The Master Game

  disinformation®

  Copyright © 2011

  Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval

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  Table of Contents

  BY THE SAME AUTHORS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Preface: - The Master Game

  INTRODUCTION - THE GAME OF GAMES

  Prologue: - The Sacred Cities

  CHAPTER ONE - BEHIND THE VEILS

  De-Christianisation

  Very Christian Kings beheaded by the Cult of the Supreme Being

  The tricolor goddess with the Phrygian cap

  The obelisk and the painting

  Coincidence, or blueprint?

  Was Freemasonry behind the French Revolution?

  Franklin, Freemasonry and Revolution

  Nine Sisters lodge

  Robespierre and the Cult of the Supreme Being

  Rousseau and the Contrat Social

  Designer Cult

  Lalande and Sirius

  Monge, Isis and Osiris

  Celebrations and iconography

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic …

  Part I: - The Secret Fatith

  CHAPTER TWO - LOST WORLD

  Hesitating at the crossroads

  A language in which ‘oc’ means ‘yes’

  The mailed fist of Occitania

  Weaving the threads of the Great Heresy

  The Perfecti and the Credentes

  Abolishing superstition and the Fear of Hell

  A Renaissance ahead of its time?

  Cosmopolitan cities

  Cathars and troubadours

  Women hold up half the sky

  The revolution and the new world order

  Fighting back

  The ancient enemy

  CHAPTER THREE - WHERE GOOD AND EVIL MEET

  Close to the sources of power

  Papa Nicetas

  Social engineering

  School of heresy

  The Portrait of Dorian Gray

  The journey of the soul

  Jehovah (aka the Devil) and the Old Testament

  The creature of mud and the Hole in Heaven

  Christ's Holographic mission to the realm of an alien God

  A short excursion to parallel worlds

  Ancient legacy or medieval invention?

  Listening to heretics and heresy hunters

  CHAPTER FOUR - CHAIN OF THE GREAT HERESY

  What was smashed?

  ‘That most wicked sect of obscene men who are called Paulicians …’

  The Praying People and the demon in the soul

  Mani, Messenger of Light

  Meetings with the Twin

  Mani and the Magi

  The Cosmos according to Mani

  If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck … then it ...

  Connecting the Cathars to the first century AD

  CHAPTER FIVE - KNOWLEDGE OF THE TRUE NATURE OF THINGS

  The Nag Hammadi library: time capsule or time bomb?

  The Organisation (1): hints of a Gnostic secret society

  The public craftsman

  The ‘Organisation’ (2): A reawakening in the 10th century?

  Gnostics, Bogomils and Cathars: much in common (1)

  Gnostics, Bogomils and Cathars: much in common (2)

  Gnostics, Bogomils and Cathars: much in common (3)

  Pontifex Maximus

  The first step on the road to the stake

  When coercion was learnt

  Longing for power long before Constantine

  Massacre of the Innocents

  The first Inquisition and the ancient enemy

  CHAPTER SIX - THE RIVALS

  Seizing control of the tradition

  No eyewitnesses we can trust

  Somehow this secret religion went on

  Christ and Antichrist

  ‘More evil than Saracens …’

  Hell's Army

  ‘Kill them all’: the Feast of Saint Mary Magdalene and the workings of divine ...

  Truth in extremes

  CHAPTER SEVEN - THE SWORD AND THE FIRE

  The darkest hour before the falsest dawn

  The Pope hires the French to finish the job

  Pieces of silver

  Informer culture

  The Dominican flying squad

  You never expect the Spanish Inquisition

  Paradox

  Making hell on earth

  Burning the living and the dead

  The fall of Montségur

  The last Cathars

  A quiet natural death?

  Renaissance

  Part II: - The Sacred Cities

  CHAPTER EIGHT - THE OTHER SECRET RELIGION

  The body is a tomb

  The enraged enforcement of an unearned spiritual monopoly

  A philosopher with fire-power

  All the learning of Constantinople and a new Platonic Academy

  Older than Moses, greater than Plato

  Drop Plato, translate Hermes instead

  The full corpus

  Veiling Hermes in the Church (1)

  Veiling Hermes in the Church (2)

  Pico della Mirandola, Hermetic magic and the Cabala

  The Borgias, orgies in the Vatican, Isis and Osiris on the ceiling

  The mystery of the Picatrix and the star-people

  Temple of the world

  The city of Adocentyn

  CHAPTER NINE - TWO PHOENIXES

  Preserving the essence

  Building the City of the God

  Sky and ground

  The divided creature

  Knowledge, reason, intelligence …

  Stars and angels falling to earth

  Reproducing eternity in a copy

  Hermetic landscapes

  The beauty of the archetype

  Transforming the world

  CHAPTER TEN - CITY OF THE GOD-KING

  Dodona, Olympias, Egypt and the Persians

  Nectanebo, Osiris, and the ancestry of Alexander

  Lightning seed and the star Sirius

  Son of Amun

  The intellectual parenthood of Alexandria

  The founding of the universal city

  Helen of Troy, the Egyptian Aphrodite and Isis-Pharia

  Brief excursion to Paris

  The Canopus Way

  Brief excursion on Napoleon and Sirius

  Mapping ancient Alexandria

  The Gate of the Sun and the Gate of the Moon

  The making of a universal god

  The labyrinth of Serapis

  Alexander's return

  A specia
l gnosis

  A time of change

  Metamorphosis

  The three major players

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE PROPHET OF HERMES

  The rise and rise of Catherine de’Medici

  The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

  A Mass for Paris

  The Hermetic mission of Giordano Bruno

  Bruno's travels

  Bruno at the French court

  Bruno in London and Oxford

  Sidney and Dee

  The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast

  As above so below

  Bruno's fatal decision

  The Field of Flowers

  The ‘Organisation’ at work again?

  Enter Campanella

  CHAPTER TWELVE - ENVISIONING THE HERMETIC CITY

  A new sort of republic and a heavenly city

  In an insane world only the mad are sane

  Beating the awakener

  The first European celebrity

  France update: murders and plots

  The low libido of Louis XIII

  Brief excursion to some buried Egyptian treasures

  Predicting a Capetian miracle

  God sent

  A Hermetic signature

  Hidden magical springs

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE INVISIBLE BROTH ERHOOD

  The Rosicrucian Manifestos

  Mystery of the Chemical Wedding

  A strange story

  Bruno, Campanella and the Rosicrucians

  The gradual unveiling of the City of the Sun

  The union of the Thames and the Rhine

  Dee and Christian Rosenkreutz

  The Rosicrucian investment in Frederick V

  The Battle of White Mountain

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - EMERGENCE OF THE INVISIBLES

  Eyes turn to England and the New World

  Hermetic Bacon

  A Rosicrucian Christmas card in the National Records of Scotland

  The New Atlantis

  A brief excursion to consider Freemasonry

  Isis in Virginia

  Antilian intrigues

  Before Freemasonry came out

  An invisible college in dangerous times

  Utopia on hold for the Civil War

  The dashing cavalier of the Palatinate

  ‘I was made a Freemason’

  Restoration and the return to the promised land

  From Invisible College to Royal Society

  Parallel developments in France

  The Scottish connection

  Blazing star of doom

  Christopher Wren's esoteric pedigree

  Pausing to deposit Wren in Paris we make an excursion to Rome to study a ...

  An English Architect meets his hero at the Court of The Sun King

  Rising from the ashes

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - CABAL

  Mystery of the Knights Templar

  The Rosy Cross and the Octagon

  Hubris

  The Horns of Hattin

  Tonight I will pray in Jerusalem!

  The Death Blow to the Templars in the Holy Land

  Nemesis

  Templar survivals and the long quest for Utopia

  Templars and Cathars

  Elements of the Templar heresy

  Emanations and the Sephirothic Tree

  Sephirothic Tree and Temple of Solomon

  The paradoxical Kircher

  John Greaves, the Pyramids and Gresham College

  Many different streams converging

  Wren's plan to rebuild the Temple

  The ghost in the plan

  Evelyn's plan

  Solomon's Temple veiled in Saint Paul's Cathedral?

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - FROM SECRET SOCIETY TO SOCIETY WITH SECRETS

  Recruiting from the ruling classes

  The Knight Ramsay

  An ancient order and a dangerous whiff of Republicanism

  Excursion to the higher degrees (1) Schisms

  Excursion to higher degrees (2) Holy Royal Arch

  Excursion to higher degrees (3) Warrior-Masons of Zerubbabel

  Excursion to higher degrees (4) Much fuss about Jahbulon

  Excursion to higher degrees (5) ancient Egypt and geometry

  From Grand Lodge to Grand Orient

  Cagliostro and ‘Egyptian’ Freemasonry

  Cagliostro reaches France by way of Germany and Russia

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - THE NEW CITY OF ISIS

  Flashback (1) 15th – 17th centuries: traditions of Paris as the city of Isis

  Flashback (2) 1665: the mystery of the deviated axis (1)

  Flashback (2) 1665: the mystery of the deviated axis (2)

  Flashback (2) 1665: the mystery of the deviated axis (3)

  Flashback (2) 1665: the mystery of the deviated axis (4)

  Cagliostro and the affair of the queen's necklace

  Prophet of Revolution plays with fire in Rome

  The noble traveller

  Illuminated by Reason

  The eye in the pyramid

  The Illuminati and the Duke of Orléans

  Out goes the Duke of Orléans, in comes Philippe Égalité

  Behind the scenes of the Revolution

  When the Third Estate found its voice

  Impregnating the national conscience

  2/100th of a second

  Isis of the Bastille

  Closing down the Church

  Cybele-Isis

  Cult of the Supreme Being veiling Isis again

  Notre Dame, Temple of the Goddess

  City of Light

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - PARIS UNVEILED

  Imaging the Supreme Being

  The cry of a dying tiger

  Napoleon's goddess

  Inspirations for the invasion of Egypt

  Trouble with Joséphine

  ‘We who have destroyed the Pope …’

  The savants and the destiny of Napoleon

  The Holy ‘French’ Empire

  Dates and words

  Masonic Emperor Of The French?

  Napoleon researches Isis

  The Place of the Star

  How France had a second revolution

  The second revolution

  Lafayette seizes the day

  Champollion

  ‘If you go to Thebes do send me a little obelisk …’

  Mitterrand's ‘Great Works’

  Mysteries of the axis

  Robert Bauval's Eureka afternoon (1)

  Robert Bauval's Eureka afternoon (2)

  Robert Bauval's Eureka afternoon (3)

  Architecture fulfilling prophecy

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - THE CORNERSTONE

  The ‘Raising’ of Washington

  Isis of the Suez Canal

  Isis of New York, a Talisman to ‘Liberty’

  Garibaldi, ‘Hero of the Two Worlds’

  An ‘admirable spot’ for a global talisman

  A short diversion: In God We Trust

  Another ancient Egyptian goddess lends her seven-pointed star

  An obelisk for New York

  Philadelphia, the ‘City of Brotherly Love’

  By the Rivers of Babylon

  A Brief Deviation: Kilbourne Plat

  The candle-maker's son

  Thomas Paine

  Franklin in France

  ‘Why not?’

  The House of the Temple

  The Blazing Star

  Thomas Paine's Supreme Being

  Engineer, artist, soldier

  Networking with the Cincinnati

  ‘Templar’ Octagons again, and the Tree of Life

  Echoes

  The Cornerstone of St. Paul's

  The Virgin and the Star

  Hidden in the sky

  An obelisk for Washington

  The Pentagon and Sirius

  The True ‘New Jerusalem’ in Israel?

  From the 30th to the 33rd degree

  Epilogue - The Master Game

  CHAPTER TWEN
TY - THE DAY THAT SHOOK THE WORLD

  Accusations

  The Lie that would not die

  The Semblance of a ‘Masonic-Zionist Conspiracy’

  The letter that stunned the world

  An Insider's Account

  Flash forward to 1978: Jerusalem Day

  Flash forward to 2001: Masonic Oath?

  ‘Jihad’ or ‘Crusade’?

  From the Crusades to Al Qaeda

  APPENDIX - THE GREAT PYRAMID AND FREEMASONRY

  ENDNOTES

  INDEX

  BY THE SAME AUTHORS

  BY GRAHAM HANCOCK

  The Sign and the Seal

  Fingerprints of the Gods

  Heaven's Mirror (WITH SANTHA FAIIA)

  Underworld

  Supernatural

  BY ROBERT BAUVAL

  Secret Chamber

  The Orion Mystery (WITH ADRIAN GILBERT)

  The Egypt Code

  Black Genesis (WITH THOMAS BROPHY)

  BY GRAHAM HANCOCK AND ROBERT BAUVAL

  The Message of the Sphinx

  www.grahamhancock.com

  www.robertbauval.com

  To my mother, Yvonne Bauval.

  Robert Bauval

  For my father. Your warmth and wise advice are sorely missed.

  Graham Hancock

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The making of this book has a long and chequered history. It began in 1992 and was finally brought to a close in 2011. The time-span reflects not only the complex nature of the subject matter but also the strong and enduring working relationship and friendship that I have with my co-author, Graham Hancock, a master of the trade par excellence. It also highlights, yet again, the power of teamwork and the old but true axiom that ‘two heads are better than one.’

  I would like to thank the many colleagues and friends who, through the many years, have helped me directly or indirectly with this book. My foremost thanks go to my wife, Michele, who always gave me unflinching support. It is not easy to live with someone whose mind is often engrossed in solving historical puzzles. I also would like to pay special tribute to Mary Bruck of Edinburgh who sadly passed away recently. She was a very dear friend and she will be sorely missed. Much thanks also go to my friends all over the world, not least Hoda Hakim (Cairo), Chafik and Racha Kotry (Alexandria), John and Josette Orphanidis (Athens), Gouda Fayed (Giza, Nazlet El Salman), Javier and Eva Sierra (Malaga), Adriano Forgione (Rome), Sandro Mainardi (Florence), Linda and Max Bauval (Hawaii), Christopher and Caroline Knight (UK), Alan Butler (UK), Juliano Fernadez (Uruguay), Jean-Paul and Valentina Tarud-Kuborn (Chile), Jeanne Ribeiro (Brazil), Ryan Gilmore (Canada), Gary Evans (UK), Hillary Raimo (USA) and Sherif el Sebai (Cairo). My gratitude to my literary agent and friend Bill Hamilton of A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd., who is always there to encourage and advise me, and to listen to my over-enthusiastic oratory. The same gratitude also goes to my editor and friend Gary Baddeley of The Disinformation Company in New York for his patience, dedication, support and invaluable help. Much appreciation to Ralph Bernardo for his diligence and dedication in putting this book together. As always I give thanks to all my readers, old and new, and hope that they will find The Master Game as enjoyable as it was for me to co-write.