Beyond the Map and the Manuscript Revisiting the Château d'Arques: Geometry in Stone Château d'Arques, Arques, Aude, France. Shown above is the main tower of the château, an imposing tall square structure with impressive turrets on the corners, aligned to the cardinal directions. The photograph is taken looking north; the side of the tower facing the viewer, with the door, is the south side of the tower. Image credit: Cathar Wars (@CatharWars) at https://x.com/CatharWars The Château d'Arques...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Beyond the Map and the Manuscript Clive Prince's review of The Map and the Manuscript Illustration accompanying the Clive Prince article at Magonia Review. This week, Magonia Review has published a review of The Map and the Manuscript. It was written by Clive Prince, author with Lynn Picknett of many well- known books, including The Sion Revelation, which remains one of the best overviews of the affair of Rennes in print. The review is very positive. Prince has clearly read the book...
7 months ago • 1 min read
Beyond the Map and the Manuscript The Alignments of Brigantia Published in 1976, Guy Ragland Phillips' Brigantia: A Mysteriography, is a special book. It's a wide-ranging compendium of folk knowledge and oral history about the land fomerly known as Brigantia, now corresponding roughly to northern England. Yet such a description barely does it justice. What makes this book one of my favourites is that it records traditions and local lore which have surely all but passed away now. It is truly a...
10 months ago • 4 min read
Beyond the Map and the Manuscript Martinism and the Affair of Rennes Henri Delaage (1825 - 1882) A video has recently been posted to the Agrippa's Diary channel on YouTube, entitled "The Martinist Order - The Unknown Heirs of the Christian Kabbalistic Arts", which offers an excellent introduction and overview of the history of Martinism. It provides a detailed account of the personalities and ideas which shaped the development of this extremely fascinating branch of Christian esoteric...
11 months ago • 3 min read
Beyond the Map and the Manuscript Megalithomania 2023 talk: video now available online for viewing Back in May of this year, I was invited to give a presentation at the Megalithomania 2023 conference in Glastonbury. The video of my talk has now been posted on the MegalithomaniaUK channel on Youtube and is available for viewing here. Hope you enjoy it! The Map and the Manuscript: Journeys in the Mysteries of the Two Rennes Available in Kindle, paperback, hardback and now ePub. Amazon.co.uk...
about 1 year ago • 1 min read
New Angles on Ancient Babylonian Geometry (Part 2) The tablet shown above was found by a French archaeological expedition in 1934 in the ruins of the Royal Archives of Susa, in modern day Iran. It has been dated to the period of King Hammurabi of the Old Babylonian Empire, around the 17th century BC. The photograph above appears in the official expedition report published in 1961 Quelques Textes Mathématiques de la Mission de Suse par E.M.Bruin (available online here). The tablet displays a...
about 1 year ago • 10 min read
Jung, Nerval and Visionary Art In 2015, Princeton University Press published On Psychological and Visionary Art: Notes from C. G. Jung’s Lecture on Gérard de Nerval's Aurélia. (Cover and link above.) Assembled from materials in the Jung archives, this book includes previously unpublished original notes for two lectures given by Jung in 1942 and 1945 on Aurélia, the short novel which was the final work of the nineteenth century writer and poet Gérard de Nerval. It is accompanied by an...
about 1 year ago • 6 min read
Umberto Eco and the Affair of Rennes-le-Château I imagine that some readers of The Map and the Manuscript might be surprised, even perhaps a little disappointed, to find the final chapter devoted to a discussion of the novel Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Rather than, say, an explosive claim to have found some extraordinary treasure, or terrible secret, or grand conspiracy. If so, I hope they won't feel too let down. I'd like to think that Umberto Eco's novel is a far richer treat and a...
about 1 year ago • 5 min read
New Angles on Ancient Babylonian Geometry (Part 1) In recent years, insights from two Sydney University mathematicians, Prof Norman Wildberger and Dr Daniel Mansfield, have shed fascinating new light on aspects of ancient Babylonian geometry. In particular, fresh analysis of two tablets, known as Si427 and Plimpton 322, has revealed the role and importance Pythagorean triangles played in their cosmology. As these and other tablets date to as early as 1900BC, this is more than a millennia...
about 1 year ago • 6 min read