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This website is dedicated to the author himself John Robert (Bear) MacNeil, Chapbook man extraordinaire! To his love Shirley, his daughter, family and friends. Beloved and dearly missed by all whose lives he touched with his heart and written words. John was a poet. You will have to enjoy the glory of your life from the other side now JB. All the joy, all the pain, left us with these blessed truths. You are a true Caper! Thank You! Chapter Titles The Chapter Titles have all been linked, so you can jump down to the page or poem. Use your BACK button to return here. Everything in the book is not linked here, so be sure to scroll through the book and use these links as bookmarks or for quick reference. By John Bear MacNeil For Kiju Kawi,
...and for Bill MacKenzie (1942-2004) Mer
Rika Books
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Mother Earth, as North and South America, holding a bear in one hand
and an oak leaf in the other. My interest was peaked by the fact
that either the bear or the leaf could represent Cape Breton Island
on the map. And I felt that something of great importance would take
place here – a true rebirth in the grail tradition. This one image
spawned the following quest for the Grail in Cape Breton. Introduction He knows nothing of the grail, but seeks it, anyway. If he finds it
he must ask a question. So he must speak, his word being made flesh
in the telling. If he asks the right question, he will inherit Eden.
If he asks the wrong question, nobody gets Eden. I think it’s something else entirely, and I’ve found it. Read on! Coming in from the Grassy Knoll Conspiracy theories abound. It came in from the grassy knoll, one hockey announcer said of a puck shot from the goalie's blind side. When we don't have to explain such a reference, we recognize that the theory of a second gunman in the Kennedy assassination is, if not valid, then at least current; and points to our ability to consider not only the official view - that a lone gunman shot U.S. president John F. Kennedy - but also a conspiratorial one, that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone on that Dallas morning. In fact we can even discern a pattern of thought, a rule, if you will, concerning major events in history: that two or more conclusions can be accepted for any historical event - the official view that says one gunman killed Kennedy - and the conspiratorial one that says others were involved in the assassination. A conspiracy, by definition, implies that a group of people perform a treacherous or evil act. Napoleon said that history is the lie agreed upon. In other words, the victor rewrites history. It makes victims of everyone not in on the conspiracy. The more insidious the conspiracy the less likely the victims know that they are being victimized. One conspiracy theory concerns the single most important historical event in the last five hundred years: the discovery of America, and whether it was, in fact, a discovery at all. Was Columbus the first European to grace our shores? It begs the question: why a conspiracy? What difference does it make whether Columbus or Madoc or Leif was the first European over? What information is being hidden from view? What's behind the veil of secrecy that such a conspiracy hides? Who wins, if there is a conspiracy, and who loses? The discovery lie goes like this: Europeans brought enlightenment to the heathen savages of America. What if it was the other way around; what if the advances in European culture were the result of an export from America to Europe which shone a light deep into the European Dark Ages. We can easily point to later events and show how contact improved the lot of the average European: the introduction of the lowly potato quadrupled the size of the European population in two hundred years, and raised their average lifespan by fifteen years. In Peru at the time of discovery, “The land was full of engineering marvels, with countless canals, aqueducts, irrigation terraces and marvelously constructed roads that crossed difficult terrain by scientifically constructed suspension bridges, on long staircases hewn into the living rock, or through lengthy tunnels. In agriculture the Incas used guano fertilization, a method unknown in Europe and adopted there only much later. The art of weaving had reached a high level of development, and the style of this civilization was exemplified by its huge buildings, especially the sun temple in Cuzco, whose massive blocks of stone were covered by golden slabs encrusted with jewels and whose dome was a large sheet of gold representing the sun.” Worlds Beyond the Horizon, Joachim G. Leithauser, (Alfred A. Knoff, NY, 1955 p. 179) The American native at the time of discovery was taller, stronger, better nourished, lived longer, and knew more about healing the sick than did the average European. What happened in the meantime can be attributed to a conspiracy of denial and control that has raged from 1492 to the present. The recently released Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples states that "America, separated from Europe by a wide ocean, was inhabited by a distinct people, divided into separate nations, independent of each other and the rest of the world, having institutions of their own, and governing themselves by their own laws." It has taken the Canadian government 500 years to
recognize the fact that its aboriginal inhabitants are a distinct
people. It can hug its “Indians” with one hand while it plunders the
aboriginal lands of its natural resources with the other. This
doublethink ideology appears impervious to logic. The land belongs
to the crown, they say. The crown, of course, being Canadians as a
whole. But the crown’s caretakers are all elected representatives of
the people, we say. So, democracy itself is the caretaker of the
crown and its wards, the natives. Is it any wonder that natives are
so nervous about their fate, it’s in the hands of a precarious
electorate. It contains a reference to Icarus, son of Dadalus, last seen flying from Minoan Crete on wings of wax and feathers 3500 years ago. According to Greek myth, Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wax wings melted and he apparently plunged into the sea. End of story. Not so, according to The Zeno Narrative. Icarus shows up on an island they visit just before they land at Trin, which Pohl says is located in Nova Scotia. They were lost in a storm for six days. The log states that they sailed four days east and two days west, when they “sighted land on the west." “Steering straight for it, we reached a quiet and safe harbour, in which we saw a very large number of armed people, who came running, prepared to defend the island. Sinclair (Zichmni) now caused his men to make signs of peace to them, and they sent ten men to us who could speak ten languages, but we could understand none of them, except one who was from Iceland." “Being brought before our Prince and asked what was the name of the island, and what people inhabited it, and who was the governor, he answered that the island was called Icari, and that all the kings were called Icari, after the first king, who was the son of Daedalus, King of Scotland." “Daedalus conquered that island, left his son there for king, and
gave them those laws that they retain to the present time . After
that, when going to sail farther, he was drowned in a great tempest;
and in memory of his death that the sea was called to this day the
Icarian Sea, and the kings there were called Icari. They were
content with the state God had given them, and would neither alter
their laws, nor admit any stranger.” ...from The Zeno Narrative, The
Holy Grail Across The Atlantic by Michael Bradley with Deanna Theilmann-Bean
(Hounslow Press, 1988 p. 124) The Icarians admit no strangers. Nor do native Americans. Even today, you must be invited, and the invitation must be earned. We will see in our own narrative that the pre-discovery contact was based on kinship ties that were both longstanding and gratifying. Note, if the Zeno account is valid, we have descendants of a Minoan Greek colony living on one of the islands in the Maritime Canadian archipelago in 1400 AD. Note also one problematic artifact in the Maritime Archaic where pottery was used, and later abandoned. Is it Minoan Greek pottery? Another reason for including the Icari story is the sheer joy we get meeting two old friends again, Icarus and Deadalus. We now know that Icarus successfully flew from Crete and fathered a race of native Americans, who name their chiefs, Icari. I wouldn’t have included the Zeno Narrative at all if it wasn’t for a bit of alluring historical trivia. In 1595 a Bristol fisher sailed into Sydney Harbour and met the native king. His name was Itari. Today, the "distinct people" live on reservations, and know that "another generation is being crushed by the lie of equality in a free society." (Natives reduced to modern serfs by Dennis A. Maurice of Vancouver in a letter to Windspeaker, an aboriginal newspaper, from What Canada Thinks, Cape Breton Post, February 28, 1997.) Is there a lie called freedom? The Royal Commission further states that Canada "has become a model for the world in many ways, yet the fundamental contradiction of building a modern liberal democracy upon the subversion of Aboriginal nations, and at the expense of the cultural identity of indigenous peoples, continues to undermine our society." (Aknutmaqn, Membertou Newsletter, February 27, 1997) The Royal Commission admits that the guiding principles in dealing with the First Nations for the past 200 years have been "assimilation, control, intrusion, and coercion." Yes, there's a lie called freedom. Everyone believes in it. It's Orwellian in its hold on us. The findings of the Royal Commission followed the first revision of the federal Indian Act in 45 years; a revision without native input, according to former Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Ovid Mercredi, who referred to the revision as "just another cage." Not only is there a lie called freedom, there's a conspiracy called freedom as well. We the people allow it to happen. No, it's worse than that. We the people are conspirators in the lie called freedom. We chain ourselves to the vote, electing the corrupt few; forgetting that we did the same thing to the last crowd, and it didn't do any good. We chain ourselves to the TV news, and are made to feel good about ourselves afterward. We chain ourselves deeper into the conspiracy each time we allow an injustice to go on, and conspire in jest at another's misfortune, or ethnicity. We chain ourselves to words and ideas, claiming rights that we define in constitutions, and values that we impose by force, like good fathers admonishing erring children. Equality between the sexes is something we have to legislate into practice, until it too becomes a chain we forge with words: equal pay, equal rights, equality before the law. The Royal Commission cites the end of both the
Napoleonic Era in Europe and the War of 1812 as a time of "general
peace" in Canada. And true, we didn't fight invasion, but we did
fight a series of internal battles in a war for control of the land.
That war continues. Louis Riel was an early skirmisher, and the
Mohawk warriors at Oka, the latest. The war itself goes back beyond
1812, and involves everyone in a conspiracy that each of us will
deny participating in:
Has it always been this way? That since 1492, a war for dominion has raged in the Americas between the indigenous population and the Euro-invader. Before that date, evidence exists that America was known to various Europeans by a number of different names. There appears to have been sustained contact, and a general respect and dignity was accorded the inhabitants that has been lacking since the time of conquest. Numerous claims of early contact have been made, then dismissed, often for the simple reason that the claim goes against the current theory. Take a recent claim, a report in the Globe and Mail from the November 28, 1996 issue under the title, Pride: “Mark McMenamin, a geologist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says the Carthaginian reached North America 1,800 years before Columbus blundered onto the scene. He bases his claims on tiny computer-enhanced images from the bottoms of Carthaginian coins; the images appear to be maps of the Americas. ‘This problem is resolved,’” he writes in the Numismatist. Debunking coin evidence is a favourite past-time of "serious" archaeologists. Constance Irwin, in her book, Fair Gods and Stone Faces, relates that, "on the coast of Venezuela, where the waves of the Caribbean wash the northern bulge of South America, a most unusual find was made: a jar containing several hundred Roman coins. The coins date from the reign of Augustus down to about 350 A.D. and cover every intervening period." (page 258) What does a coin find like this tell us? First, that In a similar vein, a gentleman named Hugh MacKenzie Jr. was seen on the five o’clock news elaborating on his theory that Leonardo da Vinci painted portolan maps into his masterpieces. A portolan map, from the phrase "port to land," is a Medieval map showing a sailor's destination port. In MacKenzie's scenario, the map in question is of the Sydney Bight area of Cape Breton Island, and is found in the Mona Lisa.
If you will recall, da Vinci painted his masterpiece around the time of the discovery of America, and at least ten to fifteen years before any maps of the area were drawn. He was also one of the Grand Masters of the Priory of Sion, according to the committee of authors who wrote Holy Blood/Holy Grail, and may have been involved in something other than painting pretty pictures and designing canal systems, something so conspiratorial and self-empowering that it concerns our evolution as a species. The poem on the right helps illustrate a new twist in the old grail stories, that we evolved with cosmic help, and they hold us accountable. Another linguistic clue linking Arcadia with over here is found in the early French name for the Maritime provinces: Acadia. The modern history of Acadia began with a charter issued in 1603 to Sieur de Monts, a Huguenot nobleman, by Henri IV of France. Under this patent, de Monts received the title of Lieutenant-General of La Cadie. According to historians the origin of the name "La Cadie" or "Acadia" is uncertain, although to Henri IV, it meant "the place." Interestingly, in the Basque language, which has no known roots, "kadie" means "homeland." The Mi'kmaw word "a'qati" means a "place, district, or land of plenty." In Cape Breton we have lots of names which have "a'qati" (or the more familiar "acadie") in them. It’s used in place names. For instance, on the Homan maps of 1550, the mouth of the Mira River is called Soolacadie, and the place where the ships landed from Europe before the time of discovery is called Macaradie, now Muklaqati, or the Place for Brant Geese on Kelly’s Mountain. Benacadie, where my father’s people settled, may be a hybrid Gaelic-Mi’kmaq word. Ben in Gaelic means wife of. My grandmother was called Ben Johnnie, wife of John Joseph. That would make Benacadie, the wife’s garden. Benacadie was poor, rocky farmland before everyone moved away. Now it’s mostly swamp spruce and ant hills. Not the ideal place for a garden. In Hebrew, Ben means son of, which would make anyone born there, son of Acadia. The Mi’kmaw word Aqati is a suffix. In their language it would never stand alone. It would have to be someone’s place, like Benacadie, Ben’s Fertile Land. Macaradie, Mac’s Land o’Plenty. Arcadia is both a Mi'kmaw word meaning "fertile place" from which our own word "Acadia" is derived and the refuge for the Tribe of Benjamin. This similarity suggests that the land that was later called Acadia, La Cadie, the Place, was settled by at least one group of Europeans before the discovery of America. Perhaps it also answers an Acadian Studies question: Why do some ancient Acadian family names seem to go back forty or fifty generations instead of fifteen or twenty. Another interesting thing about the word Aqati, is that it’s also Sumerian. Akkad is the Arcadia of Greek myth. Sargon the Great was the first ruler of the world’s first worldwide empire. That’s worldwide, as in Piri Reis was right. That’s South America on the right, and look, Antarctica is still ice free.
In the 1440s, René of Anjou, count of Bar, Provence, Piedmont and Guise, duke of Calabria, Anjou and Lorraine, and king of Hungary, Naples, Sicily, Aragon, Valencia, Majorca, Sardinia and Jerusalem was forever obsessing about three things: Arcadia, the grail, and the Merovingian's.
Roi Perdu - the Lost King The fountain, of course, was the fountain of youth which bathed the weary traveler in immortality. The Underground Stream was knowledge of where the Grail dynasty was hiding along with a remnant of the lost arts of Earth’s Golden Age, with the latter being the guardian of the former. And the lost king was Mérovée, after whom the Merovingian dynasty was named. He is said to have had two fathers, king Clodio and a "bestae Neptuni quinotaur similis," a beast of Neptune similar to a quinotaur. A quinotaur, by the way, is a bulldog. Calling the beast Neptunic would suggest that the bulldog in question, Mérovée's second father, came from across the sea, from over here. Mérovée was one of a number of "long haired" sorcerer priest-kings who, grail lore claims, was descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, with the dynasty itself claiming descent from Arcadia. It has recently come to light that skulls were found in Merovingian burials showing signs of trepanning, where the skull was drilled to provide access to the brain. People assume that because trepanning is a sign of an advanced and sophisticated medical procedure, it was used to perform brain surgery. Another reason for its usage might have been to create a portal to rapid and sustained enlightenment. There are a number of cases on record of people who have drilled holes in their heads in attempts to achieve enlightenment. Unfortunately for science these cases have been consigned to the looney bin of history, along with sundry other crack pot ideas. These lost kings were said to be great shamans, who studied the alchemical and spiritual link between man and the universe. Shamanism is said to be man’s oldest religion. One theme that emerges from a study of comparative shamanism is the universal nature of the experience. A shaman in the African veldt and his counterpart in Alaska seem to be sharing the same experience, an ecstasy of enlightenment gained when the soul leaves the body in search of a vision. The vision becomes the bedrock upon which his life will progress, guided by the animal spirit seen in the vision. The eye of a hawk, wing of an eagle, swiftness of a stag, strength of a moose. These are the riches sought. Another theme prevalent in shamanism is the sacred cave under an equally sacred mountain. The mountain may be artificial as in a pyramid or mound, but the same process occurs, the cave is a portal to the spiritual world, often called fairyland, Hades, the Underworld, Middle Earth, Hollow Earth or even the Other Side. The mountain is often topped with a temple where one may commune directly with the deity. In her introduction to Silas T. Rand’s 1893 Legends of the Micmac (free copy), Helen Webster describes the shamanism recorded by the Baptist minister. “Children exposed or lost by their parents are miraculously preserved. They grow up suddenly to manhood, and are endowed with superhuman powers. They become avengers of the guilty, and the protectors of the good. They drive up the moose and the caribou to their camps, and slaughter them at their leisure. The elements are under their control : they can raise the wind, conjure up storms or disperse them, make it hot or cold, wet or dry as they please. They can multiply the smallest amount of food indefinitely, evade the subtlety and rage of their enemies, kill them miraculously, and raise their slaughtered friends to life. “The ancient Boowin (shaman) could, he firmly believes, fly through the air, go down through the earth, remain underwater as long as he chooses, transform himself into an animal”. (x/iii) We are no closer to understanding the science of shamanism today than we were in Rand’s day. Where he sees the miraculous, we see weird physics, which is currently enrapt in a state of chaos they claim is a legitimate pursuit, and we are currently looking into hyperspace for answers, hoping to find a link between the old religion and modern science deep in the bowels of the atom. We are also searching the historical record for links between Old Europe and pre-discovery America. We find a common thread running through the underbrush of history. This thread is the grail. Scholars have linked the Arcadian theme to the wanderings of the tribe of Benjamin, its exile in Greece, its migration into Germany, and its fusion into the bloodline of the Merovingian dynasty that ruled the German-Frankish territory between 480 and 751 AD. The fusion itself has been symbolized in viticultural terms as a grafting of vines. And where else would the new vines take root? In Vinland the Good. No wonder the kings were lost! These roi perdu or Lost Kings had special powers, and when we list them, we see that they were shamanic. They could talk to animals, cure disease with the laying-on of hands, foretell the future, live for a very long time, and were in possession of the Ark of the Covenant. After Dagobert II was murdered with the complicity
of Rome in 751, his heirs set out on a long migration. They were
known to history as the rex dei, the god-kings. Their followers are
known today as the celi dei, or the Culdees, the followers of the
rex dei. They were one step ahead of the axe as they sailed from
island to island in search of refuge. The Norse followed their trail
across the Atlantic where they found further evidence of their
presence, naming the land Greater Ireland in honor of the Celtic
pioneers they soon heard about once they were in Vinland long
enough to learn the language.
It would be possible, even today, to recognize a
Merovingian king if we met him because he would be sporting a very
special birthmark, a red cross above his
heart, which brings us back to the subject at hand: Acadia.
I wasn’t
surprised to learn that this petroglyph was the Mi’kmaq shaman
symbol. I was surprised to find that it performs the same function
in Christian iconography as well - as a shaman symbol, an ancient
cell phone that rang in Heaven. It also confirms an ancient link
between the two groups - the Benjamites, who had the ark with them
in exile, and the Maritime Archaic Mi’kmaq, known for their pottery.
Isis was the goddess of the early
dynastic period and ruled over the heavens as, at times the wife of
Ra, or the mother of Ra, or even as the virgin mother of Ra. In
fact, we see the template of the Christian Mary in Isis, not
only the Virgin Mother, but also the loyal wife, of Jesus.
And of Benjamin he [Moses] said, In the petroglyph we see the Lord dwelling between the woman’s
shoulder blades, as if she were a Benjamite heiress, and as if
Acadia was the Arcadia of Greek myth all along. Little people, like wee folk and fairies, are blessed with the kind of skill needed to create petroglyphs. In one Mi'kmaw story a little man is kept in a small box. He can move mountains, kill all your enemies, then get you the daughter of the chief. The story parallels the genie-in-the-bottle tale, and is, unmistakably, a grail story. The enlightened carver who creates the glyph by hand suggests either
a feat of mind-over-matter or a lost art which briefly turns stone
to the consistency of butter. The juice of a certain fruit mixed
with the droppings of a certain bird would melt rock, according to
Inca sources. Their walls made of oddly-shaped yet tightly-fitting
stones that almost defy duplication today may have been shaped by
this method. A recent Discovery channel program showed how easily
they shaped the walls, however. A team of workers using big, round
boulders that slowly but constantly wore the rock down revealed how
simple a task it was to accomplish. A third theory, obviously, is that someone carved the glyphs into the rocks by hand using stone or iron tools. It's easy to lose sight of what the artifact means when we try to determine how it was made. The glyphs were made to record a momentous event. If we accept petroglyphs as primary historical sources, then we have uncovered nothing less than a Merovingian kinship tie with the Mi'kmaq which took place during Arthurian times. This alone should compel us to rewrite the history books, but unsigned petroglyphs will not convince orthodox historians to reconsider the dates for the discovery of America.
The Norse-Mi’kmaq Alliance In 1974 William B. Hamilton published his Local History in Atlantic Canada, which suggests that the Norse were here long enough to have permanently left their language with the Mi'kmaq. He quotes the research of Norwegian, Reider T. Sherwin, who has demonstrated a possible link between Old Norse and the Mi'kmaq languages.
What kind of relationship does it take to permanently influence a language? Nothing less than a kinship tie will do. The evidence uncovered by Sherwin suggests that the Norse stayed in Nova Scotia long enough to have left their own place names with the Mi'kmaq. How much Norse contact with America took place after the discovery of Vinland? If we assume that the Greenland colony was in constant contact with Vinland from the days of Leif the Lucky onward, then we're talking about 400 years of unrecognized contact.
In fact, until 1381,
Vinland was considered a parish in the bishopric of Gardar in
Greenland. The inscription records that eight Goths and twenty-two Norwegians had arrived at the spot, and that ten of their number had already been killed by natives. Ten others had been left with the ship which was 14 days away in Vinland. The stone was dated 1362. After 1381 Greenland's contact with Rome diminished, owing as much to weather conditions as anything else, but trade continued, especially in reference to what we know today as the Iceland fisheries. In 1432 Henry VI of England and Eric of Pomerania, king of Norway, Sweden and Denmark signed a treaty whereby England would not trade directly with Greenland. This treaty suggests two things: first, Greenland was still an economically viable trading partner; and second, Greenland was trading with England long after the colony lost contact with Rome. Along with fish, fur, whale and seal oil, the Greenland community also supplied Europeans with the white gyrfalcons that Royalty was so intent on giving each other as gifts. These reports suggest that the Greenland colony continued its existence long after it was supposed to have either gone native, or had otherwise been abandoned by Rome. The simple fact is, Vinland was a trading partner of the Norse for close to 400 years, time enough for Old Norse names to have entered the Mi'kmaq language.
The Iron Curtain of Discovery In fact, native American civilization contains
an unbroken tradition that is thousands of years old; certain groups
of Europeans knew about this tradition, and mined it for their own
purposes while keeping the information secret; and when Columbus
"blundered onto the scene," a conspiracy of silence was initiated to
hide the fact that, at the time of discovery, America was the more
advanced civilization. Whoa! you say, disbelieving, not realizing that an Iron Curtain of Discovery sits atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, and it keeps our "distinct people" enslaved. What about the magna carta? The rise of the middle class? The Nation State? Yes. Yes, and Yes. The common man theme, the demise of feudalism, and the idea of nationalism are all products of pre-Columbian contact with America, and a conspiracy of silence has been initiated to hide this simple fact: that unlike Europe, America did not suffer "the fall of man" until 1492. Whereas the Bible postulates a Land of Cain that lasted from the expulsion from the Garden to Noah's Flood, Amerindian culture has been aptly described as "Edenic" at the time of discovery, despite Cartier's claim that he was entering "the land God gave Cain." In On The Secret America is west of Europe, which makes Nod, the land God gave Cain, Europe, and if. . . . But what an impasse! Cartier was referring to the barren Labrador coast, or northern Newfoundland, when he made his famous comment. The land of Nod was a place of exile from the bounty of Eden. Did Cartier purposely get it wrong?
We have an official version of his two voyages, and it appears as if they were nothing more than haphazard attempts to get beyond America to Asia; yet, we also have hints that some other motivation was guiding Cartier. There's a hint of previous contact in the route he took on his first voyage: a latitudinal sail from France to the New World, as if someone had said: just go straight, you can't miss it. Miss what? Verrazano isn't supposed to have been near the
Magdalene Islands, either; indeed, he is supposed to have deadheaded
from Maine to Newfoundland, bypassing Nova Scotia entirely. Yet, he
mentions the word, Arcadia, four times. The discovery of America was supposedly a great hindrance to the Europeans. It was in the way of their dreams of wealth. By 1524, when Verrazano made his voyage, Europeans knew that America wasn't the Indies, yet they called the inhabitants Indians because it really didn't matter who they were; they were in the way, and that was all that there was to it. Was there a great secret everyone knew in the Middle Ages that didn’t make it into the consciousness of modern man? And what does the Magdalene Islands have to do with it? Another conspiracy theory involves the French Revolution. In this scenario, the Capetian dynasty is destroyed by the Mi'kmaq culture-bearer, Kluskap, because French explorers stole something of great value from his home. One story says that French explorers stole Kluskap’s favorite Amethyst stones. As we will see the Home of Kluskap is Kelly's Mountain in Cape Breton. Kluskap, spelled Glooskap and Glooscap in the Pere Pacifique writing system, loosely translates as book lie. He was considered the Great Liar by Rev. Rand, who attempted to demonize the Mi’kmaq prophet. In turn he was demonized by the tribe, some of whom would run and hide at his approach while young boys and girls would chant, “Here comes the devil!” It’s very sad, really, considering the fact that he
only had one Baptist convert in his many years of ministering to the
tribe, that person being Susan, wife of Ben Christmas.
A young man lives with his three sisters and brother. His father, the chief, had just died, and his uncle has denied the widow and family their rights. They become destitute and the young man leaves to seek his fortune. He reaches a royal city and gets a job as a groom in the royal stable. He works in the stable for two years. “At the expiration of this period the young man begins to aspire to higher distinction and wishes to be taken into the king’s household; he easily prevails on the groom to intercede for him.” (Rand, Legends of the Micmac, 1893 p.440.) The king is informed and the
man gets a job as a groom ferrying the royal family about. He works for seven years as
a loyal man-servant and impresses the princess so much that she
treats him like a prince and asks him to marry her. They decide to
present him to the kingdom as a poor but noble visiting prince. Rand says that “...in the hand of Tennyson, what a splendid poem it would make.” (P. 442) We agree, and further admit that it would also make a wonderful Disney movie, perhaps an animation. The young man didn’t wrestle dragons or slay the king’s enemies. He won the heart of the princess with his natural nobility. He impressed the king so much that he thought him a visiting prince from his bearing, and “loaded him with honors and riches.” It’s a beautifully written story and we can see the hand of the Victorian gentleman transcribing from Mi’kmaq into readable English. Perhaps a turn of phrase was his, but the meat and potatoes of the story were 100% oral record. The story illustrates a seminal point in Mi’kmaw thought - there’s no difference between the daughter of a king and the son of a chief. We see it time and again. At Port Royal Membertou sought recognition as the equal of the Holy Roman Emperor. Today the Grand Chief is on hand to greet visiting royalty. But we can also take the son of a previous Grand Chief and throw him in jail for 11 years, and thereafter claim he was the author of his own misfortune. Junior Marshall, recovering from a double lung transplant, Bless him, holds no grudges against anyone today for his wrongful conviction. He’s a prince, like the young man in the story, and like Louie Membertou, whose genes he shares. You didn’t know that we have royalty running around loose in Cape Breton? Why else has it always been called the Royal Isle? How far back does this royalty extend? Try 5000 years. Cuchulain was here The Cuchulain story is important for us because it discusses contact with a matriarchal tribe to the west of Ireland, across an ocean filled with ice, where a great weapon is located. The weapon is used to defeat Cuchulain's greatest enemy, a man so powerful that no other weapon could kill him. This story appears in both the Book of the Dun Cow and The Book of Leinster, each considered excellent accounts. Cuchulain was the son of a Celtic princess and the sun god, Lugh. He was born in a time when men, animals, and plants were sacrificed to guarantee that winter would end and that spring would follow, thus ensuring the fertility of the land. These rites were performed by dancing and singing around the ancient campfires to the beat of drums and pipes. They were performed for a reason. Today we take the sunrise for granted. We assume that spring will follow winter in the inexorable cycle of the seasons. We don't remember a time when there was no summer. Yet there was a time when night didn't follow day, when summer didn't arrive. The old stories speak of that time. A major catastrophe occurred. The Earth was either knocked out of its orbit around the sun, or as we shall see was captured by the sun and placed in its current orbit. Faint rumblings of this event are preserved in the legend of the birth of Venus, (whose name translates from Mi'kmaq as the last one made,) a year of three hundred and sixty days, the destruction of the Atlanteans, and the ending of the last Ice Age. Hence, we find a "hitching post of the sun," sunrise ceremonies, dancing around a campfire in imitation of the Earth revolving around the sun. We find an attempt to appease the sun god so that he will continue to shine each morning. We also find a desire to claim descent from the sun so that we would have someone who would act on our behalf and intercede for us in the heavens. Tuatha de Danann The Mi'kmaq still call themselves the people, and consider themselves children of both Mother Earth and the dawn. They continue to form confederacies, and are ruled by minor chiefs under a Grand Chief. Rulership in the European feudal sense is not an element of either the High King’s or the Grand Chief’s mandate. They could argue, cajole and convince, but not coerce their kin and friends into going to war. Ownership of property, estates and people is not an issue where everything is held in common, and nothing is owned. The Cuchulain story contains the earliest European references to the Grail - the pot of food that never empties, and will only feed honest men. It contains references to invisibility on the battlefield, rainbow coloured people, shape-shifting, a hero-god asleep in a mountain, sacred stones, worship of Mother Earth and Father Sun - all attributes, by the way, of Mi'kmaq stories. In Fetching Summer, from Stories from the Six Worlds for instance, we find a character named Sky (Cuchulain goes to the Isle of Skye to complete his education!) who allows summer to return. If you think about this one reference, a time when there was no summer, you might conclude that the story refers to the previous Ice Age. Fetching Summer also contains a reference to crossing the
ocean, this time by Mi'kmaq warriors, who are going overseas in
canoes to fight. Each processional period lasts 2160 years, and we're currently entering Aquarius. Again, the story contains the earliest reference to Brazil and the fountain of youth (Tir Nan Og) as a place to the west of Ireland where paradise is located. The Tuatha De Danann were eventually supplanted in Ireland by the Milesians, and they either went underground (literally) or sailed west to Tir Nan Og, where they remain to this day. An Elfish Race The el-fish, this time translated as Elohim fish people, harken back to an ancient Sumerian image, of a teacher-god named Oannes, who is said to be half-man, half-fish, who comes out of the sea each morning to teach mankind the arts and technology, then goes back into the sea each evening. According to one online source, Elves, once the masters of the World, have been reduced to vagabonds and wanderers, the mournful descendants of their broken Empire. Arrogant, decadent, and cruel, Elves are still masters of the magical arts, but lack the discipline and organization to re-conquer all that their former slaves, the Sons of Men, have taken from them. What few Elves still remain are distrusted by all and treated as outcasts rather than as Kings - their legendary immortality now a curse, they wander through the ruins of the World their elders made, watching them crumble and waiting to die. The remnants of the great Elvish nations can still be seen, borne out in each elves' skin tone: White in the oldest families, who ruled in the cold Northlands; Brown for those born to the Lords of the wood; and Green for the coastal families who once mapped the great Seas. From Shadowbane @ http://chronicle.ubi.com We are looking for someone who is associated with
the sea, or someone born of the sea, or of the sea foam, and we come
across the name Mary, Merrie, Mari, referring to “mer” meaning
“sea.” That both traditions should contain similar characters, mer-folk, suggests not only the universality of the myth but also the possibility that the stories are witness accounts of real events. The Annunaki story is an interesting one, for it finds support in the Genesis account of the creation of man by the Elohim. The Annunaki were “those who from Heaven to Earth came,” long ago to mine gold. It appears the gold in question, a white powder, kept them alive for ages, and was also known as the nectar of the gods, manna, ambrosia, the philosopher’s stone and the fountain of youth. They quickly tired of mining and being lazy perhaps, created a being that would work for them, a slave. A strange confirmation of this theory comes from an
unlikely source. Edgar Cayce, perhaps America’s most popular
psychic, speaks of the “things” that were created to make life
easier for the ruling Atlanteans. These created things began
clamouring for rights and soon became a liability. Hidden in the
text is the unspoken verification that these “things” evolved into
modern man. We read that this first man, Adama, meaning “of the earth,” wanted to be just like his creators, so he rebelled against his maker. In anger, the Elohim brought the Flood to destroy mankind. A sympathetic god warned man of his pending doom, and helped save him by building an ark. It’s a familiar story, one that we have heard many times. These Elohim were white skinned, and if the account of the Serpent in the Garden can be taken literally, reptilian. They were perhaps cold blooded, but immortal in that they appeared to live forever. They apparently covered themselves in a white powder extracted from gold. This monatomic gold powder apparently gave them immortality. Tradition suggests that they evolved into our elves, pixies and fairies of folklore; strange, unseen folk with magical powers and unlimited wealth. We don’t see the original Annunaki in this tradition. But they are part of our psyche, nonetheless, and have reincarnated into our current mythos as the “wee folk.” In our desire to perpetuate the myth of white supremacy deriving from a white-skinned god, we have embraced this image of the white “feathered serpent” as our own, not realizing that it would make us kin to a snake, whose medula oblongata we share, atop our reptilian brain stem. William Henry, an investigative mythologist featured on http://www.coasttocoastam.com, who has studied ancient art focusing on advanced scientific concepts, believes that the ancients understood wormholes. A wormhole is an apparent shortcut through space-time so that you might be able to travel to a planet 10 light years away instantly because it’s really only in the dimension next door, and a wormhole is the doorway to it. His Horus-Ra image is also the medula oblongata, which is our own Vault of Heaven.
Henry found that the Egyptians thought so much of the human brain
stem that they made a symbol for it. They called it the Horus-Ra
symbol under the Vault of Heaven. It corresponds to the medula
oblongata, the corpus callosum and the thalamus, and is our own
personal star gate, a dimensional portal to the universe next door. Mystery piles upon mystery as we try to unravel the past. The People of Anu (Tuatha Da Danann) disappear from Europe and show up in America, where they left ample evidence of their passage. Greater Ireland The Ogham script was in use until about 700 AD. The Druids used it both as a sacred alphabet and as a secret sign language. The series of lined figures could be easily translated into hand gestures, and while carrying on a normal conversation, the Druids could relay a secret message by various gestures. This ability to speak in code made them a formidable and feared enemy, and the Ogham script was eventually outlawed, as indeed were the Druids them-selves, with the coming of Christianity. The story of the Celtic discovery of America remains untold. The Keltoi were a seafaring race who perfected the leather boats, the coracle and curragh, which were used to visit outlying islands in search of solitude and safety from the Viking menace. Whether by design or happenstance, they discovered America early in the first millennium AD. We know this because the Norse tell us they found evidence of Celtic influence wherever they went. The Norse stories call the North American coast either "Greater Ireland" or "White Man Land," depending on how you translate the word "Hvitramannaland." The Hvitra might also have been the northern Elf Elohim version of the lost Annunaki. One further proof that the Celts were here is contained in the Mi'kmaw name for Cape Breton Island. They call it Una'ma’kik - Land of Fog. The Celtic name for Ireland is Oona. They're both pronounced the same way, so that in a pre-literate society, there would be no apparent difference between the two words. They might even represent the same link we see in the growth of New England as a colony of England. And let’s not forget Oannes, the half-fish/half-man teacher-god from Sumer. Oonaisms According to the Pyramid Texts, Unas became great by eating the flesh of his mortal enemies and then slaying and devouring the gods themselves. After devouring the gods and absorbing their spirits and powers, Unas journeys through the day and night sky to become the star Sahu, or Orion. The method by which he achieves deification and immortality was by turning on the gods, slaying and devouring them, and thus ascending to the heavens to become in fact a god. The idea is not unlike Holy Communion in many ways, and may have inspired the Last Supper of Christian tradition. An interesting anomaly occurs during Unas’ reign that Egyptologists have no way of explaining. Egyptian hieroglyph writing appears to have achieved a sudden infusion of purity during his pharaohship that’s hard to explain. It’s as if Unas found a more perfect form of his own writing system and imported it wholesale. Unas was a great seafarer. His pyramid displays the first use of hieroglyphs, a trick he must have learned from the Mi’kmaq when he was visiting. They also use hieroglyphs, by the way. Early missionaries especially LeClerq and Millard appear to have found its usage wide enough to have written a prayer book in it. Milliard also came from the same small town as Champolion, the man who allegedly cracked the Rosetta Stone code that allows us to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs today. If, indeed, Champolion used Millard’s prayer book, printed in the Mi’kmaq hieroglyph script, to crack the Rossetta code, then it also points to the denial theme so prevalent in modern thought - give aboriginal thought no credit whatever for independent creation! Hieroglyphs might have been an Annunaki or Atlantean legacy, the usage of which may have deteriorated under the Egyptians, but when Unas came across the Maritime Archaic Mi’kmaq, he quickly realized that they too were using the same system, and because the Mi’kmaq consider language a vital component of tribal consciousness, they kept this writing legacy intact, even to this day. The prayer book has recently been reissued, and is now a wonderful source of inspiration for the Mi’kmaq. Thrice Sired Son A little later she meets a poetess and seer from a sidhe (pronounced shee-hee), inhabited by fairy folk who live in the hill). She informs her that her future is filled with blood. Maeve argues with the seer claiming that while her strength and power is righteously acquired, she has the added insurance of being aligned with the "sun" which sets each day "over toward paradise and the fountain of youth in Brazil." Thus, we have the first recorded reference to the island of Brazil, the fountain of youth, and paradise, and they are all west of Ireland. We also have the barest hint of an alliance between Ireland and wherever Brazil is located. The seer then relates the story of Cuchulain. He was the son of Princess Dectera, virgin born and filled with the spirit of the glorious green-clad Lugh Lamfada. He was also the son of the Ulster chief, Sualtam, and the son of King Conor. This thrice-sired child would grow up to be "the ravening lion, the doom of the world, the conqueror of the host, the chief vassal of Ireland, the mangler of warriors, the destroyer of rulers, and the torch of the East." He got his name, which means Hound of Culann, when, as a child of six years, he killed the hound that guarded the castle of Culann, the Smith. He was seventeen when Queen Maeve consulted the priest, donned her armour, mounted her war chariot, and invaded the East.
The Plain of Misfortune In February, the Bras d'Or Lakes are sometimes frozen solid with a crusty coating of snow. It is also "snow blindness time" in the Mi'kmaw calendar. The "green youth" could have been a local Mi'kmaq who showed him how to use a toboggan or canoe, each of which resembles a wheel in some fashion. Cuchulain arrived in front of Queen Skatha's castle where he performed the almost impossible feat of jumping the Bridge of Leaps (ice clampers?) before he was taught how. His friend, Ferdiad, never attempted the crossing. Because Ferdiad never mastered the Bridge of Leaps, he also never learned how to use the "terrible harpoon" weapon that only students who mastered the bridge were given access to. Cuchulain was then accepted as Queen Skatha's student and stayed for a year and a day, learning how to fight, how to control the natural world, and how to write in the Ogham script using twigs and notches on wands. If our interpretation of the Cuchulain story is
correct, then five thousand years ago Cape Breton was ruled by Queen
Scatha, Scatach, or Scota, who was also known as the dark goddess.
She ruled a matriarchal society that was both a centre of learning
and a world power. Cuchulain spends "a year and a day" in Cape
Breton, and returns with a "buffalo shield" and a magic harpoon
weapon called a gae bulga or hooked spear, named in honour of Bulga,
the god of lightning. The "buffalo" shield is further proof that he
was over here, but the harpoon weapon could only have been the ten
and a half-foot long eeling spear-longbow. While at Skye, Cuchulain went to war against Queen Aifa from the Land of Shadows. He defeated her in battle, then lay with, and impregnated, her. She would bear the son Cuchulain would later slay. In short, Cuchulain created a kinship tie with the people of the land of Skye. As the story points out, the son later arrives in Ireland and Cuchulain must kill him so that his authority remains unchallenged. If the people of Skye are the Mi'kmaq, then this is the first recorded reference to the Mi'kmaq in Europe. This visit proved fatal for the son of Cuchulain. The "green youth" with the toboggan shows up a little later to help Cuchulain on the battlefield. From this we can infer that for every two Mi'kmaq who went over to Europe to do battle, one never returned. Cuchulain completed his education, went back to Ireland, married Emer who waited for him while he was away, and settled down to lead a violent, battle-filled life that saw him victorious in every encounter. The Beheading Game Cuchulain was invited to cut off the monster's
head, which he did. To everyone's surprise the monster then picked
up his own head and strode from the hall with it, vowing that he
would return the next day when it would be Cuchulain's turn to put
his head on the block. Cuchulain became the acknowledged champion of the East. He was King Connor's most valiant warrior. The poets recorded his victories and virtues in laudatory praises. He was the bravest, the smartest, the best orator, the wisest counselor. He was also the most dedicated of all the king's warriors to his own people. It was because of this dedication that Cuchulain killed his son, Connla, by Queen Aifa from the Land of Shadows. While King Connor and his retinue were strolling along the beach they saw a small craft (a canoe?) approaching over the choppy water. In it was a very handsome boy who was killing seagulls so skillfully with a sling that he immediately became a threat to the kingdom. The lad landed and quickly subdued the champions who were there on the beach. The king then sent for Cuchulain, his only vassal skilful enough to overcome “the bronzed youth.” Need I define the word bronzed! Emer, upon hearing the story asked Cuchulain not to go, fearing that the youth was his son, and he would be responsible for fulfilling the prophecy in which he would slay his own flesh and blood. "No," said Cuchulain. "The youth must die for the safety and honour of my land and myself. Even if it is Connla." When the two met in battle Cuchulain used the magical harpoon weapon that Queen Skatha taught him alone to use, against his own son. The barbed weapon "crept into every crevice of his body," suggesting that it entered through the head and eyes, and exited out Connla's backside.
He
uses the weapon one more time in the story, this time against his
old friend, Ferdiad, from his school days on the Isle of Skye. Again
the poets who relate the events of the battle aren't sure how the
weapon is used, except that it enters every orifice of Ferdiad's
body. A blubber arrow, entering through the eyes and exiting
the backside, would definitely look like it was filling every orifice
— a six foot blubber arrow shot from a ten foot longbow. The bow was
so long in fact that it had to be anchored with the foot. For a
people who had never seen one used, it would present the same enigma
the gae bulga posed for the scops telling the story of its use. Is it possible that the Cuchulain story is 5000 years old? We find in the archaeological record that before 1750 BC, there was a sharing of cultural traits based on red ochre that spanned the Atlantic Ocean, Commentators have posited a circumpolar civilization, which they call the Red Paint People because the one similarity between these trans-oceanic peoples was their ritual use of red ochre, an iron ore used as a pigment. We don’t understand the beneficial effects of coating oneself in red ochre. From the north of Labrador to Land’s End, South America, red ochre was used liberally to paint the body, perhaps to protect oneself from sunburn or bugs. What if red ochre did something else, made one immune to certain diseases, for instance. Or as in the myth of El Dorado, coating oneself in gold dust gave one immortality, perhaps red ochre did something similar. The Red Ochre Folk According to Patrick Huyghe, author of Columbus Was Last - From 200,000 BC to 1492, A Heretical History of Who Was First, (Hyperion Books, 1992), seven or eight thousand years ago a host of sea-oriented cultures sprang up across the circumpolar region. In 1975 archaeologists from the Danish National Museum discovered the remains of a maritime culture at a site called Vedbaek. They uncovered nineteen burial mounds, including one of a woman and child covered with red ochre. Radiocarbon dates indicate an age of more than 7000 years for the site. Another site dating to the same age was found in 1927 at the bottom of a shell heap on the island of Teviec, just off the coast of Brittany in France. Here too the burials were covered in red ochre. (p.48) Evidence found in Maine in 1882 shows that similar Red Ochre Folk had been involved in long-distance trade of chert points. Some eighty years later, archaeologists found the source of this stone, Ramah Bay in the northern Labrador, 1500 nautical miles from the coast of Maine. These chert projectile points, unlike those made in Maine of local materials, were of superior workman-ship, showed a lack of wear, and occurred only in burials. Radiocarbon dating of a site in Penobscot, Maine, during the 1960s and early 1970s revealed that the Red Paints had occupied Maine some 4500 years ago. In Newfoundland a bull-dozer working at the site of a new movie theatre outside the fishing community of Port au Choix cut across a patch of red ochre. When James Tuck from Memorial University came to inspect the site, he found a number of well preserved skeletons covered with red ochre. This isn't surprising when we consider that the Beothuk were the original Red Indians of early explorers, whose excessive use of red ochre labeled all native Americans as red, the name assuming a pejorative connotation for the colour of their skin. It was a Norwegian anthropologist, Gutorm Gjessing, who first drew comparisons between the maritime technologies of northern Europe and North America. He said that only a specialist in petrology could distinguish between the Norwegian implements and those of Maine. Such similarities led Gjessing to propose that there had once been a single "circumpolar culture" who had adapted to the ice-bound fringe of the polar sea and existed for millennia with a Stone Age technology. They maintained low population densities and travelled widely in search of their food. During their movements they encountered similar groups with whom they exchanged ideas. Eventually this resulted in a common pool of elements, including skin boats, ground-slate technology, semilunar-shaped knives, sledges, toggling and other harpoons, and oil lamps. (p.64) We might add that the Red Ochre Folk were matriarchal, worshipped an Earth goddess, practised a form of spirituality now prevalent among native people of America, played the hand drum as do natives and their European counterparts, the reindeer-herding Saalmi, who lived in a conical dwelling called a goahte which is similar to a teepee or wigwam. As in the native tradition, the Saalmi named every part of the goahte with similar ritual meaning. So the possibility that people from Ireland were allied with the people from North America 5000 years ago is not only possible, but highly probable, given the sharing of cultural traits that we have just seen. So, indeed, Cuchulain may just have been in Cape Breton 5000 years ago.
The Solar-Lunar Controversy
Then there's Thor and his thunderbolts; Joshua with his trumpet that destroyed the walls of Jericho; a more accurate calendar than ours among the Mayans; and architecture we can't understand, let alone duplicate, in civilizations we have yet to realize were more advanced than we are today.
Need we count the ways of our ignorance? I may be putting too much of a negative spin on our accomplishments, but the same debate raged a few years ago that occurred a thousand years before: would the millennium be the end of the world as we know it? Where have we progressed in our thinking? Are we not still debating the number of angel's that will fit on the head of a pin? And when the kings of the Earth finally gave up the notion that they ruled by divine right, the pope declared his own infallibility in 1870. We're still very much Ussherites when it comes to determining the age of our own civilization. Archbishop James Ussher, writing in 1658, begat his way to 4004 BC for the date of creation using a biblical chronology. Modern archaeology has kept the date in sacrosanct tact for the first cities: Sumerian agro-states; Old Kingdom Egyptians; and won't go beyond 4000 BC despite a current water-weathering theory that pegs the age of the Sphinx at a minimum of twelve thousand years. People are beginning to use the word Atlantis with more frequency in relation to the Sphinx, the word being liberated from the Daniken heresy of the 'Sixties. We can all breathe a sigh of relief now that Daniken had been charged with fraud. So many theories fell from grace in his name, Atlantis being one of them. Once Charles H. Hapgood was associated with the Daniken crowd, his theories were dismissed despite Albert Einstein blessing them. Not to sell von Daniken short by any means. He got the story out in spite of the bad press. He paved the way for serious inquiry into the UFO phenom. And he’s still telling the same story, even today, although he dropped the question mark after the first Chariot of the Gods? book came out. And I’ll read his next books too, once they come out. I’m a loyal fan. Nil bastardi Carborundum, Erich! Other von Daniken books: The Gold of the Gods, Gods from Outer Space, The Eyes of the Sphinx, Return to the Stars & Odyssey of the Gods. fan fare ♫
The Hapgood Event - 13000 BC The maps convinced Hapgood that the history books were wrong: a great seafaring culture had mapped the Earth with a geodesic, nautical, and cartographic technology as advanced as our own, six thousand or more years ago. The culture knew how to reckon longitude, a skill we acquired only after we invented the chronometer three hundred years ago. The map showing Antarctica first appeared in 1554. Antarctica wasn't rediscovered until 1818. Hapgood was elated to find that Antarctica was shown ice-free because he had theorized that the polar ice caps were recent accumulations, taking thousands, not millions, of years to build; and that they occasionally slip, setting in motion rapid tectonic displacements, in which whole continents would shift position by as much as 2500 miles. The last time it happened, it ended the Wisconsin Ice Age circa 13,000 BC. Hapgood suggested that Antarctica "slipped" into its current position at that time, and after nine thousand years, became fully glaciated. Support for his theories lie unrecognized in the atlases of today. They show that the former North Polar axis was situated in the middle of Hudson’s Bay during the last ice age, 2500 miles from where it sits today. Hapgood didn't use the word Atlantis, but later writers, recognizing the verity of his findings, would use his displacement theory to explain the sinking of the mythical lost continent. The event triggered a series of worldwide catastrophes, the least of which was coastal flooding caused by rapidly melting glaciers. The mastodon, toxodon and sabre cats all disappeared. Seventy genera of large mammals became extinct in the Americas alone, their jumbled carcasses showing that they were torn limb from limb before they were frozen solid in the Arctic and Siberian permafrost. Believe it or not, there are still practicing archaeologists who credit this massive faunal extinction to native over-hunting. Something else happened that we have trouble reconciling with our current level of knowledge. The fauna who survived the event were smaller afterward. Did the gravity of the Earth change which in turn affected faunal development? What are we missing? In native stories Kluskap is credited with making the beaver smaller. It was once six feet taller than it is today. Cats, dogs, and antelope. They all grew smaller than normal after the Hapgood event. The Sky is Falling Why 8000 BC, and not 4000? Why higher up, and inland? They then found, and resurrected, Charles H. Hapgood from the limbo serious archaeological research had found itself in after Daniken tarred all prehistorians with the same brush, suggesting that the first great culture bearers were "little green men from Mars." Not that the “little green man” concept is wrong, mind you. Even the Bible states that the sons of God looking down on the daughters of man from above, went down and fathered entire races. The native archaeological record kicks in around 8000 BC. Tuck and McGhee's find of a Red Ochre burial at L'Anse Amour on the coast of Labrador has helped confirm a continual occupation from that time. Artifacts dredged up on the fishing banks around Nova Scotia suggest a coastal plain culture that may be far older than eight or fifteen thousand years. These artifacts, lost in the flooding that followed the rapid meltdown of the glaciers, would make the culture that made them contemporary with Atlantis. John Anthony West, who is largely responsible for breaking the Egyptologist's age threshold from 4000 to 12,000 BC, using geology to date the Sphinx, convinced Graham Hancock to suggests that a different technology was used in Atlantis; one based on light and sound we don't quite understand, that gave them a control over their environment that we haven't been able to match. Recently the Discovery Channel featured a show on how one could erect a large obelisk using vast quantities of sand that lowers the stone within a confined space simply by removing the sand beneath it. We keep thinking in terms of large numbers of slaves labouring for hundreds of years to erect the pyramids, when the answer might either astound us, or be so simple that we haven't considered it. There's a parlour game where four people lift a
person sitting in a chair by using one finger each. The four lifters
prepare themselves by placing one hand on the head of the sitter,
then lifting. The chair lifts as if it were as light as a feather.
We can't explain what happens, except that we think we've somehow
overcome the laws of gravity. That's why it's just a parlour game.
“In Pictou Landing, they were trying to move a little house on log rollers down the road. And it got stuck. Sak Piel Saqmaw (Peter the Chief) said, "Wait a minute" - he was coming up the road - and everyone just stopped and moved away, and he went to the house, and lifted up his cane and touched it. That's all. He just touched it, and then said, "Now." And the house just moved along for the men as easy as anything.” (The Old Man Told Us, p. 261) The parlour game and the feat with the cane involves a technology we haven't explored, one that might explain why it need not have taken thousands of slaves hundreds of years to build the Great Pyramid. The answer calls for a change in our way of thinking about reality. It calls for a major revision to our pattern of thought, our paradigm, if we want to understand who we are and what we're capable of achieving. What knowledge do we have of the civilizations that spawned our oldest myths? Thankfully, there's more of the "old knowledge" alive than we care to admit. In Europe there's a tradition which suggests that a body of thought had survived from the first civilization, and was handed down secretly by initiates we might call Merlin, the magician, or the Magi, the philosopher-stone seekers, and practitioners of the black arts: who - either by stirring a cauldron of acids to leech gold out of the ground, as we do ourselves; or by changing the atomic structure of gold so that we get the elixir of life, which is a nut we've yet to crack - would create a font of health, wealth, and long life. The tradition also speaks of strange powers that allows one to overcome Newtonian physics, where practitioners acquire great healing power, the ability to see into the world of spirit, to fly, to become invisible at will, to change base metals into gold, and indeed, to become immortal. This knowledge is contained in various sources, such as the Kabbala, an occult companion to the Bible; the religious tracts of Old Egypt; as well as in everyone's myths and legends. Native American spirituality has preserved more elements of the "old knowledge" than appears in European thought. There are secrets in the trance, smoke, and the dance that allows us an insight into the European past that is now lost. A brief look at the Mi'kmaq Creation Story will help illustrate the point.
The Sun Wept with Grief Thereat -Mi’kmaq creation myth, recorded by missionary Le Clerq (fl.1675-83) from The Old Man Told Us, pp.3-4 The Mi'kmaq remember the biblical flood and recorded the event in their oral record. It was a time of great destruction, and they attribute the catastrophe to divine intervention because human beings "having become wicked," were in need of cleansing. It parallels the story in Genesis, and confirms the Mi'kmaq having witnessed the event. It also confirms that native thought has an unbroken oral tradition that goes back in time to the events in Genesis. The story may also confirm the Cronus myth: certain old men survived the flood. We recall the biblical story of "giants" who "lived before that time and also after," and note the singularity of intent the words invoke; that certain old men survived the flood, and fathered the new race of survivors. It also puts a lie to the theory that only Noah and his family survived the flood. Every Flood tradition has its survivors. And stories of the Flood are encountered on the seven continents. The Immaculati Sumerian accounts speak of the Annunaki, who were the “sons of god” who married the “daughters of man” and sired children, a story very similar to the Genesis account. Grailers can now trace the bloodline back through certain families to these cosmic unions. Sir Laurence Gardner tells us the word Genesis can now be defined by simply breaking the word into its lawful components: Gene Isis. Another parallel between the biblical and the Mi'kmaq flood is the reason for it: the people having become wicked, were in need of cleansing. The idea that we are personally responsible for the well-being of the planet, in that we can trigger the end of the world by our behaviour, is an idea come home to roost in our post-industrial age. A personal covenant with the Creator, where we give thanks for His bounty, is the first premise of native spirituality. It unites everyone in a moral code that is, at the same time, political and temporal. Another line in the creation story begs for clarification: the sun came to them to console them. Where was the sun before the event, that it should “come to them”? Couple this thought with the birth of Apollo, the sun god, who was the son of Zeus. In other words, Apollo was born after the Hapgood Event. He is known in both Greek and Roman myth as the young man who took the reigns of the sun chariot and drove wildly off course, creating much destruction. The Medewewin Science will step in and deny the credibility of smudging and music as valid instruments in the healing process. Yet I've seen a drooping plant stand up after smudging. I also know that some types of music are more soothing than others. I can't explain what happens, just as I can't explain Einstein's theory of relativity. We break our thoughts into words and claim that we know what we're talking about. We say energy equals mass times light squared, as if it meant something. We hear that when a thought goes slower than the speed of light, it becomes physical, and say, Yes, you're right! But when we turn to face the speaker, we're amazed because it's not a hyper dimensional physicist speaking, but an Australian aborigine, who shows us, for the first time, what word-made-flesh means. One further tenet of native spirituality is that reflected moon light caused the creation of all life on Earth. Historians note two facts that seem to confirm this belief. First, the moon was captured by the Earth some half a billion years ago. Second, an explosion of life sprang from apparent nothingness at that time. Ergo, as they say in Latin, life sprang from the coupling of the Earth and the moon. Mother Earth, Father Sky. The celestial mechanics involved have first to be recognized, then studied. Perhaps the moon lowered the vibratory frequency of the Earth and as Einstein would say, Energy equals [increased] mass (Earth & Moon) times light [plus reflected light] squared. Maybe the reflected light is slower, vibratorily speaking, and the thoughts contained within the photons, escape. And just maybe, as Horatio Cane would say, “vibratorily” isn’t a word and we have a homicide of the English Language on our hands, and nothing more. Solar Man According to Colin Wilson, that's the basis of poet Robert Graves' theory in The White Goddess, that there are two kinds of knowledge, solar and lunar. Solar knowledge is fragmented, where we try to understand the whole by examining its parts. This is the basis of our "western" science today, and is Aristotelian in approach. Lunar knowledge is intuitive, where the whole is understood at once. Plato talked about lunar knowledge in his dialogue concerning ideal forms. Everything in the physical world has an ideal counterpart in the "real" world. Our chair is but a pale imitation of the ideal chair. Our lives are but shadows of reality. We cannot know anything until we experience its ideal form. Today, we recognize the fact that we use ten percent of our brains. We see ten percent of the light spectrum. Ninety percent of everything is missing, say the astrophysicists who've measured the universe, and found it wanting. Are we truly like the blind men feeling the elephant? It's a rope, says one man who's found the elephant's tail; no, a wall, says a second, whose hands have just gone over the massive body of the beast; no, it's a snake, claims the man in front feeling the trunk. No one sees the whole elephant. We're seeing shadows, then reading Aristotle, and calling it reality. Had we embraced Plato twenty-five hundred years ago, we might have evolved differently, become lunar thinkers. Pity the cloned man growing up in a solar world. His fellows will debate his humanity as if he were a lab specimen. Lunar man would take him to his bosom and love him as his natural born son. The wall that separates the two paradigms - lunar and solar - makes each man as different as day is to night. The first salvo in the cloning wars was fired from the Pontifical Academy of Life, a panel set up by John Paul II. On June 24, 1997, the panel declared that the human soul, "the constitutive kernel," of every human created by God, cannot be produced through cloning (Chronicle-Herald, June 25, 1997). Aside from the fact that the church would declare a cloned man "soulless", the panel expressed concern that cloned human beings would pay the price psychically for being aware of the "real, or even only `virtual' presence of his `other.'" Lunar Man When did we get to be solar man? The answer is simple. Lunar man became solar man when he stopped using his memory to record things and started writing them down. The invention of the alphabet, (circa 3500 BC), not surprisingly attributed to the sun god, Apollo, also heralded the birth of our fragmenting rationality. When we learned to break speech down into its component parts, we did the same things with our minds, and lost our ability to see the whole of anything. The break between solar and lunar man was also a move away from our ability to communicate without using words. The aboriginal lover rubbing her scar to summon her mate is one facet of a lost ability, and points to a vast enterprise driven by mind over matter. In the finest regions of our science fiction literature, we note a more advanced race we encounter as having the ability to communicate with their thoughts alone. Is this something we'll evolve into, or an ability we lost when we took pen to paper? The question we dare not ask is: have we not devolved, then, from some past Golden Age to where we now stand as the golden-silver-bronze statue with iron legs and clay feet? Is not the basic ingredient of our silicon microchips sand? So we'll leave the question unanswered. Our ability to deceive ourselves knows no bounds. I think I'm six feet tall. I'm not even five-eight. I think I'm a lot better looking than mirrors and pictures give me credit. Smarter than test scores belie. The best there is. I'm also terrified of a dream I had that's as real to me as any I've ever had: the aliens have come, and are in control. I tell them I know who they are, and will expose them as soon as I wake up. Go ahead. Wake up, they say, laughing at me. No one will believe you. So I don't say anything, don't tell anyone. Who's going to believe someone who thinks he's six feet tall when he's not, that tall is better, and that we're too smart to let others control our thoughts? We are who I've become. Or is it: whom I've become? The rules are many. We surround ourselves with them so that we can isolate ourselves, one from the other, and define ourselves in terms of our separateness. Am I not barely human myself when I can point to others and say: I'm more evolved than he is, or she. When are they going to learn to be just like me: the epitome of Modern Man!
Evolution is Desire Driven If we are dust, then let us be living dust. Let us first erase all the letters, and see ourselves as the thought that created the word, not the word itself. So we aren't men and women, islands onto ourselves. We are drops in the ocean of life, rising on the wind to water a parched land, descending back into the Earth, into the rivers that take us to the ocean again. We are life, spiraling through the universe at incredible speeds. We don't notice the journey, but we are as much bound by it as the flower opening to the morning sun. Does it care that we watch? Solar man will say, No. Lunar man, Yes. When did all this happen, that we lost our ear to the voice of the flower? Colin Wilson, in an occultopedia volume called From Atlantis to the Sphinx, invites us to read Robert Graves with a view to understanding the poet's conversion from solar to lunar thought. Graves was reading the Welsh epic The Mabinogion, especially "The Song of Taliesin," when he suddenly knew by intuition that the Battle of the Trees was really a struggle between two Druid priest hoods for the control of learning. "The Druid alphabet," writes Wilson, "was a closely guarded secret, but its eighteen letters were the names of trees, whose consonants stood for the months of which the trees were characteristic, and the vowels for the position of the sun, with its equinoxes and solstices." In short the poem was a coded message that contained a sophisticated calendar. The Battle of the trees was won by the "busy rational cult of the Solar God Apollo, who rejected the . . . tree-alphabet in favour of a commercial Phonetic alphabet - the familiar ABCs - and initiated European literature and science." (p.216) I believe there's an easier demarcation that we can make, and perhaps, that we've been overlooking: Matriarchy versus Patriarchy.
Patriarchy vs. Matriarchy Swords appear in the archaeological record at the threshold leading from matriarchy to patriarchy, from lunar to solar man. It can't be as simple as that, you say; there has to be some murder and mayhem in a matriarchy. Look at the blood sacrifices of the Aztecs, the stone knife exposing the beating heart to appease an angry god. Ah, but you see, it's an angry god, not goddess. Okay. I slipped that one in there. And maybe the invention of writing is the telling sign. But it goes deeper than that. It goes to the fabric of the solar-lunar societies themselves. The lunar view of the world is different from the solar. Past, present and future is different. Concepts of time and space are different. Nothing illustrates the difference between solar and lunar thought better than the current debate over archaeological digs on native lands. A five thousand year old site in New Brunswick had been uncovered because the Trans Canada Highway was going through the area. Work was stopped when the first artifact was found. The government wanted the road to go through, but they were now dealing with an entirely new situation: native refusal to disturb the site, come what may. The natives had taken the case to the United Nations. John Joe Sark, the Mi'kmaw delegate to the U.N.
Sub-commit-tee on World Indigenous People, wanted all digging to
stop, and the highway rerouted. The government view was that if
human remains are found, they'd reroute the highway. McKenna and
Sark both knew the acidity in the soil would have erased all human
remains. Such is not the case with the Cape Breton Mi'kmaq, who have no graves. Their method of burial was twofold: excarnation, where the body was placed in the open air, in the trees, so that the flesh might be eaten by birds; and then skeletal submersion in salt water to ensure the return of the individual. Anyone they didn't want to see returned was buried with a large stone placed over the remains. This happened in the L'Anse Amour grave. The bones were found under a large flat stone. The Mi'kmaq have been fighting a dredging operation of the Bras d'Or Lakes, claiming that the operation would destroy the salinity of the lakes and ruin their fishing grounds. The explanation is weak, and consequently, hasn't been accepted by government because the silting process is no greater from dredging than from the rotors of the large gypsum carriers. The Mi'kmaq don't have a case. And indeed, they don't. But they haven't articulated the real problem: the Bras d'Or Lakes have been their burial ground for thousands of years. The stories refer to the special process of ensuring that their game will return, by protecting the bones, and placing them in salt water. This method held true for the pre-Christian burials, but with the one-life, singular redemption of Christianity, the practice was aborted in favor of ground burials. Another problem that they face is their own genesis. Every history textbook that deals with the peopling of America has as its premise a land bridge from Asia by way of the Bering Strait that joins Alaska to Russia; in fact, that Amerindian culture is a Eurasian transplant. This speculative hypothesis is held despite the native contention that they sprang from the soil of Mother Earth like the grass on the prairies. In the Muskhogean creation story, the "Master of Breath" took the clay that emerged from the receding waters of the primeval flood and molded the first man (Myths Of The American Indians, Lewis Spence, 1994 p.108). This story is similar to the account in Genesis: and the Lord God formed man of the dust of the Earth, and breathed into his nostrils, and man became a living soul (Genesis 2:7). Native spirituality continues to recognize its birth, and posits an American genesis as children of Mother Earth. Again the question is asked: when did Euro-biblical man forget that he was forged from the dust of the Earth? And again the answer is found in examining our myths. The Greeks had two sets of gods. The first gods ruled a civilization that vanished around 1750 BC, with the second set of gods taking over about eight centuries later. The Egyptians adopted Osiris after the collapse of the Middle Kingdom (1991-1786 BC). He was a more democratic god than Ra, promising immortality to rich and poor alike, if they led exemplary lives. He was the sixth of nine sets of gods stretching back 39,000 years. The 1750 BC date shows up on numerous occasions as being a dividing line between epochs. If we check the various texts we'll find the end of the Bronze Age and beginning of the Iron Age in Europe began around that date. In Nova Scotia the Maritime Archaic period ended. The Mi'kmaq gave up making pottery. They created a more intense Hunter-Harvester lifestyle.
The Velikovsky Event -1750 BC Dr Barry Fell, a Harvard professor emeritus of biology, founder of the Epigraphic Society, and master of a dozen ancient and modern languages, believes America was never really isolated by an impassable Sea of Darkness. He says that ancient seafarers came here for the same reasons that modern immigrants continue to come: to flee tyranny, taxation, and pogroms, to trade with people already here, or to seek their fortunes. They left inscriptions on temples, gravestones, tablets, rocks, and cliff faces which Fell has been able to decipher. The information he's gleaned from these numerous sources suggests that some of these visitors stayed and intermarried with the people already here so that their descendants are still here today.
A picture of a ship carved on a rock in Mount Hope, Rhode Island, commemorates the presence of Phoenician traders, whose sailing prowess is celebrated in Old Testament accounts. An inscription in the old Iberian script reads, "Mariners of Tarshish proclaim this rock." Egyptians, Lybians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Romans, Israelite and Syrian Jews, Normans, Welsh, Viking and Irish all left traces here, according to Fell. He also found traces of Hebrew, Numidian, Greek, Punic, and ancient Libyan in the languages of tribes from coast to coast. Fell came across the Mi'kmaq hieroglyph writing system and suggested that the Egyptians "taught" the Mi'kmaq their hieroglyphs. That suggestion smelled of racial bigotry to the tribal linguists. Are we not capable of inventing our own hieroglyphs? they ask. One noted linguist told me he travelled to Boston to Fell’s front door and punched him squarely on the nose. Ouch! Aboriginal lobby groups are busy protecting their heritage in numerous and some say, counterproductive, ways. A 9500 BC Caucasian skull was recently buried by order of the Supreme Court before a scientific inquiry could be made. Accusations of defacing petroglyphs to hide the “truth” have also come to light. Such is the state of affairs today that confrontation has become the only way to protect the native heritage from judicious inquiry. Worlds in Collision As we've noted above, the Mi'kmaq call the planet
Venus the last one made. Velikovsky's date for the birth of Venus
marks the division between the old and new Greek civilizations, the
change from Bronze to Iron Ages, and the break in the Maritime
Archaic from pottery to enhanced Hunter-Harvester. If Velikovsky is
right, we have an event that answers our basic question: when the
solar-lunar break occurred in human consciousness. Again we note the two sets of Greek gods: Cronus and Zeus as representing two different civilizations, and recognize the event that Velikovsky called the birth of Venus as being the dividing line between them. In the Garden of Eden, which may have been a matriarchy with Eve as the ruler, her sons Cain and Abel may be considered as the first solar and lunar men. As offerings to the Lord, Cain brought the fruit of his agriculture, Abel brought the fat of animals. The Lord blessed the hunter over the farmer, and the farmer, Cain, slew the hunter, Abel. Cain went out and built cities, and his son Tubal-Cain became an "artificer in brass and iron." (Gen. 4:22) We have to ask: is the story of Cain slaying Abel really an account of the birth of Venus, where after, iron was made? The Egyptians had iron, it was more valuable than gold, and wasn't smelted from the Earth but worked from meteorites. With Tubal Cain we get the first heavy industries, the first solar men. The Old Testament may have been written down between 900 to 600 BC, and may describe events closer to the time of writing than the estimates of Archbishop Ussher. The fact is, no one knows. Is the biblical flood associated with the birth of Venus? Again, it's hard to tell. Plato says that Atlantis was destroyed 9000 years before his time. Graham Hancock, using the data provided by John Anthony West, has proven that the Sphinx is at least that old, so that we might be looking at two different catastrophes separated by eight or nine millennia.
Were there rainbows before the Flood? God sent the rainbow as a sign of his covenant with man that he would not destroy the Earth again with a flood. My question is, why didn’t we see a rainbow in the sky before the Flood? A rainbow occurs when rain particles break a spectrum of white light into its component colours. Author Donald Ahrens in his text Meteorology Today describes a rainbow as "one of the most spectacular light shows observed on earth." He says that the traditional rainbow is sunlight spread out into its spectrum of colors and diverted to the eye of the observer by water droplets. The "bow" part of the word describes the fact that the rainbow is a group of nearly circular arcs of color all having a common centre. Ahrens is describing a natural law, seen daily across the planet. What element of the above equation was missing from the antediluvian skies that prevented early man from seeing this prism-effect in a rainbow? We know that man’s first great civilization is often referred to as the Golden Age. In geological time, this civilization would have blossomed during the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Something was different in this golden age of man. There were no rainbows. Why? What was different about the light of day back then? I believe we have an answer. A New Heaven In the book of Joshua we see the sun standing still at noon: And the sun stopped in the middle of the sky, and did not hasten down for about a whole day. Joshua 10:13 In America at that time, the sun would not have risen that morning. What terrors did it cause the Mi’kmaq? Today, they greet the morning sun with prayers of thanks to the Creator and Mother Earth. Is it also an attempt to hasten the sun, less it not rise again? It appears that the sky changed. Calendars are based on the continual renewal of the year from season to season. Early man studied the heavens so that he could predict when to plant, harvest, and hunt. There was comfort in observing a major standstill of the moon and not think something was wrong, because it was a predictable event. His gods were the constellations themselves. He would only change his gods if the constellations changed. The constellations would change only if the Earth changed. Hapgood's shifting crust would account for a change in our perception of the heavens, but the event is too early to account for the calendar change after the birth of Venus. We gained five extra days. It took the Earth longer to circle, or rather, spiral the sun, for the sun too moves through space as it circles the Milky Way galaxy.
Note the position of the sun in the artist’s creation of the eye of the god Cronus above. All three planets are shown directly above our heads conjoined along the north polar axis, with the sun appearing either just below the equator, south of Earth, and perhaps for people in the Eurasian Cradle of Civilization, unseen. The line from the Mi’kmaq Creation Myth now seems to make more sense, considering the possibility that Earth was in a different position in relation to the sun and other planets. The sun came to them to console them. Or, rather, we moved closer to the sun, and further away from Saturn, in a great reordering of the near cosmos. And in this chaotic age, Velikovski tells us, darkness reigned on Earth for a generation in the life of man. A War in Heaven Neither was their place found any more in heaven. Nothing remained of the dragon’s home planet after the war but a band of asteroids forever spiraling the sun. Today, the newspapers tell us of the success of the Mars rovers that are sending back evidence of a once-watery planet, similar to Earth. While artificial structures might not be found on Mars, despite the speculation fuelled by photos of a large granite face, and huge pyramidal structures, the fact that Mars may have had oceans from which life might have sprung, gives us pause in our quest to find out the truth about our past. The 1750 BC Velikovsky event, although not as
physically destructive as the more remote Hapgood event, took its
toll on the psyche of man. A new paradigm emerged, that began to war
with the old. Today it appears as if the two paradigms, solar and
lunar, are still at war. Each uses a different way of defining
reality. Solar thought appears to be the more recent, the result of
catastrophe that erased all trace of lunar thought in Europe. The
break in the oral record isn’t as pronounced in the Americas. The
claim for ten thousand years of continual civilization is being
taken seriously.
Our Changing Past More recently two new books, Cataclysm! Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9,500 BC, by D. S. Allan and J. B. Delair, and Earth Under Fire: Humanity's Survival of the Apocalypse, by Paul La Violette have introduced a new wrinkle into the origins of life on Earth. The Hapgood Event will happen again in another 13,000 years time. And happens every time the galaxy hiccups, which it does regularly, every 26,000 years. These cosmic core explosions wreak havoc on us, as the fossil record indicates, and proves that ancient texts, and the oral record that describe these events are valid sources of historical data. And yet the past is still a vast terra incognita, an unknown land. Over the face of it dark ages are seen. Whispers of grace and elegance are heard. Empires rise and fall, a few potsherds their only testimony. A thread is followed, a continuity seen. Some-thing is found. Called a different name by everyone who finds it, it leads to health, happiness and long life. For lack of a better word, we call it the grail. A word that at least gives it substance, for the grail itself is internal. And, whether called the Holy Grail, the San Graal, or even the pot o’plenty, we’re looking for something that everyone has been searching for since Adam. But, unlike everyone else who goes off in search of a damsel in distress, I wanted to see if I could find the grail a little closer to home. When I found stuff that had Grail written on it, I realized that European grail-folk must have left it here long before Columbus sailed. While he’s credited with the discovery of America, which is in dispute, his greatest success was in finding that the Gulf Stream could be used to get from one side of the ocean to the other. Perhaps he had heard along the waterfront that there were rivers of wind in the ocean, and you could use them to get back and forth. And what of contact between Europe and America before 1492? At times, brave individuals stand up at conventions and proclaim a pre-Columbian discovery of America. In 1934 A.W. Brøgger, director of the Norwegian Museum in Oslo, stood before the second International Congress of Archaeologists and in his role as president expressed opinions which were little short of heresy for that time and place. "It could also be very well believed," said Brøgger, "that the route to America was discovered in the Bronze Age, (3000 - 1750 BC), at the time when sea voyaging was at its height. It could perhaps help to explain why the American peoples were living in the Bronze age when Europeans reached them in the next great era of voyaging. It must be remembered that the prevailing winds and currents almost compel the discovery of Central America from Spanish and Portuguese harbours, when once open-sea voyages are begun. The story of Atlantis found in Plato would thereby gain a new and natural explanation: the great discoveries of the Bronze Age mariners, which were made and lost again." (Constance Irwin, Fair Gods and Stone Faces, St. Martin's Press, NY, 1963, page 218.) Part of the controversy which surrounds the above claim infers that native North Americans weren't capable of developing their own Bronze Age without outside help. Irwin, citing Harold S. Gladwin's book Men out of Asia, continues: By way of spectacular processes Gladwin offers metallurgy. Not only smelting, plating, sintering, welding, soldering, forging, and filigree - with gold, silver, platinum, copper, and lead - but also the intricate process of casting by the lost-wax method. All of these techniques were known and all of these metals used by the South American Indians of Columbia and Peru hundreds of years before Columbus. Before that, all of these techniques and metals were known in the Near and Middle East. Gladwin finds it both strange and significant that, whereas progress in metallurgy was painfully slow in the Old World, in the "isolated" New World there is no evidence of an experimental period. From the first use of copper anywhere - probably in Armenia in about 5500 B.C., he indicates - thousands of years were required for the development of the techniques listed above. But in America metallurgy seems to have burst forth suddenly in fullest flower - at a level, moreover, which has never again been achieved by American Indians in post-Columbian times. (page 251) If, in Lunar thought, the whole of an idea is perceived at once, then a fully-conceived pyramid or a complete industrial system is not beyond the range of possibilities. It doesn't require that architecture or industry be the result of a pre-Columbian import from the so-called European cradle of civilization. Unfortunately, however, to search for a pre-Columbian discoverer of America will now mark one as being a subtle racist, according to Ronald Wright, author of Stolen Continents, the New World through Indian Eyes, (Penguin Books, 1992). In his book the author proclaims: "Finally, a word on crackpot ideas that the American Indians and their achievements hail from Egypt, Phoenicia, the lost tribes of Israel, Medieval Welsh princes, Irish monks, Atlantis, or outer space. Such `theories' are a measure of Europeans' inability to accept native Americans for who they are. The implication behind them is often subtly racist: that Amerindians could not have done what they did without help." (Author's Note, xi-xii) Barry Fell claimed that the Egyptians taught the Mi'kmaq the hieroglyphics that were later used by Maillard to compose the Mi'kmaw prayer missal. Perhaps it was the other way around, with the Pharaoh Unas importing the Mi'kmaw hieroglyph writing system wholesale from America. His name alone is enough to get the juices of inquiry flowing especially when we consider that the Mi'kmaw name for Cape Breton is Una'maki which could equally mean "Land of Una" or "Land of Fog."
Another interesting feature that's been found in Egyptian mummies is tobacco. It's used as a preservative, a mummifier, if you will. I'm not even going to ask where they got tobacco. To date a dozen ocean going ships have been found buried in the sands of the desert. We know Unas was a great navigator because his pyramid texts contain pictures of navigational equipment. Unas could have brought hieroglyphs back with him, along with tobacco. At any rate, a mystery exists. If the solution to that mystery leads us to suggests that Europeans or Egyptians, Phoenicians or Carthaginians, or anyone else, arrived on the American shores before Columbus "discovered" it, it doesn't detract from the accomplishments of native Americans. In fact, one thesis of this grail anthology is that the Mi'kmaq had something the visitors wanted, the longbow and that they paid for it in full; and if we happen to mention the Welsh or the Irish, we're not in any way attempting to degrade anyone. The second thesis, that the capital-G Grail can be found here, will be looked at simultaneously because they both seem to go hand in hand. Early voyagers came here with the Grail and sought refuge in the new land. In a Homan map, dated 1550, we find a port called Refugio - Refuge, and in a word, find the motivation for braving the Atlantic Ocean on a flimsy craft. Safety. We recall the oft quoted mariner’s injunction: beyond here be dragons, and recognize another grail clue. You rescue a damsel in distress from a dragon. We've seen how an Irish myth, an Egyptian pharaoh, and a few anomalous items all suggest contact between Europe and America before 1492. We’ve surmised that certain visitors were connected with hiding the Grail from the usurpers who stole their thrones from the last Merovingian dynast — Dagobert II. Grail history tells us that when the church supported the mayors of the palace, mere upstarts claiming descent from Charlemagne (742-814), over the last true kings in descent from Jesus Christ and the Magdalene, the grail dynasty was forced into exile. Those that remained often became a target of church-state factions that wanted them gone. Hence, they too headed west. Waves of migration occurred. One of the more recent may have been in response to the Albigensian Crusade that occupied the first half of the thirteenth century. Those not caught in the net of this crusade would be later targeted by the Inquisition, another internal crusade mechanism that is still on the books as the Congregation of the Holy Office. Renamed and reformed by Paul VI in 1965, the Holy Office of the Inquisition is now called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In 1999 John Paul II apologized for the crimes of the church. Unfortunately it was too late for the victims, the millions of women burned at the stake as witches, or the men, women and children burned en masse in their auto de fes.
Gastaldi’s 1556 map of New France shows Port du Refuge, perhaps in Mahone Bay where the Oak Island money pit is located. Note that Cape Breton appears twice, once as c breton and again, next to Port du Refuge as c de breton. Port Real and Le Paradise complete the nearby place names. Paradise? Port Real may be connected to the French Mont Real, meaning the King’s Mount, with the first Montreal being the crusader fortress built by the first king of Jerusalem, Baldwin (1100-1118 AD). Port Real then is the King’s Port, connected to Baldwin through the word Real, and is later linked through the Templars to the Cathar castle of Montreal in the Languedoc region of France. It shows up even later in grail history as being the hiding place of the Grail family in early Montreal, Canada. If Port Real is connected to the “king” in the fashion outlined above, then we’ve found the entry port for refugee grail-folk, and it’s in Acadia. For nine hundred years, from roughly 750 to 1650 AD, the Refuge remained intact. By then it was quietly assimilated into the landscape of the new land, and slowly forgotten. That is, until an ancient spirit, threatened by the ravages of Industrialist Man, summoned his people to help save his sacred mountain. There's a strong local tradition that is compelling for the presence of something otherworldly happening on Kelly's Mountain. In fact, a tradition of folklore has grown up around the mountain and its cave system. The cave entrance at Cap Dauphin, known locally as Fairy Hole, may be the gateway to a strange place where dogs have been known to change colour after entering. I began collecting some of this folk-lore as a publisher of Cape Breton poetry. In Fine, How's Yours by James Seminal, much of the mystery is explored in a delightful way and is worth looking at in detail (see below for complete poem). The poet comes back from the cave and is questioned by his co-workers because he's changed: This morning, said Johnny MacRae,/ Your eyebrows were black / But now they're pure white, said he. He tells them that he's "been to a sacred place" and has "passed through both time and space." Other parts of his body have changed colour as well: I could have sworn your eyes were brown, said he; / And now they've turned to blue / And you're taller now, or is it shorter? / Yes, your size has altered, too. He then decides to go back to Fairyhole: To see the colour master, / Who happened to be / A friendly polka-dot troll. / Who gladly accepted his colours back / Once I'd paid the toll. Another poem, by Glace Bay writer Mona Gillis, called The Fairie's Cave, further explores the mystery of Kelly's Mountain. She takes us with her to a cave "Hidden far beyond the sea" where "a magic wand" will light our passage as we Tiptoe o'er the whitecaps / and climb the golden stair." Inside we'll find "wee folk" adorned with diamonds, emeralds, pearls and rubies, who "sing their little song of yore" and shout that they "are free." The mountain inspires strange occurrences. Before the Trans Canada Highway was cut across it, a switchback gravel road was in use. One motorist described a strange situation that happened to him: he should have gone over the side on one of the turns but the car somehow "elasticized" and stayed on the road. People have had strange visions, heard strange noises, encountered strange sights on Kelly’s Mountain: almost everyone who has travelled across the mountain has a story to tell. A song, known locally, credits an Irish moon shiner named Kelly for leaving his name on the mountain, but there's another reason why the name Kelly has stuck. The el in the first syllable of Kelly is interesting when compared to the word Babel, which means "gate of god," so that el means "god" in the Sumerian language, thus making it God’s Mountain. Not just any god’s mountain, either. The Mi'kmaw name for the mountain is Kluskapewi'tuk, the home of Kluskap; and like King Arthur, is where he sleeps while he awaits the call to return to his people; or like Atlas, has become the mountain. Both theories are valid and have been advanced for explaining the lure of Kelly’s Mountain: that Kluskap lies sleeping within and that he has become the mountain. The cave is filled with stories about its own
provenance. The True Man Although the word Mi'kmaq may be a misspelling of the word Ni'kmaq, meaning "my kin," Mi'kmaq refer to themselves as 'lnu, the True Man, which is a very subtle artifact in our quest for the grail. Sakej Henderson, a lawyer-scholar who wrote The
Mi’kmaq Concordat, in describing the Mi’kmaq, calls them The Order
of Mi'kma'ki. He says “the Mi'kmaw nation forged its origins a
thousand years before the rise of the great civilizations of
Mesopotamia and Egypt . . . [and] . . . returned to the Atlantic
provinces . . . after the Ice Age (Jenu) at least eleven thousand
years ago. . . . By 5000 BC, the people began calling themselves
Ni'kmaq, a possessive form indicating awareness of their spiritual
and collective unity. . . . Around the tenth century AD, a large
number of Ni'kmaq chose to organize themselves into a tighter and
interactive community. Their fidelity to the community was labeled
Mi'kmaq - the unpossessed form of Ni'kmaq. Note the interesting translation of the word Jenu to describe the last Ice Age. We will see this word shortly in another context. Henderson’s use of the word “Order” to describe the tribal nature of Mi’kmaq society is also interesting. The word is used to describe the post-Babylonian Jews who lost their tribalism in their captivity. They hence became known as Orders and could never again use the word tribe as in the Tribe of Benjamin, etc. Is Henderson telling us that the Tribe of Mi’kma’ ki no longer exists because of its own Babylonian Captivity - 500 years of enslavement by the conquerors, and can only be referred to as an Order in the same way as the lost tribes of the Hebrews. The official history of the tribe is as follows: Five hundred years ago, Cape Breton was one of the seven districts of the Mi'kmaq nation, which embraced the modern Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island and adjoining parts of New Brunswick, Quebec, and Newfoundland; with the Mi'kmaq, themselves as an Algonquian-speaking people who have inhabited the area for at least three thousand years. Prior to the arrival of Europeans, they were primarily fishermen and hunter-harvesters spending the warmer half of the year fishing along coasts and rivers and moving inland to hunt moose, beaver and other game in the winter. One of the best sources on early Mi'kmaq history in Cape Breton is a text published in 1672 by the French fur trader Nicholas Denys, who gives us a glimpse of how their daily life was being transformed by the fur trade in the mid-seventeenth century. He mentions a system of taboos and other beliefs which indicate that they perceived their interaction with the natural world as part of a delicate pact. This pact between the Mi’kmaq and the Creator is adhered to through daily ritual, starting with a sunrise ceremony and including the neskawit ritual, a form of righteous grieving for the soul of the animal taken in the hunt. This sense of respect for the game animals and the Creator, however, seems to have been undermined by the very fur trade which Denys himself promoted. Spurred by trade, the natives were important agents in the depletion of game stocks in much of Canada. The ambiguity surrounding native hunting ethics has created a lot of controversy about the ecological validity of restoring to First Nations their aboriginal hunting rights. These rights have been enshrined in a series of treaties known as the Covenant Chain. The Mi'kmaq Treaty Handbook, compiled by the Grand Council of the Mi'kmaq (1987), uses recent court victories to argue for the Mi'kmaq right to rely on their own traditional judgment as the exclusive constraint on native hunting. But when in September 1988 the Grand Council sanctioned a two-week "Treaty Moose Harvest" in the Cape Breton Highlands, some of the hunters were charged with violations of the provincial Wildlife Act (Marshall et al. 1989). Today the Mi’kmaq must fight for every moose, eel and salmon in the Supreme Court of Canada. In the 1640s, Nicholas Denys documented their skill in exploiting forest products. Now that neither hunting nor fishing are viable modes of subsistence, history has turned the Mi'kmaq into a nation of basket makers. Baskets, produced mainly for tourists, are still emblems of their ethnic identity. Other wares grace the shops on the reserves. Tax free cigarettes, cheaper gas and open casinos, both smoking and non, now threaten the government’s own gambling and tax-credit empire. During the Second World War, the Department of Indian Affairs attempted to concentrate the native population of Nova Scotia into two large reserves, Eskasoni in Cape Breton and Shubenacadie on the mainland. In 1958, it divided the Nova Scotia Mi'kmaq into twelve "bands," five of them on Cape Breton. The start of Apartheid in South Africa was inspired by Canada’s success in herding her aboriginal wards onto reserves in the Dirty Thirties. We still have our own version of Apartheid in operation — the reservation system is still alive and well; and supported fully by the various bands until their Indian status changes to include living off-reserve, and excludes any attempt at cultural assimilation. The Mi'kmaq population of Cape Breton now numbers about 5,000 people. Except for formal contacts between them and the rest of society, their five reserves are socially isolated from the rest of the population of the island.
The Battle for Kelly’s Mountain The quarry would start as a strip mine half a mile across and 200 feet deep, and the granite would be transported to a shipping wharf by means of a 600-foot shaft. This so-called "Glory Hole" method would be used to minimize the visibility of the operations. Almost invisibly, the company maintained, the mountain could keep yielding 2,500 tonnes of rock every working hour for the next 20 to 40 years. It would have provided over a hundred jobs. Once a month, about half a million tons would be blasted loose. The seven shoreline crushers would be at work 24 hours a day. The crushed gravel would then be washed in sizeable settling ponds. The shipping wharf would be equipped to receive 60,000-ton ships about twice weekly, and to stockpile perhaps a half million tons of gravel. Space would also be required for the 30-ton trucks, conveyor belts, and administrative buildings. Kelly Rock estimated that the project would require about 40 acres, but negotiated "an agreement in principle" to obtain almost 4,000 acres of Crown land on the mountain from the provincial government. Opposition to the quarry was immediately evident, primarily from some local residents organized as the Save Kelly's Mountain Society (SKMS), and from the Mi'kmaq. The SKMS was organized within weeks of Kelly Rock's announcement, which was made at a public meeting for the residents of the St. Ann's Bay area, on September 5, 1989. Also in September, Mi'kmaq traditionalists organized a demonstration in Englishtown, the community closest to the proposed quarry site. The protesters told the press that they represented the Grand Chief of the Mi'kmaq Grand Council (Cape Breton Post, 26/9/89). They arranged a ceremony with drumming and chanting, and requested a major historical and archaeological study of the mountain, emphasizing that it is the sacred abode of the Mi'kmaq prophet, Kluskap, and the mountain was the point of his prophesied return. In response to the debate on the status of the mountain, staff from the Nova Scotia Museum laid out the facts in October 1989: "Traditionally, Cape Breton is the site of three 'doors' into the World Beneath The Earth, the place where the Mi’kmaq spirit- helper and culture-hero Kluskap went when he left the Earth World behind. ... The third door, which is considered quite an important site due to the presence of the rock called 'Kluskap's Table,' and the rock called 'The Mother-in-law' or 'The Grandmother,' is a cave in a cliff washed by the sea, on Kelly's Mountain at Cape Dauphin. Traditionally, it is called Kluskap's Cave, Kluskap's Door, or Kluskap's Wigwam. Although known to the Mi’kmaq for generations, this cave was first recorded in anthropological literature only in 1923. The museum staff continued by quoting one of Elsie Clews Parsons' informants almost seven decades earlier, who stated, "At Cape Dolphin (Dauphin), Big Bras d'Or, there is a door through the cliff, Gluskap's door. Outside, there is a stone, like a table. Indians going hunting will leave on it tobacco and eels, to give them good luck. They do this today." The museum report concludes: "Offerings are said to
have been made at this cave for generations, up into the twentieth
century, and it is a tradition still being carried out today. Traces
of gifts made to Kluskap have been noted in the presence of deposits
of fish bones on the rock in front of the cave entrance ('Kluskap's
Table'). A year later, in October 1990, only weeks after the dramatic confrontations between soldiers and natives at Oka, Quebec, another militant demonstration made the headlines. At an information meeting called by the Victoria County Committee for Development and attended by the Kelly Rock president, the son of a provincial cabinet minister, members of three separate Mi'kmaq bands turned up, all wearing army camouflage dress. "At all costs," they said, "we will blockade the road to the quarry. We are preparing for war" (Harrowsmith Jan./Feb. 1991). This group of militant activists, some of whom had assisted the Mohawk Warriors at Oka, became known as the Mi'kmaq Warrior Society. The Warrior Society later also operated under the name Sacred Mountain Society (SMS). The SMS presented itself as "the only First Nations environmental organization in Atlantic Canada," declaring that funds would “be utilized to support environmental struggles affecting all peoples within the Mi'kmaq territory” (NSEN Network News, April/May 1993). By 1994 the struggle to save Kelly’s Mountain had gone on for five years. Kelly Rock Ltd was poised to begin operations. The Sacred Mountain Society was ready to disband in favor of a more militant approach. The Mi’kmaq Warrior Society was poised to rake the mountain with AK-47 gunfire in an attempt to clear it, end to end, of “settlers.” The warriors were committed to a siege, and plans were being drawn up to defend the reserves from attack. The need for a less violent approach was paramount. Yet the sense that the Mi’kmaq would rather die than have Kelly Rock destroy their sacred mountain was an enervating experience for those involved. Something was worth dying for, and people were prepared to man barricades. It was inspiring, a time of Last Stands.
Native teachers at three local high schools were attempting to get a Mi’kmaq language course approved, and I was putting their Mi’kmaq 420 grammar into a readable chapbook. At the same time, I was exploring the links between our own Acadia and the Akkad of Sargon the Great, when I came across a reference in the Akkadian cuneiform script which seemed to be talking directly to the Mi’kmaq. In an Admonition to the Sons of the Dawn, the people were told to go to the sacred mountain, and replace that which was taken. Because the Mi’kmaq consider themselves the Children of the Dawn, I felt the admonition was speaking directly to them. I asked my friends in Membertou if they’d be willing to go to the mountain and bring a stone from home, representing “that which was taken.” Little did I know at the time that these stones had a name: L’napskuk, and that the Mi’kmaq knew all about them. We decided to go to the top of Kelly’s Mountain on April 8, 1994 and sing a calling song, inviting the people of Mi’kma’kik to bring stones to the mountain, in place of any that might be stolen by Kelly Rock. Unbelievably, five days later, on Wednesday, April 13, Kelly Rock backed down. It cited “soft markets” in the States for its decision. We felt victory was a hand, and went ahead with ceremony of bringing stones to the mountain. In the years since Kelly Rock shelved its quarry plans, it has maintained a telephone listing in the local phone book. Like a sleeping dragon, it lies dormant, waiting to strike, perhaps hoping that people will one day forget that Kelly’s Mountain is sacred Mi’kmaq land, and will let them destroy it for a song. That’s not likely, if the following story is any indication. The Mountain Cries Shirley is no stranger to mysterious occurrences. She had a visit from a woman once who told her the following story. She was driving along, thinking about running her car off the road and killing herself. It would have been suicide, made to look like an accident. She was ready to make her move when a piece of paper bounced off the windshield. She stopped her car and retrieved the paper. It was a copy of Shirley Christmas’ poem, The Cry of the Suicide. (See below for poem) At one time, Shirley had a dream. She was inside Kluskap’s cave, in the company of her Elders of the past, who told her that a great struggle lay ahead, that the home of Kluskap was in danger, and she would have to become Guardian of Kluskap Mountain. Soon after, while Shirley and her friends were driving over Kelly’s Mountain, she became very emotional and started weeping. When asked what was wrong, she spoke three words, “The mountain cries.” Those three words led to many, and Shirley became directly involved in the battle for Kelly’s Mountain. In a series of poems, songs, stories, and eventually, a play, Shirley wrote furiously to help ease the pain of the mountain. In doing so, she gave us great literature. Drums Over the Mountain, a five act play, captures the struggle to save Kelly’s Mountain in poetry. Note the beauty of her words as they speak of the struggle to survive 500 years of oppression at the hands of the conqueror. The following is from Act IV, called The Mountain Cries: “The voice of the winter winds swoops down from the mountain. Hear its mournful wail as it sweeps across this land, beckoning to its People of the Mi'kmaq Nation. “The Spirit of Kluskap stirs for his sacredness is threatened by man. He summons for us to relinquish the pain he now suffers. “And the Mountain cries... “The voice of the winds touches the very depths of my soul, releasing within my spirit its searing pain of anger, creating tears of bitterness felt within my heart. “The Spirit of Kluskap calls to his People of the Dawn, as the Mountain cries...” Later, the speaker tells us what bothers her most about her life: the conqueror doesn’t know who she really is: “I am sad. My heart cries within for you do not know of who I am. Centuries have passed. We have since lived along side one another. Yet you do not know me by name. I have heard from the winds of the North names of shame and humiliation: Wagon burner, Redman, Scalpers, Squaws - these cause much pain.” And she doesn’t know who she herself is after 500 years of denial: “My tears have hidden the scars of time that have been placed by your kind. Years and years of ignorance and ridicule have molded me into nothingness.” We can see in the struggle she endures, the denial of self that goes hand in glove with the conquest. A conquest punctuated for Shirley personally in her surviving 12 years of the Shubenacadie Residential School. There was a real event that occurred a month after the May 20, 1994 ceremony on the mountain, that made it into the play and gave it an eerie sense of reality. The weather had been unusually hot and dry, and an open ban on fires had just been put in place. A group of local men, claiming to be volunteers with the local fire department, drove onto the site and told the people gathered that they would have to put out their campfire as it was now illegal, as of 6 pm that evening, to have an open fire. But it was a sacred fire, they said. The appeal to the Creator didn’t work, nor did the request that they simply let the fire go out. The local fire fighters then stamped the campfire out while dousing its flames with water. They destroyed the sacred fire in the same confrontational manner that they did everything else in the past 500 years – with brute force. “Up on the mountain I felt the peace of my Mi'kmaq spirit shattered by the cold words of the white man. ‘There is no such thing as a Sacred Fire,’ he said in anger.” He then douses the fire and scatters the stone offerings, the lnapskuk about, while “Tears flowed as I watched the stones being broken. The pain I felt was fierce, for before me lay the whole of my Mi'kmaq Nation slaughtered.” The Battle to save Kelly’s Mountain from destruction at the hands of “industrialist man” becomes a quest for the survival of the entire Mi’kmaq people. It is the lowest point in five centuries of unending hardship. At this low point in the play, the Little One must assume the role of Guardian of Kluskap Mountain, and go back to the mountain, relight the sacred fire, sing her songs of rebirth, and beat the drum in tune with the heartbeat of Mother Earth. Like Shirley Christmas herself, Little One decides to use the gift of the conqueror, the quill, to defeat Quarry Rock by telling “the stories of today” and singing “the songs of tomorrow.” We can almost hear the drumbeat restarting the engine of the rebirth of Lnuey, the way of the people, that occurs after the Mi’kmaq successfully reclaim the mountain. For her efforts, Christmas is given a new spiritual name, Mother Quill of Membertou, Kiju Kawi Meupeltu. For the Membertou First Nation, the change from poverty to prosperity has been great in the ten years since Kelly’s Mountain was saved from destruction. Led by lawyer-turned-band administrator, Bernd Christmas, they recently signed papers giving them ISO status in the world financial communities. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies from some 140 countries. Membertou became the first indigenous government in Canada, and likely the world, to meet these internationally recognized business standards. We see a great archetypal image evolving out of the Mi’kmaq success in reclaiming their sacred mountain. Like a grail artifact, it is restoring the prosperity of the land. The songs and drumming defeated the great beast, Kelly Rock, and once he was soundly thrashed, the land prospered again. My own quest for the grail should have ended there, at the top of Kelly’s Mountain, after having helped liberate it from the jaws of the beast, Kelly Rock. But it had only just begun. I had a long way to go in my attempt to show that there was an actual link between the mythical characters I was reading about, Cuchulain, Kluskap, Cronus and Unas, and Cape Breton Island. I knew one thing for certain after the defeat of Kelly Rock. The Mi’kmaq have a sacred mountain. They also have their own Titan, Kluskap. And I was sure they knew something about the grail, as the trail I was on was leading directly to them. A Strange Place I also found that the mountain was an important destination for the early explorers. It shows up on the Homen brothers' maps of the 1550s as Macarcade (Now Mu'klaqati), Place for Brant Geese, near New Campbellton on the south side of the mountain. The first French settlement on the island was called Fort Dauphin on St Ann's Bay. With space to berth two thousand ships, St Ann's Bay was considered one of two better harbours on the island; the other, gained by holding to port and entering what was once known as the Wintering Harbour, now, sadly, goes by the name of the Sydney Tar Ponds. Almost everyone who has travelled across the mountain has a story to tell. Perhaps none is as strange as the following Hopi story, which links the cave system to their Sipubuni. The Hopi remember a time between the third and fourth "suns" when people lived underground. One day they decided to move back to the surface and escaped through the "Sipubuni," or hole. "Sipu" means "river," as in "Mississippi" with "sippi" being the native word for "river." One of the two Bird islands off Fairy Hole is called Cibou, the Mi'kmaw word for "river." Although the second island is now called Hertford, could it at one time have been named "Buni" or "Puni"? If so, then Kelly's Mountain could be the former underground homeland of the all native Americans, a place where they went to survive the Velikovsky Event in 1750 BC, one of three doors into The World Beneath the Earth in native lore. A recently published reference to the mountain and its caves comes from the title track of the Sons of Membertou's first CD with lyrics by George Christmas. It speaks of the mountain and its caves as Hiding all our secrets away.... The secrets are many. They concern long life (Chief Membertou was at least 130 when he died in 1613!), crucial elements of the harvester technology, survival skills, invisibility on the battle field and medicine. In terms of medicine alone, blueberries are now recognized as being a very powerful anti-ageing agent. Not only are they highly medicinal in themselves but the alder mats that were used in the drying process infused the berry with an aspirin-like drug that kept the Mi'kmaq healthy throughout the long winter months. These and other secrets of life may be hidden somewhere on or in Kelly's Mountain. The cave system is said to go as far as New Brunswick and may in fact extend for untold miles through the soft limestone base of the mountain. The caves may be natural, but the rock is easily worked, so easy in fact Kelly Rock was sure of making money at it, and caves that extend for miles, natural or otherwise, are a definite part of Kelly lore. The Cronus Myth Zeus overthrew his father Cronus and imprisoned him inside a mountain where he sleeps on a golden rock. In fact he is imprisoned by sleep, but continues to rule because, whatever Cronus dreams, Zeus does. It's a strange myth. Does Zeus know he's doing his father's bidding? Apparently not, so busy is he contending with his own brood, and fathering a race of semi-divine humanity. His children were able to turn themselves into animals: Leda into a swan, and hatched from an egg; or half-animals: centaurs, satyrs, fawns, fish and fowl; hawk-headed, dog-headed - a strange menagerie - cloning gone wild. Cronus is alive today and may be imprisoned on Cape Breton Island, according to Geoffrey Ashe, an Arthurian scholar from Britain. In his book Land to the West - St Brendan's Voyage to America (Collins, 1962). Ashe cites one of Plutarch's dialogues called "The Face in the Moon," written circa 75 AD, that gives the Roman version of the Cronus myth. Using Homer as his source, Plutarch says that the Titans and their companions "lived in exile," some underground, and some at the limits of the world. The west had received the most powerful of them. Their war-leader Atlas, transformed into a mountain, (again, like Kluskap) towered over the Moroccan corner of Africa supporting the heavens on his shoulder, while . . . Cronus himself lived beyond it with many of his followers in a dark prison girdled with fog ..." Girdled with fog. Unama'kik, the Mi'kmaw word for Cape Breton, means land of fog. Another Homeric poem, which begins, "Far o'er the brine an isle Ogygian lies," speaks of the first of four islands on the way to Cronus' refuge. Ogygia is a five day sail from Britain. The other islands are ten, fifteen, and twenty days’ sail, and because Ogygia is Iceland, the other three may be Greenland, Newfoundland, and as Ashe says, "Anticosti, Grindstone, or Cape Breton." Ashe wrings another clue from Homer's epic poetry (and, as people are fond of reminding us, Schliemann found Troy after a careful reading of Homer) - the land of Cronus is toward the summer's setting sun - 45˚ North. Ashe refers to a "bay as large as the Maeotic (the Azov Sea), with its mouth nearly opposite that of the Caspian Sea," and declares that the Gulf of St. Lawrence is what Plutarch had in mind. The most important clue Plutarch gives us, however, is the number of day's sailing time needed to go there: twenty. Conditions have to be perfect but Atlantic voyages have been known to take twenty days, or less. In 1534 Cartier landed on the coast of Newfoundland after a twenty day sail on a latitude from St. Malo. Ten years earlier, Verrazano (whose name means True Son, which is a grail clue), sailed from Fogo Island, Newfoundland to Dieppe, France in "a little over two weeks," according to Samuel Eliot Morison in The European Discovery of America, The Northern Voyages, (New York, Oxford U. Press, 1971). Ashe tells us that other ancient expeditions, notably one by Hercules performing the tenth of his twelve labours, was to America where "some who came with Hercules were left behind by him, and mingled with the subjects of Cronus." That would make Geryons cattle either moose, elk, caribou, or the now-extinct aurochs. He says that expeditions occurred every thirty years, "when Saturn is in Taurus, men chosen by lot are sent in a flotilla of well-provisioned ships . . ." to go where ". . . Cronus himself sleeps within a deep cave resting on a rock which looks like gold (remember the golden stair in the poem cited above), this sleep being devised for him by Zeus in place of chains. Birds fly in at the topmost part of the rock, and bear him ambrosia, and the whole island is pervaded by the fragrance shed from the rock." Bras d'Or translates as Arm of Gold. Some authorities claim that it means "farmer" or "labourer," and credit it with belonging to an early explorer named Joäo Fernandes Lavrador, but it is self-evident that the name fits to anyone who has looked over the Bras d'Or Lakes and has seen the golden aura it gives off at sunset. Is it another clue in the Cronus myth, like the wind at Hisserlik that convinced Schliemann he was standing on the battlements of Troy? I think it's a major clue. Cronus is imprisoned “within a deep cave resting on a rock which looks like gold.” Did early Greek or Phoenician sailors spend time in Cape Breton thousands of years ago and report back that the land glows with a golden sheen? Whatever the answer, the fact that so many different legends have grown up around Kelly’s Mountain, and we’ve only discussed a few, suggests that there is indeed something other-worldly going on there. The Grail Alliance Once he got the Grail, and the girl, he became king. Engrailing oneself was a rare accomplishment. Only Percival, Galahad and Bors ever found it, but they were immediately recognized as the true heirs to the throne, ruling by Divine Right conferred on them by them by God, or before Christian times, by a goddess named Sovereignty. Anyone who thought the Grail-owner didn't deserve to be king need only look in his trophy cabinet and see, variously, the sword that came out of the stone, the chalice of last-blood, the pot of plenty, the lance of Longinus, or the Ark of the Covenant to prove that he was the true Son of Man. And that's another title the Grail-owner could wear, Son of Man. In the Bible only Ezekiel and Jesus ever spoke of themselves as such. Another title the engrailed monarch could wear was king of Jerusalem, but after the fall of Jerusalem in 1187, this title became largely ceremonial. Once in possession of the grail, the True Man (another grail sobriquet) would be able to reverse the desolation visited upon the kingdom because of the loss of the Grail, and the land would begin to flourish. Flora would grow profusely, where previously there had been only stunted growth. Fauna would multiply. The land would become Edenic. At least that's the current version of the story, with its pro- and confusion of artifacts. The real grail is a much more subtle affair; and while it is said to have been a sword, stone, chalice, pot, lance, and ark at different times, it had always been involved with a woman, that fair damsel in distress, who probably didn't need rescuing and loved the dragon more than she could ever have loved her pet-killing knight. One thing is clear from the stories, however. The grail isn't in Europe. Perhaps it never was in Europe. Where is the grail, then, if it's not in Europe? There’s evidence of its presence here in Cape Breton. In our bilingual way, we find that the same word can also be spelt with an “e” as in artefact, which reveals a French grail-connection with our fair isle, that is at least a thousand years old. For proof we need look at the history of La Rochelle on the west coast of France. And to clear up a Rochellian mystery: Why, in 950 AD, was La Rochelle located where it sits today, exactly due east of Cape Breton, and more specifically, Glace Bay harbour, which has a Rochelle Street running to the harbour itself? A Templar Port In the age of latitudinal sailing, where you could tell how far north or south you were by shooting the sun at noon and stars at night, the only sure directions you could travel in were east and west. If you wanted to sail to Cape Breton back then, you first had to find La Rochelle on the west coast of France. You would then wester your way across the Atlantic, hitting the coast of Cape Breton in due course. La Rochelle to Rochelle Street, and back, both are located on latitude 460 North. Rochelle Street in Glace Bay was probably named in honor of some secret Masonic ritual that demands we find all our clues hiding in plain sight. As if the Masons knew all along that there were launch pad ports that were used for getting back and forth across the sea, and they peppered the landscape with clues, so that a game of global hide and seek might occur.
The southern passage is called the Antioch Strait, because ships leaving by that route can go as far as Antioch on the eastern Mediterranean coast, a place they called Outremer; meaning over the sea. The northern one is called the Breton Strait, because ships leaving by that strait can go as far as . . . Cape Breton, the other land over the sea. Two straits, two lands over the sea, each strait named after the destination port, it being the farthest one can go in that direction. Another grail clue can be
garnered linguistically from the name La Rochelle. It is the
feminine form of Rock or Stone. If our theory about the grail being
a woman is correct, then when Christ said, "Upon this rock I will
build my church," he was talking to a woman, Mary Magdalene, who was
co-Messiah with him, according to Manichean sources. Mason Street is another small street that runs down to a harbour, where it reveals a vital clue to some great mystery that nobody will ever figure out unless he too can pull a sword out of a stone. And the Masons claim descent from the Templars. The Medewewin Stone The Medewewin Stone represents the Mi’kmaq covenant with the creator, and is cared for by the shaman of the Medewewin medicine society. The stone also symbolizes a political alliance with other tribes in the Wapanaki confederacy that goes back thousands of years. The capital of the confederacy was moved to Cape Breton in 1749 with the founding of Halifax, and the loss of Acadia to the English. This was by no means a Mi’kmaw defeat, as they fought the British “to a standstill” from 1713 on, according to Upton. Thereafter, the stone was kept at Chapel Island until it was taken by the Medewewin shaman back to Manitoulin Island in the stone canoe (the canoe that carried the stone!), there to be safe-guarded until such time as it is allowed to return, apparently after the Mi’kmaq recover their traditions, spirituality and land. The Medewewin Stone behaves exactly like a grail artifact should: restoring prosperity when it is cared for properly. For the record, we note that the inherent qualities that makes a stone sacred are its ability to glow red-hot when placed in a fire, then not break or explode when placed in water to boil food, and still perform like a drumstick while seeking a spiritual audience. While wholly native, the Medewewin Stone might have been known about in Europe at least a thousand years before Columbus discovered America. In fact sacred stones are well known there, with the Irish boasting a Blarney Stone and the Scots, the Stone of Scone. In the Celtic tongue the Stone of Scone is called Lia Fail, the “speaking stone” of Destiny that names the future king. While the Stone of Scone is now back in Scottish hands, it has been retired from active service, apparently, at least until it starts to speak again, perhaps naming a Stuart pretender, another bonnie prince that isn’t a Hanoverian-Windsor usurper. The stone has a lengthy tradition having been the pillow of Rachel, mother of Benjamin, and was carried by the Benjamites into exile, eventually ending up in Scotland.
When we drop the two Rs from the word Sagramore, we come up with the name of a Mi’kmaq chief: sagamo. Did Arthur have a Mi’kmaq chief amongst his knights? Note the names of Arthur’s knights: ...Kay, the seneschal, Bedivere, his cup-bearer, Gawain, Agravain, Gaheris and Gareth, his nephews, and Sagramore the Wild; later, Lancelot of the Lake, ... Perceval, ... Tristan, nephew of King Mark, and Bohort, Lionel and Lamorat; and finally Galahad, Lancelot's son, the perfect knight, and the traitor Modred, who is the son of Arthur. - from King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by Anne Berthelot (1997, H.N. Abrams, NY, p.56) We now have a Cape Breton Mi’kmaq chief visiting Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, circa 500 AD. We have them coming over here so much that they decided to build La Rochelle in 950 AD just to be able to get back and forth easily. This alliance between two allies who shared the North Atlantic Ocean was in operation for a thousand years before the discovery of America. Did Sagramore the Wild bring the idea of the Round Table to Arthur, and was it based on the confederacy which itself had grown out of the native concept of the circle of life? We now recall that Kluskap, like Arthur, lies sleeping inside Kelly’s Mountain, waiting for his people to call him to rule, when they truly want all the prosperity of the returned grail. While this is an interesting parallel between the two men of legend, other similarities between them cause us to sit up and take note: each tradition speaks of a pot of food that never empties; a piebald knight-like character; and invisibility on the battlefield. We note that the “invisibility” feature is especially strong in native stories where one character can slay many enemies who just don’t see him in front of them. He hides himself inside a familiarity, disguising himself as a bird, animal or plant, then strikes. The First Hello “We had not been here long, but there came one Savage with black long hair hanging about his shoulders, who called unto us, waving his hands downwards towards his belly, using these words, "Calitogh, calitoqh"; as we drew towards him one of our men's muskets unawares shot off; whereupon he fell down, and rising up suddenly again he cried thrice with a loud voice, "Chiogh, chiogh, chiogh"; Thereupon, nine or ten of his fellows running right up over the bushes with great agility and swiftness came towards us with white staves in their hands like half pikes, and their dogs of black colour, not so big as greyhounds, followed them at their heels, but we retired onto our boat without any hurt at all received.” The History of the Island of Cape Breton, by Richard Brown, 1869:40-41. Today, the Mi’kmaq use the above passage to record the first murder
of a native by the conqueror. We see the native speaking the same
phrase three times, while gesturing with his hands in a strange
fashion. Was he giving the sign? A tentative welcome to a friend?
The Hopi would recognize the returning Pahana by a series of coded words and gestures. Perhaps a phrase, repeated three times while he was holding his hands over his stomach showing three fingers above and five below. Note in the above first exchange story the “white staves in their hands like half pikes.” A pike was 21 feet long, making a half-pike 10 and a half feet. I grew up seeing this same white stave in my backyard. We bought our clothes props from Mi’kmaq who were going door to door selling them. Here was a great Mi’kmaq artifact, the longbow eeling spear, hiding in my back yard, pretending it was a clothes prop.
This sign-counter-sign in Latin might have been: Munit Haec Et Altera Vincit, the motto found on the Armorial Bearings of Nova Scotia. It means One defends and the other conquers. The visitor would give his sign, and wait for the response. If someone completed the expression, the visitor was welcomed as kin. Between 1620 and 1631, Sir William Alexander tried to colonize Nova Scotia. The Armorial Bearings, created at that time, show a unicorn on one side of the Cross of St. Andrew and a native holding an arrow on the other. Above them is the scrolling Latin and a mailed fist grasping a bare hand. In Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Sir Laurence Gardner states that the “fertile unicorn is associated with the kingly line of Judah - and it was for this very reason that the Cathars of Provence used the mystical beast to symbolize the Grail bloodline.” The unicorn also figures prominently in the crest of James Charles Stuart (1566-1625), who became King James VI of Scotland at 13 months of age and King James I of England after he united the thrones of Scotland and England in 1603. He is the founding monarch of the first British American colonies, signing the Virginia, Mayflower and Nova Scotia grants.
Kluskap the Arrow Maker While the European longbow that can deliver an arrow 200 yards is well known, one that can deliver one 500 yards is unheard of. The only longbow in history that can do that is native American. But the Mi’kmaq who fought in European battles before discovery weren’t called Mi’kmaq or Indians, they were often called Welsh or Irish archers. Three to 6000 welsh archers showed up at Crécy. Froissart mentions the longbow men at Crécy. The English set their “Welsh” archers beyond crossbow range (300+ yards) and created a wedging effect, drawing the French lines into the breech and then destroying them with the longbow.
The enemy had never encountered a longbow with a 500 yard range before, and they didn’t know what hit them. The entire flower of French chivalry died the day 3,000 archers loosed over a hundred thousand arrows in five or six minutes. In the words of Froissart, "arrows fell like snow". This mass volley of arrows was a new method of fighting and was first tried at Crécy. Six years before at Sluys, the Admiral of the North Sea, Robert Morley, arrived with 50 ships filled with archers who quickly won the day. This was the first major encounter of the 100 Years’ War, and would create 16,000 casualties, mostly French, who littered the decks of the hundreds of ships chained together in imitation of a land battle. The English victory permanently stopped all ideas of a French invasion of England and determined that the majority of the hundred years of warfare would be conducted in France. Is it possible that Kluskap the arrow maker, or rather, the early Mi’kmaq, supplied the Black Prince with his half million arrows? Given the fact that the Norse were living with the Mi'kmaq long enough to have given their own names to different places in Nova Scotia, and that they are supposed to have introduced the longbow into European warfare, then, indeed, the Black Prince may have used Mi'kmaq arrows. The Christopher Stories According to Grand Chief Gabriel Sylliboy, the first European to arrive in Cape Breton was called Christopher. He made several voyages to Cape Breton and on the third visit over, brought Mi'kmaq back to Europe with him. There they participated in battles. Christopher arrived after St. Anne's Day, sometime in September. He came while we were picking berries; blueberries, which the people were harvesting and drying for their winter supplies. - Grand Chief Gabriel Sylliboy (1874-1963) to Albert DeBlois in The Micmac Texts, 1990. According to the Mi'kmaq oral record the first European to arrive in Cape Breton came in a warship, which the Mi'kmaq called a manasu'lkw. We note that the root for "warship" is similar to the Latin word for "hand," manus, and we imagine a hand-rowed vessel, perhaps a cog with a deck or a Norse knoor with its single square sail similar to what the Mi'kmaq used on their own sea canoes. We can almost hear the conversation between the elderly Grand Chief and the young anthropologist back in the 1960s before DeBlois turned on his big reel-to-reel tape recorder. He travelled through the area stopping at farms which had electricity. He visited my grandparent's farm in Benacadie, and the men spoke Gaelic into the microphone with gusto, as I recall. The Micmac Texts were the result of his interviews with the Mi'kmaq. We can assume that DeBlois might have asked the Grand Chief the following question: "Can you tell us a story of the first white man to come to Cape Breton?" The Grand Chief, cagey fellow that he was, might then have asked, "Friend, who do you say he was?" Then DeBlois might have answered, "Everyone knows that Christopher Columbus was the first over in 1492." "Yes sir," the Grand Chief might have said. "It was Christopher, then...." Meaning perhaps that it was so far back in time that it must have been Columbus, and hence, Christopher; or, that the name isn’t a Christian name but a title, Christ-bearer, and that the visitor was connected to the grail. Sylliboy then goes on to describe a series of visits by different "Christophers." The first brought a potato, which the Mi'kmaq call "tapatat," a rendering of "des patats," and pronounced "dubadut." The French have two words for potato. "Des patats" is the older form of the word, and is similar to the Spanish word, patata. The second word, in common usage today, "pomme de terre," translates as "apple of the ground." "Des patats" is from the Languedoc tongue that fell victim to the church-inspired cleansing called the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1244). Almost everyone who lived in the south of France died in this great buchery: Kill them all, Simon de Montfort said, God will know his own. This was really an internal crusade whose prime objective was more than just the destruction of the ideals of "courtly love." The Languedoc region was rife with dualistic heresies, believers in a Magdalene pontificate that descended directly from the Jerusalem Church, through the children of Christ and the Magdalene. Called the Cathari, or Pure Ones, the Albigensian heretics were marked by a rigid asceticism and by a dualistic theology based on the belief that the universe comprised two conflicting worlds, the spiritual world created by God and the material world created by Satan. Their views were based on the religious doctrine of Manichaeism, characterized by a piebald knight who is half black, half white. Redemption occurs by one having achieved perfection after living a series of “pure” lives, where one has expelled all the darkness in one’s character. The word "Languedoc" translates as "tongue of oc," people who say "oc" for "yes." When I was growing up I often heard the old folks say, Och indeed, so that today we can recognize the Languedoc people as early Gaelic speakers. Sadly, in France, most of the Oc-speakers were killed or exiled, and the French now use "oui" for "yes." With that in mind we might be able to date the Mi'kmaw word for potato, dubadut, and its introduction by the first Christopher, as being thirteenth century, when refugees arrived escaping this internal crusade. The potato plant, solanum tuberosum, or common white potato, is a New World member of the night-shade family. We associate the potato with the terrace farmers of Peru. Did this Christopher come by way of the Pacific Ocean? After circumnavigating the globe long before Megellan? As we have seen, the lowly potato, once it became widely available in Europe after the discovery of America, led directly to a four-fold increase in Europe's population. It increased the life expectancy of the average European by giving a much-needed nutrient infusion to their diet. In the Grand Chief's account the first Christopher was clean-shaven, and we note a time in European history from Alexander the Great (325 BC) to the twelfth century AD when men were clean-shaven. The second Christopher was bearded, and amazed the Mi'kmaq so much that the oldest man in the village, a shaman well over one hundred years of age, couldn't believe that a man could grow hair on his face. When Champlain settled Port Royal beards were worn by the Mi'kmaq. Chief Membertou sported one, so that we get a glimpse of who might have introduced beards into the tribe, the second Christopher. The third Christopher participated in an offering of "flattened eel" to Kluskap on Kelly's Mountain before leaving, and brought Mi'kmaq back to Europe with him. By the third visit, the bond between the visitors and the tribe had become spiritual. This suggests that a kinship relationship had formed with its sharing of language and culture. The Mi'kmaq who went to Europe noted that, while the wigwams "were nice," the "moose" moved differently; they didn't respond to the moose call, and were easier to hunt. We assume they met domestic cattle. The Grand Chief called the cattle Wenjutiam, meaning French Moose. Wenjutiam is a compound word which reveals who this Christopher was. The Mi'kmaq word "tiam" means moose. "Wenju" means French, and is a pre-contact term because, from the settlement of Port Royal on, the Mi'kmaq referred to the colonials as "Normans." The word while it translates as French Moose, literally means Anjou Cow. We read in the stories that the moose they saw on their travels, the Wenjutiam, were different from the moose back home. They didn’t respond to our moose calls, and were they easier to hunt. This Christopher, whom the Mi'kmaq called Wenju, was an Anjou nobleman. The Anjou family, as we have seen with René of Anjou, who was known as the king of Jerusalem and who wrote grail-masques, was a member of the grail bloodline. Good King René, as he was affectionately known, was also largely responsible for grooming Jean d'Arcadie for her role as liberator of the French throne from the English. Historians are at a
loss to explain Joan of Arc's name. They assume Arc is short for
Arcadia, but can't understand why it was used. Arcadia is our own
Acadia. It’s nothing short of heresy today to say that the Jesus, Mary and Joseph, spoken profanely, and often, I might add, as a single entity —Jesus Marian Joseph — might not represent the son, mother, father image we associate with the Holy Family, but the father, mother, son of the “other” Holy Family, the grail bloodline. Gardner says that in the Nazarene hierarchy, the Crown Prince always held the patriarchal title of 'Joseph,' making our profanity a species of unknown grail code. Was there a connection between Jeanne d’Arc, then, and the early Mi’kmaq? Not that I want to be burned at the stake of heresy, but yes, there was. Wenju. The Anjou connection, which may go back as early as Fulk in the 10th century. In the Christopher story the bows the Europeans used were different, and we get an image of the crossbow, an arrow which, when fired, appears to return to the bow. The Mi'kmaq gifted the European with a better weapon: the longbow. In the following exchange, after having just said that they hunted from a prone position, with their bows next to them (Ji:n'muk ketkukjesinkik - The men they lay prone ), the Kji-Sagamo then tries to explain how the visitor’s bow worked. The arrowhead was firmly attached, yet appeared to spring back to the bow after it was fired. Note the reference to lying in a prone position. Keep that in mind. The arrows were good, and the arrowheads were firmly attached. Friend, the moose was shot. Oh, you better believe it, he received three arrows. The moose's heart was struck. It was precisely because of the good arrowhead on the arrow. If it is well shot and you have a good aim, your arrow springs back. At the same time, the arrowhead continues into the meat. It pierces through to his heart. They had been gifted at that time. They were gifted. That's for sure! They were given a gift, something of equal value. This exchange of weapons cemented the relationship between the Mi'kmaq and the visitors. The Christophers recognized in the longbow a weapon far superior to anything in their own arsenal until the deployment of gunpowder. We get other glimpses of Christopher in the oral record. Rita Joe tells of the power cross, the eight-pointed star enclosed in a circle, that can be found today on the Bedford Barrens petroglyph. She says it was brought to the Mi'kmaq before Columbus by a man named Christopher. His symbol, the circle cross, was worn by the Mi'kmaq to protect themselves from harm, even keeping them safe during epidemics. It was introduced by a "beautiful man" who still shows himself during visions and sometimes in the sweat lodge. The group of Mi'kmaq who sported the circle cross on their clothing were known as "Christophers." (from Capers Aweigh Presents . . . Shirley Kiju Kawi and Rita Joe at the Sydney Academy Pow Wow, 1994.)
The Circle Cross The Hopi associate the circle-cross with Pahanna, the elder white brother, who would return with it and usher in a new golden age of peace. Interestingly, he left because of the great catastrophe which destroyed the previous Hopi sun. They predicted that if he returned with the cross, minus the circle, it would be a bad omen for them. The missionaries who came to them with just the cross fulfilled the prophecy in all its negativity. The Aztecs also had the circle-cross. It was associated with a bearded "white man" called Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, who lived among them for awhile, taught them the arts of civilization, and like Pahanna, left, vowing to return. Cortés, arriving in 1519, was mistaken for Quetzacoatl, to their detriment. He conquered the nation, plundered its wealth, and destroyed their civilization. The cross enclosed in a circle also shows up in Egyptian art as early as the Fifth Dynasty in the pyramid of our friend Unas. He was the first pharaoh to display hieroglyphs, many of which are of a decidedly nautical nature. One could conclude that the solar boat found on the walls of Unas' pyramid was really an ocean-going sailing ship. Did Unas sail to the land of the Mi'kmaq and take their hieroglyphs back with him? And why is Cape Breton called Unama'kik, the land of Una? Was Quetzalcoatl a Celt? His appearance in America coincides with either the high Toltec period, circa 500-900 AD, or the Aztec period, 1325-1519. We know that Irish monks like Brendan were great seafarers; their dates are consistent with Quetzalcoatl's first sojourn; and the Norse refer to Labrador as Greater Ireland. All we can really say about the circle cross is that it is a universal symbol, perhaps representing unity: four directional divisions enclosed within a unifying circle. We might also add that the symbol is at least 4500 years old, showing up as it does in the Pyramid of Unas. According to the Hopi, the circle cross is a great shamanic device capable of restoring their nation to a previous Golden Age. As an Aztec symbol it is tied in with a restoration of their entire civilization in the person of Quetzalcoatl. For the Mi'kmaq, it is a symbol of healing. The themes of restoration and healing are common grail motifs. The latest theory on the circle cross comes from Gardner’s research into the Tolkein trilogy. He notes that it is used in reference to the Grail heir, as his symbol. Here then is the thread that ties all the grail characters together: Unas, the Hopi, Aztecs, Toltecs, Celts, and Mi’kmaq - the Circle Cross, representing the continuing presence of unity in the person of ... the grail heir. Fetching Summer “That little boy grows up. He learns war. He becomes a chief, he wears the shell medal. His People have canoes, they cross the ocean, they are fighting and killing lots of enemies.” Again, the mountain may be Kelly's, and the camp was where Christopher always came to greet them. Later, Fort Dauphin at Englishtown would commemorate this earlier contact with a short- lived settlement. The reference to crossing the ocean in their own canoes is interesting in light of at least two accounts of American natives in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; one from France describes a sighting of a canoe on the Seine; and the other event happened when the drift ice was 200 miles off the west coast of Ireland. In another story, Skun, again from Six Worlds, the narrator tells of a husband and wife who are out fishing, and are picked up by "giants" who take them back to Europe. The couple experience two battles, one with a Genoo (Jenu in Six Worlds) and one with a Googoowesk (Kukuwesk in Six Worlds). The Genoo monster may have been the Genoese crossbow men who were in the front ranks of the French lines at Crécy in 1346.
The Jenu Will Scream Three Times In Froissart, we read:
According to another online source, before Crecy, knights fought each other on horseback. At Crécy the French expected to have a battle with the knights of the smaller English army but most of the English army dismounted to do battle with the French, which was not the normal procedure. The longbow made a major debut at this battle which changed the way battles were fought for at least another fifty years. The English reinvented warfare, making chivalric battles an outmoded form of warfare. http://members.tripod.com/~midgley/crecy.html It now appears that a secret, highly organized contact was taking
place during this era, with contingents of Mi'kmaq warriors being
used with devastating effect in major European battles with
Hastings, Bannochburn, Sluys and Crécy coming readily to mind. Fifty
ships filled with archers, six hundred thousand arrows, a five
hundred yard longbow, a genoo screaming three times — the stuff of
legend. I was interested in the fact that the ears on the bowman were missing, perhaps showing that they were stopped up with moose butter. Then the unexpected happened. I found a post-1823 plate of the same bowman, and he had ears, as if someone had restored the original, and made sure the ears were showing, or was it an attempt to hide the fact that the original had no ears. Aside from the restoration mystery, the Bayeux Tapestry is an exciting document. It shows an Ark of the Covenant, which disappears on its way to Rennes in Normandy.
The Lost Ark of the Covenant That indeed may be the case, and luckily, we have evidence. One resource that Nova Scotia is rich in is petroglyphs. One in particular may very well be the lost ark. There’s a rock drawing in Kejimakujik National Park that shows a box with feathers, and along the bottom the telltale X’s denoting grail trestles. So we now have an ark lost and an ark found. And, it appears that the Mi'kmaq are familiar enough with the Ark of the Covenant to render it in stone. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the above petroglyph was also the
native shaman symbol. Seeing it atop the image of a woman reminds
one of the Cathars who allowed woman bishops. Finding it in Nova
Scotia etched onto a rock suggests a Medieval connection at the
pontifical level in a shared spirituality. The Mi’kmaq shared
something else with their engrailed cousins from Europe — their
hunting technology. The longbow won the day for the English against
the French in the entire Hundred Years’ War. The Mi'kmaq who made it back home escaped the Black Death by months. But then, the plague might not have had the effect on native Americans as it did on Europeans because of differences between the two groups. The plague struck hardest in the cities where rats congregated. Europeans thought it was sinful to bathe, so each person would be a breeding ground for the rat-flea that wiped out one half to two-thirds of all Europeans. At any rate, the Crécy longbow had a range of 500 yards. This information can be gathered from Froissart, who interviewed veterans years later. The W-shaped English battle lines tell the story eloquently enough. The later English yew bow could only achieve a range of two hundred yards, making the 300 yards for the crossbow the better weapon, and the 500 yards for the Mi’kmaq longbow much sought after in the courts of Europe. It has been suggested that the introduction of the longbow into European warfare was a ploy by the Knights Templar to seek vengeance on the French throne for the dissolution of their order forty years earlier. Talk about vengeance being a plate best eaten cold! The Age of Dictators I propose that they simply headed west and landed in
Glace Bay harbour six weeks later. They had the Holy Grail with them
when they escaped La Rochelle, because they were, unofficially, the
grail keepers. They probably buried their treasure inside Kelly’s
Mountain and hid their charges, the grail family itself, among their
kin, the Mi’kmaq. Does the arrival of eighteen ships filled with
Medieval knights make an impression on the Mi’kmaq oral record? It
may if we assume that one period in Mi’kmaq history corresponds to
their arrival and eventual departure. The impact this fleet had on the American natives was tremendous. History records that the Mexican, Wabanaki and Iroquoian tribes all adopted similar concept of confederacy around this time, as if a new political wind had swept the land. In fact when Cortés found the Aztec empire (1325-1519), abandoned as it was by the Templars for over a hundred years, they discovered a civilization stuck at what can only be described as a perverted wafer-stage of Christianity - the symbolic body and blood of Christ now replaced by a cannibal's feast. There’s further proof that the Mi’kmaq and the Templars were allied with each other. In 1998 Mark Finnan wrote about a discovery he had made of a Templar battle flag that was the mirror image of the Mi’kmaq flag.
Both flags show red symbols on a white background. In fact, they’re identical flags. One is the mirror image of the other, perhaps illustrating the Manichean concept of harmonious opposites. The flag similarities now allow us to put faces on certain grail alliance members. The Knights Templar, and hence, the Grail family, were allied with the Sante wi Mawiomi, the Mi’kmaq Grand Council.
The Holy Gathering This concordat between the Mi’kmaq and the Holy Roman Empire, is called the Grail Alliance. It created a foederati between the Wapanaki Confederacy, of which the Mi’kmaq are members, and the Roman empire. When Chief Membertou, in 1610, asked to be recognized by the ruling house of Europe, he mentioned The Holy Roman Empire, a political entity in existence since 962 AD, but waning in influence at the time of Port Royal. There’s another Mi’kmaq-Templar connection, one that also points the way to the grail-as-a-person scenario. For that we have to understand why the Knights Templar were successful in gaining the confidence of the Mi’kmaq. As we’ve seen, the word Mi’kmaq isn’t really a word at all, it’s the corruption of another word that sounds like it – ni’kmaq, which means my kin. The Templars became the kin of the Mi’kmaq, which, for a warrior monk who took a vow of celibacy is quite a feat. For proof we need only look at a chief’s cope, which is a Templar surcoat. In particular, this article of clothing stands out, not only as a grail artifact, but as an indicator of which Europeans may have been involved in the great adventure of hiding the grail in Cape Breton. The article of clothing is the chief's cape.
The Knights Templar were a fraternity of warrior monks (1118-1307) who were known in popular legends of the time as grail-keepers. In other words, if the grail had one group of protectors, one organization whose purpose was to safeguard, hide, fight for, or protect the grail, it was the Knights Templar. Another Templar - Mi’kmaq connection can also be gleaned from the history of fashion. The Templars were noted for one specific chore: protecting the Grail Maiden. We know that the woman who protects the Grail Maiden would wear a chaperon. This Medieval head covering was in fashion for a brief time, a period in history that comes down to us as grail time Europe.
In France, a black hood could only be worn by women of station, and the red velvet hood by women of the court. According to R. Turner Wilcox in his book on Medieval fashion, The Mode in Hats and Headdress, the chaperon was known as the "venerable hood of poetry and literature" (p.47). So where do we find the chaperon in Cape Breton?
The Mi'kmaw chaperon is described as a cap "of cloth, angular to the upper and back part of the head, and ornamented with small beads," it was "made of dark blue wool, with red wool additions and the double-curved motif, the cap had loose ends flowing over the shoulders, and was adorned with ribbons." (Elitekey, p.22) The Mi'kmaq chaperon is preserved today as part of the traditional regalia worn by women at Pow Wows. It is a Medieval European head-covering that invokes a time in history when all married women wore the hood in imitation of their queen, who was also a member of the grail family.
Who are these grail maidens that have live just down the road, unseen and unheard, for so long? That question speaks to the very heart of the matter: What is the Holy Grail? In my quest for those answers, I was getting grail signatures on my radar, but the grail itself was moving too fast to pin down. I could only tell where it had been, and it had been in Cape Breton. Chasing the Bear
Glooscap Cave is the only site on the map that isn’t either political (reserves) or historically religious. It stands alone, above the fray, so to speak, unknown to all but the Mi’kmaq themselves. Diamond Jenesse (1932) reported that the Mi'kmaq were the most secretive of tribes in revealing elements of their manhood initiation rites. The Sons Of Membertou's CD contains a song which speaks of Kelly's Mountain and its cave as hiding all their secrets away. The secrets are many, from medicinal potions that cured their ills and allowed them to maintain a lifespan at times exceeding one hundred and twenty years of age, to how they became invisible on the battlefield, rendered seal oil, and excelled at a seafaring technology admired today only in the ingenuity of the river canoe. One word describes the early Mi’kmaq - formidable. Anyone who could survive a grueling six or eight day trek in the harshest environment on Earth, a frozen lake that could suddenly become a Bridge of Leaps if the weather warmed up, would have to be in top physical condition. Add their skill with the longbow into the mix and you have two words that complement each other, formidable adversary, much sought after in European battles. The Mi’kmaq elders have only recently allowed the remnant of the oral record which survived to be written down. One text in particular, The Old Man Told Us, Excerpts from Micmac History, 1500-1950, compiled by Ruth Holmes Whitehead, is a worthy chronicle of the stories, songs, and history of Lnu, the True Man.
In an annual cycle guided by cosmic triggers, one can point to the drama of the night sky and find overpowering motivations. The winter solstice and an Orion mystery combine to trigger the vision quest. We note the three stars in the belt of Orion, rising vertical with Sirius trailing in the early winter eve, and see the Great Hunter in slumber, the Great Cup on its side. By zenith, the three stars become three hunters heading toward the northwest. When the later rising and now rotating Mama Bear (Ursa Major) awakens, the hunters cling to her tail while she tries to shake them off. The battle goes on all winter. The three hunters chasing the bear invokes an image of the grail quest. The quest was the most grueling four to eight days they would ever spend, and the physical exertion of crossing the ice and snow without eating or drinking would have contributed to their experiencing a "vision," which would guide them throughout their lives. They would take along the bones of their first moose kill, depositing them on the ice, where they would eventually join the salt water of the lakes to ensure that the moose would return to bless them with a lifetime of good hunting. They would also take along their lnapskuk as a gift to Kluskap in his guise as the mountain itself. The Kwetejk Story In The Kwetejk story, found in The Micmac Texts, the
maintenance of the Great Peace was upheld between the Kwetejk and
the Mi’kmaq by bringing stones to Cape Breton. They are called
Lnapskuk. Here's a summary of what Brooks says about them: The text says the stones are inscribed with The Indian Way, whatever happened is inscribed on those rocks. DeBlois, who recorded Brooks' story says that the Peace was maintained by the lnapskuk, and that the rocks were brought to Cape Breton and placed in payment for the blue and white shells that were used in the creation of the wampum belt. In the story three men Elik Skajjmeno:q - Alec Scotchman along with our good friend Ben Christmas, whose descendants settled Membertou, and Peter the Chief all go to Kahnawaki to settle the Great Peace between the Iroquois and the Mi'kmaq. When they get there they eat from a pot that appears to never empty. Brooks, in relating the story to Albert DeBlois says, "A pan, not too much, it is filled for him. Still, there were four men, even they would have eaten." A pot that appears to contain only enough to feed one man instead feeds all four, shows up on my grail radar. Eating food - give us this day our daily bread - is a covenant device, according to Sir Laurence Gardner in Genesis of the Grail Kings. See: http://www.karenlyster.com/starfirec.html It confirms the bond between the parties, that they desire peace and prosperity. No date for the creation of the native American confederacies has been successfully settled. Native historians place it just before the discovery of America in an attempt to prove native provenance. And yet, in the Mi'kmaq oral record, related by Benjamin Brooks, there's an Alec Scotchman involved in the deliberations. Who is this Scot-native? Some might say a descendant of Sinclair who not only came over in 1398, according to Frederick Pohl, but left descendants who were fully integrated into the tribe at the time of the Great Peace. The European Grail-link, introduced by Sinclair or some other Annunaki claimant, was directly involved in the events that led to the creation of the confederacies. In the story he is the first person mentioned, meaning that he had titular control over the proceedings. Another urban myth about the confederacies is that the Masonic creation of the USA was a transplant from the Great Peace, a transplant that, once initiated, led to the (apparent) physical destruction of the confederacies themselves. I've been following the history of these confederacies for years and I can tell you this: the US of A did not succeed in destroying the confederacies, just as they failed to kill off all their Indians. The Wapanaki Confederacy is alive and well and resident at Chapel Island Cape Breton. And during the Oka crisis, the Wapanaki answered the call of her sister confederacy at Kahnawaki and sent troops, Mi'kmaq warriors who stood eyeball to eyeball with the Canadian army. Oka was another native victory in an ongoing war for control of the land. As we have seen, carrying stones to the mountain was a tradition the Mi'kmaq revived in 1994 when they forbade Kelly Rock from setting up the world's largest "glory hole" rock quarry. Eight cairns of these vision stones are known to exist on the mountain, and may represent thousands of years of quest-offerings. The quest itself has entered European memory as the Arthurian journeys to the "White Land;" and in the Cuchulain story, is referred to as crossing the "Plain of Misfortune." The frozen Bras d'Or lakes in winter is the largest "plain" this side of the prairies, and crossing it in February, would prove the worth of anyone.
Back then
Cape Breton was known as Isle Royale, the Royal Island. The map has
an interesting measurement: the French league, called the lieue.
Three lieues are illustrated in the legend. And to further
illustrate the point, two islands in the Bras d’Or Lakes are called
I. Aux Lieures.
Lieure, a word currently out of use, means either reef, which fits the second island perfectly, or refers to the fettock of a ship, the knee-like keel boards that secure the mast. We propose that the island was used to get one’s bearings on the first leg of the quest, over the ice that is now blanketed with three feet of crusty, glistening snow. In today’s terms three Lieures would be approximately equal to 20 km or12 mi.
Lieure Island is just northwest of Johnstown, it being the closest approach to the island from the shore. It may have been used to align oneself with the far shore, so that the island becomes a launch pad to the other side of the lake, exactly three lieures north of the island. Perhaps the island was a gathering point, or a way station on the journey across the ice and snow. The Mi’kmaw name for Johnstown is Nemtegowak, which means the sitting place. One would sit at Johnstown and watch a great drama unfold before them - a trek across the lakes over the ice and snow. They being the families of the questors. If you recall, Cuchulain sank with each step until he was shown how to walk atop the snow using some sort of a wheel, perhaps a toboggan. It also means he wasn’t alone on his quest. We can conclude that here were people along the way to help him.
Looking out across the ice from there, he still had six lieures just to reach the base of Kelly’s mountain. He still had four lieures to reach the cave, but now, if he followed the markers correctly all along, markers that he heard about in the songs and stories he had grown up with, he knew that he was almost there, after having travelled approximately 16 lieures, a distance of almost 50 miles / 80 kilometers.) The 1751 map proves that an ancient and grueling grail quest took place each winter in Cape Breton, at least until 1751, and shows that the relationship between the French and the Mi'kmaq was based on kinship in a now-denied Métis civilization that lasted for at least 1500 before it was overthrown by the English in 1755. The sons of European nobility joined in the quests for the grail by sailing over and doing the route with native questors. Cape Breton in the winter time was the White Land. They left Chapel Island, walked up the ice to Lieure Island where they could rest on solid ground before setting out across the ice across, following the trail in the sky outlined by the Big Dipper. The first star up the handle was perhaps what he could accomplish in one day of travel. He might rest during the day, hiding from the rays of the sun during snow blindness time under blankets.
And true to the roadmap of Ursa Major, if we placed its image on the vision quest route, "the passage of the youth" would coincide with a dual star system in the handle of the Big Dipper where, in native stories, a great cooking pot is located. The pot may represent a seal rendering station, or could be where Kluskap had his pot of plenty that would bring people back to life. Although an archaeological survey of Kelly's Mountain should be conducted, a dig at Youth Point might just uncover this great cooking pot. Cooking pots came in three varieties: hollowed out logs, stone, and, simply, a hole in the ground. If nothing else, uncovering it would provide the Mi'kmaq with the evidence they need to settle their Cape Breton land claim, which seeks evidence of winter settlement. Not only would the young men have graduated to hunter-warrior status by completing the quest, but instant wealth would be theirs as well because the purple and white sea shells found in the area of the Bird Islands were the only ones used in the making of a wampum belt, which was the sole medium of exchange in the Americas, recognized from coast to coast. (Atlantic clams, quahogs, whelks and mussels were used, according to Sákéj Henderson, author of The Mi'kmaw Concordat, (Fernwood Publishing, 1997)).
The church recognized the first four levels of the medicine ritual as valid expressions of native spirituality after the 1985 papal easing of restrictions against smudging and drumming, but the four upper levels are still not allowed. One half of the native medicine ritual is still considered a black art. The Medewewin Stone was taken immediately after the 1755 Expulsion of the Acadians, and may only return after the Mi'kmaq again embrace all eight levels of native spirituality. The Mi'kmaq are at an impasse! The Medewewin Stone is their Holy Grail. It symbolizes their covenant with the Creator, and its loss, through accommodation with the conqueror, denies them the benefits of good health, happiness and long life that was the norm before the conquest. The stone itself is hidden from view on Manitoulin Island, and will be returned if, and when, the Mi'kmaq return to the old traditions. The Medewewin is an ancient medicine order, a brotherhood which exists to the present day. They are also responsible for many petroforms, the ancient medicine wheels, monolithic structures and underground temples that dot the landscape of Turtle Island, the native name for America. If The Templars hid the grail in America, its keepers over here would be this medicine society. We have an interesting historical drama going on throughout the grail time. Arthur and Sagramore were kin. Their children were the grail, but apparently not the sons. The daughters were the vessels of the holy blood. The women were the Immaculati, are the Immaculati, the grail. In Bloodline of the Holy Grail, Gardner says that, “whereas the Merovingian Kings continued the patrilineal heritage of Jesus, this other line perpetuated the matrilineal heritage of Mary Magdalene. They were the dynastic Queens of Avallon in Burgundy: the House del Acqs - meaning 'of the waters', a style granted to Mary Magdalene in the early days when she voyaged on the sea to Provence. “Those familiar with Arthurian and Grail lore will by now have recognized the ultimate significance of this Messianic family: the Fisher Kings, the Queens of Avallon and the House del Acqs (corrupted in Arthurian romance to du Lac, [and anglicized to of the Lake]).” Further on in this Netbook, which has no page references, Gardner states that Arthur’s “mother was Ygerna del Acqs, the daughter of Queen Viviane of Avallon, in descent from Jesus and Mary Magdalene.” That’s why Arthur is such a major grail character, he has grail lineage on both sides of his family tree because his father was “High King Aedàn of Dalriada (the Western Highlands of Scotland, now called Argyll), and Aedàn was the British Pen-dragon in descent from Jesus' brother James. However the point of the grail stories was not to ask, as we Cape Bretoners are fond of saying, Who’s your father? but Who serves the grail? Chances are they got their grail in Cape Breton after completing their vision quest. Perhaps in the Age of Chivalry, the winners of the great jousting matches would get a special invitation to further their training, by journeying to the White Land, in this Medieval version of the Olympic Winter Games. There they would probably stay with a family called LeBlanc, from Anjou. Before we offer any other tantalizing bits of grail evidence, a slight detour is necessary. Let me say that this is also a love story. Between Shirley Christmas and myself. On our first date, over ten years ago, a trip to Tim Hortons to meet the Sons of Membertou drum group after a practice, we outlined our plan to go to Kelly’s Mountain and call everyone to a ceremony that would, we hoped, drum Kelly Rock off the mountain. It worked! But Shirley and I, we drifted apart, and separated for seven long years. Then, as if by some hand moving the chess pieces of our lives around, we found each other again, and now continue on the path of life together. Within weeks of our reunion, we set out on a leisurely drive. I wanted to show her Lieure Island, in the flesh, and she wanted to show me an island in the Bras d’Or Lakes that appears to have haunted her dreams and lately, has led her to write about it. She referred to it as her Isle of Mystery. It was the strangest thing but we were mystified by the same island. Lieure Island. And it led us both to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
The Dark Virgin
The pictures all have one thing in common. They all portray native
Americans in the various biblical roles. For instance when an angel
appears to Mary announcing that she will become “the Virgin
Mother of the True God,” the annunciation takes place in a teepee,
and both characters are dressed in native regalia, with the angel
dressed in blue, the color of the Creator. Then, to reinforce the
native connection even further, at the very top of the walking
trail, behind two benches (the sitting place?) and a flag pole,
there’s a lone totem pole. He has a single round face, and he
appears to be leaning forward as he looks out over the Bras d’Or
Lakes. When we stand in front of him to
Our Lady of Guadalupe is the first recognized visitation in the New World of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her appearance, ten years after the Aztec conquest, led to an almost immediate conversion of the remaining natives to Catholicism. She announced herself to the young Aztec Juan Diego as the Virgin Mother of the True God, and she wanted a church built in her honor. Recently, an image of Mary graced the wall of a local Tim Hortons, the only one with a view of the Bras d’Or lakes. I now find that interesting in light of our discovery of a Marian shrine on the shore of the Bras d’Or Lakes. The Tim Hortons sighting drew thousands of people to the site. It even made the lighter side of the news, no pun intended, as nothing more real than a pattern of light and dark patches on concrete painted by the rain. So often has she been sighted of late that it’s now referred to as a BVM, short for a Blessed Virgin Mary sighting. The one element that distinguishes the Guadalupe visitation from all the other BVMs is the miraculous, and stunning, creation of a work of art said to be an exact replica of the vision of Our Lady. The artwork was created to prove to the doubting local bishop that the image was indeed authentic.
In 1929 an image of a bearded man was discovered in the left eye of the painting. It appeared on a black and white photograph taken by Alfonso Marcue, the official photographer for the basilica. The Vatican was informed and the whole matter was concealed from the public. The image was rediscovered in 1951 and since then has been studied with each improvement in camera technology. In 1979, Dr. Jose Aste Tonsmann of Cornell, scanned a good photograph at high resolution and found the following images in each of the Virgin’s eyes: In the left eye, we see the bishop receiving the tilma from the young boy. In the right eye appears an image of a family. Further study revealed that the right-eye image appears to change over time, as if it responds to an external stimulus, like a birth.
The evidence for divine intervention in the creation of the Guadalupe artifact stands on its own merit. Science can neither explain it, nor explain it away. The eye images themselves, available to us only after we achieved the technology to study them, rate the work of art as beyond our capacity to reproduce. Is the right eye continually changing to reflect the role of the “family” throughout history, or does it portray one family in particular? If so, do we recognize anyone? These are valid questions given the provenance of the artifact. And given the nature of our quest to find the grail in Cape Breton, which we defined as a genetic link between scriptural and/or mythological characters and people living today, we have to ask one more time, Do we recognize anyone in the right eye of the Tepeyac Mary?
Believe it or not, this chaperon-wearing lass in the eyes of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the very Grail Maiden of Yore that we have been seeking.
The chaperon was worn by one who protects the
Other
clues to the identity of the Grail Maiden are scattered all along the Tepeyac
Trail, behind the shrine. The trail moves along the bottom of the
Johnstown hill, where a series of paintings
The
trail was dedicated on Nov. 1, 1999 to Our Lady of Guadalupe, as a
project of the Iona Spirituality Institute. It takes us through
the Marian mysteries with the above series of paintings by Fr. John Guiliani, OSB, known for fusing native American spirituality onto
his Christian art.
A copy of each of these paintings (See right) now lines the lower
reaches of It is a testament to the fidelity of the grail protectors that a former European royal family, a dynasty that remained hidden from European eyes for over a thousand years, should suddenly and dramatically show up, over here, as if out of nowhere. Here we see Mary and Joseph finding their 12 year old son in the temple, only the temple is really a camp fire and Christ is revealing his identity to the elders of the village. There’s nothing unusual about it if we assume that the grail family was placed here long ago, in Refugio, the Refuge.
Taking the Tepeyac Trail up the hill offers breath-taking
views, and at the
top
Juan Diego received his flower-filled tilma from Our Lady as the painting indicates, but she appeared to him as a young woman who helped him gather and arrange the roses in his cloak. She was dressed like him, and spoke to him in his own language. In fact, she appeared to him as if she had come from a nearby village. The art-work all along the trail tells us that when the messiah is reborn, because that’s the ultimate message of the Guadalupe visitation, he will return as a native American.
The Juan de La Cosa 1500 Mappemonde, or world map, is an interesting artifact for a number of reasons. It portrays a round Earth, which at the time, must have been a novel idea. Samuel Eliot Morison says the map was made after 1505, but because it wasn’t found until 1833, its age is academic. The map shows the newly discovered Americas divided into circles. We know from Hopi sources that each tribe was responsible for its own circle of life, which were circular land claims that represented the great hoops of the people.
Historians believe that Cosa's map is based on Cabot's discoveries, but he isn't supposed to have met any natives on his first voyage, and he disappeared on his second, so where did Cosa get his circle information, and why are the circles absent from all later maps? Despite the map's inaccuracies, such as the absence of the St. Lawrence River and the Bay of Fundy, it does contain one vital hint that North America was known in Europe before the 1492 discovery - certain Europeans were familiar enough with native American culture not only to have understood these circles, but to have known where each one was placed. Champlain knew about the circles. He and de Monts spent their first winter on St. Croix island, outside the Mi'kmaw circle, awaiting Membertou's invitation. Then, when it came, the French were only allowed to settle on the circle's rim. That's why they built Port Royal, and later, Port Mouton, where they did. Both are on the arc of the great hoop of Mi'kma'kik, the land of the lnu, or True Man. The only way one could get into the circle was through marriage. This well-hidden fact is behind Daniel N. Paul's assertion in We Are Not the Savages that the Acadians were a Métis civilization, yet their descendants have studiously ignored this fact in every book written about their ancestry. To prove the close connection between the French and the Mi’kmaq, we have to look into the medical records of Louisbourg when it had to contend with a bad winter with scurvy taking hold. They had forgotten how to treat it, and sent someone to the habitants in Isle Madame for the cure, because they knew the ingredients, white cedar fronds steeped in boiling water and served as a cup of tea. It had been forgotten at court since Cartier’s day, but was an active home remedy among the Acadians. How do we know that Port Royal was situated on the arc of the circle? Before answering that question, we have to ask another: Where is the centre of the circle? The Mi'kmaq claim that all the land within the circle is sacred, but some areas are more sacred than others. We’ve seen that in 1994 they forbade Kelly Rock from opening a rock quarry on Kelly's Mountain. It could have any other mountain in Cape Breton, they said, but Mount Kluskap was declared off limits. The reason? The mountain itself was Kluskap. It cried out to its people to defend it from the ravages of Industrialist Man. And the people responded. On April 13, 1994, after a sacred wampum-stone ceremony was held on the mountain, Kelly Rock backed down. They haven't been back since. Poetry knocked Kelly Rock off the mountain - Kiju Kawi's beautiful folk opera, The Mountain Cries, rallied the Mi'kmaq. They reclaimed their sacred mountain by reviving a tradition that is as old as time itself - bringing stone offerings to the mountain. Underlying the desire to protect the mountain was an unstated objective: protect the sacred cave - Fairy Hole. The area is so sacred, in fact, that the white and purple seashells found near the cave are the only ones that can be used in making a wampum belt. The cave opening near Cap Dauphin, then, is the very centre of Mi'kma'kik. In the November, 1991, issue of the Micmac News, Henry Knockwood, a veteran of World War Two, defines Mi'kma'kik, as "the Circle of Life, uniting all sections of land from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, PEI., New Brunswick..." (Vol. 21, No. 27, p.1). I wasn't sure I was on the right track in defining a land claim as a circle until I came across two confirmations of the theory. In the first true world empire, the Akkadians of Sargon the Great (fl. c. 2450 BC), defined their territory as a series of eight circles. (Yes, that's Akkadia - same pronunciation!) And, the Cosa map contains eight circles. The Hopi continue to speak of the great hoops of the
people. From them we learn of the connection between spirituality
and the political division of one's territory:
The Circles of Mi’kma’ki The second byte of circular land claim information comes from the 1632 Cham-plain map showing New France. The compass is set at one hundred leagues (lieures?). Is it the radial distance of Old Acadia? By placing one arm of the compass at Fairy Hole, the cave at Kelly's Mountain, we find that the other arm brushes the coast of Labrador. Pivoting the compass on the cave at the end of Kelly's Mountain describes an area that takes in nearly half of Newfoundland, cuts Nova Scotia at Port Royal, defines the Mi'kmaq land claim in New Brunswick, and creates a circle whose radius is 270 miles or 432 kilo-meters. Same map, circle drawn, compass highlighted, shows entire Mi’kmaq circle.
Champlain knew this radial distance, and left a clue
in his map. In fact,
Where are the circles of Mi'kma'ki, then? When we look north from the cave, where our line of sight bisects the coastline below Cape Smoky, we find the radial distance of the first circle of Mi'kma'ki. It sweeps back around, enclosing the mountain. Extending the radial distance further to Cape North defines the second circle. This circle sweeps around and encloses the Bras’dOr Lakes. The third circle, defined by the radial distance from the cave to the first landfall in Labrador, Cape Whittle, represents the entire circular claim of the Mi'kmaq, given to them by the Creator in a covenant dating back to the very beginning of their tribal existence.
The red dots represent native communities. Note the five dots in Cape Breton, and one in Newfoundland at Conn River. Eleven more dots, all within the circle, complete the seventeen First Nations communities of Mi’kma’kik. The map is taken from the Canadian Geographic website showing native demographics. Before contact, these two inner circles had been used as a summer habitation and for the grueling winter vision quests. While the official view is that there weren’t any year-long native settlements in Cape Breton until 1749, it doesn’t take into account the annual migratory pattern the tribe engaged in as it moved from place to place. If we were to suggest 5000 years of continual settlement based on a story found in European literature about an Irish hero named Cuchulain who stayed a year and a day in Cape Breton, it would carry the same weight as any other event before 1725, the time of the first treaty with the English. It would be ignored. The Island was always inhabited, in the sense that people lived here seasonally. In 1597 traders were able to barter for hogsheads of fish oil, along with fresh fish, so that a sizeable rendering and fishing industry was in progress. Often the quest was simply the journey itself. Leave the bones of your first moose, or bear, immersed in the salt water of the lakes, to ensure the return of the animal. Make your offering of tobacco and eel to Kluskap at the cave. Collect the seashells that were so valuable. And come back a True Man. Unfortunately for the Mi'kmaq, with the 1749 date for the settlement of Chapel Island, their desire to settle a land claim in Cape Breton falls on deaf ears. They must pay for every acre of their expanding First Nations' communities. Hopefully, with our contention that Cape Breton is the very heart of Mi'kma'ki, they might fair better in the courts.
Who else knew about these great hoops in Europe? Arthur and his knights of the Round Table knew. The round table itself wasn't a table. It was a confederal political system based on the circle. And, as we’ve seen, one of the knights of the Round Table was called Sagramore the Wild.
Arthur, Leader of Battles Another mystery surrounds Arthur himself. Who was he? We know that Arthur wasn't his real name. It was his battle name. He was the leader of battles. A battle is a troop formation, and as the leader, he would have been the supreme commander. The name Arthur is derived from the Welsh word for bear, Arth, so Arthur was known as "the Bear." Arthur, the Bear, beat back the invading Saxon formations and kept the land free from foreign domination for at least a generation. Arthur's name has taken on a life of its own, so much so that the later Royal families of England would try to revive the Arthurian myth by naming a son after him. These hopes often faded with the early demise of their sons, as if the name itself seemed cursed. What if Arthur and Sagramore were more than just king and knight? What if they were kin? The clue is found in the name that has survived: the Bear. Grand Chief Gabriel Sylliboy was known as the Bear. It wasn't his nickname in the usual sense. It was his clan name, his battle name. Grand chief's are chosen from the bear clan. More clues are found in the manner of Arthur's death: he was taken by boat to the island of Avelon, where he sleeps in a mountain to this day, awaiting the call of his people to come to their rescue. Cronus lies sleeping, dreaming the world that his son Zeus rules. Kluskap sleeps in Kelly's Mountain, awaiting the call of his people. Coincidence? Certainly archetypical. We can now assume that the Arthurian connection is valid, and that contact was by or before Arthurian times, c. 500 AD. We have a steady connection through the Celts, the Anjou French and the Templars, the Norse, the Plantaganet English, and perhaps the Sinclair Scots. In fact Prince Henry Sinclair’s 1398 voyage is now
considered a possible pre-Columbus contender for official contact,
occupying a similar niche to L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland
before they found evidence of Norse activity. Hailing Another Mary The Cosa map contains another vital clue in our quest to find the grail. It is dedicated to the Magdalene Madonna. Gardner informs us that the Knights Templar brought back information from Jerusalem that disproved the apostolic succession from Peter to the popes. They found the Jerusalem Church documents that gave the succession to the children of Jesus and the Magdalene, with Mary, the wife of Jesus, being, rightfully, the true mother of the Holy Grail dynasty. These documents had been lost since the Jewish Wars of 68-72 AD. The Notre Dame cathedrals were all dedicated to the Magdalene, and the Roman church, in its attempt to wipe out the Grail dynasty, decided that all other churches would be dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. They further declared that she could only be portrayed in blue and white robes, “so as not to grant her any rights to ecclesiastical office in the male-only priesthood.” As a result, the Magdalene was “portrayed by the world’s great artists wearing the red mantle of cardinal status, the black robe of a Nazarite High Priestess, or the green cloak of fertility, and there was nothing the church could do about it.” (Gardner, Bloodline of the Holy Grail) In 1127 AD, a few years after the founding of the Knights Templar, they petitioned the pope to have their rule written in the vernacular, the Old French language. One change in the rule was significant, in that it was a complete reversal of the Latin rule. The Templars were charged to “go where the excommunicated knights are gathered.” The Latin rule forbade them to do so. They were the Grail protectors. They were admonished to go where the church had no jurisdiction, the other Outremer, America. They would journey over many times in next 200 years before their downfall in 1307, bringing sustenance and hope to the hidden refugees, the Grail heirs. Hence we see on the Cosa map two images of the heretical Madonna, the wife and child of Jesus. She is dressed in the red robe of a cardinal, and under it, the black dress of the Nazarite High Priestess. The Magdalene should have been the first recognized pope, with her children inheriting the thrones of the Earth. Instead she is the stone-rejected by the builders of the church, one who will “become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes?” (Matt: 21:42) So, there’s hope for the future, that the true heirs of the Holy Grail will one day rule, and the land will flourish. The Cosa map contains one final clue in our quest. There’s a line that connects Europe with America.
The Cosa map has become a precious document in our search for the grail in Cape Breton. First it shows North and South America under the gaze of Christopher, the Christ Bearer. Second it has two images of the heretical Madonna, the Magdalene. Third, and undoubtedly the most useful clue in our search, we found a line leading from La Rochelle to the centre of Mi’kma’kik. The map tells its story in symbol and allegory, like any good code. And we’ve cracked that code and call the Cosa map for what it is, an old grail map showing the refuge of the grail heirs. Someone else is dressed in the green robe of fertility. And she’s also wearing the red robe of cardinal status. Our Lady of Guadalupe wears that attire, and her portrait was painted by someone of rare genius, unmatched, even today. At this point in the narrative, it is safe to conclude that it really doesn’t matter whose portrait is painted on the tilma. The right eye image shows a real family, flesh and blood descendants of the image portrayed. That she shows up in America twenty years after the Cosa map was produced confirms our theory that, by 1531, the grail heirs had been successfully hidden in the bosom of native America.
Christ was born into a society that was under the yoke of the conqueror. Roman rule lasted from 66 BC with Pompey’s subjugation of Judea to the 136 AD Simon bar Kochba’s last Messianic war, which effectively ended the reign of the Jerusalem church. Christ was anointed king of Judea, had ruled for three years when he fell victim to political intrigue, was betrayed, tried and executed, according to Roman law. He will be born again into a society that is still under the boot of the conqueror, a victim of a more insidious conquest, one even the conqueror denies participating in. If indeed the grail is about Jesus Christ at all. From what we’ve uncovered it doesn’t appear to be about a man at all. The grail mythos concerns a woman, a member of a near-mythical sorority, the Immaculati, a woman priestess of light. The Magdalene, who anointed Christ king, is more the quarry in the hunt for the grail. It is my belief that the grail is resident in native
America, waiting for time and circumstance to join in revelation of
that fact. And it is to one tribe in particular, the keeper of the
Eastern Door, the sons and daughters of the Dawn, that protect the
grail in this Time of Disbelief. The Rebirth of Lnuey First Nations' self-government, with Education and Justice fast-tracking into native hands, is becoming a reality despite a battle still being waged over every salmon, eel and cord of wood in the Supreme courts. Perhaps with self-government the Vision Stone will be returned to its rightful place in Chapel Island. Is it the Holy Grail? Joseph Campbell believes that the Holy Grail was a stone that was brought to Earth by the neutral angels after the "war in Heaven." Because "neutral" angels, who are neither too good nor too evil, were involved, then the Grail Stone represents the middle way - the middle path, a harmonic balance between good and evil. The concept is, again, Manichean, symbolized by the piebald knight: half white, half black. Manicheanism was ruthlessly wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade. Its tenets are very much a part of native stories, however, where piebald characters are common. There is also a Christian Grail, a chalice filled with the last-blood of the wounded Fisher King in the guise of Jesus Christ. We've seen others as well: arks, gae bulgas, plates and pots. We've read of bloodlines, so that the grail may symbolize a DNA link with the divinity. What is the Holy Grail, you ask? Whatever it is, it brings something: inner peace, wisdom, wealth. You won't find it unless you ask a question, however. Who serves this cup? is the traditional request; but Joseph Campbell thinks it's more like, Does that bleeding wound hurt? Are you all right? Can I help? He says that the key to finding the grail is compassion, and he may be right. But, what happens if you find the Holy Grail and it's a stone, and you don't think stones are worth anything, so you just throw it away. There's a cute story in The Old Man Told Us that helps to illustrate the point. Someone asked an elder if all the stones thereabouts were alive. The old man pondered for some time on his answer, then said, "No, but some of them are." Some stones glow red hot when placed in a fire, others crack, while still others explode. Knowing which is which would be helpful. The Vision Stone doubles as a cooking stone, and is then called a Grandfather stone. It gets red-hot and when you place it in the soup water it immediately starts the boiling process. The stone is considered alive. It has the added advantage of mineralizing the soup so that coupled with their eating habit of gorging themselves on a large animal, trying to finish the pot in one sitting: eat, sleep, eat. It purged their digestive system and added to their long, healthy lifestyle. We've explored the possibility that our concept of history may be wrong, and we've found evidence which suggests that a world renowned artifact, the Holy Grail, may be in the possession of the Mi'kmaq, hidden in Kelly's Mountain or buried near the "Passage of the Youth." A thorough search may uncover it yet. We’ve even discovered a local titan, a Cronus-like character named Kluskap, who either sleeps inside Kelly’s Mountain or is the mountain, itself. We’ve seen him awaken and defend his sacred ground from intrusion, stopping a rock quarry from locating there, and bestowing prosperity to his People of the Dawn. On Nov. 18, 2004 the Membertou Trade and Convention Centre opened its doors to the public for the first time. In a video made to dedicate the main banquet room, called the Kluskap Room, we see that, according to local belief, Kluskap is fully awake and is directing the rebirth of Lnuey. This rebirth will be accomplished with the return of all land formerly taken being given back to the Mi’kmaq, all 230,000 square miles of land and sea. Then we found, along the vision quest route itself, a shrine to Our Lady of the True God, and after viewing the artwork along the Tepeyac Trail, we came to realize that when He returns He will be a son of the True Man, lnu. Or, the Grail might not be about a person but a process, and I'll let Malcolm Godwin, author of The Holy Grail describe it: "Along with the wounded heroes and the wondrous cauldrons, there appears an underlying theme in the Celtic mythology of a Paradise Lost. This Paradise called Logres was an enchanted reality, an Otherworld - a middle earth, which paralleled our own world. This was a world of abundance and riches and a land full of wells and springs. At these sacred watering places where the veil between the worlds was the thinnest, fair maidens, the keepers of these sacred wells, would feed travelers from golden cups and pitchers. Drinking from these golden vessels would allow the pilgrim to pierce the veil between the worlds and to perceive a oneness with paradise. "As the story goes, this paradise was peaceful and productive until an evil King named Amangons invaded Logres. He and his soldiers kidnapped the maidens, ravished them in the process and stole their sacred chalices. Their violence and violation change the realm of Logres from a paradise into a barren wasteland that still exists to this day. "We are told that the land of Logres' lost the Voices of the Wells.' The barren wasteland which was the result bespeaks a loss of contact with the Otherworld. It would appear that the Grail hero, the one who is eventually to "free the waters" has to discover the meeting place between worlds where he can re-establish the precious links between the female sovereignty and the kingship of the realm. "This fruitless land waits for a time when once again the Grail will appear to all with its light shining and its message spreading for all to hear. Paradise will be restored. The king will be healed. The maidens will return. The wells and springs will flow once again with the golden essence of happiness, love and freedom. This will occur when there is a realization, a caring and a honoring of the wholeness of life: the equality of the Goddess-Queen and the God-King, the female and the male, the Earth and the Heavens a true Oneness for all. This is the vision we need to hold in our minds and our hearts as we live the message of Divine Humanity and embark on our own Inner Grail quest. For in healing ourselves we begin the process of healing the Earth." (The Holy Grail, Malcolm Godwin, Viking Penguin, New York, New York. 1994, pg. 20.) The Grail, then, is about finding a connection with Mother Earth and living in harmony with her. It is also about our own personal lives, and how we'd like to live them, in a wasteland or an edenic paradise. But we have to make the choice. We have to ask, who serves the Grail? Who serves Bounty, Harmony, Hope? And we have to answer, without hesitation, I do! I serve the Grail... So, are we more able to recognize the Holy Grail now that we're reading the last few lines in this grail story? I hope so. But if not, then I leave you with this one thought: Question everything, everything you read, hear and see, so that each question becomes a search for the truth. Sometimes finding the answer isn't as exciting as the quest itself, but at least you won't be accused of coming upon the grail, and not asking, who serves this ( . . . and here, you supply your own definition of what the grail means to you . . . ). Before I leave this quest to others, I would like to offer a poem: sometimes it compresses a thought the way other forms of writing can't. I wrote it to help explain what the grail might mean to me. I call it:
All poetry is taken from the Capers Aweigh collection, and is the property of the respective poets. Please acknowledge these fine writers if you quote their work. Land Claim Per Province
Bibliography |
Seated in a make-shift shelter, the old woman
worked as she had done so in the past. Lingering in the air is the unmistakable
smell of sweet grass.
Chapbook: a hand-stitched pamphlet, usually consisting of 70 folded
pages, first appearing in the 17th Century, they were peddled from
door to door throughout England, and contained versions of popular
literature ranging from nursery rhymes to medieval romances.
Grail (grâl) n the cup or dish supposed to have been used by Christ
at the Last Supper, in which one of His followers received the last
drops of blood from Christ's body on the cross; Holy Grail. [ME < OF
graal < Med.L gradale plate, or VL cratale < crater bowl < Gk.
kratèr]. - Gage Canadian Dictionary
sometime shortly after 350 AD, a Roman expedition landed on the
coast of Venezuela, but because Romans aren't supposed to have
discovered America, the evidence has been neatly debunked (a coin
enthusiast lost his favourite coins while on a picnic!), and the
evidence suppressed. Second, it tells us that we can't really trust
"serious" archaeology to enlighten us about our past.
In the sixteenth century the spelling "Arcadie" with
an "r" appeared on maps of Acadia. Arcadia was a pastoral region of
ancient Greece. It was popularized by poets as signifying a place of
innocence and happiness, yet the terms Arcadia and Acadia
were once
used to describe over here. That "Acadia" is a Mi'kmaw word is
beyond dispute. That it was known and used in Europe hundreds of
years before 1492 is treated like an out of place artifact; it's
ignored. 
Was "La Cadie" the place where the lost Merovingian kings could be
found? I believe so. In fact, there are a series of petroglyphs in
Kejimakujik National Park
which definitely show not only a Merovingian king, but the “lost”
Ark of the Covenant as well. This Ark symbol is a basket with
feathers attached. (The cross-hatching on the bottom are called grail-trestles)
.
More Mi’kmaq-Malicite
pottery
dismantled.
Those who have a copy of Chief Lindsay Marshall's book of poetry
will note that the cover illustration is a series of petroglyphs
artfully reproduced by Dozay Christmas from her 1993 poster, A New
Partnership. 
There are at least five specific references to Vinland in
the written records of the period, excluding the nine references in
the two Norse sagas themselves. Adam of Bremen, writing in 1070,
mentions numerous voyages to Vinland. Bishop Eric Knupsson of
Greenland made a visit to Vinland in 1121. 
Historians will tell us that Cartier was sailing
with information supplied by Verrazano ten years before, that he set
out "to seek access to the Asian Sea through the Strait of the Bay
of Castles". However, a brief glance at the log of his voyage tells
a different story. He landed on the coast of Newfoundland after a 20
day sail on a latitude from St. Malo. He rounded Newfoundland,
picked up the St. Milo latitude again, and headed straight for the
Magdalene Islands. He then sailed around the Gulf of St. Lawrence
before heading back to France. The following year (1535) he made it
as far as Montreal. On his return voyage, he again passed the
Magdalene Islands before sailing back to France. Was he looking for
something other than a route to Asia? Did he find it?
What information is missing
from the official versions of these early voyages?
The early Celts called themselves Tuatha, meaning people, and
associated themselves with the Earth goddess Dana, so that today we
refer to them as the Tuatha De Danann, people of the goddess Dana.
They formed loose confederations under minor kings who owed their
allegiance to the High King of Tara. 
Another Oonaism - the Pharoah Unas. Unas (also Wenis or Oenas) was a
Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt, the last king of the 5th dynasty. He built
a small pyramid decorated with hieroglyphs - the so-called pyramid
texts. He was the first known pharaoh to have decorate his pyramid
in this way. He probably had no sons, so the 5th dynasty came to an
end after his death. His successor, Teti, married his daughter, Iput,
in order to legitimize the throne and found the 6th dynasty.
Before he entered the service of Queen Maeve,
Cuchulain went on a sea voyage as part of his education. He crossed
the ocean, passing through storms, ice bergs, pack ice and fog to
get to the Island of Skye. Ice and glacial pools are not elements we
would associate with Gulf Stream washed Ireland, and quicksand at
sea might refer to the pack-ice that is found in winter and early
spring surrounding Cape Breton and Newfoundland.
We know that the same design can be used for both the small river
canoe and the large ocean going type, and the longbow can range from
very small for children, to the height of a man and longer. I heard
growing up that the Mi’kmaq used their longbow to pin adult seals to
the pack ice along Sydney Harbour. Like the Sioux strong bow, the
Mi'kmaq bow was designed for taking down large prey and had a range
of up to 500 yards. The weapon Cuchulain used, the gae bulga, made
him invincible on the battlefield. 
The poets telling the tale of the gae bulga aren't sure
what kind of weapon it was. The harpoon description suggests a
stringed weapon of some kind. That it is used in relation to water
and appears to be fired from off the foot while Cuchulain was in the
water suggests that he was purposely hiding the weapon from view. A
secret weapon is only secret until someone else learns to use it. 
We're lost when it comes to recognizing their
genius. We get Stone Age envy when we read of the Mayan sun temple
at Teotihuacan that had two solid sheets of mica enclosing the floor
and ceiling of the top level. What cosmic function did it serve? Did
the structure, orientation and mass of the pyramids make them cosmic
superconductors? Old temples on sacred sites that act as
transformers in electrical grids of ley lines tell us the ancients
knew more about the Earth than we do. The record of modern man is
sparse, indeed! Our history as a civilization goes back twenty-five
hundred years or so with any degree of continuity. We are heirs to
the classical Greek world of Plato and Aristotle, the Roman world of
the Caesars, and, after a Dark Age, we emerged into this
Medieval-Modern Age of ours. We claim to be more advanced, smarter,
stronger, and faster than any civilization before us. We hold this
claim despite science's Second Law of Thermal Dynamics which reveals
that all systems decay; and myth, which posits a Gold, Silver,
Bronze, and our own Iron Age. Yes! We are Iron Age Man,
neo-Cro-Magnon interlopers on the banks of the Neander River.
Perhaps we're not as smart as Shakespeare's generation. We certainly
don't write as well. We've created a technology that has made us
lazy, so that we are mentally and physically less robust because of
it; and we believe that it will solve all our problems. We are a
warmongering, superstitious race. 
He believes the earliest arrivals were Basques,
natives of the Iberian Peninsula who settled in Pennsylvania in 900
BC according to inscriptions on boundary markers bearing family
names. Basque scholars confirm his translations and the date, based
on the kind of alphabet used. Fell further believes that between 800
and 500 BC, Celtic pioneers arrived from Spain. They worshipped the
sun god Bel, sported metal jewellery and built villages, temples and
astronomical observatories, traces of which dot New England today.
Using the Ogham writing system, they left "calling cards" all over
the northeastern United States in an alphabet so secretive that
today it is generally dismissed as natural lines on rocks, fissures,
or glacial scarring.
The Egyptians called the
Shamash disk image the Eye of Horus. The
Greeks called it the Eye of Cronus. We recall that the ancients
believed that the gods took part in the daily affairs of mankind in
a way that appears absent today. And, no wonder, if when we look up,
we see the actual eye of the god looking down at us.
This
cylinder seal, right, shows a crowded firmament, with planets that
seem strange to us today. Note the two major close-by celestial
objects, with the crescent and another large object above it. A
cylinder seal was a small bureaucratic device, used much like a
rubber stamp might be used today, as a quick signature. They also
appear to contain pictures of everyday life, and might have
accurately portrayed what they saw in the skies above.
Three researches, Ed Cochrane, David Talbott and
Dwardu Cardona, propose that the Earth was a former moon of Saturn,
which itself is a proto-sun. They suggest the illustration, below,
portrays
what early man saw when he looked skyward four thousand
years ago. It shows the planet Saturn with Venus and Mars in front
so that the configuration would look like an eye in the sky.
Illustration from The Saturn Theory by E. Cochrane, a Net book at
And why not longer than ten thousand years, we ask,
imagining the sound of an eighty thousand year old Pan pipe, as we
gaze on a face on Mars.
The pyramid texts, as they are called, are not easily translatable
according to Wallis Budge, Keeper of the Egyptian Antiquities, who
was so baffled by their meaning that he could only conclude that
they were funerary inscriptions. Yet, the picture graphics
themselves speak of seafaring. Unas took the throne in 2356 BC so
his seafaring days were over by then, but he left a record of his
world travels. The pyramid texts contain another Mi'kmaq or Celtic
or Aztec symbol, the circle cross, which we will take a look at
later. 
It appears to have been hewn by the waves that lash its
mouth twice a day. Yet it may go on for hundreds of miles, perhaps
even becoming the underground stream of grail-lore. A local native
account suggests that the cave system goes on for miles. One group
went exploring, carrying fourteen torches. They used seven, and
turned around, using the last seven to light their way out. A more
recent attempt to explore the cave system turned up a small shoe and
a child-like altar, both said to belong to the little people, who
are said to inhabit the entire Island of Cape Breton, living mostly
in the forests where, it is noted, they can bio-engineer their homes
and furniture using mushrooms, toadstools and other plants. But you
have to be child-like and innocent to even catch a glimpse of them.
Another connection with Kelly's Mountain is contained in an ancient
myth about the oldest of the Greek gods of Mount Olympus. There were
two sets of Greek gods, because there were two different Greek
civilizations: the first one ended around 1750 BC during the
Velikovsky Event, in the cataclysm that destroyed the Minoan Age,
and the second, the Hellenic Age, started about six centuries later.
Cronus ruled Olympus during the first period, and his son Zeus ruled
in the second. Cronus was the youngest son of Uranus (Heaven) and
Gaea (Earth), just like Kluskap. And he was a Titan. Genesis
mentions the Titans as being "giants in the earth...men of renown."
They were the immortal children of the sons of God and the daughters
of man, who lived "in those days; and also after that," which
suggests that they survived the Minoan cataclysm, and are still
alive. That's what the word immortal means: still alive today.
La Rochelle didn’t have a good harbour, nor easy access inland. They
eventually dug a canal, but the town was a lonely port. Its
importance back in 950 is considered a mystery to us today. Unless
it was used for another reason, one never considered before, as a
launch pad from Europe to America.
La Rochelle was a Templar port. Two
straits lead out of it, formed by Ile Re, the island sheltering La
Rochelle from the sea. 
One
character shows up in grail literature who might have introduced the
Medewewin Stone to Europe. One of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round
Table was called Sagramore, the Wild. 
According to the
prophecy, if he returns with the circle-cross, it will be good for
the Hopi.
But if he returns with just the cross, it will be bad. And was, as
later events proved.
Upon landing in Cape
Breton a thousand years ago, a visitor would have to have shouted
the words that would have gained him entrance. The Grail Alliance
members would have known a simple Latin phrase that was used as a
password to land safely.
The hands are interesting: a
mailed fist and a bare hand. One defends, the other conquers. The
mailed fist is a Medieval knight, and the bare hand is his Mi’kmaq
ally, more than his ally, in fact, his kin -ni’kmaq. The Bearings
contain other clues to early contact between Europe and Cape Breton.
Why, with gunpowder becoming a regular feature of early seventeenth
century warfare would the Bearings contain a native holding an
arrow. It appears out of date for the sixteen twenties. Three
hundred years earlier it might have made more sense. Froissart
mentions a campaign in which the Black Prince needed half a million
arrows, and was threatening to imprison every Fletcher in England if
he didn’t get them. Then, out of nowhere, 600 thousand arrows
arrived on his doorstep. 
As we can see from
the map, the distance between the Black Prince and the advancing
French formations begins at 500 yards. Note in the illustration the
legend showing a 2000 yard battle plan with the French lines at
least 500 yards from the English. They never got closer than that before
they were arrow-stormed.
Aside
from a brief encounter between the Norse and Vinlanders on one of
three voyages to America around 1000 AD, historians prefer to
consider the Norse incursion a one-off adventure. However, we’ve
seen compelling linguistic evidence that the Norse had more than a
passing influence in Nova Scotia. 
Joan’s battle standard, an orb with the words Jesus, Mary & Joseph
written on it, is, surprisingly, also the same symbol used today by
the Santé wi Mawiomi, the Mi'kmaq Grand Council, and is an
invocation to the grail holy family comprising Jesus, his wife,
Mary, and their child, perhaps named after his granddad, Joseph.
Historians tell us that Crécy
was the first European battle in which the cannon was used, but it
was most effective, not for its accuracy but because the booming
sound would scare the enemy off. Hiding under blankets would
camouflage their presence, but stopping up their ears was an old
concentration tactic: the battle was noisy, the enemy near. They
needed all their concentration to find their mark with bow and
arrow.
The
flag shows another concept. The two symbols, star (sun, sky) and
quarter-moon reflect the native contention that life on Earth is the
product of reflected moonlight. Father Sky, Mother Earth. Note how
the cross interferes with this concept, slices through it in fact,
as if the flag is saying, we now allow for a third element in
creation, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We don’t know
whether this cancels the creative process, or redirects it through
the wringer of a new paradigm. And we have to ask, is it an
abandonment of tradition, or a new covenant?
When I
showed this picture of a Knight Templar to a friend in Membertou, he
said, "Cool! He's wearing a chief's cape." "Really," I replied. "A
chief's cape, you say! ""Yes, it's part of the traditional regalia of
a Mi'kmaw chief." Since when, I wanted to ask, but I already had the
answer. 
We read that the chaperon was a head-covering for
outdoors. The black hood was considered a garment of dignity, and in
the reign of Edward III of England (1312-1337) could not be worn by
prostitutes. In 1472, in several English towns such women were
compelled to wear striped hoods. 
At a Pow Wow! Mi'kmaq “women were wearing their peaked cap style at
least by 1791,” fully three hundred years after it went out of
fashion in Europe.
It also begs two very serious questions: Where did
the Mi'kmaq get their "venerable hood", and if the word chaperon
means one who protects, whom are the Mi’kmaq protecting?
In the map, right, we see Fairy Hole, called Glooscap Cave, with a
red circle denoting a spiritual centre, one of three on the map. The
other two are at Chapel Island, where the annual Mission to St. Anne
is held, and Mollygowatch, where the first mission church was built.
The red triangles represent the five reserves in Cape Breton.
One song in the book, called Birds Of Fire, points to the heavens as
"the stars which sing," where "we make a road," while "among us are
three hunters who chase a bear." According to White-head, the
"symbolism of three hunters chasing the bear of Ursa Major was
recorded by missionary Chrestien
In an old map of Cape Breton Island I found the vision quest route.
An anonymous map dated 1751 showed that the Barra Strait was once
known as “the passage of the youth.” Note in this inset, right, the
Barra Strait through Iona and Grand Narrows when it was known as
“Passage de la Jeunesse.” From The Map-maker's Eye,
(p.144) by Joan
Dawson. 
Mistakenly renamed Book Island (Lievre/ Lieure, thanks to the “r”
being mistaken for a “v”) and currently called Red Islands, we now
know the provenance of the name.
From Lieure Island, one measured the pace, three lieues to the Passage of
the Youth, now known as the Barra Strait. Coming ashore at Grand
Narrows, the young vision seeker would have just travelled four
lieues, approximately 16 miles or 26 kilometres from the start of
the quest. He would then thread his way along the coast past Grand
Narrows to Pte. a la Juenesse, or Youth Point, where he would get
his bearings again. 
He would set out when the night sky sprinkled his
path with markers, star three, and four. He was now past Boularderie
Island, nearing Kelly’s southern shore. He was relieved because this
was last leg of the quest. He would place his stone with the others
in a growing cairn. He knew where the cairn was because he had heard
the stories about it and the sacred cave his whole life. And by
journeying there himself, he could also tell the story. It would
start with him making his first bow, continue with his first hunt,
finding his own lnapskuk, and would end with his journey to
Kluskapi-wi’tuk, for he was now lnu, a True Man.
The vision quest was the second step in the
eight-level native medicine ritual, after the child-to-man-hood
ceremony. This is where he acquired a name, and a totem protector
provided by his vision. Each level took years to accomplish. Full
shamanic power came with age, and with completing the various upper
levels.
see where he’s looking, we
note with amazement that he’s staring at our island. And we record
that the shrine at Johnstown, dedicated to the Guadalupe Mary, is
connected through the Totem Pole to our island.
Our Lady instructed Juan
Diego, declared the first indigenous American saint in 2002, to
gather roses on the top of Tepeyac Hill, on a cold December morning
in 1531. She arranged the bouquet of roses, all out of season for
that time of year, in the young man’s tilma, a poor quality
cactus-cloth, which should have deteriorated in 20 years but shows
no sign of decay after nearly five hundred. She then sent the young
man to the bishop for the second time. When he opened the tilma, the
painting, Our Lady of Guadalupe, was miraculously imprinted on the tilma. It now hangs in the Basilica of Our
Lady of Guadalupe in
Mexico City, on Tepeyac Hill. This incredible work of art is an
inspiring image to the millions of pilgrims who make their way to
Mexico each year to seek her intercession. She is credited with an
long list of miracles, cures and interventions, and her basilica is
the most popular Marian shrine in the world, and the second most
visited Catholic church next to the Vatican.
What about the kid in the
chaperon looking up at Mom, or the baby on
Mom’s back, papoose-style, or the man and woman in back, or the
other two children, one in front and another behind Mom? In all, we
see a family of seven, with one member wearing a chaperon, which we
had already defined as a major grail clue. Not only was the chaperon
worn by the queen and ladies of Camelot in Arthurian times.
Not only
was it in style centuries later, becoming all the rage of the 1340s
when steady contact across the Atlantic was maintained by refugee Templars and Iceland fishers, people who could launch fifty ships
filled with archers that showed up at
Sluys and Crécy. The chaperon was also a spoil of war, brought back
by the very veterans of the great battles with the Genoo, their name
for the Genoese crossbow men at Crécy. And it’s worn today as part
of the sacred regalia of those same people, the sons and daughters
of lnu, the True Man, who still honor the True God when they wear it
at pow wows.
members of the Holy
Family, those who care for the grail heirs daily. That it shows up,
so unexpectedly, in the most important Marian relic of all time,
only deepened the mystery further. 
leads one along the path
of Mary’s life. She is shown with the Angel Gabriel in one painting,
or the Magi are seen visiting the newborn babe in another, then we
see Christ in the temple at twelve, glimpses of his death and
resurrection, and Mary’s elevation to Mother of all Peoples. And, in
each and every painting all the Bible characters are native North
Americans, American Indians.
the Tepayac Trail, named after the hillside in Mexico
where the Guadalupe visitation occurred. The
message is clear. Mary, the mother of the returning Messiah is
native, and He will be born on a reservation in America. Our Lady of
Guadalupe is referred to as The Dark Virgin, for that very reason.
behind a flag-pole, appearing as if he just
stepped out of the woods,
stands
our totem pole. Or, rather stood
our totem pole, because he was blown over on the night of Sept. 22,
2004 when we
got the tail end of
Hurricane Frances. 
I had just
purchased a new camera and wanted to try it out on the Tepeyac
Trail. When we got to the top of the hill, we found the totem pole
lying face down. We rolled him over so he could look up at the sky,
but were told later that one shouldn’t move a totem pole, once he
fell down. We had the best interests of Buddy at heart when we
rolled him over, however, and would like to see him standing guard
over our island again, because he’s the only link we have, or
rather, had, connecting the shrine of Our Lady at Johnstown with the Leiure Islands. 
What significance the fallen totem pole has on the return of the true grail heir is open to interpretation. We may see
in it simply the end of something, i.e. the totem
pole, but it might also be the beginning of something else, a birth,
perhaps, or indeed, another immaculate conception. 
At the top
of the map, where Mexico is located, we see a man carrying a child.
He is Christopher, the Christ-bearer. He is also the Grand Chief’s
Christopher, the man who arrived first. The map is a record of his
purpose and discoveries. Also note the path in front of him, as he’s
walking North toward the land of Circles, as South American land
claims are a different shape.
It's a gift from the
Creator that demands constant and ritual adherence. 
it explains two historic anomalies: why the
French first settled Ste. Croix Island, and why they later moved to
Port Royal. They had to be invited into the circle. They were only
allowed to settle on the rim, venturing inland as they became ni'kmaq, kin. 
Today, however, the Mi'kmaq land claim is best
represented by the crescent shape found on their flag, which shows a
loss of all the water in the original hoop. For a great seafaring
nation, whose livelihood depended on the resources of the sea, this
loss is great, indeed! To confirm the crescent as land claim, we
find that the water to land ratio is a little more than 5 to 1.
(50,000 / 229,000 *100% = 22%) Therefore, the quarter moon is an apt
symbol of the water to land ratio. 
What does it mean? It means, dear reader, that when Christ returns,
he will be native American. Until he reveals himself, he will be
treated like any native American today. We will ignore him, be rude
to him, think we are better than he is. Then when we realize that
the joke is on us, the modern day Roman citizens, we will probably
try to crucify him. 
