Before the Delusion: Secret Vatican Files of the Pyramids and Stonehenge

The Temple Publications Ltd.

Somerset

United Kingdom

www.thetemplepublications.co.uk

Email: info@thetemplepublications.co.uk

First printed in Great Britain in 2012 by The Temple Publications

ISBN 978-0-9557400-5-3

Copyright© William Gleeson 2012

This E-edition

ISBN 978-0-9572113-1-5

All rights reserved. No part of the publications may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, with out written permission from the publisher

Distributed in the United States and Canada by SCB Distributors, 15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248, United States

Cover design by Lee Yarlett

Page set up and preparation by The Temple Publications Ltd.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Brightsea Printgroup, Devon, EX5 2UL

Excepting acknowledged references to historical material this book is a work of fiction. The characters of Liam Kelly and Cardinal Borgia and events surrounding them are entirely fictional and are not intended to represent any actual events or persons, living or dead.

Contents

PART I: IN THE BEGINNING

1. According to Hoyle

2. The Inquisitor

3. Lucifer

4. The English Bible

5. Abraham

6. The Secrets

PART II: DARKNESS

7. The Greek Gods

8. Before

9. Dance of the Gods

10. Impact

11. Two Classic Tales

12. Report # 1

PART III: LIGHT

13. Lords of Light

14. Ancient Egypt

15. Early Immigrants

16. Technical Difficulties

17. Not Tombs

18. Great Lights

19. Books of Light

20. A Mist Went Up

21. Report # 2

PART IV: SON OF THE SUN

22. Great Magic

23. The Number of the Beast

24. Cakes and Ale

25. Invisible Spirits

26. Sources

27. Nectar of the Gods

28. Report # 3

PART V: TWILIGHT

29. The Word

30. The Garden of Odin

31. Ill Winds

32. Lost in Translation

33. Timelines

34. Report # 4

35. Britain Megaliths

36. Breton Megaliths

37. Depths of the Temple

38. Exorcism

PART VI: DAYLIGHT

39. Back up Files

40. The Lords

41. Old Giants

42. The Melting Pot

43. The Shield

44. The Beginning

45. The Middle

46. The End

47. Postscript

APPENDIX I – BIBLICAL LIGHT

APPENDIX II – HYMNS

APPENDIX III – THE HOLY GRAIL

APPENDIX IV – FOLKLORE

REFERENCES AND NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Figures:

Bas relief sculptures on buildings at Thebes, drawn by Napoleon’s savants in 1798.

Extracts from Petrie’s records of hard stone objects drilled and sawn with jewelled tools.

Map of Old Kingdom pyramids along the Nile.

A reconstruction of the Pyramids of Abusir.

Cross-section of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Cross-sections of the upper chamber of the Great Pyramid, showing the ‘relieving chambers’.

A reconstruction of the pyramids at Giza.

Floor plan of the ‘Portal Temple’ and ‘Sphinx Temple’ at Giza.

Remains of the stone construction of the ‘Valley Temple’ of the 2nd pyramid at Giza.

(a) A reconstruction of the 2nd (middle) pyramid at Giza. 90

(b) A reconstruction of a Pyramid of the Sun at Abusir

Sun-gods Osiris and Atum seated on thrones – wall painting from the tomb of Nefertari.

Early text illustrations of the sun-god Osiris seated on a throne.

Humanised figures of ‘sun-gods’ seated on thrones.

The royal barge carrying a coffer containing sets of power symbols.

The arrangement of spheres in the coffer of the Great Pyramid.

The patterns of the ‘seed of life’ and ‘flower of life’.

The ‘sun-god’ Osiris seated on a throne; and in ‘fish-scale’ costume.

‘Sun-gods’ on thrones, seated before typical ‘food’ offerings.

‘Sun-gods’ with typical ‘food offerings’.

A reconstruction of the industrial site of Kerma in Nubia.

The ‘efflux’ and ‘food offerings’ of the gods.

The ‘creation scene’ from the Book of the Dead.

Hieroglyphic expression above the doorway of the Great Pyramid.

Temples of the Sun on the Nile and Temples of the Moon on the Euphrates.

e Menec stone alignments at Carnac, Brittany.

ermario stone alignments at Carnac, Brittany.

Bas relief sculptures on buildings at Thebes, drawn by Napoleon’s savants in 1798.

Masks of the gods.

Diagram of the Durrington Walls / Woodhenge / Cursus complex at Amesbury.

Ground plan of the post-holes at Woodhenge.

Silbury Hill, near Avebury.

Dragon mound and the White Horse at Uffington.

The Neolithic mound at Marlborough.

Hatfield Barrows at Marden.

Old Sarum mound at Salisbury.

Knowth mound, Ireland

Dowth mound, Ireland

The geographic scheme of planetary mounds.

Newgrange mound, Ireland.

The spiral dance.

Wansdyke and other remnant dykes in Britain.

The white track of the spiral dance.

Ancient illustrations of the spiral dance.

A drawing of Avebury circle from ca 1743.

A reconstruction of Stonehenge I, ca. 3100 BC.

A reconstruction of the groundplan of Stonehenge I.

Map of the North Pacific basin.

X marks the spot of ground-zero.

PART I: IN THE BEGINNING

1. According to Hoyle

A grey-haired old man sat at his disordered desk, surrounded by books piled on every available space. He was lost in thought, miles away; a theologian and Biblical historian, but today struggling to remember schoolboy physics. It was such a simple observation, why didn’t he think of it before? If you put ice in a beer-cooler the ice melts (’warms’) and the beer gets cold; the ice ‘takes’ heat to melt and the beer gets colder. Something to do with the latent heat of fusion. But at the end of the last Ice-Age, only about 10,000 BC, most of the enormous ice cap melted and the oceans got warmer at the same time. Both ice and ocean got warmer, very suddenly in just a few years. That was illogical – it couldn’t happen unless there was a very large external source of heat.

Father Liam Kelly was at his desk in the Vatican library absorbed in the task of monitoring modern heresies. Weak sunlight struggled through the malodorous atmosphere, filtered from high windows dimmed by the grime of centuries. Regrettably the Index of banned books had to be abandoned in 1966 and the Church could no longer prohibit heretical publications, let alone prevent the faithful from reading them. But the Church fathers still kept a list. On Judgement Day the omniscient Lord would already know all the heretics but, just in case, the Church kept a back-up file.

He perused the latest example of heresy. A slim volume titled, ‘The 2nd Anshen Transdisciplinary Lecture: The Origin of the Universe and the Origin of Religion’, delivered by Sir Fred Hoyle in New York in 1993, to an audience of luminary professors of physics, astronomy, philosophy, theology, geology and palaeontology. ¹

Hoyle was in the twilight of a distinguished and controversial career. A Fellow of the Royal Society, one time Professor of Astronomy & Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge, and Professor of Astronomy at the British Royal Institute and at Mt Wilson and Palomar Observatories. He was perhaps best known for contributions to the Steady State theory, the seminal understanding of formation of the heavy elements in stars, and the origin of biological life in the chemical soup of the interstellar panspermia. He published prolifically on astrophysics, cosmology and popular science, under titles as varied as Cosmogony of the Solar System, Living Comets, and On Stonehenge. It was all dreadful heresy of course, and Father Liam muttered a prayer to protect himself from the Devil’s work.

Professor Hoyle was a plainspoken Yorkshire man and used the occasion of the Anshen Lecture to make some deceptively simple but telling points. Hoyle declared, in areas of still uncertain knowledge the collective opinion of respectable establishment scientists is almost certainly incorrect. Yet they argue according to impeccable scientific process so it follows that it is not their logic which is faulty, but their basic premises.

Random catastrophic meteorite impacts were rejected as pagan heresy by medieval religion, and later Renaissance science scorned heathen Catastrophism in favour of Christian Uniformitarianism. Meteorite falls were denied by modern science until an officially documented fall at D’Aigle in France in 1803, and the obvious impact craters on the Moon were still classified by Establishment science as volcanic until the 1960’s when proved otherwise by satellite exploration. But incontrovertible scientific proof from ocean-bottom sediments showed the last Ice Age ended abruptly about 10,000 BC when ocean temperatures rose 10 degrees C in about a decade – almost instantly in geological terms. That very sudden global warming necessarily required an enormous source of external energy which, according to Hoyle, could only be accounted for by ’the infall of a comet sized object into a major ocean’.

As it happens that was not an entirely original observation but had been paralleled about 300 years before by William Whiston, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in the late 1600’s (successor of Newton), who unwisely published the same conclusion. ² For what was scandalous heresy at the time, Whiston was defrocked and dismissed from Cambridge – because in those days Oxbridge Professors were ordained priests and all scientific discoveries were required to conform to established Church doctrine, according to whichever Monarch ruled at the time. Until at least the mid-20th century the Anglican Book of Common Prayer continued to publish the Sovereign’s edict against dissention…for the avoidance of diversities of opinion.

Given Hoyle’s intellectual weight and high profile it might have been expected that his lecture would again arouse great scientific interest and public controversy. But it didn’t. It passed virtually unnoticed and the small printed pamphlet disappeared into obscurity. The guest luminaries thanked Sir Fred with patronising politeness, as if they didn’t believe a word of it, then yawned and went quietly home to mind their tenure.

Sir Fred had tilted quixotically at the windmills of our minds- two sacred cows of western culture – the pseudo-scientific doctrine of Uni-formitarianism, and the religious dogma of Creationism. The proposition of Uniformitarianism – gradual geological change characterised as, ‘so it was before so it is now and ever shall be’ – was not a scientifically tested theory at all, but directly contrary to the observed facts. Gigantic meteorite impact craters on the Moon and Mars logically imply Earth must have been likewise catastrophically bombarded, and the scars of earthquake rifts in Earth’s crust remain plain to see. Uniformitarianism was one of the greatest fallacies of Renaissance science, a pseudo-scientific concoction to endorse the accepted paradigm of the ‘creator God’ – in which the perfect Christian God created a perfect world and every living thing in it, on Sunday 23 Oct, 4004 BC according to Bishop Ussher. At 9 AM!

But what Hoyle pointed out was irrefutable scientific ‘new’ evidence that the idealised earthly paradise had in fact been catastrophi-cally impacted by a substantial comet, or asteroid, not just in the remote epochs of pre-history, but in the recent timeframe of about 10,000 BC -well within the span of the tattered threads of myth and legend.

Father Liam mused for a moment on the subject of comets. Over the years he had read almost everything in the library and retained the highlights in the steel-trap of his Jesuitical mind. Comets were commonplace in antiquity. Aristotle wrote of the frequent occurrence of shooting stars and the burning flames of torches in the sky, or ‘goats’ as people called them – because they were long-horned and ‘hairy’. ³ The Romans too called them ‘long-haired stars’ because they bristled with a shaggy blood-red tail; and the Greeks called those with a mane ‘bearded stars’. ⁴ Our very word ‘comet’ derives from Greek ’kometes’, meaning ‘longhaired’. The horned, hairy, hircines hurtled across the heavens leaving a trail of star-dust in their wake – a trail of cosmic debris of asteroids and meteors that bombarded Mars, and the Moon, and the mortal paradise of Earth. Everywhere they caused catastrophe, as Cicero recorded …Ab ultima antiquitas memoria notatum cometas semper calamitatum praenuntios fuisse… from the remotest remembrance of antiquity it is known that comets have always presaged disasters. ⁵

Fred Hoyle was merely the latest to rediscover the knowledge of the Classics, and offer modern ‘scientific proof’ of what was already plainly recorded in the Holy Scripture – where a ‘he-goat’ waxed great across the sky toward the pleasant land, and cast down a host of stars to the ground and stamped on them; and a star from heaven like a ‘great red dragon’ cast a burning millstone into the waters. ⁶ The Biblical ‘burning millstone’ was Hoyle’s comet sized object. Father Liam’s Jesuitical mind admitted the intellectual force of the evidence and the logic. Whiston had been right all those years ago, now Hoyle drew attention to logic that proved the case. It was such a simple observation, why hadn’t it been seen it before? The sudden melting of the ice cap and warming of the oceans implied enormous external energy that can only have come from a comet. Or an asteroid or very large meteorite if you prefer. It was elementary physics to do with the latent heat of fusion. At the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC, most of the enormous ice cap melted and the oceans got warmer – together, very suddenly. That’s illogical; it couldn’t happen unless there was a very substantial external source of energy. And it was not a gradual change – it happened in the blink of an evolutionary eye only about 12,000 years ago.

Liam put Hoyle’s booklet aside and penned a quick summary memo to his superior.

Eminence Cardinal Borgia,

In a lecture in New York in 1993 Professor Sir Fred Hoyle drew attention to logical scientific evidence that a large cometary impact caused the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 BC; and of course we already know that is true from ancient pagan documents in our collection.

But fortunately Hoyle was somewhat eccentric in his later years and his lecture was widely disregarded. It was published but lapsed into obscurity and poses no danger to Church doctrine on divine creation. Yours etc, Liam Kelly SJ

As Hoyle pointed out it must have been a very large impact to account for the energy involved. It must have been catastrophic, on a scale beyond our comprehension so there must be a very large crater somewhere. Liam wondered where that could be; it must have been enormous but for some reason it can’t be seen. He sighed at the dilemma and turned to background reading for his next lecture.

2. The Inquisitor

Nearby in the palatial offices of the Curia, Cardinal Borgia reclined behind his ornate desk. His grand title was now Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the ‘Holy Office’ whose task was to defend the integrity of the faith and to examine and proscribe errors and false doctrines. In past times his title had simply been the Inquisitor.

The Holy Roman Inquisition – not to be confused with the Spanish Inquisition – had its own famous victims. Notably Giordano Bruno, who was burned in February 1600 just down the road in the piazza of Campo de’Fiori. Bruno had published scandalous heresies including Cena de le Ceneri expounding the heliocentrism of Copernicus, and De l’lnfnito, Universo et Mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds) arguing the stars are like our sun surrounded by planets many of which are inhabited, just like our own. For six years he languished in the Papal prison with periodic encouragement to confess and recant. But he steadfastly refused and when condemned to death by incineration he responded, ‘You pronounce sentence upon me perhaps with greater fear than that which I receive it.’ ¹ When the flames were lit he was pressed for a final confession, but responded only, ‘The time will come when all see what I see.’ ² In 1603 all Bruno’s publications were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum joining the list of banned books under the Jesuitical justification – ‘. One must not claim that the condemnation of harmful books is a violation of freedom or a war against the Light of Truth, and that the index of forbidden books is a permanent attack against the progress of science and literature. The Holy Church, which was appointed by God himself, could not proceed otherwise [since] it represents an infallible master who securely leads his believers.’

Fifteen years later in 1615 the Inquisitor had more success with the case of Galileo Galilei. Called before the Inquisition in Rome Galileo initially protested naively, ‘It [the Earth] does move’, but was persuaded to sell his soul on being informed ‘The theory of the Earth’s movement is contrary to Scripture and may neither be accepted nor defended.’ Coerced to repudiate his work, on his knees, Bible in hand, he was forced to recite ‘.I adjure, condemn, and abhor my errors and heresies. I swear henceforth never to maintain any similar doctrines either by word or in writing. If I encounter any heretic, I will denounce him to the Holy Office. So help me God.’ ³

It is said he also murmured, ’E pur si muove’ – nevertheless, it does move. ⁴

Forced by Galileo’s telescope and later Newton’s calculus to admit that the planets revolve around the sun the Church responded with Jesuitical ingenuity, issuing guidance to the scientific faithful that they may use the heliocentric theory for the convenience of mathematical calculations, but on no account were they to believe that it was actually true. Not that the Roman Bishops were the only troglodytes – it was the Lutherans who initially suppressed Copernicus’ new theory of heliocentrism, with Luther calling him ‘a fool who will turn the whole science of astronomy upside down.’ From his pulpit Luther thundered, ‘Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees it must put out of sight.’

Cardinal Borgia was an ambitious and impatient man – a Pope in waiting. This morning his usual dour mood was soured by the reports he was reading on the state of the Church in Australia. And the DAX was down again, further deflating his personal pension fund.

The Australian statistics painted a dismal picture, not that he cared particularly about the vulgar hedonists in Australia but the depressing reports were unfortunately typical of the western Church. It was dying. Churches were empty; clergy were aging and there were few new vocations. Cynics quipped that the Church had become a club run by old men for old women. But Australian Church spokesmen said they saw a rewarding ministry in providing pastoral care to refugees, drug addicts and prostitutes. Cardinal Borgia snorted with indignation. The Church had become a welfare agency. Whatever happened to redemption of sinners and salvation of souls? In exasperation he pushed the report aside and turned his attention to more immediate matters.

What to do about Father Liam Kelly? He scanned the personnel file sent up from the HR Department.

Fr Liam Xavier Kelly, DD, PhD, SJ; b. Ireland 1946

Expert in Biblical history, conversant with a dozen languages including the ancient tongues of Akkadian, Aramaic, Syriac, Coptic, Brythonic and of course, Hebrew, Greek and Latin

A string of honorary degrees and an international reputation in his field. Vatican representative on the Dead Sea Scrolls team. The Scrolls were discovered in 1947 but translation was drawn out over decades into the 1990s and was finally so boring as to attract little interest. An excellent outcome. Tendency to be excessively and inappropriately honest – no management potential. Technologically challenged, not computer literate. He was an enigma – high IQ but naive. Unworldly. No political intelligence. But indeed an outstanding and unblemished record. Not even any trouble with altar boys – unlike the Cardinal’s own record, although nothing was ever proved.

Fr Kelly had been a faithful servant of the Church for 40 years, but times had changed.

He was now 65 – a dangerous age. Some older priests suffered disillusionment and resorted to the bottle, others adopted wet social causes -which was fairly harmless. But some, especially the scholarly ones, developed idealistic notions of truth and intellectual honesty which could be tiresome. The Cardinal himself was untroubled by original thoughts and was impatient with reformists. There was no place in the Church for individual views on theology, no place at all. Already he had had complaints of Fr Kelly expressing unorthodox views in his lectures to student seminarians. That would have to be stopped.

Then there was the issue of what to do about the secret archives. Fr Kelly had worked there for nearly 40 years and he was a walking encyclopaedia .. but without a back-up plan. He was the corporate memory and there was no succession plan – there couldn’t be because the few young priests available these days were more likely to speak Swahili than Latin. Fr Kelly had kept card records over the years and they had tried unsuccessfully to digitise them. But it was hopeless – he was not computer literate, his handwriting was terrible, he used a kind of personal short-hand and included words and phrases in arcane languages that no one else understood. It was embarrassing to admit that when Fr Kelly passed on the Church would no longer know exactly why the secret archives were secret. It would not understand what was in them. Ironically, a hundred years ago there must have been dozens of scholars who could have read the history of man in the old languages of the secret archives – now there were almost none. We have advanced backwards. Some Cardinals suggested it wouldn’t matter – the archives would be doubly secret because no one could read them anyway. Others suggested a fire. That had worked before with the library of Alexandria but would be difficult to arrange now. In any case it was unthinkable to deliberately destroy these mainly pre-Christian materials – it wasn’t just the history of the Church, it was the history of man.

Cardinal Borgia mused on what to do about it. He needed a plan to get Fr Kelly to write a plain English commentary. It would have to be secret of course because it might be dangerous; knowledge was the enemy of faith so it must be closely guarded. Perhaps he could offer hints of publication – most academics are closet authors, just dying to burst into print. That might do the trick. And he, Cardinal Borgia, would become custodian of the secrets – there could even be some personal leverage in that. Of course Fr Kelly would also know all the secrets and he might live for another 30 years – that was a loose end that would have to be tidied up later.

He formed a plan and made a diary note to speak to Fr Kelly.

3. Lucifer

Liam located the slim pamphlet of Hoyle’s lecture and catalogued it at 523.112, alphabetically under ‘H’ – for Hoyle and for Heresy and for Hypocrisy – smiling gently at the irony. Such were the small amusements of his life.

His office was a mess, but it was his mess and he knew exactly where everything belonged. Pinned to the wall was a faded and curled quote of Cartesian philosophy…

’If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.’

It was probably politically incorrect in the Vatican but the hierarchy didn’t bother him down here in the basement. He was a gentle, scholarly man of tall stature and a blaze of Celtic red hair now turned to grey. Warm azure eyes concealed a mind like a steel trap honed by years of Jesuitical dialectical exactitude. He had read everything and remembered most of it; he knew all the secrets. Some colleagues suggested a likeness to St Jerome so out of curiosity he looked up El Greco’s portrait, but the image was uncomplimentary. El Greco had made Jerome heavily aged, full bearded and very severe. Still he was flattered by the association with Jerome who in about 390 AD had first translated the Aramaic and Hebrew Old Testament into Latin.

Liam sighed. Surrounded by so much heresy the steady drip of doubt had gradually worn away his rock of faith. Catechismal certainty had slipped away. Despite earnest prayer he increasingly suffered lapses into logic and rationality. Again he was struck by the puzzle of Hoyle’s observation – not only was it so simple and obviously correct, but why didn’t it gain more attention? Hoyle was a media personality, his lecture was sponsored by the prestigious Frick Museum and attended by eminent scientists – yet it attracted no attention at all. It wasn’t just that no one cared; rather they actively didn’t want to know. As though there was a conspiracy of silence. He sighed again and picked up the pamphlet for shelving.

There were rows and rows of shelves but after forty years it was all familiar territory.

He padded past ‘B’ holding Berossos’ History of Babylon, alongside Manetho’s History of Egypt which he had idiosyncratically placed together. They were both from about 300 BC and known to the outside world only from fragments. ¹

Then past ‘C’ which held Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), along with an early copy of Martianus Capella’s 5th century De nuptiis philologix et Mercurii. It had been a popular literary allegory in the Middle Ages but oddly included a clear planetary diagram showing Venus and Mercury revolving around the sun. How did an obscure North African literary scholar in the 5th century know that Venus and Mercury orbited around the sun?

He skipped on to ‘G’ which held Galileo’s original work Dialogo dei due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems); and a Latin version of Ghayat al Hakim, containing the arcane astrologic magic of the Sabian sect of ancient Harran, where Terah and Abraham lived for many years.

And so on to ‘H’ past the volumes of Corpus Hermeticum and Tabula Smaragdina (Emerald Tablet) of Hermes Trismegistus – thrice great Hermes, the Egyptian Thoth, demigod of wisdom and magic – which had been suppressed in Europe until the late Middle Ages. He paused for moment, a Faustus lost in the learning of man.

At last finding the right place he slipped the slim Hoyle booklet into place at 523.112 in an already bulging shelf, accidentally dislodging a sheaf of loose papers. In the space behind sat a small, dusty wooden box that he had never noticed before. It might have been there for centuries. Unable to resist Pandora’s temptation he cautiously prised open the lid to find staring up at him a single Cyclopean eye – a blue-green crystal sphere about the size of an apple, Malus malus, the forbidden apple; the sacred eye of Egyptian Horus, son of the sun. Under the box lid was a short note in Latin in a faded hand: ’Crystal sphere of Lapis lazuli found amongst the precious stones handed over by the Jewish priest, Jesus son of Thebutus – from the inner Temple of Jerusalem sacked by Vespasian and Titus about 70 AD. ² Similar spheres were common in the pagan temples of Egypt and were claimed by the heathens to have magical powers.’

He lifted it out. It felt warm, almost soft and alive in his hand. Polished by a thousand palms down the ages. What stories could it tell? In the light, flecks of gold flickered back from the swirling depths. Hypnotically it held his gaze, the patterns coiled and writhed until they seemed to coalesce into a devilish face that spoke to him. Mephistopheles?

‘I’ve been many things – Baal, Belial, Beelzebub, Woden, Odin, Satan . it would take us nine hours to reckon up all the devils’ names. Lucifer will do; the light bearer.’

I am the anti-Christ and this is an ‘anti’ crystal ball, in which you can see not the future but the past. Come with me on a journey in the past back to the mysteries of Classical Greece and Rome, to the land of magic of ancient Egypt and Babylon. Retrace the quest of Gilgamesh, Alexander and Perceval for the Elixir of Eternal Life, the Grail; join Khufu’s search for the number of The Beast; explore the depths of the temple and blossom in the Garden of Odin.’

Faustus emerged again. ‘What is your price?’

‘I don’t want your soul, if you have one. But you cannot bring any baggage; there is no allowance. You cannot bring the conceit of Christianity and western science. Reformat your hard drive; empty your mind and let me refill it. And there is no return flight; normal transmission will never be resumed. You are just an illiterate survivor of the destruction, a child who knows nothing of the things of old. ³ But I know yesterday; follow me, I will be your guide.

He was hearing voices, which was a worry. But despite himself he was tempted. With a murmured prayer for forgiveness Liam guiltily slipped the gemstone into the deep folds of his cassock, and with the devil in his pocket he embarked on a journey into the past.

4. The English Bible

The lecture room used to be crowded but these days there was only a sparse and motley lot of young seminarians all hooked to their electronic devices – listening to their new philosophy, iPod therefore I am. Liam looked down at the expectant pimply faces with their angelic innocence; blessed with the certainty of faith, as yet unassailed by doubt. A zealous of novices, already filled with the Holy Spirit. How many of these minds had the Church messed with; give them to me until age seven and they are mine for life.

He was scheduled to speak on the Biblical miracles – walking on water, parting water, raising the dead – routine stuff of ancient magicians. But this morning he felt an odd sense of devilment; he would give them something different. He began with a little history.

The Church was never very keen on the Bible, especially the Old Testament. After all, it was the work of the Jews whom Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea called a hostile rabble of polluted wretches. ¹ Oh dear, that would be very politically incorrect these days.

The several versions of the Bible we have now claim to be the Word of God translated from the original tongues, but that is rather hard to verify. The original ‘original’ sacred books of the Temple were lost several times over when Jerusalem was sacked by Egyptian Pharaoh Sheshonq (Biblical Shishak) in 945 BC: Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC; Macedonian Antiochus about 160 BC; and again by Roman Vespasian in 70 AD – only to mysteriously reappear each time.

According to ‘legend’ Greek King Ptolemy in Alexandria in 250 BC, assembled seventy-two Hebrew scholars and locked them away separately for seventy-two days, after which they emerged with a single Greek translation in astonishingly word-perfect agreement – now known as the Septuagint. The number seventy-two was of course a play on the legend that the Lord(s) descended from the tower of Babel and dispersed the then single tribe in seventy-two directions from which they evolved into separate language groups. ²

Later, in about 70-100 AD, Hebrew scholar Joseph ben Mattathais claimed to still have ‘all the old books’ which he translated into Greek ³ -and that manuscript survived in entirety to be translated into English in the late 1600s by William Whiston at Cambridge. Interestingly,