SUGILITE AND THE HIDDEN SECRET OF THE HOLY GRAIL - CRYSTAL HEALING: IN PURSUIT OF THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD

It has been my good fortune, often, while selling crystals, to be called upon to give counsel, advice if you will, to the many followers of crystal healing. Later in solitude I would often reflect on the spiritual power and energies of so many of our shared sources of meaning and enchantment. Why had they so readily brought such strength and if I might say, hope, to those who believed and found their faith rewarded? What indeed was the source of their prowess, their power of enlightenment?

In handling and dealing in crystals over so many years these questions had inevitably come to dominate my thoughts. All the more so because I was daily confronted by crystal healing enthusiasts and the stories of fulfillment they told. It was inevitable then that they should become questions of meaning from which I could not escape. Why did one crystal or another create such an effect? What magic lay in them to account for their potency, their spiritual power and energy? My curiosity, mild at first, held charms of consideration and acceptance. Sometimes I’d made connections and seen through the complexities of energy levels. At others, circumstances arose that drew me much further forwards. Particularly with crystals and minerals I could only contemplate in wonder. Such was Sugilite.

Of its great rarity and prowess I have already spoken and like so many others been drawn by its spell. Why was Sugilite so special? So much more than so many others. At first I sought nothing more than to admire and enjoy, but gradually over time I came to ponder more deeply why this mineral in particular had such a spectrum of energy so universally innervating. It was purely by chance, as an interested party, both as a trader and an enthusiast who met and talked to so many people that created the coincidence of putting me right at the center of things. I wasn’t entirely an adept, a convert within the faith. I was also a businessman and someone with scientific training. An outsider if you will. Someone who could be dispassionate. Ask questions uncluttered by emotion and where necessary make cool observation. This brought me to the conclusion that as important as was the chemical structure of the mineral itself, so too was its location in time and space. In particular its geographical and geological setting.

As far as it was known all its primary sources were located centrally within the Middle Earth. The one to which I alluded earlier being at a seismically active site hidden somewhere in Central Africa. Close to a major fault line so to speak. I’d thought nothing of this until I was struck by the fact that Professor Sugi’s own source that triggered the initial discovery had an almost identical location in a Middle Earth rift somewhere in East Asia. Far more important however was that the African source was located precisely at the juxtaposition of two key meridian ley lines. Even so, I was still floundering around in the dark! My thoughts lit only occasionally by glimmers of understanding. Revelations that seemed disconnected. Nothing I could put together that might create a major breakthrough.

It was like I was reaching out in the dark. I felt utterly frustrated. It was all too close. My head too full of it all. I felt a desperate need to get away. Clear it from my mind. I remember how I felt as if it were yesterday. My wife insisting I took a break. Spend a week walking somewhere, maybe high in the Alps where the cold air might bring me clarity. Give me the chance to breathe.

I’ll never forget that third morning. We were high up together, suddenly under a narrow band of oddly coloured green cloud. Strange I thought and remarked on it. My wife came back with her own thoughts. It seemed to be powering straight out of the sun. She’d never seen a bank of cloud so perfectly straight, running in an east-west line like a meridian… only up in the sky not on Earth. It must have been something about the way she said it. A line in the sky not on Earth… A sky-line that was also a meridian! In seconds something clicked in my mind. Not a meridian but something more fundamental… Within the earth itself!  A ley line that doubled as a meridian! A crescendo of thoughts tumbled out of my head. Professor Sugi’s original discovery! Where precisely did it fit within the Middle Earth? Was it, could it possibly be that it too was located somewhere along a similar line?

We cut the walk short and raced back to the hotel. My wife understood. In minutes the laptop was up and running. It’s global ley line program skipping from one set of coordinates to another, locked into my figures estimating the location of Sugi’s source. Nothing so far…The minutes ran by with a flipping over of images until suddenly there it was. A magical moment! The source itself! It had to be and most wonderful of all, perfectly centered at the juxtaposition of a north-south/east-west set of lines. I felt excited beyond words. I’d pinpointed the two sources of Sugilite along both sets of lines. I was on fire, my curiosity running wild. East-west, north-south… where did they lead? I’d made the discovery, established the coincidence but it wasn’t enough. The lines had to lead somewhere. Was it possible that they crossed elsewhere, met again at another location? Somewhere that might reveal a third source of the mineral that was seismically active!

Slowly, carefully now, I traced my line north from Africa and tentatively east then brought the Asian line west. The projections had to meet somewhere, that was clear to me, however there was nothing to prepare me for the surprise I had waiting. I could hardly believe it. There it was! Completely removed from all prospect of seismic activity. Jerusalem! I turned to my wife with a hopeless look on my face, ready to burst into laughter. Jerusalem! Well that was a joke. Something had to be wrong with the ley lines projection.

I remember her standing behind the computer, her face lit with one of her famous wry smiles. A geologist by training she was on top of her stuff. The City itself might not be sitting on a volcano she said jovially but that wasn’t important. The whole area, from Turkey down to the Red Sea had major fault lines running through it. There was nothing wrong with Jerusalem. There could be some kind of deposit anywhere in the region. The Dead Sea Depression was a likely location, so too was the Jordan Valley. Even the Sea of Galilee itself!

My ears pricked up. The Sea of Galilee! I felt my mind going into overdrive. My imagination running so strong that I could barely contain it. I could only think of one thing. It’s direction so singular, so impossibly wild that at first I refused to believe it. If I’d paused for a moment I might have laughed it all off, but no, I wanted everything coming together till it was out of my head in a well formed conjecture. A hypothesis if you will. Something I could sit back and work on. The ideas might be wild but they were nonetheless plausible. The Sea of Galilee… Jesus… A deposit of Sugilite… The Miracles of the Bible… Healing the Sick and the Blind… It was all there before me. It felt as though there was a great silence around me and I at its center. That something had been given to me to see this. To make this connection. It had been there at the time of Jesus. His birth, his life of preaching and his death. There was a great and intimate connection between Jesus himself and the deposit!      

Somehow he must have known of it. Not as Sugilite of course but perhaps as a place. Somewhere from which he took his own strength, his spirituality, his healing energy and his wisdom. A place, a sense he’d discovered emanating from deep within the Middle Earth. Somewhere he returned to and felt its love. Maybe even feeling its power from touch… The walls of a grotto or cave… A fissure in the rock. Perhaps even some small piece of the wondrous mineral itself that he took with him among the crowds to whom he conveyed his message. Bestowing upon them the spirituality that always went with him.

There has been so much written about the life of Jesus. So much written about the Holy Grail. The Roman Catholic Christian Church that grew out of the Synoptic Gospels, stories written hundreds of years after his death, emerged as a new religion, one that abandoned absolutely his Jewish faith and that of his early followers, the Nazarenes - who themselves held to his undeniable Jewish beliefs, practices and worship -  and became something different. This new religion deified a man who was essentially a poor man’s preacher and turned him into something divine, nothing less than the son of God when he was nothing more a man, after which they persecuted the Jews who continued his teaching and wrote them out of history. Indeed they continued this persecution of Jews for nigh on two thousand years, forgetting the original teaching of someone who celebrated the Sabbath and all the Jewish festivals, believed in circumcision strictly in accordance with his faith and championed the rights of women. His celebration of Jewish history in ceremonies such as the Passover in particular was deliberately wiped out of history with The Last Supper.

This was an absolute travesty of reality. The men of the new church couldn’t allow The Passover to remain as a historical reminder of the flight from Egypt so instead they turned Jesus’s breaking of unleavened bread with his followers and drinking of wine into something else, a Last Supper. In short the Roman Christian Church falsified the Jewish character of his life for their own ends. They created something they could control and sold the idea to the Roman Emperor Constantine who knew a good thing when he saw one and used the new religion to unite the warring factions within his Empire, making it Rome’s official religion. He of course privately remained true to what he’d always been throughout his life, an unreconstructed pagan.

The early history of Christianity and its betrayal of the Judaism of its teacher and his family which included his wife and his son is well documented. More complex is the Holy Grail Legend, a story of how one of his followers, whether his wife Mary Magdalene or his friend Joseph of Arimathea held a Passover cup or dish to his body to catch his blood at the time of his crucifixion by the Romans. This is a tale that has been endlessly written about and embellished. The vessel itself came to have divine status with immense spirituality and power, bestowing immortality on its possessor. Needless to say it only got up and running after the establishment of the Christian Church in Rome. There’s no mention of it in the four gospels nor in the Gospel of St Philip and that of Mary Magdalene herself, condemned as a prostitute in later Church writing when she was in fact Jesus’s most beloved follower and wife. The Holy Grail then, containing the blood of the son of God, became a potent symbol of holy virtue and power. Sought after by crusading armies of Christian soldiers, fanatical bishops and popes, adventurers of every stripe and more recently rabid Nazis.

The cup or dish that held the blood of Jesus! In the Jewish faith which all his followers at the time observed, to do such a thing as catch the blood of a dying man in a vessel is utterly sacrilegious. Furthermore they certainly wouldn’t have done this even if he were dead... for whatever reason. They would have regarded such an act as shameful and unclean. The origin of the story originates only in early Christian Church writing and is part of a vast industry of fantasy and myth which includes the Turin Shroud and the great collection of bones of saints and other so called holy relics that became readily available to light the fires of camp followers and cajole out of them a pretty penny for holy Roman coffers.

Even so, the myth still has a remarkable potency. The cup that held the blood of Jesus! The new religion needed such myths, such made up stories, to put faith into the minds of its followers, ninety-nine percent of whom were entirely illiterate. Believed what they were told to believe and thought what they were required to think. If not they’d suffer eternal spiritual and physical damnation in somewhere called hell! Nice one that from a religion of love! But then the teaching of the Christian church has held sway for over fifteen hundred years and still does in the minds of many today. Absolute faith, absolute belief that a cup held the blood of God’s son.

Yes, there’s surely a long way between the unchallengeable word of a Pope and the views of a man who rode into town on a donkey.

That said, what then is the connection between the potent spiritual energy of Sugilite and the story, true or otherwise, of a cup that supposedly held the blood of Jesus? Well, for starters you could put it this way… what kind of connection might there be between a mineral with 12 power energy - equal to that being pumped out on a daily basis by a Blue Supergiant Star like Rigel – and a cup that held the blood of the son of God? I mean, putting it the way a fully paid up member of the Church of England might think let alone the guys in the Vatican, Christ sake, which has the greatest power, some mineral with a wondrous spectrum of energy or the entity that made me, you, and every star in the Universe? Perhaps it all depends on how religious you are. If you take God out of the equation everything’s round the other way. You get Sugilite and a cup with a bit of blood on it. And even then it’s only presuming the legend is true!

Okay, let’s not complicate things. It makes more sense to keep it all simple. Let us suppose that Jesus was just a plain Jewish preacher who somehow discovered the wonderful healing energy of Sugilite and furthermore communicated this spiritual energy to his friends without revealing its source i.e. they all thought that he himself had wondrous powers. Let’s also suppose he used this healing power to do wonderful things. Things that helped people. Cured the sick and made blind men see. Made Sugilite a force for good in the world. Okay, there he was, sitting with his closest friends. It was Pesach and they were all celebrating Passover, the time when Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt. There’s a cup of wine on the table and he breaks a matzo, that’s a piece of unleavened bread, a kind of crisp-bread to you and me, dips it into the wine and eats it. That done he passes the rest of the matzo round to his friends and they do likewise. Today the Christian Church calls it Communion. Actually it comes from the Passover Ceremony.

The cup’s made of wood. Maybe he carved it himself time back. The cup of a carpenter. It’s his cup, full of wine that he’s sharing round the table. It’s a time for rejoicing as they remember their people escaping slavery in Egypt and leaving as free men and women.  Not the kind of thing you see in all the paintings where they sit there looking solemn. Leonardo da Vinci and all the other Renaissance painters wouldn’t have known how they felt anyway. They knew jack about Pesach and the Jews leaving Egypt and even if they did it wouldn’t have meant much anyway. It was dead history. Only the Popes of the Church knew and kept it all hidden. Fuck the Jews anyway. They’d had their time and were nicely buried under the lie of collective guilt for murdering Christ.

So Jesus was there with his friends, drinking wine and breaking unleavened bread. Maybe Mary Magdalene his wife was bringing the Passover food to the table. She’d cooked it all anyway. And their son, Judah, a boy close to ten, was certainly there too. Asking his father the four Passover questions… Why is this night different to all other nights? Jesus allows his son to sip the wine. It’s the Jewish tradition.

And so the scene, solemn though the occasion is in remembrance, is also full of spirituality and energy, of promise and hope for the future. Essentially of joy. It’s not really a Last Supper at all. The Christian Church only gave it that name hundreds of years later when it acted to obliterate the historical Judaism of the man from history itself and make him something he wasn’t. And later the boy in his linen garment ran after his father in the Garden of Gethsemane when the Roman soldiers took him away and was last seen with his mother at the foot of the cross. There was no cup held up to catch the blood. The wooden carpenter’s Passover cup got lost in history like the child, or did it?

The cup carried no royal blood and neither was Mary Magdalene the Grail herself, as some like to think. They were all full of rejoicing on that Passover Night, unaware of what was to come. Truth is, it was the cup of wine they all shared that bound their spirits together. A spiritual energy shared in a spirit of rejoicing. From the wondrous power of that hidden source to a rejoicing in freedom. Even while living under the yoke of their Roman conquerors these people could still celebrate in hope. That one day again they’d be free.

This is the story of Sugilite and the hidden secret of the Holy Grail. It was a Jewish symbol of spirituality, of freedom, not of the blood and death that the Church turned it into. And millions of people would die before the land became free again.

Sugilite and the Passover Cup. Both have the liberating energy of freedom and the great spiritual promise of hope. That’s their connection. The Christian Church never discovered the source. That’s why its pious words sound hollow and empty. How could there be any real love or rejoicing when you were always too busy deconstructing reality. Thinking you could build spirituality out of a corpse when it was always right there in front of you, only you just couldn’t feel it!