In the early 1990's, more precisely 1993-1995, we lived in New York where my wife worked at the policy department of the headquarters of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). I struggled with a dissertation, taught Swedish and did one or two consulting assignments, including visit to and report on returning refugees in Guatemala.

UNDP is the UN network for global development and manages projects in 177 countries. The Organization´s main tasks are to assist nations as they increase and strengthen democracy, reduce poverty, prevent conflicts, try to halt environmental degradation and promote equality. When Rose arrived at UNDP's policy department it was engaged in reforming its somewhat stagnant operations and improve its image by launching a revolutionary initiative – Human Development Reports. The issuing of such reports had been suggested by economists Mahbu ul Haq and Amartya Sen. A development report is now published every year, describing global development challenges. Each report focuses on specific problems and strives to account for how development strategies and national efforts have contributed, or may contribute to their solution. The reports also contain a so-called Development Index (HDI) which within each individual country measures and ranks different development factors, comparing the results with conditions prevailing in the other nations of the world.

A different UN initiative that was topical in 1993 was the so-called Agenda 21, a twenty-year plan for sustainable care of the environment adopted after the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit. The idea was that all the countries, municipalities and individuals in the world would:

•Limit and radically reduce the production of toxic substances, promote recycling and drastically reduce all waste;

• find and introduce environmentally friendly energy alternatives to fossil fuels;

• control and streamline means of transport and industries to radically reduce air pollution; and

• promote the sustainable use of fresh water.

Not even such a commendable initiative escaped insane criticism from commercial forces and other groups that do not seem to have understood that the earth is collapsing through our suicidal misuse of natural resources.

Particularly annoying are the demented rhetoric from Christian right-wing congregations. Unfortunately, the UN is headquartered in the United States, where a so-called Christian Right appears to represent and promote everything I believe should be foreign to believers in a Christian message – arms - and commodity fetishism, racism, intolerance, chauvinism, selfishness, contempt for women, idolizing wealth and success, while defending the boundless exploitation of natural resources. If I listen to and read such utterly distorted views I come to understand the rabid rage that many Protestants during the Reformation poured over what they then considered the Vatican's greed, power, lies and self-glorifying rhetoric, exactly the same accusations that coldhearted right-wing forces no are making themselves worthy of.

In recent times, the UNDP has been the driving force behind the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, adopted by UN member states to eliminate extreme poverty, reduce inequality and injustice by 2030, promote peace and resolve the climate crisis. Large-scale goals that will hardly be achieved, but nevertheless they constitute benchmarks and reference points in our quest for personal and global improvements. An endeavor that cannot not be ignored and even less blocked – in particular since they concern the continued existence and well-being of our children, grandchildren and future generations.

To achieve these goals maybe some kind of religious fanaticism is needed, not based on heavenly rewards after death, but on shared resonsibilities and empathy – here and now, before everything is too late. A measure to prevent humanity's lemming run towards Armageddon cannot be to dismantle the UN and abide to the ill-informed advice of fanatics who regard sane and legitimate UN efforts as if they were the miracles of Antichrist.

When we showed up in New York, there was a lively debate going on at Rose's new workplace and she was soon contributing to the creation of guidelines, especially when it came to gender equality. In retrospect, I am convinced that the existence of the UN is clearly justified and even successful in at least one specific area – the emancipation of women and equal rights for women and men. There is still a long and difficult road ahead of us, but without the existence and efforts of a global, non-commercial organization, we would not come as far as we have.

When we showed up in New York, there was a lively debate going on at Rose's new workplace and she was soon contributing to the creation of guidelines, especially when it came to gender equality. In retrospect, I am convinced that the existence of the UN is clearly justified and even successful in at least one specific area – the emancipation of women and equal rights for women and men. There is still a long and difficult road ahead of us, but without the existence and efforts of a global, non-commercial organization, we would not have come as far as we actually.

However, with the various development organizations I have ended up working with there has been quite a lot I did not understand, or that even annoyed me. Within the UN organizations the worst has been an internal worship of members of the Senior Management, cemented through an elaborate grading system. Climbing the career ladder meant reaching various levels where each step leads to more benefits and higher salary. Just as people are categorized on the basis of titles, such as CEOs or Ph.Ds, likewise the UN system favours career climbing, power worship and labeling of colleagues who are respected according to whether they are at levels called G, T, S, PIA, LT, NO, FS, SG, DSG, USG, ASG, P-5 or D-2.

Another shortcoming is, contrary of what is constantly asserted by the UN organizations, that whistle-blowing generally constitutes a quite dangerous move that might lead to harsh punishments. This is not saying that the UN in this respect differs much from other hierarchically structured organizations. The UN is neither better nor worse than other other institutions, though it should be pointed out that the UN stands and falls through grants, which are ultimately based on tax money and the general public's benevolent attitude, which means that irregularities and mistakes often are swept under the rug, or whitewashed.

It also happened that I wondered about the plethora of slogans and empty concepts I had a hard time understanding. As an example – for me the very concept of development is difficult to define and understand, not the least Human Development, it sounds quite nice – but what is it? ”Human” as opposed to ”animalistic”, ”inhuman”, ”scientific”, or ”technical”? What does development really mean? A gradual progress towards ever more sophisticated levels of well-being and knowledge? Yet another grading of people into different categories? Or maybe it is an attempt to open up opportunities for all of us, regardless of race, class, religion or gender?

What was common in the early nineties was a, in my opinion, rather strange slogan – self empowerment, maybe meaning something like to take control of your own situation. Whatever the phrase meant, I could not help recalling an illustration by Gustave Doré depicting how Baron von Münschausen pulls both himself and his horse out of a swamp by lifting them out of it by means of a firm grip on his on queue.

Both Rose and I had previously been engaged in ”poverty reduction in developing countries.” Rose much more than I, though I had nevertheless gained some insights into such activities and thought I understood that development aid had its human shortcomings – greed, prestige hunting, fierce competition, slander, revenge, bullying and self-glorification. Of course, there was also efficiency, kindness, empathy, intelligence and self-sacrifice. Criticizing the UN is like criticizing yourself. The organization is not a solitary power structure, but the sum of its member states and thus also their citizens. It should be criticized, but have nevertheless to be supported and must definitely not be abolished. It would be giving in to selfish and destructive forces that threaten justice and cooperation, making a tolerable future impossible.

Furthermore, I was bothered by the whining I had to listen to from aid workers, especially those who found themselves high up in the hierarchy. I was embarrassing when privileged individuals compared their situation with how well ”others” fared within the ”private sector”, how great sacrifices they were forced to make for little pay and insufficient benefits. Nevertheless, I thought these whiners generally enjoyed excellent benefits and benefited from significantly higher salaries than those I received when I was not active in development aid.

When Rose worked at the UNDP, the after-effects from a book written in 1989 by Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, was still detectable. The book was on its cover described as a disclosure of ”The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business.” There was even a competition among UN employees to find examples of aid that really worked and thereby provide rebuttal to Hancock's outrageous claims.

Graham Hancock was at the time an English journalist who wrote articles in reputable magazines like The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent and my own favourite, The Guardian. From 1976 to 1978 he was editor-in chief of New Internationalist Magazine and from 1981 to 1983 he worked as The Economist's East African correspondent.

I read Lords of Poverty with great interest. It was a well written and its sometimes devastating critique of the aid industry did generally appear to be well-founded. However, it was crystal clear that Hancock had an overly obvious agenda – development aid was a thing of evil and should be abolished. I agreed with the shortcomings and criticisms he outlined, but could not support his conclusions.

There is a great need för The United Nations and several other development aid organizations, they cost only a fraction of what is spent on the arms industry and all sorts of other harmful activities. Books like Lords of Poverty are also needed. Organizations such as the UN, the World Bank, IMF, OECD, the Red Cross and a host of other similar initiatives must be subjected to constant but constructive criticism and answer to it, not with an avalanche of often pitiful clarifications, defenses and evasions, but with actions that amend the shortcomings.

An opinion I know is shared by a number of employees within these organizations. I remember how in the early nineties in one or another module I came across how an office slave on her/his bulletin board had pinned up a poster with a poem that I also found in the introduction to Hancock's book and which still can be found online. Unfortunately, I have not been able to obtain a sufficiently sharp copy. Nevertheless, it deserves to be reproduced in full:

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet

I’m off to join the Development Set;

My bags are packed, and I’ve had all my shots

I have traveller’s checks and pills for the trots!

The Development Set is bright and noble

Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;

Although we move with the better classe

Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton Hotels in scattered nations

We damn multi-national corporations;

Injustice seems easy to protest

In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks

And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.

Whether Asian floods or African drought,

We face each issue with open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution

Raises difficulties for every solution

Thus guaranteeing continued good eating

By showing the need for another meeting.

The language of the Development Set

Stretches the English alphabet;

We use swell words like “epigenetic”

“Micro”, “macro”, and “logarithmetic.”

It pleasures us to be esoteric –

It’s so intellectually atmospheric!

And although establishments may be unmoved,

Our vocabularies are much improved.

When the talk gets deep and you’re feeling numb,

You can keep your shame to a minimum:

To show that you, too, are intelligent

Smugly ask, “Is it really development?”

Or say, “That’s fine in practice,

but don’t you see:

It doesn’t work out in theory!

 A few may find this incomprehensible,

But most will admire you as deep and sensible.

Development set homes are extremely chic,

Full of carvings, curios, and draped with batik.

Eye-level photographs subtly assure

That your host is at home with the great and the poor.

Enough of these verses – on with the mission!

Our task is as broad as the human condition!

Just pray the biblical promise is true

The poor ye shall always have with you.

Of course, I became curious who the author could be, though it turned out to be difficult to trace both Ross Coggins and the origin of the poem. The source is often said to be found in Adult Educational and Development Magazine, 1976, but I have not been able to find such a publication. Likewise, the person Ross Coggins seems difficult to grasp. He was born in Texas and died at the age of eighty-four in 2011. He wrote The Development Set while working as regional director for the IAF in Central America. The Inter-American Foundation is a state-owned U.S. aid organization operating throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

After graduating from Baylor University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Coggins served seven years as a missionary in Indonesia, before returning to the United States and for another seven years acting as the mouthpiece for an association called the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission, which objectives are stated as:

dedicated to engaging the culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ and speaking to issues in the public square for the protection of religious liberty and human flourishing. Our vision can be summed up in three words: kingdom, culture and mission. Since its inception, the SBCLC has been defined around a holistic vision of the kingdom of God, leading the culture to change within the church itself and then as the church addresses the world.

Ross Coggins was later and until his retirement active in USAID and IAF, especially in Central America and the Caribbean, and was for a time also stationed in Rome. Coggins wrote hundreds of unpublished poems. One of his hymns Send Me, O Lord, Send Me is now often sung in Baptist churches. The psalm might be considered as an indication that Coggins considered himself to be a Christian idealist called by God to help people to a better life, although there may also be a hint of self-assertion, rock-solid conviction and fighting spirit, something that make me think of the Medieval Crusaders and their war cry – Deus vult! God wills this.

With holy fire my heart inspire Thy Spirit’s sword to wield;

With borrowed might I’ll take Thy light, Till darkness’ doom be sealed.

If others stop to count the cost, For fear of earthly treasures lost,

I’ll count it gain to die for Thee; Send me, O Lord, send me.

The hymn was inspired by the prophet Isaiah's response to God (Isaiah 6: 8).

That Graham Hancock and my thoughts on aid and the UNDP appear in this essay is due to the fact that I recently read a draft to an exciting historical novel about a Portuguese military campaign to Ethiopia in 1541. It was a good friend of mine who gave me the confidence to read his manuscript for a novel and I was moved by the excitement and the joy of his storytelling. On the outskirts of the thrilling tale I found the Ark of the Covenant, a gold-plated coffin in which the tablets that Moses had received from God on Mount Sinai were kept. One of the many legends spun around this cult object states that it now rests in a chapel close to the Holy Mary of Zion Cathedral in Axum.

While reading my friend's manuscript, I came to remember that many years ago, during one of my more or less forgotten trips abroad, I had at an airport bought Hancock's The Sign and the Seal, which I now found tucked away among my books. It turned out to be a quite exciting read, informative and imaginative, though its occasionally wild speculations made it appear as being too good to be true.

The Ark of the Covenant is numerous times mentioned in the Bible and was at one time the most significant religious symbol of the People of Israel. Just as the Jews, according to the Bible, were chosen to preserve God's commandments in their most tangible form through the stone tablets brought down from Mount Sinai, the Ark did likewise preserve this evidence of God's presence on earth. The Ark of the Covenant was for many years kept in the Holy of Holies, an inner room of the temple of Jerusalem that was visited only once a year by Ha'kohen ha'gadol, the High Priest. In connection with the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar´s 597 BCE conquest of Jerusalem and the nine years´ later complete destruction of the city and forced removal of the majority of its citizens, The Ark of the Covenant disappeared from history, though hardly from myth and legends.

There are countless stories surrounding this strange coffin. It could suffice to mention that it was assumed to possess supernatural powers; that many believe it is reproduced on Titus' triumphal arch in Rome (though it is rather the table of the so-called show-bread), it is said that it ended up among Christian aristocrats in Provence and hidden somewhere in the south of France (also unlikely) and it is not the least the inspiration for and driving force for Spielberg's Raiders of the Lost Ark, where, as in some places in the Bible, it is represented as a weapon with a deadly radiance.

Hancock wrote about The Ark of the Covenant because he was well acquainted with Ethiopia. He had as a young journalist been reporting on the country, later he had by the bloodthirsty Haile Mariam Mengistu's communist regime been commissioned to write a coffee table book about the country's sights and over the years he had made several Ethiopian friends and reputable contacts among experts on the country's history. The Sign and the Seal also indicates that Hancock is well-read about much concerning The Ark of the Covenant and its mysterious fate.

The main source of how The Ark of the Covenant ended up in Ethiopia is Kebra Nagast, The Glory of the Kings, which was written sometime in the 14th century CE by a certain Isqhaq Neburä-Id, although some experts claim that it may be a collective work by priests who in Axum collected and wrote a number of scriptures in Ge´ez, a now extinct language that developed into Tigrinya, Tigre and Amharic, though it is still used in the liturgy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The main purpose of Kebra Nagast was to prove that the so-called Solomon dynasty based its legitimacy on the direct descent of its leaders from the king of Israel, Solomon. In 1270 CE the first Amharic Negus Negesti, King of Kings, was crowned in Axum.

Kebra Nagast is divided into 117 chapters and includes biblical and apocryphal texts, fairy tales and stories of unknown origin. Despite its age and sometimes a bit overly and elaborate preaching Kebra Nagast is quite entertaining and not particularly difficult to read. It appears as a combination of the Bible with Arabian Nights. The Ethiopian epic is not only a literary work, but also a sacred scripture for believers within the confines of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, as well as for Jamaican Rastafarians. It constitutes a highly influential reflection of Ethiopian nationalism and religion.

The story begins with a debate during the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, when the nature of divinity was discussed. The question ”Of what does the glory of kings consist?” is answered by an exalted speech given by a certain Gregorius, who finishes his learned discourse by stating that here on earth is The Glory of God is represented by the Ten Commandments, which are kept in The Ark of the Covenant, currently present in Ethiopia where it is venerated and protected by the direct descendants of King Solomon – thus The Glory of Kings is constituted by the Ethiopian monarchs who safeguard The Ark of the Covenant. After his speech Gregorius refers to his Ethiopian colleague Archbishop Domitius, who opens a book he has found in Hagia Sophia and reads aloud the story of Queen Makeda, better known as the Queen of Sheba, her association with King Solomon and how their son Menelik brought the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia.

The story begins with a wealthy Ethiopian trader, Tâmrîn, who is told about an Israeli king who is not only tremendously rich and powerful, but also very wise. Tâmrîn is the owner of 520 camels and 73 ships and decides to load them with merchandise and travel to the court of the mighty Solomon, who impressed by the Ethiopian trader´s diligence decides to pay handsomely for his wares and Tâmrîn thus returns to his home country even wealthier than he was when he left.

After his return, Tâmrîn sat down with Queen Makeda every morning for several weeks and told her about Solomon's great wisdom. How he wisely and thoughtfully administered justice, managed his riches, set his table, taught his subordinates, made them listen and adapt to his strategically well-thought-out management system, and how every citizen behaved well, worked diligently, and that in Solomon's kingdom there was neither fraudsters, nor thieves. Finally, the Queen stated:

I am smitten with the love of wisdom, and I am constrained by the cords of understanding; for wisdom is far better than treasure of gold and silver, and wisdom is the best of everything that hath been ctreated on earth. Now unto what under the heavens shall wisdom be compared? It is sweater than honey, and it maketh one to rejoice more than wine, an it illuminteh more than the sun, and it is to be loved more than precious stones. And it fatteneth more than oil, and it satisfeth more than dainty meals, and it giveth more renown than thousands of gold and silver. It is a source of joy for the heart and a bright and shining light for the eyes, and a giver of speed to the feet and shield for the breast, a helmet for the head, and chain-work for the neck, and a belt for the loins. It maketh the ears to hear and eyes to understand, it is a teacher of those who are learned, and it is a consoler of those who are discreet and prudent, and it giveth fame to those who seek after it. And for a kingdom, it cannot stand without wisdom, and riches cannot be preserved without wisdom, the foot cannot keep the pace wherein it hath set itself without wisdom. And without wisdom that which the tongue speaketh is not acceptable.

Queen Makeda finds no peace of mind and decides to travel the Kingdom of Solomon with a large retinue. There she is received with great generosity by the mighty king, who immediately is captivated by this beautiful woman, who also appeals to him through her admirable reason and the bounless admiration she has for him. Solomon explains that his wealth and wisdom ultimately depends on the benevolence shown to him by the God of Israel, and Queen Makeda exclaims, ”Hereafter I will not worship the sun, but the Creator of the sun, the God of Israel.”

Despite all his wisdom Solomon is a slave under his unrestrained love life. He has four hundred ”queens” and six hundred concubines. However, he insists that it is not his boundless desire that makes him surround himself with this extensive harem. He created it out of respect for his God who said to Abraham: “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars of the sky and sand on the seashore.” Queen Makeda is a decent woman of high moral standards and despite of being infinitely fascinated by the handsome, wealthy and well versed Solomon, she refuses to end up as one of his numerous sexual trophies. However, she can not help noticing how the love-sick king constantly lays out ingenious snares for her and therefore asks him to take an oath:

– Swear to me that thou wilt not take me by force, and I on my part will swear not to take by force thy possessions; and he swore to her and made her swear.

But the sly and cunning Solomon continued to make plans to seduce the exotic queen. When Makeda informed him that it was high time for her to return to her subjects and in her reign apply what she had learned from the wise Solomon, he arranged a lavish event with abundant food and gloious entertainment. The queen allowed herself to be well accommodated, ate and drank with good appetite and when it was time for her to return to her quarters Solomon asked for a final tete-a-tete asserting that this did absolutely not mean that he would break his oath.

He accompanied Makeda into an exquisitely decorated chambre séparée where he treated her with a profound and flattering conversation until she became tired, and perhaps somewhat tipsy and fell asleep on one of the room's two, widely separated, chaise lounges. Solomon then turned to one of the servants and asked him ”in a foreign language” to rinse out a bowl and put a carafe of fresh spring water by the queen's bed. Then he commanded all the domestics to depart.

The room was warm and the ceiling was studded with pearls and precious stones, which shone and shimmered in the darkness. The queen's sleep became capricious and soon she was wide awake:

her mouth was dry with first, for the food which Solomon had given her in his wisdom had made her thirsty, and she was very thirsty indeed, and her mouth was dry; and she moved her lips and sucked with her mouth and found no moisture. And she determined to drink the water which she had seen, and she looked at King Solomon and watched him carfeully, and she thought that he was sleeping a sound sleep. But he was not asleep, and he was waiting until she should rise to steal the water to quench her thirst. And she rose up and, making no sound with her feet, she went to the water in the bowl and lifted up the jar to drink the water. And Solomon seized her hand before she could drink the water and said unto her, ”Why hast thou broken the oath that thou hast sworn that thou wouldst not take by force anything that is in my house?” And she said unto him in fear, ”Is the oath broken by my drinking water?” And the King said unto her, ”Is there antything that thou hast seen under the heavens that is better than water?” And the Queen said, ”I have sinned against myself and thou art free from thy oath. But let me drink water for my thirst.” Then Solomon said unto her, ”Am I perchance free from the oath which thou hast me swear?” And the Queen said, ”Be free from thy oath, only let me drink water.” And he permitted her to drink water, and after that she had drunk water he worked his will with her and they slept together.

When the Queen Makeda returned to Ethiopia she was pregnant and eventually gave birth to a son she named Bayna-Lekhem. The son constantly tormented his mother with questions about who his father might be, but he did not find out the truth until he was twenty-two years old when Queen Makeda finally gave in and told him about her affair with King Solomon. She said she was telling the truth only because Bayna-Lekhem had been nagging about it ”day and night”. Queen Makeda gave her son the engagement ring she had received from Solomon and together with the old merchant Tâmrîn, Bayna-Lekhem went to Jerusalem where he was received by a radiant Solomon who could not forget the great love of his life – Queen Makeda of Ethiopia. He appointed Bayna-Lekhem as his rightful heir. The ceremony took place in the innermost of the fabled temple Solomon had erected in Jerusalem to house The Ark of the Covenant.

And they brought the young man into the Holy of Holies, and he laid hold upon the horns of the altar, and sovereignity was given unto him by the mouth of Zadok, the priest.

Shortly thereafter, the High Priest's son Azâryâ's was visited by an angel who ”stood above him like a pillar of fire, and he filled the house with his light.” The angel ordered Azâryâs to steal the Ark from the temple, hide it and when Bayna-Lekhem finally left Jerusalem to return to Ethiopia to accompany him, carry the Ark with him, and convert the Ethiopians to the Jewish faith. The angel assured Azâryâs that he could not possibly refuse the mission since it was God's will.

To Solomon's great sorrow Bayna-Lekhem declared that he had promised his mother to return to Ethiopia. Solomon did everything within his power to make his son change his mind, but an angel of God appeared to Solomon and declared that his beloved son would not lose his kingship and that his return to his mother meant that Ethiopia would become the true heir to the Kingdom of Judah and unlike the land of the People of Israel, the Mängəstä Ityop'p'ya, the Kingdom of Ethiopia would never perish but constantly grow stronger.

Bayna-Lekhem set out with Azâryâs and a number of Solomon's priests and courtiers. It was only during their journey through Egypt that Bayna-Lekhem found out about the theft of The Ark of the Covenant and that it was kept hidden in his caravan. He wanted to return and return to its rightful owners, but Azâryâs assured him that it was God's will that Bayna-Lekhem took the Ark to Ethiopia. At the same time, Solomon had found that the Holy of Holies of the temple stood bereaved of the Ark and decided furiously to pursue Bayna-Lekhem with his entire army. However, at the last minute Solomon was hindered in his intent by a dream sent by God. Solomon made a copy of the Ark of the Covenant placed in the Holy of Holies and secretly rejoiced that his favorite son had brought the true Ark to safety in a distant land.

Salomo's unfortunate love life had namely once again put him in trouble. He had been captivated by a new wife, Pharaoh's daughter Mâkshârâ, who in accordance with the ”stupidity of the Egyptians”, worshiped animal-headed gods and had Solomon´s household follow her in these ”idiotic customs”. On his deathbed, however, Solomon was again visited by an angel who told him about the future and extremely sad fate of the People of Israel, right up to the crucifixion of Jesus, the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans and the scattering of the Jews around the face of the earth. Before his death, Solomon appointed his son Rehoboam as ruler of Judah, a kingdom that eventually would disappear from history, while Solomon's ancestors would continue to rule over Ethiopia.

When Bayna-Lekhem together with The Ark of the Covenant had arrived in Ethiopia, the last way they traveled through the air, with the help of magical powers, Queen Makeda abdicated in favour of her son and under the name of Menelik I he was crowned as ruler over Ethiopia.

In Ethiopia, Kebra Nagast is living history and it is no wonder that the journalist Graham Hancock set out on his search for the lost Ark of the Covenant. This after visiting Axum and studying its churches in detail, a lot of dizzying experiences and random encounters that deepened his interest in the Ark. He furthermore immersed himself in fascinating writings that suggested its intimate connections with Ethiopia. The result was his exciting and best-selling The Sign and the Seal , which The Guardian described as ”a new genre, an intellectual whodoneit written by a do-it-yourself sleuth.”

The fantastic story that Graham Hancock puzzled together through various of travels, adventures, meetings with experts and intense reading, can be summed up in the following manner: After the Ark of the Covenant had rested undisturbed in the Temple of Jerusalem's Holy of Holies, its sanctuary was profaned by the wicked King Manasseh, who next to it had placed an abominable idol. Deeply shaken priests secretly brought the most revered artifact of the Jewish religion to a new shrine built on the island of Elefantine in the Nile. There it was kept for a couple of hundred years before the Jews (Falashas) who were in charge of The Ark of the Covenant brought it with them when they were forced to flee south after the Persian rule over Egypt ceased in 332 BCE. They brought the ark to the island of Tana Kirkos in the Blue Nile, which was within the Jews´ new settlement around the city of Gondar in Ethiopia. The Ark of the Covenant was preserved there until the Christian regime based in Axum seized it and brought it to Axum where the Kebra Nagast was finally written and through a compilation of a variety of myths with biblical stories adapted to historical facts proving that The Ark of the Covenant Ark that had been kept by the Jews on Yana Kirkus actually was the real thing and changed the story by adapting in such a way that its presence came to legitimize the power of the Solomon Dynasty over Ethiopia.

According to Hancock knowledge of the presence of The Ark of the Covenant was secretly brought to Europe by members of the Order of the Militia of the Knights of the Temple, who through contacts in Jerusalem collaborated with both Jews and Muslims to convey a message of harmonious coexistence between the three Abrahamic religions - Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At the center of these ideas and aspirations was The Ark of the Covenant and the knowledge possessed trhough it, a line of thought that could be traced in Wolfram von Eschenbach's remarkable novel Parzival.

Certainly a strange story, but with a lot of probable elements. Since I occasionally wander around in speculative shadow worlds I could not help but being fascinated by this soup with its spectacular ingredients. Let me therefore now fish up some of what was boiling within Hancock's spicy dish and follow one of the stray tracks that lead him to Parzival. von Eschenbach's novel appeared in his life six years after Hancock first had visited Axum, specifically in 1989 when he and his family vacationed in Chartres and he spent three days there “slowly walking around the cathedral, gradually imbibing its powerful and numinous atmosphere .” He read a number of guide books and at a café close to the cathedral, named La Reine de Saba, he learned that it had received its name from the Queen of Sheba whose statue may be found among those that adorn the cathedral's portals.

Now, memories from Ethiopia rushed over Graham Hancock. He found the Ethiopian queen in the cathedral's north portal – next to King Solomon and standing on top of a representation of an African. Hancock also found under a pillar near the queen a relief with some oxen pulling a cart with … The Ark of the Covenant! Next to that relief was another representation of the Arc, though on a more, damaged relief depicting some kind of tumult around the holy crate.

Hancock now began, with the help of his handbooks, to examine all the sculptures placed in the cathedral's three portals and found within the central arch of the northern portal a sculpture representing Melkisedek. He is in the Bible called the King of Righteousness and priest of El Elyon, The Most High God. Melkisedek met the patriach Abraham when he with his people came to the land of Canaan. Melkisedek is not described in any great detail in the Bible, but in the legendary flora that has grown around him he has become all the more important. Melkisedek became the ancestor of all the High Priests of Jerusalem and a symbol of its temple. Jewish mysticism made him the epitome of ”faith and reason”; maintainer of rites, order and tradition, a defender against chaos and heresy. A role taken over by Christian mythology, where Melkisedek came to symbolize the Christian Church.

Graham Hancock now became fire and flames. Between the gate vault with Melkisedek and the Queen of Saba's gate vault is the representation of the ox cart with The Ark of the Covenant. Could this not mean that in Chartre's northern portal The Ark of the Covenant is depicted as being brought from Jerusalem (Melkisedek) to Ethiopia (Queen of Sheba)! Kebra Nagast thus told the truth and there was apparently a connection between Christian medieval mysticism and the fact that the Ark is now in Ethiopia. The damaged Latin inscriptions under the reliefs representing The Ark of the Covenant read ARCA CEDERIS, which can mean ”the Ark that is sent away” and HIC AMICTUR ACHA CEDERIS ”Here the ark is hidden, which you must send away.”

Hancock speculates wildly. He creates a fantastic story about how the Order of the Militia of the Knights of the Temple, more commonly known as the Knights Templar, a monastic order of knights founded in Palestine during the Crusades, was involved in the construction of the Chartres Cathedral. That this order knew that The Ark of the Covenant was in Ethiopia and that the whole cathedral is a kind of mysterious map indicating the religious thinking of the Order at the same time as it suggests the presence of The Ark of the Covenant in Axum. Speculations that eventually led Hancock to Wolfram von Escenbach's Parzival.

Exciting and extremely inspiring! Especially since I have read Parzival and my oldest daughter some years ago worked on the scenography for Wagner's opera of the same name. But, but … hold your horses – the whole thing is actually too dizzying. I stopped in my reading of The Sign and the Seal. I have been to Chartres more than once. Admittedly, I have not for three days been slowly walking around the cathedral, imbibing its atmosphere, and I have not read read a lot of guide books about the cathedral. However, I had actually noticed the Queen of Sheba, who, incidentally, as Hancock writes, is not only produced in full size in the northern portal, begun in 1204. She can also be seen in the so called Royal Portal, begun in 1145. However, Hancock is right about the that Melkisedek only appears in the northern portal. This made me wonder if it could not have been the case that Hancock systematically picked out things that fitted into his wild speculations and overlooked facts that did not support his argument.

I had noticed that Hancock made a big deal out of his personal investigations and discoveries. He flips through his guidebooks, consults experts and travels around the world. While in Chartres I wondered why he did not do as I did during my much shorter visits to Chartres – visit the bookstores and tourist shops and in most such places he would have found several editions of Louis Charpentier's Mysteries of the Cathedral of Chartres written as early as 1966 and which when I first visited Chartres in 2010 was available in a variety of languages. I did not buy any of them because in 1982 I had in Santo Domingo purchased and read a Spanish translation of this rather nutty book.

Charpentier had also noticed the two queens, whom he admittedly did not associate with Ethiopia, but nevertheless with The Knights Templar, as well as with The Ark of the Covenant. Charpentier's theory was that The Knights Templar were intimately associated with the construction of virtually all French-Gothic cathedrals. During their first time in Jerusalem they had dug tunnels under its original temple site, where they were headquartered in the Al-Aqsa Mosque. They had then found a number of Hebrew writings and objects, among them probably also The Ark of the Covenant, which they had brought with them to France. According to Charpentier, the ark also contained the Book of the Law, containing mathematical calculations originating from ancient Egypt and explaining how buildings could be erected in accordance with cosmic laws. Such calculations formed the basis of the revolutionary building techniques that first were applied in Chartres, which cathedral is the first building to effectively use flying buttresses to create the high and lofty, ”heavenly” space that characterizes the High Gothic cathedrals.

The two unknown master builders of Chartres had previously been active under Abbot Suger in Saint Denis outside Paris, a church widely regarded to be the world's first Gothic structure. These two masters organized in Chartres a builders' guild called The Children of Solomon and it has by many been assumed to be the origin of the Masonic Order. What these master builders tried to achieve was Solomon's intentions with the Temple of Jerusalem:

a means of passage from one world to another, a bridge between two worlds. Unless he or she is toiallly impervious, who ever enters the cathedral is saturated with an energy and celestial harmony come alive in matter. They become no longer the same man or woman.

Graham Hancock mentions all this in his book, but without referring to Louis Charpentier's book, which I assume he must have read. The only difference between Charpentier's Knights Templar speculations and Hancock's description of the connection between Chartres and these legendary warrior monks is that Charpentier believed that the Ark was buried under the floor of Chartres Cathedral, while Hancock believes it is in Axum.

I assumed I had discovered that Hancock might be somewhat too inclined to pick the raisins out of the cake, being careless with basic research and apparently anxious to present himself as a skilled private investigator. Among other things, I became somewhat suspicious of Hancock's selective Bible reading. How he discovers the most obscure hints that The Ark of the Covenant might have been brought to Ethiopia, while apparently flipping through pages that question what he thought he had seen and discovered. Take, for example, the two well-known reliefs with the Ark of the Covenant that he ”discovered” in Chartres. Their imagery is clearly explained in the Bible's First Book of Samuel.

The tumult by the Ark, which Hancock does not elaborate upon, took place during the battle of Shilo when Israel lost 30,000 men and their enemies, the Philistines, took ”the Ark of God” as a war booty after killing its protectors: ”Eli's two sons Hofni and Pinechas” (1 Sam 4: 10-11). However, the robbery did not bring any luck. The Philistines placed the Ark in their temple dedicated to their god Dogon in the city of Ashod, but the very next day the idol was torn apart by itself, while the entire population of Ashod was struck by a deadly plague of hemorrhoids and thousands of people died. The Philistines found no other remedy than to send The Ark of the Covenant back to the People of Israel, along with a guilt offering. The Philistines cast five boils and five rats in gold, ”as many as the lords of the Philistines,” placed them in a box next to The Ark of the Covenant, which they then placed on a chariot drawn by two cows. They had the cows walking on their own accord and thus return the Ark to the Israelites.

It is this scene we see reproduced on the second relief in the northern portal of Chartres, which even shows the golden rats and boils, as well as what was inside The Ark of the Covenant – Moses´s tablets and a jar with the manna that God sent down to the People of Israel when they walked trough the Desert of Sinai.

Incidentally, there is another representation of the Ark in the Chartres Cathedral´s northern portal, which Hancock forgot to account for and there we get to see, together with the tablets and the manna jar, Moses´s brother Aaron's flowering rod, which also was stored in the Ark

On the sculpture in Chartres, Melkisedek carries a goblet in one hand, probably an allusion to the fact that the Church, through its sacramental ritual administers the blood of Christ and that Melkisedek´s holding the chalice thus represents the connection between the New and the Old Testaments, the New Covenant sealed through Christ's sacrificial death and the Old Covenant visualized through the Ark of the Covenant and the stone tablets with The Ten Commandments it contained. Both covenants are preserved and guaranteed through the Christian Church. Incidentally, the north portal in Chartres Cathedral is called the Portal of the Covenant and its reliefs and statues unite figures and ideas from both the New - and the Old Testaments. Hancock, however, considers the chalice in Melkisedek's hand to be a representation of The Holy Grail, an idea that leads him to von Eschenbach's Parzival.

By mixing The Grail and The Knights Templar into his tale Hancock transforms it from being more than a search for The Ark of the Covenant, he becomes a seeker of The Holy Grail. Thus Hancock entered a path that eventually would bring him far away from reality – into the world of fiction, where imagination and reality are mixed together in a manner creating conspiracy theories. Where you seek The Holy Grail with the help of Knights Templar you run the risk of ending up like the sleeping man in Goya's etching: ”The sleep of reson produces monsters.”

Abbot Suger (1081-1151), whose master builders erected the cathedral in Chartres, was an energetic politician who during certain periods was the actual ruler of France. He was sometimes allied with the equally enterprising Bernhard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), who was one of the most outspoken theologians of his time and like Suger a politically influential leader. Under St. Bernhard's leadership his Cistercian Order did from 1112 until his death establish 280 monasteries throughout Europe. St. Bernhard pointed out that the hard work of monks should generate income for The Greater Glory of God. Art and architecture would also transform earthly material into a confirmation of God's omnipotence. The Cistercians hired the foremost architects and stonemasons of their time. All their new constructions were built in stone and as early as 1133 stately buildings were erected in St. Bernhard's mother monastery in Clairvaux and the new building style created there, the Gothic Style, soon became prevalent all over Europe.

In addition to being practically minded, St. Bernhard intended that every monastery through handicraft and agriculture would become both self-sufficient and profitable, he was an ascetic mystic with a boundless devotion to Virgin Mary and not least the cult of the Black Madonna, whom he assumed to be Mary Magdalene and associated with the woman in Solomon's Song of Songs who states:”I am black, though I am beautiful.” St. Bernhard wrote no less than sixty reflections/sermons dealing with this specific Bible site and we currently find Black Madonnas throughout Europe. In Chartres Cathedral there are/were two of them. The most worshiped of them became after a restoration in 2017, under vehement protests – white. The restorers claimed that after a violent fire in 1194 the Virgin had turned black and she had darkened further through soot and dust to such a degree that the black coating had become almost porcelain-like. Blasphemy! proclaimed the Black Madonna´s pious worshippers who believed that either she had been black from the beginning, when she was made under St. Bernhard's direction, or God had miraculously made her black in 1194. Nowadays, postcards with both the black and the white Madonnas are sold.

St. Bernhard was furthermore an outspoken supporter of the Order of the Militia of the Knights of the Temple and through his focus on hard work and asceticism, he came to point out that this Order was both religious and militaristic. He was instrumental in ordaining an oath that all members of the Order had to take and which, among other things, meant that they swore obedience to Bethania's Mary, i.e. The Black Madonna. Of course, this did not escape Graham Hancock, who saw an intimate connection with the black queen of Ethiopia, The Holy Grail in Melkisedek's hand and thus also The Ark of the Covenant, The Knights Templar, St. Bernhard and Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. von Eschenbach´s multi-faceted and remarkable novel was written in Germany sometime in the early 13th century, in the midst of the turbulent time when the Chartres Cathedral was built.

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170-1220) was a poet and a knight. In the first picture of him (in the Codex Manesse from 1304) we do not see what he looked like because he is dressed as before a tournament and stands with his face concealed by an ornate helmet next to his squire and horse. Not much is known about von Eschenbach's life. By all accounts, he was of lower nobility and came from Bavaria. During his lifetime von Eschenbach was at several German princely courts a fairly well-known Minnesänger, a word which in medieval German meant ”singer of love”.

We know even less about Chrétien de Troyes (probably 1135-1190) the first author to write about the Grail Legend. Apparently he was a learned man, perhaps a priest, working at the courts in Champagne and Flanders. Somewhere Chrétien de Troyes mentions that he translated Ovid from Latin. von Eschenbach obviously had a completely different character. Sometimes he steps forward in his own writings, for example jokingly stating that his wife is so beautiful that he does not dare to present her to his patrons, he also makes fun of contemporary writers and brags that he can neither write nor read. The latter should for certain be taken with a pinch of salt, he was obviously well acquainted with French and moves like a fish in water among contemporary fairy tales, legends and songs. In addition, von Eschenbach seems to be quite knowledgeable about alchemy and astrology, which play a major role in his novel. He is at least as familiar with the Arthurian tales as Chrétien. In von Eschenbach's, as in Chrétien's tales, there are numerous descriptions of tournaments and fights, though in von Eschenbach's writings a more obvious, perhaps self-experienced realism is detectable to a much higher degree than by the French court poet.

As an example I recall how the knight Gawain is thrown off his horse, which is caught by a strong current while they try to cross a river. Gawain manages to get to solid ground, but witnesses how his horse struggles to avoid drowning, unable to reach the shoreline. Lying on his stomach in his cumbersome armor, the knight cannot reach the reins of the terrified horse, though he manages to get hold of a long branch with which he within the last minute manages to catch the horse's harness and against all odds is able to bring the frantic horse so close that he can get hold of the reins and manages to bring the poor animal to solid ground.

Or when Parzeval by a forest edge is surprised by a Grail knight, appointed to protect The Grail from uninvited outsiders. The young knight spurs his horse and with a lowered lance he gallops towards Perzeval, who in his turn urges on his runner for a counterattack. The two riders clash, the Grail youngster´s lance slides against Parzeval's armor and he manages to stay in the saddle, while his lance hits the opponent where ”the helmet's cord is attached” and the Grail Knight is thrown headlong out of his saddle, straight down a precipice. However, Parzival does not manage to rein in his horse to a sudden halt and it also plunges down the precipice. Parzival falls off and grabs the reins to prevent the horse's fast rushing downhill, but it breaks its front legs, the reins snap and the stallion rolls helplessly down the precipice until it lies lifeless at the foot of the slope while Parzival's young opponent links away from the violent encounter and he himself labouriously climbs up the precipice and then sits up in the saddle of the horse the Grail Knight has left behind, calmly grazing on the meadow where the violent encounter had taken place.

The novel begins with the knight Gahmuret leaving his homeland after his older brother has received their entire paternal inheritance. However, the older brother is a noble person who gives his younger brother a large part of his wealth, which the adventurous Gahmuret uses to get to the Muslim countries with a well-equipped entourage. In the East, among other things, he serves the Caliph of Baghdad and succeed in marrying the coveted dark Queen Balkane of Zazamanc. The beauty and grace of the African queen had dazzled the Nordic knight who after seeing her spun plans to conquer her love and favour. von Eschenbach's description of the night Gahmuret spends wide awake in Belkane's palace, tormented by his desires, is through the confined, intimate atmosphere somewhat reminiscent of Solomon's and Makedas' first night of love:

Great candles stood there burning lightly. The hero lost his patience with the night for dragging so on. With thoughts of the dusky Moorish Queen he fell from swoon to swoon, he whipped from side to side like an osier, setting all his joints a-cracking. He was on fire for love and battle. Now pray his wish were granted! His heart pounded till it echoed, it was near to bursting of battle-lust, as it arched the warrior´s chest as the sinew does the crossbow – so keen was his desire! He lay without sleep until he saw the grey of dawn.

The intensity of von Eschenbach's battle and love scenes reflects his statement that ”he who masters the moment, masters life.”

Finally, Gahmuret reaches the fulfillment of his desires. He marries Belkane who gives birth to their son, Feirefiz, handsome and strong "but white and black as a magpie". When his son is born, Gahmuret has already been whipped further by his desire for adventure and left Belkane. In Wales he later married Herzeloyde, who became the mother of Parzeval. Gahmuret was then still married to Belkane, whom he continued to long for but nevertheless did not want to return to. Since Belkane was not a Christian woman, Gahmuret did nor worry about becoming a bigamist. Later in the story, the half-brothers Ferirefiz and Parzeval woiuld meet, become best of friends and find the Grail together. Parzeval becomes its patron and steward, while Feirefiz marries a Grail Maiden and their son Prester John eventually becomes ruler of the fabulous kingdom where the Grail is kept, and which Hancock wants us to believe the Ark of the Covenant as well, i.e. Ethiopia. There, as in Parzeval, the Grail is not a goblet but a stone, a square tabot, which probably corresponds to the tablet with the Ten Commandments which are kept, or were kept, inside The Ark of the Covenant.

Most Ethiopian churches preserve one or more tabots. They are generally fifteen by fifteen centimetres, square slabs made of alabaster, marble or acacia wood. They are highly revered objects, generally covered with precious fabrics and worn on the heads of priests during certain ceremonies. There are a number of tabots in British churches, including theWestminster Abbey. They ended up there after British soldiers stole hundreds of tabots and brought them with them when the Ethiopian city of Magdala in 1868 had been looted and destroyed. The picture below, from an English newspaper, shows the dead, Ethiopian emperor Tewodros II, who shot himself when the battle was lost.

In von Eschenbach´s novel there are, as in several other contemporary stories and novels, descriptions of numerous clashes between Christian knights and warriors from other cultures, often depicted as if they were tournaments. von Eschenbach´s apparent ”reckless” and ”turbulent” manner of telling a story irritated his classically educated and restrained contemporary Gottfried von Strassburg, who labelled him ”a friend of the hare”, an expression through which he apparently wanted to liken von Eschenbachs fast drive and sudden leaps to a hare chased by a fox. von Strassburg complained about:

inventors of wild tales, hired hunters after stories, who cheat with chains and dupe dull minds, who turn rubbish into gold for children, and from magic boxes pour pearls of dust […] but we for our part have not the leisure to seek the gloss in books of the black arts.

Von Strassburg´s criticism pinpointed the attraction of von Eschenbach – he spiced Chrétien de Troyes legends about The Grail with depth and thrills, as well as alchemy and oriental mystique.

At one point in his tale, von Eschenbach makes Parzival, in the depth of dark forests, encounter the hermit Trevizent ”who ate badly on Mondays and not much better duting the other days of the week”. His ”weapon against the Devil was self denial” and thus he did not eat neither meat, nor fish. As a matter of fact Trevizent is von Eschenbachs mouthpiece within the novel and the only one who knows the secret of the Holy Grail. He tells Parzival about all others who have been asking him about The Grail and how they all have left him disappointed since the one who originally had told Trevizent the tale of The Grail had explicitly advised him not to reveal anything until the right listener came along. Parzival´s arrival was the awaited sign and von Eschenbach suddenly sheds his disguise as Trevizent when he suddenly directs himself to his readers and mentions his predecessor Chrétien de Troyes, whose unfinished Le Conte Du Graal von Eschenbach had completed:

If Master Chretien de Troyes has done this tale an injustice, Kyot, who sent us the true tidings, has reason to wax wroth. Definitely, the Provençal tells how Hrezeloyde´s son won the Grail as was decreed for him when Anfortas had forfeited it. From Provence into German lands the true tidings have been sent to us.

If this ”Master Kyot from Provence” had not found the entire story of Parzeval within a book of ”pagan script” it would not have reached Christian lands. The ”wise” Kyot, who wrote in French, but knew both Latin and Arabic, had ”in a corner of” the Moorish town of Toledo found a forgotten book written in Arabic by a Jew named Flegetanis, who in the Moorish lands was highly esteemed for his exploits and knowledge. Flegetanis was a physicus (one of the many words that von Eschenbach invented and which apparently could mean both medical doctor and alchemist) and came from an ”Israeli family descending directly from Solomon.” According to Kyot, Flegetanis worshiped a calf and believed in Jupiter and Juno and von Eschenbach states parenthetically:

How can the Devil make such mock of such knowledgeable people, in that He Whose power is greatest and to Whom marvels are known neither does nor did deliver them from their folly?

The ”infidel” Flegetanis was able to find out through the orbits of the planets and movements of other celestial bodies how they affect human life and declared that there was ”such a thing as the Grail, whose name he read in the stars without any major difficulty.” A heavenly ruler had brought The Grail to earth and left it in the care of a Christian family who had been commissioned to preserve it and, through their pious way of life and honest efforts bring the right people closer to it and spread its message throughout the world through the good deeds it inspired.

After this parenthesis von Eschenbach returns to the tale and Trevizent who tells Parzeval that the Grail is not the calice Jesus used while he proclaimed the Eucharist and the one in which Joseph of Arimathea had collected Christ´s precious blood after he had died on the Cross. Not at all – Trevizent explains that the Grail is a lapsit excellis, another one of von Eschenbach´s complicated puns. The words might mean a stone ex celis, from the sky, though excilis might also indicate an elixir, a word that during the Middle Ages denoted a panacea, as well as the alchemists´ legendary Philosophers Stone that could transform anything. The word elixir originally comes from the Arabian  al-ʾiksīr,”a powder drying up wounds,” something that may indicate that the Grail was used to mitigate Grail keeper Anfortas´s crippling wound in the groin.

von Eschenbach´s tale about The Grail was most likely inspired by a story in Pfaffe Lamprecht's Alexanderlied, the Alexander Song, from 1150, where a story from the Talmud is retold. Alexander the Great had sent messengers to the end of the earth where they came to a high wall they assumed encircled the Earthly Paradise. A small hatch was opened in the wall and a man handed Alexander's envoys a ”jewel of unusual colour and remarkable brilliance, which in size and shape much resembled a human eye.” When Alexander received the stone, which when placed on a scale turned out to be both incomprehensibly light and incredibly heavy, a wise, old Jew explained to him that the stone was:

the master of all wisdom, the conquerer of kings the possessor of kingdoms, the Word of the world, the stone is your counsellor, your castigator; its little substance shall keep you from the yearning of shoddy ambition.

A similar story was told in the 8th century CE by the Arab writer Wahb ibn Munabbih and much later by the Persian writer Abu Yusuf Nizami Ganjavi (1140-1203). All, both Jews and Muslims, agreed that the stone had a heavenly origin and that it conveyed to people an realization of their own mortality and that they should therefore help each other.

This lore about a heavenly stone unfailingly leads to associations to the black stone, which is walled into the eastern corner of the Ka´ba in Mekka, for most Muslims the absolute centre of the earth. According to tradition, al-Hajar-ul-Asswad, The Black Stone, is a kind of hierophany, i.e. where the divine reveals itself. It fell to earth to indicate where Adam had to erect an altar to pay homage to God. The stone was originally white, or green, though the sins of humankind made it black.

If the Grail stone furthermore is an elixir it may be connected to alchemy, which during the Middle Ages was considered to be a science mediated by Jews and Muslims. Alchemy is connected to astrology, where stars, planets and other celestial bodies correspond to gems. The emerald corresponds to the planet Mercury and accordingly also to the god who served as messenger of the other gods and whose messages could change the course of events and even materia. In alchemy, mercury was considered to be an element that could shift from solid to liquid states, and vice versa, and it was thus considered to be able to bring about transitions, especially from death to life.

By Wolfram von Eschenbach The Grail also produces food and beverages, heals wounds and furthermore serves as the centre piece of a religious cult that fosters peace and illumination. It is remarkable that von Eschenbah is not describing his Grail together with any Christian allusions or characateristics and that Christianity has a marginalized role in his novel. It is Parzival´s brother in arms, Feirefiz, who together with him, contrary to all other Grail Seekers, is allowed to finally experience the transforming powers of The Grail and Feirefiz is at that moment still a Muslim. It is first in connection with his betrothal to the Grail Bearer that Feirefiz is bapitised.

According to von Eschenbach The Grail was originally an emerald and he had been told that it once adorned the crown of God's favorite angel Lucifer, The Light Bearer, but when he rebelled against God and was thrown down into the chasm of Hell the angels took care of the emerald. It was angels who did not take a stand in the battle against the rebellious angels who supported Lucifer, who brought the Grail to the earth. These neutral angels gave The Grail to the Anjou family who in their castle Munsalvaesche gathered young, innocent people from all over the world, men and women, poor and rich, Muslims as well as Christians, so that they in the presence of The Grail could realize what human beings really are and what their purpose in life ought to be. Regardless of race and religion, they would maintain peace and coexistence on earth and this was the reason to why the half-brothers Parzeval and Ferirefiz were chosen to re-establish The Grail's power and influence after the decline that prevailed under Anfortas's rule.

Trevizent, who in von Eschenbach's book tells all this to Parzeval, who is certainly young, innocent and uneducated, and to him explains why he has been chosen to enter the palace Munsalvaesche and become a member of the Grail Society, which through Anforta's sins has become increasingly powerless. Parzeval's mission is to cure Anfortas, who the hermit now reveals is Parzeval's uncle and after his death, Parzeval will become The Grail´s trustee.

In Munsalvaesche, Parzeval later witnesses how The Grail rejuvenates the power of The Grail Society. On every Good Friday, The Grail is placed on a table made of hyacinth, red zircon, a white dove descends over it and

by that stone´s power the phoenix burns away turning to ashes, yet those ashes bring it back to life. Thus the phoenix sheds its moulting plumage and thereafter give off so much bright radiance that it becomes as beautiful as before.

In this episode von Eschenbach displayed those magic storytelling tricks that Gottfried von Strassburg accused him of dazzling his audience with. True to his habit, von Eschenbach plays the role of an uneducated man, perhaps an allusion to the credulous Parzival, who does not really know what he is talking about. However, beneath this innocent surface it is possible to discover a variety of allusions to Islam and Arab culture, especially astrology and alchemy.

During the thirteenth century, when Parzeval was written, there was a relatively strong Muslim influence and presence at several European courts, especially among French and Italian princes. Europeans were still present in Ourtremer, the crusader states established after Jerusalem in 1099 had been conquered during The First Crusade. Within these states, Muslims and Jews were in the overwhelming majority, but they were ruled by Christian warriors in the service of European princely houses. During the 13th century, however, the Crusader states were gradually re-conquered by the Muslims. The Kingdom of Jerusalem fell in 1291 when Acre was lost and at that time its ”Christian” vassal states – Galilee, Jaffa/Ascalon, Oultrejordain and Sidon – had all been taken back by Muslims, but for almost two centuries Muslims and Christians had influenced each other through bloody power struggles and peaceful coexistence.

In Europe, the situation was the opposite. There the Muslims had from 711 CE and a short time onwards conquered Spain and Portugal (Al-Andalus) and a coastal strip in the Provence (Fraxinet), but had then slowly been driven back by Christian armies, until 1236 the only part left of this once mighty empire was Granada. The Sicilian Emirate, which occasionally controlled Sardinia and the southern Italian peninsula, lasted for more than a hundred years, between 965 and 1072, when it was conquered by the Christian Normans.

However, the Christian princes of Spain, Provence and southern Italy were forced to keep Muslims, or inadequately ”converted” ones, in their service and the reciprocal influence that took place between the different religions/cultures continued for a long time onward. Several minnesänger and French/Provencal troubadours moved during the 13th century between princely courts where influences from Muslim culture still prevailed in science, literature and customs and it is not so strange if traces of this appear in Wolfram von Eschenbach´s Parzeval.

Neither Kyot, who von Eschenbach stated had told him him the Grail story, nor Flegetanis, who according to Kyot had written it down, have existed. The imaginary Kyot claimed that Flegtantis was a Jew, though it is in fact the name of an Arabic book, Felek-Thânî, which deals with alchemy and secret knowledge. The word means the Second Sphere and this is according to Arabic astrology Mercurys´s sphere, which in alchemy is considered to be a shapeshifter able to transform other elements. Mercury is usually white, but is symbolized by the green emerald – The Grail Stone.

Kyot claimed that Flegetanis worshiped a ”calf”. But … was he not a Jew? Once again, von Eschenbach fools us. In Jewish mysticism as it is expressed in the Zohar, the Radiance – the most important text of the Jewish Kabbalah probably written in Castile during the 13th century by Moses de Leon – egl, ”calf” corresponds to the the zodiac sign Shׁvr, the Ox, which corresponded to the emerald, probably the same gem as The Grailstone. The Ox is also one of the four creatures, the hayyot, which surround and protect the Merkabah, the Throne/Chariot of God – a man, a lion, an ox and an eagle.

Good Friday's Grail ceremony might thus be associated to Arabic/Jewish alchemy, where green mercury (emerald), stands for a ”feminine” principle; cold and moist, and red sulfur (zircon) stands for a masculine principle; heat, united through the addition of air and fire (the white dove) thereby creating new life. This process constitutes the so-called ”alchemical wedding”.

The Grail Society has also been associated with an Arab/Christian symbiosis. von Eschenbach sometimes calls this group of sworn men and women who protect The Grail the Templeis, another word invented by him, which has later come to be regarded as if he wrote about the Order of the Militia of the Knights of the Temple, although if he had intended to describe this Order it would had been more convenient for him to use of the well-known German denomination Tempelherren. Incidentally, Tempelherren were not particularly influential in Germany. The Order was not established there until a hundred years later than in France and was active only for a short time. Nevertheless, since von Eschenbach was well versed in French culture, it is not entirely improbable that he had the Knights Templar in mind when he wrote his story.

It has often been pointed out that the Knights Templar had great similarities with Muslim congregations that were equally mysterious and largely initiation-based, as well as fanatically religious and militant. For example the Haššāšīn, a term that in Europe was interpreted as ”hashish-eaters”, though the word actually means ”people who follow Al-Hassan, a breakaway group from the Shia Muslim Ismaelites. This group got its name from Ismail ibn Jafar who was considered as the rightful heir to Muhammad's cousin and stepbrother Ali, by Shia Muslims considered the highest authority after the Qu´ran and Muhammad.

Haššāšīn was founded by Hassan-i Sabbah (1060-1124), who was born in Persia where most of his activities took place before he in 1090 isolated himself in Alamut, a stronghold in a mountain range in northern Persia, about 100 km north of present-day Tehran. The castle was called the Eagle´s Nest and was difficult to conquer; it had just one strongly fortified and well-protected entrance and was equipped with a sophisticated water supply system. From this inaccessible place, Hassan-i Sabbah, now called The Old Man in the Mountain, controlled his terrorist organization with an iron fist. Hassan-i Sabbah was a fundamentalist, an extremely strict theologian, a fanatic who had his own sons killed because, according to him, they were not sufficiently pious. The eldest was killed because his father assumed he had been involved in a murder that had not receive his blessing, though soon after the son had been beheaded, it was discovered that he was completely innocent. Hassan-i Sabbah´s youngest son was executed after he was caught drinking wine.

The basis of the Haššāšīn´s belief was fifty-one epistles called Rasa´il, which may be described as a synthesis of Muslim law and Greek philosophy. The basic idea was that the microcosm, i.e. the individual human being, must be harmonized with macrocosm, i.e. the entire universe. This had be done in stages through intensive studies; first of mathematics and logic then of physics, and finally theology. Within the tight circle of the Haššāšīn , everything was graded, teaching as well as career. At the bottom of the scale we find the fida´i, warriors willing to sacrifice themselves for the good cause, above them were the lasiq, followers, refiq, comrades, and finally da´i, the initiates. Above them all was the Imam - Hassan-i Sabbah and his successors. The faithful advanced within the organization through hard tests and complicated initiation ceremonies.

Haššāšīn were structured like a mafia organization where followers who found themselves at the lower levels were unaware of who constituted the senior management. All sect members blindly obeyed the orders issued by the Imam. Apostates were killed without mercy. Several combat units were part of Haššāšīn, though much of its activities were constituted by threats, bribery, extortion, protection money and well-planned assassinations. The sect is believed to have given rise to the word assassin and even mafia, which is believed to originate from the Arabian mu’afa, protection. The sect used all means believed to promote its lofty goal – the creation of a divine harmony in which everyone who could be considered as a threat to such a world order had to be eliminated.

Order of the Militia of the Knights of the Temple had in Palestine and Syria apparently connections with the Haššāšīn. Like their Muslim sect opponents, the Knights Templar built or conquered fortified castles as bases in strategic border areas. Even the Christian monk soldiers were fanatically faithful to what they perceived as their divine mission. They amassed considerable wealth and were strictly hierarchically organized, where members of the Order reached a higher positions through secret initiation ceremonies. The cadres of the Knights Templar were divided into laymen, sergeants, and knights, all with various subdivisions and the whole organization blindly obeyed the Grand Master.

Like Haššāšīn, the Knights Templar acted alongside other power structures. They were only subordinate to their Grand Master, were tax-exempt and thus did not have to pay tithes to the Church. The order enjoyed its own right of asylum, and unlike other Catholics, their members could not be excommunicated by the Pope. Like the Haššāšīn, the Knights Templar methodically spread their influence in various countries. One important reason for the Knights Templar's success and great influence was their Order´s complete control over their income and that they, like the Jews, were allowed to lend money at interest, which eventually became the main reason for the Knights Templar´s final downfall.

Philip IV of France (1268-1314) waged constant and costly wars. Despite the fact that he exceedingly taxed his people and the Church did not provide enough income and he eventually became heavily indebted to both the Knights Templar and the Jews. Philip solved the problem by expelling all Jews from France in 1306, seizing their capital and property. The following year he arrested all the knights that could be found associated with the Knights Templar, which lost its privileges and was dissolved by Philip´s puppet Pope Clement V. The Grand Master of the Knights Templar Jacques de Molay, was burned alive at the stake in Paris on May 18, 1314, and his Order thus disappeared from general history, but survived in legends, conspiracy theories and secret societies.

Like a Phoenix bird The Knights Templar rose from the flames and was revived through the so-called Masonic Lodges. These societies were said to preserve a variety of rules and ceremonies that were declared to have originated from the hibernated teachings of the original Knights Templar. These Masonic Lodges, which members were elected and initiated on the recommendation of men who had already been initiated into the Order, found their origin in artisan societies, so-called Trade Guilds, which were common during the Middle Ages and they have in several countries survived to the present day. These associations of artisans from specific trades provided their members with certain benefits; for example they paid for funerals and managed funds to support surviving family members of deceased fellow craftsmen. They also organized festivities and social gatherings, which were often gilded by a variety of more or less secret rituals and ceremonies.

Gradually, some of these associations began to accept membership from paying patrons, who did not practice the professions that had given gave rise to the guilds. One such group of craftsmen was apparently the Freemasons, who organized architects, stonemasons and bricklayers. Wealthy members of the bourgeoisie became increasingly dominant in the Masonic Orders and deepened their ceremonies, rules and teachings through contributions from all sorts of occult speculations that became increasingly common during the 18th century, when esoteric thinking permeated more and more associations. Rumors of the existence of esoteric orders influenced by alchemy, hermetism and secret Knights Templar lore, began to flourish in England and France during the late 17th century. Even if bourgeoisie Freemasons already in 1649 in Paris had founded a lodge that was apparently independent from mason craftsmen, it was not until 1717 when The Grand Loge of London was established that Freemasonry became a more common part of European cultural history. Apparently did Masonic lodges answer to a deep-felt social need and several of them gradually became the breeding ground for innovation, both when it came to philosophy and politics and their techings were adopted by a growing bourgeoisie, which resented the privileges enjoyed by nobility and clergy. In 1789, there were no less than 100,000 organized Freemasons in France.

Between 1797 and 1798, four volumes of a book called Mémoires pour servir à l´histoire du jacobinisme were published in England, written by a Jesuit named Augustin Barrauel on the run from the revolutionary Paris. In his books, Barrauel argued that the demands of revolutionary citizens for political freedom and democracy were based on lies created by radical philosophers to overthrow the Church and the monarchy and take control not only of France but also of the whole of Europe and America. Behind these plans were, according to Barrauel, the Masonic lodges and the Illuminati,, two God-denying secret organizations with roots down deep in a time among heretical thoughts created by Gnostics, Hermetists and alchemists. According to the conservative Jesuit, these two sinister organizations already controlled a large parts of Europe's decision-making bodies.

Illuminati? By the end of the 18th century, the Bavarian Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830) had lost himself within the multitude of occult societies that flourished throughout Europe at that time. Most of the German occultism and alchemy was based on the teachings of the Protestant Rosicrucians, eclectic societies which in their ideology united influences from theology, astrology, alchemy and Jewish Kabbalah. They had taken their name from a number of books written in Germany in the early 17th century and dealt with a certain Christian Rosencreutz (1378-1484) who was said to have been a learned alchemist who after living in the Middle East had instituted a brotherhood called the House of the Holy Spirit that would promote well-being, social justice, and healing of the sick.

Christian Rosencreutz has certainly never existed, but in 1616 the Lutheran priest Johann Valentin Andreae published his novel The Chemical Wedding of Christain Rozencrutz in which the aforementioned Rosencreutz rlates his initiation as a ”Knight of the Golden Stone”. A process that took no less than seven years of his life. The novel is undeniably strange and fascinating. It appears as a fictional description of a variety of alchemical processes and degree trials, similar to those that occur within the Freemasons and similar esoteric societies.

It would surprise me Pastor Andreae had not read von Eschenbach's Parzeval since this novel has a lot of similarities with The Chemical Wedding of Christain Rozencrutz. In Andreae's novel there is a castle (Munsalvaesche?) in which The Golden Stone (The Grail?) is enclosed and surrounded by a court of consecrated guards (Grail Knights and Grail maidens?) and there is also a ritual through which a Phoenix bird is reborn through the alchemical wedding that the novel's title alludes to (sulfur and mercury are united by external influences). Pastor Andreae also does not neglect to include oriental mysticism and alchemy in his story, for example by letting his Rosencreutz visit Muslim countries and meet Hermetics in Syria and Harran, even Bernhard of Clairvaux appears in a dream.

Andreae called her novel a joke, a ludibrium, but like Parzival it exudes a hope for a future marked by tolerance and peace; that humanity as well as the substances of the alchemical wedding should unite and give rise to a new, fairer world - the reborn Bird Phoenix.

I assume The Chemical Wedding of Christain Rozencrutz just like Parzeval is a novel, a fictional story based on its authors' interest in and great knowledge of esoteric traditions and alchemy, though zealots and dreamers have believed they were but more or less realistic depictions of existing associations using mysterious objects and actions to change the common destiny of mankind.

Adam Weishaupt was certainly some kind of zelot who through his dreamt up Illuminati intended to found a society capable of changing the world. While working as professor of Canonical Law at the University of Ingolstadt and did among his acquaintances count upon the the ingenious Goethe Johan Wolfgang von Gothe, who wrote extensively about alchemy, not the least his Märchen, The Fairy Tale, that is an even more strange achemical tale than Andreae´s Chymical Wedding. In Ingolstadt Weishaupt managed to engage five of his students to found the Illuminati, which can perhaps best be likened to a radical book circle with a bit of a hocus pocus on the side of the reading.

In time, however, Weishaupt came in contact with a certain Adolf von Knigge, a Freemason with a broad network, and the Illuminati's ideas of hermeticism, social justice, modern science, and similar notions began to spread within German Masonic lodges until Bavaria's Elector, Karl Theodor, got hold of some Illuminati documents and on the basis of their revolutionary ideas decided to sentence Weishaupt to death. However, he defended himself eloquently and was judged to be a harmless dreamer, but perhaps nevertheless a potentially harmful instigator. The spread of Illuminati's ideas was banned and Weishaupt spent the rest of his life as a rather unnoticed professor at the university of Göttingen.

By then, however, Augustin Barrauel had succeeded in pairing the Illuminati with the Freemasons and turning the organizations into a vicious, extremely powerful threat to the Catholic Church, Europe's monarchies, and thus to all law and order. Barrauel's books were devoured by the princely court of Europe, which lived in the shadow of the execution of the King of France and Napoleon, whose armies marched across Europe and were regarded by several radical citizens as a harbinger of future times of tolerance and general prosperity.

However, Napoleon's violent advance also brought to life both national aspirations and conservative counter-attacks and Augustin Barrauel´s indication about the secretive Illuminati´s great power was immediately picked up by the influential writer and philosopher Joesph-Marie, Conte de Maistre (1753-1821). He was the main influencer of the highly conservative Counter-Enlightenment and regarded Monarchy to be a divinely sanctioned institution and the only possible guarantee for law and order, while the Pope must be the ultimate authority for anything regarding human existence. de Maistre argued that the  rejection of the absolute truth of Christianity, in its Catholic manifestation, was directly responsible for the disorder and bloodshed which followed the French Revolution and he embraced gratefully Augustin Barrauel´s over-inflated view of Illuminati´s importance:

those guilty men who dared to plan and even organize in Germany that dreadful, most criminal conspiracy to extinguish Christainty and royality in Europe.

The Counter-Enlightenment gained particular force in the Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Catholic aristocratic, anti-liberal and powerful Klemens von Metternich. Incidentally, the imperial city of Vienna was a well-known center for all sorts of esoteric speculation and reckoned with a large number of secret societies. It has been estimated that when all alchemical activities in 1785 were completely banned within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there were about 10,000 ”alchemists” active in Vienna alone.

In line with the Augustine Barrauel's discovery of the anti-Catholic and world-wide activities of Masonic lodges and Illuminati, the Austrian Orientalist and author Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) published in 1818 his monumental work Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum seu fratres militiae templi, qua Gnostici et quidem Ophiani apostasiae, idolodulae et impuritatis convicti per ipsa eorum monumenta and breathed life into a variety of myths surrounding The Grail and in aprticualr the assumed satanic ritulas of The Knights Templar. Hammer-Purgstall mainly focused his attention on a strange cult around a devilish creature which he identified as Baphomet and which The Knights Templar according to him had taken over from The Assassins who mediated Satanist cults that still survived in Gnostic/Hermetic circles within the Middle East.

Hammer-Pursgstall supplemented his extensive historical and linguistic accounts with a rich visual material, which, however, was largely based on strange illustrations in the all sorts of alchemical/hermetic writings that spread especially in the 18th century in Europe's extensive and wild flora of esoteric societies. Hammer-Purgstall´s conclusion, however, spread like wildfire throughout Europe. His ”discoveries” fit like hand in glove for a Vatican that saw its power increasingly threatened by ”liberal and god-denying” forces:

a pagan religion survived into the Middle Ages, and in the guise of Freemasonry remains a threat to the Church even in the early ninteenth century.

As early as 1738, the Vatican had considered itself threatened by the attraction of Freemason rituals and the revolutionary teachings that arose within these secretive societies, which furthermore appeared to their roots in Islam and heresy. However, criticism also came from elsewhere. The French socialist, emancipist, Masonic magician and author Eliphas Lévi (Aphonse Louis Constant) also assumed that Bephemot was a demon worshiped by The Knights Templar and in his 1856 book Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie he presented a highly influential drawing of this monster.

As a matter of fact, Baphomet was a medieval distortion of the name of the Prophet Muhammad and had been used in the process against the Knights Templar to accuse them of associating with the Assassins. According to the accusers, the Order had fallen into idolatry, an accusation added to sodomy, orgies and bloody child sacrifices that were commonplace during heresy- and witch trials among both Catholics and Protestants. However, this does not prevent Elipha's Lévis Baphomet from being abundantly present in a number of the conspiracy theories created around Freemasons' devil worship. It is common, for example, to find references to ”medieval” representations of Baphomet as evidence of the devil worship among Knights Templar. An example often cited is the entrance tympanum at the Saint-Merri church in Paris, not far from the Knights Templar's former headquarters in Paris. On this tympanum is a representation of the devil with horns, female breasts and bat wings,which brings to mind Lévi's image of Baphomet. What the conspiracy theory sleuths rarely state, or perhaps do not know, is that Saint-Merri´s devil was created by the architect Hippolyte Godde while he between 1841-1843 led the restoration of the church which had been badly damaged during the French Revolution and it had proved impossible to identify the figure on the main stone of the central portal.

It is very likely that Elipha's Lévi thirteen years later was inspired by this small sculpture when he created his image of Baphomet. It is undeniable that the sensational journalist Léo Taxil (Marie Joseph Jogand-Pagès) used the same image when he in his fictional and very popular Les mystère de la Franc maçonnerie ”revealed” the Freemason's orgies, devil cult and plans to take over world domination. He spiced up the dish by claiming that the Freemasons were controlled by a Jewish, global conspiracy aiming at making the Christian faith suspicious and eventually crushing the Catholic Church.

Léo Taxil's ”revelations” came two years after the Vatican under Leo XIII in the encyclical Humanum genes once again had banned The Order of Freemasons. The myth of a Jewish-Masonic conspiracy became a powerful weapon in the hands of right-wing forces which unjustly accused the Jew Alfred Dreyfus of espionage and treason and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. When Dreyfus was released in 1899 and in 1906 was completely acquitted of all charges, this was by stock conservative and anti-Semitic forces interpreted as yet another proof that the French judiciary system was controlled by Freemasons and Jewish millionaires. A view further fueled by the blatant forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in 1903, but quickly spread around the world in countless translations. This supposed ”protocol” pretended to be an authentic document in which leading Jews established the plans for how the world economy and the prevailing social order would be ruined to such an extent that the Jews could easily take over world domination.

In 1921, Henry Ford published the book in the first part of his four-volume book series The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, which was printed in half a million copies and the Nazis listed it as compulsory reading after it to a high degree had influenced Hitler and the men around him. Despite its obvious absurdity the Protocol of the Sages of Zion and the links it established to Freemasonry and and an almighty world finance controlled by Jews continue to boil in the minds of conspiracy theorists and have not the least been in the background of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán's campaign against the Jewish philanthropist Georges Soros.

From this rich soil of dubious knowledge has sprouted a fantastic flora of conspiracy theories and occult madness, while a likewise esoteric though more well-meaning tendency found its expression in art and literature with masters such as Wagner, Tennyson, Balzac, Geroge Sand, Ruskin, Rosetti, Tolkien, William Morris, C.S. Lewis, Burne-Jones, Rimbaud, Renan, Debussy, Satie, Delville, Beardsley, Thomas Mann, Blavatsky, T.S. Eliot, Syberberg, Yeats and countless other writers and artists. Nevertheless, speculations about Grail-seeking, knights and conspiracy theories also inspired nasty ideologues such as Rosenberg, Himmler, Hitler, Julius Evola, Sayyid Qutb, Bat Ye´or, Pat Robertson and Steve Bannon, not to mention mass murderers like Anders Behring Breivik. Myths and legends are two-edged, both inspiring and harmful and several of the artists and writers I have listed were, although they could be said to be ingenious innovators, not averse to musty racism and self-glorifying chauvinism based on ”realities” that never existed.

Anyone who enters the labyrinth around the Grail and the Order of the Knights Templar runs the risk of getting lost in the increasingly dense mists rising from uninhibited conjecture. Something I fear has severely affected Graham Hancock, who in the past wrote sensible criticism of the UN activities, but now seems to be helplessly lost in a swamp of amateurish speculations where he furthermore believes himself being attacked by the ”academic establishment” and the secret, evil forces that he assumes control our existence.

Like so many other pseudo-researchers before him, Graham Hancock has picked and chosen from a wealth of evidence for his theories. Too often he has concentrated his search on unprovable cues he has been stumbling upon. It may be an exciting and stimulating experience to read about what he has seen and found, but Hancock´s too obvious shortcoming has been to allow his theories guide the results. Amateur researchers have a tendency to cling to fixed ideas, making it difficult for them to become acquainted with new findings in science, history and archaeology. Many of them behave like a defense lawyers who believe that winning a case is more important than any objective truth. They just present things that seem to prove their predefined ”truths” overlooking anything that might cast doubt on them. Hancock appears to be a self-taught gentleman whose method is largely to apply an idea to a fascinating phenomenon, which he then spends all his time and energy to prove. If an archaeologist in general begins an investigation by in detail studying all perceivable details of an object and its context and then form an idea of when and how it was used, then Hancock does just the opposite – he takes his starting point in the idea.

Unfortunately, the undeniably skilled jigsaw puzzler and narrator Graham Hancock has fallen on hius own grip and ended up in the nutty company of other pseudo-researchers, von Däniken, Flem-Ath, Hapgood, Velikovsky, Baigent and Bauval. In the books that followed The Sign and the Seal, Hancock did among other things claim that Mars was once home to an advanced civilization and also convinced that more than 15,000 years ago an extremely advanced ”super-civilization” existed here on the earth, which left behind myths about ”culture bringers” such as Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Osiris and Prometheus, as well as huge underwater remains in the Bermuda Triangle or Yonaguni under the sea outside of Japan.

And even worse - in the company of another confused and self-taught researcher, Robert Bauval, Hancock has ventured into dangerous terrain. In the book Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith, the two authors compare the nonexistent pillars of Solomon's Temple with the former Twin Towers on Manhattan and the Pentagon with the Star of David, something that almost inevitably leads them into the abyss of speculations concerning the infamous Jewish-Freemasonry conspiration for achieving a New World Order. The two authors continued downhill with The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World, an increasingly insane roller coaster through a plethora of ”facts” and speculations where the reader ends up in an absurd Disney World consisting of increasingly unreal fantasies.

Someone who, on the other hand, knew how to mix facts with the joy of storytelling was Umberto Eco, who in his piqaresque novel Baudolino issued in 2000 made innovative use of actual medieval history, tales, legends, religion and philosophy in an exemplary manner. The novel begins with the 1204 savage pillage of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. Baudolino, whose name originates from an obscure saint in Eco's Italian hometown, tells his life story to Niketas Choniates (who, like most of the novel's characters, is based on a historical figure) a high-ranking Byzantine official. Baudolino, the foster son of Emperor Frederick I (1122-1190), also known as Barbarossa, does with his ironically light-hearted narrative guide the reader through a variety of adventures in Germany, Italy, France and the legendary Orient. Eco brings to his story every conceivable medieval curiosity. A complex narrative fabric which includes The Grail, fabulous animals and humanoid creatures, Priester John, The Old Man in the Mountain, Hypatia's descendants, alchemists, Knights Templar, Jews, Arabs, wars and court intrigues, misery and spiritual conversations about philosophy and religion. A thread that runs through it all is an exposure of various means to tell a story; how legends and myths are created and used as political means, how stories arise through the joy och telling a good story, through unbridled whims, or in-depth reserach, lies and manipulations, seriousness and play.

A central episode is when Baudolino and his companions, half seriously, half at play, compile a letter from Prester John to various European potentates. The document turns into a Bitches Brew of facts, fabrications and wild speculation. Almost everything Eco writes are well-documented in other sources, so Prester John´s letter did really exist, though no one knows who wrote it and several of the recipients actually thought it came from Prester John despite, or perhaps thanks to, its exaggerated descriptions of million-strong armies, gem-studded city walls, strange fable beasts and the Priest King's promise to give The Holy Grail to the prince who allied himself with him.

The members of the gang who wrote the letter together with Baudolino also find their origin in medieval myths and even then they were all more or less made up or at least rather obscure – Kyot who von Eschenbach claimed had conveyed Parzeval to him, Ezra ben Salomon from the Moorish Girona who is considered be a co-author of Zohar, Robert de Boron who is named as the author of a book on the Grail Legend, but who like Kyot probably did not exist in reality, and a man called The Poet a designation behind we find the unknown author to the disrespectful songs in Carmina Burana. There was also a character called is Abdul, the son of an Irish woman and a man from Provence, who had grown up in Jerusalem, speaking French and Arabic, and who when inspiration ran out provide his friends with ”green honey”, probably hashish and the joy of storytelling flew again, interspersed with heavenly visions.

Here too, Eco moves on ground well prepared through his medieval studies. That Haššāšīn was mistaken for meaning ”hashish eater” is note entirely off the target. Hashish was used by several Persian mystics. It was green and was often called ”distilled sugar”. In what the Persian Sufis called The Language of Birds, a many of speaking expected to hid truths from the uninitiated, it was the green parrot who brought the drug to god-inspired poets. The poet Hafiz wrote: ”Parrot, you who do not appreciate mysteries, may your beak never lack sugar” and in his epic poem The Conference of the Birds, written sometime in the mid-1200s CE, the Sufi poet Farid ud-Din Attar lets the green parrot in his beak bring green sugar. In another poem, a Sufi poet praised hashish as a means of ”elevating the imagination until it achieves a blissful realization of the joy of being in a future world.” By a ”future world” he probably meant The Paradise.

Graham Hancock would probably agree, especially as his taking drugs was one step further from reality. When the companions in Umberto Eco's novel wrote their letter from Prester John and assume reality was not exciting enough, they interrupted their writing about imaginary feats and marvels and made hallucinogenic drugs bring them to ever higher narrative dimensions.

This is a method that Graham Hancock also seems to have embarked upon. In his book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Hancock seems to have left reality far behind himself by claiming that less 50,000 years ago, humanity had:

no art, no religion, no sophisticataed symbolism, on innovative thinking. Then in a dramatic and elctrifying change described by scientists ”as the greatest riddle in human history” skill and qualities that we value most highly in ourselves appeared already fully formed as though bestowed on us by hidden powers.

These forces, or rather ”supernatural beings” came into contact with humans through hallucinogenic drugs that Hancock himself has tried, with astonishing results when it comes to gaining insights into the mysteries of existence. OK, now it is high time to leave Hancock in his opium mists though with a well-known note of precaution – taking drug is not without its perils.

You can actually fabricate a marvelous story about almost anything. Myths can be created about pretty much any phenomenom that surrounds us and even about the fancies appearing in our thoughts and dreams. Even if they might be unfounded and fictitious it is quite possible to believe in myths, just as well as it is possible to create good aa well as evil myths, just as we can choose to believe in evil or good perceptions. I guess that is what Grail seeking is all about. To follow a faith. Searching for something that may very well be a myth, a chimera. In the case of the Holy Grail, it is actually something beneficent. A Grail seeker must believe in kindness, since that is what ultimately motivates hers/his search. It is righteousness that keeps her/him on the right track and and helps her/him to avoid the underbrush of daily worries – the confusion and madness that is part of being human, which obscures our dreamed-up ideals.

Graham Hancock realized early on that he did not believe in the UN. In response to his doubts, let me create a Grail myth about that particular Organization – When the rebellion of evil forces against God's order finally, after much sacrifice and horrendous bloodshed finally had been vanquished and its leaders – Hitler and Tojo – had been overthrown from the bloody thrones they had raised among boundless cruelty and contempt for human beings, the victors tried to preserve the good that is hidden in most of us – a belief that we all can work together to create a just world where each and every one of us has the right to freedom, joy and prosperity.

The goodwill of the people created a Holy Grail - the UN Declaration of Human Rights and a belief that we would be able to realize it – the Global Goals for Sustainable Development. A fortress was erected to preserve the Declaration and from which its message would be spread throughout the world – the UN Headquarters in New York. The Declaration is now protected by young idealists coming from all over the world, both women and men, thinkers and warriors. They strive to ensure that the Declaration is kept alive and that its goals will be realized. They are led by a Grand Master, called The Secretary General. But, like Anfortas, The Secretary General is unable to shoulder his great responsibility. People around him are aging and confused by power, greed and dark urges. Hope and power are not renewed. The United Nations, can no longer constantly re-emerge from its own ashes – like the Phoenix in the Grail Castle.

Decay threatens the Palace, feelings of loss of hope and meaninglessness afflict the Grail Knights, while the greed and selfishness around grow stronger with every day that passes and my smitten their own ranks. Opponents of sustainable development and global justice sow their demonic seed of doubt about the UN's meaning and goals. Will young, idealistic grail seekers like Parzeval and Feirefiz reach their goal and succeed in saving the faith and convictions that the UN is meant to preserve? Or will this Munsalvaesche finally be conquered by the powers of darkness, be destroyed so evil once again may plunge the entire world into ruin and despair, and will it this time be the final countdown?

ABP News (2011) ´Send Me, O Lord, Send Me’ author Ross Coggins dies. https://baptistnews.com/article/send-me-o-lord-send-me-author-ross-coggins-dies/#.X1M9oHkzbIV Andreae, Johann Valentin (1991) The Chemical Wedding of Christain Rozencrutz. Boston: Phanes. Barber, Richard The Holy Grail: The history of a Legend. London: Penguin Books. Burman, Edward (1987) The Assassins: Holy Killers of Islam. London: Crucible. Charpentier, Louis (1980) The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral. New York: Avon books. Domínguez Arribas, Javier (2018) ”Massoneria: L´impostura di Léo Taxil”, National Geographic Storia, No. 116, Ottobre. Eschenbach, Wolfram von (1987) Parzival. Harmondworth, Middlesex: Penguin Classics. Fritze, Ronald H. (2009) Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Sicence and Pseudo-Religions. London: Reaktion Books. Hancock, Graham (1989) Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Hancock, Graham (1997) The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant. London: Arrow Books. Hancock, Graham (2007) Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. New York: Disinformation Books. Hancock Graham och Robert Bauval (2011) The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World. New York: Disinformation Books. The Kebra Nagast: Book of the Glory of Kings, translated by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (2013) Rookhope, Durham: Aziloth Books. McIntosh, Christopher (1987) The Rosicrucians: The History and Mythology of an Occult Order. London: Crucible. Nataf, André (1991) The Wordsworth Dictionary of the Occult. London: J.M. Dent. Ponsoye, Pierre (1976) L´Islam e il Graal. Milano: Arché. Ramm, Benjamin (2017) ”A Controversial Restoration that Wipes Away the Past,” The New York Times, September 1. Stoneman, Richard (2010) Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend. New Haven: Yale University Press. Southern Baptist Convention (2020) https://www.sbc.net/ Troyes, Chrétien de (1993) Arthurian Legends. London: J.M. Dent.

I början av nittiotalet, närmare bestämt 1993-1995, bodde vi i New York där min hustru arbetade på policyavdelningen på högkvarteret för FN:s Utvecklingsprogram (UNDP). Själv slet jag med en avhandling, undervisade i svenska och gjorde ett och annat konsultuppdrag, bland annat hos återvändande flyktingar i Guatemala. UNDP är  FN:s nätverk för global utveckling och administrerar projekt i 177 länder, dess främsta uppgift är att bistå nationer när de föröker stärka demokrati, minska fattigdom, förebygga konflikter, hindra miljöförstöring och befrämja jämlikhet.

Då Rose anlände till UNDPs policyavdelning var den febrilt verksam med att reformera sin något stagnerande verksamhet och lansera ett revolutionerande initiativ – Human Development Reports. Dessa rapporter hade kommit till stånd genom ett förslag som utarbetats av ekonomerna Mahbu ul Haq och Amartya Sen. En utvecklingsrapport ges ut varje år och redogör för globala utvecklingsinsatser. Varje rapport fokuserar på specifika problem och vinnlägger sig om att redogöra för hur utvecklingsstrategier och nationella insatser har bidragit, eller kan bidraga till, deras lösning. Rapporterna innehåller dessutom ett så kallat utvecklingsindex (HDI) som inom varje enskilt land mäter och rangordnar olika utvecklingsfaktorer och jämför resultaten med förhållanden i världens övriga nationer.

En annat FNinitiativ som var högaktuellt 1993 var den så kallade Agenda 21, den tjugoåriga plan för utveckling och miljö som antogs efter FN:s Konferens för miljö och utveckling (UNCED), även kallad the Earth Summit. Meningen var att all världens länder, kommuner och individer skulle:

• begränsa och radikalt minska produktionen av giftiga ämnen, befrämja återvinning och drastiskt minska allt avfall, samt finna och introducera miljövänliga energialternativ till fossila bränslen;

• kontrollera och effektivisera transportmedel och industrier så att luftföroreningar radikalt minskas; och

• befrämja ett hållbart utnyttjande av sötvatten.

Inte ens ett så lovvärt initiativ har undgått vansinneskritik från kommersiella krafter och andra grupperingar som inte tycks ha begripit att jorden håller på att gå under genom vårt självmordsinriktade missbruk av naturresurserna.

Speciellt irriterande är det dementa orerandet från kristna högerkrafter. Dessvärre ligger FN:s högkvarter i USA där en så kallad kristen höger tycks företräda allt sådant som jag antar borde vara främmande för det kristna budskapet – vapen- och varufetischism, rasism, intolerans, chauvinism, egoism, kvinnoförakt, framgångsdyrkan och gränslös exploatering av jordens resurser. Lyssnar jag till och läser deras förvridna åsikter förstår jag det rabiata raseri som många protestanter under reformationstiden öste över vad de då ansåg vara Vatikanens girighet, gudsförnekande maktanspråk, lögner och självförhärligande retorik, exakt samma saker som det nu går att anklaga de förstockade högerkrafter som i Guds namn bojkottar globalt samarbete och all förändring till det bättre.

UNDP har under senare tid också varit den drivande kraften bakom de Globala målen för hållbar utveckling som av FN:s medlemsstater har antagits för att år 2030 ha avskaffat extrem fattigdom, minskat ojämlikhet och orättvisor, främjat fred och löst klimatkrisen. Storstilade mål som knappast kommer att uppnås, men likväl ... de utgör nu riktmärken och referenspunkter i vår strävan efter personliga och globala förbättringar. En strävan som inte får ignoreras och än mindre förhindras – den gäller våra barn, barnbarns och kommande generationers fortsatta existens och välbefinnande.

Kanske behövs någon form av religiös fanatism, inte baserad på himmelska belöningar efter döden, utan på medlidande, empati – här och nu, innan allt är försent. En åtgärd för att hindra mänsklighetens lämmeltåg mot Armageddon kan inte vara att nermontera FN och falla till föga för fanatiker som betraktar vällovliga FNinsatser som Antikrists mirakler.

När vi dök upp i New York pågick en livlig debatt på Roses nya arbetsplats och hon var snart i färd med att bidra till skapandet av nya riktlinjer, speciellt då det gällde jämlikhet. Så här i efterhand är jag övertygad om att FN:s existens är berättigad i varje fall inom ett specifikt område – kvinnors emancipation och lika rättigheter. En lång, besvärlig väg ligger fortfarande framför oss, men utan existensen av och ansträngningarna hos en global, icke kommersiell organisation hade vi inte kommit så pass långt som vi faktiskt gjort.

Dock fanns det mycket som jag inte begrep mig på och även retade mig på inom de olika utvecklingsorganisationer jag hamnat inom. Värst har varit undfallenheten inför och den interna dyrkan av Senior Management, ”Den högre ledningen”, in FNsystemet cementerad genom en prestigegynnande gradering för olika positioner och lönenivåer. En karriärstege där uppnåendet varje steg leder till alltfler förmåner och högre löner. Precis som människor kategoriseras utifrån titlar, som CEO´s eller Ph.D.´s så gynnar FNsystemet karriärklättrande, maktdyrkan och etiketterande av kollegor som respekteras i enlighet med om de är en G, T, S, PIA, LT, NO, FS, SG, DSG, USG, ASG, P-5 eller D-2.

Ett annat tillkortakommande är att i motsats till vad som ständigt bedyras av FNorganisationerna är att så kallad whistleblowing, d.v.s. att slå larm om oegentligheter, i allmänhet utgör ett  mycket farligt tilltag som kan leda till hårda bestraffningar. Därmed inte sagt att FN i det avseendet skulle skilja sig från andra hierarkiskt uppbyggda organisationer. FN är varken bättre eller sämre än de flesta andra organisationer, men det bör poängteras att FN står och faller genom bidrag som ytterst grundar sig på skattemedel och allmänhetens välvilliga inställning, vilket gör att oegentligheter och misstag ofta sopas under mattan, eller vitmålas.

Jag undrade också över den uppsjö av slogans och tämligen tomma begrepp som jag ofta hade haft svårt att begripa mig på. Exempelvis är utveckling ett svårdefinierbart begrepp och inte minst mänsklig utveckling. Human Devlopment låter visserligen fint, men vad är det? ”Mänsklig”, till skillnad från ”djurisk”, ”omänsklig”, eller ”teknisk”? Betyder utveckling en etappvis färd mot allt ”högre” former av välbefinnande och förståelse, ännu en gradering av olika människor, eller rör det sig själva verket om ett försök att öppna upp möjligheter för oss alla, oavsett ras, klasstillhörighet, religion eller kön?

Vad som var vanligt under nittiotalets början var en i mitt tycke tämligen underlig slogan – selfempowerment, jag tror inte att den går att översätta till svenska, det är definitivt inte självförverkligande, kanske snarast något i stil med att ta makten över sin egen situation. Vad frasen än betydde så såg jag framför mig Gustave Dorés bild av hur Baron von Münschausen drar både sig själv och sin häst upp ur ett träsk genom att lyfta dem båda medelst ett stadigt grepp i sin hårpiska.

Både Rose och jag hade tidigare sysslat med ”fattigdomsbekämpning i u-länder”. Rose mycket mer än jag, men jag hade likväl fått en del insikter i det hela och tyckte mig förstå att även ideellt arbete kan vara präglat av mänskliga tillkortakommanden – girighet, prestigejakt, hård konkurrens, baktaleri, revanschlust, översitteri och självförhärligande. Givetvis fanns också effektivitet, godhet, empati, intelligens och självuppoffring. Att kritisera FN är som att kritisera oss själva. Organisationen är inte en solitär maktstruktur, utan summan av sina medlemsstater och därmed även deras medborgare. Den skall kritiseras, men måste likväl stödjas och bör absolut inte avskaffas. Det vore att ge upp inför själviska och destruktiva drifter som hotar allt samarbete och omöjliggör en dräglig framtid.

Vad som även besvärade mig var allt gnäll jag allt som oftast tvingades lyssna till från biståndsarbetare, speciellt sådana som befann sig högt upp inom hierarkin. Jag fann det pinsamt då privilegierade individer jämförde sin belägenhet med hur bra ”andra” hade det inom den ”privata sektorn”, hur stora uppoffringar de själva tvingades göra för liten lön och otillräckliga förmåner. Jag tyckte dock att dessa gnällspikar i allmänhet åtnjöt alldeles förträffliga förmåner och betydligt högre löner än de som jag erhöll då jag inte varit verksam inom biståndet.

Då Rose arbetade på UNDP märktes efterdyningarna från en bok som skrevs 1989 av Graham Hancock, Lords of Poverty, Fattigdomens herrar. Den beskrevs på omslaget som en skildring av ”den hämningslösa livsstilen, makten, prestigen och korruptionen inom mulitimiljard-dollar-biståndsindustrin.” Det förekom till och med en tävling bland FNanställda som gick ut på att finna exempel på bistånd som verkligen fungerat och därigenom bemöta Hancocks påståenden.

Graham Hancock var en engelsk journalist som skrev artiklar i välrenommerade tidningar som The Times, The Sunday Times, The Independent och min egen favorit, The Guardian. Han stod 1976 till 1978 tillsammans med en kollega som utgivare för New Internationalist Magazine och var mellan 1981 och 1983 The Economist´s östafrikakorrespondent.

Det var med stort intresse jag läste Lords of Poverty. Den var välskriven och dess emellanåt förödande kritik av ”biståndsindustrin” tycktes i allmänhet vara väl underbyggd. Det märktes dock tydligt att Hancock hade en alltför uppenbar agenda – bistånd är inte alls av godo och borde avskaffas. Jag höll med om bristerna och kritiken som han redogjorde för, men kunde inte stödja slutsatserna.

Bistånd behövs, det kostar en bråkdel av vad som läggs ner på vapenindustri och allsköns annan skadlig verksamhet. Böcker som Lords of Poverty behövs också. Organisationer som FN, Världsbanken. IMF, OECD, Röda Korset och en mängd andra liknande initiativ bör utsättas för ständig, men konstruktiv kritik och verkligen ta sig an den, förutan en mängd ofta erbarmliga klargöranden, försvar och undanflykter.

En åsikt jag vet delas av en mängd anställda inom dessa organisationer. Jag minns hur jag vid nittiotalets början i en och annan modul såg hur någon kontorsslav på sin anslagstavla nålat upp en affisch med en dikt som jag även fann i inledningen till Hancocks bok och som fortfarande kan skymta fram på nätet. Dessvärre har jag inte lyckats uppbringa någon tillräckligt skarp kopia.

Dikten är skriven av en viss Ross Coggins och  tål att på engelska återges i sin helhet, så att rimmen inte går förlorade, vilket de gör i min följande direktöversättning:

Excuse me, friends, I must catch my jet

I’m off to join the Development Set;

My bags are packed, and I’ve had all my shots

I have traveller’s check and pills for the trots!

The Development Set is bright and noble

Our thoughts are deep and our vision global;

Although we move with the better classes

Our thoughts are always with the masses.

In Sheraton Hotels in scattered nations

We damn multi-national corporations;

Injustice seems easy to protest

In such seething hotbeds of social rest.

We discuss malnutrition over steaks

And plan hunger talks during coffee breaks.

Whether Asian floods or African drought

We face each issue with open mouth.

We bring in consultants whose circumlocution

Raises difficulties for every solution –

Thus guaranteeing continued good eating

By showing the need for another meeting.

The language of the Development Set

Stretches the English alphabet;

We use swell words like “epigenetic”

“Micro”, “macro”, and “logarithmetic.”

It pleasures us to be esoteric –

It’s so intellectually atmospheric

And although establishments may be unmoved

Our vocabularies are much improved.

When the talk gets deep and you’re feeling numb

You can keep your shame to a minimum:

To show that you, too, are intelligent

Smugly ask, “Is it really development?”

Or say, “That’s fine in practice, but don’t you see:

It doesn’t work out in theory!

A few may find this incomprehensible,

But most will admire you as deep and sensible.

Development set homes are extremely chic,

Full of carvings, curios, and draped with batik.

Eye-level photographs subtly assure

That your host is at home with the great and the poor.

Enough of these verses – on with the mission!

Our task is as broad as the human condition!

Just pray the biblical promise is true:

The poor ye shall always have with you

Förlåt mig vänner, jag måste med ett flyg,
jag är på väg till Utvecklingseliten.
Mina väskor är packade och jag har fått mina sprutor.
Jag har resecheckar och piller för färden!

Utvecklingseliten är smart och ädel.
Våra tankar är djupa och visionen global.

Även om vi rör oss inom de bättre klasserna
är våra tankar alltid med massorna.

På Sheratonhotell i förödda nationer
ondgör vi oss över internationella kooperationer.
Mot orättvisor är det lätt att protestera
i sådan grogrund för socialt lugn.

Vi diskuterar undernäring över goda stekar
och vid kaffet planerar vi våra tal om hungern.
Asiatiska översvämningar och afrikansk torka
tar vi oss an mätta och belåtna.

Vi anställer konsulter
vars omskrivningar försvårar varje lösning –
och därmed garanterar goda måltider
vid nya konferenser.

Utvecklingselitens språk
ställer krav på vokabulären.
Vi brukar häftiga ord som“epigenetik”,
“mikro”, “makro” och “logaritmer”.

Vi gillar att vara esoteriska –
det gör oss intellektuellt atmosfäriska.
Även om etablissemanget inte blir imponerat,
så förbättras ständigt vårt ordförråd.

Om vårt tal blir för djupt och vi tröttnar
så mildras vår förlägenhet
när vi får bevisa vår intelligens
genom att självbelåtet fråga: “Är det verkligen utveckling?”

Eller säger: “Det där är fint i praktiken, men ...
håller teorin!” En del kan finna sådant obegripligt,
men andra beundrar dig som djup och känslig.

Utvecklingselitens hem är mycket eleganta,
fyllda med sniderier, kuriosa och dekorerade med batik.
Realistiska fotografier visar tydligt
att din värd är välbekant med rika, såväl som fattiga

Nog med poesi – ut på fältet!
Vår uppgift är lika väldig som det mänskliga tillståndet!
Det är endast att hoppas att Bibeln har rätt:
”De fattiga kommer alltid att finnas hos oss”.

Givetvis blev jag nyfiken på vem författaren kunde vara, men det visade sig vara svårt att spåra såväl Ross Coggins, som diktens ursprung. Källan anges ofta som publicerad i Adult Educational and Development Magazine, 1976, men någon sådan publikation har jag inte lyckats finna. Likaså tycks personen Ross Coggins vara svår att få grepp om. Han föddes i Texas och dog år 2011, åttiofyra år gammal. Han skrev The Development Set medan han arbetade som regional chef för Inter-American Foundation (IAF) i Centralamerika. IAF är en statlig U.S. biståndsorganisation verksam i hela Latinamerika och Karibien.

Efter utblidning vid Baylor University och Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary verkade Coggins i sju år som missionär i Indonesien, innan han återvände till USA och i ytterligare sju år blev språkrör för en sammanslutning kallad the Southern Baptist Christian Life Commission. Kommissionen för sydliga baptisters kristna liv, vars mål sägs vara:

Att engagera kulturen för Jesu Kristi evangelium och stimulera en offentlig debatt för att skydda religionsfrihet och mänsklig utveckling. Vår vision kan sammanfattas med tre ord: Rike, kultur och mission.

Ross Coggins lämnade sedermera sitt arbete för baptisterna och var fram till pensioneringen verksam inom USAID och IAF, speciellt i Centralamerika och Karibien och var under en tid även stationerad i Rom. Coggins skrev hundratals opublicerade dikter. En av hans psalmer Send Me, O Lord, Send Me, Sänd mig, O Herre, sänd mig, sjungs numera ofta inom baptistförsamlingar. Antagligen ett tecken på att han var en kristen idealist som såg sig kallad av Gud för att hjälpa människor till ett bättre liv, fast där finns möjligen även en aning om självhävdelse, bergfast övertygelse och stridsanda, något som kommer mig att tänka på korsfarare och deras krigsrop – Deus vult! Gud vill det.

With holy fire my heart inspire Thy Spirit’s sword to wield;

With borrowed might I’ll take Thy light, Till darkness’ doom be sealed.

If others stop to count the cost, For fear of earthly treasures lost,

I’ll count it gain to die for Thee; Send me, O Lord, send me.

Med helig eld hänför mitt hjärta så jag kan svinga Din Andes svärd;

och med förlänad kraft bära Ditt ljus tills mörkrets dom har fallit.

Om andra tvekar inför mödan, av rädsla att förlora jordisk rikedom,

jag räknar det som vinst att dö för dig; Sänd mig, O Herre, sänd mig.

Psalmen är inspirerad av profeten Jesajas svar till Gud (Jesaja 6:8).

Att Graham Hancock och mina funderingar kring bistånd och UNDP dyker upp i den här essän beror på att jag nyligen läste ett utkast till en spännande historisk roman om ett portugisiskt krigståg till Etiopien 1541. Det var en god vän som gav mig förtroendet att läsa manuskriptet till hans roman och jag greps av spänningen och berättarglädjen. I utkanten skymtar Förbundsarken, d.v.s. den guldbeslagna kista i vilken lagtavlorna som Mose fått av Gud på berget Sinai förvarades. En av de många legender som spunnits kring detta kultföremål bedyrar att det numera vilar i ett kapell bredvid Den Heliga Maria av Sions katedral i Aksum.

Medan jag läste min väns bokmanuskript kom jag att minnas att jag för många år sedan, under en av de många mer eller mindre förgätna resor jag gjort, på en flygplats hade köpt Hancocks bok The Sign and the Seal. Jag har nu rotat fram den, läst den och funnit att den var spännande, informativ och fantasieggande, fast genom sina vilda spekulationer även smått galen, något som nu fått mig att liksom Hancock gräva ner mig i förbundsarkslore.

Förbundsarken förkommer på flera ställen i Bibeln och var på sin tid den mest betydande religiösa symbolen för Israels Folk. Liksom judarna enligt Bibeln valdes att bevara Guds bud i sin mest påtagliga form genom de stentavlor som Mose fört ner från Sinais berg, så bevarade arken dessa bevis på Guds närvaro på jorden. På så vis kom Förbundsarken att representera Guds närvaro här på jorden och Förbundsarken förvarades under flera år i det Det allra heligaste, ett inre rum i Jerusalems tempel som enbart en gång om året besöktes av Ha'kohen ha'gadol, Översteprästen. I samband med att den babyloniske kungen Nebukadnessar 597 f.Kr. erövrat Jerusalem och nio år senare totalförstörde staden och förde bort huvuddelen av dess befolkning i fångenskap, försvann Förbundsarken ur historien, men knappast från legendfloran.

Det finns ett otal legender kring denna märkliga kista. Det kan räcka att nämna att den antogs besitta övernaturliga krafter; att flera tror att den finns återgiven på Titus triumfbåge i Rom (det rör sig dock snarare om de s.k. Skådebrödens bord), det sägs att den hamnat bland tempelriddare i Provence och gömts någonstans i södra Frankrike (även det är föga troligt) och inte minst utgjorde den inspiration till och drivkraft för Spielbergs Jakten på den försvunna skatten, där den liksom på vissa håll i Bibeln skildras som ett slags vapen med dödlig utstrålning.

Att Hancock skrev om Förbundsarken beror på att han är väl förtrogen med Etiopien. Han rapporterade som ung journalist om landet, på uppdrag av den blodtörstige kommunisten Haile Mariam Mengistus regim skrev han sedan ett påkostat bildverk om landets sevärdheter och fick genom åren flera etiopiska vänner och välrenommerade kontakter bland experter på landets historia. The Sign and the Seal visar också att han är ordentligt påläst om mycket som rör Förbundsarken och dess märkliga öden

Den främsta källan till legenden om Förbundsarkens närvaro i Etiopien är Kebra Nagast, Konungarnas ära, som någon gång under 1300-talet skrevs av en viss Is´haq Neburä-Id, fast en del experter hävdar att det kan röra sig om ett kollektivet arbete av präster som i Aksum samlade och författade en mängd skrifter på Ge´ez, ett numera utdött språk som utvecklats till tigrinska, tigre och amharsika, men fortfarande används inom liturgin för den Etiopisk Ortodoxa Tewahedo Kyrkan. Bokens främsta syfte var att bevisa att den så kallade salomoniska dynastin grundade sin legitimitet på sina ledares direkta härstamning från den israeliske kungen Salomo. År 1270 e.Kr. kröntes i Aksum den förste amhariska Negus Negesti  Konungarnas konung.

Kebra Nagast är uppdelad i 117 kapitel och inkluderar bibliska och apokryfiska texter, sagor och berättelser av okänt ursprung. Trots sin ålder och emellanåt lite väl snirkliga predikoton är Kebra Nagast underhållande och inte speciellt svårläst. Den framstår som en kombination av Bibeln med Tusen och en natt. Det etiopiska eposet är inte enbart ett litterärt verk utan även en helig skrift för de troende inom den Etiopisk Ortodoxa Tewahedo Kyrkans hägn och även för Jamaicas Rastafaris; en spegling av etiopisk nationalism och religion.

Berättelsen inleds med en debatt under kyrkmötet i Nicea år 325, då man diskuterade gudomlighetens natur. På frågan ”Vari består konungars ära?” svarar en viss Gregorius med ett högstämt tal som han avslutar med att konstatera att Guds ära representeras på jorden i påtaglig form av tavlorna med Tio Guds bud som förvaras i Förbundsarken som befinner sig i Etiopien. Därefter tar Ärkebiskop Domitius fram en bok han funnit i Hagia Sofia och läser högt berättelsen om Drottning Makeda, bättre känd som Drottningen av Saba, hennes samröre med kung Salomo och hur deras son Menelik förde Förbundsarken till Etiopien.

Berättelsen börjar med att en abessinsk köpman får höra talas om Salomos visdom och framförallt hans enorma förmögenhet: ”och det fanns en viss förståndig man, en karavanförare vid namn Tâmrîn, som kunde lasta femhundratjugo kameler och ägde sjuttiotre fartyg”. Tâmrîn lyckades vinna Salomos förtroende och återvände till Etiopien med sina kameler och skepp fullastade med varor långt värdefullare än de som han fört med sig till Judahs och Israels förenade kungadöme.

Efter sin återkomst satt Tâmrîn under flera veckor varje morgon hos Drottning Makeda och berättade för henne om Salomos stora visdom. Hur han klokt och eftertänksamt administrerade rättvisa, förvaltade sina rikedomar, dukade sitt bord, undervisade sina underlydande, fick dem att lyssna och anpassa sig till hans strategiskt genomtänkta förvaltningssystem och hur varje medborgare uppförde sig väl, arbetade strävsamt och att det i Salomos rika varken fanns bedragare eller tjuvar. Slutligen konstaterade drottningen:

Jag har smittats av en obetvinglig kärlek till visdom. Trots att jag är fjättrad av okunnighet inser jag nu att visdom är mer eftertraktansvärd än guld och silver och det bästa som sökas kan all världen kring. Vad kan jämföras med visdom – honung, vin, överdådiga måltider, skydd för kroppen, vapen, ädelstenar, allt som glimmar och lyser under solen? Den fröjdar hjärtat, öppnar ögon och öron, är en lärare för de lärde, en tröst för de förståndiga, den ger ära och berömmelse till dem som besitter den. Ett rike kan inte bestå utan visdom, utan den går vi vilse och våra tungor formar oacceptabla ord.

Hon finner ingen ro utan beger sig med ett stort följe till Salomos rike. Där tas hon emot med överväldigande generositet av kung Salomo, som omedelbart blir betagen av denna undersköna kvinna, som dessutom tilltalar honom genom sitt förnuft och den gränslösa beundran hon hyser för honom. Drottning Makeda inser att landets välstånd och den ordning som råder inom riket utgår från konungens klokhet och utstrålning. Salomo förklarar dock att allt ytterst beror på den välvilja som Israels gud har visat honom och Drottning Makeda utbrister: ”Hädanefter skall jag inte tillbedja solen, utan solens Skapare, Israels Gud.”

Trots all sin visdom är Salomo slav under sitt ohämmade driftsliv. Han har fyrahundra ”drottningar” och sexhundra konkubiner. Dock bedyrar han att det inte är hans gränslösa begär som fått honom att omge sig med detta väldiga harem, utan han har skapat det av respekt för sin Gud som sagt till Abraham: ”Jag skall göra din säd lika talrik som himlens stjärnor och havets sandkorn.” Drottning Makeda är en ärbar kvinna och trots att hon är gränslöst betagen av den stilige, stormrike och ytterst verserade Salomo vägrar hon att bli en bland hans talrika, sexuella troféer. Hon kan dock inte undgå att lägga märke till hur den kärlekskranke konungen ständigt lägger ut sina snaror för henne och ber honom därför avlägga en ed:

– Svär på att du aldrig kommer ta mig med våld och jag kommer då att svära på att inte, utan ditt medgivande, ta något värdefullt från dig; och han svor att göra henne till viljes och hon bedyrade att hålla fast vid sin försäkran.

Men den pilske och listige Salomo fortsatte smida planer på att förföra den exotiska drottningen. Då Makeda meddelade honom att hon nu var tvungen att återvända till sina undersåtar för att i sitt rike tillämpa allt hon lärt sig av den vise Salomo, arrangerade han en överdådig tillställning med riklig mat och strålande underhållning. Drottningen lät sig väl bekomma, åt och drack med god aptit och då det var dags för henne att återvända till sina kvarter bad Salomo om ett sista samkväm på tu man hand och bedyrade att det absolut inte innebar att han skulle bryta sin ed.

Han förde Makeda till ett utsökt inrett chambre separé där han trakterade henne med djupsinniga och smickrande samtal tills dess hon blivit trött, och kanske även något berusad, och föll i sömn på en av rummets två, vitt skilda, schäslonger. Salomo vände sig då till en av tjänarna och bad honom ”på ett främmande språk” att skölja ur en skål och sätta in en karaff med friskt källvattten vid drottningens bädd. Sedan befallde han samtliga tjänsteandar att avlägsna sig.

Rummet var varmt och taket besatt med pärlor och ädelstenar. som lyste och skimrade i nattmörkret. Drottningens sömn blev därför nyckfull och snart var hon klarvaken:

hennes mun var torr, ty den mat som Salomo genom list undfägnat henne med hade gjort henne mycket törstig. Hon rörde läpparna och försökte svälja, men fann ingen fukt i munhålan. Hon bestämde sig för att dricka vattnet hon såg i karaffen vid sin säng, men först blickade hon bort mot Salomos schäslong, han tyckes vara försänkt i djup sömn. Men, han sov inte. Han avvaktade att hon skulle stiga upp, stjäla vattnet och släcka sin törst. Hon steg upp och smög sig ljudlöst fram till vattenskålen, lyfte karaffen men då rusade Salomo fram, grep henne kring handleden och utbrast: ”Varför bryter du nu eden du gav mig? Du bedyrade att du på egen hand inte skulle tillgripa något som fanns i min ägo.” Hon svarade och sa honom i sin rädsla: ”Inte bryter jag eden om jag dricker vatten?” Och konungen svarade henne: ”Finns det något som du sett under himlen som är dyrbarare än vatten?” Drottningen svarade: ”Jag har syndat mot mig själv och brutit mitt löfte och det betyder att du nu är befriad från din ed. Låt mig enbart dricka för att släcka min törst.” […] Han lät henne dricka, då hon druckit vattnet fick han sin vilja igenom och de sov tillsammans.

När drottningen återvänt till Etiopien var hon gravid och födde sedan en son hon gav namnet Bayna-Lekhem. Sonen plågade ständigt modern med frågor om vem hans far kunde vara, men fick inte veta sanningen förrän han var tjugotvå år då Drottning Makeda berättade om sitt samröre med kung Salomo. Hon sade sig berätta sanningen eftersom sonen ”tjatat på mig dag som natt”. Drottning Makeda skänkte honom trolovningsringen hon fått av Salomo. Tillsammans med den gamle köpmannen Tâmrîn begav sig Bayna-Lekhem till Jerusalem där han togs emot av en glädjestrålande Salomo som inte kunnat glömma sitt livs stora kärlek – Drottning Makeda av Etiopien. Han utsåg Bayna-Lekhem till sin rättmättige arvtagare. Ceremonin ägde rum i det innersta av det sagolika tempel Salomo hade låtit uppföra i Jersualem för att hysa Förbundsarken.

och de tog den unge mannen in i det Allra Heligaste och där lät de honom lägga sig ner ovanpå altarets horn och suveränitet förlänades honom genom prästen Zadoks mun.

Kort därefter fick översteprästens son Azâryâs besök av en ängel som reste sig framför honom som en ”eldstod vars ljus fyllde hela huset”. Ängeln befallde Azâryâs att tillsammans med sina bröder stjäla arken från templet, gömma den och då Bayna-Lekhem slutligen lämnade Jerusalem för att återvända till Etiopien följa med honom, bära med sig arken och omvända etioperna till den judiska tron. Ängeln försäkrade Azâryâs att han omöjligt kunde neka uppdraget eftersom det var Guds vilja.

Till Salomos stora sorg förklarade Bayna-Lekhem att han lovat sin mor att återvända till Etiopien. Salomo gjorde allt för att få sonen att ändra sig, men en Guds ängel visade sig för honom och förklarade att älsklingssonen inte skulle förlora sin kungavärdighet, att hans återvändande till sin mor i själva verket innebar att Etiopien skulle bli den sanna arvtagaren till Judah Rike, till skillnad från det skulle Mängəstä Ityop'p'ya, Etiopiens kungadöme aldrig att gå under utan ständigt växa sig allt starkare.

Bayna-Lekhem gav sig av tillsammans med Azâryâs och en mängd av Salomos präster och hovfolk. Det var först under deras färd genom Egypten som Bayna-Lekhem fick reda på stölden av Förbundsarken och att den hölls dold i hans karavan. Han ville återvända för att lämna tillbaka den, men övertygades av Azâryâs att det var Guds vilja att den skulle föras till Etiopien. Samtidigt hade Salomo funnit att templets Allra Heligaste stod tomt och beslöt sig rasande för att förfölja Bayna-Lekhem med hela sin här. Men i sista stund hindrades han i sitt tilltag genom en dröm sänd av Gud. Salomo förfärdigade en kopia av Förbundsarken som placerads i det Allra Heligaste och gladde sig i hemlighet över att favoritsonen fört den sanna arken i säkerhet i ett fjärran land.

Salomos olycksaliga driftsliv hade nämligen åter försatt honom i bryderi. Han hade blivit betagen av en ny hustru, Faraos dotter Mâkshârâ, som i enlighet med ”egypternas dumhet” dyrkade djurhövdade gudar och fått hans husfolk att följa henne i dessa ”idiotiska seder”. På sin dödsbädd fick dock Salomo återigen besök av en ängel som för honom berättade om Israels folks framtida och ytterst sorgliga öden, ända fram till Jesu korsfästelse, romarnas ödeläggelse av Jerusalem och judarnas skingrande över världen. Innan han dog utsåg Salomo sin son Rehobeam till härskare över Judah Rike, som slutligen kom att försvinna ur historien, alltmedan Salomos ätt fortlever som härskare över Etiopien.

Då Bayna-Lekhem tillsammans med Förbundsarken kommit fram till Etiopien, den sista vägen färdades de med hjälp av magiska krafter genom luften, abdikerade drottning Makeda till sonens förmån och han kröntes till Etiopiens härskare under namnet Menelik I.

I Etiopien är Kebra Nagast levande historia och det är inte märkligt att den journalistiskt lagde Graham Hancock gav sig ut på eget sökande efter den förlorade Förbundsarken. Detta efter att ha besökt Aksum och ingående studerat dess kyrkor, haft en mängd omtumlande upplevelser och slumpmässiga möten som fördjupat hans intresse för Förbundsarken och dessutom funnit fascinerande skrifter som antydde dess kopplingar till Etiopien Reultatet blev hans spännande och bästsäljande The Sign and the Seal som av The Guardian beskrevs som ”en ny genre, en intellektuell deckare skriven av en privatspanare”.

Den fantastiska histoira som Graham Hancock pusslar ihop genom en mängd resor, äventyr, möten med experter och läsning, kan sammanfattas som att efter det att Förbundsarken i trehundra år vilat ostörd i Jerusalems tempels Allra Heligaste profanerades dess fristad genom att den ogudaktige kung Manasseh bredvid den placerade ett avgudabeläte. Djupt skakade präster förde då i hemlighet den judiska religionens mest vördade artefakt till en ny helgedom byggd på ön Elefantine i Nilen. Där förvarades den i ett par hundra år innan de judar (Falashas) som inom sin krets bevarade Förbundsarken tvingades fly söderut då det persiska väldet över Egypten upphörde 332 f.Kr. De förde arken till ön Tana Kirkos i den Blå Nilen som låg inom judarnas nya bosättningsområde kring staden Gondar i Etiopien. Där bevarades Förbundsarken tills dess den kristna regimen med säte i Aksum bemäktigade sig den och förde den till Aksum där Kebra Nagast slutligen författades för att genom sammanställningen av en mängd myter med bibliska berättelser och anpassade historiska fakta använda Förbundsarkens närvaro för att legitimera den salomoniska dynastins makt över Etiopien.

Vetskapen om Förbundsarkens närvaro spreds i Europa genom Tempelherreorden som genom sina kontakter i Jerusalem samarbetade med såväl judar som muslimer för att föra fram ett budskap om harmonisk samlevnad mellan de tre abrahamitiska religionerna – judendom, kristendom och islam. I centrum för dessa tankegångar och strävanden fanns Förbundsarken och den kunskap dess innehav förmedlade, ett uppsåt som bland annat kan spåras i Wolfram von Eschenbachs märkliga roman Parzival.

Förvisso en märklig historia, men med en del troliga inslag. Eftersom jag emellanåt vimsar runt i spekulativa skuggvärldar kunde jag inte undgå att fascineras av denna soppa med sina milt sagt uppseendeväckande ingredienser. Låt mig därför nu fiska upp en del av det som kokade i Hancocks anrättning och följa ett  villospår som leder till Parzival. von Eschenbachs roman dyker upp sex år efter det att Hancock första gången besökt Aksum, nämare bestämt 1989 då han tillsammans med sin familj semestrade i Chartres och ägnade tre dagar åt att ”långsamt gå runt katedralen och gradvis anamma dess kraftfulla och numinösa [närvaron av något heligt] atmosfär”. Han hade läst en mängd guideböcker och på ett kafé i närheten av katedralen, vid namn La Reine de Saba, får han veta att det fått sitt namn av att Drottningen av Saba som finns framställd bland katedralens statyer.

Nu forsade minnena från Etiopien över Graham Hancock. Han fann den etiopiska drottningen i katedralens norra portal – bredvid kung Salomo och stående över en framställning av en afrikan. Han fann också under en pelare i närheten av drottningen en relief med några oxar som drar en vagn med … Förbundsarken! Bredvid den framställningen finns en annan, mer, skadad relief med någon slags tumult vid samma ark.

Hancock började nu med hjälp av sina handböcker undersöka samtliga skulpturer i katedralens tre portaler och fann i denna norra portalens centrala portvalv en skulptur av Melisedek. Han kallas i Bibeln för Den Allrahögstes präst och mötte Abraham då han med sitt folk kom till Kaanans land. Melisedek beskrivs inte speciellt ingående i Bibeln, men i legendfloran som vuxit kring honom blir han desto viktigare. Melisedek blir där förfader till alla Jerusalems överstepräster och en symbol för dess tempel. Judisk mystik gjorde honom till sinnebilden för ”tro och förnuft”; ritens, ordningens och traditionens upprätthållare, dess försvarare mot kaos och kätteri. En roll som övertogs av kristen mytologi, där Melisedek får symbolisera den kristna kyrkan.

Graham Hancock blev nu eld och lågor. Mellan portvalvet med Melisedek och Drotttningen av Sabas portvalv finns framställningen av oxvagnen med Förbundsarken. Kunde inte det betyda att i Chartres norra portal framställs det hur Förbundsarken förs från Jerusalem (Melisedek) till Etiopien (Drottningen av Saba)! Kebra Nagast berättade alltså sanningen och det fanns tydligen ett samband mellan kristen medeltida mystik och det faktum att arken nu befinner sig i Etiopien. Den skadade latinska inskrifterna under relieferna med Förbundsarken lyder ARCA CEDERIS, som kan betyda Arken som som sänds iväg och HIC AMICTUR ACHA CEDERIS Här är arken gömd som du skall sända iväg.

Hancock spekulerar vilt. Han bygger upp en fantastisk historia om hur Tempelherreorden, en monastisk riddarorden som grundades i Palestina under korsfarartiden, var involverad i konstruktionen av Chartres katedral. Att denna orden visste att Förbundsarken var i Etiopien och att hela katedralen utgör en slags mystisk karta som visar Ordens religiösa tänkande och även antyder Förbundsarkens närvaro i Aksum. Spekulationer som med tiden ledde Hancock till Wolfram von Escenbachs Parzival.

Spännande och ytterst inspirerande! Speiellt som jag läst Parzival och min äldsta dotter arbetade med scenografin till Wagners opera med samma namn. Men, men … sakta i backarna – det hela är faktiskt alltför svindlande. Jag hejdar mig i min läsning av The Sign and the Seal. Jag har varit i Chartres. Visserligen har jag inte under tre dagar långsamt vandrat kring i katedralen och läst en mängd guideböcker. Men, jag hade faktiskt lagt märke till Drottningen av Saba, som för övrigt inte, som Hancock skriver, enbart finns framställd i naturlig storlek i den norra portalen, påbörjad 1204, hon är även framställd i samma storlek i den Kungliga Portalen, påbörjad 1145. Hancock har dock rätt i att Melisedek enbart förekommer i den norra portalen. Detta fick mig att undra om det i själva verket inte var så att Hancock systematiskt plockat fram sådant som passade in i hans vilda spekulerande och försmått sådant som inte stödde hans argumentation.

Jag hade nämligen redan märkt att han gjort en lite väl stor affär av sina personliga efterforskningar och upptäckter. Hancock bläddrar i sina guideböcker, konsulterar experter och reser jorden runt. Jag undrar dock varför han inte till en början gjorde som jag under mina betydligt kortare besök i Chartres – tittade in i bokhandlar och turistbutiker och på de flesta sådana ställen fann flera upplagor av Louis Charpentiers Les mystères de la cathédral de Chartres som skrevs redan 1966 och som då jag för första gången besökte Chartres 2010 fanns att tillgå på en mängd olika språk. Jag köpte ingen av dem eftersom jag 1982 i Santo Domingo hade införskaffat och läst en spansk översättning av den galna boken.

Även Charpentier hade lagt märke till det två drottningarna, som han visserligen inte kopplade till Etiopien, men likväl till Tempelherrarna, liksom framställningarna av Förbundsarken. Charpentiers teori gick ut på att Tempelriddarna varit intimt förknippade med konstruktionen av så gott som alla franskgotiska katedraler. De hade under sin första tid i Jerusalem grävt tunnlar under dess tempelplats, där de hade sitt högkvarter i Al Aqsa-moskén. De hade då funnit en mängd hebreiska skrifter och föremål, bland dem antagligen även Förbundsarken, som de tog med sig till Frankrike. I arken låg, enligt Charpentier, även Lagens bok, som innehöll en mängd matematiska beräkningar som på egyptisk grund förklarade hur man kunde uppföra byggnader i enlighet med kosmiska lagar. Sådana beräkningar inspirerade den revolutionerande byggnadsteknik som först tillämpades i Chartres, vars katedral är den första byggnad som effektivt använder strävpelare för att åstadkomma den höga, ”himmelska” rymd som kännetecknar höggotikens imponerande katedralbyggen.

De okända mästerbyggarna i Chartres hade tidigare varit verksamma under Abbot Suger i Saint Denis utanför Paris, en kyrka som allmänt anses vara världens första gotiska byggnadsverk. Dessa två mästararna organiserade i Chartres ett byggmästarskrå de kallade Salomos barn och som av många ansågs vara ursprunget till Frimurarorden. Vad de eftersträvande var ett fullkomnande av Salomos avsikt med Jerusalems tempel:

en byggnad där en högre vetenskap tillämpades, där beräkningar, materia och andlig kraft förenades för att skapa en bro mellan två världar och därigenom få en besökare, om han inte är helt opåverkbar, att efter inträdandet i katedralen genomströmmas av energi och himmelsk harmoni, gestaltad genom ett perfekt utnyttjande av jordiskt material och därmed inte förbli samma man, eller kvinna, som före katedralbesöket.

Allt detta redogör Graham Hancock även för i sin bok, dock utan att nämna Louis Charpentiers bok, som jag antar att han måste ha läst. Enda skillnaden mellan Charpentiers tempelherreriddarspekulationer och Hancocks beskrivning av sambandet mellan Chartres och dessa mytomspunna krigsmunkar är att Charpentier ansåg att arken finns begravd under golvet i Chartres katedral, alltmedan Hancock tror att den finns i Aksum.

Jag trodde mig ha upptäckt att Hancock möjligen varit alltför benägen att plocka russin ur kakan, slarvat med grundforskning samtidigt som han tydligen var angelägen om att framställa sig som en skicklig privatspanare. Jag förundrades bland annat över Hancocks selektiva bibelläsning. Hur kom det sig att han upptäckte de mest obskyra antydningar om att Förbundsarken kunde ha förts till Etiopien, samtidigt som han uppenbarligen bläddrade förbi de ställen som ifrågasatte vad han trodde sig ha sett och upptäckt. Ta exempelvis de två relieferna med Förbundsarken som han ”upptäckt” i Chartres. Deras bildspråk förklaras tydligt i Bibelns första Samuelsbok.

Tumultet vid arken, som Hancock inte går närmare in på, utspelar sig under slaget vid Shilo då Israel förlorade 30 000 man och deras fiender, filistéerna, tog ”Guds ark” som krigsbyte efter att ha dödat dess beskyddare: ”Elis båda söner Hofni och Pinechas” (1 Sam 4:10-11). Rovet förde dock ingen lycka med sig. Filistéerna placerade arken i gudens Dogons tempel i staden Ashod, men redan dagen efter splittrades avgudabilden av sig själv samtidigt som hela Ashods befolkning drabbades av dödliga hemorrojder och tusentals människor dog. De fann ingen annan utväg än att sända tillbaka Förbundsarken till Israels folk, tillsammans med ett skuldoffer. Filistéerna göt fem bölder och fem råttor i guld, ”lika många som filistéernas hövdingar”, lade dem i ett skrin bredvid Förbundsarken, som de placerade på en vagn dragen av två kor. De lät sedan korna självmant föra arken tillbaka till israelerna.

Det är den scenen vi ser återgiven på den andra reliefen i Chartres norra portal, som till och med visar guldråttorna och bölderna, samt vad som fanns inuti Förbundsarken – Mose lagtavlor och ett krus med den manna som Gud sände till Israels folk då de vandrade i öknen.

Det finns för övrigt ännu en framställning av arken i Chartres norra portal, som Hancock glömt att redogöra för, och där får vi tillsammans med lagtavlorna och mannakruset även se Moses bror Arons blommande stav, som även den fanns förvarad i arken.

På skulpturen i Chartres bär Melisedek en bägare i ena handen, antagligen en anspelning på att Kyrkan genom nattvardsritualen förvaltar Kristi blod och att Melisedek representerar kopplingen mellan det Nya och det Gamla Testamentet, det Nya Förbundet beseglat genom Kristi offerdöd och det Gamla Förbundet som ingicks genom Moses avtal med Gud och bevisades genom tavlorna med Tio Guds Bud. Båda förbunden bevaras och garanteras genom den Kristna Kyrkan. För övrigt kallas nordportalen i Chartres katedral för Förbundets Portal och dess reliefer och statyer förenar gestalter och tankegångar från såväl det Nya som det Gamla Testamentet. Hancock ser dock bägaren i Meisedeks hand som en framställning av den heliga Graalen och det som vilar i kärlet är enligt honom inte en oblat utan en sten, en uppfattning som förde honom till von Eschenbachs Parzival.

Genom att blanda in Graalen och Tempelherrar i sin historia förvandlas den hos Hancock från att vara enbart ett sökande efter Förbundsarken, den blir till ett sökande efter Den Heliga Graalen. Därmed betträdde han en stig som med tiden förde honom långt bort från verkligheten – in i fiktionens värld, där fantasi och verklighet blandas samman på ett sätt som skapar konspirationsteorier. Där man söker Graalen med hjälp av Tempelherrar är faran stor att man förvandlas till den sovande mannen i Goyas etsning: ”Då förnuftet sover skapas monster”.

Abbot Suger (1081-1151) vars mästerbyggare reste katedralen i Chartres var en energisk politiker som under vissa perioder var Frankrikes verklige härskare. Han var stundtals lierad med den minst lika driftige Bernhard av Clairvaux (1091-1153), som var en av samtidens mest franstående teologer och likt Suger en politiskt inflytelserik ledare. Under St. Bernhards ledning växte Cistercienserorden från 1112 till hans död till att omfatta 280 kloster över hela Europa. St. Bernhard poängterade att munkars hårda arbete skulle generera inkomster till Guds större ära. Även konst och arkitektur skulle omforma jordiskt material till en bekräftelse på Guds allmakt. Cistercienserna anlitade samtidens främsta arkitekter och stenhuggare. Samtliga deras nybyggnationer var uppförda i sten och redan 1133 påbörjades ståtliga byggnadsverk i St. Bernhards moderkloster i Clairvaux och den nya byggnadsstil som skapades där, Gotiken, kom att bli stilbildande i hela Europa.

Förutom praktiskt inriktat arbete poängterade St. Bernhard att varje kloster genom hantverk och jordbruk skulle bli såväl självförsörjande som vinstdrivande. Skt. Bernhard var förutom en strikt praktiker en asketisk mystiker med en gränslös hängivenhet till Jungfru Maria och inte minst kulten av den Svarta Madonnan, som han antog vara Maria Magdalena och associerade med kvinnan i Salomos Höga Visa, som om sig själv säger ”svart är jag, dock är jag vacker”. Skt. Bernhard skrev inte mindre än sextio ”betraktelser” kring detta bibelställe och vi finner numera svarta madonnor i hela Europa. I Chartres katedral finns/fanns två stycken. Den mest dyrkade av dem blev efter en restauration 2017, under våldsamma protetser – vit. Restaurörerna hävdade att hon efter en våldsam brand 1194 hade blivit svart och mörknat ytterligare genom sot och damm till en sådan grad att den svarta beläggningen blivit nästan porslinsaktig. Hädelse! utropade den Svarta Madonnans trogna tillbedjare som menade att antingen hade hon varit svart från början, då hon tillverkades under Skt. Bernhards ledning, eller så hade Gud 1194 genom ett mirakel gjort henne svart. Numera säljs vykort med både den ”svarta” och den ”vita” madonnan.

Skt. Bernhard var även Tempelherreordens främste förespråkare och genom sin inriktning på hårt arbete och askes kom han att poängtera att denna orden var såväl religiös som militärisk. Han hjälpte till att utforma den ed som alla ordensmedlemmar avlade och som bland annat innebar att de svor lydnad till Bethanias Maria, det vill säga den Svarta Madonnan. Detta undgick givetvis inte Graham Hancock som såg ett intimt samband med Etiopiens svarta drottning och Den Heliga Graalen i Melisedeks hand och därmed också Förbundsarken och Tempelherrarna, Skt. Bernhard och Wolfram von Eschenbachs Parzival. Denna mångbottnade och märkliga roman skrevs i Tyskland någon gång under 1200-tales början, mitt under den omvälvande tid då Chartres katedral byggdes.

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170-1220) var såväl poet som riddare och på den första bild som finns av honom (i Codex Manesse från 1304) ser vi inte hur han ser ut eftersom han är klädd som inför en turnering och står med fälld hjälm bredvid sin väpnare och häst. Mycket lite är känt om von Eschenbachs liv. Av allt att döma var han av lågadel och kom från Bayern. Under sin livstid var han vid flera tyska furstehov en tämligen välkänd minnessångare, ett ord som på medeltidstyska egentligen betydde kärlekssångare.

Vi vet än mindre om Chrétien de Troyes (antagligen 1135-1190) den förste som skrev om Graallegenden. Uppenbarligen var han en lärd man, kanske en präst, verksam vid hoven i Champagne och Flandern. Någonstans nämner Chrétien de Troyes att han översatt Ovidius. von Eschenbach hade uppenbarligen en helt annan karaktär. Ibland stiger han fram i sina egna skrifter, påstår att hans fru är så vacker att han inte vågar presentera hennes för sina mecenater, driver gäck med sina samtida författare och skryter med att han varken kan skriva eller läsa. Det senare skall säkerligen tas med en nypa salt. von Eschenbach var uppenbarligen väl förtrogen med franska och rör sig som fisken i vattnet bland alla de sagor, legender och sånger som hans samtida berättade och sjöng. Dessutom tycks von Eschenbach vara kunnig om alkemi och astrologi, som spelar en stor roll i hans roman. Han är minst lika förtrogen med Arthursagorna som Chrétien. Hos von Eschenbachs finns det liksom hos Chrétien en mängd skildringar av torneringar och stridigheter, men det finns hos von Eschenbach en mer påtaglig, kanske självupplevd realism än hos den franske hovpoeten och den berättardynamik som emellanåt bryter fram kan vara ordentligt engagerande.

Minns exempelvis hur riddaren Gawain kastas av sin häst i en strid ström Han lyckas ta sig upp på fast mark, men ser hur hästen hjälplöst driver vidare mot sin drunkningsdöd. Liggande på magen i sin åbäkiga rustning kan riddaren inte nå den skräckslagna hästens tyglar, men han lyckas riva åt sig en lång gren med vilken han i sista sekund lyckas fånga in hästens seldon och kan mot förmodan föra den kämpande hästkraken så pass nära att han med händerna lyckas dra till sig det stackars djuret så det får fast mark under hovarna.

Eller då Parzeval i ett skogsbryn överraskas av en graalriddare, utsedd att skydda Graalen från utomstående. Den unge riddaren spränger på sin häst med sänkt lans mot Perzeval, som i sin tur sporrar sin springare och går till motangrepp. De båda ryttarna stöter samman, graalynglingens lans glider mot Parzevals ringbrynja och han förmår hålla sig kvar i sadeln, men hans lans träffar motståndaren där ”hjälmens snodd är fästad” och graalriddaren slungas handlöst ur sadeln, rakt nerför en brant. Paival lyckas dock inte hejda sin häst som också den störtar utför branten. Han faller av och försöker genom att gripa tag i tyglarna hindra hästens snabba hasande utför, men den knäcker frambenen, tyglarna brister och springaren rullar hjälplöst nerför branten tills den ligger livlös vid vid sluttningens fot alltmedan Parzivals unge motståndare linkar bort från sammandrabbningen och han själv mödosamt tar sig uppför branten och sedan sitter upp i sadeln på graalriddarens kvarlämnade häst, som lugnt betar på valplatsen.

Romanen börjar med att riddaren Gahmuret lämnar sitt fosterland efter det att hans äldre bror fått hela fadersarvet, brodern är dock en ädel person som skänker honom en stor del av sin rikedom som den äventyrlige brodern använder för att med ett ett välutrustat följe ta sig till morernas länder där han bland annat tjänar kalifen av Baghdad och trolovar sig med den mörka Drottning Balkane av Zazamanc. Den afrikanska drottningens skönhet och grace bländar den nordiske riddaren som spinner planer för att erövra hennes gunst. von Eschenbachs skildring av en natt då Gahmuret ligger klarvaken i Belkanes palats och plågas av sina begär påminner i viss mån, genom sin instängda, intima atmosfär, om Salomos och Makadas första kärleksnatt:

Ljusen omkring honom brann med klar låga. Hjälten förlorade tålamodet med en natt som släpade sig fram. Tankar på den mörkhyade, moriska drottningen fick honom gång på gång att tappa fattningen, likt en videgren piskades han från sida till sida, det kändes som om alla hans leder skulle brista. Han brann av lust efter kärlek och strid. Bad att hans heta begär skulle stillas! Hans hjärta dundrade så att det kom honom att tro att det ekade i rummet. Han var nära att brista av stridsiver, då bröstkorgen hävde sig spändes den som senorna på ett armborst – så påfrestande var hans pockande begär. Han låg sömnlös tills han såg gryningens gråa ljus.

Intensiteten i von Eschenbachs strids-och kärleksscener speglar hans yttrande om att ”den som behärskar ögonblicket, behärskar livet”.

Slutligen når Gahmuret sitt begärs uppfyllelse. Han gifter sig med Belkane som föder deras son, Feirefiz, stilig och stark ”men vit och svart som en skata”. Då sonen föds har Gahmuret piskats vidare av sin äventyrslust och lämnat Belkane. Senare gifter han sig i Wales med Herzeloyde som blir mor till Parzeval. Gahmuret är fortfarande gift med Belkane, som han fortsätter tråna efter men likväl inte vill återvända till. Att han gifter om sig gör Gahmuret ingenting eftersom ”den mörka Belkane inte är kristen” och han därmed inte gör sig skyldig till bigami. Längre fram i berättelsen kommer halvbröderna Ferirefiz och Parzeval att mötas, bli goda vänner och tillsammans finna Graalen. Parzeval blir dess beskyddare och förvaltare, medan Feirefiz gifter sig med en Graaljungfru och med henne får sonen Prester John, Johannes Prästen, som blir härskare över det sagolika rike där Graalen finns, och som Hancock vill få oss att tro – även Förbundsarken, alltså i Etiopien. Där, liksom i Parzeval, är Graalen inte en bägare utan en sten, en kvadratisk tabot, som antagligen motsvarar Lagens tavlor som förvaras, eller förvarades, i Förbundsarken.

De flesta etiopiska kyrkor förvarar en eller flera tabots. De är i allmänhet femton gånger femton centimeter, kvadratiska plattor gjorda av alabaster, marmor eller akaciaträ. De är ytterst vördade föremål och täckta med dyrbara tyger bärs de under vissa ceremonier på huvudet av präster. Det finns en mängd tabots i engelska kyrkor, bland annat i Westminster Abbey. De hamnade där efter det att engelska soldater tagit med sig hundratals tabots när den etiopiska staden Magdala år1868 hade plundrats och förstörts. Bilden nedan, från en engelsk tidning, visar den döde, etiopiske kejsaren Tewodros II som sköt sig själv när slaget förlorats.

Hos von Eschenbach, liksom i flera andra samtida berättelser och romaner, förekommer ofta sammandrabbningar mellan kristna riddare och krigare från andra kulturer, ofta skildrade som om det rörde sig om torneringar. von Eschenbachs ”ohöviska” stil skiljer sig från dessa och hans till synes vårdslösa och ”bullrande” berättande retade uppenbarligen hans klassiskt skolade och återhållsamme samtida Gottfried von Strassburg, som kallade honom ”harens vän”, ett uttryck genom vilket han av allt att döma ville likna von Eschenbergs snabba flykt och tvära kast med harens språng framför en jagande räv. von Strassburg ondgjorde sig över:

uppfinnare av vilda skrönor, hyrda berättelsejägare, som fuskar med falska smycken och lurar de trögtänkta, som förvandlar skräp till guld för barn och ur magiska lådor häller pärlor som enbart är damm [...] men vi för vår del är inte så fräcka att vi lånar lyster från svartkonstböcker.

Det senare är en del av von Eschenbachs attraktion – han förlänar Chrétien de Troyes graallegend djup och spänning genom att krydda den med alkemi och orientalisk mystik.

Mitt i sin berättelse om Parzivals sökande efter Graalen låter von Eschenbach graalsökaren i djupet av skogarna möta eremiten Trevizent ”som åt uselt på måndagarna och inte mycket bättre under de andra veckodagarna”. Eftersom hans ”vapen mot Djävulen var självförnekande” åt han varken fisk eller kött. Trevizent är i själva verket von Eschenbachs språkrör i romanen och den ende som känner Graalens hemlighet. Han berättar för Parzival att alla som tidigare frågat honom om Graalen har från honom inte fått annat än besvikelse, eftersom den man som ursprungligen berättat ”allt” för honom hade uttryckligen befallt Trevizent att inte avslöja något förrän tiden kom då han måste göra det och Parzivals ankomst till hans eländiga boning var just det tillfället.

Trevizent berättar nu att Graalen inte alls är den bägare som Jesus använde för att instifta Nattvarden och som Josef av Arimathea sedan använde för att samla upp Frälsarens blod efter det att han dött på korset. Nej, det är i själva verket en sten. von Eschenbach kallar den för lapsit excellis, en av hans typiskt invecklade ordlekar. Uttrycket kan betyda en sten ex celis, från himlen, men excilis kan också motsvara elixir, ett ord som under Medeltiden betecknade såväl en universalmedicin som kunde bota allt, som alkemisternas mytomspunna De Vises Sten som kunde omvandla materia. Ordet kommer från arabiskans  al-ʾiksīr, ursprungligen med betydelsen ”ett pulver för att torka ut sår”.

Till sin berättelse om graalstenen inspirerades von Eschenbach med största sannolikhet av Pfaffe Lamprechts Alexanderlied från 1150, som baserad på Talmud återberättade en historia om hur Alexander den Store sände budbärare till världens ände där de kom fram till en hög mur som de antog kringärdade det jordiska Paradiset. . En liten lucka öppnades i muren och en man räckte Alexanders sändebud en ädelsten ”med en ovanlig färg och märkvärdig utstrålning. I storlek och form liknade den mycket ett mänskligt öga”. Då Alexander fått stenen, som då den lagts på en våg visade sig vara såväl obegripligt lätt, som otroligt tung, förklarade en vis jude för honom att stenen var:

mästaren till all visdom, konungars besegrare, ägare till alla kungariken, världens sista ord, stenen är din rådgivare, din bestraffare; dess till synes obetydliga substans kommer att skydda dig från all usel strävan.

En liknande historia berättades på 700-talet av den arabiske författaren Wahb ibn Munabbih och långt senare av den persiske författaren Abu Yusuf Nizami Ganjavi (1140-1203). Samtliga, såväl judar som muslimer, var överens om att stenen hade ett himmelskt ursprung och att den till människorna förmedlade en insikt om allas vår dödlighet och att vi därför bör hjälpa varandra.

Att von Eschenbachs graalsten föll från himlen kan väcka associationer till den svarta sten som sitter inmurad i det östra hörnet av Ka´ban i Mekka, som för muslimer utgör den absoluta jordiska mittpunken. Enligt traditionen utgör al-Hajar-ul-Asswad, den Svarta Stenen, en hierofani, ett föremål där det gudomliga manifesterar sig. Den föll till marken för att visa Adam var han skulle bygga ett altare till Herren. Stenen var från början vit, eller smaragdfärgad, men människors synder gjorde den med tiden svart.

Om Graalstenen även är ett elixir kan den kopplas till alkemin som under Medeltiden uppfattades som en urgammal, egyptisk vetenskap förmedlad genom judar och muslimer. Som sådan hade den även en koppling till himlavalvet där stjärnor och andra himlakroppar hade sina motsvarigheter i jordiska stenar. Smaragden motsvarades då av planeten Merkurius, gudarnas budbärare, vars budskap kunde förändra händelseförlopp. Inom alkemin motsvarades Merkurius av kvicksilver, ett ämne som ansågs kunna skifta från flytande till fast form och därför symboliserade övergången från död till liv, alltså ett livgivande element.

Hos Wolfram von Eschenbach producerar Graalen mängder med mat och dryck, helar sår och fungerar dessutom som centrum i en slags kult som leder till fred och upplysning. För övrigt är det märkligt att von Eschenbah inte uttryckligen förlänar Graalen med några kristna allusioner och att kristendom spelar en så marginell roll i hans roman. Om kristna präster nämns är det uteslutande som officianter vid riter. Märkligt är också att Parzivals vapenbroder Feirefiz, som tillsammans med honom som de första Graalsökare verkligen får se Den Heliga Graalen och uppleva dess kraft, vid det tillfället fortfarande är muslim. Det är först när Feirefiz gifter sig med den jungfruliga Graalbärerskan som han låter sig döpas och de därefter får sin son Johannes Prästen, Prester John, den framtida härskaren över Graalriket.

Under tolvhundratalet, då Parzeval skrevs, fanns det ett relativt starkt muslimskt inflytande speciellt vid de franska och italienska furstehoven. Européer var fortfarande närvarande i Ourtremer, korsfararstaterna som bildats efter det första korståget, då Jerusalem erövrades 1099. I dessa stater var muslimer och judar i överväldigande majoritet, men behärskades av kristna krigare i tjänst hos europeiska furstehus. Korsfararstaterna återerövrades dock under 1200-talet successivt av muslimerna. Kungariket Jerusalem föll 1291 då Acre förlorades och vid den tiden hade även dess ”kristna” vasallstater – Galiléen, Jaffa/Ascalon, Oultrejordain och Sidon – återtagits av muslimer, men under nästan två sekel hade muslimer och kristna påverkat varandra genom såväl blodig maktkamp som fredlig samlevnad.

I Europa var förhållandet det motsatta. Där hade muslimerna från 711 och en kort tid framöver erövrat Spanien och Portugal (Al-Andalus) och en kustremsa i Provence (Fraxinet), men sedan sakta drivits tillbaka av kristna furstar, tills 1236 det enda som återstod av detta en gång så mäktiga rike var Granada. Det Sicilianska Emiratet, som emellanåt även kontrollerade Sardinien och den södra italienska halvön bestod i mer än hundra år, mellan 965 till 1072, då det erövrades av de kristna normannerna.

De kristna furstarna i Spanien, Provence och södra Italien var dock fortfarande tvungna att att ha muslimer, eller bristfälligt ”omvända” sådana, i sin tjänst och den ömsesidiga påverkan som ägde rum mellan de olika religionerna/kulturerna fortsatte under lång tid framöver. Flera minnessångare och fransk/provensalska trubadurer rörde sig under 1200-talet mellan furstehus där det fortfarande fanns en hel del inverkan från muslimsk kultur – inom vetenskap, litteratur och vanor – och det är inte så underligt om spår av detta dyker upp hos Wolfram von Eschenbach.

På ett ställe mitt i sin roman vänder sig plötsligt von Eschenbach till sina läsare och nämner sin förgångare Chrétien de Troyes, vars oavslutade Le Conte Du Graal von Eschenbach hade fullbordat:  

Om Mästaren Chretien de Troyes gjort denna berättelse en orättvisa, så har Kyot, som sände oss det sanna budskapet, anledning att ondgöra sig. Det är provensalen som berättar den definitiva versionen av hur Hrezeloydes son vann Graalen, så som sagts honom då Anfortas hade svikit sin uppgift. Det är från Provence till de tyska länderna som de sanna nyheterna blivit oss tillsända.

Om denne Mäster Kyot från Provence inte hade funnit hela berättelsen om Parsifal i en bok med ”hednisk skrift” hade den säkerligen aldrig nått kristna länder. Den ”vise” Kyot som skrev på franska, men kunde såväl latin som arabiska, hade ”i ett hörn” i den moriska stadenToledo funnit en bortglömd bok skriven på arabiska. Den var författad av en jude vid namn Flegetanis, som i de moriska länderna var mycket uppskattad för sina bedrifter och kunskaper. Han var physicus (ett av de många ord som von Eschenbach på egen hand hittar på och som tydligen kan betyda såväl läkare som alkemist) kommen från en ”israelisk ätt som härstammade direkt från Salomo”. Enligt Kyot dyrkade Flegetanis en kalv och trodde på Jupiter och Juno och von Eschenbach konstaterar parentetiskt:

Hur kan Djävulen göra sådant hån av kunniga människor och att Han vars allmakt är störst inte kunnat hindra dem, för vilka alla underverk är kända, från att framhärda i sina galenskaper?

Den ”otrogne” Flegetanis kunde genom planeternas och himmelskropparnas banor utröna hur de påverkar människors liv och deklarerade att det ”fanns ett sådant ting som kallas Graal vars namn han läste i stjärnorna utan något större besvär”. En himmelsk härskara hade fört den till jorden och skänkt den till en kristen, jordisk ätt som fått till uppdrag att bevara den och genom ett oförvitligt leverne få de rätta personerna att närma sig den och sprida dess välgärningar över världen.

Graalen var från början en smaragd som suttit i kronan på Guds favoritängel Lucifer, Ljusbäraren, men då denne gjort uppror mot Gud och slungats ner i Helvetet tog änglarna hand om smaragden. Det var änglar som inte tagit ställning i striden mot de upproriska änglarna i Lucifers följe, de som sedan blev demoner, som fört stenen till jorden. Dessa neutrala änglar hade skänkt Graalen till släkten Anjou som i sitt slott Munsalvaesche samlat unga, oskuldsfulla människor från hela världen, män och kvinnor, fattiga som rika, muslimer såväl som kristna, för att de i Graalens närvaro och utstrålning skulle komma att inse vad människornas verkliga uppgift är. Oavsett ras och religion skulle de upprätthålla fred och samlevnad på jorden och detta var en del av orsaken till varför halvbröderna Parzeval och Ferirefiz valdes att upprätta Graalens makt och inflytande efter det förfall som rått under Anfortas styre.

Trevizent som i von Eschenbachs bok berättar allt detta för Parzeval, som förvisso är såväl ung, som obildad, förklarar sedan att han av högre makter hade utsetts för att uppsöka palatset Munsalvaesche och Graalsällskapet, som genom Anfortas försyndelser blivit allt kraftlösare. Parzevals uppdrag var att bota Anfortas, som eremiten nu avslöjar är Parzevals farbror, och efter hans död skulle Parzeval bli Graalens förvaltare.

I Munsalvaesche bevittnar Parzeval senare hur Graalen förnyar kraften hos Graalssällskapet. På Långfredagen placeras Graalen på ett bord gjort av hyacint, d.v.s. röd zirkon, en vit duva sänker sig över den från skyn och

genom den stenens kraft bränns Phoenix till aska, men ur den askan återfår den sitt liv. Phoenix befrias från sin sönderbrända fjäderdräkt och avger därefter så mycket ljus utstrålning att den åter blir lika vacker som förut.

I det föregående avsnittet spelar von Eschenbach upp alla de magiska berättarknep som Goffried von Strassburg anklagade honom för att blända sin publik med. Sin vana trogen spelar von Eschenbach rollen av en obildad man, kanske en allusion till den trohjärtade Parzival, som egentligen inte vet vad han talar om. Men under ytan på von Eschenbachs uppenbara taskspeleri går det att upptäcka en mängd allusioner till Islam och arabisk kultur, speciellt astrologi och alkemi.

Varken Kyot eller Flegetanis har existerat. von Eschenbach påstår att Flegtantis var jude, men i själva verket är det namnet på en arabisk bok Felek-Thânî, som rör alkemi och hemlig kunskap. Ordet betyder Den Andra Sfären och är enligt arabisk astrologi Mekurius sfär, som inom alkemin är kvicksilvrets sfär, det element som tros skifta form och kunna omvandla andra element. Kvicksilver är oftast vitt, men symboliseras av den gröna smaragden – Graalstenen.

von Eschenbach påstod att Flegetanis dyrkade en ”kalv”. Men, var han inte jude? Återigen driver von Eschenbach med sina läsare. Inom judisk mystik som den uttrycks i Zohar, Strålglansen, den judiska Kabbalans viktigaste skrift som troligen skrevs under 1200-talet i Kastilien av Mose de Leon, motsvarar egl, ”kalv” stjärntecknet shׁvr, ”oxen” vars stensymbol är smaragden,Oxen är också en av de fyra varelser, hayyot som omger och skyddar Merkabah, Guds tron/vagn – en man, ett lejon, en oxe och en örn.

Även Långfredagens graalceremoni kan sättas i samband med arabisk alkemi, där grönt kvicksilver (smaragden), står för en ”feminin” princip, kyla och fukt, och rött svavel (zirkon)som står för en manlig princip, hetta och röelse, elemementen förenas genom tillsats av luft och eld (den vita duvan) varigenom nytt liv skapas. Denna pocess utgör det så kallade ”alkemiska bröllopet”.

Även Graalsällskapet har satts i samband med en arabisk/kristen symbios. von Eschenbach kallar emellanåt gruppen av edsvurna män och kvinnor som skyddar Graalen för Templeisen, ännu ett av honom påhittat ord, som senare har kommit att betraktas som om han skrev om Tempelherreorden, fast om han antytt det skulle det vara mer närliggande att von Eschenbach använt sig av den på hans tid välkända tyska beteckningen Tempelherren. För övrigt var den Ordern inte så inflytelserik i Tyskland. Den instiftades där först hundra år senare än i Frankrike och var verksam enbart en kort tid. Men, eftersom von Eschenbach var väl bevandrad i fransk kultur är det inte alls otroligt att han hade Tempelherrarna i tankarna då han skrev sin berättelse och medvetet satte dem i samband med Islam.

Det har ofta påpekats att Tempelherreorden hade stora likheter med den muslimska lika mystiska och till stor del initiationsbaserade, religiösa och stridande organisation – Haššāšīn, en beteckning som i Europa tolkades som ”haschischätare”, fast ordet betyder egentligen ”folk som följer Al-Hassan”, en utbrytargrupp från de Shia-muslimska ismaeliterna. Denna grupp fick sitt namn genom Ismail ibn Jafar som ansågs vara den rätte arvtagaren till Muhammads kusin och fosterbror Ali, av shia-muslimer betraktad som den högsta auktoriteten efter Koranen och Muhammad.

Haššāšīn grundades av Hassan-i Sabbah (1060-1124), som föddes i Persien där det mesta av hans verksamhet ägde rum innan han 1090 isolerade sig i bergsfästet Alamut i norra Persien, ungefär 10 mil norr om det nuvarande Teheran. Borgen kallades Örnnästet och var svår att erövra; det fanns enbart en möjlig ingång och fästningen var försedd med ett mycket sofistikerat vattenförsörjningssystem. Från denna otillgängliga plats styrde Hassan-i Sabbah, som numera kallades Den gamle i berget, med järnhand sin terrororganisation. Hassan-i Sabbah var en grundlärd, men ytterst sträng teolog, en fanatiker som lät döda sina egna söner för att de enligt honom inte varit tillräckligt renläriga. Den äldste dödades eftersom fadern antog han varit inblandad i ett mord som inte fått faderns välsignelse, efter det att sonen halshuggits uppdagades det dock att han varit oskyldig. Sin yngste son lät Hassan-i Sabbah avrätta efter det att han ertappats med att dricka vin.

Grunden för assassinernas tro var femtioett epistlar kallade Rasa´il och som kan beskrivas som en syntes av muslimsk juridik och grekisk filosofi. Grundtanken var att mikrokosmos, d.v.s. den enskilda människan, måste harmoniseras med makrokosmos, d.v.s. hela universum. Detta skulle ske etappvis genom intensiva studier; först av matematik och logik sedan av fysik, psykologi och slutligen teologi. Inom assassinernas krets var allt graderat; undervisning såväl som karriär. Längst ner på skalan finner vi fida´i, krigare beredda att offra sig för den goda sakens skull, sedan följde lasiq, anhängare, refiq, kamrater, och slutligen da´i, de initierade. Över dem alla presiderade Imamen – Hassan-i Sabbah och hans efterträdare. De troende avancerade inom organisationen genom hårda tester och komplicerade initiationsceremonier.

Haššāšīn var uppbyggd som en maffiaorganisation där de lägre kategorierna var ovetande om vem som befann sig inom den högre ledningen. Samtliga sektmedlemmar åtlydde blint de order som utgick från Imamen. Avfällingar dödades utan misskund. Flera stridande förband ingick inom Haššāšīn, men mycket av verksamheten grundade sig på hot, mutor, utpressning, skyddspengar och välplanerade lönnmord. Sekten tros ha gett upphov till ordet assassin, lönnmördare och även maffia, som antas komma från arabiskans mu’afa, beskydd. Sekten använde sig av alla medel som den antog befrämjade dess höga målsättning – skapandet av en gudomlig harmoni där var och en som ansågs utgöra ett hot mot en sådan världsordning måste undanröjas.

Tempelherreorden hade i Palestina och Syrien bevisligen samröre med Haššāšīn. Liksom sina muslimska sektmotståndare uppförde eller besatte Tempelriddarna befästa borgar som stödjepunkter i strategiska gränsområden. Även de kristna munksoldaterna var fanatiskt trogna vad de uppfattade som sitt gudomliga uppdrag. De samlade på sig ansenliga rikedomar och var strängt hierarkiskt organiserade, där man genom hemliga initiationsceremonier nådde en högre ställning. Tempelherrarnas kadrer var uppdelade i lekmän, sergeanter och riddare, samtliga med olika underavdelningar och hela organisationen lydde blint under en Stormästare.

Liksom Haššāšīn agerade Tempelherrarna vid sidan om andra maktstrukturer. De var enbart underställda sin Stormästare, var skattebefriade och behövde därmed inte betala tionde till Kyrkan. Ordern åtnjöt egen asylrätt, samt tullfrihet och till skillnad från andra katoliker kunde deras medlemmar inte exkommuniceras av påven. Liksom Haššāšīn spred tempelherrarna metodiskt sitt inflytande inom en mängd olika länder. En bidragande orsak till Tempelherrarnas framgångar var att deras organisation hade fullständig kontroll över sina inkomster och att de, liksom judarna, var tillåtna att låna ut pengar mot ränta, något som sedermera också blev den främsta orsaken till Tempelherreriddarordens slutgiltiga undergång.

Filip IV av Frankrike (1268-1314) förde ständiga och kostsamma krig. Trots att han hårt beskattade sitt folk och Kyrkan räckte inte inkomsterna och han blev efterhand gravt skuldsatt hos såväl Tempelriddarorden som judarna. Filip löste problemet genom att 1306 kasta ut alla judar ur Frankrike och beslagta deras kapital och egendomar. Året därefter grep han samtliga riddare inom tempelherreriddarorden, som genom en banbulla av hans marionett påven Klemens V förlorade sina privilegier och upplöstes. Ordens Stormästare Jacques de Molay brändes levande på bål i Paris den 18:e maj 1314 och Tempelherreriddarorden försvann därmed från den allmänna historien, men överlevde inom legendbildningar, konspirationsteorier och hemliga sällskap.

Som fågel Phoenix ur lågorna uppstod tempelherrarna inom de så kallades Frimurarlogerna. Dessa sade sig bevara en mängd regler och ceremonier som förklarades ha sitt ursprung i en övervintrad Tempelherreriddarorden. Dessa sällskap vars medlemmar invaldes och initierades på rekommendation av tidigare medlemmar fann sitt urspung i hantverkarsällskap, så kallade gillen eller skrån, som varit mycket vanliga under Medeltiden och i flera länder fortlevt till våra dagar. Dessa sammanslutningar av folk från speciella yrkesinriktningar försåg sina medlemmar med vissa förmåner; de bekostade exempelvis begravningar och förvaltade fonder till stöd för efterlevande. De ordnade även festligheter och samkväm, som ofta förgylldes genom en mängd mer eller mindre hemlighetsfulla riter och ceremonier.

Efterhand började en del av dessa sammanslutningar acceptera medlemskap från betalande mecenater, som inte utövade de yrken som varit upphov till föreningarnas existens. Ett sådant hantverkarsällskap var uppenbarligen Frimurarna, som organiserade arkitekter, stenhuggare och murare. Rika borgare blev allt mer tongivande inom Frimurarorden och fördjupade dess ceremonier och regler genom bidrag från allsköns ockulta spekulationer som blivit allt vanligare under 1700-talet, då esoteriskt tänkande genomsyrade alltfler sammanslutningar. Rykten om esoteriska frumurarordnar började florera i England under den seanre delen av 1600-talet, men det var inte förrän 1717 när The Grand Loge of London etablerades som frimurarnas verksamhet blev en mer allmänt förkommande del av europeisk kulturhistoria. Uppenbarligen fyllde frimurarlogerna ett socialt behov och flera av dem blev efterhand grogrunden för nytänkande, såväl inom den filosofi som politik som anammades av en växande borgerlighet som retade sig på de privilegier som adel och prästerskap åtnjöt. 1789 fanns det i Frankrike inte mindre än 100 000 organiserade frimurare.

Mellan 1797 och 1798 gavs det i England ut fyra volymer av en skrift kallad Mémoires pour servir à l´histoire du jacobinisme, den var skriven av en jesuit vid namn Augustin Barrauel på flykt undan revolutionens Paris I sina böcker hävdade Barrauel att de revolutionära borgarnas krav på politisk frihet och folkstyre var en lögn som radikala filosofer skapat för att störta Kyrkan och monarkin och sedan ta kontrollen inte enbart över Frankrike utan även hela Europa och Amerika. Bakom dessa planer låg frimurarlogerna och Illuminati, enligt Barrauel två gudsförnekande hemliga organisationer med sina rötter långt tillbaka i tiden hos kätterska tankar som skapats hos gnostiker, hermetister och alkemister. Dessa två sinistra organisationer kontrollerade enligt den konservative jesuiten redan stora delar av Europas beslutsfattande organ.

Illuminati? Vid mitten av 1700-talet hade bayraren Adam Weishaupt irrat bort sig bland den mängd ockulta sällskap som vid den tiden florerade i hela Europa. I Tyskland baserade sig ockultism och alkemi ofta på läror från de protestantiska rosenkorsarna, eklektiska trosföreningar som i sin ideologi förenade inflytlytanden från teologi, astrologi, alkemi och judisk Kabbala. De hade fått sitt namn från en ett antal böcker som skrevs i Tyskland i början av 1600-talet och som handlade om en viss Christian Rosencreutz (1378-1484) som sades ha varit en lärd alkemist som efter att ha vistats i Mellersta östern hade instiftat ett brödraskap kallat Den Helige Andes Hus som skulle befrämja mänsklighetens välbefinnande, social rättvisa och botande av sjuka.

Christian Rosencreutz har säkerligen aldrig funnits, men 1616 publicerade den lutherske prästen Johann Valentin Andreae sin roman Christian Rosencreutz alkemiska bröllop i vilken nämnde Rosencreutz berättar om sin initiation som ”riddare av den Gyllene Stenen”. En process som tog inte mindre än sju år av hans liv i anspråk. Romanen är onekligen både underlig och fascinerande. Den ter sig som en skönlitterär beskrivning av en mängd alkemistiska processer och gradprövningar, liknande de som förekommer inom frimurarna och liknande esoteriska sällskap.

Det skulle förvåna mig om pastor Andreae inte läst von Eschenbachs Parzeval eftersom den har en mängd likheter med Christan Rosencreutz alkemiska bröllop. I Andreaes roman förekommer ett slott (Munsalvaesche?) i vilket den Gyllene Stenen (Graalen?) finns innesluten omgiven av ett hov av invigda väktare (graalriddare och graaljungfrur?) och där förekommer en ritual genom vilken en Fenixfågel blir pånyttfödd genom det alkemiska bröllop som romanens titel anspelar på (svavel och kvicksilver förenas genom yttre inverkan). Andreae försummar inte heller att föra in orientalisk mystik och alkemi i sin berättelse, exempelvis genom att låta sin Rosencreutz besöka muslimska länder och träffa hermetiker i Syrien och Harran, till och med Bernhard av Clairvaux dyker upp i en dröm.

Andreae kallade sin roman ett skämt, ett ludibrium, men liksom Parzival andas den en förhoppning om en framtid präglad av tolerans och fred; att mänskligheetn liksom substanserna i det alkemiska bröllopet skall förenas och ge upphov till en ny, rättvisare värld – den pånyttfödda Fågel Phoenix.

Jag antar att Christian Rosencreutz alkemiska bröllop liksom som Parzeval är en roman, en påhittad berättelse baserad på sina författares intresse av och stora kunskaper om esoteriska traditioner och alkemi, men inte alls som så många svärmare har förmodat mer eller mindre realistiska skildringar av existerande sammanslutningar som förvaltar och använder sig av mystiska föremål som kan förändra mänsklighetens gemensamma öden. Romanerna är skönlitteratur inget annat, men det hindrar inte att de inspirerat en mängd virrhjärnor att grunda hemliga sällskap och/eller upptäcka reella och farliga kabaler benägna att bringa oss alla i fördärvet.

Adam Weishaupt var säkerligen en förvirrad svärmare som med sitt drömda Illuminati ville grunda ett sällskap förmöget att förändra världen. Weishaupt verkade som professor i kanonisk rätt vid universitetet i Ingolstadt och räknade bland sina bekanta ingen mindre än den genialiske Johan Wolfgang von Gothe, som skrev en hel om alkemi, inte minst hans Märchen, Sagan, som är en ännu underligare  alkemistisk berättelse än Andreaes Alkemiska Bröllop. I Ingolstadt lyckades Weishaupt engagera fem av sina elever för att grunda Illuminati, som kanske bäst kan liknas vid en bokcirkel med lite hokus pokus vid sidan om bokslukandet.

Med tiden fick Weishaupt dock kontakt med en viss Adolf von Knigge, en frimurare med ett brett nätverk och Illuminatis ideer kring hermetism, social rättvisa, modern vetenskap och annat började sprida sig inom tyska frimurarloger tills dess Bayerns kufurste, Karl Theodor, fick tag på några Illuminatidokument och på grundval av deras revolutionära ideer beslöt att döma Weishaupt till döden. Denne försvarade sig dock vältaligt och bedömdes var en ofarlig svärmare men kanske likväl en potieniellt skadlig uppviglare. Spridandet av Illuminatis ideer totalförbjöds och Weishaupt tillbringade resten av sitt liv som en tämligen obemärkt professor vid Göttingens universitet.

Vid det laget hade dock Augustin Barrauel lyckats para ihop Illuminati med frimurarna och förvandlat organisationerna till ett ondskefullt, ytterst mäktigt hot mot den katolska kyrkan, Europas monarkier och därmed all lag och ordning. Barrauels böcker slukades vid Europas furstehov som levde i skuggan av avrättningen av Frankrikes konung och Napoleon vars arméer drog fram kors och tvärs genom Europa och betraktades av flera radikala borgare som ett varsel om kommande tider av tolerans och allmänt välstånd. Men, Napoleons våldsamma framfart väckte även till liv såväl nationella strävanden, som konservativa motangrepp, inte minst i den katolsk aristokratiske, antiliberale och mäktige Klemens von Metternichs Österrikisk-ungerska imperium. För övrigt var kejsarstaden Wien ett välkänt centrum för allsköns estoterisk spekulation och räknade med en stor mängd hemliga sällskap. Det har uppskattats att då all alkemisktisk verksamhet 1785 totalförbjöds inom det Österrikisk-ungerska imperiet fanns det enbart i Wien omkring 10 000 verksamma "alkemister". 

Helt i linje med jesuiten Augustin Barrauels upptäckt av frimurarlogernas antikristna och världsomstörtande verksamhet publicerade den österrikiske orientalisten och författaren Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774-1856) 1818 sitt monumentala verk Mysterium Baphometis Revelatum seu fratres militiae templi, qua Gnostici et quidem Ophiani apostasiae, idolodulae et impuritatis convicti per ipsa eorum monumenta och blåste därvidlag ordentligt liv i en mängd myter kring Graalen och Tempelherrriddarordens sataniska riter. Främst koncentrerade sig Hammer-Purgstall sin uppmärksamhet på underlig kult kring en djävulsgestalt som han identifierade som Baphomet och som tempelriddarna enligt honom hade övertagit från assassinerna som i sin tur förmedlat satanistkulter som fortfarande levde kvar inom gnostiskt/hermetiska sällskap i Främre Orienten.

Hammer-Pursgstall kompletterade sina omfångsrika historiska och lingvistiska redogörelser med ett rikt bildmaterial, som dock till största delen grundade sig på märkliga illustrationer i den allsköns alkemiskt/hermetiska skrifter som framförallt under 1700-talet spreds inom Europas omfattande och vildvuxna flora av esoteriska sällskap. Hammer-Purgstalls slutsats var dock solkar och spreds som en löpeld genom Europa. Hans ”upptäckter” passade som hand i handske för en Vatikan som såg sin makt alltmer hotad av ”liberala och gudsförnekande” krafter:

en hednisk religion har överlevt vid sidan av Kristendom och Islam och fortsatt frodas under Medeltiden och i skydd av Frimurarorden fortfar denna kätterska tro att vara ett hot mot Kyrkan även under denna tid [d.v.s. början av 1800-talet].

Redan 1738 hade Vatikanen sett sig hotad av frimurarnas spekulationer och riter, som tycktes finna sina rötter inom Islam och kätteri. Påven hade i banbullan In eminenti apostolatus specula fördömt organisationen. Men kritiken kom även från annat håll. Den franske socialisten, frimuraren, magikern och författaren Eliphas Lévi (Aphonse Louis Constant) antog även han att Bephemot var en demon dyrkad av tempelriddarna och presenterade en teckning av honom i sin bok Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie från 1856.

I själva verket var Baphomet en medeltida förvrängning av profeten Muhammads namn och hade i processen mot tempelriddarna använts för att anklaga dem för samröre med assassinerna. Enligt åklarna hade Ordern förfallit till avgudadyrkan, en anklagelse som lades till sodomi, orgier och blodiga barnaoffer som var allmängods under kätteri- och häxprocesser hos såväl katoliker som protestanter. Detta hindrar dock inte att Eliphas Lévis Baphometdjävul är rikligt förekommande i en mängd av de konspirationsteorier som skapats för frimurarnas djävulsdyrkan. Vanligt är att finna  hänvisningar till ”medeltida” framställningar av Baphomet som bevis för tempelriddarnas djävulsdyrkan. Ett exempel som ofta anförs är entrétympanot på kyrkan Saint-Merri inte långt från tempelriddarnas forna högkvarter i Paris. På detta tympanon finns en framställning av djävulen med horn, kvinnobröst och fladdermusvingar som onekligen för tankarna till Lévis bild av Baphomet. Vad dessa privatspanare dock sällan konstaterar, eller kanske inte ens känner till, är att Saint-Merris djävul skapades av arkitekten Hippolyte Godde då han mellan 1841-1843 ledde restaurationen av kyrkan som skadats svårt under Franska revolutionen och det visade sig vara omöjligt att identifiera figuren på centralportalens huvudsten.

Det är mycket troligt att Eliphas Lévi tretton år senare inspirerades av denna lilla skulptur då han skapade sin bild av Baphomet. Helt klart är dock att sensationsjournalisten Léo Taxil (Marie Joseph Jogand-Pagès) använde sig av samma bild då han i sin uppdiktade och mycket populära Les mystère de la Franc-maçonnerie ”avslöjade” tempelriddarnas orgier, djävulskult och planer på att ta över världsherraväldet. Han kryddade dessutom sin anrättning med att påstå att frimurarna var i händerna på en judisk, global sammansvärjning som syftade till att misstänkliggöra den kristna tron och krossa den katolska kyrkan.

Léo Taxils ”avslöjanden” kom två år efter det att Vatikanen under Leo XIII i encyklikan Humanum genes åter hade bannlyst Frimurarorden. Myten om en judisk-frimurarsammansvärjning blev ett mäktigt vapen i händerna på de högerkrafter som orättfärdigt anklagade juden Alfred Dreyfus för spioneri och landsförräderi och dömde honom till livstids fängelse på Djävulsön. Då Dreyfus släpptes fri 1899 och 1906 helt friades från alla anklagelser tolkades detta av stockkonservativa, antisemitiska krafter som ett bevis på det franska rättsväsendet var helt i händerna på frimurare och judiska miljonärer. En uppfattning som eldades på av falsariet Sions Vises Protokoll som först publicerades i Ryssland 1903, men snabbt spreds över hela världen i ett otal översättningar. Detta förmenta ”protokoll” utgav sig att vara ett autentiskt dokument där ledande judar fastställde planerna för hur världens ekonomi och rådande samhällsordning skulle fördärvas så till den grad att judarna med lätthet skulle kunna överta världsherraväldet.

Henry Ford publicerade skriften i den första delen av sin fyra volymers bokserie The International Jew: The World´s Foremost Problem, Den internationelle juden: Världens främsta problem, som trycktes i en halv miljon exemplar och nazisterna angav den som obligatorisk läsning och den eländet påverkade i hög grad Hitler och männen omkring honom. Trots sin uppenbara absurditet fortsätter Sions Vises Protokoll och dess kopplingar till frimurare och allsmäktig världsfinans att koka i konspirationsteoretikers hjärnor och har inte minst funnits i bakgrunden för den ungerske presidenten Viktor Orbáns hetskampanj mot den judiske filantropen Georges Soros.

Ur denna rika mull av tvivelaktig kunskap har det spirat en fantastisk flora av konspirationsteorier och ockulta galenskaper, samtidigt som en mer ideellt, esoterisk och välmenande rörelse tog sig uttryck i konst och litteratur med mästare som Wagner, Tennyson, Ruskin, Rosetti, Tolkien, William Morris, C.S. Lewis, Burne-Jones, Rimbaud, Renan, Debussy, Satie, Delville, Beardsley, Thomas Mann, Blavatsky, T.S. Eliot, Syberberg, Yates och ett oräkneligt antal andra författare och artister, men spekulationer kring graalsökande, utvalda riddare och konspirationsteorier inspirerade även otäcka ideologer som Rosenberg, Himmler, Hitler, Julius Evola, Sayyid Qutb, Bat Ye´or, Pat Robertson och Steve Bannon, för att inte tala om massmördare som Anders Behring Breivik. Myter och legender är tveeggade, så väl inspirerande som skadliga och flera av de konstnärer och författare jag räknat upp var, även om de kunde sägas vara genialiska nyskapare, anfrätta av unken rasism och självförhärligande chauvinism baserade på ”realiteter” som aldrig existerat.

Den som anträtt labyrinten kring Graalen och Tempelherretriddarorden löper risken att förlora sig i de allt tätare dimmor som stiger upp ur otuktat spekulerande. Något jag fruktar har drabbat Graham Hancock som i en förfluten tid skrev sansad kristik av FN:s verksamhet, men nu tycks vara ohjälpligt vilsegången i ett gungfly av amatörmässiga spekulationer där han dessutom tror sig vara angripen av det ”akademiska etablissemanget” och de hemliga, ondskefulla krafter som han antar styr vår tillvaro.

Som så många andra pseudoforskare har Graham Hancock plockat och valt bland en mängd bevis för sina teorier. Han har alltför ofta koncentrerat sitt sökande på obevisbara tankegångar han snavat över. Det kan vara spännande och stimulerande att läsa om vad han sett och funnit, men hans uppenbara brist har varit att låta teorier styra resultaten. Amatörforskare har en benägenhet att klänga sig fast vid fixa ideer, något som gör att de har svårt att sätta sig in i nya rön inom vetenskap, historia och arkeologi. Flera av dem beter sig som en försvarsadvokat som anser att vinna ett mål är viktigare än objektiv sanning. De presenterar enbart sådant som tycks bevisa deras ”sanning” och förbiser sådant som kan ställa den i tvivelsmål. Hancock framstår som en självlärd herre vars metod i stort sett går ut på att han får en idé som han därefter spenderar all sin tid och energi åt att bevisa. Om en arkeolog i allmänhet börjar sina undersökningar med att ingående studera ett objekt och dess kontext, så gör Hancock precis tvärtom – han tar sin utgångspunkt i idén.

Dessvärre har den onekligen skicklige pusslaren och berättaren Graham Hancock fallit på eget grepp och hamnat i det snurriga sällskapet av andra pseudoforskare som Däniken, Flem-Ath, Hapgood, Velikovsky, Baigent och Bauval. I de böcker som följt på The Sign and the Seal har han bland annat hävdat att Mars en gång varit hem för en avancerad civilisation och har dessutom blivit övertygad om att det för mer än 15 000 år sedan existerade en ytterst avancerad ”super-civilisation” här på jorden, som lämnat efter sig myter om ”kulturbringare” som Viracocha, Quetzalcoatl, Osiris och Prometheus, samt väldiga undervattenslämningar i Bermudatriangeln eller Yonaguni utanför Japan.

Och än värre – i sällskap med en annan virrhjärna, Robert Bauval, har Hancock gett sig in i riktigt farlig terräng. I boken Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith jämför de båda författarna antagna pelare i Salomos tempel med Tvillingtornen på Manhattan och Pentagon med Davidsstjärnan, något som nästan ofrånkomligt leder dem in i avgrundshögerns spekulationer kring den judisk-frimurar konspirationen för en ny världsordning. Sedan har det fortsatt utför med The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World, en allt galnare berg- och dalbana genom en uppsjö av fakta och spekulationer där läsaren hamnar i en absurd Disney World bestående allt overkligare fantasier.

Någon som däremot visste hur man blandar fakta med berättarglädje var Umberto Eco som i sin pikareskroman Baudolino från år 2000 på ett föredömligt sätt använde sig av medeltida historia, skrönor, legender, religion och filosofi. Romanen tar sin början under det Fjärde korstågets besinningslösa plundring av Konstantinopel år 1204. Baudolino, vars namn härstammar från ett obskyrt helgon i Ecos italienska födelsestad, berättar sin livshistoria för Niketas Choniates en högt uppsatt bysantinsk ämbetsman (som liksom de flesta av romanens karaktärer är baserad på en historisk person). Baudolino som är fosterson till kejsar Fredrik I (1122-1190), även kallad Barbarossa, för med sin ironiskt lättsamma berättarton läsaren genom en mängd äventyr i Tyskland, Italien, Frankrike och Österlandet. Eco för in all tänkbar medeltida kuriosa. En komplicerad berättelseväv i vilken ingår Graalen (han kallar den Gradalen) fabeldjur, Prester John, Den gamle i Berget, Hypatias ättling, alkemister, tempelriddare, judar, araber, krigståg och hovintriger, misär och spirituella samtal kring filosofi och religion. Som en röd tråd genom det hela löper tankar kring och exempel på berättandets natur; hur legender och myter används som politiska medel, hur historier uppkommer genom berättarglädje och ohejdade infall, eller djuplodande studier, lögner och manipulationer, allvar och lek.

En central episod är när Baudolino och hans kumpaner, halvt på allvar, halvt på lek sammanställer ett brev från Prester John till olika europeiska potentater. Det blir till en soppa av fakta, påhitt och vilda spekulationer. Som det mesta Eco skriver om finns det en faktiskt grund även för ett sådant brev – det existerade verkligen, ingen vet vem som skrev det och flera av mottagarna trodde faktiskt att det kommit från Prester John trots, eller kanske tack vare, sina inslag av våldsamt överdrivna skildringar om miljonstarka arméer, juvelbesatta stadsmurar, underliga fabeldjur och Prästkonungens löfte om att han skall skänka Den Heliga Graalen till den furste som lierade sig med honom.

Gänget som skriver brevet tillsammans med Baudolino finner även de sitt ursprung i medeltida myter, de var alla mer eller mindre påhittade eller tämligen obskyra redan då – där finns Kyot som von Eschenbach påstod förmedlade Parzeval till honom, Ezra ben Salomon från det moriska Girona som anses vara en medförfattare till Zohar, Robert de Boron som anges som författare till en bok om Graallegenden, men som likt Kyot antagligen inte existerat i verkligheten, och en man som kallas för Poeten och som antagligen står för den okände författaren till de respektlösa sångerna i Carmina Burana. Det är Abdul, son till en irländsk kvinna och en provensalier, fast uppvuxen i Jerusalem, som då inspirationen tryter förser vännerna med grön honung antagligen haschisch och berättarglädjen flödar åter, interfolierad med himmelska visioner.

Även här rör sig Eco på en mark väl förberedd genom medeltida studier. Att Haššāšīn misstogs för att betyda ”haschischätare” var inte underligt med tanke på att drogen användes av persiska mystiker. Haschisch var grönt och kallades ofta ”destillerat socker”. Inom vad de persiska sufierna kallade fåglars språk, ett sätt att tala som dolde sanningar för sådana som inte var invigda, var det den gröna papegojan som förde med sig drogen till gudainspirerade poeter. Poeten Hafiz skrev: ”Papegoja, du som inte uppskattar mysterier, må din näbb aldrig sakna socker” och i sin episka lärodikt Fågelkonferensen låter den sufiske diktaren Farid ud-Din Attar den gröna papegojan i näbben föra med sig grönt socker. I en dikt hyllar en annan sufier haschisch som ett medel som kan ”upphöja fantasin tills den uppnår ett saligt förverkligande av glädjen av att befinna sig i en framtida värld”. Med en ”framtida värld” menade han antagligen Paradiset.

Graham Hancock skulle antagligen hålla med, speciellt som han med hjälp av droger tagit ännu ett steg bort från verkligheten. När kompanjonerna i Umberto Ecos roman författar brevet från Prester John och inte tycker att verkligheten är tillräckligt spännande spär de på med överdrifter och fantasifoster och när inte heller det räcker till tar hallucinogena droger dem till allt högre berättardimensioner.

Detta är en väg som även Graham Hancock tycks ha slagit in på. I sin Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Övernaturligt: Möten med mänsklighetens forntida lärare, tycks han ha lämnat verkligheten långt bakom sig. I den boken hävdar Hancock att för 50 000 år sedan hade mänskligheten:

ingen konst, ingen religion, ingen sofistikerad symbolism, inget nytänkande. Men, så skedde plötsligt en elektrifierande och dramatisk förändring som av vetenskapsmän beskrivits som ”den största gåtan i mänsklighetens historia”. Samtliga de färdigheter och egenskaper som vi värderar mest dök plötsligt upp helt kompletta, som om de förlänats oss genom dolda krafter.

Dessa krafter, eller snarare ”övernaturliga varelser” fick människorna kontakt med genom hallucinogena droger som Hancock själv prövat på, med förbluffande resultat då det gäller att få insikter om tillvarons mysterier. OK, det är nu hög tid att lämna honom i sina opiumdimmor, och jag gör det med en påminnelse om att konsumtion av droger inte alltid är av godo.

Det går att berätta om allt, fast på olika sätt. Myter kan skapas om i stort sett all som omger oss och som vi tänker på. Det går att tro på myter och även det kan man göra på skilda sätt – det går att skapa såväl goda som onda myter, likaväl som vi kan välja att tro på onda ting eller goda ting. Jag antar att det är sådant som graalsökande rör sig om. Att följa en tro. Att söka efter något som mycket väl kan vara en myt, en chimär. I Graalens fall rör det sig om något gott. Något som kan gynna oss alla och leda till positiv förändring.

Graalsökaren måste tro på det goda, den goda vilja som motiverar hens sökande, som gör så att hen inte går vill och förlorar sig i verklighetens snårskog – all den förvirring och galenskap som hör mänskligheten till och förmörkar våra drömda ideal.

Graham Hancock insåg tidigt att han inte trodde på FN. Låt mig som svar på hans tvivel skapa en graalmyt kring den organisationen. När onda krafters uppror mot Guds ordning hade hejdats och dess ledare – Hitler – störtats från den blodiga tron han rest bland gränslös grymhet och människoförakt, försökte segrarna bevara det goda som trots allt finns förborgat hos de flesta av oss – en tro på att vi alla kan samverka för att skapa en rättvis värld där var och en av oss har rätt till frihet, glädje och välstånd.

Människors goda vilja skapade en helig Graal – FN:s deklaration om de mänskliga rättigheterna och en tro på att vi skall kunna förverkliga den – de Globala målen för hållbar utveckling. Det restes också en fästning för att bevara Deklarationen varifrån dess budskap skulle spridas över välden – FN:s högkvarter i New York. Deklarationen skyddas nu av unga idealister från hela världen, såväl män som kvinnor, såväl tänkare som krigare. De arbetar för att Deklarationen hålls vid liv och för att dess mål skall kunna förverkligas. De leds av en Stormästare, kallad Generalsekreteraren. Men, likt Anfortas förmår inte Generalsekreteraren axla sitt stora ansvar. Folket kring honom åldras och förvirras av maktpositioner, girighet och mörka drifter. Hopp och kraft förnyas inte. Förenta Nationerna kan inte längre som fågeln Phoenix ständigt återuppstå ur sin egen aska.

Förfall hotar Graalpalatset. Känslor av hopp- och meningslöshet drabbar graalriddarna, alltmedan girighet och egoism ånyo växer sig allt starkare. Motståndare till hållbar utveckling och global rättvisa sår sin djävulssäd av tvivel kring FN:s mening och mål. Skall unga, idealistiska graalsökare som Parzeval och Feirefiz nå fram till sitt mål och lyckas rädda den tro och övertygelse som FN är tänkt att bevara? Eller skall detta Munsalvaesche slutligen erövras av mörkrets makter, ödeläggas och ondskan än en gång störta hela världen i fördärvet och kommer det då att vara slutgiltigt?

ABP News (2011) ´Send Me, O Lord, Send Me’ author Ross Coggins dies. https://baptistnews.com/article/send-me-o-lord-send-me-author-ross-coggins-dies/#.X1M9oHkzbIV Andreae, Johann Valentin (2009) Christian Rosencreutz alkemiska bröllop 1459. Lund: Bakhåll. Barber, Richard The Holy Grail: The history of a Legend. London: Penguin Books. Burman, Edward (1987) The Assassins: Holy Killers of Islam. London: Crucible. Charpentier, Louis (1980) The Mysteries of Chartres Cathedral. New York: Avon books. Domínguez Arribas, Javier (2018) ”Massoneria: L´impostura di Léo Taxil”, National Geographic Storia, No. 116, Ottobre. Eschenbach, Wolfram von (1987) Parzival. Harmondworth, Middelsex: Penguin Classics. Fritze, Ronald H. (2009) Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Sicence and Pseudo-Religions. London Rektion Books. Hancock, Graham (1989) Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press. Hancock, Graham (1997) The Sign and the Seal: A Quest for the Lost Ark ot the Covenant. London: Arrow Books. Hancock, Graham (2007) Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. NewYork: Disinformation Books. Hancock Graham och Robert Bauval (2011) The Master Game: Unmasking the Secret Rulers of the World. New York: Disinformation Books. The Kebra Nagast: Book of the Glory of Kings, translated by Sir E. A. Wallis Budge (2013) Rookhope, Durham: Aziloth Books. McIntosh, Christopher (1987) The Roicrucians: The History and Mythology of an Occult Order. London: Crucible. Ponsoye, Pierre (1976) L´Islam e il Graal. Milano: Arché. Ramm, Benjamin (2017) ”A Controversial Restoration that Wipes Away the Past,” The New York Times, September 1. Stoneman, Richard (2010) Alexander the Great: A Life in Legend. New Haven: Yale University Press. Southern Baptist Convention (2020) https://www.sbc.net/ Troyes, Chrétien de (1993) Arthurian Legends. London: J.M. Dent. Werne, Kent (2019) Allt är en konspiration: En resa genom Underlandet. Stockholm. Ordfront. 

When it comes to math, I'm on a Neanderthal man´s level. I understand virtually nothing and the more I struggle to understand, the less I do. There must be some brain wrinkles missing, or a defult brain capacity that hinder me from undertstaning much related to algebra and geometry.

Already in primary school, math lessons became a torment for me, not to mention the math homework, which deprived me of time that could be used for other, more pleasureable activities. The first and only time I have been accused of cheating was when I handed in a math notebook while I was in middle school, so the teacher could do the routine check if I had done my homework or not. He then found that several pages were had been filled by my scribblings. However, in between them others had been left blank.

- What is meant by this? For several weeks you have not done some of the homework! I admit that you have done some of the tasks, but far from all of them. What I don´t understand is why you left blank pages between those you solved? Did you try to trick me into thinking you had done all of it? Remember that I am always checking that everything is done, … or not.

I answered:

- Where I have not entered anything, it was because I hadn´t understood what it was all about. When I get older and wiser, I plan to fill them all in.

I was serious, though the teacher probably thought I was crazy, or tried to cover up my laziness. I wonder if I would ever would be clever enough to fill in those pages. It felt like a liberation when, after finishing school, I was freed from the scourge of mathematics.

When I, in the past, did not understand certain things, I assumed that these lacunae were extremely important and thus my ignorance of math haunted me for several years. However, I now realize that for for most of my life span, I have not at all been bothered by my ignorance of those things that I once assumed to be of life changing importance.

I have always found great pleasure in immerseíng myself in music and religion, but that does not mean that I understand the rules governing music and I am far from being a pious and religious person. I cannot play any instrument and do not consider myself to be of any religious persuation, but that does not hinder me from listening to all kind of music with great joy and satisfaction and throughout my life have participated in a wide variety of religious ceremonies, within different contexts and have occasionally been deeply moved by what I experienced.

I assume that religion, like music and math, is related to order and structure. A believer considers her/his religious faith to adhere to a set of rules and provide an explanation of how everything works and is structured. S/he feels included within a system that permeates and controls her/his entire existence. Likewise, religion is a harmonious system where each individual is included as an essential fragment within a structure that provides her/him a sense of belonging, commitment, and peace. Like our existence, some music and even art may appear to be chaotic, though chaos can neverthelss be considered to amount to an ingrediant that after all is part of, or possibly be a reflection of a so far insufficiently known cosmic order governing all creation. 

A harmony of spheres where you and I, as well as single tones, words or numbers, are included as small, but perhaps after all not entirely essential details. Just as our speech reflects a vast universe of relativity and imagination, so are perhaps music and mathematics provide a reflection of a cosmic order we are all part of. Perhaps is math the language that most clearly indicates such a context.

John Napier (1550-1617) was a Scottish aristocat who depised the clinging of stupid priests to unproven dogmas, which they furthermore indoctrinated their parishioners with. Consequently, Napier was an enthusiastic supporter of the Scottish Presbyterians, who did not want to have anything to do with bishops and the Pope. They believed that God was above all that and that the priesthood was an unnecessary and oppressive institution. The only thing that counted was the sovereignty of the Bible and grace through faith in Christ.

Napier believed that the fundamental truths of the Universe were to be found in the Bible. God speaks to humans through His Holy Scripture, but it is important to interpret its content correctly. Just as mathematics can explain and prove cosmic contexts, it could, according to Napier, also be used to clarify the inner message of the Bible. Napier published a commentary on the Book of Revelation - A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of Saint John. This was an account presented in strictly mathematical terms, with postulates, propositions and evidence, which Napier applied to the biblical text to prove that the Pope was identical to Antichrist and that the world would perish sometime between the years 1688 and 1700. Napier's psyche was, as the case is with many other geniuses, a combination of great talent with quite a lot of madness.

Napier was a mathematical genius and able to express himself in fluent Latin and ancient Greek, the latter was at that time (and even now) quite unusual. Nowadays, John Napier is best known as inventor of mathematical logarithms, which he calculated by using a home-made device called Napier's Bone.

In his book Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio Napier explained the principles of his use of logarithms and presented the first logarithmic lists based on his use of Napier's Bones. The eccentric and rather wealthy Napier preferred to work on his own. However, through his friend John Craig he apparently had some contact with the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe.

In any case, sometime during the 1590s, Craig wrote a letter to Brahe in which he described Napier's use of logarithms, which was to become of great benefit to Brahe when he, violent and impulsive as he was, in 1597 came on unfriendly terms with the Danish king Christian IV and was forced to seek refuge in Prague. where he was received with open arms by the Emperor Rudolph II. This eccentric ruler and generous patron of art and science provided Brahe with a new observatory in the city of Benátky nad Jizerou, north of Prague, where Brahe in the last years of his life together with another genius, Johannes Kepler, used Napier's logarithms to formulate three basic principles for the planets' elliptical orbits around the sun, as well as they calculated the time it took for each of them to complete its orbit. The logarithms made it possible for them to deal with very large numbers and since then logarithms have been of great importance to astronomers.

Despite this, Napier considered his nutty interpretation of the Book of Revelation to be his most important contribution to the welfare of humankind, and unlike his other books, which were written in Latin, he published his treatise in English so his ”simple” presentation of essential facts could ”effectively illuminate this entire island .”

As I write this, I hear the utterly annoying pigeons cooing on the balcony outside my room. A month ago we cleared away one of their nests and the house became invaded by almost microscopic pigeon lice, which settled in our beds, bit us and sucked our blood. It was therefore with interest that I now read about how Napier's neighbors in Edinburgh told stories about how Napier in order to get rid of pigeons, which irritated to the verge of madness, dipped wheat grains in alcohol that he spread all over his yard. When the helplessly drunk pigeons could not lift off the ground, he rushed out and wrung their necks.

Back to the topic. Logarithms? You who read this probably know more about them than I do. I should probably ask a mathematician about them, but how could he explain it all to a math idiot like me? However, I assume that they are series where numbers constantly increase in a certain sequence. What the word means is not so difficult to understand - the Greek logos may mean ”relationship”, ”plan”, or ”reason”, while arithmosis is ”numbers”. A logarithm could thus be something in acordance with a a sequence like10¹-10²-10³-10⁴, etc., where each number, one by one, is doubled and multiplication thus becomes transformed into addition.

Well, towards the end of his life Napier was visited by the professor of geometry at Oxford University, Henry Briggs, who suggested that he develop his earlier logarithmic tables on the basis of something called the 10-logarithm. Napier explained that he had considered doing so, but that his remaining life would not be enough. Briggs did then on his own compile such a table, which was published the same year Napier died, 1617, containing the logarithms for all integers between 1 and 1,000. Seven years later, Briggs published a book containing "40,000 logarithms, calculated by roots up to the 54th order and results with 30 decimals." I have no idea what that might mean. However, a contemporary astronomer wrote that Briggs' efforts had been invaluable

by reducing to a few days 'work what had previously taken several months, Briggs' work has doubled the life of an astronomer and now spares him from the errors and abhorrence that are inseparate from the execution of extensive calculations.

In 1881, Professor Simon Newcomb sat down in the library at the United States Navy Observatory, which director he was, and opened a logarithmic table. Newcomb had performed a complete revision of the elliptical orbits of Mercury, Venus, Tellus, Mars, Uranus and Neptune and compiled tables displaying how his calculations had been performed. Of course, Newcomb had then used logarithm tables. As Newcomb flipped through the tables in the book on the table in front of him, he noticed that the first five pages were significantly more worn and thumbed than the following pages.

He then discovered that any list involving a large number of figures, like the length of various rivers, death rates, sea depths, incomes, population figures, etc., most numbers were initiated by the number one. And even more astounding – if compiled within a diagram organised in accordance with the initial numbers the resulting curves became almost exactly the same – thirty percent of the numbers began with the number one, seventeen percent of them with number two and then the incidence gradually dropped down to 4.6 percent for the number nine. All in accordance with the curve presented below:

The curve that Newcomb discovered arose from the compilation of figures from virtually any statistical material, regardless if they were generated from human activities or measurements of various natural phenomena, the result became the same. The larger and more varied the range of figures, the closer the numbers of the curve equalled what could be predicted from this so-called Benford´s Law.

That the phenomenon is called Benford's Law was because a physicist named Frank Benford began applying Newcomb's method to compilations he made of price lists, sports scores, areas irrigated by various rivers, electricity bills, and even the street addresses of members of the American Physicists' Association. In total, Benford's lists contained 20,229 different numbers and the curves they resulted in proved what Newcomb had previously come up with. In 1938, Benford reported the results of his research in the article The Law of Anomalous Numbers, published in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

Deviations from Benford's Law indicate conscious manipulations – or the invention of fictitious figures. In recent years, a growing number of statisticians, accountants and mathematicians have become convinced that Benford´s Law is actually a powerful and relatively simple tool for proving suspicions of all kinds of fraud, such as tax evasion, dishonest audits, even computer fraud, such as the famous trolls, false identities, that Russians apparently used to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Napier, Newcomb and Benford performed their huge calculations of statistical material before the use of computers and calculators. What can now be figured out within a minute or two previously took several years of extremely patient and meticolous calculations. What is also interesting is that all three engaged in these extensive logarithm exercises as a side job.

Napier was intensively busy with the peculiar and self-invented figures he assumed he was discovering in the Bible. Benford was for eighteen years a conscientious and diligent engineer at General Electric's "lighting laboratory" and then for another twenty years he worked at the company's research laboratory. He was an expert in optical phenomena and took out twenty patents for various optical instruments. Newcomb was an astronomer, but also an economist whose theories were highly praised by no less authority than John Maynard Keynes. Newcomb spoke French, German, Italian and Swedish, was for many years an active mountaineer and also wrote several popular science books, as well a science fiction novel – His Wisdom The Defender, a Story. The novel has similarities with the Marvel character The Iron Man, hero in three popular movies from 2008, 2010 and 2013.

Iron Man was originally a Marvel Comics hero created by the author and publisher Stan Lee. This superhero made his debut in 1963 in Tales of Suspense No. 29. In private, Iron Man is Anthony Edward ”Tony” Stark, an American millionaire, entrepreneur, playboy and ingenious scientist. He suffers from a life-threatening chest injury resulting from a kidnapping during which his jailors tried to force him to construct a weapon of mass destruction, though he managed to manufacture a high-tech flight suit and used it to escape from captivity. After that. Tony Stark donned his costume to fight evil forces as The Iron Man.

I do not know if Stan Lee could have been inspired by Simon Newcomb's quite obscure novel, though his Tony Stark does undeniably remind of Newcomb's Professor Campbell, a heroic and skillfull scientist who gathers around him a bunch of loyal comrades and together they fight both the evil of the world and an unreliable manipulative establishment.

Newcomb's novel takes place in the 1940s and tells the story of how the world, through the heroic struggle of a genius scientist, is transformed into a peaceful Utopia. It begins by telling how Professor Campbell, from Harvard University, together with two assistants make two revolutionary inventions. He finds a method for converting aluminum into an extremely flexible material for motorcycles and cars, which he fuels with etherine, extracted from the atmosphere in the form of luminiferous aether, an airborne ether that counteracts gravity. Campbell leaves the university and becomes filthy rich. His second invention is something he calls motes, a kind of aircraft, which becomes the basis of a global network of air transportation.

In secret, Professor Campbell also organizes a group of intelligent and university-educated, young and athletic men, whom he trains to use a mechanical flight suit – a tight-fitting leather jacket fitted with tubes resembling small organ pipes. This is how Campbell describes the first flight attempt with such a flight suit:

The little man began to rise from the floor as the spiritual mediums were said to do a hundred years ago, and was very soon nearly up to the roof, being prevented from striking it and perhaps passing through it only by the rope with which his leg was tied. He could apparently move in any direction he might choose through the air, by a very slight inclination of the handles.  Holding them in one way, he swung round and round a circle having for its radius the length of the rope; holding them another way, he swung in the reverse direction.

With the help of the motes and his rather insignificant army of flying men, Professor Campbell tries to bring about the complete cessation of all global warfare and killing by arms. However, his quest is being thwarted by political, military and journalistic forces which do everything in their power to frustrate his efforts to create a global, permanent peace, while they are trying to get their hands on his highly sophistacted weaponry.

Perhaps it was Newcomb's discovery of Benford's Law, which seemed to prove that there was a solid, natural structure behind the obvious chaos of existence, that made him believe that we could adapt human development to a well-regulated Cosmos, ruled by enlightened scientists. Something I believe will never happen – my own experience tells me that people tends to be intelligent, or stupid, whatever education they might count upon and whatever they do. Of course, knowledge is important, but it does not make us better persons, perhaps more efficient administrators but not morally superior. Take Reinhard Heydrich as an example – he was a handsome man, a sensitive musician, an unusually intelligent person, and at the same time an extremely effective administrator of the mass extermination of Jews and other people who by the rulers of The Third Reich were considered ”unworthy of life”. Something crazier and more bestial is hard to imagine.

It was a short story about a small group of benevolent and eccentric monks striving to achieve the realization of something that could be called a New World Order that made me think about cosmic order, mathematics and religion and write this essay. Arthur C. Clark's Nine Billion Names of God written in 1953 begins with a Tibetan lama, monk/teacher, visiting a computer company on Manhattan. He is interested in buying the company's latest model of the Automtic Sequence Computor Mark V and also for three months hire two computer engineers able to reprogramme the computer for processing words instead of numbers and provide the monks in his monastery with computer printouts of extensive lists.

When the astonished CEO wondered what the purpose of buying such a computer could be, the lama replied that ever since his monastery was founded three hundred years ago, its purpose has been to register every conceivable name of God. After several years of patient counting, meditation and intense thinking, the monks had come to the conclusion that the most comprehensive names consisting of words with less than nine letters and it had been estimated they would amount to nine billion, Compiling and printing all these names by hand would take 15,000 years, even if the most obvious nonsense combinations were ruled out. It was to speed up this time-consuming process that the monastery's lama had now decided to acquire modern computer technology.

When the CEO further wondered what such a strange process would lead to, the lama replied that it all had to do with his religious beliefs and earthly mission. That it was a matter of re-arranging the chaos of existence:

Call it a ritual if you like. But, it's a fundamental part of our beliefs. All the many names of the Supreme Being – God, Jehovah, Allah and so on – they are only man-made labels There is a philosphical problem of som difficulty here which I do not propose to discuss, but somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters, which can occur, are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters, we have been trying to list them all. […] Luckily it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a thousand days.

Arthur C. Clarke's little story about the reclusive computer use of Tibetan monks is probably the reason to why it has now become quite common to publish stories about high-tech educated monks who in the depths of the Himalayas fight evil and try to make the world a better place.

Clarke was certainly inspired by a combination of early twentieth-century speculations about the exkistence of Agartha, an Aryan dreamland nestled among the inaccessible massifs of the Himalayas (the existence of such a secluded ,advanced society found for example a fanatic believer in Heinrich Himmler) and James Hilton's novel Beyond the Horizon from 1933. In 1937, Hilton's novel was filmed by Frank Capra and when the movie was presented in Swedish TV sometime during the early 1960s, it became a great inspiration for me and my friends when we played that we struggled and died in the snow.

Let us now return to The Nine Billion Names of God. After three months, we find the two computer experts during a conversation while looking out over the Himalayan massifs and the Tibetan valleys. The three months are almost over and they are now somewhat anxious. What will their hard work side by side with the patient and kind monks result in?

Everything has worked out beyond expectations. The cumbersome computer had been flown into a nearby primitive, but quite usable airfield. The installation had not been particularly difficult. To the experts' great surprise the monastery had been equipped with modern, diesel-powered generators. They had effortlessly installed a programme that converted numbers into letters and soon the machine was producing extensive lists of God names, all of them with less than nine letters and none with more than three consonants or vowels in a row. The monks had cut the words from the long strips of data printouts and arranged them in extensive books, while mumbling their mantras, the prayer mills had been buzzing around them and prayer flags fluttering in the cool mountain breeze.

However, one of the two experts had recently had a lengthy conversation with the lama and now explained to his colleague that the monks assumed that soon they would have complied all names of God, after that nothing would be the same. They called the ”sum” of the names the Supreme Being, although it was something quite different from a comprehensible creature. It was rather a kind of all-encompassing presence far beyond human imagination. When His/Its purpose for the creation of the earth had been fulfilled, the human race would cease to exist in its present form. The computer expert claimed that the whole thing was blasphemous and obviously dangerously fanatical.

He had asked the lama if it was the Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, he expected to acheive. However, the old lama had smiled benevolently, shaken his head and looked at the computer expert ”in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said, ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that’.”

The expert was now worried about what would happen. When the monks had pasted the last name of God in their huge book and nothing revolutionary occurred, they would probably become extremely disappointed and saddened. There was even a risk that the general dissapointment would make the otherwise so kind and patient monks to blame their failure on the computer experts. Accordingly, the two Americans decided that as soon as they had delivered the last computer printout, and before the computer hade been turned off and the monks managed to enter the final name in their book, they had to secretly leave the monastery and board the plane that regularly visited the valley.

A few days later, the computer experts left by sunset, while all the monks were busy entering the last names in their huge books. With two mountain ponies and without saying goodbye, the Americans sneaked out from the monastery. When they had been on the path for a while

George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamasery. The squat, angular buildings were silhouetted against the afterglow of the sunset; here and there lights gleamed like portholes in the sides of an ocean liner.

He wondered aloud if the computer had finished its run by now and the last name had been entered in the books:

”Look”whispered Chuck and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything).

Overhead, without any fuss. The stars were going out.

Despite its brevity and obvious simplicity, Clarke's short story received considerable attention, not the least in American avant-garde circles where several experimental postmodernist writers have created stories about it. Most striking among them is probably Carter Scholz's short story Nine Billion Names of God, which takes the form of an exchange of letters between a pretentious plagiarist, ”Carter Scholz”, and an editor who has rejected the short story on the grounds that Scholz has ”written” a verbatim plagiary of Arthur C. Clarkes short story with the same name.

The ”author” refuses to accept the publisher's arguments and torments the increasingly desperate editor with a barrage of ”evidence” that his exact Clarke copy is a unique work in its own right. Among other things, he claims that since Clarke's story was written thirty years earlier, it can thus not be the same story as the one Scholz has now ”written”. But… it is in every single detail exactly identical to its model, the publisher claims, whereby Scholz replies that he is of a completely different opinion due to the fact that the time period we now live in is completely different from the one thirty years ago. No one can deny that a story is a child of its time and context. Scholz's short story may seem ot be identical with Clarke's, but since it is ”written” now, it cannot be the same as the ”original”. The editor explains that Scholz's claims are unreasonable, but the stubborn ”author” persists in his madness – he claims that everything is plagiarism and writes the editor a letter in which every single word is limited by quotation marks. The editor says that he gets a headache from reading such annoying rubbish. Scholz then claims that his Nine Billion Names of God is a ready-made work of art like Duchamp's Fountain, and Warhol's Brillo Boxes.

The exhausted editor then offers to buy Scholz's manuscript, as long as he stops tormenting him with his idiotic letters. Nevertheless he adds that it is unthinkable that a serious publishing house ventures to issue such a brazen plagiary as Scholz shameless theft of a wellknown and respected short story written by an established author. However, Scholz is not silenced by that, he writes that the text is a screen behind which a writer hides his true self. ”How in Heavens name might a reader know that?” asks the editor, ”that's exactly the mystery of all writing, its innermost core” explains Scholz. When the editor replies that whatever Scholz s says his text remains a plagiary. The ”author” finally claims that the text came out of a computer after he had programmed it with randomly selected words. He receives no answer – the publisher has gone bankrupt.

This cryptic postmodern fable is entirely in line with other literary inventions by Scholz, such as Kafka Americana from 1999, which he co-wrote with Jontahan Lethem. In this strange book, actual texts written by Kafka are mixed with plagiarism, as well as ”Kafka-stories” written by the two authors, or original Kafka stories provided with alternative endings. Among the stories written by Letham and Ascholz we find we find the latter´s The Amount to Carry, which recounts how the poet Wallace Stevens, the composer Charles Ives and Franz Kafka meet one another during an imaginary Conference for Insurance Executives organized in 1921. An ingenious whim since these three odd geniuses actually worked in the insurance industry. In terms of age, it was not completely impossible that they could have met each other. In 1921, Kafka was thirty-eight years old, while Stevens was forty-two and Ives forty-seven. Kafka and Ives had their creative periods behind them, while Stevens matured late as a poet.

Each of them wanders around the huge hotel, which seems to be a combination of twentieth - century modernism and the increasing comforts of modern times, with Kafka's nightmare worlds and Borge's labyrinths. Scholz is intimately familiar with the three men's different spheres of life and lets their thoughts and lives flow freely in their thoughts. On two occasions they converge – iIes plays the piano in a lobby where Stevens has sits in an armchair with a cigar and redaing The Herald which telling a stories about an Italian political group calling itself fascisti and an obscure demagogue in Munich with a Chaplin-Hardy mustache.

Kafka appears cautiously and discreetly in a doorway. Stevens listens to Ive's music, it appeals to him but worries him as well. It is full of dissonances though it is apparent that these are consciously embedded in a melody based within a Lutheran hymn Stevens heard in in his childhood. The pale man in the doorway whose jug ears and piecing gaze makes Stevens identifying him as as a ”genuine Central European Jew”, suddenly speaks up and declares that he recognizes the melody. He has heard it in Munich ten years earlier, it appeared by the end of a symphony conducted by no less master than Gustav Mahler. Touched and surprised, Ives stops playing. In reality, the symphony was not performed until 1947. The fact is, however, that a year before his death, Mahler had been sent the notes to Charles Ives's Third Symphony and had intended to perform it, but he died the following year, without the project being realized. It soon turns out that the three insurance agents have a lot in common, both taste and trivialities. They meet again during a lunch, but then talk past each other and are soon alone again with their thoughts in the huge hotel's solitary corridors and anonymous hotel rooms. To himself Stevens summarizes the content of both the insurance industry and life in general:

The final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction, because there is nothing else.

Scholz has declared that he wrote his short story after realizing that three of his favorite artists had created their perceptive art alongside their work as hard-working officials. It is a strange, unusually lyrical, empathetic and well-informed short story. A kind of dream play. After reading it once, I read it again several times.

Let us take a look at these strange insurance agents. I have already written about Kafka, so we put him aside.

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is one of America's foremost poets. Educated at Harvard and The New York Law School, he spent most of his life as a high-ranking official in the insurance industry and in 1934 he became vice president of the Hartford Livestock Insurance Company. Steven's specialty was to investigate whether an individuals' self-confidence, sense of duty and loyalty was a sufficient basis for economic risk-taking and investments in both individuals and companies. He also wrote about the possibility of insuring against bankruptcy and how to investigate the solvency of company employees.

It may seem somewhat strange that research concerning a company's risk management could be inspiring for a great poet. However, as a matter of fact, Stevens considered writing poetry to be a form of risk management. A good poet has to weigh every word s/he writes against the entire composition and harmonize it with thought and structure. Small mistakes could have catastrophic consequences and ruin what could have been an excellent work of art.

The bureaucrat Wallace Stevens considered himself to be an anonymous cog within a comprehensive system, a way of thinking that characterized a large part of his lyrical output. To pay attention to existence, to realities, to nature and discern the immense context of everything, could be perceived as a kind religion innocent of an almighty, compassionate and personal God.

Towards the end of his life, Stevens struggled with the possibility of reshaping Dante's Divina Commedia in such a way that it reflected our existence as enclosed within a ”Darwinian realm”, where conditions are predetermined by a cosmic force, not a deity, and that a dissolution of the self would not be the end of everything, but a joyous deliverance. Undoubtedly a thought that seems to be closely related to Buddhist ideas.

Stevens was fascinated by art as a means of meditation and an opening to other worlds. He wrote poems about works by Picasso and Klee. His poetry has inspired several artists, among them David Westhead who created an extensive Wallace Stevens Suite.

During his imaginary Berlin conference, Carter Scholz allowed the composer and insurance agent Charles Ives to present his pamphlet The Amount to Carry, which deals with what kind of insurance you may need to protect yourself and your business, and assess how much you ought to spend on an insurance.

In fact, Charles Edward Ives (1874-1954) actually wrote such a work, but he is better known as an American avantgarde composer. In the fifties and sixties, Ives was noticed by bold music innovators such as John Cage and experimental jazz musicians. He was hailed as a pioneer in polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatory/random elements, and quarter tonality.

To my ears, Ive's music can sound both quietly meditative, as well as dynamically exciting. I discovered him through the Swedish essayist Torsten Ekbom's book The Experimental Fields, where he wrote about Ive's strange The Unanswered Question:

Listen, for example, to the strangely beautiful and suggestive orchestral meditation ”The Unanswered Question” from 1906. The piece is made up of three independent layers or sectors that are played out more or less independently from each other. A string quartet placed off-stage plays pianissimi a slowly advancing diatonic chord sequence with a soaring tonality. A lone trumpet intones a five-tone, dissonant motif that reappears unchanged six times. The phrase with its ascending compound second and softly falling third has the question's wondering tone. One can hear the words behind the phrase, something about transcendentalists' wonder at the place of man in Nature and Creation.

All music Ives wrote was characterized by visual imagination, it is a pronounced ”programme music”. Long after he wrote The Unanswered Question, Charles Ives explained that the introductory, silent and impressionistic string suite represented a group of druids ”that understands, sees or hears nothing,” as they are quietly subdued by the sound a lone trumpet loop – The Unanswered Question, which does not explain anything, but concerns The Mystery of Existence. Ives declared that since this question drives development forward it must remain unanswered. During the course of the piece, which lasts less than five minutes, four quarreling flutes (in the version I am listening to there are two flutes, a clarinet and an oboe) break in above the string quartet's meditative flow and according to Ives they correspond to ”the struggling respondents,” but they soon give up and the piece finally culminates in the quiet question followed by silence. Ives characterized his musical meditation as a ”cosmic landscape”.

Fascinated by Carter Scholz's informative and innovative combination of arttistic insurance agents, I came to read his collection of short stories The Amount to Carry where this Kafkaesque story is included together with fifteen other often astonishing stories that challenge time and space. Several of them touch on the theme of this essay - mathematics and cosmic order. For example, The Catastophe Machine which is based on theories developed in the 1960s and 1970s by the mathematicians René Thom and Christopher Zeeman.

Trying to give a simple explanation of what a Catastrophe Theory means that I have to thread on thin ice, since I hardly understand any of it. In mathematics a Catastrophe Theory apparently examines constructed mathematical models within which the value of a variable changes in accordance with rules depending on values ​​that are created by the model itself. Such so-called dynamic systems are generally quite stable and relatively insensitive to influences from external factors, but under certain conditions this state of equilibrium state can change dramatically, often under the influence of extremely small changes in the external factors. With the help of complex mathematical calculations and geometric structures, such sudden changes in dynamic systems, which generally have developed gradually, can be studied and possibly remedied. In these contexts, the word catastrophe refers to a sudden, discontinuous transition to a new, often chaotic state.

As in several other of his stories, Scholzs takes us in the Catastophe Machine into sterile corridors and rooms in research laboratories, apartment buildings and astronomical observatories to demonstrate how we humans often lose control of what our work might actually result in – death and destruction. In The Catastrophe Machine, we meet an odd and misunderstood scientist who has almost innocently ended up in a military-technical, completely emotionally cold, organization, which is translating his ingenious theories about mathematics of loss into a weapon of mass destruction. In his despair, the ingenious scientist exclaims:

– And I who thought I was here to to do math! Don´t you understand that this is mathematics? Pure?”

– Everything pure gets applied, Francis. We deal in the arts of the real.

He is told that everything he has written and calculated belongs to the Organization with which he signed his contract. It has also secretly entered his apartment and without his knowledge copied all his notes and drafts for the book he is writing, which in mathematical terms is intended to describe all historical development.

In the austure vocabulary in the mathematics, a catastrophe is not sudden turn of violence. It is a set of conditions under which a which steady change may cause abrupt effects. At some point in a war of forces, one gives away.

Francis Eckart finds that his own research is classified and he cannot access his writings. What he thought were equations, game theories, a logically constructed fantasy world he took refuge in while suffering from personal problems, may in fact be converted into real nighmare scenarios.

By then the young mathematician has experienced an increasing chaos in his personal life – the death of his mother, his father's severe alcoholism and a painful divorce, but at the same time his experiences have given rise to his discovery of Mathematics of Loss, which he to his despair realized might cause a catastrophe of cosmic dimensions. In this way, Carter Scholz links math to the rules that govern not only our personal lives, but the entire universe.

A pure-minded Buddhist lama would possibly perceive such postmodern fiction as an abomination, especially through its frequent fixation on chimeras, considering life to be filled with alternative possibilities, while sexuality has an overwhelming importance. However, the idea of ​​a universe goverened by strict laws would however not be foreign to him and entirely compatible with the logically based belief system of Buddhism, at least as it was imagined by Arthur C. Clarke's in his The Nine Billion Names of God. which subtly connected mathematics, databases and the basic structure of the universe.

In its original version, Buddhism seems to have been an unusually logical religion. If a pious believer follows the precepts of the Buddha, s/he will reach her/his goal. Although the path to salvation and bliss in Nirvana´s deliverance from suffering involves renunciation, austerity and hard work, the Buddhist is assured of the fact that all this yields desirable results.

As he is portrayed in the scriptures, the founder of Buddhism, Siddhārtha Gautama, was a strict logician who neverthelss was endowed with a certain amount of humor. The Danish religious scholar Vilhelm Grønbech (1873-1948) described him in an unusually sympathetic way:

If there was no more to him than this cold, sharp intellect, we would only admire him and then leave him to his destiny. However, by Buddha we find a face that reflects a soul making him human.[…] The features are characterized by a mild seriousness that excludes all melancholy and hints of sadness and austere seriousness is mitigated by a sense of humor which permeates everything it falls upon. […] He saw himself as something new, not as a warrior, but as life itself. […] His experiences had made him wise, he had a view of life that encompassed its diversity and misery. Then he experienced something that surpassed every vision: all longing and pain left him. It is not enough to state that this new perception of life liberated him, it transformed him into freedom itself.

In Cūḷamālukya Sutta, written sometime between 200 BCE and 100 CE, a story is told of Malunkyaputta, who had set out on the Noble Eightfold Path designated by the Buddha. The cencept is for sure quite well known, though since it illustrates Buddhism's methodic approach to essential insights this path away from suffering might be worthwhile to repeat. Note that the basic principles of Buddhism are generally expressed in different numbers - the three refuges, the four truths and the noble eightfold path:

• Correct understanding of the four noble truths, i.e. i) the truth about dukkha - suffering, dissatisfaction, sorrow, distress, discomfort and frustration. ii) its cause, origin iii) its cessation, ending; and iv) the path leading to to the cessation of dukkha.

• The right intention based on kindness and compassion bringing you to liberation from desire for things that cause suffering for you and others.

• Correct speech includes distancing yourself from all lies and the avoidance of misleading and hurtful claims, as well as gossip and slander.

• Proper action means not harming other beings, as well as refraining from sexually reprehensible acts.

• The right livelihood is to engage in activities that require the right speech and the right action.

• The right effort is to consciously prevent unfavourable perceptions from arising and instead evoke and develop a mindset making it possible to follow the eightfold path.

• Conscious presence means knowledge of how one's own body reacts to emotions, sensory impressions and the insights Buddhist teachings provide you with.

• Proper concentration and meditation equals exercise in and the continous development of dhyana

The word dhyana origintes in ancient Vedic scriptures, the oldest of which were written down as early as 1,500 BCE, it is derived from the Vedic Dhi meaning ”creative vision”. Dhyana eventually came to mean ”deep, methodical and abstract meditation.”

Malunkyaputta had struggled along his cumbersome path towards salvation, but could not really understand what he was devoting so much of his time and effort to. His efforts swere unable provide any answer to the eternal, difficult questions that constantly tormented him, and thus his renunciation and harsh discipline increasingly appeared as utterly meaningless. Siddhārtha Gautama was still alive and to get answers to hiis questions, Malunkyaputta sought out the Master and wondered:

– Venerable Master, as I sat in my solitude, immersed in meditation, the following thoughts rose in my soul: All these doctrines which the Holy One has left unexplained, set aside and rejected – that the world is eternal, that the world is not eternal … the Holy One has actually avoided to answer all these issues. That they remain unanswered displeases me.

Buddha was not at all troubled by Malunkyaputta's disappointment, instead he asked him:

– Say, Malunkyaputta, have I ever told you: Come Malunkyaputta, live a holy life under my direction and I will explain to you if the world is eternal or not eternal … or if the saints exist or do not exist after death?

- No, Venerable Master:

– Accordingly, Malunkyaputta, what has not been explained by me, let it remain unexplained, and what has been explained by me, hold on to what I have explained. And what I have not explained? That the world is eternal and that the world is not eternal… why, Malunkyaputta, did I not explain this? Because it is of no use and has nothing to with the entry into a holy life, nor does it lead to any renunciation of the world … the path to freedom from suffering, to cessation, to peace, to insight, to the highest enlightenment, to Nirvana – therefore I have not explained what you are asking for.

The teachings of the Buddha were practical and logical, there was no room for abstract speculations, only for things that really mattered, which conducted to a throurough change of existence. He explained to Malunkyaputta that his concerns and doubts only caused continued suffering andpossibly death before he had reached the coveted goal of deliverance from suffering.

The Buddha explained his view through a parable. Malunkyaputta's doubts and questions were reminiscent of how a man who had been wounded by an arrow, ”whose tip has been thickly coated with a deadly poison” and was offered the help of a skilled surgeon, though still did not allow him to pull out the arrow and remove the poison until he knew who had shot him, which caste he belonged to, if the bowstring had been manufactured from twisted tendons or any other material, if the bow was made of bamboo or any other material, if the feathers of the arrow shaft came from a heron, or any other bird, if the tip had been smooth or barbed, whether it had been made form iron or ivory. The Buddha stated that such an inquisitive person might die long before the arrow had been pulled out and the poison removed from the wound.

As skeptical as he was of profound speculation, as reluctant was the Buddha to be impressed by miracles. Once an ascetic came to him and claimed: ”Master, your teaching has now perfected my meditation technique and my control of my own body to such an extent that I am able to walk on the water, back and forth across this lake.” The Buddha smiled and wondered, “And what good does that do? And … by the way, there is a perfectly seaworthy boat over there.”

Just as Jesus was a Jew, Siddhārtha was a Hindu. The Kingdom of God taught by Jesus God and The Nirvana by the Buddha found their origins in Judaism and Hinduism and were perhaps even identical with what others had perceived and preached before them. Certainly. the Buddha, just like Jesus, was fully aware of how the Universe was constructed, at least in accordance with to several philoophers of their time had told their audience, and thus they thought it unnecessary to explain such things in too much detail to people who happened to live in the same imaginary world as they did. Jesus's Kingdom of God seems to have been more of a state of mind than a physical place. Siddhārtha, who apparently came from a relatively affluent and highly educated environment, probably regarded the universe as a logical/mathematical construction, possibly akin to what is symbolically represented by Tibetan mandalas.

Hindu philosophy generally speking perceives the Universe as several different, diverse worlds that together build up a multifaceted, yet uniform, Cosmos where each part corresponds to the whole in accordance with mathematically explainable conditions. Probably reminiscent of the motto inscribed on the Grand Seal of the United States – E pluribus unum, by many - one.

Indian cosmology may divided into two variants. The vertical cosmology, Cakravāḍa, describes the arrangement of the worlds in the form of a vertical pattern in which all units are assigned higher and lower positions. Sahasra cosmology, on the other hand, divides the universe into different groupings, a kind of clusters consisting of thousands of millions of individual worlds. Both cosmologies assume that different universes are continuously created and dissolved, ”as Brahman breathes” and this takes place within infinite, cyclical time intervals.

The governing principle of this infinite, cosmic unity follows the same principles summarized by the four Mahavakyas, ”The Great Sayings”, a concise summary of the content of the Indian teachings known as the Upanishads, ” To Sit Down” some of which were written down long before Buddha appeared, sometime during the 400s BCE, others were written down much later. The last of the 108 Upanishads was written sometime during the 15th century CE.

The four Mahayakas are:

• Prajnana Brahma – insight is Brahman, i.e. the supersensible, ever-present and perfected Reality.

• Ayam Atma Brahma – the self (you) is Brahman.

• Tat Tvam Asi – The essence (sat “existence”) is (asi) you (tvam).

• Aham Brahma Asmi – I am Brahman.

We are thus all part of a Cosmic soul/presence, like a drop of water is an undistinguishable part of the sea. Nirvana might be described as a state when we become one with the Cosmos. Accordingly entering a state of Nirvana does not mean an end to our existence, rather a boundless union with, or maybe an ascendant into, the World Soul – the Brahman. The problem is that Buddhism does not acknowledge the existence of any soul, neither a personal one, nor a World Soul, it is a religion that is anātman ”without a self”. According to Buddhism, every human being is a soulless sum of thoughts, feelings, impressions, heritage, and assembled ”palpable” small parts. Nirvana then does not mean an ascension in the Universe but an extinction, a disappearance through the dispersal of all these components. However, several Buddhist philosophers have argued that these ”parts” of human existence do not dissolve and disappear, but constitute permanent parts of the Cosmos, thus they have basically the same view of the Nirvana state as Hindu philosophers.

Accordingly, when our self disappears through our entry into Nirvana, all parts of our ”person” are spread out throughout the Cosmos. Like a drop of water falliing into the ocean. This is perhaps in line with similar views we might discern in Arthur C. Clarke's fable about the Tibetan monks. By compiling all scattered names of God, The Supreme Being, like dispersed letters of a sacred text, or numbers of a mathematical solution, the monks believe they can find a pattern, a plan for the construction of the universe. When this cosmic order appears with the same clarity as the Noble Eightfold Path the monks hope that through their painstaking compilation of the order of the universe they would be able to save/change the entire existence/world and bring us all closer to Nirvana. It was maybe something like that the lama meant when he explained to the American computer expert that what they were trying to accomplish was not the enabling of an Apocalypse , but something that was not so ”trivial” at all. According to Buddhist/Hindu cosmology, the universe/world cannot be obliterated, only changed and this also happens in accordance with a specific, eternally lasting set of rules.

It was possibly speculation about the underlying order of the Cosmos that led Hindu philosophers in the direction of sophisticated, mathematical constructions. As soon as it is possible to reformulate direct observations of our surroundings into descriptions based on relationships between and symbols of ”natural” phenomena, we humans have passed on to a higher stage of knowledge which, if I remember correctly, the philosopher Adi Shankara (788-829 CE)  tried to explain in a simple manner.

If you take an apple and put another apple next to it, there will be two apples. This is completely easy to understand for each and every of one of us. If you then put an apple and a pear next to each other, it will be not only an apple and a pear, but also two fruits. This is our tangible reality.

However … Shankara named the relationship described above as a ”lower reality”. What is then a ”higher” reality? Yes – abstraction. When we reach an abstract sphere we have broken the glass roof of ”reality” and ended up in a completely different dimension than the world of apples and pears. Let us then call the apple one and the pear one as well. When we at this abstract level put them together the result does not become 11, which would have been completely logical, but two 2. How can 1 plus 1 be something as completely different as 2? Well, the equation indicates a new logical context, an abstraction, and according to Shankara a ”higher reality”. That 1 + 1 = 2 is possibly more difficult to understand than that one apple plus another apple become two apples, though abstract numbers do not indicate that a simple summation of apples is wrong, they are just means to bring our thinking up to a ”higher” level.

Let us now say that apples correspond to gods, according to Shankara this is perfectly OK, though the belief in gods does nevertheless belong to a ”lower reality” than the belief that abstract numbers may describe and explain reality as effectively, and even better, as beliefs in gods. If we replace the names of the gods with numbers this does not mean that we change the basic concept – our human existence is governed by contexts and concepts that we can name and replace with numbers. A relationship proving that we are not masters of our existence but only components within an infinite system transcending our comprehension, but which character we nevertheless inmagines by applying mathematics to calculations of how everything relates to each other.

I assume it was such speculations that long before the Europeans could even have imagined it brought the Hindus to the introduction of the number zero as an absolute point of comparison for everything else. Around 200 BCE, the Hindu philosopher Pingala used the word sūnya to indicate the concept we now call zero and around 600 CE the sign 0 had on the Indian subcontinent been established as a symbol for the number zero. However, it was not until the thirteenth century, after much opposition, that the Italian Leonardo Fibonacci succeeded in introducing the concept into Western mathematics.

Another example of the Hindu's early understanding of mathematical comparisons in order to form a concept of the natuers of the Universe and how everything relates to each other is the invention of the game of chess, an almost incomprehensibly refined model of warfare, as well as the dynamics and structure of the universe.

Chess was probably invented during the heyday of the Gupta Empire (280-550 EC) and was then named Chatarunga. The game came to Europe after the Muslims had had conquered Persia in the 7^th century CE and introduced it to Spain, Sicily and Constantinople, while in Africa the Arab version of chess mixed with more ancient board games like the Ethiopian Senterej. Soon chess was played by the Vikings in Scandinavia and Marabouts in West Africa.

Legend states, it was during the regin of a king called Shahram (or Balhait, or Ladava; legends are unreliable) that a ”Brahmin” named Sissa ibn Dahir (or Lahur, Sessa, or Sassa, ibn is the Arab masculine article so it is likely that in its current version the legend has a Muslim origin) invented the game and gave it as a gift to the king, who became so fond of the game that he offered the ”Vizier” (prince, minister, philosopher, or peasant) whatever he asked for as a reward for such a fantastic pastime. The Vizier said that all he asked was that:

You, Most Revered Ruler, place a grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard and then two on its second. Four on the next, then eight and continue to double the number of rice grains you place on each subsequent square, until the board is full.

It seemed to be a modest request, though the king's accountants found that what Sissa Ben Dahir had requested was no less than 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 rice grains, equivalent to the entire world's rice harvests during several upcoming decades. Sissa Ben Dahir had thus demonstrated the marvel of the logarithmic tables that Napier introduced a thousand years later and which now are used to calculate cosmic distances.

Miraculous numerical sequences and relativity-clarifying geometric figures have been used for thousands of years to explain conditions within the universe and make calculations to support planning and construction.

Leonardo Fibonacci was born in Pisa in 1170 but spent his childhood and youth in Algeria where his father during the rule of the Muslim Almohads worked as a merchant with his office in the city of Bugia and Leonardo did not return to Pisa until he was in his thirties. By then he spoke fluent Arabic and was after trading around the Mediterranean well acquainted with the Arabic numeral system (which originally came from India) and position determinations used by Arab seafarers. In 1202, Fibonacci published his Liber Abaci in which he summarized his Arabic arithmetic skills and it is today considered as one of the most important works in the history of mathematics.

The book begins with the phrase ”The nine Indian digits are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 and with these nine digits, and with the sign 0 all numbers can be written,” then follow algorithms for multiplication, addition, subtraction and division and not least the famous Fibonacci Sequence where each number is the sum of the previous two - 1,2,3,5, 8, 13, 21, 35, 55, 89, 144, etc. Although the sequence now bears Fibonacci's name it was apparently also discovered by the Indian philosopher and mathematician Pingala, but it did not come into general use until the 6th century CE.

It is interesting to notice that if you illustrate the Fibonacci Sequence by a geometrical drawing you obtain the following graph:

Or somewaht more elegant:

This is the so-called Golden Section which was known already by Pythagoras (570-495 BC), who believed that everything in the universe could be described through numerical relations and geometric figures and accordingly founded a religion based on this cosmic harmony. Through their great interest in geometry, classical Greek mathematicians became interested in the strange Golden Section, which, for example, appeared in figures such as pentagrams and icosahedrons.

During these COVID-19 times, it may be interesting to remember that many viruses have a capsule shaped like an icosahedron. Of course, the ancient Greeks did not know this, but several of them regarded The Golden Section as a description of a universal relationship and saw it as a norm for the perfect harmony of dimensions and proportions in architecture, painting and sculpture. They also found The Golden Section in several forms and conditions in the nature that surrounded them.

The notion of The Golden Section's presence in the entire universe became even more pronounced during the Renaissance, especially after the Franciscan monk Lua Pacioli (1445-1517) in his work De Divina Proportione, made The Golden Section into metonym for the all harmony found in God's creation. 

The presence of math in the universe has also been used for the production of fractals, a self-uniform pattern that has the same structure at every scale. Natural fractals are, for example, the branches of a tree or the patterns created by river deltas.

The so-called Tree of Life is, moreover, a central symbol in the Jewish Kabbalah, which through speech, numeric and letter symbolism builds up complicated patterns used to describe the universe and which might even serves as a means for an individual to help God,who Kabbalists calls Eyn Sof, "Something that is hidden", in perfecting His creative process. Maybe something akin to the strange activities of the Tibetan monks in Arthur Clarke's short story. Eyn Sof communicates between the different worlds through His ten sefirot, ”emanations”. By becoming deeply acquainted with the different properties and conditions of each sefrirot the Kabbalist tries to find explanations for both the physical and the metaphysical world and thereby become part of the universal harmony that has been divided and dispersed through human egocentrism and childish arrogance.

I had quite early on heard about the Kabbalah since the father of a very good friend and classmate of mine in Hässleholm was quite deeply involved in Jungian metaphysics and the Kabbalah, and when I later was confronted with Noam Chomsky's transformative grammar while studying linguistics at university, I thought I recognized the incomprehensible diagram trees from the Kabbalah and similar incomprehensibilities, which nevertheless could stimulate some of my confusing thoughts about the mystery of life. By the way, Noam Chomsky was certainly well acquainted with Kabbalan. His parents were Jewish refugees from Russia and in addition to being a principal of a Jewish religious school, his father was a linguist and expert in Hebrew.

Generative grammar, at least in Chomsky's version, did in my opinion view grammar in a similar manner as several mathematicians appeared to perceive the Universe, namely as an ordered system which through rules created by the establishment of a certain structure arrange individual sounds so they become to an effective means of communication between individuals expressing themselves through a common language. Accordingly, our way of rearding the world and expressing how we perceive it became subsumed within an almost mathematically predetermined thought structure. I struggled desperately with those, in my opinion, overly complicated linguistic structural trees and silently cursed my profound disinterest in math and utter inability to absorb the miracles of the wonderful world of mathematics.

And it did not get much better when I began studying History of Religions. My friend and professor Tord Olsson had written his doctoral dissertation on Claude Lévi-Strauss, who was interested in complex diagrams and saw them as a means of explaining human thinking. Lévi-Strauss stated that ”I perceive all problems as being linguistic.” Lévi-Strauss combined what he called structural anthropology with mathematical thinking, for example in an early article Les Mathématiques de l´homme, Human Mathematics, which he published in 1954 in the UNESCO Bulletin des sciences sociales and then continued to refine in book after book. Lévi-Strauss argued that in order to understand the basics of human thinking, and thus the society we have created, it is important to study metaphors derived from physics and mathematics, as these sciences examine man's connection with the natural world order.

Lévi-Strauss, who in addition to mathematics also was fascinated by music, stated that ”sounds and numbers are constantly present in the oldest and most mysterious Kabbalistic texts.” He noticed that there was a fundamental correspondence between grammatical rules and mathematical descriptions of reality. In language, through which we express how we relate to and use our position within the universe, it is not the words themselves that carry meaning but how they are combined, as in mathematics where it is the combinations of numbers that give meaning to equations:

It is the combination of sounds, not the sounds in themselves, which convey meaningful data ... [religious thinking] always progresses from the awareness of opposites towards their dissolution.

During the time I studied in Lund, I sometimes worked at a mental institution and there I came across patients who in their desperate efforts to bring order to their mental chaos devoted themselves to counting everything possible. By combining numerical sequences some of them discerned specific messages aimed at them. Because Chomsky's linguistic tree and Lévi-Strauss's diagrams spun around in my head, tormenting and irritating me by obscuring what fascinated me most in literature, art and religion, namely adventure and inspiration, I could not but relate this number hysteria to madness .

The mental disorder of some of the mental patients probably had to do with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a behaviour characterized by constantly repeated rituals, or thought patterns. Such a condition goes by the international name obsessive-compulsive disorder, OCD. Often the compulsive behaviour does not cause the person who suffers from it any discomfort, but may by them instead be considered as a useful and extremely important method to create calm and harmony around them.

The fixation on certain numbers and an almost uninterrupted counting is often referred to as arithmomania and people suffering from such a mental disorder feel a strong need to count everything; their own actions and/or objects they find in their environment. For example, it is common to manically count steps, the number of letters in different words, cracks in floors and ceilings, line markings on streets, even how many times you breathe, or blink. Such manias can develop into the delusion that if you do not do something a certain number of times, for example touching something, then an accident is due to happen.

As in the religious and scientific examples above, a person suffering from OCD may develop complex systems within which values, ​​or numbers, are assigned to people, objects and events in order to arrange them into a larger, even more comprehensive structures. Occasionally, numbers might be linked to previous events and while the victim remembers such incident over and over again, s/he assign special numerical values to them and arrange in the ”Cosmic patterns” they are apt to construct.

I recall several films depicting arithmomania, such as Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, which tells about the mathematician John Nash, who for his game theory in 1994 received the Prize for Economic Science in Memory of Alfred Nobel. While studying at a university, Nash neither goes to lectures nor manages to write a dissertation. Nevertheless, his brain works hard to find mathematical formulas to explain things that no one else is pondering about, such as how birds move in a limited space. He becomes increasingly insane and imagines that through his complicated mathematical calculations enabled to trace the behaviour and plans of enemies to the USA and soon fills a number of notebooks, walls and ceilings with calculations in a shed close to his home, where he lives with his wife and children.

The main character Larry Gopnik's brother in the brother Cohen's film A Serious Man, behaves in a similar manner, spending most of his days and evenings writing down carefully constructed equations and geometric figure intended to constitute a book he calls The Mentaculus that will provide a ”probability map of the universe.”

After stumbling around in an incomprehensive mathematical universe I have overtaken by a slightly confused mood. Before I end up on another trail where I run the risk of getting lost in this seemingly endless cosmos of calculations, correspondences and unexpected contexts, I now give up and for now leave the math to go outside and breath some fresh air.

Barlow, D. H. (ed.): (2014) Clinical Handbook of Psychological Disorders: A Step-by-Step Treatment Manual. New York: The Guilford Press. Charbonnier, Georges (1969) Conversations with Claude Lévi-Strauss. London: Jonathan Cape. Clarke, Arthur C. (2002) The Collected Stories. London: Gollancz. Gbur, Greg (2013) His Wisdom The Defender: A Story, by Simon Newcomb (1900). https://skullsinthestars.com/2013/02/08/his-wisdom-the-defender-a-story-by-simon-newcomb-1900/ Gethin, Rupert (1998) The Foundations of Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grattan- Guiness, Ivor (2003). Companion Encyclopedia of the History and Philosophy of the Mathematical Sciences. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Havil, Julian (2014) John Napier: Life, Logarithms, and Legacy. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1995) Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. New York: Schocken. Lévi-Strauss, Claude (2008) ”Les mathématiques de l'homme,” Sciences humaines, N^o 8. Scholem, Gershom (1978) Kabbalah. New York: Meridian. Scholz, Carter (2003) The Amount to Carry. London: Picador.

Då det gäller matematik befinner jag mig på en neanderthalmans nivå. Jag begriper i stort sett ingenting och ju mer jag kämpar med att förstå, desto mindre begriper jag. Det måste finnas några vindlingar i min hjärna som inte fungerar, eller kanske de saknas.

Redan på lågstadiet blev matematiklektionerna en plåga för mig, för att inte tala om mattehemläxorna, som berövade mig tid som kunde användas till annat. Den första och enda gång jag har anklagats för fusk var när jag på mellanstadiet lämnade in en matteskrivbok för att läraren rutinmässigt skulle kontrollera om jag gjort läxorna och han då fann att flera av sidorna var fullklottrade medan andra var tomma. 

– Vad menas med detta? På flera veckor har du inte gjort vissa läxor! Jag medger att du gjort en del, men andra inte. Vad jag inte begriper är varför du lämnat blanka sidor mellan dem du gjort? Försökte du lura mig att tro att du gjort allt? Kom ihåg att jag kollar om varje läxa är gjord, eller ej.

– Där jag inte har skrivit in något beror det på att jag inte begripit något. Då jag blivit äldre och klokare tänker jag fylla i dem.

Jag menade allvar, men läraren tyckte antagligen jag var knäpp, eller försökte skyla över min lathet. Jag undrar om jag någonsin skulle ha kunnat fylla i de där sidorna. Det kändes som en befrielse då jag efter avslutad skolgång befriades från matematikens gissel.

Då jag förr i tiden inte begrep vissa saker antog jag att de var oerhört viktiga och eftersom min tankevärld inte klarade av att handskas med sådana obegripligheter som matematik betraktade jag det som en plåga, ett ständigt överhängande hot. Det har nu gått över. I skrivande stund slår det mig att under den större delen av mitt liv har jag inte behövt befatta mig med sådant som jag i min ungdom ansåg var oerhört viktigt att begripa och behärska.

Vad jag däremot alltid har gillat är att försjunka i musik och religiösa grubblerier, men det betyder inte att jag begriper vilka regler och mentala strukturer som ligger bakom musik och religion. Jag kan inte spela något instrument och anser mig inte tillhöra någon religiös organisation, men jag lyssnar med glädje och intresse till all möjlig musik och har deltagit i en mängd religiösa ceremonier, i vitt skilda sammanhang och har emellanåt blivit djupt gripen av vad jag upplevt.

Antar att religion, liksom musik och matematik, har har med ordning och struktur att göra. Den troende ser sin religiösa övertygelse som ett regelverk, en förklaring till hur allt fungerar och är uppbyggt. Hen känner sig delaktig i ett system som genomsyrar och styr hela tillvaron. Likaså är musik ett harmoniskt system, där varje enskild del ingår som ett väsentligt fragment inom en struktur som skänker oss engagemang eller lugn. Liksom vår tillvaro kan en del musik framstå som kaotisk, men även kaos kan anses uppgå i en allomfattande konstruktionen som tycks vara en del av, eller möjligen en återspegling av en kosmisk ordning som styr hela skapelsen. 

En sfärernas harmoni där du och jag liksom toner, ord eller siffror ingår som små, men kanske trots allt väsentliga detaljer. Liksom vårt tal speglar vår fantasi och förställningsvärld, så kanske även musik och matematik ge ett återsken av den kosmiska ordning vi alla är en del av. Kanske matematiken är det språk som klarast visar på sådant sammanhang.

John Napier (1550-1617) var en skotsk adelsman som avskydde korkade prästers fastklamrande vid obevisade dogmer, som de dessutom ägnade sig åt att tvångsmata sina församlingsmedlemmar med. Följaktligen var Napier en entusiastisk anhängare av de skotska presbyterianerna, som inte ville ha med biskopar och påven att göra. De menade att Gud stod över allt och att prästadömet därmed var såväl onödigt, som förtryckande. Det enda som räknades var Bibelns suveränitet och nåden genom tron på Kristus.

Napier menade att Universums grundläggande sanningar fanns att söka i Bibeln. Gud talar till oss människor genom sin Heliga Skrift , men det gäller att tolka dess innehåll på rätt sätt. Liksom matematiken kan förklara och bevisa kosmiska sammanhang, kunde den enligt Napier också användas för klargöra Bibelns inre budskap. Napier publicerade en kommentar till Uppenbarelseboken – A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of Saint John, En rationell upptäckt av Sankt Johannes fullständiga uppenbarelse. En redovisning framställd i strängt matematisk form med postulat, propositioner och bevis, som Napier tillämpade för att bevisa att påven är identisk med Antikrist och att världen skulle komma att gå under någon gång mellan åren 1688 och 1700. Napiers psyke var, liksom hos många andra genier, en kombination av stor begåvning och en hel del galenskap.

Napier var ett matematiskt geni och kunde dessutom uttrycka sig på flytande latin och forngrekiska, det senare var vid den tiden (och även nu) mycket ovanligt. Numera är John Napier mest känd som uppfinnare av matematiska logaritmer, som han beräknade genom användandet av en egenhändigt förfärdigad apparat kallad Napiers ben. Han vidareutvecklade även användningen av decimalpunkten i aritmetik och matematik, något som redan italienaren Leonardo Fibonacci lärt sig från muslimerna och börjat använda omkring år 1200.

I sin bok Mirifici Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio förklarade Napier principerna kring sitt användande av logaritmer (de benämndes så långt senare) och presenterade de första logaritmlistorna baserade på hans användande av Napiers ben. Den högst originelle och tämligen förmögne Napier arbetade helst på egen hand, men genom sin vän John Craig hade han uppenbarligen viss kontakt med dansken Tycho Brahe, som hade sitt observatorium på ön Ven i Öresund.

Under alla förhållanden skrev Craig någon gång under 1590-talet ett brev till Brahe i vilket han redogjorde för Napiers användande av logaritmer, något som blev Brahe till stor nytta då han, våldsam och impulsiv, 1597 blivit ovän med Christian IV och tvingats fly till Prag där han tagits emot med öppna armar av kejsaren Rudolph II. Denne högst originelle härskare försåg Brahe med ett nytt observatorium i staden Benátky nad Jizerou, norr om Prag, där Brahe under de sista åren av sitt liv tillsammans med att annat geni, Johannes Kepler, med hjälp av Napiers logaritmer formulerade tre grundlagar för planeternas elliptiska omloppsbanor kring solen, samt beräknade den tid det tog för dem att göra sina varv. Logaritmerna gjorde det möjligt för dem att handskas med mycket stora tal och sedan dess har logaritmer haft stor betydelse för astronomer.

Trots detta ansåg Napier sin fullkomligt knäppa tolkning av Uppenbarelseboken vara hans största insats för mänsklighetens bästa och till skillnad från sina andra böcker, som var skrivna på latin, gav han ut sin uppenbarelseskrift på engelska för att hans ”enkla” framställning därigenom effektivt skulle kunna ”instruera hela denna ö”.

När jag skriver detta hör jag hur de hopplösa duvorna kuttrar på balkongen utanför. För en månad sedan röjde vi undan ett av deras bon och huset blev då invaderat av nästan mikroskopiska duvlöss, som bosatte sig i våra sängar, bet oss och sög vårt blod. Det var därför med intresse jag nu läste om hur Napiers grannar i Edinburgh berättat hur han för att bli av med duvor, som retade honom till vansinne, doppade vetekorn i alkohol, som han sedan spridde ut på sin gård. Då de redlöst berusade duvorna inte förmådde lyfta från marken sprang han ut och nackade dem.

Tillbaka till ämnet. Logaritmer? Du som läser detta vet säkert vad det rör sig om, men jag visste det inte innan jag började läsa om John Napier och begriper inte ens nu vad det egentligen rör sig om. Jag borde antagligen fråga någon matematiker, men hur skulle han kunna förklara det hela för en matematisk idiot som jag? Jag antar dock att det rör sig om serier där talen hela tiden ökar i en bestämd följd. Vad ordet betyder är inte så svårbegripligt – grekiskans logos kan betyda ”förhållande”, ”plan”, ”förnuft”, alltmedan arithmos är ”siffror”. En logaritm skulle alltså kunna vara något i stil med principen 10¹-10²-10³-10^4, o.s.v., alltså en serie där varje tal, ett efter ett, fördubblas och multiplikation på så vis förvandlas till addition – tror jag.

Nåväl, mot slutet av sitt liv fick Napier besök av professorn i geometri vid Oxfords universitet, Henry Briggs, som föreslog honom att utveckla sina tidigare logaritmtabeller på bas av något som kallas för 10-logaritmen. Napier förklarade att han funderat på att göra det, men att hans återstående livstid inte skulle räcka till. Briggs utarbetade då på egen hand en sådan tabell som publicerades samma år som Napier dog, 1617, och som innehöll logartitmen för alla heltal mellan 1 och 1 000. Sju år senare gav Briggs ut en bok som innehöll ”40 000 logaritmer, beräknade med rötter upp till 54:e ordningen och resultat med 30 decimaler.” Jag har inte aning om vad det kan betyda. Men, en samtida astronom skrev att Briggs insats var fullkomligt revolutionerande

genom att reducera till ett par dagars arbete sådant som tidigare tagit flera månader i anspråk har Briggs verk fördubblat livslängden för en astronom och skonar honom nu från de fel och den avsky som som är oskiljaktig från långa beräkningar.

År 1881 satte sig professor Simon Newcomb ner i biblioteket på Förenta Staternas Marinobservatorium, vars föreståndare han var, och slog upp en logaritmtabell. Newcomb hade utfört en fullständig revision av de elliptiska omloppsbanorna för Merkurius, Venus, Tellus, Mars, Uranus och Neptunus och sammanställt tabeller som visade hur hans beräkningar hade utförts. Han hade givetvis då använt sig av logaritmtabeller. Medan Newcomb bläddrade i tabellen han lagt framför sig på bordet upptäckte han att de första fem sidorna i tabellboken var betydligt mer slitna, tummade och sönderbläddrade än de följande sidorna.

Vad han fann var att inom varje lista som involverar en stor mängd siffror – längden på floder, dödstal, havsdjup, inkomster, befolkningsmängder, m.m., så börjar de flesta siffermängderna med talet ett. Och än mer förvånande – det är fullt möjligt att åstadkomma nästan identiska kurvor baserade på talen i listor med olika fenomen, trettio procent av talen börjar då med siffran ett, sjutton procent av dem med en tvåa och sedan sjunker förekomsten successivt ner till 4,6 procent för siffran nio. Allt i enlighet med nedanstående kurva:

Kurvan som Newcomb upptäckt uppkommer vid sammanställningen av siffror från i stort sett allt statistiskt material, både sådant som genererats av mänskliga aktiviteter, som mätningar av olika naturliga fenomen, blir i stort sett alltid densamma. Ju större och mer varierade siffrorna från olika datamängder är, desto mer närmar sig sifferfördelningen den kurva som denna så kallade Benfords lag förutspår.

Att fenomenet kallas Benfords lag beror på att en fysiker vid namn Frank Benford började tillämpa Newcombs metod på sammanställningar han gjorde av prislistor, sportresultat, ytor bevattnade av olika floder, elektricitetsräkningar, till och med gatuadresserna till amerikanska fysikerförbundets medlemmar. Sammanlagt innehöll Benfords listor 20 229 olika tal och de kurvor de uppvisade bevisade vad Newcomb tidigare kommit fram till. År 1938 redovisade Benford resultaten av sina undersökningar i artikeln The law of anomalous numbers, Lagen om avvikande tal, publicerad i Proceedings of the American Philosopical Society. 

Avvikelser från Benfords lag tyder på manipulationer – på påhittade siffror. Under senare år har ett växande antal statistiker, revisorer och matematiker övertygats om att lagen faktiskt utgör ett kraftfullt och relativt enkelt verktyg för att bevisa misstankar om allsköns bedrägerier, som skattefusk, oärliga revisioner, till och med datorbedrägerier, som de berömda troll, falska identiteter, som ryssar uppenbarligen använde för att manipulera det amerikanska valet 2016.

Napier, Newcomb och Benford utförde sina väldiga beräkningar av statistiskt material innan användningen av datorer och miniräknare. Vad som nu kan räknas fram på ett par sekunder tog tidigare flera år av träget, ytterst tålamodskrävande räknande i anspråk. Vad som också är intressant är att samtliga tre ägnade sig åt dessa omfattande logaritmövningar som en bisyssla.

Napier var invecklad i sina egendomliga och av honom egenhändigt påhittade sifferangivelser i Bibeln, Benford var under arton år en samvetsgrann och flitig ingenjör på General Electrics ”ljussättningslaboratorium” och arbetade sedan ytterligare tjugo år på företagets forskningslaboratorium. Han var expert på optiska fenomen och tog ut tjugo patent på olika optiska instrument. Newcomb var astronom, men även en ekonom vars teorier hyllades av igen mindre än John Maynard Keynes. Newcomb talade franska, tyska, italienska och svenska, var till högt upp i åren en aktiv alpinist och skrev även flera populärvetenskapliga böcker och en science fiction roman – His Wisdom The Defender, A Story, ”Hans visdom Försvararen, en berättelse”. Romanen har en hel del likheter med Marvelkaraktären The Iron Man, Järnmannen, hjälte i tre populära filmer från 2008, 2010 och 2013.

Iron Man var från början en seriehjälte från Marvel Comics  skapad av författaren och förläggaren Stan Lee. Superhjälten gjorde sin debut 1963 i Tales of Suspense No. 29. I det privata är Iron Man Anthony Edward "Tony" Stark, en amerikansk miljonär, storföretagare, playboy och genialisk vetenskapsman. Han lider av en livshotande bröstskada till följd av en kidnappning under vilken hans gisslantagare försökte få honom att konstruera ett massförstörelsevapen, men han lyckas istället tillverka en högteknologisk flygdräkt och med den fly ur sin fångenskap. Tony Stark använde sedan sin dräkt för att som Iron Man bekämpa ondskefulla krafter.

Jag har inte en aning om Stan Lee läst och låtit sig inspireras av Simon Newcombs numera tämligen okända roman, men hans Tony Stark är onekligen liksom Newcombs Professor Campbell, en heroisk och stormrik vetenskapsman som kring sig samlar ett gäng trogna medkämpar och tillsammans med dem bekämpar såväl världens ondska som ett opålitligt manipulerande etablissemang.

Newcombs roman utspelar sig under 1940-talet och berättar hur världen genom en genial vetenskapsmans heroiska kamp förvandlas till ett fredligt Utopia. Den inleds med hur Professor Campbell, från Harvard University, tillsammans med två assistenter gör två revolutionerande uppfinningar. Han finner en metod för att omvandla aluminium till ett oerhört flexibelt material för motorcyklar och bilar, som han driver med etherine som utvinns direkt från atmosfären i form av luminiferous aether, ljusbärande eter, ett ämne som motverkar gravitationskraften. Campbell lämnar universitet och blir stormrik. Hans andra uppfinning är något han kallar motes, en slags flygmaskiner, som blir grunden för ett globalt nätverk av lufttransporter.