STAR FIRE - The Gold of the Gods

Once the Anunnaki departed Sumeria, Master Craftsmen developed a substitute for Star Fire in the form of a mystical bread made from the alchemical white powder of gold.

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Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume 6, Number 2 (February-March 1999).
PO Box 30, Mapleton Qld 4560 Australia. editor@nexusmagazine.com
Telephone: +61 (0)7 5442 9280; Fax: +61 (0)7 5442 9381
From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

From a lecture presented by
Sir Laurence Gardner, Kt St Gm., KCD, KT St A.
at the 1998 NEXUS Conference held in Sydney, 25-26 July
Transcript © Sir Laurence Gardner 1998

By the 1880s, the governing establishments of Christendom were dreading the very word 'archaeologist'. And so, archaeological digs were brought under strict control, and their funding and undertakings had to be approved by newly designated authorities.

One of these, the Egypt Exploration Fund, was established in Britain in 1891, and on the very first page of its Memorandum and Articles of Association it is stated that the Fund's objective is to promote excavation work "for the purpose of elucidating or illustrating the Old Testament narrative".

In short, this meant that if something was found which could be used to support the scriptural teaching, then we (the public) would be informed. Anything which did not support the Church interpretation of the Bible was not destined to see the light in the public domain.

Now we are going to take a look at one of the monumental finds from that era - a discovery about which very little is known to people at large. In fact, it is probably the most important biblical discovery ever made and it has stunning implications far beyond the discovery itself, for this is the ultimate story of the Phoenix and the Fire-stone.

Within the Book of Exodus, a significant biblical mountain is named. It sits in the extensive range of the Sinai Peninsula - the upturned triangular land-mass which lies above the Red Sea between the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqabah. In the Old Testament, the mountain is firstly called 'Mount Horeb', then it is called 'Mount Sinai', and is subsequently called 'Horeb' again as the story progresses.

The story, of course, is that of Moses and the Israelite exodus from Egypt. This was the mountain upon which, according to Exodus, Moses saw the burning bush; the mountain where he talked with Jehovah; and the place where he received the Ten Commandments and the Tables of Testimony.

Something that we should recognise at this stage is that at the time of Moses (roughly 1350 BC) there was no mountain called 'Mount Sinai'. There was no mountain by that name even in the days of Jesus, nor even for another 300 years.

It should also be said that the Old Testament which is familiar to us today is a translation from a Hebrew text compiled only 1,000 years ago, and it is therefore a few centuries younger even than the canonical New Testament.

The mountain now generally known as Mount Sinai sits in the south of the peninsula, quite near to the bottom point of the upturned triangle. It was given its name in the 4th century AD by a mission of Greek Christian monks, 1,700 years after the time of Moses. It is now sometimes called 'Gebel Musa' (or 'Mount of Moses'), and a small Christian retreat, St Catherine's Monastery, still exists there. But, was this the Sinai mountain which the Bible calls 'Mount Horeb'? Well, it transpires that it was not.

The Book of Exodus goes into some detail to explain the route taken by Moses and the Israelites from the Nile Delta land of Goshen, down across Sinai, across the wilderness regions of Shur and Paran, to the land of Midian (which is to the north of present-day Jordan). From this route it becomes very easy to identify the location of Mount Horeb. It sits a good deal north of Gebel Musa.

The word horeb simply means 'desert', and the great desert mountain which soars to over 2,600 feet within a high stone plateau above the Plain of Paran is today called 'Serâbît' - or, to be more precise, Serâbît el-Khâdim (the Prominence of the Khâdim).

In the late 1890s, the British Egyptologist Sir William Flinders Petrie, a Professor at the University College, London, applied to the Egypt Exploration Fund to take an expedition into Sinai. By January l904, he and his team were in Sinai, and in March of that year they took their expedition to the heights of Mount Serâbît.

In the following year, Petrie published the detailed results of his findings, but added to his report the fact that this information would not be made available officially to the Egypt Exploration Fund subscribers; they would receive only maps and a general outline. Furthermore, Petrie explained that even though he had taken previously funded teams into Egypt, from the time of that Sinai expedition his sponsorship by the Fund had been terminated. Why? Had he perhaps broken the binding rule of the Articles by divulging something which was contrary to Bible teaching? He certainly had.

In fact, Petrie had discovered the great secret of the sacred mountain of Moses - a secret which not only made sense of the Exodus portrayals, but which (in so doing) blew the lid totally from their common scriptural interpretation.

What the Bible does not make clear is that Sinai was not a foreign land to the Egyptians. It was actually regarded as a part of Egypt and came under Pharaonic control. So Moses and the Israelites had not left Egypt once they were east of the Nile Delta; they were still in Egypt, having the whole Sinai Peninsula to cross before they entered the Palestinian land of Canaan.

During the time of Moses, Sinai came under the control of two Egyptian officials: the Royal Chancellor and the Royal Messenger. This was the era of Egypt's 18th Dynasty - the dynasty of the Tuthmosis and Amenhotep Pharaohs, along with Akhenaten and Tutankhamun. The Royal Messenger of those times was Neby, an official who was also the mayor and troop commander of Zaru in the Nile Delta region of Goshen, where the Israelites had lived before the exodus.

The position of Royal Chancellor was hereditary in the Hyksos family of Pa-Nehas, and Panahesy of this family was the official Governor of Sinai. We know him better from the Bible as Phinehas. He became one of the first priests of the new Mosaic structure, but previously he had been the Chief Priest at Pharaoh Akhenaten's temple at Amarna.

Before we get back to Sir William Flinders Petrie, and to understand the root significance of his discovery, it is worth making a necessary distinction between the Israelites and the Hebrews of the Mosaic era. At that time they were not one and the same, as Bible teaching seems to indicate. The Hebrews were the family and descendants of Abraham, and their place of residence was, in the main, Canaan (or Palestine). The Israelites, on the other hand, were the family and descendants of one of Abraham's grandsons, Jacob, whose name was changed to 'Israel'. It was Jacob's family alone who had moved into Egypt, and it was their descendants who eventually returned with Moses - to be reunited, after countless generations, with their fellow Hebrews.

The difference between the strains was, of course, that the Israelites had long been subjected to the laws and religions of Egypt and they knew very little about the customs of their cousins in Canaan. Through more than 400 years they had been in an environment with a whole pantheon of gods; and although they had developed a 'One God' concept within their own fraternity, that god was not the Jehovah of the Canaanite Hebrews.

The Israelites' god was a faceless entity whom they called, quite simply, 'the Lord'. In the Israelite language he was called 'Adon'. This is one of the reasons why the names 'Lord' and 'Jehovah' were always separately identified in early texts, although they were brought under the wrap of the single God in later times to suit the emergent Jewish and Christian faiths. To the Egyptians, the name of this Lord (Adon) was quite similar; they called him 'Aten'. From this derived the name of Pharaoh Akhenaten, meaning 'Servant of Aten'.

So, when Moses and the Israelites made their exodus into Sinai, they arrived not as worshippers of Jehovah but of Aten; and it was for this very reason that they were given a whole new set of laws and ordinances to bring them into line with the Hebrew culture of their prospective new homeland.

When Moses and the Israelites left the Nile Delta, their obvious route to Canaan (where they were eventually headed) would have been directly across the wilderness of northern Sinai. So, why did they push southward into the difficult high country to spend some time at the Horeb mountain of Serâbît? This was a question that had long puzzled Petrie and his team.

So, what precisely did they find high on the Bible's holy mountain? Well, to begin with, they found nothing very much. But on a wide plateau near the summit there were distinct signs of ancient habitation, and some pillars and standing-stones could be seen protruding above the ground-rubble. This rubble had been deposited, little by little, by wind and landslides over some 3,000 years. But when it was finally moved away, the truth of the Bible story emerged. Petrie wrote:

There is no other such monument which makes us regret that it is not in better preservation. The whole of it was buried, and no one had any knowledge of it until we cleared the site.

What they found was an enormous temple complex. Set within an enclosure wall was an outer temple, built over an expanse of 230 feet (approx. 70 metres). This extended outwards from an inner temple cut within a great cave in the mountainside. From the various cartouches, carvings and inscriptions it emerged that the temple had been in use from as far back as the time of Pharaoh Sneferu, who reigned about 2600 BC and whose immediate successors are reckoned to have built the pyramids of Gizeh.

The above-ground part of the temple was constructed from sandstone quarried from the mountain and it comprised a series of adjoined halls, shrines, courts, cubicles and chambers. Of these, the key features unearthed were the main Sanctuary, the Shrine of Kings, the Portico Court, and the Hall of the goddess Hathor (to whom the whole complex was dedicated).

All around were pillars and stelae denoting the Egyptian Kings through the ages, and certain Pharaohs such as Tuthmosis III (founder of the Rosicrucian movement in Egypt) were depicted many times on standing-stones and wall reliefs.

The adjoining Cave of Hathor was carved into the natural rock, with flat inner walls that had been carefully smoothed. In the centre (from about 1820 BC) stood a large upright pillar of Pharaoh Amenemhet III, the son-in-law of Esau. Also portrayed were his senior chamberlain and his seal-bearer.

Deep within the cave Petrie found a limestone stela of Pharaoh Ramesses I - a slab upon which Ramesses (who is traditionally reckoned by Egyptologists to have been an opposer of the Aten cult) surprisingly described himself as "The ruler of all that Aten embraces". Also found was an Amarna statue-head of Akhenaten's mother, Queen Tiye of Egypt, with her cartouche set in the crown.

In the courts and halls of the outer temple there were numerous stone-carved rectangular tanks and circular basins, along with a variety of curiously shaped benchtables with recessed fronts and split-level surfaces. There were also round tables, trays and saucers together with alabaster vases and containers, many of which were shaped like lotus flowers. In addition, the rooms housed a good collection of glazed plaques, cartouches, scarabs and sacred ornaments designed with spirals, diagonal squares and basketwork. There were magical wands of an unidentified hard material, and in the portico were two conical stones of about six inches and nine inches, respectively, in height.

The explorers were baffled enough by these finds, but they were further confounded by the discovery of a metallurgist's crucible. Ever since, Egyptologists have argued as to why crucibles would have been necessary in a temple - while at the same time debating a mysterious substance, called mfkzt, which seemed to be related to the crucible and the conical stones and which had dozens of mentions in wall and stelae inscriptions.

Some have suggested that mfkzt might have been copper; many have preferred the idea of turquoise; and others have supposed it was perhaps malachite. But these are all unsubstantiated guesses, and there were no traces of any of these materials at the site.

Sinai is noted for its turquoise mines, but if turquoise mining had been a primary function of the temple masters over so many centuries then one would expect to find turquoise stones in abundance within the tombs of Egypt. But such is not the case. Hardly any have been found.

Another cause of wonderment has been the innumerable inscribed references to 'bread', along with the prominent hieroglyph for 'Light' found in the Shrine of the Kings.

The discovery which caused the most bewilderment, however, was the unearthing of something which was identified as the enigmatic mfkzt to which the 'bread' symbolism seemed to be related. Laying some inches deep in a storeroom was a considerable supply of the finest, pure white, unadulterated powder.

At the time, some suggested that the powder could be a remnant of copper smelting, but, as was quickly pointed out, smelting does not produce white powder; it leaves a dense black slag. Moreover, there was no supply of copper ore within miles of the temple, and the old smelting works were in any event apparent in the distant valleys. Others guessed that the powder was ash from the burning of plants to produce alkali, but there was no trace whatever of any plant residue.

For want of any other explanation, it was determined that the white powder and the conical stones were probably associated with some form of sacrificial rite, but again it was pointed out that this was an Egyptian temple and animal sacrifice was not an Egyptian practice. Moreover, there were no remnants whatever of bones or any other foreign matter within the mfkzt, which appeared for all the world like a hoard of sacred talcum-powder.

Some of the mysterious powder was taken back to Britain for analysis and examination - but no results were ever published. The rest (opened to the elements after 3,000 years) was left to become a victim of the desert winds.

What has become apparent, however, is that this powder was seemingly identical to the ancient Mesopotamian fire-stone or shem-an-na - the substance that was made into bread-cakes and used to feed the Light-bodies of the Babylonian Kings and the Pharaohs of Egypt.

This, of course, explains the temple inscriptions denoting the importance of bread and light, and this white powder (the shem-an-na) was identified with the sacred manna that Aaron placed in the Ark of the Covenant. In Egypt, the cakes made from this powder were called 'scheffa food', while the Israelites called them 'shewbread'.

The Book of Exodus tells us that the Master Craftsman who made the original shewbread for Moses in Sinai was Bezaleel, the son of Uri Ben Hur. But Bezaleel was not a baker; he was a noted goldsmith - the very man who made the golden accoutrements for the Tabernacle and the Ark of the Covenant.

This conforms precisely with the function of the priestly Master Craftsmen in Mesopotamia. They were the great Vulcans and metallurgists of Tubal-cain, who manufactured the valuable shem-an-na from pure gold.

As for the crucible, the conical stones and the great array of tanks, tables and equipment which made the Sinai temple appear more like a gigantic laboratory than a church, it emerges that this is precisely what it was.

What Petrie had actually found was the alchemical workshop of Akhenaten and of the 18 dynasties of Pharaohs before him - a temple-laboratory where the furnace would have roared and smoked in the production of the sacred fire-stone of the high-spin shem-an-na. Quite suddenly, the words of Exodus begin to make sense as we read them again with a wholly new insight:

And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and the smoke thereof

ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly.

In Exodus we read that Moses took the golden calf which the Israelites had made, and then burnt it in the fire and ground it to a white powder. This is precisely the process of a shem-an-na furnace, and it is evident that the Egyptian priests of the goddess Hathor had been working their fire for countless generations before the priests of Aten became involved in the time of Moses.

It was in fact Pharaoh Tuthmosis III who had reorganised the ancient mystery-schools of Thoth and founded the Royal School of the Master Craftsmen at Karnak. They were called the 'Great White Brotherhood' because of their preoccupation with a mysterious white powder. A branch of this fraternity became especially concerned with medicines and healing, and they became known as the Egyptian 'Therapeutate'. In much later times, the Therapeutate extended its activities into Palestine, especially into the Judah settlement of Qumran where they flourished as the Essenes.

But what was so special about the goddess Hathor? Why was she the chosen deity of the Sinai priests? Hathor was a paramount nursing goddess, and as the daughter of Ra she was said to have given birth to the Sun. She was the originally defined 'Queen of the West' and 'Mistress of the Netherworld', to where she was said to carry those who knew the right spells. She was the revered protectress of womanhood, the 'Lady of the Sycamore', and the goddess of love, tombs and song. And it was from the milk of Hathor that the Pharaohs were said to gain their divinity, becoming gods in their own right.

On one of the rock tablets near to the Mount Serâbît cave entrance is a representation of Tuthmosis IV in the presence of Hathor. Before him are two offering-stands topped with lotus flowers, and behind him is a man bearing a conical cake of white bread. Another relief details the mason Ankhib offering two conical bread-cakes of shem-an-na to the king, and there are similar portrayals elsewhere in the temple complex. One of the most significant perhaps is a depiction of Hathor and Amenhotep III. The goddess holds a necklace in one hand, while offering the emblem of life and dominion to the Pharaoh with the other. Behind her is the treasurer Sobekhotep, who holds in readiness a conical cake of white bread. Sobekhotep is described as the "Overseer of the Secrets of the House of Gold, who brought the noble and precious stone to His Majesty".

I mentioned earlier that, upon coming out of Egypt into Sinai en route to Canaan, the Israelites would have expected to be made familiar with the laws and ordinances of their new homeland. However, although this appears to have been partially the case, the situation was largely reversed on the religious front, with the Egyptian customs being introduced to the native Hebrews.

It was upon the mountain at Sinai that Jehovah first announced his presence to Moses. Being an Aten supporter, Moses asked this new lord and master who he was, and the reply was "I am that I am", which in phonetic Hebrew became 'Jehovah'. However, for the longest time afterwards, the Israelites were not allowed to utter the name 'Jehovah' - with the exception of the High Priest who was allowed to whisper the name in private once a year. The problem was that prayers were supposed to be said to this new godhead - but how would he know the prayers were said to him if his name was not mentioned?

The Israelites knew that Jehovah was not the same as Aten (their traditional Adon or Lord), and so they presumed he must be the equivalent of the great State-god of Egypt, even if not one and the same. It was decided, therefore, to add the name of that State- god to all prayers thereafter, and the name of that god was 'Amen'. To this day, the name of 'Amen' is still recited at the end of prayers. Even the well-known Christian Lord's Prayer (as given in the Gospel of Matthew) was transposed from an Egyptian original which began, "Amen, Amen, who art in heaven..."

As for the famous Ten Commandments (said to have been conveyed to Moses by God upon the mountain), these too are of Egyptian origin and they derive directly from Spell Number 125 in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. They were not new codes of conduct invented for the Israelites, but were simply newly stated versions of the ritual confessions of the Pharaohs. For example, the confession "I have not killed" was translated to the decree "Thou shalt not kill"; "I have not stolen" became "Thou shalt not steal"; "I have not told lies" became "Thou shalt not bear false witness"; and so on.

Not only were the Ten Commandments drawn from Egyptian ritual, but so too were the Psalms reworked from Egyptian hymns (though they are attributed to King David). Even the Old Testament Book of Proverbs - the so-called 'wise words of Solomon' - was translated almost verbatim into Hebrew from the writings of an Egyptian sage called Amenemope. These are now held at the British Museum, and verse after verse of the Book of Proverbs can be attributed to this Egyptian original. It has now been discovered that even the writings of Amenemope were extracted from a far older work called The Wisdom of Ptah-hotep, which comes from more than 2,000 years before the time of Solomon.

In addition to the Book of the Dead and the ancient Wisdom of Ptah-hotep, various other Egyptian texts were used in compiling the Old Testament. These include the Pyramid Texts and the Coffin Texts, from which references to the Egyptian gods were simply transposed to relate to the Hebrew god Jehovah.

In Bloodline of the Holy Grail I made the point that the modern style of Christianity, which evolved from the Roman Church in the 4th century AD, was actually a created 'hybrid' - a religion based on themes from numerous others, including, of course, Judaism.

Now it transpires that Judaism itself was no less of a hybrid in the early days, being a composite of Egyptian, Canaanite and Mesopotamian traditions, with the stories, hymns, prayers and rituals of the various and sundry gods brought together and related to a newly contrived 'One God' concept.

What is particularly interesting is that, historically, this was not fully contrived in the time of Abraham, nor even in the later time of Moses. It did not happen until the 6th century BC, when tens of thousands of Israelites were held captive by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Until that time, the Hebrew and Israelite records referred to any number of gods and goddesses by individual names, and under a general plural classification of 'the Elohim'.

Through some 500 years from the captivity, the scriptures existed only as a series of quite separate writings, and it was not until after the time of Jesus that these were collated into a single volume. Jesus himself would never have heard of the Old Testament or the Bible, but the scriptures to which he had access included many books that were not selected for the compilation that we know today.

Strangely, though, some of these books are still mentioned in the modern Bible text as being important to the original culture. They include the Book of the Lord, the Book of the Wars of Jehovah, and the Book of Jasher. Why were they not included? Quite simply because their content did not suit the new Jehovah-based religion that was being created. Jasher, for example, was the Egyptian-born son of Caleb; the brother-in-law to the first Israelite judge Othneil; and the appointed royal staff-bearer to Moses. It is generally reckoned that the Book of Jasher's position in the Bible should be between the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, but it was sidestepped by the editors because it sheds a very different light on the sequence of events at Mount Horeb in Sinai.

The familiar Exodus account explains that Jehovah issued instructions to Moses concerning masters and servants, covetousness, neighbourly behaviour, crime, marriage, morality and many other issues including the all-important rule of the Sabbath, along with the Ten Commandments.

But, in Jasher (which pre-dates the Exodus writings), these laws and ordinances are not conveyed to Moses by Jehovah. In fact, Jehovah is not mentioned at all. The new laws, says the Book of Jasher, were communicated to Moses and the Israelites by Jethro, High Priest of Midian and Lord of the Mountain. In effect, Jethro was the overall governor of the Sinai temple.

In Hebrew, the title 'Lord (or Lofty One) of the Mountain' was translated as 'El Shaddai', and this is particularly significant for that was precisely the name related to Moses when he asked the Lord to reveal his identity. The Lord said, "I am that I am. I am he that Abraham called 'El Shaddai'". "I am that I am" eventually became transposed to the name 'Jehovah', but, as related in Jasher (and as confirmed in Exodus when correctly read), this Lord was not a deiform god at all. He was Jethro the El Shaddai, the great vulcan and Master Craftsman of the Hathor temple.

Apart from the fact that we are taught about certain aspects of the Bible text, I think it is fair to say that not too many of us actually study the books ourselves. As a result of this, our perceived images are generally those conjured by picture-books and films. Hollywood, of course, has done us proud with its portrayals of Moses on the mountain and God blasting the words of the Ten Commandments onto two great, barely portable, granite slabs. In Exodus, however, there is no such depiction, and the Commandments are said to have been written down by Moses himself (at the dictation of the Lord) after he had broken the first tablets that he was given.

As for the other part of the Sinai package, the Tables of Testimony, these are stated in the teachings of the Kabbala and the Midrash to have been held within a sacred gemstone which Moses placed "in the palm of his hand". This was the same Divine Stone of Wisdom said to have been inherited by King Solomon. In the earlier texts of Egypt it was called the 'Tablet of Hermes', which embodied the wisdom of Thoth.

According to the records of the ancient Dragon Court of Egypt (founded by Queen Sobeknefru in 1785 BC), an early guardian of the Table was Chem, the High Priest of Mendes. The word chem (or khame) means 'blackness', and from this root word derived the word 'alchemy' - the science of extracting light from the blackness. To us, Chem is perhaps better known as the biblical Ham, the grandfather of Nimrod, whose family was cursed by the Hebrews because his historical tradition was in conflict with the emergent Jehovah-based culture.

Readers of Gothic novels and books about sorcery will, of course, recognise the name Chem of Mendes. He is often symbolised by a goat, which was precisely the emblem of Ham in ancient Egypt. The only difference is that in latter-day Christian lore the goat is meant to be symbolic of the Devil. What we now discover, however, is that by following the story of Chem of Mendes we are led directly to the Sinai temple and to the white powder of gold.

Mendes was a major city of the Egyptian Delta, and Chem was the temple's designated Archon of the 10th Age of Capricorn. It was in this Capricorn regard that his symbol was a goat, generally depicted by an inverted pentagram. This five-pointed star has two uppermost points, which are the horns of the Goat of Mendes. The two downward-sloping side points represent the ears, and the single base-point is the chin and beard.

When a pentagram is seen in this inverted position, it is regarded as a male emblem, but the pentagram star is, of course, a female device (a Venus symbol) and is usually shown with the single point uppermost.

In the pentagram's male position, Chem is personally identified by an emerald jewel set centrally at the meeting of the horns. When turned about, the pentagram achieves its female status with the uppermost single point becoming the head of the goddess. The side points are now arms, while the twin points (once the horns) are now at the base, being the legs of the goddess, with the emerald jewel of Venus established in the vulval position.

Sometimes the inverted pentagram of Chem is shown with flames rising from the sacred jewel between the horns. These flames are traditionally referred to as 'Astral Light'. But when reversed into the Venus position, the uterine flames are identified as 'Star Fire', the lunar essence of the goddess.

From the earliest times, whether representing Astral Light or Star Fire, the pentagram was indicative of enlightenment. It was associated with the pre-Jewish Sabbath - a ritualistic period of reflection and experience outside of general toil. For this reason, Chem of Mendes was called the 'Sabbatical Goat' - from which derived today's use of the word 'sabbatical' in academic circles.

In view of this age-old tradition, it is hardly surprising that the pentagram and Sabbatical Goat became associated with heterodox Christians (like the Cathars of Languedoc) from medieval times. In contrast, the orthodox Christian Church endeavoured to overawe the old wisdom of the mystery schools by creating a hybrid religion based upon salvation from the unknown - a salvation that was only attained through people's subjugation to the authority of the bishops. As an outcome, the spiritually based doctrines of the Gnostic movement (which sought to 'discover' the unknown) were declared blasphemous by the Inquisition, while the pentagram and the goat were denounced as symbols of black magic and witchcraft.

From those times (even to the present day in some circles), personal attainment and learning which does not conform to the bishops' opinions has been considered heretical. And individually acquired wisdom became so feared that the Goat of Mendes has been decried as the epitome of the Devil himself. This is manifest in a wealth of trashy propagandist novels (by Dennis Wheatley and others) wherein crucifixes and holy water abound as the weapons used against the so-called emissary of Satan.

Ham (or Chem) is given in the Old Testament as a son of Noah, but in the oldest records he is correctly identified (along with Japhet) as being a son of the great Vulcan and goldsmith Tubal-cain who is better known to historians as King Meskalam-dug, the Hero of the Good Land.

In the early lore of Palestine, Chem was synonymous with a certain Azazel of Capricorn who (according to the Book of Enoch) made known to men "all the metals, and the art of working them, and the use of antimony". Antimony is the black element otherwise known as 'stibium'. This is an essential ingredient of the preparatory alchemical process when producing the Philosophers' Stone. In the ancient Arab world, antimony was called kohl, from which derives the word 'coal', meaning 'that which is black'. The related word 'alcohol' stems from the Arabic al-kohul - the highly refined 'philosophical mercury' prepared from spirits of wine rectified over antimony.

Azazel of Capricorn actually appears in the Bible, but not in the authorised English-language translation. In the Vulgate Book of Leviticus there is an early reference to the custom of Atonement, and it states that Aaron shall cast lots upon two goats, "one for the Lord, and the other for Azazel". That which fell to the lot of the Lord was to be sacrificed as a 'sin offering', and the other was to be sent into the wilderness as an 'atonement'.

The more familiar English translation is somewhat confusing, for the name 'Azazel' has been supplanted by the word 'scapegoat'. The reason for the substitution was simply that the original sequence made it quite clear that Hebrew offerings were made both to Jehovah and to Chem-Azazel, while the Book of Enoch (which was excluded from the Old Testament) drew readers' attention to the direct link between Azazel and hermetic alchemy.

In the tradition of the Rosicrucian mystery schools, the writings of Chem (the Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis) were recorded as "The most ancient monument of the Chaldeans concerning the Philosophers' Stone". Being associated with the wisdom of Thoth (or Hermes), they were defined as hermetic teachings, and they were directly linked to the fire alchemy of pyramid construction.

The very name 'Hermes' derives from the word herma, which means 'a pile of stones', and the Great Pyramid was called the 'Sanctuary of Thoth'. The word pyr, from which derive 'pyro-', 'pyre' and 'pyramid', actually means 'fire' - and the pyramids were so called because they were 'fire-begotten'.

This leads us to one of the great unanswered questions: How did they build the pyramids? Were the thousands of massive blocks raised to great heights with such accuracy by hundreds of thousands of slaves using nothing but ropes and ramps over an undefined period of time, as is the common speculation? Certainly not. To construct an inclined plane to the top of the Great Pyramid at a gradient of 1:10 would have required a ramp 4,800 feet (approx. 1,463 metres) long, with a volume three times greater than that of the Pyramid itself.

As we saw earlier, the powder of the highward fire-stone is a monatomic superconductor. It is exotic matter with a gravitational attraction of less than zero. Recent experiments with this amazing white powder of gold have proven that, under certain conditions, the substance can weigh less than nothing and can be made to disappear into an unknown dimension. The most interesting quality of the powder, however, is that it rides upon the Earth's magnetic field, so that when it is in a zero-gravity state it is capable of transposing its own weightlessness to its host, thereby facilitating levitational powers. This host might be a laboratory pan, a container, or a table - or it could just as easily be an enormous block of stone!

The age-old tradition relates that in the secret repository of the King's Chamber within the Great Pyramid the builders had placed "instruments of iron, and arms which rust not, and glass which might be bended and yet not broken, and strange spells". But what did the first explorers find, having tunnelled their way into the sealed chamber? The only furniture was a lidless, hollowed stone coffer, and it contained not a body but a layer of a mysterious powdery substance. This has been superficially determined to be grains of feldspar and mica, which are both minerals of the aluminium silicate group.

During the course of the recent white powder research, aluminium and silica were two of the constituent elements revealed by conventional analysis of a granular sample that was known to be a 100 per cent platinum-group compound.

Standard laboratory testing is done by striking a sample with a DC arc for 15 seconds at a Sun-surface heat of 5,500° Centigrade. However, with the white powder, a continuation of the burn-time way beyond the normal testing procedure revealed the noble platinum metals of which the substance truly consisted.

It is because of the limitations placed on the conventional testing sequence that five per cent by dry weight of our brain tissue is said to be carbon, whereas more rigorous analysis reveals it as the platinum metals iridium and rhodium in the high-spin state.

The King's Chamber was, in fact, contrived as a superconductor, capable of transporting the Pharaoh into another dimension of space-time. And it was here that the Pharaoh's Rite of Passage was administered in accordance with the Book of the Dead.

The key to this Rite of Passage is defined by a single conical inscription near the entrance to the Chamber. This hieroglyphic symbol - the only verifiable hieroglyph on the whole of the Gizeh Plateau, and the very same as appeared many times at the Sinai mountain temple - reads, quite simply, 'Bread'.

In the context of this talk, we have stepped beyond the bounds of the Bible to witness the alchemical and scientific process which facilitated the genesis of the Grail Kings. This line of succession from Cain, through Egypt to King David and onward to Jesus, was purpose-bred to be the earthly Purveyors of the Light. They were the true Sons of the Gods, who were fed firstly on Anunnaki Star Fire from about 3800 BC and, subsequently, on 'high-spin' metal supplements from about 2000 BC. In short, they were bred to be leaders of humankind, and they were both mentally and physically maintained in the 'highward' state: the ultimate dimension of the missing 44 per cent - the dimension of the Orbit of Light, or the Plane of Sharon.

Only during the past 150 years or so, and more specifically during the past 80 years, have the great storehouses of Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Syrian and Canaanite record been unearthed from beneath the desert sands. First-hand documentary evidence from before Bible times has now emerged on stone, clay, parchment and papyrus, and these many tens of thousands of documents bear witness to a far more exciting history than we were ever told.

Had these records been available throughout the generations, the concept of a particular race enjoying a single Divine revelation would never have arisen, and the exclusivity of Jehovah - which has blinded us for the longest time, setting us in warlike fashion against those of other faiths who follow their own traditions - would never have taken such an arrogant hold.

Gradually, as new discoveries are made, it is evident that we are now emerging from the darkness of our preconceived but unfounded notions. Even so, our centuries of Church-led indoctrination make it very difficult to discard the restrictive dogma of inbred third-hand tradition in favour of a greater enlightenment from those who were there at the time.

The truly inspiring prospect is that the learning curve has still not ended. Just as a single glacier is but a continuation of age-old activity, so too are the ancient wisdoms that now fall to us one by one, with each new facet of learning ready to be stacked upon the former knowledge.

Fortunately, the dawn of consciousness is already behind us and, although some will choose to look backwards beyond its veil, many will step with vigour into the new millennium to witness a bright new sunrise - a revelation of unbounded possibility and a restoration of our true universal inheritance.

About the Speaker:
Sir Laurence Gardner, Kt St Gm., KCD, KT St A., is an internationally known sovereign and chivalric genealogist. He holds the position of Prior of the Celtic Church of the Sacred Kindred of Saint Columba, and is distinguished as Le Chevalier Labhràn de Saint Germain and Preceptor of the Knights Templars of Saint Anthony. Sir Laurence is also Presidential Attaché to the European Council of Princes (a constitutional advisory body established in 1946), and Chancellor of the Imperial and Royal Court of the Dragon Sovereignty. He is formally attached to the Noble Household Guard of the Royal House of Stewart, founded at St Germain-en-Laye in 1692, and is the Jacobite Historiographer Royal by Appointment.

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