The White Staff Nudge: Joseph of Arimathea, the 24 Elders, and the Crowning of Earth

By Richard Leviton

This is a story of how a sages staff that blossomed in white petals two thousand years ago gave the Earth and humanity a valuable spiritual nudge in 2054.

The sage was Joseph of Arimathea, famous for providing a tomb for the crucified Jesus. But hes also legendary for arriving in Celtic Glastonbury in the first century AD, where he established the first Apostolic church in Britain.

Joseph also introduced the Grail Knight Fellowship and the Christ Light transmission. Immortal, hes been the chief magus of the Quest for the Holy Grail ever since and the leader of an esoteric academy spanning the centuries that trains people to use the authentic Christ Light to rebalance the planet.

It all comes down to a flowering white staff, and its a staff made of Light. Its blossoms are blazing diamond-white fire, and its called the White Crown. But Joseph is not the only one with a staff. All Grail Knights have one, and thats how they combine Christ alignment with Earth energies, as Edward Burbage found out. Hes an established Boston book editor who sets off with two companions on a four-year immersion in the powers and uses of the flowering white staff.

The story begins in the year 2050, and the world is still reorganizing itself along better lines than it has seen in millennia since the Golden Age finally began in 2020. But it still needs a few expert nudges from the white staff to keep it on track.

Edwards initiation into how you do this with the white staffs power takes him to Nebraska, Iowa, Glastonbury, Ireland, Gozo, and Greece. Along the way, he learns the true story of the Holy Grail, how Irelands original gods brought the Grail from the Andromeda Galaxy, and how their allies, the famously enigmatic 24 Elders, guide the Earths secret destiny. But Edward will have to deal with their enemy, Klingsor, the trickiest, nastiest, most deviously clever Grail Killer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532033636

Richard Leviton

Richard Leviton is the author of 14 books, including many on myths and the global landscape, notably The Galaxy on Earth, The Emerald Modem, Signs on the Earth, and Encyclopedia of Earth Myths. He has been in regular contact with the angelic realm for more than 22 years, and has written about his experiences with them in Looking for Arthur and What's Beyond That Star. He is the director/founder of the Blue Room Consortium, a cosmic mysteries think tank based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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Copyright © 2017 Richard Leviton.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-3362-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-3363-6 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 10/03/2017

Contents

Foreword

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About the Author

The Blue Room Consortium

For Judith A. Lewis and Silver Boy

Foreword

I didn’t realize it at first. Joseph was nudging me. But it was a nudge from his flowering white staff that lasted four years, and I was so immersed in it I didn’t realize this. Now, after a time of reflection, I can see how much he showed me while I was living inside that nudge, that it was a perpetual revelation.

Yes, I know. This is all opaque. Let me clarify these references. Who am I? I am a book editor for a Boston publisher; I’ve been editing books for about 30 years now, and during the course of this profession I have had occasion to travel a bit, meet interesting people, gain a few insights, and write two books. One was about the Celtic magus, Merlin; the other about a significant world event in 2033.

I also edited a few books about an enigmatic but fascinating human called Blaise. Of him, let’s say he had a different take on the history of humanity and the Earth, and he had some startling remarks to make about the role of angels in the life of both, a role that hasn’t stopped and has gained momentum by an event in 2020. At that time, Blaise said, some members of the order called Ofanim started incarnating as humans, for the first time ever in this present 311-trillion-year cycle known as an Age of Brahma. It had been planned a long time ago, possibly at the start of this Age, and they waited patiently until 2020 arrived.

The Joseph I refer to is generally known as Joseph of Arimathea, a man famous in the New Testament for having aided Jesus and providing him a tomb. His time, as you will realize, was some 2,000 years ago, so I must be recounting some new historical aspect to his life and mission. But I’m not. I have met him.

If you have read my Merlin chronicles you will have been introduced to the idea that certain famous characters from the deep past are not necessarily out of the picture. Merlin certainly wasn’t. I met him too, though to be accurate, he met me, coming to see me one night here in my Boston home to invite me to participate in what turned out to be a five-year apprenticeship program in some of the Mysteries of consciousness and the energy pattern of the planet. My contact with Joseph proceeded along those same eldritch lines.

My training, I suppose I should call it, with Joseph lasted four years, and I did it with two colleagues that I met along the way, one from Gozo, one from Athens. I should clarify that. It has lasted four years so far; it could well start up again. The kinds of projects this Joseph appears to be involved in span long time periods, and, I have to say at the outset, aren’t always in the present moment.

Incidentally, whatever you might have read about Joseph, you may as well forget it. His true story is very different and far more interesting than the conventional historical account, which is at best sketchy. Let’s start with the absolute basics. First, he’s not dead. Not even close.

He has evolved beyond the necessity of dropping a body when it wears out. He creates them from Light, or, more often, as semblances of a human form in Light. Joseph is a perfect example of the classical image of a Hierophant. That is an old but serviceable term that means a Revealer of the Holy Light. Joseph does that. That’s what geomancy is all about; that is a word you’ll encounter often in this report. It signifies energy patterns in the planet’s subtle environment and their effects on life and awareness and how they can act as Mystery temples. One of Joseph’s principal geomantic tools is a white staff that is famous in British legend for turning into a flowering tree when it was inserted into the ground. I call Joseph an Emitter of the Holy Light; the flowering white staff does that. He shows you where the Light switches are, and then he turns them on for you.

Second, he wasn’t just a rich Jew from Judea who was involved with Jewish politics in a governing body called the Sanhedrin. He was, and I am still surprised when I think about this, he still is, a master, if not the premier, Earth geomancer, which means somebody involved in adjusting the planet’s energy patterns known as the Light grid of Earth and which modulate consciousness as we experience it and basically everything to do with planetary physical matter. The Light grid of Earth is akin to what esotericists call the human etheric body. It contains the vital blueprint for our biological form and keeps it alive and healthy. This grid maintains these patterns for the Earth, a living, sentient organism, and these energy patterns not only run the Earth’s life but direct our human life too.

Third, he’s in charge of the Grail Knights, men and women who work these patterns. In fact, he is the permanent chief of the Grail Knight Fellowship. Those are old terms decidedly, but they still have relevance even now in the year 2055, centuries after events in the King Arthur and Grail saga supposedly took place. That’s where you most frequently encounter references to Grail Knights, mostly men riding around on horses searching for the Grail Castle and its precious holy object, the Holy Grail, and often failing at it. Once a year they gather at Arthur’s headquarters called Camalate and discuss their outings.

In reality, however, the term points to a group of men and women of any time period, not just the medieval, dedicated to helping the planet and, by extension, humanity, through adjusting conditions in the Earth’s complex Light grid. The Holy Grail is not so much a sanctified object they search for but a geomantic tool employed in the maintenance of the planet’s energy and consciousness body. The issue is not finding the Grail; it is about using it. It is a geomantic tool among many in the Grail Knight’s planet Light grid repair kit.

I know this is most likely an unfamiliar concept for the reader, so I will return to it again. This grid is a complicated, even intricate, geometric pattern of Light that wraps around the planet and provides the subtle context for its sacred sites. This pattern of Light is an anatomical map of consciousness. It is, taken as a whole, a mirror image of the structures of human consciousness, and that is how it provides the etheric interface for our lives. It is a finely tuned system for consciousness regulation, for our potential awareness across many levels, and it needs regular servicing in the form of expert human interaction.

It has supporters and opponents, and the job of the Grail Knights is to regulate this, which means to enhance the beneficial acts of the supporters and minimize the obstructive effects of its opponents. Why would this system have opponents? It is a scaffolding you climb to achieve total wakefulness, by which you acquire the full spectrum of consciousness potency intended for humans. Some don’t want that to happen. They think it better that humans remain asleep to this potential and stay unaware of the intricacies of their environment.

The Earth’s Light grid is a means for controlling world consciousness, either to wake it up or keep it asleep, and as everyone knows, some people gravitate towards that second goal. This work is done within consciousness; it doesn’t involve the body very much or even require much walking around or hiking difficult mountains, though sometimes you have to. It’s done in your awareness focused upon specific sites according to well-tested protocols.

This focusing of awareness I refer to requires the Grail Knight be able to access what’s called the Christ Light. This is a condition of consciousness that already exists in all humans. It is different from what people ordinarily think of as the Christ, and it certainly is not Jesus or any discrete personification. It is not about religion or Christianity or, for that matter, dogma of any kind.

It is already deposited within every human, part of our generic spiritual design. Everyone already has a generous endowment of this quality of consciousness within. Let me emphasize that this Christ Light is not outside us, but is originally inside us. You don’t need to call upon an external deity to save your soul or help you out. Help is already here, inside you, put there by God at our creation as humans. You brought it with you when you were born.

But you have to find where it is and activate it. Then you deploy it as a practical geomantic tool. That’s what the training of a Grail Knight entails. That sounds strikingly different than normal Christianity, doesn’t it. I must emphasize when I say Christ Light I mean it in a sense different from the dogma of Christianity. It is not the Christian Christ, but the factual, cosmic one. It could just as well be called other things, such as Buddha Mind, which in fact it is. The yogis of Hinduism call its home the Abode and Root of Bliss and Delight.

Rudolf Steiner once made that important distinction. The Christ, he said, is a fact of the cosmos, a fact of the order of Creation, not a brand name or exclusive salvific figure of only one religion. Grail Knights work under this understanding of what the Christ Light is. Students of mythology may discern equivalent representations of the Christ figure in other mythic pantheons, such as the Egyptian Horus, the Norse Balder, and the Greek Dionysus. Each of these alternate images discloses different nuances of this archetypal cosmic quality.

If you happen to be a Buddhist, this same quality is known as the Buddha Mind. That is a more abstract picture, pointing to a condition of enlightenment rather than its holder because Buddha simply means the Awakened One, which is abstract and impersonal too. In neither case is the Christ or Buddha in its true, original form a person in any sense we know of this. Think of it as a condition of consciousness that does not require a godly form, though some deific figures have been commissioned to model this quality to make the point.

They have put forward instructive visual metaphors to connote this quality, but we have to remember to see through these personifications to the true reality. The Christ Light is more like an atmosphere, almost like a cloud, inside you; you enter this and dissolve your sense of self into this wide-awake consciousness vapor. Then you and the Christ Light, this atmosphere, are one.

Anyway, in practical terms, whoever wields the Christ Light becomes the face of the Christ, and the point of the Grail Fellowship, I now understand, is to have lots of faces. If you wield the Christ Light, then the face of the Christ is your own. Don’t panic. I am not trying to deliberately sound blasphemous, but it actually is true. It is a condition, otherwise invisible, that shines through you. Think of it like this: you go to a fashion show, like the outfit the model wears, buy it, take it home, and wear it. Now you are the one in that smashing outfit. It was never about the model; it was always about who wears the designed clothes.

Whatever you look like, the Christ Light, when turned on, will come through your physiognomy, your face. It’s egalitarian and, I think, rather funny. It was never meant to be exclusively tendered by only one heroic individual other than to demonstrate it publicly. The hope was that everyone would then copy this gesture and thereby claim an original patrimony that is part of what a human is. In this case, everyone gets a copy of this brand new fashion outfit.

Here is a way of getting across the special nuance I reserve for the Christ and Christ Light in this account. As I mentioned, it is not the conventional one. The Hindus speak of Vishnu, a masculine god, and Sri, his feminine consort. She was an early, if not perhaps the first, female goddess figure in that pantheon. She arose as a ratna, a spiritual treasure, and an embodiment of splendor when the gods churned the Ocean of Milk at the beginning of time, or maybe before that. All sorts of heavenly treasures emerged when they stimulated this vast Sea of Light to see what it might precipitate; they likened this Light to a Sea of Milk.

Garuda, the mighty celestial eagle-like bird of Hindu myth, flies these two august personages around on his broad back throughout the cosmos. Garuda, with a golden body, a white human face, red wings, an eagle’s beak, and a crown on his head, his size so massive he can block out the Sun as seen from the Earth, was Vishnu’s designated vahana, or mount. He was always with Vishnu. As I understand it, by Vishnu the Hindu sages meant the Christ in a masculine guise, and by Sri, they meant the Christ in a feminine guise. It is a balanced syzygy. This term denotes a conjunction or a balanced pairing of two components. Unfortunately, Christianity has scripturally edited out most signs of this pairing.

This is not a conventional belief in Christianity, though I contend it is a correct one. You don’t hear much talk about a feminine Christ. My experience verifies it, as does that of other Grail Knights. Sri is a reality; there is a feminine Christ, of equal importance as the masculine guise. I should mention that the Grail Knight view of the world is entirely empirical, based on direct experience. It’s what the Gnostics meant by the term gnosis, direct revelation as the basis for belief. It is still a viable approach and Grail Knights use it. All the deities, even God, have this masculine and feminine polarity and we do as humans, both outwardly in gender and inwardly in what psychologists inspired by C. G. Jung call anima and animus, our inner feminine and masculine parts, respectively.

Let’s say there is a small domestic drama being played out in your heart chakra, which is an energy-consciousness center in your chest. The feminine Christ wants to hug and merge with the masculine Christ but you are in the way. The you in question is your selfhood and all your cognitive tools, such as perception, will, feelings, the tendency to give names to forms, and your consciousness itself in the way it has been adapted to fit your notion of reality.

These tools keep separating you from the world, positing a dualistic reality. You are here, and the entire rest of the world is outside you there. All these tools stand between the two aspects of the Christ, which is an experience of nondualism, which means consciousness and the universe are one, you and the outside world in fact are the same unit of consciousness. That is not a perspective people normally or easily take on. It can feel daunting. It wasn’t easy for me.

For it to prevail, you have to get yourself out of the way of Sri and Vishnu. That’s because you are like a brick wall that stands between these two spirits. You get out of the way by dissolving yourself, your selfhood and its cognitive habits, into this singular Light. It’s like disappearing, no trace left behind. Then the two parts of the Christ rush together and embrace in bliss. This is the Christ Light, the emanation their union gives off. Dualistic, individualized notions of separate selfhood unfortunately have no place in it, but the entire universe does. Then this unified condition starts to shine through your face, because you still have a body, don’t forget, and it comes through your voice and your gestures. The Grail Knight transmits this new alignment to the planet through its grid.

The Christ Light is an egalitarian opportunity. Anyone may have it and embody it. That has always been the point. Your experience may vary from somebody else’s and that’s perfectly fine. No dogma is involved, and really no doctrine either. It is purely empirical; a self-empowering epistemology in which you prove the validity and reality of the Light to and by yourself. You don’t have to take anything on faith or hearsay, only the factuality of this celestial Light. How hard do you need to be convinced the Sun is in the sky shining in the daytime? You accept the factuality of this; that’s how Grail Knights look on the Christ Light. Its reality, its factualness, is proven by their direct experience of it.

After all, it has received many names, and the Christian ones are only the most recent but by no means the definitive titles nor does Christianity own the Christ. This celestial spirit has generated many metaphorical guises but has no discrete or definitive personification, only semblances for the purposes of illustration. In fact, Hindu myth describes nine previous Earth personifications of the Christ or Vishnu, known as his descents or "avatars." One was a very long fish; another a lion; one a boar; and one was even a dwarf. I appreciate how this will distress those insisting on the uniqueness of the Jesus-Christ personification.

Let me finish up my point on the egalitarian nature of the Christ Light. Let’s use the most recent personification as our example to make my point. First you have the Christ, one person, appearing as Jesus. Then you have the 12 Apostles who emulated this quality. Then you have everyone, the whole of humanity, carrying the Christ Light; we call that condition Christed. It means this Light has made some big changes in a person, burned off much darkness. The Grail Knights represent a special, professional application of this condition. Think of the Grail Knight as a transition stage between Apostles and all humans, except there is no preaching or even testifying, just a lot of geomantic field work.

Grail Knights are like technicians trained to adjust the geomantic Light system as needed. One of the prime tools for this technical work is the flowering white staff, which I‘ll explain as this book proceeds. This staff is filled with the Christ Light, and that is the principle geomantic tool we use out there in the planet’s Light grid and subtle terrain of numinous high points. Joseph is the master of this approach and the trainer of Grail Knights in its use. Please don’t think of this staff as being a physical one. It is made of Light. It is a psychic tool. The trained Grail Knight is considered Christed when he or she can wield this special etheric white staff for the benefit of a landscape-geomantic site. The Christ Light is actually a geomantic tool for maintaining the health of the Earth.

In case this is still opaque and too vague to make sense of, here is a key story line. Joseph of Arimathea came to England shortly after the Crucifixion. He landed at a hill in Glastonbury, a quirky, mystical town in Somerset, which is west of London about a hundred miles, and he planted his staff in the damp soil. That probably meant he inserted its bottom tip a few inches into the ground and left it standing there as a thin upright pillar. Then something magical happened. It turned into a tree and immediately sprouted flowers out of its top.

The site, called Wearyall Hill, became a sanctified ground marked by Joseph’s magical act. A hawthorn tree was regularly maintained there to commemorate this sanctifying gesture and to mark the spot for future visitors. Then he founded Britain’s first Apostolic Church there in Celtic Glastonbury. This is the folklore of Joseph of Arimathea. It probably is all true, but just not the way it sounds, or let’s say it has metaphysical connotations not obvious at first. I wrote this book to explain what those connotations are and what the image of a flowering white staff means, which is to say, what Joseph’s mission was about.

You might wish to regard my account as another installment in the folklore of Joseph of Arimathea. That’s okay. A few years ago I would have done so, both as a person and an editor. But you will probably agree that in the last 35 years reality has been lightening up, loosening its tight materialistic hold on us. Things seem possible and happen now that we never could have countenanced before the year 2020. Something very important to the Earth happened that year.

So many items of our culture, which we have thought to be solid, cemented in place, like immoveable statues in our museums, have started walking around, talking to us, revealing secrets of the past, present, and future, and these secrets have startled us. Usefully, though, I think. Think of the Joseph of Arimathea story as another statue suddenly come to life and speaking. Our mythic past, our planet itself, have become suddenly hierophantic. The Holy Light is being revealed to us from all directions; it definitely is a new trend.

The same goes for the 24 Elders. Most people have heard of them, but only vaguely. There is only a fleeting reference to them in Revelation, and nothing else. So who are they? They are genuine figures, extremely old, well-informed on matters of policy and planning, that is, with regard to the Planner-in-Chief. You will probably have heard of this enigmatic figure as the Supreme Being, or, in the vernacular, God. The Elders are members of the Supreme Being’s Cabinet, we might say, privy councilors. I learned that they work closely with our Joseph, that he is a kind of emissary or middleman between them and the Grail Knights. He is, if this doesn’t confuse you, their flowering white staff through which they reach down from their august, arcane level to inform the realm of the Masters. If we’re lucky and sensitive, we might catch a few sentences of their conversation.

The Elders come into this story, and you may gain a fresh appreciation for the scope of their awareness and responsibility. As I said, they’re well-informed, and it’s my impression, after these four years, that they are willing to share some of this information with those people who find it interesting and see its value. The white staff is a kind of spiritual elevator that takes you up to their realm.

As for the crowning of Earth, certainly a potentially pretentious phrase, that refers to something that comes out of the top of the white staff, the flowering part. It resembles a white crown with numerous diamond-white fire points. The Qabalists tell us it signifies an aspect of the Supreme Being manifesting through the highest level of reality humans are capable of perceiving or understanding. It is a means by which the Supreme Being can impart something of His intentions to those toiling in the incarnate realm, scratching their heads and wondering what it’s all about. We might number the planet itself among those wondering.

The White Crown, when deployed from the white staff, provides some answers. It raises sacred sites and their components, both physical structures and the subtle Light temples also present, into a higher realm of revelation where reality and the reasons for their existence start to make sense. That is what I mean by crowning. It’s something humans can do to help the Earth. We can help take it and all its geomantic nodes up to the place of the full explanation. Then we are crowned with understanding and a sense of perpetual revelation.

It’s up to the Grail Knights to deploy the white staff and release the White Crown on behalf of the sites. It’s Joseph’s job to train the Grail Knights in the protocols of doing that. He hopes that enough people will be interested to sign up for this training to create enough of a foundation and generate sufficient traction to crown enough landscape sites so that they can start providing answers. Then we can start living in a reality that is self-revealing all the time. I’m sure you will appreciate the advantages of that kind of living conditions.

That’s the key thing I’ve learned from the unusual adventure I’ve had. That there are answers, and there are intelligences capable of providing them, like Masters, angels, Elders, but it’s more than that. The larger picture is that our reality, that of the Earth and humanity, has been planned, accounted for, and has since its inception been monitored and occasionally given a jog. The reality is somewhere between chaos and determinism; there is wiggle room.

Let’s say the designers of reality have a general plan in mind, a desired outcome, but they’re flexible on how that will be achieved. They allow for many contingencies and Plan Bs. They have fallback plans by the truckload; they have committees constantly coming up with new ones, a million ways to get to the pictured goal. It’s a whole creative industry they have in the celestial worlds.

If you award free will to your dominant self-aware phylogeny, humans, you can’t go around meddling and intervening every minute the plan goes awry and the species runs amok. You can only and with exquisite discretion give it a nudge. That gentle prod must allow for refusal and resistance by you and me, its intended recipients. No thank, you, sir, I don’t want that. I don’t want to go that way. All you can do is make it possible for them to go that way if they wish to. So this is an account of some aspects within the most recent episode of nudging.

Readers may be perplexed by some apparent inconsistencies or even implausibilities in this chronicle regarding time and space and modes of travel. I share that perplexity. I am still trying to work out how I did some of the things I know I did and report in this chronicle. They seem to defy the causal logic of our world as we know it. But that’s the thing, isn’t it. Don’t you think the world has changed quite a bit since that epochal year of 2020 when the angels started becoming humans and subtly changed the vibration of the planet and humanity.

Much now seems possible, though still hard to explain, that formerly, before that date, would have staggered our three-dimensional minds and led us to dismiss whatever claims followed such unfounded assertions as I casually make here. I hope I still retain some signs of the kind of sobriety you would expect from a seasoned book editor and that this gravitas informs my account. I know I would be scouring any manuscript that came in to my office making the kind of claims I have to see if the writer was still anchored in our known reality.

My only defense, though I’m not sure I need one now in 2055, is that understanding trumps logistics. How precisely Joseph facilitated the movement of our bodies and certainly our awareness to these various nodes on the timeline is less important than the discoveries we made once we were there and the actions we were asked to make at those theres on the timeline of humanity which, as you will see, is more like a wrap-around environment than a linear progression with traffic moving in only one direction. The timeline is a circle, and it flows more than it moves, train-like, in only one direction, or so it seemed. The timeline indicates the complete and factual record of everything humanity has done since its inception on the Earth, our complete record written in time.

My two colleagues in this Grail Knight romp along the timeline, Matthias Debrincat and Elena Gianakos, share my insouciance about how we managed to get about so fleetly. They both occupy responsible professional positions, museum curator and professor, respectively. You would think these prestigious appointments would assure in them the requisite gravitas to avoid such sensational exploits as those I recount. You wouldn’t expect such people to seem flighty, reporting all sorts of wild adventures. Apparently not, and I’m glad not because they have been excellent companions and explicators on this Grail adventure, and they have shared in my training with Joseph of Arimathea.

As for myself, a supposedly tempered book editor at a respected Boston publishing house, well, I suppose I have already demonstrated my wanton disregard for the proprieties of consensus rationality, as those who may have glanced at my two previous books and the ones I edited will know. All I can do is thank my publishers for their continuing forbearance in tolerating my metaphysically feral proclivities and my readers as well for giving me the benefit of the large doubt. What I can promise is that, even though my account may seem improbable or wildly fantastic, I can at least assure the reader that it will read coherently and pay due respect to the requirements of clear writing.

Yes, that sounds a bit droll and perhaps ironical as well. Meanwhile, for those willing to credit that the Grail, Grail Knight Fellowship, Grail Castle, the mystical realm called Sarras, the 24 Elders, the Tuatha De Danann (original gods of Ireland), flowering white staffs with White Crowns on top, and a possible early role in the unfolding of human life on Earth by representatives from the Andromeda Galaxy (certainly the wildest of my many wild claims), have any basis in reality, and a reality a mostly average person could expect to experience, perhaps want to sample, you will find the reports contained in this book at least entertaining, but I hope, to a small degree, edifying, and even more so, inspiring.

I stated at the beginning that I discovered I had been inside Joseph’s staff getting a slight fingertips push for four years. I meant that in the sense of an environment. I did not realize the degree to which everything I did with Joseph, Matthias, and Elena seemed so easy and fluid was because I was seeing things from inside this staff. Life inside the influence of his white staff was revelatory.

I was under its influence during that time, seeing under its auspices and through its clear lens. That view is Hyperborean: it is the view from the heavenly Light of the Crown, from the original Golden Age specifications for Earth reality and Light. That sounds a little ponderous, but let’s say it was the view of the Earth landscape and the human timeline from the vantage point of the plan for it. Let’s say it was the view you get when you can examine the original blueprints. It is regarding this momentous reality from inside the white flowering staff as wielded by Joseph and on behalf of the Elders and for the benefit of the planet.

Hyperborean is a Greek term that points to the original purity of the planet, the time of perhaps the planet’s first Golden Age when the Light temples were factory-fresh and consciousness was pristine, wide-open, and full of possibilities. The Greeks used to say Hyperborea lay somewhere in the far North and it enjoyed conditions of perpetual springtime and constant music. Their god, Apollo, frequently visited Hyperborea to check in on conditions. Satya-yuga is an equivalent term from Hinduism, meaning Era of Light, and I explain that and Hyperborean in more detail in the book.

I’m saying that I see now I took this perspective for granted, but that was because I couldn’t then appreciate the fact I was inside it, under its influence. Now I do. I confess I am surprised by what I saw and did, how easily I accepted a series of discoveries and how quickly I was able to build up an understanding. I have discussed this with Matthias and Elena and they concur it was like that.

The only reason I mention this and what possibly makes it relevant to the reader is that you may experience something like this as you read this field report. I suspect this is how Joseph of Arimathea likes to work, deftly, behind the scenes. You may find yourself immersed in this expanded view of the world and its prospects without suspecting it or perhaps not even seeing its subtle boundaries. I can think of worse things to be immersed in—Klingsor and his dark antics come readily to mind. Ah yes, Klingsor. I was saving this for last.

You’ll find out about that soon enough, what this black-minded Grail Knight and Tuatha-Andromedan god has been up to in the last many millennia and what we did to put a halt to all that interference. After all, every good adventure story has to have a villain, a bad guy, to give the good guys something heroic to accomplish. Still, you’ll find some ironies here.

—Edward Burbage

Boston, Massachusetts

April 23, 2055

1

I saw the face first. It seemed to come out of the tree. I shook my head. I wasn’t sure I was truly seeing this. It was too implausible. First I saw a small thorn tree in blossom. The tree stood about ten feet tall and perhaps six feet across when you included the spreading branches. It was physical; you could touch it. I saw the man’s head as if it were under the ground at the base of the tree, like spreading roots, and the tree and its blossoms seemed to have sprouted out of this man’s head to rise above the ground and upwards for ten feet, oddly like a fountain in freeze-motion. Instead of white spumes you had the blossoms.

It was magnificently white. It was a white that was more like flames than fluttering tree blossoms. The man seemed to be holding a tall white staff, but as I studied it this staff seemed more a white column, like a massive Corinthian pillar in Greek architecture, and he was standing inside that as if it were a temple. He flickered in and out of visibility. He was smiling, inwardly, as if in a state of bliss.

This white column, which I should perhaps more accurately call a pillar of Light or even of organized white fire, like the fire that burned at the start of Creation, as I might imagine it, was searingly, impossibly bright, and its flames were like fire blossoms that seemed to be consuming the hill and moving outward. Amidst the many white blazing flames or flower petals were nesting birds. At least it looked like that at first. Then I realized they were old men—as old as Creation itself, they seemed—crowned men seated on golden thrones arrayed in a circle within the white petals of the flowering staff on the man’s head. Now he appeared in the midst of this throne array, a head facing all of the crowned figures at once. Their arms extended, they appeared to hold him as if he were a white fire staff. They infused this upheld staff with their attention.

The odd spectacle kept enlarging. Now it was the size of the entire hill, enveloping it, and now it had doubled in diameter and was enveloping houses and the rest of the town’s landscape. I was in Glastonbury, in Somerset, England. You can see most of the town from this hill, all the red-roofed homes of people who probably would prefer this vexed mystical business would go away. The staff held all of this as if with cupped hands made of white fire blossoms. The hill, this long, low-slung, loping green hill with wet grass and sheep droppings and numerous houses huddled up along its lower flanks and halfway up its spine, was now inside the flowering white staff and taking nourishment from it. The physical hill was growing brighter and stronger. It seemed much more real.

I had impressions of several temples of Light, subtle architectural forms, inside the hill. They couldn’t have been inside the hill in physical terms, but in the same place as the hill. Somehow this burgeoning white flowering staff like a magic wand had revealed them. All of this was the strangest thing I’d ever seen. It was even stranger when the man spoke. He was a man with a white staff topped with a white crown, and he stood before me on Wearyall Hill as if real.

I hadn’t planned to be in Glastonbury, yet here I was, atop Wearyall Hill on St. George’s Day, April 23, in 2050. I was in nearby Wells for meetings. I was representing my publishing company in merger talks with an English firm, and I had secured a couple hours of free time today to drive over to Glastonbury. The early, or should I say, grudging, English spring here in mystical, low-lying Somerset was blowing hard at times, threatening rain, promising sunshine, settling for a vexed compromise, a strong breeze mixed with occasional drizzle. The physical thorn tree, a flowering hawthorn, wasn’t much to speak of, at least not anymore. Once it had flourished on this long, lanky, whale-backed green slump of a soggy hill, like a bald head edged in greenery where the ears belong. The tree had always been a place-marker for a momentous if unlikely event.

Local legend has always maintained that Joseph of Arimathea, a wealthy Jew famous for giving the crucified Jesus his own tomb for burial in Jerusalem and for taking down the crucified body of Jesus and preparing it with spices and linen wrappings for entombment, arrived right here more than 2,000 years ago. On this hill he planted his staff in the ground to signify his apostolic arrival in pagan Celtic Somerset, and it burst immediately into flowers at its tip. His staff sunk a little into the ground and became a flowering tree with white blossoms.

Glastonbury folklore claims that various physical descendants of this magically implanted first tree, known as the Glastonbury Thorn or Holy Thorn, have flourished here on the southwest-facing flank of the hill since then, dying or suffering vandalization or even destruction over the years. It was considered a miraculous tree because it flowered twice a year, once in spring, once around midwinter; a budded branch was sent annually to King James I during his reign, from 1603 to 1625, and the tradition was continued for some years after. The tree and its associations was a strong lure for the tourist trade in Christian pilgrims coming to Glastonbury up until about 1539 and the Dissolution of the Abbeys, including the prominent one at Glastonbury, whose ruins may still be visited.

I think the physical tree is not the point. It is Joseph of Arimathea’s arrival in Glastonbury that is. I confess I was not overly surprised at this apparition of the venerable Joseph. As a book editor specializing in metaphysical accounts and unusual mystical adventures and as someone who had himself enjoyed a few instructional tours into the improbable world of direct psychic experience, I had seen enough things that I once would have thought impossible to take this in stride. The real question, the one that pressed itself against my mind, was why? Why was I experiencing a spectral presence of a famous saint today on this hill?

Even so, I wasn’t sure if it was the large white head underground, the flowering white staff, or the man with the staff standing before me who talked. The unarguable presence of someone, of an intelligence, fluctuated among these. In any case, he pointed downwards, to indicate the landscape in which he stood. I emphasize in because he, or his guise as the white flowering staff, was sunk deep into Wearyall Hill, so it was like a man standing neck deep in the ocean, except oddly or incongruently, it was not water but earth, rocks, and greenery.

I enjoyed the additional irony that Wearyall Hill was anciently one of four islands or high points that stood above the floodwaters of the Summer Country, so called because it was habitable, other than in boats, only in the dry summertime. Glastonbury lies below sea level and The Levels below, which is what the locals call the flat coastal plains and wetlands, some 160,000 acres, and their tiny old towns before me, are always a bit soggy and misty in the mornings.

The Light streaming out of the staff, which, by the way, kept enlarging, created an arterial network of Light throughout the interior of this hill and its temples. Then like fast-motion plant growth these Light veins spread out beyond the hill. They threaded the Glastonbury landscape in all directions up to some 2,000 yards. The Light was bright and pulsing, but more significantly it emitted a loud hum. Underneath the surface were these myriads of veins and arteries; on the surface and rising upwards off it were hundreds of white petals from a white crown. Soon all of Glastonbury, with its physical structures and its many subtle geomantic features, what I have been calling Light temples, was infiltrated by these petals of white flame as if they were upraised angelic hands of white fire.

As the Glastonbury landscape lit up with the Light coming off these flaming white petals, the whole place suddenly felt alive, throbbing with awareness, as if the white petals were the scales of a fish of tremendous consciousness, of self-aware consciousness, rising monstrously, beautifully, out of the land to observe conditions, and to observe itself doing that observing. The White Crown (I capitalize it here, and from here on, to emphasize its regality and, even though at the time I didn’t understand, its importance) was flashing its Light from within a golden bowl, like the Holy Grail itself, an image from mythology I hadn’t expected to encounter in this context, that was the size of the immediate Glastonbury landscape which made it about two miles wide.

As if this image were not already complex, I then saw this array apparently inside the raised white staff of the hierophantic figure standing on Wearyall Hill. All of this had the quality of a swimmer who had been underwater for a long time suddenly breaching the surface with a big whoosh, looking around, marvelling as he saw the upper world for the first time. It was odd but the world too (in this case, the Glastonbury landscape) seemed to see itself for the first time and to be aware, almost self-consciously so, of seeing itself. This awareness became recursive, circulating in loops. The man with staff, I surmised, was making this circulation of awareness occur. It was as if the landscape was beholding itself for the first time in a wraparound mirror.

Everything was back the way it was a moment ago, tree, hill, and figure. It was as if the landscape, the reality around me, had just taken a giant inhale, and for a moment reality hung there, transfigured into Light, and now it was slowly exhaling back to normal conditions. Though, given Glastonbury, normal usually means abnormal. Nobody could ever accurately describe Glastonbury as normal. Even the sidewalks on the High Street don’t look completely normal, but suspect. You walk along them, half expecting a magician or dolphin maybe to leap out.

I knew the figure with the staff was Joseph of Arimathea. That identification was easy: his appearance and actions matched the folklore account. At the time I thought I was seeing an historical or psychic artifact as if preserved in the ethers of the hill. Glastonbury legend, or maybe I should say Joseph’s hagiography, has him arriving at this hill in a time of spring flooding when only the four small hills in town were above the water like islands. As I said, Glastonbury was the Summer Country because once it was only in summertime that the water receded from the lowlands. The Glastonbury landscape lies at or below sea level. That was only one of the reasons. The other, I was to learn, was that Summer Country referred to this middle subtle landscape of Light temples, a designation that Celtic folklore labeled Avalon. That was the Summer Country.

Joseph steps out of his boat, out of the etheric Summer Country of Light, you might say, onto Wearyall Hill, and tired—weary—of his long journey from Judea (today’s Israel), implants his staff into the soggy ground and it suddenly bursts into a proliferation of white blossoms at its tip, announcing his mission. He is credited with establishing the first apostolic Christian church in Britain, and folklorists take the flowering white staff as iconic for that intention. Scholars say this attribution only first appeared as late as the ninth century and may be suspect. It doesn’t matter. I know he established the Grail Knight Fellowship here and used the geomantically-templated Glastonbury landscape as a prime training ground for new recruits to this necessary if somewhat arcane profession.

You can see old paintings or etchings in which artists imagined what this looked like. Joseph stands magisterially before his magically flowered staff as other men look on in astonishment or admiration at his feat of magical or spiritual prowess. A physical hawthorn tree has been planted and replanted many times over the centuries to commemorate this act of arrival and declaration of apostolic purpose. Joseph and his flowering staff have become iconic in town. I had just seen that iconic image, but with a big difference. Joseph planted his staff then he became that staff, entered it like it was a pillar of Light, then he expanded it to rise up floweringly in white crystalline petals of diamond fire across two miles of physical terrain now possessed by a lucid self-awareness.

That a Hierophant’s staff could become, or, in essence, already was, a column of Light big enough to enter was not new to me. I had seen that demonstrated in my training with Merlin then later in our Green Knight expedition in which we toured the Underworld and made some changes, but I had not associated this phenomenon with Joseph of Arimathea and his staff.

I suppose that was due to the fact that I had accepted the consensus scholarly view of this figure that he was a wealthy man of political influence among the Jews in Palestine at the time of Jesus and had facilitated Jesus’s work and travels, and, as I said, secured a respectable tomb for Jesus after his crucifixion on Golgotha. There was nothing in the public record (very scanty) or in Joseph’s biography to suggest he was a magus on the order of an Ascended Master or, even higher, a Ray Master, or even as another freelance magician like Merlin. He was, most people believed, a man who played a role in the life of Jesus, brought the Christ message to England, and founded an early church.

I was so wrong in accepting that consensus view of this figure. Then he stood before me on Wearyall Hill. He was not physically present in any normal touchable sense, yet he had congealed his presence partially into material form. He had manifested a strong, visible, astral presence, taking the likeness of a man. He was looking right at me. It was unsettling only because I hadn’t expected it.

His emanation was cordial if mysterious in the sense of I didn’t know why he was here with me as the principal object of his perception or what he had in mind. As for his appearance, he had assembled a pontiff’s guise, with bishop’s mitre on his head, Hierophant’s robes, mostly in gold and silver cloth, and the white staff. It was so bright it seemed to be made of stabilized lightning. It was in a state of permanent flowering at its top, though to say it was white blossoms would understate the reality of what was growing out of the top of his Hierophant’s staff. It was more an array of crystals made of diamond-white fire. I realized they were in a resting pattern, but could instantly enlarge to any size.

As for his face, he allowed me to form the impression of a friendly, older man of great attention, marshaled will, and inner reserves of power and wisdom. All of my consciousness struggled to form a coherent, believable image of him, as if my physical eyes and perception were fuzzy, myopic, half-asleep, or even concussed. I felt as if my whole being, my awareness, was in a prolonged squint.

Let me clarify something important: I have referred to this diamond array as a White Crown on top of Joseph’s staff. By that I do not mean the crown chakra. That energy-consciousness center on the top of our head has many petals of Light, but this White Crown is above that, of a faster, finer frequency. In musical terms, the human crown chakra is a lower harmonic of this White Crown which is vibrating three octaves higher, not beyond our reach, but to reach it requires adroitness and fluidity of awareness. You have to rise up to it. That’s why I felt all of my faculties were squinting. I was trying to rise up to it.

None of this accounted for why Joseph stood before me. I waited for him to speak. Then I realized I was inside his expanded white staff again. It was a Light temple. I may have expected it to look like a columnar tower, but it didn’t. It looked like a square temple of Light possibly 50 yards on each side, all white. I saw white swans everywhere. They were Light forms in the shape of swans.

It reminded me of movie effects from old black and white films where you would see multiple overlapping impressions of the same object or person, as if your vision was faulty or split. Was it one swan or a hundred? I couldn’t tell. Maybe I was seeing just the one swan from a hundred different angles. They seemed large, certainly bigger than me, but I suspected size had little relevance. I had the sense they had all just landed, that I, swanlike, had just settled onto the water, that we had just flown, sailed, or floated from a refined formless realm.

I did know they emanated serenity and the implied water they glided upon was exalted, some condition far beyond our ordinary frame of experience. I knew from my years of training with Merlin and the subsequent Underworld expedition that what you see in the psychic world are plausible visual metaphors, so if I was seeing elegant white swans it meant I was in fact in contact with something else, a condition of consciousness, one that perhaps had a metaphorical correlation with swans and whose essence was swanlike.

Swans glide serenely over still bodies of water. They look meditative, concentrated, at ease, as if they understand water, feel one with the water. A human view, I admit. While the seeable atmosphere around me seemed saturated, densely populated, with diaphanous swans of white Light, two swans seemed to bookend a large altar.

I felt like I was floating with the swans, that either I had assumed a swan form in Light or my awareness had moved up to be among them. I saw swan heads everywhere, and they were possessed of a regal serenity. I felt swanlike. I saw a hundred swan heads, but I didn’t know which one was mine, where my consciousness was. I don’t know why I even assumed I was one of these Light swans. I seemed to be in all of them and it felt wide-open, completely awake, and selfless. It was awareness without a discrete self or without even a specific location. It was saturated within reality, just like one drop of water in the ocean.

These swans, I felt, had just descended here from a completely marvelous land. Hinduism assigns a swan guise called Hamsa to Vishnu, the high god and Christ figure, and the swan to the yogis represents the universal soul, supreme spirit, or ultimate reality, as pure and sunlight-luminous as the swan’s white feathers. The swan’s flight stands for moksha, the release and liberation from samsara, which to Westerners, means the repeated rounds of incarnation and its karma. Hamsa is also the vahana, or celestial mount, for the goddess Saraswati, the overseer of knowledge, wisdom, music, harmony, speaking, and the creative arts. She is Hamsavahini, "She who has a hamsa as her vehicle," and the swan symbolizes spiritual perfection, transcendence, liberation, and discernment of good from evil, essence from external show, the eternal from the evanescent.

That marvelous land I suspected the swans came from is called Lake Manasarovar in Tibet. It is a physical body of water, but the Tibetans understand it has an antecedent spiritual aspect. It is the Lake of the Mind, the first lake created by the mind of Brahma, the world-creator; apparently, it was created as a pure mental body of consciousness, then manifested later as physical water. The lake personifies spiritual purity, and it is said to cleanse the soul of all its karma.

I shivered. Was this the origin of the legend of Lohengrin, the Swan Knight who arrives in King Arthur’s world on a boat towed by swans and announces he is here to save a troubled soul but can’t speak of his origin?

I remembered too an old Irish story about several children who were transformed into swans and had to live in that form for 300 years. That might have been pleasant because I never thought this story was literal, that they became physical swans, but that they reverted to an earlier, perhaps original, form of consciousness, a condition that precedes selfhood and which, oddly, is hinted at in the folklore notion that a stork or large aquatic bird delivers the souls of babies to the body. The swan condition of consciousness, or the time when consciousness is swanlike, precedes the soul and selfhood, and this congeries of swans I now found myself in was refreshing my memory of that antique state.

Then I saw the children who had been transfigured into swans. They weren’t children. They were masters and spiritual adepts like Joseph. They took these swan forms of Light as metaphors to suggest their essence and presence. It was as if they said, "In consciousness we are like these swans, serene and graceful. We occupy these metaphorical forms of Light as if they are elegant swan boats as we move imperturbably across the Sea of Consciousness which we call Vaikuntha, the ‘Place of No Hindrance’ and the celestial home of Vishnu. Like swans upon the water, we move about serenely above the phenomenal world."

For a moment I saw a myriad of swan forms each with a celestial figure inside it. I saw these forms as swans, but then I saw them simpler, as brilliant globes of Light; in either case, each one contained a celestial Adept, each like a Buddha, and the space around me seemed bubbled with these Adept-bearing Light spheres. I saw this flotilla of Adept-bubbles landing on a crown of golden petals on somebody’s head. I laughed. It was my head they were settling on. It felt like I was experiencing the falling of morning dew in slow motion, that I watched each separate molecule of celestial moisture, points of Light, arrive on my surprised head as I stood at the crest of Wearyall Hill by the Holy Thorn.

From amidst this delightful array of celestial bubbles came a voice, or perhaps it was a chorus of voices speaking as one: Find Joseph’s Seed.

There’s nothing like a mystery to engage one’s attention, at least mine. I would be misrepresenting conditions if I said I knew who this Joseph was. Certainly the reference was to Joseph of Arimathea, but I mean who he truly is, separate from the legends, falsehoods, and fabrications piled up upon his name. All I knew at this point was what every other scholar knows: very little, and just the outer husk of his public record, assuming any of it is accurate or complete.

Allegedly, he was born in a town in Judea called Arimathea, which scholars tentatively identity with either Ramathaim or Ramleh. He was wealthy and spiritual, a bouleutes, a senator, meaning a member of the Sanhedrin, the ruling council in Jewish society. This word, from the Greek synedrion, meant sitting together, an assembly or court of judges numbering between 23 to 71 and sitting in every Jewish town. The Sanhedrin, the assembly of the Ancients and House of Judgement, as it was popularly known, could vote for exoneration or conviction in criminal cases. The original mandate reportedly came from God through Moses; the powers in Rome tolerated Jewish self-government, though Jesus’s trial was under the control of Roman procurators.

Politics aside, Joseph was an early disciple of Rabbi Jesus at the beginning of his public ministry, and he was deliberately absent from the pivotal Sanhedrin meeting when its members sentenced Jesus to crucifixion on Golgotha. He petitioned Pilate for possession of Jesus’s crucified body, then, with the help of Nicodemus, he wrapped it in fine linen and grave bands and placed it in his own fine tomb, after which they rolled a great stone before its opening to secure it.

This fulfilled an early prophecy by Isaiah that the future Messiah’s grave would be provided by a rich man. Roman authorities thought Joseph had stolen Jesus’s body because they couldn’t find it after its burial in Joseph’s tomb; apparently, they couldn’t comprehend, or simply disbelieved in, the resurrection, that the risen Jesus had in fact walked out of the sepulchre in limbs of Light, and the physical tomb, bodily death, or anything to do with the material world was now of no consequence to him. It had never been, really, and now he’d proven it.

Apparently, Joseph’s peers did not condone his actions. Joseph was incarcerated by the Jewish elders in a dungeon, devoid of light, food, and water. Fortunately, he was sustained by the daily gift of a wafer brought by a heavenly dove to his prison cell. Then Jesus appeared in his Light body or Resurrection form, explained Joseph’s apostolic mission and superintendency of the Holy Grail, and gave him the Grail chalice itself, adding that when the time was propitious, Joseph would be released from jail by miraculous means.

Joseph’s hagiography says that was 35 years later when he was freed by Vespasian, son of the Roman emperor Titus, who had heard and liked the stories of Jesus’s ministry. But other accounts say the