not that it may break our spirit with its relentless indifference, but that we might, at long last, recognize the abominable lineaments of Falsehood and separate ourselves from them.
How do we set about to do this?
Our predicament resembles that of the mythical hero trapped in the Labyrinth of the monstrous Minotaur. Like Theseus, we must find the end of the magical thread somewhere close at hand if we are to have any hope of following it out of the maze. And this is precisely where our bellwether Pope becomes so useful to us, because the trajectory of his exit from this World must merge, at some point, with the route of Antichrist’s entry ― just as the circuits of the Sun and Moon must cross during an eclipse. From this point of occlusion ― if we can detect it ― might it not be possible to grasp the end of a “thread” traceable back to its origins? Let us see.
During his travels during the autumn of 1996, the Pope cut a rather controversial path across the Nation of France ― the “eldest daughter of the Church” ― where he made two particularly intriguing stops. Arriving first in Tours, one of the most popular pilgrimage sites of the Middle Ages, he celebrated the 1600th anniversary of the death of St. Martin ― who argued in vain against the Church’s first resort to murder as a means of silencing heresy. From there Il Papa proceeded to Rheims, the ancient coronation site of French monarchs, to commemorate the 1500th anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, the Frankish king whose fabled bloodline ― we already know ― is so strangely enmeshed with the esoteric traditions of the Holy Grail.
That the Polish Pontiff should place his frail health at risk only weeks prior to what the Vatican would evasively label an “appendectomy” ― this clearly signaled to the World that something important was afoot. That he should further provoke a firestorm of outrage in what is surely the most proudly secular Nation on earth ― to this we can only ascribe the force of a divine mandate. From whence could such a mandate come? And from whom? Above the Bishop of Rome, the Church recognizes no higher temporal authority, and in its dogma no living mortal surpasses the spiritual authority which rests on the head that wears the tiara. Even as we pose these questions we begin to experience an eerie foreboding, as if we have begun to open the door to a long-sealed closet inhabited by ancestral ghosts ― not all of them friendly!
As usual we are, Janus-like, compelled to look backward to see forward. To make our task easier, our bellwether Pontiff has led us to Clovis, founder the Gallic Nation’s first royal dynasty, the Merovingians. A traditional story (but one strongly supported by genealogy) traces the bloodline of Clovis to the royal house of Priam, the first of the great kings of the Gentiles ― the kings with whom the Church has, from the time of Constantine, committed fornication. Ultimately, this genealogical trail leads us back to an ancestor named Antenor, a Scythian ruler of the 5th Century before Christ.[1]
At the time Antenor reigned, the Scythians were plundering nomadic horsemen of the Asian steppes ― the land from which prophecy suggests the Destroyer himself will come. Such masterful brigands they were, in fact, that a series of ancient wars were fought over naval access to their trading ports on the eastern side of the Black Sea. Whoever dominated the heights above the narrow straits of the Dardanelles controlled the flow of the golden booty. The Trojans’ success in commanding the strategic passage brought them unrivaled wealth ― along with nearly continuous assaults on their stronghold, culminating in the successful Greek siege immortalized in Homer’s epic.
My reader is familiar with the basic story of the Trojans and may even recall that something called the Palladium figures prominently in the plot. The Palladium is one of those objects, like the Grail, that defy description. From the bits of quantum physics which I have (I fear) force-fed my reader, he/she will perhaps associate this state of indeterminacy and ambivalence with the condition of the prima materia, i.e. Matter uninformed by Consciousness. Onto this subtextual layer of the formless, the ineffable One holographically imprints the contours of His Mind, and thus conceives the Son, the Word Made Flesh. The Kabbalists call this primal realm Malkuth, a precinct at once most holy and most profane, a place where Heaven and Earth and the Abyss touch one another. To the ancient priestesses of Athena ― the pagan personification of Logos ― the Palladium was a sacred stone that the goddess had cast down from Mt. Olympus. In that sense it resembles the Scriptural stone that Jacob consecrated at Bethel to mark the “ladder” connecting Heaven and Earth.[2]
According to the Iliad, the hidden cause of the calamitous fall of Troy lay in the treacherous theft of the Palladium from its temple sanctuary. After the death of Paris, Priam sent his closest advisor to the Greeks to see if a peace could be arranged involving the return of the now-widowed Helen. The king’s trusted emissary was none other than Antenor, the eponymous ancestor of our proto-Merovingian king Antenor of Scythia. Instead of offering the Greeks Helen, which would have removed the pretext of their attack, Antenor offered them Troy itself, on the condition that he be crowned the new ruler of the conquered city and receive half of Priam’s treasure. Such a betrayal ― while it resonates emphatically with the vile spirit of our own age ― in the classical world brought down the unending wrath of the ancestral Furies.
In the chansons de geste of medieval romance ― the genre that spawned the legends of the Grail Quest ― the name Antenor became synonymous with Judas. Dante even labeled a province in the deepest pit of Hell ― the Ninth Circle of the Traitors ― Antenora in his “honor”.[3] With the complicity of Antenor, the Greeks snatched the Palladium, and the city it had so long protected fell. The Trojan noblemen were all put to the sword, save only the two who had betrayed their own people: Antenor, the ancestor of Clovis, and Aeneas, the founder of Rome. As a sign to the marauding troops that Antenor was to be spared from the general slaughter, the Greeks draped over his door a leopard skin ― the same emblem by which we have come to recognize the Beast of Revelation.
Unlike the Greeks, the people of Ilium and its environs ― the Phrygians ― were a matriarchal culture whose religion revolved around a great Mother goddess, symbolically represented by the queen bee. Originally a benevolent Earth deity associated with fertility and nurturing, the Phrygian goddess became progressively transformed into a terrifying banshee whose worship demanded the emasculation and dismemberment of her priest-consorts. This hideous metamorphosis of the antediluvian “Great Goddess” was mirrored among the other ancient societies of the Mediterranean as they became submerged in the Arian Age of warfare and the culture of Death that it spawned.
Various mythical renderings of this transmogrification of the goddess were compiled by the Roman poet Ovid during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Finding Ovid’s depiction of the depravity of the pagan deities to be a “corrupting” influence on Roman youth, Caesar had the poet banished from Rome. Augustan culture instead conferred its laurels on Virgil, who had conveniently recast the Trojan traitor Aeneas ― Rome’s founding father ― as a hero. Among the tales in his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells of how the gentle matriarch of the Trojans, Queen Hecuba, was transmuted, after the brutal annihilation of her entire family, into a rabid bitch ― the infernal Hecate, goddess of Death incarnate.[4]
On the archetypal level, Ovid was portraying the effect of two thousand years of continuous warfare on human consciousness ― a traumatic, radical dissociation of the Male and Female principles of the psyche, with the latter exiled into the darkest recesses of fear and abomination. Gone was the all-giving, all-enduring Mother, and in her stead enshrined the ravenous she-wolf who devours her own young. Into the place of the loving companion and Bride stepped the tyrannical Queen Bee, who castrates and disembowels her unlucky consort. It is axiomatic that Man’s separation from God must finally lead to his separation from himself: In union with the Male, the Female principle is the source of Life, but in scission she is the Angel of Death.
For the Male principle, the consequences of this fission are even more dire. Divided from the feminine source of its activating energy, the masculine Will is mortally wounded, maimed, rendered impotent. No longer capable of true Desire, the Will becomes infected with concupiscence. The Male principle undergoes an archetypal metamorphosis of its own ― becoming the lecherous Satyr, the besotted Bacchus, the bestial Centaur. Meanwhile, the blockage of Affect from acting through the Will forces the irrepressible Female energy to find other outlets, manifesting itself in the ubiquitous compulsions and phobia which paralyze the Will, even in its own domain.
Ironically, the exile and demonization of the Female principle proves to be its salvation, because, while terribly disfigured, it nonetheless survives as a collective entity. Hence we can still speak of a Collective Unconscious, which all humans share ― but can we speak of a Collective Will? Alas, no longer in any human sense. Sadly, we are forced to acknowledge the death of the Male principle as a component of collective Man and its irretrievable disintegration into the individual Will, ruled by that malign spirit of pride and envy that distinguishes Satan.
In the parlance of the Grail Legend, this mortal wounding of the Male principle is known as the “Dolorous Stroke”. The “Maimed” or “Fisher” King inflicts this injury upon himself with the Lance of Longinus, which dispatched Jesus at Calvary and constitutes one the four Grail Hallows. Though sufficient to incapacitate the King, the Dolorous Stoke is not immediately deadly, and the wounded monarch limps about, spending most of his time “fishing”. From this perspective, then, it must strike us as a very odd “coincidence” indeed that the Merovingian descendants of Clovis were called les Rois fainéants ― the lethargic Kings!
As the Arian Age of the “hero” drew to a close, Mankind was in extremis, its Male principle hopelessly eviscerated and its Female nature banished to the dark night side of Consciousness. The reflexive concupiscence and violence which had supplanted the Will now turned to the relentless pursuit of the elusive Female ― a pursuit we find rendered as a recurring theme in classical mythology. Once again we turn to Ovid, the “politically incorrect” poet of Imperial Rome, for his account of the maiden Proserpina’s abduction at the hands of Pluto, the baleful Ruler of the Underworld.[5]
The tale begins with the maid’s mother, Ceres, goddess of the Earth’s fertility, mounting her dragon-drawn chariot to search for her missing daughter, Proserpina. In Sicily, Ceres paused to take a drink from a mountain spring called Arethusa ― Greek for “the Water Pourer” (a title which also describes the constellation Aquarius). As the goddess drew her draught, the stream began to speak to her of having spotted her lost child in the Underworld. Deducing that the abductor must therefore be the lascivious Pluto ― her equal in the ranks of the gods ― Ceres dismissed any designs of outfacing the tyrant of the Dead in his own den. She elected instead to retaliate by making the entire Earth fruitless and barren. The World was reduced to a desolate landscape, just as was the Wasteland realm of the Maimed King, according to the Grail Legend. Ceres’ stratagem quickly succeeded, as Jupiter commanded Pluto to restore her daughter to her. Soon thereafter, the Mother goddess returned to Sicily to thank Arethusa ― and to inquire how the maiden had come to assume the form of a stream.
Arethusa related how, as a virgin companion of the lunar goddess Diana, she had one day been bathing alone in an Arcadian stream called the Alpheius ― the same sacred river Alph that the poet Coleridge describes as flowing down into a Asunless sea@ (i.e. the Underworld). As she bathed, she heard the voice of the river god and, sensing that he was ravishing her, fled from his embraces. But the sight of her nakedness as she ran from him only fanned the flames of his ardor. At length no longer able to endure the chase, Arethusa called upon her patroness Diana, who transformed her into a stream. The lubricous Alpheius was not so easily discouraged, however, and, morphing himself back into a river, began to mix his waters with those of Arethusa. To evade his ruttish favors, she dove deep into the Earth, so far down that she reached the Underworld ― hence her knowledge of Proserpina’s whereabouts ― and then resurfaced again in Sicily, where Ceres had encountered her.
Before proceeding further, let’s step back for a moment to survey the path we have just traveled through the realms of myth. We observe that we have gone from Scythia to Troy, then to Arcadia, and now have landed in Sicily ― an itinerary remarkable for the fact that it exactly reproduces the legendary migrations of Clovis’ ancestors, the Sicambrian Franks.[6] From this correspondence, we can postulate an association of the bloodline of Clovis with the archetypal figure that has led us along this track ― the Maimed King, symbol of the fatally wounded Will, the lapsed Male principle. In the Grail Legend, the Maimed King yearns for his own death, but he cannot be released from his suffering until his lineage spawns the Desired Knight, the hero who will complete the sacred Quest. This chosen Knight is to be recognized by his acquisition of all four of the Grail Hallows. These comprise, in addition to the Lance previously mentioned, a sword, a dish, and ― most precious of all ― the Cup of Our Lord’s Last Supper. Before following the trail of the Merovingian bloodline any further, we must carefully probe the meaning concealed in these four relics.
Revealed Wisdom teaches us that, while the Eternal Kingdom is governed by the principle of Trinity, the temporal World is founded upon the Quaternity. Quaternity is intrinsic to the four Living Creatures of Ezekiel’s vision, because it mathematically describes the imprint that the Word makes upon Flesh. Accordingly, in the great drama of Christ’s Passion, we are not surprised to find that the sublime mementos that he left us are Four in number. The transition from the spiritual plane to the material plane is thus represented by the numbers Three and Four ― the Trinity of the Most High and the Quaternity of the World created in the image of the Word.
The archetypal meaning of the Lance of Longinus has already manifested itself to us. It is the instrument that fatally wounds the Fisher King … and yet he cannot die. What is it that is mortal, but cannot die? From the impenetrable forests where the River Danube meets the Black Sea ― part of the migration route of Clovis’ fabled ancestors ― come tales of the undead, the vampires of popular imagination. While the vampire must be classed with the witch and hobgoblin as a projection of the human psyche, however, that is not a cause for discounting it ― because the quarry we are pursuing in this prophetic voyage of ours consists largely of such projections. The vampire is no less Real for the fact of its nonexistence: It haunts the collective Mind of Man precisely because it conjures up ancestral memories.
As the instrument that took the life of the Son of Man, the Lance of Longinus is condemned to shed blood unceasingly. From the instant he pierced the side of Jesus with his weapon, the Roman centurion Gaius Longinus was struck blind, while the World fell into total darkness for three hours ― foreshadowing the three days of darkness that will precede Christ’s return. In one version of the Grail Legend, the Fisher King is revived with the blood dripping from the Lance, much as the vampire of folklore is said to require the periodic replenishment of human gore. But before we rush to reduce the Maimed King to a one-dimensional fiend, we do well to remind ourselves that we are treading here on sacred ground ― such as that which Jacob consecrated at Bethel with his stone ― the hallowed precinct where the three levels of the Unapparent come together.
Besides the stone marker he placed at Bethel, Jacob set up another pillar at Gilead, to mark the outer boundary of the land which Yahweh had given to His beloved people. Until the coming of Christ, the realms beyond the pillar of Gilead ― the kingdoms of the Gentiles ― dwelt in spiritual darkness. It is worthwhile to draw a parallel between the two pillars established by Jacob at Bethel and Gilead and the twin pillars that betokened the Punic god Moloch and his Greek counterpart Hercules ― both consumers of innocent blood for the sake of their accursed immortality. We have come to view the duality of these figures as the hallmark of Set/Satan, i.e. the principle of spiritual opacity and division from the One. And now, in the course of our current discussion, we have followed the emanation of this infernal duplicity up “Jacob’s ladder” to the level of the human soul, where it is mirrored in the radical breach between Male and Female.
Significantly, in the Grail Legend the pillar of Gilead imparts its name to the Desired Knight, Sir Galahad, whose worthiness to complete the Quest is founded upon his lineage. Galahad is descended from the House of David, i.e. the royal House of Judah, which is identified in Old Testament prophecy as the pedigree of the Messiah:
And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.[7]
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and a King shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth.[8]
Implicit in the scriptural imagery of the flowering rod or Branch of the Davidic bloodline is a heraldic motif that extends also to the bloody Lance of the Grail Hallows. In a very real sense, the Chosen Knight possesses the Lance as a blazon of his Messianic pedigree. Further, since the various renderings of the Grail story all cast this Knight as a direct descendant of the Fisher King, the latter must himself be a scion of the royal House of David. When the medieval troubadours sang of the Fisher King as the keeper of the mystical Sangraal, therefore, they were also extolling him as the ancestral source of the Sang real ― the “royal blood”, by virtue of which the last of his progeny would lay claim to the Messianic Kingship at the end of Time.
From my childhood days at St. Joseph’s elementary school in Union City, New Jersey, I can still picture the Saint’s statue cradling the infant Christ in one arm, while holding in the other a blossoming green branch. Since then I have seen countless similar depictions of Joseph bearing the branch that proclaims his place in the line of David ― the dynasty destined to bring forth the Messiah. But, according to symbolic usage, the flowering branch also signifies fertility, which begs the question: The fertility of whom? A father in the carnal sense may proudly display a symbol of his own virility when he carries his newborn son, but was Joseph the father of Jesus in the way of the Flesh? Mindful of the blessed virginity of his wife, we are at first inclined to deny this. Yet Christ had a human nature, and a human nature must be composed by the union of a man and a woman. If we are obsessed with the idea of virgin intacta, we can consider this union to have been transpiritual. Yet there remains the fact, as unequivocally reported by two of the Gospels,[9] that Joseph went on to father four more sons and several daughters after his firstborn. There having been no intercession of the Holy Spirit in these later conceptions, we are left to conclude that Mary and her husband were lovers in the most intimate natural sense.
The subject of an unspoken Church taboo, Mary’s fecundity is sublimated into icons ― such as the May Queen, the Easter lily, and the rose ― but it is nonetheless at the core of her nature and of the divinity of the Son born from her womb: It is precisely because the Male and Female principles are perfectly fused in the Messiah that he is divine. The source of this divinity informs his conquest of Death on the Cross, in which we find superimposed the vertical masculine line of the pillar and the horizontal feminine line of the sea. In view of this, we are left to wonder: If the image of St. Joseph’s flowering branch so richly illuminates the mystery of his son’s divine nature, might it not shed light as well upon the mystery of his abominable counterpart?
According to prophecy, the Man of Sin will convince the World that he is the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of Man. In spite of his many other talents, however, the Deceiver cannot be divine. It follows, therefore, that he must persuade humanity that the Messiah need not be divine and ― as a necessary corollary ― that Jesus himself was not divine. Those inclined toward conspiracy theories can easily find a common thread in all of the major “heresies” of past two thousand years: virtually all deny the divinity of Christ. Yet, the persistence and rampant proliferation of these heresies belies the notion that they are the product of petty human scheming. Like the rank weeds that sprout relentlessly even through concrete, the various avatars of the Arian heresy arise from the level beneath us ― the level which the Greeks and Romans called the Underworld ― the realm in which abide the spirits whose envy of the Son of Man caused them to be cast down.
Out of this same chthonian subreality once came a race of men, the posterity of Cain, who were, before the Flood, the masters of the Earth. Scripture reports them to have been a Titanic race, builders of great antediluvian cities and Cyclopean edifices, beside which the most ambitious architecture of the modern era shrinks to miniature scale. Indeed, the megalithic wonders of our ancient world (whose supposed fabrication by Neolithic techniques is utterly ludicrous) are undoubtedly restorations of Cainite ruins.
Greek and Norse mythology are in accord with Genesis in describing this lost race of “giants”, accounted to have been peerless artificers of metal and stone. Their spectacular ability to direct the movement of massive monoliths at will leads us to surmise that they had mastered some form of psychokinesis. This power eludes modern man because the division and atomization of his psyche renders it feeble and impotent ― like the Maimed King of Grail lore. In our era, the individual minds function ― at least on the conscious level ― more or less autonomously, like several billion small flashlights all pointed in different directions, producing only a diffuse glow. Based on their apparent psychokinetic powers, however, we must infer that the Cainites had a means of focusing mass Consciousness ― and perhaps unconscious impulses as well ― to do their bidding. Clearly, this technique would not have involved the melding of human minds in unconditional Love, which will be the foundation of the New Jerusalem. It would instead rely rather upon a very hierarchal edifice of collective Consciousness ― the consummate Temple of Worldliness.
Just as the geometry of certain crystals can produce coherent light, so there are definite proportions in Space/Time which can effect the integration of Consciousness. For the moment, we must defer detailed discussion of these principles, but a few observations are in order as they relate to our current topic. Epitomizing the hierarchal mental order of which we have been speaking is the Great Pyramid of Giza, which enshrines the proportion pi 3.14159... in the ratio of the perimeter of its base to its height. Similarly, in the dimensions of the great temples of Luxor and Karnak, we repeatedly encounter the so-called Golden Mean, phi 1.61803..., the self-replicating proportion by which all biological generation and growth proceeds. Consequently, the same esoteric knowledge that enabled the antediluvians to create an insect-like psychic unity would also have given them the key to vegetative and animal fertility ― the power to make even a lifeless staff or rod burst into luxurious flowers.
All of this brings us back to the mystical properties of the Grail Hallows, casting new meaning particularly on the power of the Chalice to restore fertility to the Wasteland. We begin to deduce that the Hallows constitute the remnants of a lost language of sorts, a system of hieroglyphs embodying a portion of the knowledge that survived the Flood. Is this knowledge the Gnosis from which the Hydra-headed heresies of history have sprung?
Mankind, St. Augustine teaches, is divided into two Cities, one of which was founded by the race of Cain. But if ― as Scripture attests ― Cain’s progeny were extirpated in the Deluge, then how is it that their City lives on and prospers? One response to this question ― the one that has tragically been given far too often in the past ― is to ascribe the survival of Cain’s legacy to the sinister machinations of the various “secret societies” which pursue Hermetic wisdom. Again, one of the dangers here is that we tend to forget we are dealing with projections of forces that, in fact, lie within us. We can tell ourselves that we are not the children of Cain, but, if we are the children of Adam, then Cain is our brother. As such, he and his race, though now extinct, belong just as much as we do to the collective Body of Man, the Body which was One in our father Adam and will be One again in the new Adam, that is to say the Messiah. This explains why the spirit of Cain must be born again in Antichrist at the end of Time, for without him mankind cannot become whole. Thus, even the coming of the Beast displays the working of the supreme Mercy of Our God for our salvation.
When the Man of Sin is finally revealed, he will begin to lose his attraction, and this is part of the meaning of the Apocalypse as an uncovering of what is now hidden. Until that time, however, the vestiges of his race will and must exert a strange magnetism on the human Imagination. Much of the lost civilization of the Cainites was buried deep beneath the oceans, where the passage of thousands of years has all but obliterated its traces. But, in the first few millennia after the Flood, their colossal submerged cities remained visible to mariners ― providing the stuff of ancient myths which tell of the vast underwater palaces of King Neptune and the cavernous stables of his horses. In some areas, such as North Africa and the Middle East, the former seabed became desert, and the Cyclopean citadels and temples of the antediluvians were interred beneath a sea of sand. As the dunes shifted, the ghostly outlines of these buried ruins would sometimes reappear. Such visions inspired a vivid genre of Bedouin folklore ― some of which is captured in the Arabian Nights ― depicting immense underground cities of a lost race.
The people who had the best opportunity to explore the Cainite ruins and discover their secrets were the ancient Phoenicians, a mercantile breed of seafarers whose empire stretched from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. As we discussed in a previous section of this treatise, the Phoenicians worshiped Moloch, who was symbolized, like his Greek counterpart Hercules, by the twin pillars ― the very emblem we have now seen associated with the name of the Grail Knight Galahad. Moreover, according to both Hebrew and Hellenic sources, the antediluvians created two great pillars to preserve their esoteric knowledge from the coming cataclysm. In some versions the pillars are said to have been inscribed with hieroglyphs, while in others scrolls or tablets were reportedly hidden within or beneath them. In any case, it was from these pillars that Thoth ― the mythical architect of the Egyptian pyramids ― derived his science. They were also the source from which the Greek Pythagoras formulated his metaphysical geometry based on the Golden Mean.
Given this background, we cannot be blamed if we puzzle at the meaning of the two bronze pillars that guarded the entrance of the great Temple o