The following article is an excerpt (Chapter 2 in its entirety) from the best-selling book Evidence of an Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long M.D. with Paul Perry (HarperOne, 2009), reproduced with kind permission of the author and publisher. You can purchase a copy of the book from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

JOURNEY TOWARD UNDERSTANDING

Build it and they will come.
— W. P. Kinsella, Field of Dreams

The year was 1998, and I was now in Las Vegas practicing the medical specialty of radiation oncology. The nineties was the decade in which the Internet exploded. Everyone was rapidly becoming smitten with this big brain in the sky, and I was no different.

Despite the steep learning curve of building websites with primitive software and slow connections, I had decided in 1997 to build the Radiation Oncology Online Journal (ROOJ.com) as a way of sharing credible information about this medical specialty with the world. It took a tremendous amount of time and effort outside of my clinical practice to assemble this nonprofit website, which I maintain as a way of providing solid information to the public about cancer treatment.

By the time I completed the ROOJ site I was an expert in website computer code. Then the idea hit me: build a website that will collect near-death experience case studies. By doing this I could amass a large number of NDE stories from around the world. Working with a large number of NDEs is important because medical studies involving a large study group produce more reliable results than do those studying a small group of people.

I built on the curiosity and work of those who had gone before me. Over the ten years since I heard Sheila recount her personal story, I had stayed in close contact with research in the field of near-death studies. Hundreds of scholarly articles had been written on near-death experience, including publications in many of the world’s most prestigious medical and scientific journals. I read the works of many major NDE researchers, including those of Dr. Moody; Melvin Morse, MD; Bruce Greyson, MD; Michael Sabom, MD; and Ken Ring, PhD. I also found myself fascinated with some of the individual stories, like that of Betty Eadie (Embraced by the Light). All of these books relied heavily on case studies. These stories of individual NDErs fed the sense of mystery I associated with this subject.

Now I was even more interested in searching for the truth than I had been ten years earlier. The implications of these experiences were so profound that I wanted to research the subject to determine if they were truly real.

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who was first to synthesise LSD and the first to taste its awesome power, died in April last year at the grand age of 102. Twelve years earlier, I was fortunate enough to have dinner with the grand old man; we talked about many things, but his vision of the need for a new Eleusis for the 21st century shone out the most brightly. But what was Eleusis?

The site of the Eleusian temple is located 12 miles (19km) west of Athens, Greece, and was the focus of a Greek Mystery cult that lasted for nearly 2,000 years. It was situated around a cave, said to be the entrance of the underworld, where Persephone was taken after she was abducted. In myth, her mother, Demeter, wandered and grieved in the area now occupied by the temple and eventually persuaded Hermes to rescue her daughter. The first building of the temple proper was built at the site c.1500 B.C., and other buildings were added to the complex over the centuries. The mysteries themselves were a 10-day event, held every September and were open to almost anyone, except murderers. The climax was a procession from Athens to the temple for the Mystery Night, where the revelation of the mystery, the epopteia, was to take place. As the candidates for initiation made their way to the temple they imbibed a sacramental drink, the kykeon. They then went through various procedures until a final, and secret, revelatory event took place in a strange building known as the Telesterion. This was unlike any other structure found in ancient Greece in that it had a plain exterior. There has been much debate about the nature of the sacred drink, but by far the best theory states that it was a beer containing ergot, a parasite of rye that contains alkaloids from which LSD can be synthesised. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and is detailed in the new, revised edition of my book, The Long Trip – A Prehistory of Psychedelia (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK).

Many of the notable philosophers and intellectuals of ancient Greece, such as Plato, Aristotle and Sophocles, were initiated at Eleusis. A visionary, mind-altering initiation was therefore at the very roots of Western civilisation – an initiatory experience it has long-since abandoned. Hofmann felt that something like it needs to be re-established if Western culture is to save itself. Aldous Huxley envisaged such a renewed institution in his last novel, Island, but in reality we are still a long way from such a thing coming to pass. We are still arguing about cannabis, for goodness’ sake.

In 2008, British politicians re-categorised cannabis as a dangerous drug after a period of having it in a lower category. They ignored the advice of their own panel of experts and police chiefs who have been arguing for the legalisation of the drug. When pressed about this retrograde step, government spokesmen made the tired old demand that cannabis needs further testing to see if it is safe, along with promoting scare stories about it causing schizophrenia. Yet not only has the drug been tested for decades and found to be safer than many prescription drugs, tobacco or alcohol, the testimony of our forefathers confirms its spiritual and physical benefits. This latter fact was brought sharply into focus in November 2008, when it was announced that archaeologists had found a cache of cannabis in a Yanghai tomb in the Gobi Desert near Turpan in northwestern China. The cache consisted of 789 grams of dried cannabis contained in a leather basket and in a wooden bowl. It was c.2700 years old but had been preserved due to extremely dry conditions. While remnants of cannabis have been found elsewhere in the ancient world the helpful conditions in which this cache was found has allowed it to be the oldest so far that could be thoroughly tested for its properties. The research team found it to have a relatively high content of THC, the main active ingredient in cannabis. In the past, those sceptical of the mind-altering use of cannabis in prehistory have claimed (somewhat disingenuously) that it was only used for making ropes, fabric and so forth, but they can’t get away with that this time. This Chinese sample was clearly “cultivated for psychoactive purposes”, a paper in the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Botany states. "To our knowledge, these investigations provide the oldest documentation of cannabis as a pharmacologically active agent," wrote the paper's lead author, American neurologist Dr. Ethan B. Russo.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of this find is that the cannabis was uncovered in the tomb of a light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man, not an Asiatic person. He would have been a member of the somewhat curious Cheshi clan, a group of nomadic people of Indo-European origins who inhabited the region. The tomb also contained bridles, archery equipment and a harp, confirming the 45-year-old man's high status. The researchers assume he had been a shaman.

Another intriguing side issue regarding this case is that a British laboratory that monitors crop quality for producing Sativex (a cannabis-based medicine approved in Canada for relieving pain in conditions such as multiple sclerosis, certain cancers, and so forth) was used to conduct the tests on the cannabis find, but it took months to cut through the red tape hindering the entry of the sample into Britain from China – a perfect cameo of how eccentric our modern Western attitudes to mind-altering drugs are compared with our ancestors.

As long as decisions about visionary substances are made on the basis of ignorance or political expediency, the creation of a new Eleusis remains merely a dream. Bernd Debusman, a Reuters columnist, underlined such stupidity in a December 2008 column. He points out that the failed “war on drugs” has helped to turn the United States “into the country with the world’s largest prison population” (it has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners). This failed war “has helped spawn global criminal enterprises that use extreme violence”. Among other things, Debusman points out that it has been estimated that legalising and regulating drugs would inject a total of over 76 billion dollars into the U.S. economy alone. Perhaps with the global financial collapse governments would be wise to consider this…

Ignorance needs to be banished – “know drugs” rather than “no drugs”. Decision-makers ought to be able to differentiate between dangerous, addictive drugs and those visionary substances that are mind-enhancing. On the other hand, altering consciousness is no light matter, and shouldn’t be simply another form of careless, hedonistic consumption that predominates in the popular counter-culture – it needs the framework, discipline and knowledgeable guidance that an Eleusian-like system would bring to bear.

Another ignorant view held by our politicians and shared by the mainstream culture as a whole is that the altered mind states caused by visionary substances are somehow hallucinatory, sham experiences. It is hard to counter such a false perception by pointing out that enhanced consciousness cannot by definition be illusory when the collective mindset promulgating such a misperception is itself not sufficiently enhanced to know that it is mistaken.

A new Eleusis would let badly needed light reach into the gloom of our modern civilisation’s general state of consciousness. The fruits of this would be for us to know collectively, as a culture, that the nature of reality is much greater than we currently think we know. It would humble us; make us aware that we have read but the first few pages of the great book of nature. It would link us to vast realms of knowledge, and pull us back from our isolation outside the gates of Eden into the folds of a consciousness that communes with the biosphere as a whole, and perhaps even greater consciousnesses beyond. It would make our political decisions, whether regarding the environment, foreign relations, the economy, scientific endeavour or social structures more informed, more humane, more sustainable. Anthropologists have noted that in antiquity, the use of visionary plants has seemingly triggered the flowering of some civilisations – our own modern culture is in desperate need of such a new flowering, otherwise it will leave the stage. As I remark in The Long Trip, if this proves to be the case, then the Earth, in the ages that belong to it alone, will surely birth a new species more capable of continuing the great adventure of consciousness.

This article is excerpted from Darklore Volume 3, which is available for sale from Amazon US and Amazon UK. The Darklore anthology series features the best writing and research on paranormal, Fortean and hidden history topics, by the most respected names in the field: Robert Bauval, Nick Redfern, Loren Coleman, Jon Downes and Daniel Pinchbeck, to name just a few. Darklore's aim is to support quality researchers, so it makes sense to support Darklore.

The author of the article is Mike Jay (http://mikejay.net), and is a modified excerpt from his book Emperor’s of Dreams (Dedalus, 2002), reprinted with permission.

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Watson...the Needle!
by Mike Jay

Cocaine was the great pharmaceutical success story of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In a few short years, it went from a minor item in specialist catalogues to a major seller in a huge range of preparations in high-street chemists, grocers and general stores. It was hailed as a miracle of modern medical science, a panacea for all manner of minor ailments – but also, increasingly, as a dangerous and addictive novelty, a social menace and even a new ‘scourge of humanity’. During this period of the cocaine boom – in retrospect, the euphoric high before the crash – its impact on the public consciousness is vividly illuminated by the two enduring literary characters who emerged from its golden age, one dealing with it implicitly, the other explicitly: Dr. Jekyll and Sherlock Holmes.

Cocaine Cola and Cure-Alls

From around 1885 to the beginning of the twentieth century, cocaine was both soft drink and hard drug: mild tonic preparations and strong pharmaceutical solutions coexisted side by side. The most famous and successful of the tonics was the range produced by the Corsican entrepreneur Angelo Mariani, who had begun in the 1860s to produce a stimulant wine for the French market by steeping coca leaves in sweet burgundy. ‘Vin Mariani’ was the first brand to penetrate the new market in Europe and America, and was rapidly accompanied by a wide ancillary range of therapeutic preparations. By the late 1880s these included Pâte Mariani (cocaine lozenges for catarrh), Thé Mariani (a concentrated coca tea recommended for long walks), and Pastilles Mariani (for coughing fits).

But one of Mariani’s lesser-known competitors was to eclipse his fame in the long run. John Pemberton, a small-scale Atlanta druggist, began to supply a ‘Peruvian Coca Wine’ in the mid-1880s; when the city of Atlanta adopted alcohol prohibition in 1886, he removed the alcohol and produced a gloopy syrup masking the bitter active ingredients of coca leaf extract, cocaine and cola nut, a natural caffeine source. He christened it ‘Coca-Cola’, and in 1891 he was bought out by a marketeer called Asa Chandler who set up ‘The Coca-Cola Company’, promoting the “nervine tonic” as a cure for “headaches, hysteria and melancholia” and pushing it with slogans such as “the intellectual beverage” and “the Temperance drink” (which, in a sense, it remains – the bar-room alternative to alcohol). Chandler took Coca-Cola’s sales to over a million dollars a year by the end of the century, and provoked a flurry of copycat products with names like Koca Nola, Celery Cola, Rocco Cola, Wiseola and even Dope Cola.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Dark Intrusions: An Investigation into the Paranormal Nature of Sleep Paralysis Experiences, by Louis Proud (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK). Reprinted with permission of Louis Proud and Anomalist Books.

THE SPIRITS WHO FEAST ON YOUR SOUL

The year was 2001 and I was seventeen when my Sleep Paralysis (SP) experiences began. I had previously been living with my father and brother in Tenterfield, New South Wales, in Australia, and had just moved down to Healesville, Victoria, to live with my mother. My new home was a Buddhist retreat center, where my mother worked as a caretaker. My room, no. 25, was located near the office and the main meditation hall. It was a reasonably small and humble room and, like most of those at the Buddhist center, would have suited a monk better than a teenager. Still, it was agreeable enough.

The year 2003, the year after I graduated from high school, was an idle period in my life. Events had taken a rather unfortunate turn, and my future did not look bright. I began to spend most of my days alone, reading in my bedroom with the curtains drawn, and occasionally writing in my journal. The activities I did to keep myself occupied were rarely ever constructive. I would start building something, a model plane, for example, suddenly become discouraged, and put the project aside, never to complete it. Whenever I felt nervous, stressed, or depressed, my SP experiences would become more frequent and more intense. Often, when life becomes unpleasant, one attempts to escape by finding comfort in sleep. But for me, that was becoming less possible.

It wasn’t until mid-2007 that I fully recognized the fact that I suffered from SP. Ever since I first started having episodes back in 2001, I had no idea what was happening to me. I had heard of the phenomenon before, but not enough to know anything substantial about it. At first, I worried obsessively about the state of my mental health. I even began to suspect that I might be developing schizophrenia, or some other serious and debilitating neurosis. When I did finally investigate the subject, I was both astonished and relieved to discover that other people had undergone, and were undergoing, the same bizarre experiences as me.

My SP experiences have changed over the years, gradually becoming more and more intense. They have now reached a kind of plateau, in that most of them are pretty much the same these days, and I know what to expect. Every now and then, however, I will have a particularly frightening or compelling episode, and I will not be able to forget it for a very long time – or at all. Instead of describing any single episode – of which there are only a handful that I remember with total clarity – I will attempt to shed light on what a typical episode involves. To do so, and in the most veracious way possible, it’s necessary that I refer to a short story I wrote in 2005, during the first year of my diploma at RMIT University. ... Read More »

The following is an excerpt from Paul Devereux's The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia (available from Amazon US and Amazon UK), reprinted with permission. The Long Trip is...

...probably the most comprehensive single volume to look at the use of mind-altering drugs, or entheogens, for ritual and shamanistic purposes throughout humanity's long story, while casting withering sidelong glances at our own times - as Paul Devereux points out, our modern mainstream culture is eccentric in its refusal to integrate the profound experiences offered by these natural substances into its own spiritual life.

This particular section discusses the little-known role of hallucinogenic substances by medieval witches, including a rather eye-opening theory as to the real use of the witches' broomstick...

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Witches' Brews
by Paul Devereux

The magical and medicinal plant lore of the rural “wise woman” (or man) in Anglo-Saxon, Medieval and Early Modern Europe may not occupy a period we can properly call prehistory, but we can say that it was outside history, in that it was a living knowledge largely overlooked or dismissed by the ruling classes and the sophisticates, or discouraged and repressed by the Church. The Church-orchestrated witch-persecutions of the late Middle Ages transformed what was in fact a quietly surviving country tradition into what was hysterically and neurotically seen as a satanic activity.

One of the key elements of “witch lore” was that witches were able to fly on broomsticks, rods or other implements to their sabbats and other night-time gatherings in the wilderness beyond the pale of the town or village. “Flying ointments” were often used, either smeared on the person’s body or flying implements. Long before the Church contextualised this “flying out” to the wilderness as a diabolic practice, however, it was happening simply as part of the practice of women and men wise in the rural magic arts and healing based on arcane plant knowledge. The people who became identified as “witches” by the Church were in actuality simply the continuation of an ancient tradition of “night travellers.” In northern Europe they were called qveldriga, “night rider,” or myrkrida, “rider in the dark.” In Scandinavia, there was the tradition of seidhr, in which a prophetess or seidhonka would travel around farmsteads and hamlets with a group of girls to give divinatory trance-sessions. She wore a ritual costume and carried a staff. The goddess Freya, who taught Odin the secrets of magical flight, was the patronal mistress of seidhr. “Night travellers and the later witches are carelessly lumped together,” Hans Peter Duerr warns.

Depending on the time or place in Europe they operated, the night travellers might join the flying hosts of Diana, or Frau Holda-Mother Holle, the Old Norse Hela, the veiled goddess of the underworld, whose sacred bird was the migrant snow goose – the winter snows were said to be feathers falling from these birds’ wings. She is remembered in the nursery-rhyme image of Old Mother Goose, who, when she wanted to wander, we will recall, would fly through the air on a very fine gander. Researcher Nigel Jackson has noted:

Author, Fortean, futurist, and friend Mac Tonnies passed away this week aged 34. Mac was an original thinker, a poet who could explain strange and confronting topics with intelligence, grace and humour. In his final days, Mac had finished the manuscript for his new book The Cryptoterrestrials (which may yet be published post-humously by Anomalist Books). The following article from the Darklore anthology series shows how honest a thinker Mac was, as he simultaneously considered an alternative and contradictory theory to his own 'cryptoterrestrial' musings. Godspeed Mac.

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UFOs as Vanguards of a Post-Biological Intelligence
by Mac Tonnies

"We are property." - Charles Fort

"We are part of a symbiotic relationship with something which disguises itself as an extra-terrestrial invasion so as not to alarm us." - Terence McKenna

Part of the fun of being a Fortean is second-guessing myself. While many endeavors encourage us to trust our first impressions, the study of unexplained phenomena offers no such luxuries. Researchers of the "paranormal" are instead tasked with policing their own streams of consciousness - a process as rewarding as it is laborious.

In my own case, the study of UFOs and occupant encounters has led me to two predominant interpretations, each at odds with the traditionally accepted Extraterrestrial Hypothesis (ETH). In one scenario, the beings sighted since at least the 1950s (and, if folklore is any indication, long before) are the denizens of an invisible landscape: technologically savvy but impoverished hominids I've dubbed "cryptoterrestrials." In the other, the enduring UFO spectacle is the product of an almost inconceivably ancient machine intelligence not unlike that portrayed in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. I'll limit the scope of this essay to the latter possibility.

As the human species enters an era of rampant existential threats and finds itself mirrored in the quantum circuitry of would-be artificial intelligences, there's reason to suspect our existence has been monitored (and perhaps even groomed) by a "post-biological" super-intelligence. Although the galaxy is formidably vast, it's also ancient. A growing chorus of pundits clamors over the perceived "Great Silence" that greets our arsenal of electronic listening gear; either we're alone, condemned to solitude on the edge of an unremarkable galactic disk, or we have neighbors. And if even one of these neighboring intelligences has managed to spawn an artificially intelligent offshoot, there's no end to how expansive it might have become in the ensuing millennia.

Suppose we've not only been detected, but catalogued and studied, our very identity eviscerated and infiltrated. What might we expect? Overt acknowledgement on behalf of the overseeing intelligence might be too much to ask, but it seems reasonable to expect an echo imprinted in our mythological and historical records, however faintly. Indeed, our collective psyche itself might bear mute witness to a visitation we don't dare acknowledge for fear of staring too deeply into the abyss.

by Gary Lachman.

Gary Lachman's new book Politics and the Occult: The Left, The Right, and the Radically Unseen is available from Amazon US and Amazon UK.

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Dark Sides: The Jung Case

Although Hitler apparently had little interest in the occult - as Mark Sedgwick writes, “Hitler had no sympathy for occultism of any variety,” - he had close contact with people who did, and the Nazi movement, while not the product of “black brotherhoods” or diabolical “unknown superiors,” was certainly amenable to some occult influences. Himmler’s SS infamously incorporated runic, pagan, and Grail elements and was deeply influenced by the ideas of the occultist Karl Maria Wiligut. One SS officer, Otto Rahn, wrote a bestselling book, Crusade against the Grail, associating the Cathars with the Grail legend. Hermann Wirth, author of the monumental The Rise of Mankind, used meditation to view the past and argued, like Bal Gangadhar Tilak, that the Aryan race began in the frozen north. In 1935 Wirth was a co-founder of the notorious Ahnenerbe, the Nazi “research unit” devoted to uncovering Germany’s ancestral Aryan heritage, whose efforts included sending the SS explorer Ernst Schäfer to the Himalayas to measure Tibetan skulls. And while Hitler himself may have rejected occultism, he was certainly aware of “the power of myth,” a phrase familiar to viewers of the journalist Bill Moyers’ fantastically successful series of interviews with the mythologist Joseph Campbell.

The electrifying power of the swastika; Albert Speer’s dazzling lighting effects at the Nuremberg rallies; Hitler’s “demonic” oratory and his own deification as the Führer; the romantic vision of a bucolic Germany rooted in “blood and soil,” as opposed to an urban, mechanical modernity - all were part of the myth of National Socialism that Hitler and his followers sold to an interested public. A myth was instrumental in Hitler’s success, the dark lie voiced in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Whether the Protocols were “true” or not probably never occurred to Hitler; what was important was that they agreed with his own views and that, like himself, many people believed they were true. (The people who believed in the Protocols weren’t necessarily unintelligent; one of their most fervent supporters was Henry Ford, father of the assembly line and mass production. Like many influential people, faced with evidence that the Protocols were forged, Ford refused to believe it.) Like the French syndicalist George Sorrel and the political philosopher Leo Strauss, Hitler knew that in politics, myth is often more important than the “truth,” a difficult commodity to pin down at any time. Reason and rationality are boring and demand effort. Myth bypasses the inhibitions of the critical mind, and reaches down to the vital forces below. This is what makes it exciting and enlivening. It is also what makes it dangerous. In saying this I am not arguing “against” myth, merely pointing out that it entails something more than just “following your bliss.”

Yet many at the time were willing to risk the danger and embrace myth over reason. One was the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung, perhaps more than anyone else, the single most important figure in the reawakening of spiritual thought in modern times. Although for much of his career Jung obscured his interest in the occult, in his later years his writings on Gnosticism, alchemy, the paranormal, spiritualism, and even flying saucers brought these otherwise marginal areas into the field of respectable research.

The Rennes-le-Chateau Research website now have a large number of video clips from the upcoming documentary film Bloodline available for viewing. They give a good feel for the movie, with excerpts of interviews with key players and researchers, as well as visits to locations of interest.

Further to the topic of locations in the film, the producers of Bloodline have been kind enough to offer a pre-release exclusive from the film for Daily Grail readers: apparent confirmation from a Priory of Sion insider that the tomb discovery of 'Ben Hammott'/'The Tomb Man' (see attached picture) is genuine. Here's the entire release, with some of my own comments afterward:

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Priory of Sion confirms Hammott’s tomb: “One of three in the area”

Nicolas Haywood, representing the Priory of Sion, confirmed both by email and in phone conversations to the Bloodline producers, that Ben Hammott’s tomb is real and that it’s one of three tombs in the area near Rennes-Le-Chateau. He said that the three tombs each contain a shrouded corpse, and their locations form a triangle around a larger central ‘repository’, and that at least one the tombs contains a woman. He also said that there are items in all three tombs that come from this larger ‘repository’. He would not be drawn on any specifics about what was in this repository, but according to the producers, the inference was that it had been used to hold both Templar and Cathar relics, archives and treasure since it was first hidden there in the 13th century.

Dr Rupert Sheldrake has given me permission to post his commentary on his 'involvement' with Richard Dawkins's recent documentary Enemies of Reason (Part 1 and Part 2 on Google Video). Given the one-sided judgements of the documentary, I think it is important to put forth Dr Sheldrake's account. It certainly shows that it's worth understanding *all* points of view before coming to a decision, considering the ability of television programs to shoot and edit things to their liking. My thanks to Rupert for allowing us to reproduce the article here on TDG:

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Richard Dawkins Comes to Call

By Dr Rupert Sheldrake

Richard Dawkins is a man with a mission – the eradication of religion and superstition, and their total replacement with science and reason. Channel 4 TV has repeatedly provided him with a pulpit. His two-part polemic in August 2007, called Enemies of Reason, was a sequel to his 2006 diatribe against religion, The Root of All Evil?

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company’s representative assured me that "this documentary, at Channel 4’s insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was." She added, "We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry". So I agreed and we fixed a date.

I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?

The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. Richard began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things, "But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs."

I agreed that we had a lot in common, "But what worries me about you is that you come across as dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science."

Richard Leigh, writer: born 16 August 1943; died London 21 November 2007

Copyright (c) 2007 Marcus Williamson

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail is one of the most successful and controversial non-fiction books of recent times, having sold more than two million copies since its publication in 1982. Written by Richard Leigh, Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln, it tells the story of secret documents found during the late 19th century by Bérenger Saunière, a country priest at Rennes-le-Château, who subsequently became extremely wealthy. The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail – and its 1986 sequel, The Messianic Legacy – advanced the theory that Jesus did not die on the cross but instead went on to marry Mary Magdalene, have children and live in southern France. This knowledge, both books propose, was carried down the centuries by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion. Anthony Burgess, reviewing the book in The Observer in 1982, remarked: "It will seem to some a crackpot exercise, but these young men are no fools; they have learning, energy and enthusiasm tempered by scepticism."

Richard Leigh was born in New Jersey in 1943 to a British father and Austrian mother. After studying at Tufts University in Boston and the University of Chicago, he obtained his doctorate from Stony Brook University, New York. He arrived in London in 1974 having originally intended to write literary fiction. Instead, he encountered the Rennes-le-Château material for the first time and met Michael Baigent.