Many thanks for all the letters following Abduction Watch 24. This is AW 25 but, more particularly, it's the
10. Eurgen. here the great-great-great-granddaughter (the 5th generation) of Joseph of Arimathea, married Aminadab who was, Gardner says, the "Nazarite Bishop of Saras (Gaza)". the great grandson (the 3rd generation) of Jesus Christ, Joseph's brother. They had one child, Catheloys (Castellors). Gardner holds that this conjoining of the lines of descent from the Holy Family founded the line of the Fisher Kings.
Abduction Watch 25
GRAIL BLOODLINE SPECIAL
This may be new to many of you - I hope you'll find it interesting . . .
In the murk and mire that typifies so much of what passes for history in our field, it is sometimes best to start by simply looking at the accounts presented to us. If we make our first step a careful analysis of the narrative, and of the sources quoted in its support, then any questions about the competence or honesty of the author of the narrative can, in due course, be asked - and maybe answered - with considerably more authority.
In a recent review in Fortean Times of the book Princess Diana - The Hidden Evidence by John King and John Beveridge (yes, the culprits responsible for that dire magazine UFO Reality), I commented on the existence of a 'chain of gullibility' in the development of the sources of the book, which asserts that the 'murder' of Diana by our secret service was largely a result of her descent from Jesus Christ. I suggested that much of the material in the book was unlikely to be true in any generally accepted sense of the word, but that it was difficult to establish who had created the fictions involved, who had unwittingly believed them, and who had knowingly decided to repeat and even elaborate them.
In a recent review in Fortean Times of the book Princess Diana - The Hidden Evidence by John King and John Beveridge (yes, the culprits responsible for that dire magazine UFO Reality), I commented on the existence of a 'chain of gullibility' in the development of the sources of the book, which asserts that the 'murder' of Diana by our secret service was largely a result of her descent from Jesus Christ. I suggested that much of the material in the book was unlikely to be true in any generally accepted sense of the word, but that it was difficult to establish who had created the fictions involved, who had unwittingly believed them, and who had knowingly decided to repeat and even elaborate them.
You may be wondering what the 'Grail Bloodline' is doing in an issue of AW. Aliens are, of course, at the very heart of the Bloodline itself. They were responsible for introducing the strangely indescribable chemical and genetic material that somehow, almost inexplicably, not only distinguishes those who have it from those who do not, but also makes the (white Europeans) who have it eternally superior to those who do not. Aliens, who here spring substantially from the increasingly undisciplined ramblings and translations of Zechariah Sitchin, begat Adam and Eve. They made the Blood special. They created the Bloodline.
Apart from the ever-present The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh, various editions), the more recent Princess Diana (SPI Books, New York, 2002) referred to above, and The Forgotten Monarchy of Scotland by 'HRH Prince Michael of Albany' (Vega, 2002), the primary source for the detailed account of the Grail Bloodline is Bloodline of the Holy Grail - The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed by Laurence Gardner (Element 1996 and, the 'Author's Special Edition', Mediaquest, 2002). I understand that this book has been a huge success both in the UK and abroad, and it has also had a considerable effect in field of popular genealogy. Many family trees now claim descent from Adam, King David, Joseph of Arimathea, Jesus Christ and a variety of other remarkable historical characters on the basis of Gardner's unique genealogies. But it's already clear that I can't just look at Gardner in isolation from either the roots of his theories, or from the work of his immediate predecessors: it is unfortunate that both Sitchin and the 'Holy Blood, Holy Grail' team have both produced a succession of books.
There are close associations between the three more recent of these books. Princess Diana features a foreword by Albany, ends with an interview with him, and relies heavily on Gardner as a source. Forgotten Monarchy has a foreword by Gardner. In Bloodline Gardner describes himself as 'Sir' Laurence because he is "distinguished as the Chevalier Labhran de St Germain", an honour Albany considered within his gift. Albany is, Gardner says, the President of the European Council of Princes: Gardner is the Presidential Attache to the European Council of Princes. Gardner says that he is the Prior of the Sacred Kindred of St Columba, a Knight Templar of St Anthony and Attache to the Grand Protectorate of the Imperial Dragon Court of Hungary, 1408, and is the "appointed Jacobite Historiographer Royal". It appears that Gardner's titles and honours rest entirely on whatever authority Albany has to grant them. Albany's authority rests on the legitimacy of Gardner's reading of history.
Which brings us to Gardner's reading of history, a construction of quite extraordinary complexity, covering thousands of years. I can't do all of it justice here - that would take a book, and I'm surrounded by some of the mounds of material I'm going to need to write it. For now, I hope you'll enjoy a preliminary assessment of the evidence of a small historical period in the giant genealogical sweep that Gardner presents, one without which the whole theory falls at the first hurdle - the
'Hidden Lineage of Jesus'.
'Hidden Lineage of Jesus'.
The descent from Jesus of both Albany and Princess Diana - the 'Grail Bloodline' - is the essential common element of the claims and theories being touted by Albany, Gardner and King not only in their books, but also in a series of talks and presentations both here and abroad. Nexus magazine has given them particularly vigorous support. But I've been researching Gardner's work for several months now, examining his few, but often quite obscure sources. Thus for, I've concentrated on his genealogies covering the first two centuries AD. Thus far, I don't think that even his chosen sources - let alone the more usual authorities for the subject and period - support his published conclusions: conclusions which somehow turn Jewish origins into white, European, Christian lines of descent.
It's probably best to try to set out the factual essentials of Gardner's account, noting that many of his characters. have more than one name or title, some of those names being of characters who, in the traditional accounts, are quite different people. I'll give the extra name, names or titles in brackets. So...
1. Jesus Christ and Joseph of Arimathea (St James the Just, ha Rama Theo) were brothers, the only children of Joseph and Mary.
2. Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion.
3. Jesus Christ married St Mary Magdalene, and they had three children-
5. Jesus II had one child, Galains (Alain), but Galains had no children.
6. Josephes had one child, Josue, who had one child, Aminadab. No details of the spouses, or any other children of Josephes or Josue are given. Aminadab was, says Gardner, the great grandson of Jesus Christ.
7. Joseph of Arimathea married 'Anna', and they had one child, named Anna (Enygeus)
8. Anna married Archdruid Bran the Blessed (Bron) who was, apparently, the son of King Lear. They had two children
1. Jesus Christ and Joseph of Arimathea (St James the Just, ha Rama Theo) were brothers, the only children of Joseph and Mary.
2. Jesus Christ survived the crucifixion.
3. Jesus Christ married St Mary Magdalene, and they had three children-
(i) Tamar (Damaris) b. AD33 (who married St Paul).4. Tamar and St Paul had no children.
(ii) Jesus II (Gais/Gesu - "the Justus") b. AD37 (married an unspecified person).
(iii) Josephes (ha Rama Theo) b. AD44.
5. Jesus II had one child, Galains (Alain), but Galains had no children.
6. Josephes had one child, Josue, who had one child, Aminadab. No details of the spouses, or any other children of Josephes or Josue are given. Aminadab was, says Gardner, the great grandson of Jesus Christ.
7. Joseph of Arimathea married 'Anna', and they had one child, named Anna (Enygeus)
8. Anna married Archdruid Bran the Blessed (Bron) who was, apparently, the son of King Lear. They had two children
9. Penardun and Marius had a child, Coel I, who had a child Lleiffer M wr (Lucius), who had two children, Gladys and Eurgen.(i) Beli (Heli)
(ii) Penardun, who married Marius, the son of Arviragus, King of Siluria.
10. Eurgen. here the great-great-great-granddaughter (the 5th generation) of Joseph of Arimathea, married Aminadab who was, Gardner says, the "Nazarite Bishop of Saras (Gaza)". the great grandson (the 3rd generation) of Jesus Christ, Joseph's brother. They had one child, Catheloys (Castellors). Gardner holds that this conjoining of the lines of descent from the Holy Family founded the line of the Fisher Kings.
(i) Tamar (Damaris) b. AD33 (who married St Paul).
(ii) Jesus II (Gais/Gesu - "the Justus") b. AD37 (married an unspecified person).
As you can see, Gardner makes a considerable range of assumptions in setting out his 'Grail Bloodline'. He rewrites most of the basics of New Testament history, wipes out the Resurrection of Christ and thus any assumption of redemption arising from it. He has Jesus Christ marrying Mary Magdalene, and having three children with her, all after traditional accounts see him raised from the dead. He has Joseph of Arimathea, here also called James, as the brother of Jesus Christ.
Perhaps surprisingly, much of this is not entirely new. Others have suggested that the apostle James was the brother of Jesus (by identifying James as Joseph of Arimathea, this results in Joseph and Jesus being brothers), or even that Thomas was his twin. Dr Barbara Thiering, a minor but vociferous theology lecturer who has attracted much attention but little support for her far-fetched 'pesher' concept of textual interpretation, is Gardner's primary source for the marriage and three children. He doesn't mention Thiering's inconvenient assertion that Mary Magdalene later left Jesus, or that he went on to make a second marriage in 50 AD with one Lydia, the "seller of purple from Thyatira."
However, although Thiering gives Gardner his sole source for the three children, and names for the first two, all she says of the third is "44 AD, Fri Apr 10 Birth of second son to Jesus", and that it was after the birth that Jesus's wife decided to leave him. No name is ever given for the child. We hear no more of him. At no point does Thiering have anything to say about Jesus Christ having descendents beyond that generation, or who they might have been. It is not apparent how Gardner established the line of descent that he proposes: conventional history appears to be as unfamiliar with Josephes, Josue and Aminadab as direct descendents of Jesus Christ as is Dr Barbara Thiering. What is original in Gardner's account is everything which is necessary to establish the 'Grail Bloodline'.
If we look at the 'Arimathea line' as a separate entity, at least until the supposed conjoining between Eurgen and Aminadab, its provenance appears to be even more uncertain. Thiering has nothing to say of any relatives of Joseph of Arimathea, and although Gardner depends heavily on the discredited assertions of British Israelite authors for the adventures of the man himself in first century Britain, there is scarcely a mention of the alleged daughter Anna, and none of her supposed marriage to 'Archdruid' Bran, commonly regarded as a mythical figure (his severed head supposedly spent many years chatting away in the White Tower of the Tower of London) and placed historically some time before the generation after Christ.
Gardner gives only one source for Anna - the Harleian Genealogies, written sometime in the 10th century. Supporting his text, his reference says "Genealogies of the Welsh Princes, Harleian MS 3859, confirm that Anna was the daughter of Joseph of Arimathea."
The academic content of the internet can be impressive. A number of wise souls have put the Genealogies on for public use: the full text of the relevant section reads
Gwynedd
1. [O]uen map [H]iguel map Catell map Rotri map Mermin map Etthil merch Cinnan map Rotri map Iutguaul map Catgualart map Catgollaun map Cotman map Iacob map Beli map Run map Mailcun map Catgolaun Iauhir map Eniaun girt map Cuneda map /EterJL.map Patern pesrut map Tacit map Cein map Guorcein map Doli map Guordoli map Dumn map Gurdumn map Amguoloyt map Anguerit map Oumun map Dubun· map Brithguein map Eugein map Aballac map Amatach, qUi fuit Beli magni filius, et Anna, mater eius, quam dicunt esse consobrina
Let's have a look at what this says, before considering Gardner's interpretation. My Latin is a victim of serious disuse, but I think I have the gist of it. 'Map' can roughly be said to mean "was descended from", and this is a long list, in reverse, of the generations of Welsh history. We're only interested, at present, in the first few of these, and I think these could be read as saying
" ... Brithguein son of Eugein, son of Aballac, son of Amalach, who was the son of Beli the Great and Anna, whose mother was said to be the 'consobrina' of the Virgin Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus Christ."
Gardner's explanation of the marriage of Anna and Bran, for which he gives the Genealogies as his only reference, reads
"The Silurian Archdruid Bran the Blessed (Bendigeidfran) was married to Joseph of Arimathea's daughter Anna (Enygeus), who is sometimes loosely referred to as a consabrina of the Blessed Mary (that is Jesus the Christ's mother Mary). Because Joseph has sometimes been wrongly portrayed as Mary's uncle, the word consabrina has been taken to denote a 'cousin', and is often given as such. In practice, the definition, consabrina, was very obscure, and denoted no more than a junior kinswoman of inferior status. It was the perfect word to use when a genealogical relationship was unspecific - or when it was deemed necessary for it to remain unspecified, as was precisely the case here."
Gardner's scholarship is, here, less than dazzling. He turns Aballac and Amalach into the same person. He repeatedly misspells the word 'consobrina' as 'consabrina', and attempts to give it a meaning none of the dozen or so Latin-English dictionaries I've checked with even begin to suggest. All give 'consobrina' as 'cousin', generally 'first cousin'. None give anything like 'junior kinswoman of inferior status'. The fact is that the Genealogies fail entirely to "confirm that Anna was the daughter of Joseph of Arimcthea". To suggest that by not stating the fact it is somehow proved because "it was deemed necessary for it to remain unspecified" appears to be no more than standard conspiracy nonsense.
The natural conclusion to be drawn from the evidence Gardner actually presents and refers to is, for me, that there is no 'bloodline' through from Joseph the father of Jesus Christ to any of those Gardner says are their descendants. Even if Jesus married and fathered three children - and there is really only Thiering who gives any academic credibility at all to that supposition - no evidence is presented to support the dramatic assertion that the Josephus Josue-Aminadab line was in any way real, let alone that Aminadab wed Eurgen to found a Fisher King dynasty. There is much bluster and confident assertion, but on the evidence Gardner gives us, .the 'Grail Bloodline' looks like no more than wishful thinking. Whether or not Gardner~ doing the wishing, or whether others have persuaded him that his analysis is correct is, and supplied documents accordingly is as yet, unclear.
Which brings me to what I suspect, should Gardner or his publishers respond to my comments, would be at the heart of his response. He would, I think, suggest that he has access to extraordinary historical sources, much as he claimed in a lecture given in Washington in 1997. That lecture has been published in Nexus, is available on video, and can be found all over the internet. In it, he says
" .. for the last six years I have been Britain's Grand Prior of the Sacred Kindred of Saint Columba, the royal ecclesiastical seat of the Celtic Church. So I had, also, access to Celtic Church records dating back to AD 37. Because of my attachments to the families, to the knightly orders, I also had access to Templar documents, to the very documents that the Knights Templar brought out in Europe in 1128 and confronted the Church establishment with, and frightened the life out of them with, because these were documents that talked about bloodline and genealogy .. "
Claims of the existence of ancient and secret genealogies are rife in all of the 'Bloodline' books. In King and Beveridge's Princess Diana we meet a variety of unnamed spooks, particularly a "former British Foreign Office (MI6) historian". His job was, they say, to "sift through historical and genealogical data due for classification review", and his sources included "documents dating back to the first and second centuries AD". It is probably implied that these were the ones Gerard de Sede says were found by Berenger Sauniere in the 'hollow' (but actually solid) pillar in the church at Rennes le Chateau.
If Gardner has the documents to which he refers, then I think that we are back to the 'chain of gullibility' again. I strongly suggest that there are no genuine documents such as Gardner describes, and that consequently what he says he has seen will, if it exists, have been manufactured at a considerably later date. As to the question of why, if he believes he has accessed such extraordinary documents, and that they support his case, he has neither referred to nor quoted from a single one of them, that'll have to be left open for now. As will the question of where those documents were from AD 37, or 1128, until they came - presumably only in the last decade or so - into Gardner's possession.
Finally, for now, perhaps one of you erudite souls out there could assist with answering a couple of specific questions. In the Washington lecture, Gardner also said that
" . . there's a lot of what we'll talk about tonight that in Europe is taken as read. It was never any secret when my book came out, for the majority of these people, that Jesus was married and that Jesus had heirs because it was written as such in very many family archives, not necessarily just private but in the open domain. The published papers of Mary, Queen of Scots talk about it at length. The papers of James II of England, who was wasn't deposed until 1688, talk of it at length."
Can anyone suggest where, in all of these royal papers, this material might be found or, if anyone is familiar with the period, whether there is any reason to believe that Gardner's assertions might not be correct? And did anyone know anything of Gardner as a genealogist prior to the publication of Bloodline of the Holy Grail? It is time, I think, to start assessing the credibility of the 'Bloodline', by looking at both the books and their authors. So far, its great' complexity, and Gardner'S frequent use of obscure references, however irrelevant they actually turn out to be, seems to have deterred any thorough analysis of any of the key periods and events on which the theory depends. Let's see what we can do.
