‘Are you suggesting the English were behind the French Revolution?’ I was incredulous.
‘Would that be so preposterous?’
‘For one thing, it would rewrite history.’
‘And would you consider that a bad thing?’
I smiled. ‘Who knows?’
‘The truth is—’ he looked at me pointedly, ‘—the English Lodges were also behind the American Revolution.’
‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ I told him. ‘It wasn’t in the interest of the English to lose America.’
‘Who said they lost anything?’ The fire in the hearth blazed now as if he had conjured the flames. He then said, quite fittingly, ‘From the ashes was born the phoenix – the replacement of a physical aristocracy with a spiritual one: an aristocracy of the Lodges working behind the façade of democracy. In other words, the Lodges were the puppet masters of the new world. It is well known that Benjamin Franklin was a Mason, as were most of the founding fathers. Now . . . many of these men had fine intentions but there were also those whose intentions were not fine; those who wanted to gain power over the many on behalf of the few by using a means that lies hidden in the Lodges.’
‘What means?’
‘The power of magic.’
I considered this.
‘Why do you look so amazed?’ He laughed, but it was cold and cheerless. ‘Every time you go into a church you are exposed to ceremonial magic: incense, song, mantras; they’re all magical, any priest will admit it, and so are the rites and rituals of the Masons. Now, I’m not suggesting they’re all the same. There are white, grey and black ceremonies.’
‘And the book of Pope Honorius?’
‘It is the blackest, in some respects.’
‘Because it mixes the rituals of the Catholic mass with the rituals of black magic?’ I asked.
‘What you have to understand is that white magic doesn’t trespass on human freedom – it is based upon the premise that human will is free, but because the will lies asleep in the human being, it can be seized, pulled out and manipulated by the black magician – an example of this is hypnotism. Now, this will in the human being is also a form of energy – a form of magnetism. A similar type of magnetism is found in the Earth. Have you heard of kundalini?’
‘The yogis achieved enlightenment through it, am I right?’
‘That’s right, they called it the fire that works upwards from the base of the human spine to the head – like a fiery snake. A similar fire, or magnetism, runs upwards from the centre of the Earth and becomes trapped within those great mountain ranges that are aligned towards the magnetic north. Rahn was working on a report written by De Mengel about grid lines and ley lines of energy – places where magnetic forces become exceptionally strong. Black magic rituals connect these forces in the Earth with the same forces in the human being, and you can’t imagine the untold power this gives to the magician capable of manipulating it.’
‘I remember something about the Templars and the building of churches . . .’
‘The Templars built their churches on locations they knew were potent, magnetically, hoping to redeem the rising forces of the Black Mother.’
I sat forward, amazed. ‘The Black Mother . . . is that why there are so many churches devoted to the Black Madonna – Chartres for instance?’
‘Yes, didn’t you know that?’
‘You are opening up a universe to me,’ I admitted.
‘Those who built these churches understood that the Black Mother is the Earth’s kundalini – this is what makes a place like Wewelsburg powerful.’
I was speechless, breathless. I wanted to laugh out loud like Rahn. At least to shout ‘Aha!’ I didn’t, of course.
‘Even Matteu didn’t realise how close he had come with his Song of the Grail, which portrays how Esclarmonde de Foix sealed the Grail inside a mountain. But to understand that we have to move onto another gallery, and this one is called The Abbot. The abbot of the monastery of Saint Lazarus.’
I sat up, surprised and puzzled. ‘I know that monastery! I’ve written a novel about it!’
‘Yes . . . of course you have,’ he said, with raised brows. ‘You also had the Grail locked in a mountain, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t understand where this is going.’
‘You will.’
31
The Abbot
‘Death on the summit of the hills struck from the sky: The abbot will die when he will see ruined
Those of the wreck wishing to seize the rock.’
Nostradamus, Century II Quatrain 56
Monastery of Saint Lazarus, 1244