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Authors: Lynn Picknett

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The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code (44 page)

BOOK: The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code
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9. www.satansheaven.com/necromancy.htm.

10. 1 Samuel 28.

11. Goethe, Faust, p. 40.

12. See in previous chapter.

13. Lewis Mumford, Interpretations and Forecasts, New York, 1973, p. 302.

14. The Devils, 1971, directed by Ken Russell, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Oliver Reed.

15. T. K. Oesterreich, Possession, Demoniacal and Other, New York, 1966, pp. 49-50.

16. Grillot de Givry, Witchcraft, Magic and Alchemy, New York, 1971, pp. 118-19.

17. Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft, London, 1925, p. 73.

18. Ibid.

19. Rossell Hope Robbins, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, New York, 1959, p. 316, quoted in Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, New York, 1983, p. 811.

20. Summers, p. 73.

21. Colin Wilson, The Occult, London, 1973, p292.

22. `A Aix, par Jean Tholozan, MVCXI', quoted in Summers, p. 82.

23. Ibid.

24. Russell, p. 299.

25. See Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Immanuel Kant, Berlin, 1914.

26. Published in paperback in 2000, subtitled: `How Leonardo Da Vinci Fooled History'.

27. Thomas Humber, The Sacred Shroud, New York, 1978, p. 120.

28. It is know that he had a mysterious room in the Vatican, in which he built a `machine made of mirrors'. No one would have been any wiser but for the German mirror-makers he employed on the project - they were foreign because they wouldn't understand much of what was going on - who, convinced he was practising sorcery, locked him in the room and ran away. Such was Leonardo's controlled physical strength that he merely lifted the heavy door off its hinges and strolled away. But what was the `machine made of mirrors'? In the experiments conducted into Leonardo's possible modus operandi by Clive Prince and his brother Keith in the early 1990s, it soon became obvious that any device that concentrated heat and light would be very useful in producing an image using a very simple pinhole camera - a camera obscura, one of which we know from his notebooks that Leonardo built.

29. Codex Atlanticus.

30. See Josef Maria Eder's 1945 History of Photogaphy.

31. Tobias Churton, The Golden Builders - Alchemists, Rosicrucians and the first Free Masons, Lichfield, 2002, pp. 34-5. I am indebted to Clive Prince for finding this for me.

32. Ibid. and ditto.

33. BSTS Newsletter 42 (January 1996), pp. 6-8, reproduced from Avenire, 7 October 1995.

34. Picknett and Prince, pp. 187-90.

35. Maurice Rowden, Leonardo da Vinci, (London), p. 1975, p. 117.

36. Picknett and Prince, p. 167.

37. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London, 1964, p. 435.

38. The history of the Rosicrucian Manifestos and the growth of the movement is told in Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London, 1972, which includes full translations of the original text. Another excellent book on this subject is Tobias Churton, The Golden Builders.

39. C. J. S. Thompson, The Lure and Romance of Alchemy, New York, 1990, Chapter XXII.

40. Dr Christopher McIntosh, Foreword to Churton, The Gnostic Philosophy, p. xii.

41. Ibid.

42. Clive Prince and I remain indebted to the insights of Abigail Nevill, who at the age of eleven, inspired us to really look at the Shroud image with a child's eye - and suddenly a great deal fell into place. See Picknett and Prince, pp. 136-7, 157, 235, 240, 242, 245, 252.

43. I am indebted to the research of Steve Wilson for this interesting fact.

44. Thanks to the computer wizardry of Andy Haveland-Robinson, who had no particular axe to grind and viewed our project with complete objectivity.

45. As Abigail Nevill asked when viewing the Shroud image in negative: `Why is his head too small? And why is it on wrong?'

46. The head at the back is thrown backwards, the hair falling away from the face. At the front the chin is level.

47. Actually the hair appears to have been lightly touched up or painted in using the light-sensitive chemicals that created the photograph. When Clive and Keith Prince discovered that the fish-eye effect renders the hair invisible, that's what they did.

48. Of course Leonardo had the strong sunlight of Italy if he cared to use it, although as this work was undoubtedly of the highest secrecy, he would have chosen to create the Shroud behind closed doors, probably in the Vatican (see note 28, above). We had no such possibilities, having only a garage in grey and unromantic Reading, Berkshire, for our experiments, and a strong UV light bulb or two.

49. See Picknett and Prince for instructions on how to recreate all the so-called `miraculous' characteristics of the Shroud using the simplest of methods. However, you do need an abundance of light - and time! We were the first researchers ever to publish details of our own Shroud recreation, although at roughly the same time Professor Nicholas Allen was completing his similar photographic work in South Africa.

50. For a time we were annoyed at the image of the lens appearing on our experimental `Shrouds' - until we checked with the image of the Turin Shroud and saw it in exactly the same spot! Then, of course, we were overjoyed.

51. Such as Maria Consolata Corti. See Picknett and Prince, pp. 161-3, 331.

52. In 1898 a lawyer from Turin, Secondo Pio, took the first photographs of the Shroud, which was being displayed as part of the celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy. Seeing the Shroud in negative was a true epiphany for Pio: previously a lukewarm Catholic, after seeing all the intricate detail of the horrific crucifixion leap into life, he abruptly became passionate about his religion. Unfortunately, like millions of others, he had been duped by possibly the world's greatest psychological conman. The Shroud of Turin is not testimony to the truth of the Christian faith, but quite the opposite.

53. Serge Bramly, Leonardo: The Artist and the Man, London, 1992, first published as Leonardo da Vinci, Paris, 1988, p. 445.

54. Although the image was clearly not created with paint, there is a small amount of pigment on the cloth, probably due to the custom of laying religious paintings on it to imbue them with extra holiness.

55. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists,1550. This is quoted at the beginning of Chapter Five of Picknett and Prince, `Faust's Italian Brother'.

56. See Picknett and Prince, The Templar Revelation, p. 198.

57. Paracelsus, De Natura Rerum, 1572, Book 3.

58. Ibid.

59. Gian Battista della Porta, Natural Magik, 1658, Second Book.

60. Ibid.

61. Paracelsus.

62. Andre Nataf, The Wordsworth Dictionary of the Occult, London, 1994, p. 161.

63. Ibid.

64. Lynn Thorndike, `A History of Magic and Experimental Science', New York, 1929, vol. VIII, p. 629, quoted in Clara Pinto-Correia's online essay `Homunculus: Historiographic Misunderstanding of Preformationist Terminology', www.zygote.swarthmore.edu/fert I b.html.

65. Ibid.

66. The robot was a result of Leonardo's studies in anatomy, which are described in the Codex Huygens.

67. See www.w3.impa.br/-jair/e65.html.

68. Ibid. This online article is sponsored by the Istituto e Museo di Storia delta Scienza, Florence, and The Science Museum, London.

69. Dee himself had what is believed to be the perfect astrological chart for an occultist, being born with the Sun in Cancer and his ascendant in Sagittarius.

70. Montague Summers indefensibly describes `the work of rehabilitation so nobly initiated by Queen Mary'. Summers, p. 22.

71. Nevertheless, Dee persuaded Queen Mary to establish a national library, bestowing on it 4000 of his own books. It would ultimately become the British Museum.

72. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1, c.1608.

73. Elizabethan spelling was notoriously inconsistent, even for personal names.

74. See www.johndee.org/charlotte/Chapter6/6pl.html. This is extracted from a page from The Alchemy Website, www.levity.com/alchemy/kellystn.html.

75. This appeared in three parts from 1663 to 1678.

76. Their magic mirror can now be seen in the British Museum.

77. From the Fama Frateritatis, quoted in Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 99.

78. Ed. Meric Casaubon, A True & Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and some Spirits, London, 1657, quoted in ibid. Churton notes: `Casaubon took his material from Dee's diaries, chiefly from those of 1583-4'.

79. Churton, p. 100.

80. The important and stunning 1997 film, Photographing Fairies, starring Toby Stephens, Emily Woof and Frances Barber, and directed by Nick Willing, makes this point quite clear. The main character even fails to defend himself against an unwarranted charge of murder because fairyland calls so strongly to him. `Death is merely a change of state. The soul is a fresh expression of the self. The dead are not dust. They really are only a footfall away.'

81. Godfather of British esotericism, John Michell, believes that the gods are reluctant to give occult researchers money because it would make them 'slack'!

82. The Stone of the Philosophers, ascribed to Edward Kelley, which was included in the booklet Tractatus duo egregii, de Lapide Philosophorum, una cunt Theatro astonomniae terrestri, cum Figuris, in gratiam ftliorum Hermetis nunc primum in lucem editi, curante J. L. M. C. IJohanne Lange Medicin Candidato], Hamburg, 1676, translated by L. Roberts.

83. Some say 1595 or 1597.

84. Shakespeare, Epilogue.

85. I myself grew up in a seriously haunted house in the back streets of York. I was about sixteen before I realized that not everyone has a poltergeist! Since those far-off times I have researched and studied the paranormal and have concluded that although many people report ghosts etc out of a desire to cause a stir, or perhaps even to get rehoused by the local council, most have seen something or someone from another dimension. An underlying belief in the reality of intrusion from elsewhere underpins my The Mammoth Book of UFOs (2001), while the strange crossover between a belief in the paranormal and the intelligence agencies is the main theme of my book, co-authored with Clive Prince, The Stargate Conspiracy: Revealing the truth behind extraterrestrial contact, military intelligence and the mysteries of ancient Egypt (1999).

86. Although, interestingly, not all and not on all points. There are modern scholars who privately pursue alchemical, Gnostic and magical studies, but who for obvious reasons - mainly academic funding - would never go public.

87. Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 100.

88. www.johndee.org/charlotte/Chapter7/7pl.html.

89. His companion is often erroneously said to have been John Dee himself.

90. Summers, p. 6.

91. Ibid., p. 256.

92. Automatic writing is a common product of dissociation, deliberate or unconscious. One's hand writes apparently by itself, sometimes in another handwriting style, conveying messages that appear to come from another personality, and giving information that the person holding the pen seemingly could not have known.

93. Guy Lyon Playfair, `This Perilous Medium', The Unexplained, pp. 2934-7, c. 198 1.

94. Ibid.

95. Ibid.

96. Roy Stemman, `The Phenomenal Palladino', The Unexplained, pp. 2241-5, c.1981.

97. Ibid.

98. Ibid.

99. Ibid.

100. Ibid.

101. Suffering from intense religious rapture, Saint Joseph (1603-63) was questioned by the Inquisition, but released. Considered to be simple-minded - as a child he was known as `open-mouth' - he lacked the concentration for the most menial of tasks.

102. Personal conversation between myself and Professor Roy in the early 1980s.

103. Steinman.

104. Ibid.

105. Parapsychologists of the 1980s had a term for this phenomenon: `retrocogni- tive dissonance', meaning the further one moves away in time from witnessing even the most spectacular phenomena, the more one is liable to doubt them.

106. Charles Richet, `On the Conditions of Certainty', PSPR p. 14, No. 35,1899.

107. Dr Margaret Mead, quoted in Archie E. Roy in A Sense of Something Strange, Glasgow, 1990, p. 20.

Chapter Six Do What Thou Wilt

1. Colin Wilson, The Occult, London, 1971, p. 372.

2. Ironically, as we have seen, `Salem' is Semitic for `peace' - other variations including `shalom'. `Jeru-salem' means `House of Peace'. Shalem was the Hebrew Evening Star, twin to Shaher, or Lucifer, the Morning Star.

3. For the verbatim petitions of this and other convicted witches awaiting execution at Salem, see www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_ E&P.HTM.

4. Montague Summers, The History of Witchcraft, London, 1926, p. 146.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Typically, a mob would capture a black man accused of raping or abusing a white woman, and then proceed to beat and torture him publicly, setting fire to him, gouging out his eyes and/or cutting off his fingers, toes or genitals. Members of the crowd would be invited to participate in the torture. Eventually the victim would die of his injuries or be hanged or burnt to death. None of this was usually seen as cruel or anti-Christian: indeed, young people were encouraged to watch and even take part, almost as a sort of initiation into adulthood.

8. The Crucible by Arthur Miller was first produced on Broadway in 1953 but was not received well. However, a year later a new production won critical acclaim, setting the seal on the play as a modern classic.

9. Bombers and Mash, by Raynes Minns, London, 1980, p. 66.

10. As Elizabeth had no children, ironically the throne went to James, son of Mary Queen of Scots, whom she had had executed. James was the first king of that name in England, but James VI of Scotland.

11. More properly known as the Palace of Westminster.

12. Henry T.F. Rhodes, The Satanic Mass, London, 1954, p. 44.

13. Ibid.

14. Quoted in Ibid.

15. H.C. Lea, Materials Towards a History of Witchcraft, Philadelphia, 1939, p.101.

16. Of course if one analyses what is believed to happen during the mass in the form of transubstantiation - i.e., the bread and wine become Jesus' actual flesh and blood - all priests are sorcerers. This is high magic: indeed, some commentators have had no hesitation to denounce it as black magic.

BOOK: The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code
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