Newsletter – March 2011 Let us begin, as is customary, with Ancient Aliens. In early March, the team of Ancient Aliens came to our Los Angeles home to film six hours of interviews with Kathleen and me, for Season Three of a series that is tapping right into the Zeitgeist. Both young and old are watching this show and I even got recognized in a Pasadena restaurant by one of the waiters as one of the faces of Ancient Aliens.
Season Three, expected to begin airing in early July 2011, will be sixteen one-hour episodes, making for a total of 48 hours of Ancient Alien-material that has been screened since 2009! The History Channel is continuously rerunning episodes, as well as doing marathons, and the show is also shown in various other countries where The History Channel is available. For all others who are missing the shows, most episodes are also available on such sites as YouTube.
More screen news involves my participation in a new 2012 documentary and I will keep you posted on that. My interview will be recorded in late March. Writings… It’s with great pleasure that I can announce that together with Patrick Bernauw, I am now a published fiction author! The work in question is a Dutch novel, published by Manteau, and titled “Satan’s Pope”. It details the late 19th century figure initially recorded by J.K. Huysmans, a very controversial figure in the French occult scenes, as he was the author of La-Bas. The main focus of the book is Louis Van Haecke, chaplain of the Holy Blood chapel in Bruges, who was deemed by Huysmans to be a most wicked man, hence the title of the book. If you can read Dutch, we hope you can enjoy this book. If not, an English edition will become available in the not too distant future! The ebook on 2012 is almost finished. I will announce its publication both here and on the site. It will be a landmark publication, as it will contain not only the usual text, but links to internet sites, videos, and a video interview with me, too, which was filmed in January 2011 near Amsterdam.
I am also working on two eguides – ebooks that can be used as guides to certain places. The first two eguides will be on Rosslyn Chapel and Rennes-le-Château and will appear in the next few months. Eguides are a new concept, with the new technology allowing such developments. Any ebook-enabled phone or device will even allow you to use the eguide on the site itself! I am also completing a manuscript, The Ancient Alien Question, which should see publication in late 2011 and which tackles the topic of Ancient Aliens. Apart from all the above, I was very happy to see Atlantis Rising publish two of my articles in one issue, one on the Egyptian Revolution, the other on the Virgin of Kazan. It was the first time Atlantis Rising ever allowed two contributions from one author. I now also have a bi-weekly blog on my website, and have two columns, one in the Dutch magazine Frontier and one on the Dutch alternative website grenswetenschap.nl. Carrying the bones of Mary Magdalene In February, we learned – by coincidence – that the relic of St Baume, the tibia of Mary Magdalene, was going to tour Southern California, making its way down from San Francisco to San Diego. The relic is one of the most renowned relics of this saint, and key to her sojourn in Southern France.
Both Kathleen and I had seen the relic in its native setting of St Baume – as recently as May 2010 – but the opportunity to see this relic while on tour in California was not going to be missed. A number of factors – and a very late and impromptu adjustment of our own plans – meant we saw the relic in Hollywood, at St Victor’s, on March 5. We were too late for mass, but were happy to see (as we entered) that the relic could be approached and even touched – in its display cabinet – by all those desiring to venerate it. In fact, you could venerate it more closely and more personally than in its French setting.
Afterwards, we made our way to the little (mobile) information booth, where through a series of interesting coincidences, Kathleen was identified by Paula Lawlor, the organiser of the tour, and we all got to talk, me with Father Thomas, the Dominican priest of St Baume whom we had see celebrate mass in May in St Baume and who accompanied this relic throughout California.
When the veneration was about to end, Father Thomas unexpectedly asked whether I could help him carry the relic to the car, so they could make their way to Montclair – the next step on the pilgrimage. And so I ended up carrying the bones of Mary Magdalene in what was a most surprising and unexpected and beautiful little procession. So I put Mary Magdalene in the back of a car… cool! On the road… Kathleen and I went to visit MAX and its caretaker JoAnn Parks in Albuquerque. Of all the known ancient crystal skulls – of which there are only a handful – MAX is the only one currently travelling and exhibited regularly. Kudos has to go to JoAnn who has travelled with MAX for more than a quarter century across the States and beyond, so that people can meet MAX and hear his message.
It is my belief that the ancient crystal skulls were given to some privileged Westerners several decades ago by the Mayans of Central America so that the West could be confronted with new tools to experience the divine and learn the ways of the Mayans – an endeavour that has certainly succeeded. JoAnn related the story of how the skull belonged to an American red hat lama Norbu Chen who lived in Houston and who had received the skull in Guatemala and how he passed it to JoAnn. It sat in her closet for ten years, before he began to speak to her, telling her his name was MAX – and not “a rock in a box” – and she accepted her mission to travel the world to show the skull to people.
MAX is a remarkable creature – consisting from five different types of crystal, and carved in such a way that where the layers meet, provides an aesthetically enhancing quality to the skull itself. It was a privilege to spend a day in his company!
Meanwhile, Compassion, the recently discovered crystal skull, is also taken out more and more to audiences. I am glad to hear that Joe, its caretaker, had a sell-out event in Santa Cruz (California) recently. In April, Kathleen and I will spend a week in France and Spain, after which I will travel to Belgium and the Netherlands. I will also be attending the Megalithomania conference in Glastonbury in mid May. If you are in any of these places when I am there, let me know!
Most of our summer – July and August – will be spent in France, where we will be leading two sold-out tours through the wonders and mysteries of the Languedoc. If you can make it to Chartres for July 7-10, don’t miss out on a guided tour of the town and especially the cathedral. A unique opportunity! The Spirit Revolution I cannot leave you without underlining that Kathleen and I still have a weekly radio show, The Spirit Revolution. You can now also listen to the latest archived show directly from my homepage, but all the other methods of listening either live or to our archives remain available. Find out more on the show’s own website. The slogan of my site is “To prepare for the future, you have to understand the past” and is derived from the television series Heroes. However, I am slightly changing that slogan, to “Ancient knowledge will give us a future”, to better express my conviction that ancient wisdom needs to come back. Without it, we don’t have a future. It is time to be intelligent, time to be wise. Science in the manner it is practiced today simply is not good enough to be given the central position it has in our lives; neither is religion. Both are cerebral and based on rules and dogma, rather than on spirituality and wisdom. This is the true Spirit Revolution that should be and is happening, and I invite all of you to spread the word! Until next time…