The city of Lisbon was for centuries the gateway to the Americas, Africa and Europe. A cosmopolitan city of palaces, opulent churches and people from all corners of the globe. In front of the royal residence, was the river Tagus clogged with ships bearing spices, precious metals and….slaves. But this picture of unbridled wealth came to a sudden end in November 1755 when the city was hit by an earthquake, tsunami and fire.
The day when hell rained down on Lisbon was the 1st November. This was All Saints Day when the city’s mainly Catholic population was in church. By all accounts it was a sunny and very pleasant morning when at 9am, citizens heard an ominous subterranean thunder. Lisbon shook for about three minutes with buildings collapsing everywhere and people crushed beneath the rubble.
Then the sea retreated far from the harbour. It returned with an immense wave of about fifty to sixty feet in height. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people had rushed to the harbour to escape toppling structures in the downtown area. But sadly, they’d dashed headlong into the tsunami.
The scene in churches across the city was utter carnage. At the Igreja do Carmo, a massive convent, overlooking the city, hundreds of worshippers died during mass when the church roof collapsed on their heads. The ruins have been kept to the present day as a grim reminder of what happened.
Because so many churches had candles burning that day, fires spread very quickly. It was also claimed that robbers and other criminals engaged in widespread arson to distract from acts of theft. Whether deliberately caused or not, the inferno raged in the city for six days. In every corner of Lisbon there were half-burnt bodies lying around for long afterwards.
The Lisbon earthquake literally rocked 18th century opinion. On one side, it bolstered the arguments of those who saw a divine hand in natural events. Lisbon was being punished for its hubris. On the other side were the great thinkers of the Enlightenment. People like Voltaire who penned a sarcastic satire titled Candide where he mocked the idea that we lived in the best of all possible worlds – as the horror in Lisbon only too clearly evidenced.
On the plus side, the Lisbon earthquake gave a big boost to the study of earthquakes leading to our modern day understanding of these deadly phenomena.
The real meaning of Easter – and how best to see it than a visit to the church of Bom Jesus in northern Portugal. I was there in August last year to look at the life-sized depictions of the Passion of Christ. Each station of the cross has its own little chapel up a steep hillside just beyond the city of Braga. And it’s well worth the trip!
The church of Bom Jesus covers a hillside and more than likely was the site of a pagan temple – especially as Braga was the Roman city of Bracara Augusta. A Christian church was there in the Middle Ages but the baroque pile that confronts you today dates back to around 1722. Last year, UNESCO listed it as a world heritage site – and about time too!
It’s incredible and you’ll be glad to know that I got my iPhone out and filmed this for you. Here is the Easter message in beautiful 18th century sculpture. Visiting it now will be difficult with the wretched Coronavirus restricting all our movements around the world.
So, enjoy the Passion of Christ this Easter with my little video.
I was in the capital of Kosovo – the city of Pristina – last month and saw some incredible 7,000 year old statues from the Neolithic period that quite frankly, looked like aliens.
At the Museum of Kosovo in Pristina, I browsed the strange Neolithic sculptures of alien like beings in glass cases. Oblong heads and huge eyes – they really are quite hypnotic. These figures were made by people of the so-called Vinca culture.
These Neolithic humans hadn’t mastered metalwork yet – this was a late phase of the Stone Age. But despite that, the Vinca were surprisingly advanced. They may have had multi-storey buildings, sophisticated agriculture and even a written script. Eventually, they discovered how to work with copper.
These Neolithic alien-like figures were first discovered a century ago. At first, it wasn’t completely clear what they were – let alone their incredible age. Now we know these enigmatic figures came from one of the largest Stone Age communities in Europe.
In some ways not surprising that a relatively large population was there. The mighty river Danube flowed nearby that would have ensured both fertile land and fish to eat.
Unfortunately, the Museum of Kosovo suffered during the Balkans war in the 1990s. Most of his prehistoric exhibits were spirited off to the Serbian capital Belgrade and there’s not been much willing to hand them back.
I loved these figures and have one sitting on my desk – a replica of course!
When I was a kid back in the 1970s, I devoured a hugely popular book by the Swiss author Erich von Däniken called Chariots of the Gods. You may have read it too.
His contention was that ancient monuments, carvings and stories clearly evidenced the presence of alien beings amongst us in ancient history.
One famous example in his book is a carving on the sarcophagus lid of the Mayan king Pakal Votan (603-683 CE). He was a long lived ruler in central America and Von Däniken speculated that the Mayan had experienced contact with superior alien technology (as the image above shows):
In the centre of that frame is a man sitting, bending forward. He has a mask on his nose, he uses his two hands to manipulate some controls, and the heel of his left foot is on a kind of pedal with different adjustments. The rear portion is separated from him; he is sitting on a complicated chair, and outside of this whole frame, you see a little flame like an exhaust.
Chariot of the Gods – Erich Von Däniken
Von Däniken wasn’t the first person to speculate along these lines. Imagining contact between humans and creatures from outer space began to emerge in 19th century as the shackles of religion were thrown off and science increased our knowledge of the cosmos.
In 1897, the British author HG Wells wrote The War of the Worlds where resource hungry Martians invade southern England. A later movie version with Tom Cruise moved the action to the United States.
But Wells imagined aliens as hostile and warlike with no interest in helping humanity. That jaundiced view of extraterrestrials has been hugely influential in science fiction ever since.
But others conjectured a more benevolent relationship. Aliens as our friends and mentors. The most notable proponent of this view was a woman normally referred to as Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891 CE).
She was convinced that humans in ancient history had made contact with highly advanced alien life forms on the planet Venus. Christianity, obsessed with putting humanity at the centre of the universe, had hushed this up.
It’s been hypothesised that there are stories in the bible that point to first contact with aliens and the inability of humans two thousand years ago to understand what they were seeing. So many of the visions of people ascending into the sky and fiery lights all relate to aliens and UFOs.
In popular culture the idea of more primitive species being influenced in weird ways by more advanced beings has even been dramatised in sci-fi classics such as Star Trek and Doctor Who. The Ridley Scott movie Prometheus also dabbles in the notion of an advanced species calling humanity into existence for its own dark purposes.
The belief in aliens creating humanity or turbo-charging our civilisation has been derided by a number of scientists including the late Carl Sagan. In a nutshell, they argue that the alien-human contact theorists are relying on a kind of “god of the gaps” intellectual approach. Where religious fundamentalists insert God into gaps in scientific knowledge, the first contact brigade place aliens.
Needless to say – opinions on this subject are sharply divided!
Exorcism has a long history in human society. The casting out of evil spirits. Rituals to remove demons that were destroying crops or bringing illness into communities. Even Jesus is reported to have done some exorcism in the bible.
Only recently I was reading of the terribly sad story of three children sacrificed by the Inca around the year 1500 to please their Gods. The community was worried about their harvest. So two girls and one boy were imprisoned in a cave and starved. We only know about this because their mummified bodies survived.
There is a reviving belief in exorcism in the US and Europe. The casting out of devils is coming back into vogue. It’s something our ancestors would have understood. Evil spirits were all around them waiting to make them sick, mad or even kill them.
HISTORY OF EXORCISM: Violent demons were expelled angels
Violent demons were believed to be extremely dangerous and their power was derived from the fact that they were originally angels – living in heaven. They rebelled against God and were cast out. They became ugly and hideous.
But they did not lose their power. Even when they fell from heaven, the power of their fall created the pit of hell. And forever, they are trying to escape from hell. Beneath the earth these demons are trying to grab at your soul while up above, angels are trying to guide you to God.
HISTORY OF EXORCISM: How demons entered your body
It was once believed that demons could enter your body as a vapour through any opening. That might be your open mouth for example. Chester girl Anne Millner was possessed in this way in the 16th century when she found herself surrounded by a white cloud. She had no doubt it was a physical entity and it entered in to her.
People in the Middle Ages truly believed that demons could turn in to everyday objects like food – there are accounts of people inadvertently admitting a demon by consuming an apple or even a lettuce leaf.
Bad case of food poisoning? Maybe. Very probably. But the resulting fevers and lack of medicine to help meant these sick folk appeared to be possessed.
HISTORY OF EXORCISM: How to get rid of a pesky demon?
So how to get rid of a demon? How to treat a ‘demoniac’? Well, an exorcism of course.
In 1585, Sarah Williams was subjected to an exorcism. Sarah truly believed herself to be possessed. She could not cross herself. She behaved strangely. Her verbal outpourings were taken to be the demon talking.
So, like a scene out of the Hollywood movie The Exorcist, she had holy water chucked at her and Sarah called her tormentors all sorts of unpleasant and profane words.
As there was no sign of improvement – the treatment became more intense. A cauldron stew of powdered root that smelt disgusting was held under nose and the smoke turned Sarah’s face black. Sure sign of possession!
The next step was to cram the bones of a dead saint in to Sarah’s mouth! And she was touched over and over again with a crucifix – particularly the extremities like the feet. And the rite of baptism and other prayers were chanted over her. After several months, Sarah was ‘cured’.
HISTORY OF EXORCISM: Some people rather liked demons
Not everybody wanted to get rid of demons – some people wanted to harness their power through necromancy…the conjuring up of spirits through spells. A crime punishable by death. Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester (1400-1452), was an infamous necromancer.
She consulted two astrologers who predicted that King Henry VI of England would suffer a life threatening illness. For this she was forced to do penance while one of the astrologers was hung, drawn and quartered.
The Munich Handbook was hugely popular in the Middle Ages and gave detailed instructions on just how to summon up the spirits. One spell described how to turn a beautiful maiden in to a love slave.
This involved finding a white dove, bite in to it near its heart, draw with the blood using a quill from an eagle on a parchment made from a female dog on heat….no, I’m not making this up! The dove, by the way, was seen as being the symbol of Venus while the dog was the symbol of lust.
Having turned the maiden one is after in to a slave, the demon that has been summoned would create a replica human in the shape of the maiden who would return to her home and pretend to be her. So you could never be sure who was a real human being and who was a demon in disguise.
Aaaah…but fairies you say. They’re nice spirits aren’t they? Cute little things with pink wings. Well, not in the Middle Ages. The medieval mind had not heard of Peter Pan or Walt Disney. To them, fairies did not have gossamer wings – a Victorian invention – and were not necessarily small – a Shakespearian invention.
Fairies were human size – possibly inherited from the Roman idea of nymphs. They were only invisible when they wanted to be.
Fairies could kill you, ruin your crop and worst of all, abduct your child and replace it with a ‘changeling’. In medieval Britain, the belief in changelings led to women advising new mothers to surround the cradle with cold iron – like shears, which should be placed near the head.
Draw a chalk circle around the cradle and recite prayers as you did it. But even this didn’t guarantee a child’s safety.
Demon changelings – when evil spirits replaced family members
If the child inherited an abnormality – a fairy had probably taken its place. A child being deaf, not moving much or throwing violent tantrums – could very well be a fairy changeling.
A parent in the Middle Ages might do something odd to test the child. They would bake bread in an eggshell to see if the baby or toddler laughed – thereby proving it was an old knowledgeable fairy in a child’s body.
So if the baby was proven to be a changeling – what then?
Well, according to contemporary sources, babies were left exposed on a dung heap or placed near a fire and the terrified fairy would fly out of the body and it would be replaced by your real baby.
Unfortunately, babies did die. And as late as 1895, a man killed his wife in England because he believed his own wife to be a fairy changeling.
So, as you can see, exorcism has a long and violent history – which I rather hope will not return!
Of all the strange conspiracy theories that bedevil our time – the idea that we’re being ruled by lizard people has to be the oddest.
An article in The Atlanticin 2013 estimated that 12 million people in the United States believe that lizard people run their country. That’s small beer compared to the 66 million who think that aliens landed at Roswell in 1948. But it’s still a very significant number.
Lizard people and David Icke
Conspiracy theorist David Icke has been a leading proponent of the idea that reptiles have gained access to the levers of power. The Icke sympathetic ufochick.com site explains how lizards can take over human bodies with compatible DNA.
They have apparently been doing this for centuries targeting people in positions of power – who then intermarry to preserve the reptilian bloodline.
Apparently, lizards might also go for humans who “live in a state of negativity, fear, anger, violence, aggression and or abuse of drugs or sex”. A form of invisible grooming takes place to lower the individual’s guard.
This allows the lizard to “hop into the human energy field” manipulating the subject’s emotional state to change their “vibrational energy”, which allows the lizard to mount a full takeover.
Lizard people – aliens breeding with humans!
Lizard people theorists seem keen to emphasise that they are not talking about shape shifting. It’s something way more subtle and long established. Icke claims that reptiles came from the constellations of Orion, Sirius and Draco and interbred with humans long ago – though not physically. They did it by altering human DNA.
Basically, to put it crudely, there’s a bit of lizard in all our brains but not all of us have embraced our inner reptile. You can tell those who have by certain traits such as eye colour, scars, mannerisms, etc.
Anyway, that’s the theory in a nutshell. There are, needless to say, some famous lizards in human guise. Queen Elizabeth II is one. Several US presidents. Global corporate executives. And…of course….the Illuminati and Freemasons.
Lizard people in history
Reptiles as super-powerful people and deities is a recurring theme in many mythologies throughout history. For example, Kekrops – the founder of the city of Athens – was reputedly half-man and half-snake. He established the cult of the goddess Athena and dedicated her shrine on the Acropolis.
Another half-man, half-snake was Fu Xi, the first mythological emperor of China. He was also the creator of mankind. After a huge flood, Fu Xi and his wife Nu Wa – who were brother and sister – married and repopulated the planet. Both had snake bodies.
The name of Fu Xi’s wife Nu Wa is similar to Noah and some have wondered whether the flood story was shared between China and the Hebrews. Anyway, the bit that should interest us is that this couple, our common ancestors, were 50% reptile. And the idea of reptile gods recurs in many cultures from the ancient Egyptians to the Aztecs.
In the 19th century, the mystic Elena Petrovna Blavatsky – known commonly as “Madame Blavatsky” – claimed knowledge of a long lost land called Lemuria. The Lemurian culture had existed 14,000 years ago and the Lemurian people were a race that could lay eggs, had psychic powers and were bisexual. They were wiped out by a huge catastrophe that also engulfed Atlantis.
In 1983, the notion of reptiles from another galaxy coming to Earth and taking over humans was popularised in the science fiction series V. The “visitors” claim to come in peace but a small band of plucky humans see through their lies and heroically resist. V was remade in 2009 though failed to make the same impact the original series did in the 1980s.
Social media has heralded a revival in lizard people theory
Today, largely thanks to social media, we are witnessing a surge in the belief that lizard people run our society. A few years ago, I found myself arguing with somebody convinced that a well known celebrity was a lizard because their eyes flickered “unnaturally” in a YouTube video. I tried to explain the concept of pixelation but got nowhere.
I can only conjecture that as people feel less in control of their surroundings and lives, theories that claim alien reptiles are running the show seem increasingly plausible.
Flat Earthers will find no support for their view that we’re standing on a very large dinner plate from ancient sources. Because even the Greeks of Pericles and Aristotle knew we were on a globe. They even calculated its circumference!
When I was at school, we were taught something false about the shape of the Earth.
Medieval people were not Flat Earthers
The falsehood was that people in the Middle Ages sincerely believed that the Earth was flat. Seafarers feared that if they sailed too far their ships would literally fall off the edge of the planet into the void. Christopher Columbus had to convince the church that by heading west in search of a better route to the Indies he wouldn’t suffer such a terrible fate!
The astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson appears to think our ancestors clung to this superstitious belief. When the Atlanta rap singer B.o.B recently tweeted his personal view that the Earth is flat, Tyson replied that nobody had believed that for five centuries – thereby inferring that before the Renaissance, it was the accepted wisdom.
But it wasn’t.
Even the Dark Ages rejected Flat Earthers
Even in the so-called “Dark Ages”, after the fall of the Roman Empire when classical learning was allegedly lost to us, the Venerable Bede calculated the date for Easter on the assumption that the Earth was spherical.
One mistake he made was thinking this “orb” was at the centre of the universe. It would take Copernicus hundreds of years later to put the Sun in the middle and the Earth orbiting round it. But, while getting that wrong, Bede never countenanced the notion that the planet was flat as a pancake.
Long before Bede, the Sumerian civilisation, Babylonians, ancient Greeks and Hebrew scholars – all accepted that the Earth was round. They didn’t have modern observatories or the ability to fly planes and rockets. Instead, they deduced the Earth was round from observation – mainly of the stars in the skies and their movements.
Also, simple facts like watching a ship disappear hull first when it reached the horizon.
Ancient Greek boffins blow apart Flat Earther theory
Ancient Greek super-brains Pythagoras and Aristotle wrote about the Earth being round five hundred years before Christ while Eratosthenes, a Greek scholar living in Ptolemaic Egypt even calculated the circumference of the Earth using a stick, the shadow cast by the sun in two places and some pretty basic maths. This video explains how he did it – then read on afterwards!
So why on Earth, pardon the pun, in the 21st century is the Flat Earth movement experiencing huge growth?
The Flat Earth Conference this year was better attended than ever. Attendees were told that mainstream science and NASA in particular have been lying to them. The planet is flat and the Antarctic forms an icy barrier that stops us all falling off and plunging into outer space.
The Flat Earth view is endorsed by celebrities from ex-basketball star Shaquille O’Neill to English cricketer Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff. In an outburst against those who think the planet is spherical, Flintoff asked:
If you’re in a helicopter and you hover, why does the Earth not [rotate under you] if it’s round?
In 2007, a survey found that 55% of American adults and 95% of eight-year-olds (who have a better excuse for ignorance) believed the Earth was flat. Not even Christopher Columbus, most of the medieval church and anybody remotely educated in the Dark Ages thought we live on a gigantic plate. Yet there are people today who think NASA and the world of science are peddling myths.
Blame the Victorians for Flat Earthers
Today’s Flat Earth movement began in Victorian England with a reaction against rationalism and the scientific establishment. A chap called Samuel Birley Rowbotham (1816-1884), writing under the pseudonym “Parallax”, founded the school of Zetetic Astronomy.
This kicked off a rancorous debate that ended in a vicious court battle between scientist and round Earth proponent Alfred Russel Wallace and Flat Earth advocate John Hampden – who ended up trolling Wallace (in a Victorian manner) for years afterwards.
Surveyors make calculations for the construction of roads and railways that make no allowance for the Earth’s surface being curved
The light from lighthouses is seen from distances that should be impossible if the Earth was round
Mariners use maps and not globes because the Earth is flat
Carpenter begged his readers to just use their senses and trust the bible – which he claimed made no assertion of the Earth being round (but neither does it state it’s flat). His lightweight arguments were known to the Ancient Greeks and refuted over two thousand years ago.
Eratosthenes, using his calculations of the Earth’s size, was even able to work out a distance from the Earth to the moon and a rough idea of its size. Other Greeks got close to working out how gravity operates (so why human beings don’t fall off a spherical earth) and that our planet circled the sun and not vice versa. This was two thousand, five hundred years ago.
The depressing revival in Flat Earthism threatens to take us back – not to the Middle Ages…but to the Bronze Age!
Is there any link at all between the Knights Templar and Freemasons? I have recently been filmed for an episode of The Curse of Oak Island – Specials – Season 7, episode 2. I was asked to comment on the links between the Masons and Templars.
As you know, the Knights Templar were in existence between their founding in 1118 and their destruction in 1307 – a period of nearly two hundred years. The Freemasons as we know them today are largely a construct of the 18th century though with roots going further back.
How far back and whether they link to the Knights Templar is the big question. Freemasons seem to vary between those that are quite happy to state an explicit and firm link and those who say it’s part of the masonic mythology but not to be taken too literally.
Templar infiltration of the Freemasons?
The linkage between the Freemasons and Knights Templar is difficult to prove but there’s no shortage of theories. One goes that after they were suppressed by Pope and the King of France, the Templars infiltrated stone mason guilds.
These were then refashioned to embrace Templar ideals and rituals. In effect, the masons and Templars over time became one and the same thing.
Freemasons came to full public view in 1717 with the foundation of the Grand Lodge of England. The organisation’s website traces the history of the order back to the stone masons of the Middle Ages who built Europe’s great cathedrals and not to the Knights Templar. It doesn’t recognised the aforementioned merger of masons and Templars.
The website cites evidence of people becoming Freemasons throughout the seventeenth century such as a gentleman called Elias Ashmole in 1643. Then in the eighteenth century, grand lodges were formed in England, Ireland and Scotland and the order grew significantly to include top politicians and establishment figures. But as its lodges spread throughout government and business, the conspiracy theories proliferated.
From the eighteenth century to the present day, there were Freemasons happy to state that their rituals and organisation were directly descended from the Templars. Equally, there have always been Freemasons irritated by these claims. However, the creation of an occult mythology around masonic activity was largely created by Freemasons and not their detractors.
Baron Gotthelf and the Knights Templar – Freemasons link
The prominent eighteenth century Freemason Baron Karl Gotthelf von Hund was forever hammering home the link between masonry and the Templars. The baron founded The Rite of Strict Observance within Freemasonry, as series of degrees through which members would pass including the degree of “knight”.
Michael Haag details in his book The Templars that a crusader connection was first expounded by Andrew Michael Ramsay, a Jacobite who headed up the French Grand Lodge around 1737. He said in a speech that the crusaders had wanted to create a global spiritual confraternity. While attempting to rebuild the Temple of Solomon, he believed they had developed secret signs and rituals to protect themselves from Saracen infiltration.
When the crusades collapsed, these spiritual crusaders left the Holy Land and returned to their European homes setting up the first Freemason lodges. But these were neglected over time and the secrets forgotten. Only in Scotland was the flame kept burning.
Holy Blood Holy Grail – and the Knights Templar – Freemasons connection
The authors of The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail in 1982 wrote about the alleged flight of Knights Templar to Scotland when the order was suppressed by the King of France in 1307, repeating an old claim that they participated in the Battle of Bannockburn against the English.
They claimed to have discovered “what seemed to be” a Templar graveyard in Argyllshire with 13th century Templar gravestones and eighteenth century Masonic gravestones. The authors asserted that the later stones had mixed motifs suggesting a fusion at some point between the Templars and Freemasons.
The alleged link between Freemasonry and the Templars has often been used to damage the reputation of masons. Stephen Knight authored The Brotherhood in the early 1980s claiming a link to the Templars and arguing that Freemasons were running the United Kingdom.
Knight had also written a book on Jack the Ripper claiming that his murders were part of a conspiracy involving masons and the Royal Family. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it influenced the later work From Hell by Alan Moore.
John Robinson’s 1989 book Born in Blood claimed that Knights Templar fleeing arrest and torture in England and Scotland formed a secret society of mutual protection that eventually revealed itself as the Freemasons.
The symbols and rituals we associate with the masons in fact dated back to the Templars. He credited this secret society with the Protestant Reformation and included among its members the first US President George Washington.
