The Stargate Conspiracy (38 page)

Thanks to this complex, often covert, input from clever men and women, what seems to be happening under our noses is the creation of a new belief system that efficiently brings together many different elements in order to broaden its appeal as much as possible. But does this merely represent a natural progression, a syncretism of ‘fringe’ ideas, or are they being spun together deliberately? And who or what really sits at the centre of this gigantic web?

This is a conspiracy of enormous proportions, so successful that it is impossible to pinpoint any one person or group as the real controllers, although we have catalogued those they use. We have seen how the Nine’s circle were and are supported by very wealthy people, such as Barbara Bronfman and Joyce Petschek, but it is unlikely that they are in on the secret; they are too easily identified. It makes more sense that they, too, are being used as part of an experiment, perhaps simply to see how easy it is for outlandish beliefs to persuade such people to part with their money. Of course it also has an eminently practical purpose: it makes the operation self-financing. The CIA always has its balance sheets in mind. (In the United States there is a tradition of close ties between private business and the defence and intelligence communities, which is not so apparent in other countries. Where such a special relationship exists elsewhere, it is likely to be the result of Masonic dealings.)

There are two major elements in this gigantic, complex conspiracy. One is the apparent attempt to make contact with extraterrestrial intelligences — the Nine - using whatever means are available. The other is the exploitation of these contacts in order to promote a message. Like all propaganda, this does not depend on the reality of the communications, only on the belief that they are real. But why bother? What is the motive behind the business of the Nine?

There are several possible agendas:

There is a further possibility. The conspirators themselves could be being duped — by the Council of Nine. History is replete with cases of otherworldly visions and voices that may promise heaven, but who actually deliver something quite other — or, as Shakespeare put it:

But never before have they had so many of the world’s most powerful individuals in their insubstantial grip.

 

 

In an email in August 1998, Jack Sarfatti told us he was amazed at our discovery that the Nine had been known of for fifty years: he thought they dated only from the 1970s. But we were to discover that even half a century fails to cover the whole story of their strange, disquieting genesis. In the same bubbling cauldron from which the Nine was to emerge, also lay the misshapen homunculi of twentieth-century totalitarianism. We found that some of the key figures intimately involved in the Nine’s lengthy gestation are surprising, not to say unsettling. The story includes such figures as L. Ron Hubbard, the consistently controversial founder of the Church of Scientology, and the flamboyant magus Aleister Crowley, who may or may not have earned his tabloid soubriquet of ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’, but who certainly relished such notoriety.

R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz has had extraordinary influence on the New Egyptology, on the thought and writing of John Anthony West, Graham Hancock, Robert Bauval and many others. Although, since his death in 1961, he has become a kind of ‘godfather’ to such writers, Schwaller de Lubicz was, in many ways, hardly a laudable role model. His ideology — and the company he kept - would hardly endear him to today’s politically correct reading public, which is presumably why his bestselling admirers fail to mention them.

We noted earlier that Schwaller de Lubicz emphasised the significance of the number nine in the ancient Egyptian religion, and also that he — uniquely — translated the Egyptian neter, meaning ‘god’, as ‘principle’, often speaking of the ‘Nine Principles’. He wrote:

He stresses that the Ennead are ‘the Nine Principles’:

Schwaller de Lubicz’s wife Isha (this was her mystical name - originally she was just Jeanne) explained:

This is exactly how the Council of Nine first introduced themselves to Andrija Puharich through Dr Vinod back in 1952. It was not just the term ‘Nine Principles’ that Schwaller de Lubicz shared with the Council of Nine, but also the same mystical interpretation of the numbers one to nine and their relationship with the number ten. As he wrote in 1913: ‘As number it is 10, containing and surrounded by the nine principles, the irreducible One, the eternal fecundator.‘
⁴
And John Anthony West wrote in
Serpent in the Sky:
‘The Grand Ennead ... is not a sequence, but the nine aspects of Tum [Atum].‘
⁵
This perfectly reflects the words of Tom (allegedly Atum) himself in 1974: ‘We are the nine principles of the Universe, yet together we are One.’
⁶

This seems to be too much of a coincidence. Had the Council of Nine read Schwaller de Lubicz, or had he written those words while under their influence, way back in the early years of the twentieth century? His master work, the three-volume
Le temple de l‘homme
(
The Temple of Man
) was published in 1958, six years
after
the ‘Nine Principles’ had introduced themselves to Puharich through Dr Vinod. However, the key
neter
/Principle interpretation also appeared in Schwaller de Lubicz’s similarly named
Le temple dans l‘homme
(
The Temple in Man
), published in 1949. (It would have been very obscure in terms of its influence in the United States as it was published only in French and with a very small print run in Cairo. An English-language edition did not appear until the 1970s.) Schwaller de Lubicz first published his mystical interpretation of the number nine as long ago as 1913, in a series of articles he wrote for the French Theosophical journal
Le Théosophe,
where he described the number ten as ‘containing and surrounded by the nine principles; the irreducible One, the eternal fecundator’. But at that time he did not elaborate: the parallel with the Egyptian Ennead came later.

So Schwaller de Lubicz seems to have been a key figure in the genesis of the Nine well before Puharich’s machinations, taking the story much further back than we had anticipated. But as we delved further into his occult philosophy and the traditions that inspired him, a very different picture emerged from the dispassionate, scholarly mystic so carefully and respectfully portrayed by John Anthony West and others. We discovered that the occult interests of Schwaller de Lubicz are generally played down. Hancock and Bauval, for example, simply refer to him as a ‘mathematician’.
⁷
However, the truth is that first and foremost he was an esotericist, his particular interests being Hermeticism and alchemy.

We should clarify our own position on the subject of the occult. By now it should be obvious that we ourselves are by no means opposed to most manifestations of the esoteric, and deplore the popular concept that anything ‘occult’ is automatically superstitious and worthless at best, and downright evil at worst. In our view, some forms of ‘occultism’, particularly Hermeticism, represent the highest and most noble search for knowledge the world has ever known, and many of today’s scientific and technological triumphs are the end result of the so-called ‘black art’ of alchemical research. It may be that writers do not mention Schwaller de Lubicz’s occult leanings either because they do not know about them or because they have no wish to lose their audience or waste precious pages on lengthy explanations and caveats. However, Schwaller de Lubicz’s occultism is not the only aspect of his life and works that is not widely acknowledged. Less mention is made of his political ideology, with good reason, for it would seriously antagonise the majority of today’s readers.

Schwaller de Lubicz has been described as a ‘protofascist’:
⁸
he was a highly influential figure in the development of the mystical underpinnings of Nazism, and a particular inspiration for Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s complex, occult-minded deputy. For such a highly influential figure, Schwaller de Lubicz seemed curiously disinclined to bask in the limelight: on the contrary, he appeared to be more than content to lurk in the shadows, so it is difficult to find biographical detail about him. Only since his death - and because of his ideas about ancient Egypt — has his name reached a wider public. Apart from Isha Schwaller de Lubicz’s somewhat sanitised 1963 biography of her husband, which skips over lengthy portions of his life, the only source is
AL-Kemi,
written by the American artist André VandenBroeck in 1987, but even that only covers the two-year period (1959 — 60) that he spent with Schwaller de Lubicz as his pupil in Plan-du-Grasse in the south of France.

VandenBroeck’s book largely describes his own struggle to define why he found Schwaller de Lubicz so fascinating, and why he felt compelled to move to the south of France to be close to him. This fascination was even more of a puzzle when he discovered that his hero was in fact very much ‘a man of the right’
⁹
— the political opposite of VandenBroeck himself - and he was shocked to the core to discover that Schwaller de Lubicz was, as befitted an
eminence grise
of the Nazi party, vehemently anti-Semitic.
¹⁰
VandenBroeck had some serious soul-searching to do, for he is himself of Jewish descent. Curiously, his mentor still held a fascination for him, and he helped out by correcting more than seventy factual errors in
Le temple de l’homme,
including some fundamental mistakes in his discussion of harmonics.
¹¹

VandenBroeck visited Schwaller de Lubicz’s house many times before he was offered the chance to become his pupil in Hermeticism and alchemy, a rare privilege. The teacher made it clear that he only made the offer once he had ascertained that VandenBroeck knew nothing whatsoever about the subjects. As he said: ‘You see, I have to be careful. There are people who would like to know what I do.’ Then he added by way of explanation : ‘Governments.’
¹²
But significantly, he elaborated on this cryptic statement, saying: ‘It is well-known that both the USA and the USSR are running experiments with dabblers in all kinds of occult stuff, from psychics to pseudo-alchemists and who knows what not. It has always been a good policy not to attract attention, particularly in times like ours.’
¹³

Originally simply René Schwaller, the future Nazi guru and mystical Egyptologist was born in Asnières in Alsace in 1887. After serving an apprenticeship as a chemist, at the age of eighteen he moved to Paris, where he was drawn irresistibly into occult studies and became deeply involved in the Theosophical Society. In Paris he also joined an alchemical group called the Brotherhood of Heliopolis. His name has even been put forward as that of the mysterious writer - under the pseudonym ‘Fulcanelli’ — of
Le mystère des cathédrales
(
The Mystery of the Cathedrals
), published in 1925, one of the most influential books to come out of that time and place. This masterwork argued that the Gothic cathedrals of medieval Europe carry encoded alchemical and esoteric symbolism in their architecture and decoration. The real identity of the author has long been hotly debated: for a time it was believed to be Schwaller de Lubicz himself,
¹⁴
but although he was not Fulcanelli, he knew and inspired the man who was: Jean-Julian Champagne.
¹⁵
In fact, it was Schwaller de Lubicz who claimed to have been the first to discover the Hermetic principles encoded in the Gothic cathedrals, enabling him to recognise the same principles in the temples of Egypt later in life.

In 1918, with his wife Isha, Schwaller founded a group called Les Veilleurs (The Watchers), to (in Isha’s words): ‘give a new momentum with new words, with the aim of revealing to the troubled world
the knowledge (conscience) of the aim of human existence’
[her emphasis].
¹⁶
He also founded a journal called
L’Affranchi (The Emancipated),
later changing its title to
Le Veilleur.
Les Veilleurs began within the Theosophical Society, but later became an independent organisation, primarily because of its political ambitions. It was mostly composed of esotericists and artists, but among its members also boasted the famous astronomer Camille Flammarion, perhaps significantly one of the first proponents of the idea of life on Mars. As the leader of this group, Schwaller took the mystical name Aor, which may also have been used as a ‘pseudonym’ for channelled material, for André VandenBroeck wrote, without elaborating further: ‘What is signed ‘Aor’ comes from a mystic source . . . a private source of knowledge with which Aor alone had contact, and he took its name.’
¹⁷
One of Schwaller’s greatest supporters at this point in his life was a member of Les Veilleurs, a Lithuanian nobleman and poet called O.W. de Lubicz Milocz, who in 1919 adopted Schwaller into his clan, giving him the right to use the title Chevalier de Lubicz.