Reminiscence

John Stray, testing his daughter, Angela, aged 11, on her 13-times-table:

"Four thirteens?"

Geoffrey Stray, aged 8, eavesdropping:

"Fifty-two!"

John and Angela together:

How did you know that?

Geoffrey:

"I guessed!"

Introduction

The seeds of this essay were planted in 1980, when I met an Englishman named “Nab”, while working on Kibbutz Revivim in the Negev desert. Nab recommended a science-fiction trilogy he had read, called Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, which was a complex satire about the Illuminati conspiracy, possibly containing the secrets of “life, the universe and everything”, according to Nab.

In 1981 I read the trilogy, and found it very hard going, as it jumped backward and forward in time and space, and parts of it seemed to be pure nonsense. However, I persevered, and halfway through the second volume, the scattered pieces started to come together, so that by the time I’d finished it, I began to understand the style, spotting encoded words and phrases which were hidden clues. Instead of re-reading it, I tried for two years to get hold of Wilson’s follow-up book, which was a semi- autobiographical explanation of the trilogy. Finally, I found Compendium Bookshop, of Camden, (sadly, Compendium have now closed down), who were willing to import me a copy from USA.

The book, Cosmic Trigger; The Final Secret of The Illuminati, while not actually revealing the meaning of life, posed alot of thought-provoking questions, and along with later books by Wilson, explained that he had used the Illuminati conspiracy to “touch on every readers deepest hopes and anxieties” as a way to “force the reader to think for himself or herself”. He had even cut up some of the key passages and jumbled the words to a state of gobbledy-gook, though they obviously contained a cryptic meaning. Wilson also explained, that during and after writing the trilogy, some of the gossip and even the jokes he’d made up about the Illuminati, were found to be actually true, or came true, so that he seemed to be surrounded by a web of synchronicity, as if a “cosmic coincidence control center” was communicating with him. Alot of this coincidence surrounded information on Sirius and its associated number - 23 - some of which was already familiar to me when I read the Illuminatus! trilogy, having read astronomer Robert Temple s The Sirius Mystery.

The Sirius Mystery is a scholarly work investigating the roots of the sacred knowledge possessed by the Dogon tribe, of Mali, in North Africa. They have been in possession of certain astronomical knowledge for thousands of years; a large part of this knowledge concerns details of the Sirius system; in particular, knowledge that it is a binary system, with a white dwarf companion - information only available to Western astronomers for the last few decades, with high-powered telescopes. They also know comparative weights and orbit times, and claim that the knowledge was bequeathed to them by extra-terrestrials from Sirius who visited them thousands of years ago. Temple has traced Dogon origins to Egypt.

Before having heard of Temple or anything else about Sirius, Wilson had apparently received a telepathic message that “Sirius is important”, following an experiment in Tantric yoga.

After reading Cosmic Trigger, one reference stood out above all others; one about which I had a “gut feeling”. This was a five- page summary of a book by Terence and Dennis McKenna, called The Invisible Landscape. The McKennas had developed a complex explanation for the meaning of life, which, when I try to analyse why I felt intuitively drawn to it, I suppose must be close to my own “deepest hopes and anxieties”, but there may be more to it than that.

The McKenna brothers had been promoted my certain events (more of which later), to study the ancient Chinese oracle, the I Ching. The I Ching is a system of sixty-four “hexagrams”, which represent every possible combination of Yang and Yin (a bit like positive and negative,) in a six-line structure (hex = 6; gram = written). The I Ching is known as The Book of Changes, and was consulted by throwing 6 sticks or coins. In the case of coins, each coin would represent a line of a hexagram, and
heads and tails would represent the “moving line”, which would be changing to its opposite, indicating a change from one hexagram, or situation, to another (each hexagram had a name and a meaning).

The McKennas concluded that the hexagrams encode the pattern that governs change in the universe, and all the information contained in the original sequence could be converted to an equation that could then be converted to a graph that contains identical replicas of itself within itself, where each level is 64 times greater than the one below. The longest wavelength is from the beginning of time to the end of time. The shortest is in the range of Planck’s constant - the shortest events known (subatomic). The beginning of time and the end of time are the only points when all the waves peak together, and it takes 26 of these levels to describe all levels of change in the universe. When all the time-waves were combined into one wave, and plotted against history, using a sophisticated computer programme, the computed End of History was revealed to be scheduled for the year 2012 AD!

The way that Wilson summarised the acceleration leading up to this evolutionary climax made my hair stand on end!

Here is that summary (Cosmic Trigger. p229);

 “…a 4,300-year cycle from urbanization to the dawn of modern science;

a 384-year cycle in which science has caused more upsurge of novelty than in that 4,300-year cycle;

a 67-year cycle (from the technological breakthroughs of the 1940s, including nuclear energy and DNA, to the peak in 2012) in which there will be more acceleration than there was between Galileo and Hiroshima;

a 364-day cycle in 2011-2012 when there will be more transformations than in all the previous cycles; a 6-day cycle at the end of that in which things will move even faster; and so on, down to a grand climax in 

which, as they say,

in the last 135 minutes. 18 such barriers (i.e.. barriers comparable to the appearance of life. the invention of language or the achievement of immortality- R.A.W.) will be crossed. 13 of them in the last 75x10^-4 seconds.

 That is, in the last two hours before Peak, we will achieve 18 extensions of consciousness and power, each one comparable to the passing from sea to land or from Earth to Space.

And in the last .0075 seconds of the Great Cycle we will pass through 13 such transformations.”

As you can imagine, I desperately scrabbled around, trying to get a copy of The Invisible Landscape, which had come out in America in 1975 and was out of print. This time, the library “came up trumps”, where even Compendium failed, and, after 10 months, got hold of a copy for me; (Wilson was actually mistaken about the 384-year cycle - each level is 64 times greater than the one below, and the 4,306-year cycle is 64 times greater than the 67.28-year cycle).

I read it, and found I hadn’t really understood it, so I read it again. At the time, I was working as a bus driver and reading the book in my lunch break. In the canteen of the bus depot, I remember a fellow bus-driver peering over my shoulder and saying  “Farkeynil! What’s that you’re reading?” Then he proceeded to read out the following from page 4 of The Invisible Landscape:

 “During 1970 our thinking coalesced to a point where we felt that a basic reconstitution of culture, while theoretically possible through an archological holocybernetic revolution, was practically impossible, given the intransigence of power elites and the lack of direction evinced by putative revolutionaries.”

This seems to be an over-complex way of saying that the authors were disillusioned with the political ideals of the sixties, but illustrates why I hadn't quite grokked  the book fully on the first reading.

In 1988, another bus driver inadvertently contributed a large dose of mental fertilizer to the germinating seedling of this essay, from the unexpected source of Awareness- a fundamental Christian magazine, lent to me to illustrate the wickedness of New Age thinking. On page 9 of the Summer 88 issue, in an article about “Harmonic Convergence and the New Age”, I found;

“In America, Jose Arguelles, labeled “father of the convergence”, said that the earth and the sun are leaving a galactic beam in 2012 AD and this is our last chance to give out good vibes to avert disaster. He predicts a wave of UFO sightings and a “great, unprecedented outpouring of extra-terrestrial intelligence that will, be clearly received.”

This was quoted from the Daily Mail 14^th August 1987, in connection with the “Harmonic Convergence” of l6th August 1987, when, according to various Aztec, Mayan, Zapotec, Hopi and Tibetan prophecies, the Earth entered a new phase of “spiritualization”, and people all over the world meditated at sacred sites.

Crick and Watson published their discovery of the genetic code in 1953. The code consists of 64 binary triplet figures (I would suggest that they are actually tertiary couplets, out it amounts to the same thing), called DNA codons, (the I Ching’s 64 binary triplet figures are called hexagrams), from which the 20 amino acids are derived. The correlation goes further than this, as the so-called “nonsense-codons”, which end every genetic “sentence” correspond to hexagrams 12 and 33, Standstill and Retreat, both of which indicate “no further development”, like a full-stop.

Arguelles’ maps illustrate a complex correspondence between the I Ching and the Tzolkin - the Sacred Calendar of the Mayan Indians of Central America. Although Arguelles had been aware since the mid-seventies that the Mayan Great Cycle is due to end around 2012 *, and the research culminating in Earth Ascending had convinced him that mankind is creating a “noosphere” or mind layer around the Earth, which is evolving towards Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point of Planetary Awakening, he failed to connect the two events until he met Terence McKenna in 1985, the year after Earth Ascending was published.

In 1967, Arguelles published The Mayan Factor - Path Beyond Technology, which gives an autobiographical account of the development of his ideas, where he admits that, “even for myself the actual understanding of the maps did not come until after the publication of the book in 1984.”

 So I’d found several “coincidences” between McKenna and Arguelles:

l-a: The 1927 “Goodman-Martinez Hernandez-Thompson” correlation of Christian and Mayan chronology, indicating that the Mayan 5,125-year Great Cycle ends on December 21, 2012 A.D.

l-b: McKenna’s I Ching-based prediction of a 2012 Omega Point.

1-c: Arguelles independent work correlating the I Ching to the Tzolkin, and thereby to 2012.

2: Both Arguelles and McKenna had independently adopted a Gnostic approach, which sees all humans as “sparks of one flame”.

In the early nineties, Terrence McKenna made a recording with a band called The Shamen, called Reevolution. I discovered this by chance, when I bought the album. The Shamen became very popular following that album - Boss Drum, and McKenna appeared in magazine interviews and on TV. At the same time, Evolution Records sent me an album list (I don’t know where they got my address from), and I sent off for an album called The Zuvuya Compilation, as I recognized the word Zuvuya, as a Mayan word meaning 13^th or highest heaven, or a circuit of return. The album was very tribal, featuring loads of didgeridoo, a track called ‘2012”, and a track called “Shaman I Am” featuring Terence McKenna’s voice.

Spacetime Continuum, plus several “rave cuts” with other bands. Following this exposure in the media, from 91-93, six of McKenna s books became available in the UK, including a new, updated edition of The Invisible Landscape. There were also 3 lectures in London organised by Evolution, wnich I unfortunately didn’t manage to attend, but I did obtain audio and video coverage of 2 out of the 3 lectures. I was also informed by some people called Head of 2 Robert Anton Wilson lectures, which I did go to; (again, I don’t know where they got my address). I asked Wilson, during the question and answer session, to comment on Jose Arguelles, and he did confess his own amazement at the

Apparently  coincidental 2012 predictions of Mckenna and Arguelles – results which he confirmed,        were reached independently.
After reading the new edition of the Invisible Landscape, and re-reading the Mayan Factor, I became aware that there were, after all, some resonations between the I Ching time cycles and the Mayan time cycles. The 2 most significant numbers in the I Ching are 6 (lines in a hexagram) and 64 (hexagrams in the I Ching). 6 x 64 = 384. 384 days - 13 lunations, or lunar months = 1 “lunar year”. 384 x 64 = 67.33    solar years = 6 minor sunspot cycles. 67.35 solar years x 64 = 4,306 years = 2 zodiacal ages. 4.306 x 6 = 25,836 years = 1 precession of the equinoxes; (as the precise figure is 383.89 days, that would result in a precession of 23,829 years). Arguelles states that the Tzolkin or sacred Mayan calendar is a means of tracking information through knowledge of the sunspot cycle, which he gives as 11.3 years x 2 — 23 years (that Sirius number).

20 is the main number linking the Mayan time cycles. The next most significant number is 13. A day is called a “kin’. 20 kins = 1 vinal: 18 vinals = 1 tuns 20 tuns = 1 katun: 13 katuns = 1 ahau cycle: 20 katuns = 1 baktun: 13 baktuns - 1 Great Cycle = 20 Ahau cycles = 5.123 years. The Tzolkin is a 260-day sacred calendar, which equals 13 x 20. 5 Great Cycles = 1 “evolutionary cycle” = Z6.000 tuns = 1.872.000 days = 25.627 years, which is almost a precession of the equinoxes. (There is disagreement among academics concerning the duration of the precession. and I have found it variously quoted as 25,776: 25,780: 25,600: 25,826: 25,9081 25,920 and 26,000 years).

The Great Cycle, of 5,125 years represents the width of a “resonant frequency synchronization beam”, through which the solar system is passing, the outcome of which will be a harmonic integration of the planets with the sun, and the solar system with the galactic core. The information of this beam is “being transmitted through the sun, or more precisely, through the cycles of the binary sunspot movements”, and is tracked by the Tzolkin.

Quotation

“Probably the wisest view is to say: the truth -  like the Self -  is splintered up over thousands of miles and years; bits are found here and there, then and now, and must be re-collected; bits appear in the Greek naturalists, in Pythagoras, in Plato, Parmenides. in Heraclitus, Neo-Platonism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Mani, Gnosticism, orthodox Christianity, Judaism, Brahminism, Buddhism. Orphism, the other mystery religions. Each religion or philosophy or philosopher contains one or more bits, but the total system interweaves it into falsity, so each as a total system must be rejected, and none is to be accepted at the expense of all the others (e.g. “I am a Christian” or “I follow Mani”). This alone, in itself, is a fascinating thought: here in our spatiotemporal world we nave the truth but it is splintered - exploded like the EIDE - over thousands of years and thousands of miles and (as I say) must be re-collected, as the Self or Soul or EIDOS must be. This is my Task.”

(Philip K. Dick, in his Exegesis. 3/10/80).

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CHAPTER 1

The Tarot As An Apocalyptic Cryptogram

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Epagomenal Neters and Axis Tilt

Murry Hope has studied Egyptian mythology and has come up with a theory to explain why not only the Egypyians, but also the Hindus, Greeks, Babylonians, Chinese, Romans, Incas and Mayans  used a 360-day year.¹² The Chinese later added 5 and a quarter days to the year; the Mayans added 5 "unlucky" days, but had a "year-drift formula", (after 1508 365-day haabs, exactly 1507 solar years of 365.2422 days would have passed) ; the Egyptians added only 5 days, so their calendar moved out  of synchronisation by one day every four years, taking 1460 years to return to its starting point. (This 1460-year cycle was known as the Sothic cycle, after Sothis, or Sirius, which is the only star in the sky by which the true Earth year can be measured “The Sothic cycle is established on the coincidence every 1460 years of the vague year of 365 days with the Sothic (or Sirian) year of 365 & a quarter days”). ¹³

Murry Hope finds the answer in the Egyptian myth of the Birth of the 5 Great Gods or Neters of ancient Egypt:

Shu and Tefnut, the twin Lion gods of time, were the children of the Solar Lord Ra (seen in this context, I feel, as the binary star Sirius rather than our own sun. They, in turn, gave birth to Geb and Nut (the earth and sky). But Nut, who was also believed to be the spouse of Ra, offended her husband by cohabiting with her brother. Enraged by his wife's infidelity, Ra swore that she should not be delivered of a child on any of the 360 days of his year, which might have caused her considerable difficulty had not Thoth, god of science and mathematics, Keeper of the Akashic records, Divine Advocate, and Lord of Time, played his famous game of draughts with the moon, from which he won one seventy-second part of her light (1/72 of 360 is exactly 3!) which he made into five new days called “epagomenal”. Nut was then able to give birth to the five children she had been carrying; Osiris, Horus the Elder, Set, Isis and Nephthys, in that order. The legend is also reiterated in the Greek myth of Cronus (Time) swallowing five of his own children and disgorging them after taking a potion administered to him by Metis (Justice!).” ¹⁵

“Although various magical and mystical interpretations have been placed upon these stories by scholars, psychics and romantics, what the myths are basically telling us is that as a result of some drama played out between Earth, the moon and some solar energy external to our star system, the calendar had to be changed, and that it was Thoth, a LUNAR deity, who affected the alteration. In other words, a change in the Earth’s orbit involving the moon, which precipitated a change in the Earth s axis, was responsible for the five extra days we now have in our calendars...” 16

Due to the connections of the 5 Neters with Sirius, Murry Hope sees Sirius as the “solar energy” source she mentioned, which somehow affected the Earth & moon’s orbits. 

Perhaps a near miss, or a collision with a comet or asteroid would be a neater explanation, but Sirius may be involved, as we shall see.

Sitchen's Planet

A comet, or large meteor impact is a scientifically acceptable answer to the question of what caused the sudden change of climate that wiped out the dinosaurs. 

Zecharia Sitchin spent 30 years researching ancient mythology, especially Babylonian and Sumerian myths, revealed by archaeological excavations, in particular, from the bilingual library at Ninevah. Among these myths, he informs us, are the much older original creation stories, from which the Old Testament creation story was derived, and other stories, such as the Tower of Babel, and Noah’s Ark. ¹⁷

Sitchin has found evidence that there is a massive planet, on a huge elliptical orbit around our sun. It takes 3,600 years to complete one revolution round the sun, passing near Earths orbit on it’s way to, and again on its way back from it’s perihelion, creating havoc in the geomagnetic equilibrium of the Earth as it passes. (Astronomers have already realized the connection between the conjunction of Jupiter and other planets with the incidence of earthquakes). The havoc could include pole-reversal, which geologists tell us has happened many times in Earth’s history, according to the magma in oceanic ridges; also axis tilt. 

Our current axis tilt is responsible for the seasons. Before the hypothetical collision, or drama which caused it, there may…

Star of The Tenth Moon

It is interesting that Murry Hope sees Sirius as "the third, and probably  most influential player in a celestial drama",²⁶ which caused the orbit and axis changes to the earth and Moon, and that it is due, in the near future, to cause a speeding-up of time, and an evolutionary quantum leap for life on earth. This is why:

Robert temple spent 8 years  investigating the Dogon tribe, from Mali, West Africa; in particular, their detailed knowledge, not only about other planets in our solar system, but information concerning orbit times and the presence of a white dwarf in the Sirius system. They have known this information for thousands of years , and their religion revolves around it. They say they were given the information many centuries ago, by extra-terrestrial visitors from Sirius. Temple has traced their ancestry back to Egypt.²⁷

These beings are called "Nommo", which is a collective name for them. They came to earth in an ark, while, what Temple presumes to be their "interstellar spaceship hovering above in the sky at a great distance",²⁸ is actually described by the Dogon as "appearing in the sky as a new star, and leaving with the Nommos at their departure from Earth".²⁹ They call it "star of the tenth moon".³⁰ When it appears, the description is more like a materialisation  than the approach of an object. "The star is not easy to see...the ten rays, placed in pairs, are inside the circle because the star has not yet "emerged"; it will be formed when the Nommo's ark descends, for it is also the resurrected Nommo's "eye" symbolically".³¹

Here we have a possible connection with Sitchin's "12th Planet", as he says the asteroid belt was originally a planet (the tenth), with 11 moons, which was destroyed when it collided with one of the moons of "Marduk" (Nibiru) - the 12th planet on the 3,600 year orbit. What's more, that too was loaded with extra-terrestrial visitors. The Dogon say that the Nommo will come again. "A certain "star" in the sky will appear once more"³² - the star of the tenth moon. The Dogon also say that "po tolo (Sirius B) and Sirius were once where the Sun now is".³³

All this is very strange, but its getting stranger...

No More Firmament

In the early 1920s Antonin Artaud wrote a one-act surrealist play called "There Is No More Firmament".³⁴ After everyday scenes, there is rising panic as the Sun gets bigger and plague breaks out, accompanied by thundering noises; someone says, "It was a magnetic phenomenon", then a loudspeaker announces, "STUPENDOUS DISCOVERY. SKY PHYSICALLY ABOLISHED. EARTH ONLY A MINUTE AWAY FROM SIRIUS. NO MORE FIRMAMENT." One actor claims it is the end of the world. Another says it is 2 worlds ramming each other. There is a chant hailing the new ruler, King Mob. A revolutionary says, "We won't see the Antichrist yet", then a scientist explains: "The molecular grouping in Sirius is everything. These two forces, ours and theirs, had to be put in touch with each other".³⁵

(The first anthropological study on the Dogon was not published until 1950). This sounds like Revelation 6 v14: "the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up".

In Peter Lemesurier's translation of Nostradamus's prophecies, (published in 1993),³⁶ we find this rendition of Century II quatrain 62:

When Mabus shortly dies, there shall ensue

Of man and beast a laying waste most dread.

Then suddenly shall vengeance heave in view:

Thirst, famine, blood, with comet overhead.³⁷

Mabus is "an oriental overlord", a Mongol leader due to invade the Middle East, possibly connected to the "Kings of the East" in Revelation 16 v.12. "Discounting the Latinate ending, he sounds suspiciously like someone called Mab"...or Mob.³⁸

This brings us back to the Tarot, and Atu 17, The Star, which Kenneth Grant tells us, is the "key to the Aeon of Horus", as it represents Sirius, the Star of Isis, the mother of Horus, who is "the son of this God, and the sun or father of our solar system".³⁹ In Antoine Court de Gebelin's pack, of the late 18th century, Atu 17 is titled "The Dog Star", which is Sirius, and is accompanied by 7 other stars, which probably represent the constellation of Canis Major, The Great Dog, of which Sirius is a part (or possibly Ursa Major - see Moses & Heliopolis in Ch.2).

The Star is attributed to Aquarius, and is virtually identical to medieval representations of Aquarius, with someone emptying 2 pitchers of water - one on land; the other into a pond.⁴⁰ So here is another connection between Sirius and our imminent future, the dawning of Aquarius; "the New Age of Aquarius is seen as dating  from 2010 or shortly thereafter", as Lemesurier quotes the french Institut Geographiique National.⁴¹

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