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New Territories

 

Rome and Incarnate Angels, Atlantean Metallurgy, Geophysics of Third-Density Planets, Donyale Luna’s Magic, and Atlantean History

In Rome a cold wet wind blew in over the river Tiber that winter of 1968. A small community of Processeans was huddling together for warmth in the cellar of a fine palazzo on Villa Julia, just behind Campo de’ Fiori.

The campo was the public square where the philosopher and astronomer Giordano Bruno, condemned by the Roman Inquisition for heresy and pantheism, was burned at the stake on an equally cold February day in 1600 CE.

Giordano Bruno is probably best remembered for being martyred for his Copernican view of Earth and planets orbiting the sun, yet his issues with the Roman Catholic Church ran far deeper with his rejection of Jesus Christ’s divinity, his denial of Mary’s virginity, and, perhaps worse in the church’s eyes, his assertion that the devil would be saved. It was for these and other “theological errors,” as the church called them, that he was condemned to death, although his heretical cosmological ideas certainly hadn’t helped his cause.

Yet among his other, even more radical theories was his belief in the infinite multiplicity of planets orbiting an infinite multiplicity of other suns just like this one and populated by other intelligent beings. This went far beyond any Copernican thinking, and it’s significant that he refused to recant his belief in the plurality of worlds, even under the threat of death, taking his truth with him to the fire.

I add these facts about Giordano Bruno’s beliefs and his unfortunate death because Mein Host must have walked across the Campo de’ Fiori a hundred times without ever once noticing Bruno’s statue or knowing anything about the man or his tragic martyrdom. He quite obviously wasn’t in Rome to take in the sights.

However, as anyone who has followed my narrative so far will have likely anticipated, Giordano Bruno was one of the early fallen rebel angels who’d chosen a mortal incarnation. Such incarnations were relatively few in those incendiary times, and even then a number of them met terrible ends. Bruno’s brilliant mind and his equally abrasive character were almost sure to lead him to a sticky demise. Less generally known, however, was that before he died he was able to link up with other incarnate rebel angels, such as the English polymath John Dee and the two poets Sir Edward Dyer and Sir Philip Sydney. Although Bruno’s arrogance quickly made enemies, his contact with the other incarnates imparted something of his supreme confidence to those in John Dee’s circle of initiates.

As you will have also likely deduced, I hold no great respect for the Roman Catholic Church, or what has become of it. Giordano Bruno’s murder is merely one of the many reasons I’ve come to feel that way.

Shamefully, as recently as the year 2000, four hundred years after Bruno’s death, the best a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church could come up with in describing Bruno’s end was to say that it was a “sad episode.” (A very sad episode indeed—for Giordano Bruno! And even worse for the progress of scientific investigation.) Clearly unable to feel any true empathy for Bruno’s death agonies (and believe me, burning people in the most painful way had become an art by that time), Cardinal Angelo Sodano just couldn’t help adding to his insensitivity by justifying the torturers’ actions. (The cardinal was the same high official who later became known for blocking an investigation of sexual abuse—and more famously for referring to such accusations directed at the church as “petty gossip.”) The cardinal maintained that the inquisitors were merely doing their best to save poor Bruno’s soul by getting him to recant! That a courageous man died a terrible death for his beliefs, many of which have turned out to be true, betrays a remarkably unforgiving attitude.

When these so-called leaders among men distort the truth, or downright lie like guilty children to protect themselves or their institutions, and when they are bribed with gratuities or flattery, it carries all the stamp of Prince Caligastia’s interference.

However, as a thought experiment, I ask you to imagine how different modern life might be had Bruno’s concept of other inhabited worlds been accepted and absorbed into the way you human beings consider yourselves.

Wouldn’t the reality of extraterrestrials be more firmly established by now? Might not beneficent extraterrestrials already be here living openly among you? Would you be traveling among the stars by now? And that art exhibit you saw the other day, wouldn’t it have had some superbly crafted panoramas of the landscape on other worlds?

Rome in the fall of 1968 was abuzz with gossip about the movie Federico Fellini was completing at the Cinecittà movie studio in the city. People knew it was going to be called Fellini Satyricon, and if they’d read their Petronious they were anticipating some good old Roman orgiastic fun.

Julian Beck and Judith Malina had brought the Living Theater to the city, and they mixed in easily with some of the cast of Fellini’s movie at parties and private gatherings. It was at one of these parties that my ward found himself sitting on the carpeted stairs of a smart apartment in Rome chatting with the actor Max Born, one of the leads in Fellini Satyricon. A tall, strikingly beautiful black woman was moving gracefully around the party passing from one guest to another with a plate of tempting-looking chocolate brownies. Mein Host and Max Born both took one, as did Father Aaron, the other Processean attending the party with my ward (Processeans were expected to go everywhere in pairs). Father Aaron was now perched quietly, sitting a couple of steps farther up, doing his best to appear as though he was following the conversation. He and my ward knew each other well by now, having traveled together all over America before coming to Rome.

Father Aaron was a tall man in his late twenties with a crop of red hair, an untidy red beard fringing his chin, and a presence that I observed many people found imposing, even a little scary. The southern sun had reddened his face and heightened the many freckles on his sensitive skin. His eyes were extremely blue and bulged slightly from his bright pink face—whether from an excess of enthusiasm for the Process Church or from a slight thyroid condition was never really clear.

Poor Father Aaron; he was never comfortable at parties or social gatherings and was quite incapable of casual conversation. Mein Host has described Aaron earlier in this narrative as the “quintessential Processean.” In another religious denomination he’d be a fundamentalist, a true believer, a man utterly convinced in the rightness of Process teachings and, in Father Aaron’s case, not shy about letting loose a stream of dogma at his unwitting victim. Having observed himself chasing away people with his peculiar intensity, to his credit he had become aware enough of this failing to leave the social chitchat to Mein Host.

Aaron had a remarkably fine analytical mind, but, like many people so gifted, he seemed to lack the intuitive intelligence to gauge when his listeners had heard enough of his voice. Whereas my ward was a listener, Father Aaron was a talker. His voice was loud and he annunciated clearly in the English way, but the sound could be abrasive to sensitive ears. He had no natural sense of personal space, so when he was talking to someone, before he had learned the error of his ways, he would stand a little too close to them, and, perching on the balls of his feet, he would lean forward to loom over his listener. When he became carried away with his own rhetoric he would punctuate his spiel by throwing his head back and rolling his eyes upward in his apparent despair at the hopeless insanity of the human race. Aaron gestured often, flinging his arms open wide—a bit too wildly to make his point. To those who knew him well, Father Aaron presented an unsettling mixture of guileless enthusiasm and intellectual brilliance—he had one of the highest IQs at Oxford University—yet to most he remained an oddity.

Mein Host has previously observed that Father Aaron never seemed comfortable in his body. He walked on his toes, for example, leaning forward and taking long strides, so he seemed to be bouncing along, as if anxious to spend as little time as possible in physical contact with the ground. He had difficulty ending conversations, often giving a bounce and jerking one hand up in an awkward semblance of a wave. Despite being one of the most senior Processeans and required to give instructions to others below him in the hierarchy, he couldn’t help appearing awkward and hesitant when trying to deliver an instruction. In a more psychiatrically probative time Father Aaron might have been thought to be suffering from Asperger’s syndrome, although no doubt he would be considered an extremely high-functioning example of it. But, of course, he wasn’t really “suffering” from any such debility, even if such a potential might have existed in his genes.

Awkward though Father Aaron may have been in social situations, and whether or not a diagnosis of Asperger’s would have been an accurate psychological evaluation, on a spiritual level he was an example of a class of rebel angels who have chosen, prior to incarnation, to adopt a defective physical body. The motives for choosing this can be as varied as the nature of debility itself. In some cases crippling self-punishment is the intended result, and in others, less serious developmental disorders are chosen to permit an experience of the limitations of the flesh. Yet in other cases a body might be chosen by a reincarnate deliberately to evoke unconditional love in an overly self-concerned parent. There are also some rebel angels who choose lives of bitter suffering and who frequently die in childhood, prior to the opportunity to live a full mortal life. In these cases a choice has been made to opt for another incarnation, a life that might be more beneficial for that individual’s emotional and spiritual education.

For it is only on a third-density planet—and more particularly on a rebellion-tossed world such as this one—that rebel angels have, as mortals, the opportunity to discover for themselves a basic and enduring love and knowledge of the Great God, an essence of whom indwells all mortals of sound mind.

If this is hard to credit given the human atrocities that appear nightly on the TV news, what in fact you are watching are the actions, dastardly or noble, of human beings who, whether or not they know it, are all embarking on their spiritual journeys. Most will not be aware of this until they awaken from the dream of mortal death. And, as I have previously explained, that which has remained unexamined or unforgiven during a mortal’s lifetime will become the focus of that individual’s life review. It’s during this review that your companion angels will be with you in reviewing your lifetime, or who will be encouraging you to reexperience, if needed, the unresolved aspects of your life. This can frequently involve reexperiencing an action or an event in your life from the point of view of the person wronged. In the clarity of the after-death state of mind, such events can be seen and felt, free of denial or justification, for the pain or damage they might have caused. This process will allow you to observe your mortal lifetime, as separated from the pulls of the flesh, with far deeper self-understanding and compassion for both self and others. And dependent on your heart’s intentions and the state of your consciousness, the course of your future Multiverse career will open up to you. And, yes, the choice is offered as to whether you wish to continue on your Multiverse journey, but only a few, having once tasted the transcendent wonders of the afterlife realms, will tend to choose personality extinction.

If those familiar with my chronicle will forgive a brief reiteration: Now that I’m starting this, the fifth volume of my Confessions, I feel more deeply committed than ever to boldly expressing my truth as I have experienced it. So, perhaps I should warn you that this might be an uncomfortable reality for some readers, especially those fair-minded souls who believe all humans have essentially the same spiritual heritages. Yet, I also trust it will throw more light on one of the persistently unresolvable issues separating some of the major world religions.

Do human beings reincarnate, as Hindus and Buddhists believe? Or do humans have the one mortal lifetime and then proceed to the heaven or hell of the Christian belief, or whatever is the Jewish or Islamic equivalent? Or do humans, perhaps, have just the one mortal lifetime and that’s it, as is the case for the materialist nonbeliever?

Who is correct? All sides insist to one extent or another that they have the truth; that what is true for them and their cohorts has to be so for everybody else. Thus, we’ll find no real answer there. Even The Urantia Book, which I’ve come to know through Mein Host’s study of it, states that reincarnation is not a technique practiced in this Local Universe. So what can be made of this?

The reality, as I’ve come to understand it, is more intriguing and demands rather greater emotional maturity to appreciate its implications and the reasons why reincarnation might have been held as an occult secret for so long.

However, in one way, the truth is quite simple. Some human beings are reincarnates; most people are not. Neither path is better or worse, superior or inferior. Some people merely have different backgrounds and destinies. Reincarnates are the exception to the normal conditions on Earth. A third-density world such as this one functions as a nursery for new souls, souls who are created here. Having lived a single mortal lifetime, those new souls, whom we call “first-timers,” have no need to undergo another inevitably punishing lifetime. Once will be quite enough! Following their after-death review they will proceed through a succession of frequency domains, to ascend ultimately out of the Local Universe and into realms as yet unrevealed to me. (I’ve heard it said there are more than 590 frequency domains, each of which can be thought of as a “lifetime.”)

Reincarnates, on the other hand, comprised almost entirely of fallen rebel angels, will have had a number of difficult lifetimes on a variety of frequency domains. Yet those lifetimes will have been more of a preparation for the most challenging incarnation of all—a lifetime on a third-density world suffering from the ravages of an angelic revolution. A planet such as Earth.

And if it is any consolation for exhausted reincarnates, I can say with some certainty that unless you choose otherwise, this will be your final incarnation of this great cycle. Following this lifetime your soul will ascend along with those of your fellow mortals.

There will be some exceptions to this pattern: benevolent extraterrestrials who incarnate in human vehicles to observe or assist; a few more unpleasant extraterrestrials expelled, perhaps, to live out a lifetime on a troubled world such as this; a trickle of agents from the Multiverse Administration (the celestial administration; MA for short); a number of bodhisattvas; and some such as my ward, who for reasons of their own, have chosen to reincarnate as many as half a dozen times on the same world. I believe in these cases a powerful attraction and love can develop between an angel and the planet of her mortal incarnations.

Mein Host was informed in 1990 that there were sixty million or so reincarnates currently on the planet, with more coming in every day. I’ve no doubt as I write these words that the current number is now well in excess of a hundred million. I would hazard a guess—as my narrative will probably be of little interest to most first-timers—that if you’re reading these words you are most likely among those one hundred million reincarnates.

If that is indeed so, and if you’ve been following my narrative all along, you may have already been able to deepen your level of self-awareness. My words are intended to activate, or resonate, with the deeper, occulted knowledge you possess as a natural part of your angelic heritage. If this is the case, then my narrative will be functioning as intended.

*  *  *

Metallurgy had reached a relatively high level of development in Lemuria under Vanu and Amadon’s guidance. However, unlike later times, Lemurian technical progress was devoted entirely to peaceful purposes.

I have described earlier how the Lemurians’ skill at alloying metals had led to the invention of devices that, when lodged in specific places, created an electromagnetic field sufficient to neutralize the Pacific typhoons before the storms had a chance to gather energy. The Lemurians were clearly aware of the essentials of electricity, yet their only way of generating it was by tapping in to electric eels. Its use was reserved for their temples and their important rituals.

The most significant of the secrets Vanu shared with the more technically minded of the islanders concerned their use of focused sound to levitate cut blocks of basalt, many tons in weight, and float them gently into place. I’m not a scientist, at least not compared to Astar—one of my sister Watchers with a more technically adroit mind—so I can only guess how they may have done this. (If Astar turns up, I’ll let her take over.)

What made sense to me at the time was that the islanders had been shown a way of creating vibrations at a frequency matching and canceling the resonant frequency of the basalt. Wouldn’t the centrifugal force of the spinning Earth work to lift the blocks off the ground? And if their quarry was to the west of where they wanted to place the basalt block, then wouldn’t the turning Earth allow the block to drift eastward? Was that how they were able to move blocks of stone so massive they would defy even the most advanced contemporary Earth-moving technology? But those were just my speculations!

There’d been a slight movement in the ether next to me, and here was Astar again. My questioning must have drawn her in. She was smiling up at me before she spoke. “Right enough in principle,” I heard her in my mind, her tone colored with what I hoped was a new respect for the clarity of my insights.

“Guesses, more like!” And we both laughed before she continued in a more serious tone. At least she was taking me seriously. “The basalt on the islands had an unusually high crystal content, as much as 27 to 30 percent on some islands. So, yes, you are correct, all they had to do was generate frequencies at around 1,012 vibrations per second, which would shut down or cancel out the gravity generation of the basalt block. This would allow it to float. Is that what you’ve worked out?”

I must have looked proud of myself for guessing right, so Astar took it as a sign to get a little more complicated.

“That’s only part of it, though. What you need to understand is something of the geophysics of a third-density planet. Look!” And, she conjured up a liquid-light simulacrum of a gently spinning planet, a globe the size of a melon that she floated in front of us.

I was impressed! I’d never seen her manipulate liquid light so adroitly before. As I watched, she waved her hands in an unfamiliar mudra and within a few moments I could see Earth’s magnetosphere glowing and flowing around the globe. She’d even been able to simulate an ovoid form caused by the impact of the charged particles of the solar wind on the magnetosphere as the planet circles the sun.

She continued. “Now, can you see how the shape of the Earth’s magnetic field is belted around the middle? This is where the electromagnetic energies of the North and South Poles meet. See how the North Pole magnetism and the negative energy pole spins to the left, whereas the positive energy pole, as well as the South Pole magnetism, spins to the right?”

“Yes, I see it,” I agreed, leaning closer to the spinning globe. “But what happens there . . . where they meet?”

Astar sighed at my ignorance. “It is a gravity field source, of course, but it also creates a neutral zone where all sorts of gravitational anomalies exist. Where the negative energy pole spinning to the left meets the positive southern energy pole spinning to the right, you could think of that as a no-spin region in which the opposing spins essentially cancel each other out. Understand?”

Well, not really. I asked, “But if a neutral zone stretches like that around the planet, how would you ever get across the equator? Wouldn’t you float off the surface if the gravity was neutralized?”

Astar paused. I wondered if she was getting irritated with my ignorance. It turned out to be quite the opposite.

“Very good!” she said. “Quite right. It would indeed be a risky affair. This is where what’s been called the ‘Crystalline Earth Grid’ comes into action. Look, see how it’s like a latticework mesh?” With another mudra from Astar, a crisscross pattern emerged over the globe’s surface. It appeared focused in a wide band encircling the world between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. Looking closer, there seemed to be a number of glowing hot spots dotted around the grid, mainly between the tropics.

“That’s how the Energy Beings designed it. Those glowing lights on the simulation—they handle the magnetic polarity reversals when they occur. This is where you’ll find those strange diamagnetic effects.”

“So is that how they levitated those enormous blocks of stone?” I asked, hoping she’d get to the point. She evidently picked up on my impatience.

“Yes, using gravity, which I’m sure you remember from your tutorials,” she announced, her tone hardening slightly in the manner of a schoolteacher repeating a lecture her student really should have known by now. Her tone made me all the more determined to grasp what she was telling me. And, yes, I was trying to impress her.

“You can think of gravity as the result of two opposing force fields meeting, the magnetic and the electric—with two vector force fields—and between them they generate a quadripole force field. That’s what creates Earth’s gravity. With me so far?”

I nodded, encouraging her to go on. Once again I felt on the verge of understanding something floating just beyond my intellectual reach.

“Those pulsing lights on the grid,” she gestured to the glowing points, four or five of which appeared to fall over the Islands of Mu. “It’s in those regions of magnetic-gravity anomalies that levitating is the easiest. Those places can be dangerous too, for humans!” Her tone changed slightly, and I wondered if she was relishing what she was describing.

“I’ve only seen it happen three times,” Astar told me. “And only under certain conditions, when the sun and moon, and even the surface temperature—it’s when they all conspire together. The combined stresses can produce an intense rupture in the energy flow. Under those conditions, I’ve seen the energy erupting upward . . . it will levitate anything in its way. Once I saw a boulder the size of a small hut flying straight up in the air on this column of energy; another time, all eight men in a canoe close to one of the Lemurian islands were suddenly plucked up, like the rock, straight up! Up went their oars . . . everything that wasn’t tied down . . . leaving just the empty canoe floating in the ocean.”

I interrupted her. “So, what you’re saying is Vanu showed the Lemurians how to control and use the neutral zones to levitate those giant stone blocks, yes?” I didn’t want to dwell on those horrifying images.

“Perhaps another way of putting it,” she said quickly, “is that Earth pushes the basalt blocks away from herself. Here. Look again.” Another mudra and the continents appeared with a crisscross mesh overlaid and showing the neutral regions.

“You can see how the Islands of Mu straddle north and south of the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn; and look at how many of those diamagnetic vortex points fall within those regions.”

And, indeed they did. I could see other places too. One seemed to be in central Australia, another on Easter Island; there were a couple of lights in the deserts of Mongolia, one in Florida, three in northern Europe, and one in Egypt. But she was right; at least half a dozen of these vortex points were distributed on or close to many of the Lemurian islands. My eyes were straining as I moved around the globe, squinting to see the hot spots and trying to recall exactly where they were.

“I can feel you’re getting fatigued,” her tone kindly. “It is probably more than you bargained for. But if you’ve at least taken in the basic principles of gravity and electromagnetism and how they can be mastered to serve humankind, I won’t have wasted my time.”

With that, Astar dissolved the globe, and in a rustle of the ether she was gone, leaving me thoughtful, and yes, fatigued too. I’d begun by thinking about the Lemurian skills with metallurgy, and now my mind was swimming with Astar’s talk of electromagnetism and gravity waves. I needed to repair back up to the resuscitating energies of the fifth dimension. I had become so involved with Astar’s explanation that I’d quite ignored the downward pull of the heavy emotional energies in the midastral realm. Little wonder I was exhausted.

With that, I followed Astar and thought myself back to the dimension I regarded as home.

*  *  *

In Rome the party was going full swing, with people still arriving and shrugging off their expensive coats and shouting their greetings across the crowded room. The air was a smog of cigarette and hashish smoke; the conversations in a smattering of different languages were loud, and the music louder still. The Beatles had just released their White Album, and the staccato descending chords of “Helter Skelter” were rippling off the satin finish of the Venetian plastered walls in waves of sound so palpable that I could see them as clearly as you might watch the ripples made by a pebble dropped in a pond.

Mein Host, from his perch on the stairs, was able to see over the top of people’s heads. Most were talking at full volume, their voices competing with and then drowned out by Paul McCartney’s rasping screams: “Do yer, don’t yer, want me to love yer . . . I’m coming down fast but I’m miles above yer . . . Helter Skelter . . . Helter Skelter . . .”

Half-a-dozen beautiful people swayed together in the middle of the crowded space, their eyes closed and clearly in tenuous contact with their physical bodies. Most of the guests were gathered in small groups; one or more person in each group was mouthing and gesticulating wildly in the Italian way.

Up on the wide, carpeted staircase the young actor Max Born and Mein Host were eating their brownies while continuing to talk, their heads close together trying to hear one another above the ambient din. Although Max must have been more than ten years younger than my ward and already a star, their mutual English backgrounds brought them together.

Father Aaron, who’d taken a small bite off the edge of his brownie, wrinkled his nose at the rich taste and handed it down to my ward to eat. Max, evidently more aware of the ways of the Roman glitzeratti, turned down the offer of half the brownie, and so my ward finished off the entire piece. Process cooking was brutally simple, and when they were fortunate enough to have retrieved food from the back doors and dumpsters of fine Italian restaurants, chocolate brownies of such evident deliciousness were never on the menus. It was obvious from my ward’s enjoyment that he hadn’t had anything quite so tasty for many years.

“You’re really digging those brownies,” Max was saying, amused and obviously appreciating my ward’s appreciation.

“The whole time I was in America,” my ward replied between mouthfuls, “I never once had a brownie. I think they come from the States, don’t they?” Licking his fingers, he added, “I never had brownies when I was growing up in England . . . did you, Max?”

The actor seemed more like a shy kid—which was really what he was. A beautiful young boy who would be playing the object of desire for the two main protagonists in Fellini’s movie. Max’s gamine and impish face was smiling as if he knew something my ward did not; but he wasn’t saying anything as he washed down the last of his brownie with white wine. Then he was pointing out Judith Malina in the crowd and asking my ward whether he’d ever met Judith or Julian back in the States.

“No, never met them over there—weren’t they touring in Europe then? Judith was saying earlier they’d had some sort of problem . . . didn’t say what . . . the U.S. government, I think.”

“The IRS . . . the tax people, is what I heard,” Max said. “They were chucked in prison too . . . not for long though.”

“No wonder they don’t want to go back.” Mein Host leaned closer to Max. “Who is that gorgeous black girl? The one who brought around the brownies?”

“Her?” Max nodded over to where a tall woman towered over those clustering around her, offering the last of the brownies to Julian Beck. “Oh! That’s Donyale . . . Donyale Luna. Don’t you know her face? You must have seen her on magazine covers . . .” Max was shaking his head in wonderment that someone wouldn’t know who Donyale Luna was; but no, my ward appeared to have no idea.

Max still couldn’t believe it. “You must have seen her on the cover of Vogue a couple of years ago . . . back in London? It was the biggest thing in the industry. The first black model ever to make the cover of English Vogue? No? Where the hell’ve you been all this time?”

“I don’t get much time to look at maga . . .” my ward was interrupted by Max’s call over to the tall model, who put the tray down and writhed her long body through the crowd to join them on the carpeted stairs. After introducing both Processeans, Max asked her when it was she’d been on the cover.

“Oh! That was years ago!” Donyale replied in a deeper voice than might be expected. Then, when she must have realized there was a reason Max wanted her to be more specific, “It was in March . . . March of ’66. Now I s’pose you want to know the photographer?”

Max said, “David Bailey, wasn’t it?” Obviously proud he knew the answer.

“March 1966 . . .” my ward said thoughtfully. “We were just leaving England forever, weren’t we, Aaron? In March?” He looked over to where Father Aaron was sitting, just starting to get restless.

“1966. In the spring, yes,” Aaron shouted past the crouching bodies of a couple making their way up the stairs. “We were just selling off everything we owned and were on our way to Nassau . . .”

“And then on to Mexico,” my ward continued, “and on to Xtul. In the Yucatan.”

At the mention of Mexico, Donyale’s dark eyes lit up.

She said proudly, “I am Mexican!” And then, at Mein Host’s obvious surprise, “My mother is Mexican. It is true. My grandmother was Irish, and my grandfather was an African king.” Her eyes were huge and dark and set in the face of an Ethiopian queen.

“But, darling,” she spoke softly and mischievously, leaning toward Mein Host, enveloping him in her musk so even I could sense the rich color of her pheromones. “I am not really from this planet,” she whispered in his ear.

I recall thinking at the time, what an intriguing way to start a friendship. But I quickly realized it was an opening gambit that Donyale Luna had used before “to separate the intuitive from the robot”—her words, when they later came to discuss that first meeting. Although her statement could well have accounted for her extraordinary, out-of-this-world beauty, it didn’t carry the quiet authority of personal experience.

Mein Host, in his turn, appeared unfazed by her claim, although I observed Aaron pull back from the conversation. His skepticism about extraterrestrials, which he’d sharpened in previous discussions with my ward, had developed into a knee-jerk dismissal of my ward’s talk of extraterrestrial life.

Some years earlier Mein Host had been fortunate enough to bump briefly in to a genuine extraterrestrial, as I’ve related in an earlier volume. Although this ET encounter was extremely brief it left my ward entirely convinced of the reality of extraterrestrial life. I could tell from observing Donyale’s emotional body that in her case she fervently believed she was not from this world. My ward, in his turn, was evidently aware what that felt like! He winked knowingly at Donyale and, catching a glimpse of Father Aaron looking at his watch and mouthing “Midnight Meditation . . . Midnight Meditation,” my ward pulled himself to his feet.

After saying his good-byes to the hosts and then to Max Born, who remained seated, smiling charmingly, my ward was warmly embraced by Donyale, perhaps a little too warmly for a priest. Barefoot at six feet two inches tall, Donyale’s long, slim form fit into my ward’s body, curve for curve, convex into concave, perfectly aligning their eyes—hers, pools of darkness; his, bright, cornflower blue—allowing a deep and obvious sense of mutual recognition to pass between them. Father Aaron was soon pushing at my ward’s back to get a move on. As they disengaged from their embrace, I noticed another glitter pass between Donyale and my ward; then the two priests were down the stairs and out into the chilly Roman night.

I recall watching the pair of Processeans rushing along as fast as possible to get to the Omega’s apartment, where Mary Ann and Robert lived. The dozen or so members of the Omega’s inner circle were currently staying there, and it was where they were holding their private meditation together at midnight. I knew this was considered an unusual privilege. Over the past few years, since they’d returned from Xtul, they’d meditated with Mary Ann and Robert less than a dozen times. This was not an occasion for which anyone dared to be late. Mary Ann was a stickler for timing, especially if she was the one kept waiting.

The two barely talked as they half-walked/half-ran through streets still greasy from a recent shower. Brightly lit shop windows flared the reflections of the men on the rain-slicked sidewalks, while small parties of elegantly dressed Romans turned to watch these two bizarre figures, one with a frizzy red Afro, the other with hair already turning white and falling halfway down his back, both dressed entirely in black, their long black cloaks flying behind them, rushing at a madcap pace homeward.

I doubt if either of them gave any further thought as to what Donyale Luna might have been up to. What was that glitter, initiated by the woman, that passed between them? Was it the glitter of mutual recognition? Or, might it have been the glitter of intended manipulation?

Mein Host seemed unconcerned in their rush to get back for the meditation. Yet I knew something that he didn’t at that time: Donyale Luna was appropriately enough playing the part of Oenothea, the witch with fire between her legs in Fellini Satyricon. I had little doubt that Luna the Sorceress was going to work her magic, and it looked like my ward was the chosen object of her desire.

What I didn’t know until the priestly pair arrived home for their Midnight Meditation was that the sorceress had already made her first move! It will be a meditation that he’ll never forget.

*  *  *

It always surprises those of us who observe humanity’s development over the eons that its progress, if I can call it that, has seemed to move in such fits and starts. After the singularly long-lasting Lemurian civilization, all the major civilizations and cultures that followed it have collapsed in progressively shorter spans of time, right up to the present.

In the West, for example, the period of Egypt’s cultural flowering covered about six thousand years; the Minoan culture was cut short by Santorini’s volcanic explosion before it was barely two millennia old; the Greeks lasted for perhaps seven or eight hundred years; and by the time the Roman Empire was winding down, it had barely lasted four hundred years at its prime.

Atlantis would be no exception to this, although by the standards of recent European history it appeared to be relatively long-lasting. I say it appeared to be relatively long-lasting, because the nine thousand years of Atlantean history can be divided into three quite distinct eras. Given that each of these eras came to an end in calamity, it was as though the men and women of Atlantis had to start all over again each time, with little knowledge still remaining from the previous time. Only the third and last of these three periods left its mark on history.

The first era ended in the devastating geophysical upsets of the twelfth to fourteenth millennia BCE. The planet’s sudden warming had started chasing the glaciers back toward the poles. This, in turn, raised the sea level by as much as three hundred feet. It reopened the Strait of Gibraltar, which had originally been created in another devastating flood more than five million years earlier, when the sea level was far higher.

As the world had cooled and the sea levels dropped, the Mediterranean became an inland sea, its waters gradually evaporating over the millennia until once again the rising Atlantic Ocean poured across the land bridge that had temporarily linked North Africa and Europe. This created the Mediterranean Sea much as it is now, leaving only the Rock of Gibraltar separating the two channels.

The second era lasted until the next of the great glacial floods engulfed many of the low-lying areas of the world in the eighth and seventh millennia BCE.

The last of these three eras—which included the fourth and third millennia, during which the planet was rocked with geophysical changes—is the one most readily identified with the legends of Atlantis. This was the one that ended with the disappearance of its northernmost island in the second millennium, during a single day and night. It will have been this final disaster that was recorded by Plato almost a thousand years after the event. He’d managed to construct it from details he got from his fellow Athenian Solon, who, in turn, had received the information from Egyptian priests. It was a circuitous trail, taxing both memory and language, as well as being subject to mismatched numerical values and confusing calendrical systems.

Yet there was another issue that has subsequently led to a great deal of confusion among those trying to identify the facts about the island of Atlantis from Plato’s writings. For example, he maintains the final disappearance of Atlantis occurred in the tenth millennium BCE, which was far earlier than the island’s actual destruction in the year 1198 BCE.

Egypt as a national power was already ancient and tired by 566 BCE when Solon was told about Atlantis by the priests in Heliopolis and Sais. Athenian Greece, in contrast and despite its ugly regional conflicts, had a vigor that had long deserted the Egyptian culture. While Egypt was on its way down, Greece, for all its internal strife, was heading upward, with Alexander the Great still a couple of hundred years in the future.

The Egyptian priesthood had felt this diminution of power most severely and had already began to feel deserted by their gods as the midwayers, posing as gods, moved their center of attention to Greece. The priests had always prided themselves on being the primary line of spiritual continuity of the Egyptian civilization, far transcending even the importance of the pharaonic dynastic succession.

This disequilibrium was therefore the complicated subtext of the circumstances Solon walked into with all his questions. I could feel the resentment in the air, although it was obvious to me (and to the canny Egyptian priests!) that Solon seemed too self-satisfied to be aware of the true emotional dynamics of the situation among the priests. They were long practiced at hiding their emotions, but they couldn’t do much to change the ambient subtle energies that betrayed them.

Solon, for all his wisdom, his experience as a statesman, and as a moral and economic reformer back in Greece, was seen by the Egyptian priests as a pompous parvenu and a thoroughgoing nuisance. Most of all, they resented Solon’s insistence on reciting his poetry at the slightest provocation. They didn’t understand the Greek language, and when the poem was translated for them, as Solon invariably demanded, they could barely conceal their scorn at the self-pitying doggerel. Then there were all those questions about ancient historical events that the priests would much sooner forget, and which proved a constant irritation. I frequently overheard them angrily complaining how “the wretched poet’s” presence (Oh, how they sneered at him!) was becoming more of an irrelevant distraction. And a self-satisfied foreign politician, who was also the most mawkish of poets, was the last sort of distraction they needed.

However, they were able finally to solve their problem by assigning a single priest to attempt to answer all the Greek’s questions. Then, when Solon moved on to the city of Sais, they sent a messenger on ahead to warn the priests of the Athenian’s imminent arrival.

As it turned out he believed he’d found out more about Atlantis from one of the oldest of the priests of the goddess Neith in Sais than he was ever able to learn in Heliopolis. Yet it was only a distorted shadow of what really happened. For, in truth, the priests hated and resented the Atlantean people even more than they disliked Solon’s aggressive questioning.

Later, the old Egyptian priest received the gratitude and admiration of his colleagues for his clever evasions and the confusing exaggerations with which he was able to satisfy Solon’s curiosity.

The wars that the Egyptians had been fighting with the Atlanteans over the centuries before the disaster, when the “Sea People” were trying to invade Egypt and had only just been beaten back a few years earlier, turned out to be a bitter blow for the once all-powerful priesthood. They had never fully recovered from their obvious and humiliating lack of relevance in that troublesome time. With the recent upsets and the military failures of Pharaoh Apries, and the ensuing civil war within the Egyptian army that resulted in the exile and, then later, the death of Apries, the priests felt they were in danger of losing the last of their power. Their influence on the people, and even more importantly, on the reigning pharaoh, had been waning fast and was now in serious jeopardy. That the priests were far more preoccupied with their new pharaoh than with the fall of Atlantis hadn’t helped Solon’s cause.

This new pharaoh, Amasis II, was a commoner who’d become a well-regarded general when he’d invaded Nubia twenty-six years earlier. Then, more recently, when he was sent to resolve the conflict between Egyptian soldiers and the Greek mercenaries of Apries, the Egyptians simply raised Amasis to the throne. By 570 BCE, Amasis had defeated Apries and his mercenaries and made himself pharaoh.

The priests hadn’t cared to talk much about Atlantis with all these disturbances in the country, least of all to a bumptious Greek poet. It was this that had most directly led to some of the exaggerations and distortions that were dutifully copied down by Solon. Some words were misunderstood and some mistranslated, and many of the dimensions and measurements were wholly unrealistic. Canals dug to the width and depth of those described to Solon and passed along to Plato were far more massive than would ever be required for even the most improbably enormous boat.

Through no fault of Solon’s—yet a revealing insight into his personal credulity—and as a consequence of these distortions and exaggerations (as well as the priests’ hidden pleasure at Solon’s expense), all the measurements recorded in Plato’s Timaeus and Kritias should be reduced by something like a factor of ten. This distortion also held true for the time frame of the demise of Atlantis, when the ancient priest in Sais informed Solon that the disaster had occurred more than ten thousand years earlier.

Little wonder with so much lost in all the confusion of the times that the island nation of Atlantis has become a legendary Garden of Eden for some, a myth to others, an archaeological enigma to the open-minded, and a geological and anthropological impossibility to most skeptical scientists.

What remains, however, is a picture most human beings have no wish to contemplate. Not twelve thousand years ago but a mere 3,209 years prior to my writing these words, an entire civilization was wiped out in the blink of an eye. Yet the impact of the destruction of Atlantis has continued to reverberate on a subconscious level in the World Mind to this day. This manifests in many of the more advanced nations as a chronic sense of collective insecurity and imminent doom, in a fascination with violence and war, in the desire for ever more destructive weaponry, and with apocalyptic movies and their Armageddons. It even makes a showing in the thoroughly mistaken big bang theory, touted by so many contemporary physicists and cosmologists as the apocalyptically explosive birth of the universe.

Religions that use the theme of the end of the world to play off the subconscious terror of their followers are just as subject to this apocalyptic imprint in the World Mind as are the scientists who dismiss the possibility of Atlantis and reject the concept of such a catastrophic event ever occurring in recent history.

However, it is not my intention to thoughtlessly invoke this collective apocalyptic imprint but merely to bring the fear to full consciousness, to have it exposed to the light of spiritual illumination. It’s in doing this as conscious human beings that the truth of what occurred on Atlantis will be revealed, and the apocalyptic terror lodged in the collective unconscious of humanity can be released.

For my own better understanding I will need to return to the mid-sixteenth millennium, when the first era of the Atlantean culture was just starting to take shape. And lest my collaborator becomes impatient with my endless digressions (as I trust my reader is not. My ward has to write this material—you merely get to read it!). I will give him a hint: It was in Atlantis that I first encountered him in the flesh.

However, exactly what that “flesh” will be only becomes clear in that brief period just prior to when the southernmost islands of Atlantis made their final disappearance.