first published on Sunday, 19 September 2010 10:35
Adventures in Geodetic Imagination
At the heart of Sacred Number and the Origins of Civilization lay the story of the Secret Men of the North, which followed the west-to-east path of a European Michael line, in the sense of the original invasion of the Indo-Europeans of the Baltic into the Mediterranean and as the later axis this provided for the Normans to orchestrate the Crusades; ostensibly to re-take Jerusalem from the world of Islam, that was also competing over Europe, from Spain, Sicily and Levant.
Whilst working on a continuation of such a geodeticUnits of measures and monumental measurements relating to the numerical definition of the shape of the Earth by the late megalithic. story, the concept of Sacred Latitudes emerged in which parallels of latitude might have some psycho-historical relevance, based on the original insight that, in the last century, “manifestations of Mary” have emerged, first in Garabandal in Spain and recently in Medjugorje, in Bosnia, that are on exactly the same line of latitude, 43 degrees and 12 minutes. (brought to my attention by the late John D. Kirby’s studies of “Mary places”.)
Travelling south from Garabandal one passes Avila just 15 minutes longitude further west, the town associated with St Teresa of Avila. There was a thought to note the places associated with Christian saints as one of the markers of significance, a habit followed in studies on the Michael line and now with a putative Mary latitude. Whilst Avila was not on the same meridian as Garabandal, it was then discovered that Fatima in Portugal, another Mary place, was located 30 degrees west-south-west of Avila suggesting there might be a Michael line between the two places.
If the Fatima-Avila line is projected east, then it is found to pass through Genoa, Italy, a point at which the Michael line to Jerusalem crosses it. Beyond this it passes through (Slovenia), Budapest (Hungary) and Kiev (Ukraine), three capital cities. Another aspect of cities akin to their saints can be their coats of arms and Kiev has St Michael whilst Ljubljana has a green dragon, key symbol of the earth energy, atop a castle. Genoa has the cross of St George and indeed it is the crossing point of these two lines whilst the name Genoa is most likely to mean “knee”, since it is a south-facing bay where the peninsular of Italy begins from the West.
Genoa is also directly north of Corsica and Sardinia, a meridian that goes north to pass through Jutland, the peninsula of Denmark. The two lines then form a St Andrew’s style cross or crux decussate in heraldry, interestingly a device also found in the Cross of Burgundy flag used by the Spanish. Genoa became associated with Spain as a dependency after the period in which Genoese navigator, Christopher Columbus, discovered the new world, a subject to return to later. Columbus donated one tenth of his income from the discovery of the Americas to the Bank of Saint George in Genoa, for the relief of taxes. Rubens, Caravaggio and Van Dyke were attracted to the city at its pre-plague height.
The Cross of St Andrew is so named after the cross on which this disciple of John the Baptist and then of Jesus, died. Early Christian History in Ukraine holds that the apostle Saint Andrew is said to have preached on the southern borders of modern-day Ukraine, along the Black Sea. Legend has it that he travelled up the Dnieper River and reached the future location of Kiev, where he erected a cross on the site where the St. Andrew’s Church of Kiev currently stands, and prophesied the foundation of a great Christian city, though extant sources suggest this to be a later myth for the purposes of giving the Russian orthodox church an independence from Greek precedence.
The need for finding trade through new routes had arisen through the loss of trade routes to the Far East and its silk route, due to Islamic expansion. Since the Pope had given the West to Spain and the East to Portugal, Columbus proposed to go east by going west, deluded though as to the distances involved. The Portugese turned him down after finding the passage around Africa, the British took too long thinking it over and others, quite rightly, rejected his assumptions. Spain however had an desperate need for income to pay for the costs of their Reconquest of Spain by finding new sources of trade and so ended up backing Columbus’ plan.
Columbus had discovered that one could be blown west at the latitude of Western Africa and then east again at the latitude of northern Spain, according to the seasons. Using this fact he famously discovered the islands around the Bahamas and Cuba, an area that would become the spring board for the new Spanish empire and a playground for the mysterious world of the pirates and buccaneers, the first “wild west” of the new world. The line of his expeditions, was an extension of the Kiev-Genoa-Fatima line.
The greater invasion of the Americas than came from north-western Europe, after a strange prelude attributed to a cult of the West in European secret societies, themselves already bound into the project of the Crusades.
It appears then that Columbus’ exploration west was driven by the consequences of the same “problem” of Islam, consequences involving trade and empire. The Venetians were in difficulty since their trading was based on goods from the silk route from China and being bypassed they were made almost bankrupt when also the passage around Africa was discovered. At such times people naturally seek alternatives and head off into the unknown.
The Mysteries of the Burgundians
Another such extremity occurred two centuries earlier, when the Holy Land was all but lost yet the religious organisations set up to support the crusades had amassed great power in all the lands of NW Europe. The Knight’s time was over, or so the French king thought since he was heavily in debt and the Church itself in political turmoil. The Templars had become a multi-national organisation rivalling and bypassing royal powers and by implying that this secretive Order was up to no good, and even engaged in Satan’s work, national kingdoms could claw back their power and wealth. However, the Templars were populated by knights of noble birth and were therefore from families close to the royal lines of Europe.
Both the wealth and naval power of the Templars largely went missing when a putsch was mounted against them throughout Europe. There were also areas of resistance to the papal edict dissolving them and requiring Templars to be arrested wherever found. The inevitable political limitation in executing the Templars in a decisive way and their good political connections explains their convenient disappearance leading to a very great enigma as to what became of them. A myth has grown up that their navy dispersed into places where they could not be seen, into less explored areas of the Atlantic such as the Baltic, Africa and North America.
The Templars had developed a secret base on the isle of Bornholm in the Baltic. Incredibly, this island was once occupied by the Burgundians who originated in Scandinavia, the same Burgundians who figured strongly in the foundation of the Templars and Cistercians, Bernard of Clairvaux himself being one such. Later Burgundy extended over much of modern Switzerland, the home of modern banking after the Templar disappearance and, as we have seen, the Burgundian flag mysteriously turns up in Spain’s “discovery” and conquest of the New World. The mysteries of the Michael lines, geodetic knowledge and the history of the West appears to be contained in a few families chiefly the Burgundians and Normans and the religious orders of the Benedictines and their offshoot the Cistercians.
It is thought that they developed along the lines of maritime explorers, traders and pirates, since they were an armed force with good ships. The skull and crossbones was within in their iconography, one eventually adopted by the Freemasons, a group thought to have roots in the Templar Order.
If this recent conceit is a fantasy, it is a very good one for it enables the historical eventualities to be given a possible and higher purpose. Without the development of the West there would be no context within which such myths could develop because with this development has come a cultural globalisation at the cost of traditional forms of meaning.
An alternative way to North America, pioneered by Viking sailors, was to cross to Greenland and Newfoundland and then hug the coast, a route thought to have brought the Clovis point making to America from France in the late Stone Age – The Solutrean Hypothesis. [Weirdly, Clovis the First with his Burgundian queen founded the Merovingian dynasty and the Frankish kingdom]. Some Templars are thought to have used this route to create a colony in the New World some time in the 14th century leaving traces in frescos of new world plants within Rosslyn Chapel due to the involvement of the Sinclairs, who built the chapel before the New World was discovered.
Anyway …. I hope to return to this “St Andrew’s Cross” of Europe, shown below using Google Earth. In this the Michael Line of Europe is mirrored relative to North to form the cross about a meridian passing through Genoa, Cosica and Sardinia [a meridian noted in Peter Dawkin’s work].
