“Who is he?” is probably the first question your mind formulates upon reading the subject title. The referenced magician is so spell-weavingly adept that not once does she claim to be a magician, yet she has masterfully cast a spell of illusion upon the world’s literary community.

She is Dr. Azar Nafisi, author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran”. I offer these comments about her book not as a review so much as “Cliff Notes” for those who have read the book in its one-dimensional, literal presentation and found the topic interesting, while simultaneously finding it written and organized at a level non-representative of an acclaimed university professor of literature. One reviewer bluntly called it “surprisingly, disappointingly, dull.”

(As an aside -- for those of you wondering how discussion of this book fits into any of the “metamagical themas” this site represents – I submit that the book is all about illusion. What could be more magical than illusion?)

Back to Nafisi: I won’t belabor what most reviewers think the book is about (see http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/n... to get an idea) because each of those reviewers completely missed the book’s depth and compelling theme. Granted, the theme was well camouflaged, as befitting a master illusionist. Despite the lengthy trail of clues Nafisi left so readers could find “her,” no reviewer deduced that Nafisi was the book’s magician character. The book is a memoir, you say, she wouldn’t just invent a character! What if the character was real to her? What if the magician was one aspect, one face or personality of the many (read split) personalities she affected behind the veil, and who presented himself publicly via the safest way she could muster -- in book form?

With introduction of the magician (Part I, Chapter 9) she advances the theme: everything is illusion. Nothing is as it seems. With one swoosh of her veil, she makes him appear or vanish from the page (which causes some of the fragmentation consternation). She develops the theme blandly, almost muffledly -- as if she were speaking through the voice of one suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and living amongst millions of countrymen also suffering from PTSD. Or is it an illusion that only the ‘good guys’ get PTSD and should receive empathy accordingly? As typical of PTSD sufferers, she invented a fictional world to help her cope with the harshness, arbitrariness, and vagaries of ‘reality’. To protect her fragmented inner self, she can only describe the horrors of surviving eight years of bombings on her city of Tehran -- sometimes listening to and feeling the shock waves of 14 bombs a day while sheltering her two young children in the hallway -- by speaking through the neutral voice of a reporter. You notice a more animated voice when she describes her teaching experiences – her first love.

This is where her allegory gets dicey. Once we ascertain that Nafisi is the magician, we have no recourse but to question all the other characters in her book, especially her cast of book club participants. Although any psychoanalyst worth his/her salt would have figured it out immediately, Nafisi’s book club women could easily be aspects of herself – just as the magician is the self she brings to the front when needing guidance. Nassrin, the emotionally strong person of the reading group, could have been the foundation of Nafisi’s Sibyl-like personality. Azin may represent the wounded Nafisi who hid from the world the beatings she suffered from her previous husband(s).

Nafisi had to reinvent herself as a veritable troop commander in order to orchestrate an eventual escape from the mental and physical imprisonment her government had imposed. The veil became the symbol, the flag, around which she would rally her troops, her sanity. She often said she was made to feel irrelevant by her government, so she built her armor and defense mechanisms by modeling her commander after one of her hero Nabokov’s characters who said, “I want to be forgotten; I am not a member of this club.”

If in fact her book club students existed, it is probable that these former students of Nafisi’s gathered together independently of her and fabricated the ruse of the book club because they knew it would help Nafisi survive her bout with insanity. These former students would have loved and respected her, and wanted very much to repay her for all she did for them as their instructor.

With this new multi-level perspective, you begin to see a closer parallel to her acting as the character of ‘the book’ in “The Great Gatsby” trial, to her very acting as the character of the book in her own book. Fiction takes on an entirely new ‘reality’ – reality takes on an entirely new fictionality.

In essence, this is a tale about how the horrors of war made a very intelligent woman half crazy, and how she coped by developing the strategy of her ‘heroes’ -- the great writers she so loved -- of turning her arbitrary world into a world she could control via fiction. As they say during times of stress, “Whatever gets you through the night.” For her, survival came down to feeling. She turns to her hero Henry James for guidance: “Feel, feel, I say – feel for all you’re worth, and even if it half kills you, for that is the only way to live, especially to live at this terrible pressure, and the only way to honour and celebrate these admirable beings who are our pride and inspiration.” She knew on some level that feeling would stir up empathy and would remind her that life was worth living.

With this new perspective, I no longer judge the book on its less-than-painterly writing, I evaluate it as I would “The Diary of Anne Frank” or Sibyl, or any memoirs of an “alternatively sane” person. Nafisi had similar coping mechanisms to Anne Frank – she wrote letters to friends and never sent them, wrote out “two quotations about James’ wartime experiences for Nassrin, but I never showed them to her.” Why? Were these people even ‘real’? That becomes irrelevant under the book’s theme.

Even though the Iranian expatriate is now a professor at John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies, Nafisi continues to wear a veil – the veil/mask of arrogance (see her photo at http://www.identitytheory.com/interviews...). But perhaps now we can be more understanding of her continued need for the defensive posture, as well as her Scheherazade-like weaving of tales intended “to break the cycle of violence by choosing to embrace different terms of engagement.”

I've been waiting for your annual predictions, earthling. Your prognostications for 2006 proved to be quite 'on', if wishful (see below).

1) Elections in Canada result in a minority government. Pretty boring I know.

(2) The party that doesn't want Canada gets to be the strongest opposition party.

(3) George W Bush resigns, and gets a job with his old buddy Putin. The pay is better, and he doesn't get as much public abuse, and he finally can reconcile with Gerhard, having a few beers. Vladimir takes care of the oppositon.

(4) Netherlands don't win the World Cup.

(5) Neither does England, although they are good enough, just like NL.

(6) Spain does not flake out early as normal. They flake out a little later this time.

(7) At least one of Brasil and Germany is the final.

(8) Queen Liz makes it through another year, and she still looks like my grandmother.

(9) Queen Liz recommends Canada and Oz to become republics, she has enough work with the rest of her royal responsibilities. Can the queen just declare a country to be a republic, if she is tired of being queen of some dreadful place? I never thought of that angle.

(10) All of us live to see 2007.

It's that time of year again -- time to show appreciation to all who contribute to this site. TDG remains my favorite site after all these years.

Admittedly, my last year's gift didn't draw rave reviews, but this year's gift I think you'll have fun with. It's simply the best reference site I’ve ever come across for merging data from all relevant phenemona that affect whether we are currently shifting into or currently bypassing a negative probable future. It lists solar, HAARP, seismic, moon phase, waterfall, sunspot, low pressure systems, and planetary aspect activities.

I stumbled across the page on the Montalk site: http://montalk.net/indicators.php

Happy New Year all!

I must have cut class the day this was covered, so I ask in all seriousness, Who owns the Earth? I both googled and asked the cyber entity formerly known as Jeeves this question. Only a few lame (as in no one knows for sure but act as if they do) theories presented themselves. Most conjecturists would have you think that every human must have a fair and equal right to the Earth itself in a way that can be understood and monitored by the average individual. But I’m talking about rights, not right. Ownership.

The 12 or 13 World Management Team (WMT) families presumably think they own the planet – they’re mistreating it as if they do. But if it is ‘common sense’ that Earth belongs equally to all of her inhabitants, as John Locke stated in his 1689 text, “The Second Treatise of Government”, then any one of us could legally sell the planet.

William Tenn makes a case for this eventuality in his short story, “Bernie the Faust” in which characters from outer space want the Earth for a vacation resort. “They're strong enough and advanced enough to come right down and take over. But they don't want to do it cold. You know, a big country wants to invade a small country, it doesn't start until there's at least a riot on the border. It gives them a legal leg. Even a big country needs a legal leg. These characters from outer space, maybe all they had to have was a piece of paper from just one genuine, accredited human being, signing the Earth over to them. Any piece of paper? Signed by any Joe Jerk? You have to own a planet before you can sell it. That's law.”

I doubt the legal system relishes the idea of tackling Earth’s ownership because of the WMT ramifications it would just as soon not have to encounter. The UN, in its grandiose ethnocentric way, has addressed ownership of outer space real estate based on the premise that humans are the only sentient life form in the Universe. The UN has left the question about Earth’s ownership unaddressed.

"Outer space is a province of all mankind," says Sylvia Ospina, a member of the board of directors at the International Institute of Space Law. "There is not, and should not be, any privatization of outer space. It is a common thing that should belong to all."

To try to ensure that space remains a "common thing," space lawyers have drafted five international treaties under UN direction. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 provides the basis of all space law with its clear decree that no nation can claim ownership to any part of it, and all nations must agree to its peaceful use. The treaty was signed by all major space powers and remains the guiding light of space initiatives.

In 1979, in attempting to resolve the issue of moon ownership with the international Moon Treaty, a clear prohibition on private ownership of extraterrestrial real estate was established. Extraterrestrial resources were determined to be "the common heritage of mankind." But the Moon Treaty has received far less support than the Outer Space Treaty - only five countries (none of them a major space power) have signed it: France, Guatemala, India, Peru, and Romania.

The United States, along with the other major powers has not signed the Moon Treaty and without the treaty there is no law excluding space ownership - a loophole some have sought to exploit.

In 1993 three Yemeni brothers filed suit against the United States for trespassing. The brothers claimed to have inherited the planet Mars 3,000 years ago from their ancestors. The US sent attorneys to Yemen to fight the charges. The case was ultimately dismissed ,but it raised issues over who could grant rights to property in space.

A US-based company called The Lunar Embassy claims it possesses a legal basis and copyright for the sale of lunar and other extraterrestrial property. Through its website, interested buyers can purchase one acre of lunar property for $49.99.

With President Bush's announcement earlier this year that he intends to increase privatization in the space industry and send astronauts to Mars, space law is again becoming a topic of concern.

One of the stickiest issues in all of space law remains the definition of space itself. "There is no real delineation or definition of outer space," explains Ospina. Some argue that outer space begins where airspace ends. But others point out that to escape the earth's gravity requires a voyage of 13 million miles - and suggest that outer space begins only there.

That lack of definition will be the crack through which ownership of space real estate will get interesting in the years ahead.

But back to Earth’s ownership. Assuming that Earth is a sentient being, which many native cultures believe, and Earth’s cymatic (the science of sound affecting matter) pictograms (crop circles) may one day convince modern cultures of, no one should be able to own/enslave her. Then again, if Sitchin is correct and the first ‘discoverers’ of Earth were from outer space (Nibiruans, aka Pleiadians, aka Corteum, aka what ever persona they care to assume – they are, after all, more intelligent that humans), they would, and legally could, claim ownership of Earth. It will be interesting to see what happens when the planet Nibiru returns – 2035 if memory serves me (it’s been a while since I’ve read Sitchin).

The pope must appreciate the irony of his latest blunder. Quoting a 14th century book to paint Muhammad in a bad light (“his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”) backs Benedict into a corner. How easy it will be for his detractors to quote 14th century texts that paint off color pictures of the Inquisition (it’s okay for the Pope to order the killing of 20,000 people since, after all, the pope is infallible according to Dictatus Papae, an 11th century canonical legislation that said “No one may judge the Pope.” Certainly no one would think to judge Pope Alexander VI who fathered at least two children. Or Pope John VIII who ruled for two years, until 855. One day, while in a procession from St. Peter’s to Lateran in Rome, he suddenly stopped and gave birth to a child. John VIII was really a woman. How indeed can Benedict think to cast aspersions?

A feature article from the Press Republican (NY) by: Robin Caudell, PR Staff Writer
August 18, 2006
LINCOLN, Vt. — Post-polarity shift of the Earth, Native American prophecy says the first 1,000 years will be peaceful in the Age of Indigo.

Precursors of these changes include the Grand Cross of August 1999, Harmonic Convergence of August 1987 and Harmonic Concordance of November 2003. Last December, the Earth lost its wobble. This year, there is a possibility of land loss.

"If that does occur, that will start the motion and it is not stoppable," said Michael Bastine at the 22nd Annual Native American Elders Gathering at Odali Utugi "Hope Mountain" in Lincoln, Vermont recently.

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami were a wake-up call.

"All the islands where the native people had little contact or change from the outside world, they went up to higher ground. There was no loss. You get in places with contact with civilization and industrialized nations, there were major losses."

Elephants felt the shock waves and trumpeted.

"Humans lose this ability due to the influence from the system that distracts us so much it interferes with our ability to detect this. Villages in the back country were told many, many years ahead. They were told to look for certain things."

Right now, nothing is stable and things will continue to destabilize. The X factor in this cycle is human behavior that can mitigate or accelerate events. The new wars are part of the polarization. Bastine urges people not to pray for peace because doing so negates that peace already exists.

"You have to be careful. You may have a nut sitting at a button and another nut at another button, and they get a bright idea. When the dust settles, you will have peace. I don't think we want to achieve it in that manner. Be careful what you send out. Send prayers to Mother Earth. Send prayers to the Creator and the guides in other realms that do something we call divine intervention."

The transition doesn't have to be difficult, painful and hard.

"But it will be because of the resistance. I don't know how many hearts and minds are going to open up in the next six months. No one knows the day or time. These things can happen in the twinkling of an eye."

Humans can work with the changes or let the Earth do it on its terms. For example, global warming.

"For humans to think they have the power to cause this is a fallacy. Industry may contribute but it's not the cause. Scientists are tracking magma in the oceans. Larger masses of magma are moving faster than it ever has. It's warming the oceans. The Gulf Stream is being impeded. The Arctic people and the North Pole are showing dramatic changes."

Bastine's mentor, Mad Bear, a Tuscarora medicine man and activist, spoke of this coming Fourth World. For some Native Americans, it is known as the Fifth World of Illumination.

"Human beings assume they can and will move into the next realm. Native Americans come into this life and are taught by their elders when you want to do something, ask permission. Be polite. Be respectful to all the rest of creation. Ask permission to go into the next world."

Many prophets, ancient and contemporary, say things are going to be bad during the last days.

"I say things are going to get good. Things are all in place. That's how we should understand it. That's how we should live with it. Don't get scared. Don't over prepare. You can build bunkers and think that can save you. What is coming is for our benefit. We should welcome it and talk to it and say don't hurt too much of this life. Don't wipe out so much that it hurts people's hearts."

The Earth Changes correct imbalances — environmental, physical, spiritual and ethereal. While there will be loss and conflict, people should embody compassion. Pure love.

"That's why we should be welcoming these changes," Bastine said. "Don't fight it. Don't try to stop it. This is a relationship we're going through. It's a sacred relationship not only with each other but the life force. As things clean up and things move on, we're able to move on. We know the Earth is moving in conjunction with all the other elements. It is what the Creator wants and Mother Earth wants. Everything you need is provided."

You vulnerably exposed your Achilles’ heal by featuring on network news a youth performing altruistic service for the betterment of mankind. True, she was cute and blond, but all’s fair . . . as you people say. In playing the game by the rules you’ve established, look for the following full-page ad to appear in major newspapers throughout the world. (Thought you’d appreciate the irony that it will run in the ‘Arts’ section.)

Wanted: People ages 12 – 15 who are interested in helping fix FEMA (each countries’ FEMA counterpart will be listed) so FEMA can do its job of helping people in need.

Mandatory Requirement: Must have performed at least two random acts of kindness to date,
and
Any one of these Additional Requirements:
Profitably ran a lemonade stand.
Organized a sleep-over.
Helped build a tree house.
Convinced your parent or sibling to do something.

Brought to you by: YES, PLEASE (Youth Eager to Save the Planet, Love Everyone, and Stop Exploitation)

Send your resumes to: Rupert Murdoch
c/o The Roundtable Network

In his first Encyclical to the Christian world, Pope Benedict XVI, an intelligent man judging by the litany of degrees following his title, misses the mark of his intention to “call forth in the world renewed energy and commitment in the human response to God's love” because he deliberately sends a mixed and conflicting message throughout the two part missive. I use the word ‘deliberately’ based on his academic background and the assumption that he knows what he’s doing when writing an encyclical to the world.

His agenda, I believe, is two-fold. Preach love because it is the requisite thing for a pope to do, while protecting self-interests (the Church’s wealth and power). He kicks off his dialectic of purposeful obfuscation by backpedaling with an apologetic paragraph about semantics. “ . . .we immediately find ourselves hampered by a problem of language. Today, the term “love” has become one of the most frequently used and misused of words, a word to which we attach quite different meanings.” He never recovers from this weak first parry although he dutifully belabors Eros and agape for several more paragraphs.

How can the pope lose by quoting the Bible, the subservient Catholic would be inclined to think. Benedict loses by pitting conflicting biblical quotes against each other and expecting the reader to remain unphased by the conundrum. He says that the Catholic Church has a duty through its charitable work to influence political leaders to ease suffering and promote justice; while at the same time he rejects the theology which holds that criticizing the oppression of the poor and marginalized should be central to Christian theology.

Benedict conceded that Marxist models of dealing with injustice by trying to provide for social needs did help the poor, which he claims the Liberation theology is based upon, but he feels Marxism was a failed experiment because it could not respond to every human need. Does religion respond to every human need and, if not, is it a failed experiment? How is this entrapping logic not a purposeful dichotomy.

How if “love is free; it is not practiced as a way of achieving other ends” does Benedict justify the influencing of political leaders?

“God is love” yet “God is sometimes associated with vengeance” – mixed messages don’t win converts. If I had to grade his inaugural papal attempt at persuasiveness and clarity: F

Just when you thought you had everything figured out. Here's some reading that will ramp up your perspective, if nothing else. http://www.ascendpress.org/articles/grea... Call it my gift to all of you for your many contributions here. I'm not suggesting any of it is true . . . but what if some of it is true?

This article is not for the meek of mind. It answers questions like: "Who is one going to trust if soul is essentially destructive?" Here's a sample about where we're headed:

"Sirius is a magnetic solar system from your Great Central Sun; and therefore this is the most resonant DNA in human form upon earth at this time. It will take many future generations in order for humans' DNA to become compatible with earth. It is anticipated that by 2035, all foreign DNA (Pleiadean and Reptilian, for example) shall be removed from all incoming human births. By 2050-2075, there shall be few humans remaining with foreign DNA. This shall lead to a greater day of unity amongst all human nations as human conflict is really about conflicting dreams that humanity of different nations attunes unto."

What can we do until then? The article explains.

Intending to write a book "to uncover the traces in architecture of a secret religion that has shaped the world," instead Hancock and Bauval (H & B) wrote the book on obfuscation. They've given us no new pieces to the puzzle, merely refitted existing pieces in a slightly different way, and after 486 pages, withheld a cogent idea as to the completed picture's content.

H & B's latest offering drags readers onto a disjointed, verbose highway where the circuitous routing of information never achieves a cohesive closing. Name-recognized authors certainly owe readers a more insightful interpretation of historical data, and, at the very least, a better job of editing.

Almost 200 pages into the book, the most "provocative" (their word choice) finding they could offer was that there is a close link between Egyptian, Hermetic, and Gnostic religious beliefs. Yet how can any discourse on the links associated with sacred cities or religions be considered provocative unless there is at least a cursory reference to the Sumarian culture. More than likely, everyone who's read H & B has read Zecharia Sitchin, so their failure to reference Sitchin is telling. Should "Talisman" be considered fully researched and well-rounded with this kind of gap? By not addressing a pre-Egyptian link to the "secret religion," are we meant to think there wasn't one? Certainly their research indicated otherwise. Why didn't they present those findings? The book leaves way too many unanswered questions.

Another interesting omission in "Talisman" is that though they've striven to list every common denominator they could find in shaping world events, they did not include Milo Rambaldi or Leonardo da Vinci.

Rambaldi and da Vinci were alive at the same time as C. Rosencreutz, and they likely had occasion to communicate in both Rambaldi's function as chief architect for Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia) and da Vinci's function as military engineer under Cesare Borgia. As most of you know, Rambaldi's and da Vinci's notebooks contained detailed schematics for inventions which preceded their time: binary 'machine code,' as well as cell phone and transistor design (Rambaldi), and breech loading cannon, submarines, and helicopters (da Vinci).

These two geniuses shared the goal of "preserving the chief gift of Nature, which is Liberty" -- they seem to have similar ideologies as Bacon, Wren, and the numerous other Freemasonic thinkers H & B reference. So very likely they would have played a role in shaping, staging, and actualizing the movement of the "invisible" brotherhood.

Also missing from H & B's "Who's Who" of history is R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz who, many agree, wrote the definitive explanation of Luxor Temple's raison d'etre in "The Temple of Man: Apet of the South at Luxor." Lubicz shows that a symbolic directive was operative in the architecture of the Temple of Luxor such that the function and scale of every facet of the temple corresponded with both human and celestial bodies.

Here are a couple of 'alternative' theories that are equally as plausible as H & B's: could Francis Bacon have found some of da Vinci's and/or Rambaldi's lost documents and passed them off as his own; or more provocatively, could Bacon/da Vinci/Shakespeare, etc. be the same person in a continued line of identities delineating from Thoth, Hermes, Moses, etc. Thoth was said to be immortal, having arrived in Egypt from Atlantis under the guise of Chiquetet Arlich Vomalites. Egyptian born Ahmed Osman claims that Moses of the Bible is no other than King Akhenaten who ruled Egypt for 17 years in the mid-14th century BC. Sigmund Freud was the first to argue that Moses was in fact an Egyptian.

One could easily draw the inference of Thoth's immortality from Andrew Michael Ramsay's "carefully chosen words" in his "Oration" in 1737 where he said, "Freemasons attribute great antiquity to the Brotherhood by ascribing 'our institution to Solomon, some to Moses, some to Abraham, some to Noah and some to Enoch who built the first city, or even to Adam.'

The "Brotherhood" might actually have originated with Tat, Thoth's son, who formed the Tat Brotherhood which was assigned to closely monitor the Egyptians and reseed the knowledge of Atlantis. There are examples of this stair-step evolution in Egypt and Sumeria -- all of a sudden the people just know everything about a certain subject (astronomy, etc.) All Hancock is willing to go on record with is: "Hermes Trimegistus, the alter ego of the ancient Egyptian wisdom god Thoth. . ." That says nothing. If Thoth and Hermes were linked closely enough to share an ego, might not they be the same person? As I mentioned, we get no new insights from "Talisman."

Another example of H & B's skimming the surface is their interpretation of Isis' astro-geographical statement in this quote from the "Kore Kosmou":

"The earth lies in the middle of the universe, stretched on her back as a human might lie facing toward heaven . . . Her head lies toward the south . . . her right shoulder toward the east, and her left shoulder toward the west; her feet lie beneath the Great Bear [North] . . . But the right holy land of our ancestors [ i.e., Egypt] (H & B's interpretation) lies in the middle of the earth; and the middle of the human body is the sanctuary of the heart, and the heart is the headquarters of the soul; and that, my son, is the reason why men of this land . . . are more intelligent [wise]. It could not be otherwise, seeing they are born and bred upon Earth's heart."

The "middle of the earth" could just as easily be the area on either side of the equator, especially when one takes into account that 16 ancient sites are located along the latitude of 19.5 degrees within a margin of error of less than one tenth of one degree of latitude http://home.hiwaay.net/~jalison/ including the Great Pyramid, Easter Island, Machupicchu, Perseopolis, Ur, and Nazca. It's generally agreed that these structures were not built by local people for local reasons. Rather, there is a single global pattern that ties these monuments together. This in turn implies the existence of an advanced civilization that existed before the flood and managed to communicate important geodesic, geological and geometric information to people throughout history.

In "The Geometry of Ancient Sites" http://www.earthmatrix.com/ancientsites.... Charles William Johnson expands these thoughts, expressed earlier by Carl P. Munck in "The Code," into the idea of a matrix where the Great Pyramid, along with all the other pyramids of different ancient sites, are situated so as to maintain the proper revolution and rotation of the Earth on its cosmic orbit within our solar system.

A final example of H & B's almost Masonic (secretive) interpretation of data is their limited look at Campanella's City of the Sun plan that showed seven concentric divisions ringing the temple separated by walls penetrated by gates facing the cardinal directions." H & B make no reference to the almost identical layout of the City of Atlantis, as described by Plato, nor the fact that the Minoans and Cretans used the flat record of the seven strips off the torus, the labyrinth, to dance the dance of remembering -- as Dan Winter explains in "Alphabet of the Eartheart" (available free on-line at http://spirals.eternite.com/ ).

Winter's book examines alphabets within historical context, pointing to the medieval kabbalists of southern France as the initiators of a one source geometrical letter shape tradition. Using this tradition as a base line, the book also develops the idea of an alphabet of symmetry as a way to create resonant coherence across dimensions or realities (possibly how the Invisible College/Rosicrucians were able to "be fluent in many languages and to possess their own magical language and writing"). The letter shapes of this phase-angle alphabet are mapped off a Phi-ratio shaped torus by a Phi-based spiral.

In passing, H & B remark that Fourier visited Egypt, but they make no mention of Fourier's significant contributions. Thanks to the Fourier transform, we understand that all shapes are woven of sine waves. And in a world made only of waves, there would be just two basic geometric forms, the torus and the golden mean spiral. A sine wave spun into 3D is a torus. Stan Tenen, Dan Winter, and Vincent M. Bridges ("Sacred Waveform Alphabets: coherence, consciousness and the kabbalah") have concluded that all sacred alphabets (like Hebrew) have some sort of geometric symbolism which underlies their sound.

According to Tenen, "the text of Genesis can be looked at like a woven structure, where meanings are seen in the pattern, beyond just what the words spell out. This structure is like a software program that once activated in your mind can be a path to a higher view or enlightenment, he explained. Biblical Hebrew is an 'acronym language' where each letter can be read as a word, and each word as a sentence." (Tenen's book "First Hand: The Geometry of Genesis and the Alphabet" will be available in 2005.)

But getting back to the book's biggest failure -- editing. Flailing through the wordy forest H & B have created, a forest in which a quarter of the trees could have been spared through judicious deletion of repeated passages, the reader's progress is thwarted by the downed limbs of fragmentation (between pages 200-204 for example, there are independent tales about Alexander the Great, Helen of Troy, Isis, Stella Maris, Cleopatra, Paris, then back to Alexander -- with no thread of continuity); the dead-ends of minutia (who cares about a donkey's size, or a one-time mentioned eunuch's being forced to swallow his own poison, etc.?); and repetition (after more than 20 times of being warned that a major repetition was about to follow ("as the reader will recall from Chapter _"), this reader stopped counting). Although the flow improves after Chapter 11, it may be too late by then.

Unless, of course, future big-screen adaptation drove the minutia and repetition issues. The made-for-movie aspects of the book are most obvious in the chapters devoted to beyond-belief detail of the Inquisition horrors. Why grind the reader's eyes so intently into the reality that the Catholic Church was indeed the bad guy throughout most of history? Why belabor the horrific details when a one-time statement about the Church's culpability would suffice?

It's difficult not to deduce that H & B are out-of-touch with their audience. Which begs the question: who is their intended audience? It appears it's their peers based on H & B's heavy reliance on Frances Yates for validation throughout "Talisman."

Forsaken as a casualty of their directed effort at mollifying and persuading their peers toward a favorable consideration of their theories, are whole generations of truth seekers. Even if a GenX'er were to make it through the first chapter, he/she would give up, saying, "It's like, why didn't they just flip-flop the chapters -- it would have been more interesting?" Today's readers require two things: innovative substance and conciseness. H & B offer neither in "Talisman". Aside from the book's color plates, this book leaves the reader feeling shortchanged at £20 a pop.

Not due for release in the U.S. until early 2005, there's still time for damage control. Unless editors for the next edition take mercy on readers who scourge themselves to stay awake so they can read an entire chapter, and let history come alive through more logical flow and less repetition, "Talisman" is destined to find its niche alongside the myriad other approximations of truth produced through the ages by Catholic Church/Illuminati-filtered versions of history offered by mainstream historians.

Most literate people are well aware that "there are major discontinuities in the historical record which have severely distorted and 'edited' the data about the past" -- "Talisman" does nothing to change our opinion. If we learn anything from this book, it's that perhaps we've stumbled upon the master plan for humanity -- which is a concerted effort to fragment knowledge to the point of frustrating the masses into begrudgingly accepting the status quo on this over-populated, resource-deplenished planet -- just as "they" (the conglomerate establishment watchdogs embedded in the top echelons of politics, media, education, science and religion) intend.

Perhaps Hancock and Bauval are so steeped in history that they've forgotten that it's the 21st century -- it's time to courageously take alternative history to the next level -- not simply rehash relatively 'safe' theories. Quantities of up-to-the minute scientific, archeological, astronomical, quantum physics information are at today's gnosis-seeker's fingertips. Most of today's truth seekers can fit the puzzle pieces together less randomly and more insightfully than H & B were able to accomplish -- like author David Icke's done in "The Biggest Secret" where he bravely traces the "secret society brotherhood" back to ancient Babylon.

Or Umberto Eco who in "Foucault's Pendulum" makes fiction seem factual by determining that what every major society of Europe, from the thirteenth century onward, has wanted -- Templars, Rosicrucians, Masons, Jesuits, even Nazis, -- is control of the Earth's 'telluric currents,' the energy grid that circles the planet. The pre-Celts built Stonehenge; the Gothics erected immense cathedral spires; Eiffel contrived his tower. Why? "What need did Paris have of this useless monument? It's the celestial probe, the antenna that collects information from every hermetic valve stuck into the planet's crust!"

Tracing religious links has proven over the centuries to be a dead-end -- religion has failed to provide humanity with serious answers to probing questions. Knowing this, H & B should leave the tracing of religious links to the rookies and concentrate on more likely possibilities about why humans are on this planet -- like tracing bloodlines (some think sacred sites are coded to respond to blood biology -- not technology), or the stargate capabilities of ancient sites, or geometry as a communication vehicle (crop circles, the fact that all the "sacred sites" on the planet are laid out in either logarithmic or Fibonacci (Golden Mean) spirals, mathematically connected and delineated back to the area in Egypt called the solar cross, according to Thoth); or frequencies -- anything but religion.