The Ark of the Covenant & The Holy Grail | Part 1
Let’s have a look at Graham Hancock’s dive into the ancient Ark of the Covenant mysteries in “The Sign and the Seal” and beyond.
While reading the book, one thing that came to my attention was that the question of whether the entity to have appeared to Moses and claimed to have been “Yahweh” was benevolent was never actually asked. It perhaps needs to be considered because of the apparent dangers that seem to stem from the Ark of the Covenant, as described through the myths. — Then too, seem there to be massive discrepancies between the Old Testament Yahweh and the teachings and sayings of Jesus.
However, does it necessarily invite the conclusion that the creation of the Ark would forcibly be a work of evil if a negative entity had falsely claimed to be Yahweh? If, to take this as an example, the knowledge to build the atomic bomb can be used to benefit humanity, could it be similar with the Ark? And anyway, might the Ark rather hold a more symbolic relevance from our perspective today, recognizing the possibility of there being a grand design of the universe?
Also consider this:
Claims of people being or having been Jesus or his reincarnation have not been rare, especially in our current day and age. Yet, according to prophecy, only “the Messiah” will be able to see the Ark of the Covenant.
What seems almost certain is that it is all about energy and energy magnification…
The “tablets” inside the Ark, presuming they are still there, could be additional amplifiers of energy if the material they are made from is crystals or meteorites, as suggested in ancient writings. Perhaps the Ark could also be a receiver/transmitter of… a radio signal? But where to, and from where?
“Hello, who’s there? Is this God?”
“No, this is Tim.”
“Who are you, Tim?”
“I’m just a guy on Venus talking into a wooden box laced with gold.”
“Oh ok! So you are not God?”
“Well, let me see. I AM. Are you?”
But back to sirius…
Its dimensions are precisely measured to fit the dimensions of the “sarcophagus” of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Graham Hancock often points out “coincidences” surrounding its history and related occurrences. But before I bring up things that, to me, seem a lot like coincidences as well and perhaps even faintly relate to Graham Hancock himself (in Part 2), let’s look at some of his findings:
In the Ethiopian Bible, the Kebra Nagast, which tells the story of the Ark’s abduction from Israel to Ethiopia, the translator referred to the sacred relic as though it were a feminine person:
“And as for what thou sayest concerning the going of the Ark of the Covenant to their city, to the country of Ethiopia, if God willed it and she herself willed it, there is no one who could prevent her; for of her own will she went and of her own will she will return if God pleaseth.”
“Without the Will of God the Ark of God will not dwell in any place. But the chosen ones of the Lord are the people of Ethiopia. For there is the habitation of God, the heavenly Zion, the Ark of his Covenant.”
Let’s look at the term Zion:
- In the Bible, Zion is used as a synonym for both Jerusalem and the Land of Israel as a whole.
- In the above quote, Ethiopia is seen as the “heavenly Zion”.
- It is variously transliterated Sion, Tzion, Tsion, Tsiyyon. “This convention apparently originates in German orthography where z is always pronounced [t͡s].” — References to Germans are quite frequent in the whole Ark story. More below and in the second part.
- Quoting from Wikipedia…
“When Solomon’s Temple was built on the adjacent Mount Moriah (which, as a result, came to be known as the Temple Mount) the meanings of the term Tzion were further extended by synecdoche to the additional meanings of the Temple itself, the hill upon which the Temple stood, the entire city of Jerusalem, the entire biblical Land of Israel, and “the World to Come”, the Jewish understanding of the afterlife. - “The form Tzion appears 108 times in the Hebrew Bible, and once with article, as HaTzion.” — “The number “108” has long been considered a sacred number. In Hindu/Buddhist beliefs, there are 108 virtues to cultivate and 108 defilements to avoid, which speaks to the value of balance. Hindu/Buddhist malas (rosary) also contain 108 beads. In Islam, the number 108 sometimes is used in place of the name of God.”
- “Psalm 147 uses “Jerusalem” and “Zion” interchangeably to address the faithful: “The Lord doth build up Jerusalem: he gathereth together the outcast of Israel. […] Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O Zion.”
- “Within the Latter Day Saint movement, Zion is often used to connote a peaceful ideal society. In the Latter Day Saints belief system, the term Zion is often used to determine a place of gathering for the saints. It is also often used to determine an area or city of refuge for the saints.”
- “In Rastafari, “Zion” stands for a utopian place of unity, peace, and freedom, as opposed to “Babylon”, the oppressing and exploiting system of the materialistic modern world and a place of evil. — It proclaims Zion, as reference to Ethiopia, the original birthplace of humankind…”
- Exchange the letter Z with L, and you get Lion. The Sphinx of Egypt has the body of a lion and has been speculated by respected Egyptologists and Graham Hancock himself to initially have had the head of a lion, considering that the head as we know it does not match the body in proportion.
- “The term “Zionism”, coined by Austrian Nathan Birnbaum, was derived from the German rendering of Tzion in 1890. Zionism as a political movement started in 1897 and supported a “national home”, and later a state, for the Jewish people in the Land of Israel (the region of Palestine).”
Not mentioned on the Wikipedia page about Zion, since Zionism goes into politics, is the Haavara Agreement, an ”agreement between Nazi Germany and Zionist German Jews”. It had made ”possible the migration of approximately 60,000 German Jews to Palestine in 1933–1939.”
The notion for bringing this up here is quite a bit of a stretch (and I’m also mentioning this for reasons that are based on personal experience). The Haavara Agreement should make one think. And it is strange that almost a century later, one cannot ask questions in the context of WWII and the Jews (“You cannot say this!”) or being brushed off as nonsense if one were to question the official narrative. Such as the astronomical numbers of Jews that presumably had fallen victim in WWII. Alone with basic math skills and the numbers of concentration camps in relationship with the numbers of people who could have died in those per day/week/year, something just doesn’t seem to add up. I once told someone that the Red Cross had found that, though the numbers were still great, they were not nearly as great as the official numbers. That person (not a Jew) was confident in his beliefs, saying, “no, I believe the official numbers to be correct!” Blindly so. And I once had to make a few lesser pleasant experiences with two Jews, one British-born, the other US-born, when I worked as the Photo Editor for a magazine called The Word in Vietnam. The reasons for having let go of the position actually went back to both of them. The latter, having been the one to have triggered the tension with an insult towards me, along the lines of all Germans inherently being Nazis — me being German — the former, as the boss, to have asked me to resign. The question to be asked should be as to which of the two world’s most notorious countries have been in recent decades up until today when it comes to military violence? Israel and the US. - Lastly, and this gets more speculative, I have also once heard of the Earth as having been referred to as Zion. Which does not have to be true. It could, however, be an additional possibility. So, just something worth pondering about. When it comes to the Zionists, at least, not much positive would come to mind.
Is-Ra-El can also be translated into Isis-Ra-Elohim, suggesting a certain meaning behind the name; three Divine names in one. And upon looking into Rudolf Steiner’s work, perhaps one could look at the term “Zionists” from a different angle; such as, referring to those in power who are materialistically orientated aiming to hide spiritual truths and the truth about God with a purpose. But the Earth itself is as much merely physical as the human body, which they know. If, for example, one were to want to study the human body like mineralogists study the Earth, then one would merely have to study a skeleton, when the body is much more than that. The same with planet Earth.
The irony here is that, while trying to hide and distort spiritual truths, they may actually make use of negative forces including demons — again referring to insights obtained by Rudolf Steiner — so to gain and maintain power over the population, trying to keep them steeped in ignorance, materialism, and away from spiritual truths and the true reality of God. So, by that, the name Zion, like so many other things, was taken by the dark ones to give it a very different meaning from what it really means.
One might ask, could it be that the Ark was removed from Israel with a purpose because of the presence, or later appearance, of the negative Zionists? Graham Hancock tells about how, even within Ethiopia, the Ark was not safe at the same place for extended periods of time; until, at some point, it seems to have found its resting place at the then capital of Axum.
Another thing to note is that there have been various Arks up until some point in time. So, again the question remains whether the mysteries surrounding this one Ark might actually serve an alternative purpose, such as for mere symbolic reasons.
There seems to be a connection to the Holy Grail, with the Grail to have been proposed as a cryptogram of the Ark. The Grail itself is at times described as a stone or tablet. Presumably, there were two inside the Ark of the Covenant.
However, the Grail also is said to be located at Glastonbury Tor, the Planetary Heart Chakra.
According to Robert Coon’s book Earth Chakras, it is linked with the planet’s main Ley Arteries, called the “Rainbow Serpent” and the “Plumed Serpent” — furthermore, it also appears to be intrinsically linked with the Earth Cycles:
“The most famous legend of Glastonbury tells the story of Joseph of Arimathea and the Holy Grail. After the Resurrection of Jesus, Joseph shifted the archetype of Everlasting Life — the Grail — from Jerusalem to Glastonbury.
This ritual act established the foundation for the eventual shift of the world sixth chakra from the activation circle for the Aeon of Pisces, 2000 years ago, to the present Aquarian Aeon area in Western Europe.” ~Robert Coon
The world sixth chakra, therefore, became conjunct with the world heart chakra. “For those who study Cabala, this alchemically unites Binah (Grail) with Chokmah (Wand):
The Grail, directed by the Will of the Earth Spirit, has the power to dissolve all boundaries between nations. If the heart of the Earth expands to its full circle, then — throughout the world — pain, suffering, and physical death among all species will fade from experience and memory.” ~Robert Coon
There also is a mysterious link to the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose Parzival holds keys pointing to Cabala (or Quaballah) as well.
Graham Hancock studying Parzival led him to ask:
- “How, in the late twelfth century, could information that the Ark might rest in Ethiopia possibly have reached a German poet and a group of French iconographers?
- What connected the former to the latter? — for they must have been connected in some way if they had both produced works of art encoding the same message.
- Finally, why should anyone have chosen to express the secret of the Ark’s location in a story and in sculptures? I had already concluded that this might have been done to ensure transmission of the secret to future generations. At the same time, however, the code used — particularly by Wolfram — had been exceptionally difficult to crack. I myself, with all the research resources of the twentieth century at my disposal, had only got as far as I had because I had been to Axum and had thus been predisposed to accept that the Ark might be in Ethiopia. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, however, that advantage should not have been available to anyone. From this, it followed that the hidden message of Parzival could not have been decoded in the medieval period at all — unless there had been people with access to some very special and privileged knowledge. Since there would have been no point in creating a code that no one could crack, it seemed to me logical to assume that such people must have existed. But who could they have been?”
You can find a compelling Quaballistic conclusion of Wagner’s Parcival on the last pages of The Chalice of Ecstacy: Parcival.
“The main Formula of the Great Work, that of the Rose and Cross, is symbolised in the Great Order as 5ø=6ø. This refers to the Microcosm and the Macrocosm as the Pentagram or Fivefold Star on Unconquered Will and the Hexagram or Six−fold Star. The Work is to discover their equivalence, and to unite them.”
Without having looked into it too much yet, I would tend to interpret the character of Parcival as that of King Solomon and that of his father akin to King David, whom ‘God did not allow to build a temple for the Ark’.
To sidetrack a bit, since it could be relevant, also again taking into consideration Graham Hancock often looking for “coincidences” — which I have done a lot myself in the last over two years — here some background info surrounding Parcival.
“Parcival by Wolfram von Eschenbach is a 13th-century epic poem of the Arthurian knight Parzival (Percival) and his quest for the Holy Grail (12th century).”
The designated birthplace of von Eschenbach, Ansbach, is where I have distant relatives which our family visited after the wall came down.
— Coincidence no. #1
The German composer Richard Wagner later composed an opera which he had based upon it.
“Wagner’s spelling of Parsifal instead of the Parzival he had used up to 1877 is informed by one of the theories about the name Percival, according to which it is of Persian origin, Parsi (or Parseh) Fal meaning “pure (or poor) fool”.
I also find it worth mentioning that “Richard Wagner was born to an ethnic German family in Leipzig, who lived at No 3, the Brühl (The House of the Red and White Lions) in the Jewish quarter.”
This makes me wonder:
Was von Eschenbach not aware of the meaning of the name Parzival or Parsifal when he chose the title, and by it the name for the hero of the story? The archetypal Hero’s Journey starts with “the fool” (him/her being pure or poor, or both), with the fool card being the lowest number in the Tarot. Whereas it can also be used as the highest number, the twenty-two.
“Wagner read von Eschenbach’s poem Parzival while taking the waters at Marienbad in 1845.”
Marienbad is a spa town in the Karlovy Vary/Carlsbad region, where I have relatives and from where my grandparents from my father’s side had come to Germany. My family name stems from there. — Coincidence no. #2
Chrétien de Troye, who had preceded von Eschenbach in writing about Parzival in his poem “Perceval, the Story of the Grail”, also had written another poem entitled “Yvain, the Knight of the Lion”.
I found the name of the latter curious. Yvain has the first two letters identical with my own name, Yves, and also, a lion comes up yet again.
Back once more to the Holy Grail, Wikipedia writes the following:
“In the 15th century, English writer John Hardyng invented a fanciful new etymology for Old French san-graal (or san-gréal), meaning “Holy Grail”, by parsing it as sang réal, meaning “royal blood”. This etymology was used by some later medieval British writers such as Thomas Malory, and became prominent in the conspiracy theory developed in the book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, in which sang real refers to the Jesus bloodline.”
I’ve noticed that here, with a little bit of creativity, one could change a letter or two and turn san-greal or sang real into “song real/real song” (song as in Universe, Uni-Verse meaning “One song”), or “real son”; the name — or term — Jesus or Christ (or Jesus Christ) often being referred to as “the only begotten son”.
But as in other contexts, should any of these be valid deductions, I would not go so far as to suggest that a conclusion needs to be made as to which “the true meaning” might be, and instead, like with the terms Zion or Holy Grail, would look at it all as part of the puzzle, forming a whole.
Also, “Jesus bloodline” in mind, Graham Hancock relates to “the Solomonic line” and it holding great relevance.
This I’m mentioning also since, during my search, I’ve frequently come across possible connections of Jesus and Solomon. And to add this here as well, also to Thoth/Hermes. And not just me, but other (re)searchers have found links between them. I would even go so far as to add Rumi and/or his friend and mentor Shams Tabriz in this line, among others.
Physical evidence, or at least uncanny signs for the link, could be the Throne(s) of Solomon, which have several locations with that same name; including one at Takht-e Soleymān in Iran, near Tabritz (almost the exact same name as the family name of Shams Tabriz), and another at Takht-i-Sulaiman in India, a temple ruin near Dal Lake, associated with Ahmadi claims of Jesus in India.
About Takht-e Soleymān, “folk legend relates that King Solomon used to imprison monsters inside a nearby 100 m deep crater which is called Zendan-e Soleyman “Prison of Solomon”.”
Other than that, under the term Throne of Solomon, Wikipedia also mentions a Peacock Throne. The term ‘Throne of Solomon’ to have been used “to underscore his position as a just king.”
However, my related research (into the struggle of dark vs. light) would put the symbol of the Peacock into a less favorable context. And looking at the teachings of Jesus, who would normally emphasize and support everyone’s own inner strengths, such an emperor on the other hand, “was the focus around which everything else revolved, giving audiences and receiving petitioners.” Which does not by necessity have to be negative, but it could be interpreted in a less positive light.
Lastly, the prophet Muhammed could be mentioned as well and put in the above context, especially considering the fact that several of the Thrones of Solomon are located in Iran, an Arab-speaking country.
Muhammed was “sent to preach and confirm the monotheistic teachings of Adam, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets.” “When he was 40 (notice the frequent occurrence of the number 40), Muhammad reported being visited by Gabriel in the cave and receiving his first revelation from God.”
But back to Graham Hancock’s book.
“According to Emma Jung, analyst, lecturer and wife of the eminent psychiatrist Carl, Gustav Jung, the way in which the literary genre of the Holy Grail appeared at the end of the twelfth century was both sudden and surprising.
In an authoritative study of the Grail legend which she undertook, she argued that something of great significance must have lain behind this abrupt and dramatic materialization.” Indeed she went so far as to suggest that in that in Chretien de Troye’s “Perceval, the Story of the Holy Grail” and Wolfram’s “Parzival” — the first two exemplars of the genre — it was almost ‘as if a subterranean watercourse had been tapped’, What might that ‘subterranean watercourse’ have been?”
He goes on to refer to a mysterious source of von Eschenbach with writing “Parzival”, named ‘Kyot’, whose actual name seems to have been Guyot De Provins, a twelfth-century French poet who had previously made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He turned out to have been “closely associated with the Knights Templar who, according to Emma Jung’s study, ‘were considered to be the guardians of Solomon’s Temple’.” Furthermore adding that the “German poet might himself have paid a visit to the Holy Land whilst writing Parzival.”
Again a German is mentioned: a warrior-monk who, as Graham Hancock had found, had made a “valuable testimony about the Architecture of the Templars”.
And this is something one can frequently observe with ancient architecture: “Clearly he had regarded the Templar’s architectural skills as almost supernaturally advanced and had been particularly impressed by the soaring roofs and arches that they had built.” Adding that “cathedrals that I knew were regarded by some observers as ‘scientifically… far beyond what can be allowed for in the knowledge of the epoch’.
To skip ahead in the Ark story, all the way to Ethiopia, towards the end of the 12th century, Ethiopia had an Emperor by the name of Lalibela — “meaning, literally, the bees recognize his sovereignty.” He is venerated as a saint by the local Orthodox churches and he too was associated with the building of impossible structures: monolithic or rock-hewn churches that were literally carved out of volcanic rock. There are 11 of them in the town Lalibela — which was named after him.
“Lalibela is said to have seen Jerusalem in a vision and then attempted to build a new Jerusalem as his capital. As such, many features of the town of Lalibela have Biblical names including the town’s river, known as the River Jordan.”
The names of the 11 churches are: Church of the Redeemer, Saint Mary, Mount Sinai, Golgotha, House of the Cross, House of the Virgins, Saint Gabriel, Abba Matta, Saint Mercurius, Immanuel and Church of St. George.
“Details about the construction of his 11 monolithic churches at Lalibela have been lost. The later Gadla Lalibela, a hagiography of the king, states that he carved these churches out of stone with only the help of angels.”
Graham Hancock:
“Lalibela’s reign had represented the zenith of the Zagwe dynasty’s powers and achievements in terms of foreign and domestic policy, and also in terms of architectural expression and spiritual development. After his death a steep decline set in.” Later, his grandson “was persuaded to abdicate in favour of Yekuno Amlak — a monarch claiming Solomonic descent. Thereafter, until Haile Selassie was deposed during the communist revolution of 1974, all but one of Ethiopia’s emperors had belonged to the royal line that traced its heritage back, through Menelik I, to King Solomon of Jerusalem.”
G.H. then goes on to list what he calls “A pattern of coincidences”, involving and beginning with the Crusaders in Jerusalem at the beginning of the twelfth century, the Templar order, the then-still-Prince Lalibela seeking refuge in Jerusalem, the first appearance in literature of the Holy Grail in 1182 in an uncompleted poem by Chrétien de Troyes, the return of Lalibela to Ethiopia in 1189, the writing of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. In that order.
Eventually, “at exactly the same time (of the writing of Eschenbach’s Parzival between the years 1195 and 1200) work started on the north porch of Chartres cathedral with its Ethiopic Queen of Sheba, its Grail (containing a Stone), and its representation of the Ark of the Covenant.”
