Like Dionysus, Mithra was born of a virgin on December 25th inside a cave attended by shepherds bearing gifts. He was a great traveling teacher and miracle worker who was accompanied by twelve disciples. He was considered “the Good Shepherd”; the “Way, the Truth, and the Light”; the “Logos” (or Word); the “Redeemer”; “Savior”; and “Messiah.”
As the “great bull of the Sun,” Mithra sacrificed himself for world peace. He was buried in a tomb and after three days was arisen. His Eucharist was known as the “Lord’s Supper” at which he said: “He who shall not eat of my body nor drink of my blood, so that he may be one with me and I with him, shall not be saved.” His annual sacrifice was the Passover of the Magi, a symbolical atonement and pledge of moral and physical regeneration.
Like the followers of Dionysus, believers in Mithra sought inner communication with the gods through the use of sacred plants. This inner path to god consciousness was known in India as Krishna, also the name of an Indian Hindu deity.
Lord Krishna was born of the Virgin Devaki (“Divine One”) on December 25th. His birth was signaled by a star in the east and attended by angels and shepherds bearing spices. He was the “Shepherd of God,” the “Redeemer,” “Firstborn,” “Sin Bearer,” “Liberator,” and “Universal Word.” He worked many miracles and wonders, raising the dead; healing lepers, the deaf, and the blind; and was once anointed on the head with oil by a woman whom he had healed. Krishna was often depicted with his foot on the head of a serpent.
Krishna was killed around the age of thirty, at which time the Sun was said to darken. In some traditions he died on a tree or was crucified by arrows between two thieves, probably symbolizing the two horns of Taurus known as the Tau Cross. He was even depicted on a cross with nail holes in his feet and a heart emblem on his clothing. Yet from death he rose and ascended to heaven “in the sight of all men.” His disciples called him “Jezeus” or “Jeseus,” meaning “pure essence,” and believed he would return some day on a white horse to judge the dead and do battle with the Prince of Evil.
The original meaning of Krishna was a reference to the color indigo, “dark, black, dark-blue,” which was used to indicate only the highest Hindu deities. As a figure central to Hinduism, Krishna is still considered the Avatar of Vishnu, the All-Pervading essence, and Supreme Being of the Rig-Veda. In this way Krishna was the essence (or essene) of God within.
The early spelling of Krishna was “Christna.” In Bengali, Krishna is known as “Christos,” identical to the Greek word meaning “the anointed.” In fact anointing was also associated with entheogenic communion and religious ecstasy. According to The Living Torah, cannabis and henbane were ingredients of holy anointing oil. This is mentioned in various Hebrew texts as kaneh-bosm (as in cannabis or cannibalism) and several times in the Old Testament as calamus.
The Green Man is also found in Zoroastrian scripture associated specifically with an entheogenic plant. The Persian name for Soma was Haoma, which was known by epitaphs such as “the Golden-Green One,” “righteous,” “furthering righteousness,” and “of good wisdom.” Haoma was said to grant “speed and strength to warriors, excellent and righteous sons to those giving birth, [and] spiritual power and knowledge to those who apply themselves to the study of the nasks.”
Haoma ultimately became Zoroastrianism’s chief cult divinity and was taken as its divine priest. In scripture Ahura Mazda invested Haoma with the “sacred girdle” and installed him as the “swiftly sacrificing zaotar” for himself and the Amesha Spenta or “Bounteous Immortal.” Amazingly the worship of Haoma survived at least into the 1970s, practiced still in a strongly conservative village near Yazd, Iran.
As the likely namesake for the Green Man, Egyptian god Osiris was actually depicted in fresco paintings as having green skin. He was called the “Lord of Lords,” “King of Kings,” and “God of Gods.” He was the “Resurrection and the Life,” the “Good Shepherd,” “Eternity and Everlastingness,” and the god who “made men and women to be born again.” Like the others, Osiris suffered, died, and rose again—only to be devoured by his followers in the form of entheogenic communion cakes of wheat called the “plant of Truth.”
Osiris’s son Horus inherited his father’s Green Man attributes while assuming other symbolisms from the Rig-Veda. Born of the virgin Isis-Merion on December 25th in a cave, he was announced by a star in the east and attended by three wise men. He delivered a “Sermon on the Mount,” which his followers recounted as the sayings of Lussa. He was crucified between two thieves (again the Tau Cross of Taurus), buried three days, and resurrected. Perhaps most telling of his connection to Krishna in the Vedas, Horus was called “the KRST,” or “Anointed One.”
There were in fact many other Green Men of the Garden. The Chinese Buddha, Greek demigods Odysseus and Heracles, Roman Romulus, Phrygian Attis, Norse Odin, and the serpent-god Glycon were all plant gods of enlightenment born from a primary sun god.
As messengers of the Sun, they were usually associated with the planet Mercury, though could also be associated with the Moon. For instance Buddha was initially associated with Mercury in the Rig-Veda, then later merged with the Moon-god Chandra. Some think the Moon personification came from an association with the sacred mushrooms because they grow at night by moonlight, thereby replacing the Mercury personification that may have originated from its astronomical position between the Sun and Venus. But either way they both brought their message to Earth through the ingestion of entheogenic plants.
Now given the striking similarities between the Christian gospels and Green Man attributes described above, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Christian messiah was another of these plant gods and a Son of the Sun. If so, then Jesus Christ would have been the Jewish Green Man, an updated version of the Hebrew Nizziz (that rhymes with Jesus) linked with entheogenic communion in the temple.
Some researchers, such as John Rush and John Marco Allegro, go a step further and propose that Jesus was the magic mushroom itself. They point out that most, if not all, of the other Green Men were not real people either, and that early religious illustrations of Jesus show him next to mushrooms. Perhaps the people who made these illustrations knew a closely held secret—Jesus was only a personification of the sacrament.
After all, it is certainly true that the New Testament is largely a compilation of old stories about Dionysus, Bacchus, Mithra, Krishna, Zoroaster, Osiris/Horus, and other Green Men. It is also true that the early Christians worshipped Jesus like every other Green Man by taking a Eucharist they called the “blood and body of Christ.” If Jesus was indeed the magic mushroom or some other entheogenic plant, his followers would have “accepted him into their heart” as they ate the sacrament, letting the KRST king or “Christ consciousness” enter their minds to “save” them from ignorance and make them “born again.”
So it seems, consuming sacred plants to ascend into the sky was the original purpose of religion. The designers of Rosslyn chapel probably knew this, indicated by the many carvings of vines depicted growing out of the mouth of the Green Man. They could have also known Jesus was the Jewish Green Man and associated with sacred plants, just as they probably knew he was a personification of the feminine Jusas, Lusaaset, or Lucifer linked to the planet Venus. This they could have learned from the San Marco library or simply deduced it from the historical record as I have.
We might now see that the Jesus character was a blend of both gods and goddesses of the Vedas, unifying inner and outer worlds, just as the Venus Blueprint seems intended to reunify the Sun with Venus, Earth with Sky, body with spirit, and mind with God. This would explain why Jesus was personified as an effeminate character rather than the masculine superhero type. He was an asexual hybrid similar to the Galli eunuchs of Attis, emasculated for the sake of “purity and profundity.”
We might now wonder if Jesus was indeed a real, historical person or just another god of the Garden. After all he never wrote anything himself and was not well documented outs
ide the small cult of Christian believers, who incidentally never knew him personally and wrote the gospels well after his death. While it seems logical to assume he was an anthropomorphic plant-planet god or perhaps even a figure appearing in a psychedelic vision, his existence as a man remains an open question.
One thing we do know is whatever living, breathing man named Jesus that might have existed two millennia ago has long since been buried under the Green Man monomyth. The stories attributed to him were not original and descended through many cultures from the Rig-Veda. Whether one wants to believe he was real or not, the preponderance of evidence suggests beyond a reasonable doubt that Jesus was the Jewish Green Man. This is the only rational explanation for the Green Man’s appearance over one hundred times in Rosslyn chapel.
From this we might be more confident in our earlier hypothesis that the Sinclair family practiced some form of entheogenic communion in the chapel. A plant ritual may well have been part of the funerary rites for the Sinclair barons, ingested perhaps to invoke Venus and summon her assistance in reincarnation. They might have also used it during special celestial events, such as the solstices or a solar eclipse, in an effort to commune with the sky gods. It could have even been an essential part of the medieval practice known as “angelic alchemy” and performed secretly in the chapel.
The Grail Solution
One of the first things that entered my mind when I saw the tower etching in Rosslyn was that it looked like a cup. It was only after I had discovered it was a Vedic symbol for Mount Meru and related it to entheogenic communion that I began to consider the possibility the tower might have a double meaning as a cup or goblet. Not just any goblet, mind you, but a veiled reference to the biblical Holy Grail itself.
Suggesting this to Stuart in an email message, he admitted that he too had thought the same thing. But with so much hype surrounding Rosslyn chapel after Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, he felt it was perhaps too controversial to mention and might serve to discredit and distract from the legitimate discovery of the Venus Blueprint design of the chapel. I agreed to his logic and set it aside.
Yet given the importance of entheogens in the mystery schools and some depictions of Meru as two interlocking “Vs” like a goblet or cup, it seemed remiss not to discuss the Grail as a chemical doorway from the temple of the mind to the summit of Meru. With only a semicircle at the top, the Rosslyn etching of Meru may be a double entendre using Meru as a communal cup. Perhaps it was a multipurpose cup, holding not only the Sun-Moon in a Tau Cross but also the entheogenic wine—the blood of the vine. In this way sipping from the cup of Meru might enable one to commune with the gods.
Could it be the Holy Grail is Meru and Meru is the Grail? Could the solar serpents inside Meru be the serpent’s “blood” in the Grail? Might the Sun at the summit of Meru be the enlightenment of the entheogenic wine? And would the Sun of God in the Grail cup not also be the Green Man of the garden whose serpent spirit wraps around the Grail like the kundalini? The symbolism seemed as intertwined as the carved vines in Rosslyn.
If this were true, I thought, any possibility of the Grail representing a real, physical bloodline from Jesus through Mary would disappear. More likely the Holy Blood in the Holy Grail would have been a mixture of serpent blood, wine, and psychotropic plants used to ascend to the heavenly realm of Meru (or Mary). Besides the Green Man monomyth had already made it questionable whether there was ever a real man named Jesus in the first place.
So if we consider the Grail as a chemical doorway to the top of Meru, it becomes even more likely that Sinclair and Hay built Rosslyn for the same reason Solomon built his temple—as a sacred space for entheogenic communion. This would explain why its symbol was etched directly across from the entrance to the crypt under Rosslyn. Entheogen use during a funerary rite could also explain some of the strange descriptions in Sir Walter Scott’s account, in particular the purported appearance toward the end of the poem of the famous Scottish sorcerer Michael Scott out of the smoke.
The question is where would the Sinclairs have found such ingredients in Scotland? To answer this I turned to Tommy to see if he knew of any entheogenic rituals within the Scottish esoteric groups during the 1960s or in relation to Rosslyn. He said that he had not heard of any such connection of entheogens to Rosslyn and had certainly not experienced it himself, but that many varieties of mushrooms did indeed grow in the Scottish countryside and even right outside his living room window.
Researching the subject further, I stumbled across an online blog discussing magic mushrooms in Scotland. Here I found claims there were “loads of them in the highlands” and “I found four outside my mum’s house the other day.” I also found historical accounts of ergot growing on rye in ancient Scotland, which may be a more likely entheogenic ingredient since rye is used in the production of Scotch whiskey.
From this I concluded that psychotropic plants must have been readily available in fifteenth-century Scotland and thus a real possibly at Rosslyn. The overwhelming presence of the Green Man symbolism in Rosslyn seemed to confirm this. It was as if the designers were saying: “Drink the wine and behold the musical angels as they perform for you the heavenly music of Meru.”
In those days summoning angels was a Hermetic magic known as angelic alchemy and not uncommon. Alchemist and mathematician John Dee practiced this very seriously, as did his Scottish friend John Napier, the inventor of logarithms. The Napier family, who lived in Edinburgh just a few miles from Rosslyn, had long been friends with the Sinclair family. With such inquisitive and free-thinking friends, it is not hard to imagine angel magic being practiced by candlelight inside the chapel, aided perhaps by beautifully resonant music and a cup of the Green Man’s finest spirit.
The Invisible Realm
The practice of summoning spirits has always been the underlying purpose of temples. In fact most ancient temples and medieval cathedrals are built over necropolises containing the bodies of revered elders, in hopes they would speak to the faithful in prayer. Entheogens were used to summon their presence, while the resonant design of the Venus Blueprint temples apparently helped focus the experience and control the visions.
Regardless of whether it ever worked or not, angelic alchemy was practiced in the fifteenth century to try and summon a group of ascended supernatural beings known as the Great White Brotherhood. These beings were believed to be a group of enlightened Mahatmas (like Mahatma Gandhi) who were once incarnated on Earth, but upon death remained in close proximity to Earth to assist in the spiritual development of its people. They were said to do this by communicating or “channeling” through certain people.
Other names for this group include Masters of the Hidden Brotherhood, Universal White Brotherhood, the Secret Chiefs, Great White Lodge, Inner Plane Adepti, teaching Masters, the A.•. A.•., and the Immortal Saints and Sages. The Brotherhood is central to the beliefs of the Rosicrucian Order AMORC (Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis), the Order of the Golden Dawn, and certain orders beyond Freemasonry.
But the Brotherhood is also found in the Christian concept of Guardian Angels and Communion of the Saints. After first emerging into the public light with the Mahatma Letters in 1881, the idea of the Brotherhood was further popularized in the writings of Helena Blavatsky and Charles Leadbeater, Alice Bailey, Helena Roerich, and Aleister Crowley.
Not surprisingly entheogens played a part in the resurgence of Brotherhood channeling during the late nineteenth century. Blavatsky was said by a close acquaintance to have used hashish to boost her visionary powers. She made clear references in her writings to psychoactive plants, referring to their effect as the “Sleep of Siloam.” Aleister Crowley thought that certain drugs could wake up ordinary people to the prospects of mysticism and described them from the Chaldean Oracles as “lightening the girders of the soul.”
We might now see John Dee’s invocation of Enochian Angels as a link between ancient spiritual practices and this reemerging belief in the Brotherhood around the time
Rosslyn chapel was being built. In fact claims of consultation with disembodied beings of one sort or another existed in virtually all of the mystery schools. Even in the Vedas, it says: “The association of a mahatma (meaning “Great Soul”) is very rare, and yet it is available to a sincere seeker.”
The more you look, the more you find repeated in every culture the same practice of summoning disincarnate beings from some etheric earthly realm to assist the living. Indeed this is the very idea behind Meru and its hierarchy of deities. Did not the ancient priests meditate, incubate, induce trance, and consume psychotropic plants in religious ritual in order to commune with the gods on high?
For most of my life, I never gave such things much thought. The idea of a group of invisible beings who assisted people always seemed like wishful thinking or even delusional to me. Then something happened to make me wonder if there might be more to it than just legend.
During the writing of my first book, Interference, there was a particularly intense period during which I was undergoing a radical adjustment of my worldview as I encountered wave after wave of new information that was threatening my scientific worldview. In the middle of this process, I began having dreams in which I would meet with different people night after night. Each meeting was in a different location, such as an old library, on top of a skyscraper, walking along a downtown street, or in an office. The dreams were always one on one and in a Socratic question and answer format.
I did not think much of these recurring dreams until after the third or fourth. At that point I began paying close attention and noticed that I was somehow finding answers to my most difficult questions during the day. It was as if the dreams were guiding me in my research. Once the dreams stopped, I looked for information about dream guidance, which is when I stumbled across material concerning the Brotherhood.
The Venus Blueprint Page 19