Later in October 1998 Farouk Hosni announced to the Egyptian press that French composer Jean Michel Jarre had been commissioned to organize this event at Giza. The Egyptian Tourist Authority announced that Jarre would compose an opera titled The Twelve Dreams of the Sun for the sum of 10 million US dollars and that, At midnight a helicopter will fly into the site and, hovering in a starburst of lasers and spotlights, will place a gigantic gilded capstone atop the Great Pyramid – all to the accompaniment of what is expected to be an unprecedented Jarre crescendo of electronic music. The gold cap, approximately 28 feet high (about the size of a two-story house) is being especially constructed to protect the pyramid structure. In place, it will catch the first light of the new millennium as the sun rises over Egypt. Capping pyramids with gold and timing important events to the setting and rising sun are very much part of the ancient Egyptian pharaonic tradition, making this piece of Jarre theatre particularly meaningful.8
Let us note that back in July 1989 Jean Michel Jarre had organized a somewhat similar event in Paris for the bicentennial of the French Revolution when he set up a large metal-framed pyramid as a stage for his band in front of the Grande Arche at La Defense at the western end of the Champs-Élysées. Another show by Jarre also took place a few years later in London's Canary Wharf which is topped by a glowing glass pyramid apparently having the same geometrical proportions as the Great Pyramid in Egypt like the one that stands in the courtyard of the Louvre Museum in Paris, built by the architect I. M. Pei.
It would appear that the idea of placing a golden capstone on the Great Pyramid originated with Dr. Zahi Hawass, at the time director-general of the Giza monuments. It seems that a few months before the May 1998 celebrations Hawass had unearthed two limestone blocks with ancient inscriptions and drawings depicting workers moving a capstone for a royal pyramid amid scenes of dancing and celebrations. Inspired by this, Hawass proposed that Egypt should celebrate the millennium in a similar fashion. At first three million people were scheduled to attend the event but the Egyptian authorities put a limit of 250,000 for security reasons. A massive worldwide promotional campaign was organized including New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and various cities in Europe. Preparations then began for a huge stage to be erected in the desert south of the Great Pyramid with seating capacity for VIPs.
All was apparently going to plan until, in September 1999, senior members of the Egyptian Parliament began to complain of the costs involved and also that the millennium celebrations coincided that particular year with the holy month of Ramadan when devout Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. To counteract such criticism, culture minister Farouk Hosni stated that a ban would be placed on alcohol during the celebrations and that no music would be played until after the official end of the fast was announced.
To add fuel to this political fire, the radical Egyptian press, notably the newspaper Sawt al-Shaab (‘Voice of the People’) reported that Jean Michel Jarre was Jewish and also that he intended to project an ‘eye’ among many other images on the Great Pyramid using laser beams. The upshot was that Sawt al-Shaab accused the organizers of staging a ‘Masonic’ event in collusion with the ‘Jews’. The newspaper claimed that the ‘eye in the pyramid’ planned for this ceremony was intended to evoke the well-known Masonic symbol of the ‘eye in the triangle’ and, more specifically, the ‘Eye of Providence’ seen on the US one-dollar bill (and also in the ‘Great Seal of the United States’, suspected to be of Masonic significance).
More such accusations of ‘Masonic-Zionist’ infiltration of the millennium party at Giza ensued in the Arab press, although hotly denied by Farouk Hosni as ‘groundless’, and by Dr. Hawass who stated that ‘the celebration has nothing to do with Masonic beliefs. The design on the US dollar is a faulty imitation of the Pyramids of the Middle Kingdom.’9
Adding to the growing hype was another bizarre twist to this strange story. This involved the so-called ‘prophecies’ made by American psychic Edgar Cayce known as the ‘Sleeping Prophet’, who died in 1945. It turns out that Cayce foretold the placing of a gilded capstone on the Great Pyramid and also associated the event with the establishment of a sort of ‘new world order’ based on Masonic principles: For with those changes that will be wrought, Americanism with the universal thought that is expressed and manifest in the Brotherhood of man into group thought as expressed in the Masonic Order, will be the eventual rule in the settlement of affairs in the world. Not that the world is to become a Masonic Order, but the principles that are embraced in the same will be the basis upon which the new order of peace is to be established …10
It is well known in Egyptological circles that since 1973 the Edgar Cayce Foundation has been involved in various archaeological expeditions at Giza to find the fabled ‘Hall of Records’.11
In 1996 – 7 much controversy surrounded the precise relationship of the Edgar Cayce Foundation and the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, with allegations that prominent members of the organization arranged for the university education of Zahi Hawass, then chief inspector of the Giza pyramids All these allegations and rumours reached a peak in early December 1999, and finally under heavy pressure from the Egyptian press and also from members of Parliament, the Supreme Council of Antiquities took a face-saving position by delegating the decision of placing the golden capstone to a scientific committee. Hawass stated that the capstone, which apparently was to be made from an 8-meter high light metal frame and covered in gold sheets, could not be lowered by a helicopter ‘… because it will hurt the pyramid. Therefore if we find out that putting this capstone will hurt the pyramid, then, we will not do it.’ But some critics rightly pointed out a lightweight capstone on the 6 million ton stone pyramid would be like placing a flea on an elephant's back. Finally the Egyptian minister of culture caved in and, at the eleventh hour, admitted that due to public outrage over the ‘Masonic’ and ‘Zionist’ implications the placing of the golden capstone would be scrapped, but the show would go on just the same.
Ironically on the night of 31 December a thick fog settled over the Great Pyramid which would have anyway made it impossible for the helicopter to lower the capstone on its summit. Jean Michel Jarre did, however, manage to project his images on the Giza pyramids including ‘eyes’ until they, too, were engulfed by the fog and the thick smoke caused by the smoke of the huge firework display.
The one-eyed fiend
Although the alleged Masonic-Zionist conspiracy is generally seen as a secular evil, the Freemasons, as we saw in Chapter Twenty, are often associated with the mysterious and satanic figure of Masih ad-Dajjal, a supernatural entity akin to a ‘false prophet’ or a ‘false messenger’ who, in Muslim lore, is supposed to appear before Yawm al-Qiyamah (the ‘Day of Judgment’). In the Koran the Dajjal has a single eye which is inevitably associated to the single eye in the pyramid on the US one-dollar bill and, of course, the ‘eye in the triangle’ in Freemasonry and also Judaic symbolism.
It was thus no surprise that a few days before the planned millennium celebrations at the Giza pyramids, Sawt al-Shaab accused culture minister Farouk Hosni of allowing the ‘Jew’ Jean Michel Jarre to present a ‘Masonic-Zionist’ event on the soil of Egypt to be seen live on television on a global scale by billions of viewers. The newspaper printed a large composite image showing a Freemason with a huge eye (clearly representing the Dajjal) on whose chest was pinned the Star of David and the Masonic triangle. Yet Farouk Hosni and Zahi Hawass are themselves not immune to fictitious Israeli and Jewish plots against Egypt and the Arab World in general. In 1997 Farouk Hosni told the Arab press: The Israelis do not stop claiming that they built the pyramids, and this is why we need to stand firmly and respond courageously … even if it leads to a crisis because those pirates are committing a robbery … The Israelis want everything … This is the way the Israelis took Palestine … Now they use [this method] regarding the big pyramid. These are continuous projects – people come, steal your history and civilization. This proves that Israel has no his
tory or civilization, since those who have history of their own do not need to rob the history of others … Israel has many political goals … First of all, they steal your civilization and history. Second, they do not have any civilization … they do not have a country, and do not deserve a country. This is why they create a country by force …12
To which Zahi Hawass added: A group of people are making an organized campaign. There are some people pushing them [Israel] … These people are waging a big attack against us. I swore two years ago that I would not reveal their names, but I found out that I must mention them because it is becoming a threat.13
A few years later, on 17 September 2002, a small robot was used to explore narrow shafts in the Great Pyramid of Giza. The exploration was aired on a ‘live’ TV show by the National Geographic Channel with an estimated 300 million viewers watching. After the show Hawass told bemused journalists at a press conference at the Mena House Oberoi: The results of the robot's exploration refute the allegations reiterated by Jews and some Western countries that the Jews built the pyramids!
… and I will tell the public that everyone who tries to talk against the Egyptians should shut their mouths!14
In a more recent television appearance in February 2009 Hawass seemed almost to be quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, those fake documents that claim to expose a Masonic-Zionist plot to control the Arab world, when he told the interviewer that, … For eighteen centuries they [the Jews] were dispersed throughout the world … they went to America and took control of its economy … they have a plan: Although they are few in number, they control the entire world … look at the control they have over America and the media!15
Paradoxically, in view of the above, it was announced in early 2009 that Farouk Hosni was the prime candidate to be the new head of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO.) Not unexpectedly worldwide protests ensued when it was revealed that in May of the previous year Hosni had told an Islamist politician that he would ‘personally burn any Israeli books he found in an Egyptian library’. The French-based Reporters Without Borders wrote that ‘Farouk Hosni has been one of the main forces for censorship in Egypt, trying unfailingly to control press freedom, as well as citizens’ freedom of information’. The Independent of Ireland was even more forthright: To put such a creature in charge of the UN body for science, education and culture might seem rather like appointing a bull as manager of a china shop.16
Ultimately the UNESCO job went to Bulgarian ambassador to France, Irina Bokova. This decision, however, was seen by the Arab press as ‘a sign of Western prejudice against Islam and the Arab world, the product of an international Jewish conspiracy.’
‘America, Europe and the Jewish lobby brought down Farouk Hosni’ was the headline in the Egpytian newspaper Al-Masry Al-Youm, while Egyptian foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit accused ‘international Judaism and Western powers’ of plotting against Hosni. As for Farouk Hosni himself, he was quoted as saying: ‘there was a group of the world's Jews who had a major influence in the elections and who were a serious threat to Egypt taking this position.’17
ENDNOTES
PREFACE: THE MASTER GAME INTRODUCTION: THE GAME OF GAMES
1 Sir Walter Scott (trans.), Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, Kessinger Publishing, Kila, MT, 1995, pp. 341 – 5.
PROLOGUE: THE SACRED CITIES CHAPTER ONE: BEHIND THE VEILS
1 Jean Duché. L’Histoire de France Raconté à Juliette, Presses Pocket, Paris, 1954, p. 179.
2 Palloy made 83 ‘models’ of the Bastille with the original stones which he had distributed to various towns in France. One of the ‘Bastille’ models can still be seen at the Musée de Valence. The rest of the stones were used for the building of the Pont de la Concorde. Some were pulverised and the fine powder sold in bottles.
3 Jean Kerisel, La Pyramide à Travers les âges, Presses des Ponts et Chaussées, Paris, 1991, p. 161.
4 Jurgis Baltrušaitis, La Quête d’Isis, Flammarion, Paris, 1985, p. 24. Ermanno Arslan, Iside : il mito il mistero la magia, Electa, Milano, 1997, pp. 642 – 4. See also Jean-Marcel Humbert, L’Egyptomanie dans l'art occidental, ACR, Paris, 1989, p. 36.
5 Arslan, op. cit., p. 643.
6 Michel Vovelle, La Révolution contre L’Eglise: de la Raison à l’Etre Suprême, Editions Complexe, Paris, 1988.
7 Ibid., p. 15.
8 Louis IX was canonised on 11 August 1297 and his feast day is 25 August; In AD 800 Charlemagne was unofficially ‘beatified’ by Pope Leo III but not actually canonised.
9 Vovelle, op. cit., p. 103.
10 Jean Starobinski, 1789: Les Emblèmes de la Raison, Flammarion, Paris, 1979, p. 42.
11 Grand Larousse Encyclopédique, Paris, 1961, vol. 8, p. 1014.
12 The son of Louis XVI died in Temple prison in Paris in 1795 at the age of six. He was proclaimed king by the French nobility in exile in January 1793 after his father's death.
13 Originally offered as a gift to the French by Muhammad Ali in 1824. Champollion judged the Alexandria obelisks to be of poor quality due to their excessive corrosion by the sea air, and exchanged the ‘gift’ for a single obelisk from the Luxor temple.
14 Hunbert, op. cit., p. 44. Interestingly, at the top of the pyramid was to be place a statue of a goddess wearing a seven-pointed star on her head, much like the Statue of Liberty in New York.
15 Ibid.
16 Starobinski, op. cit., pp. 49 & 58.
17 Jacques Godechot, La Prise de la Bastille, Paris, 1965, p. 183.
18 Michael Baigent & Richard Leigh, The Temple and the Lodge, Jonathan Cape, London, 1989.
19 Steven C. Bullock, Revolutionary Brotherhood, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1996, p. 50.
20 Fred Pick & G. Norman Knight, The Pocket History of Freemasonry, Frederick Muller, London, 1953, p. 272.
21 Ibid., p. 271.
22 Ibid., p. 275.
23 Pierre Chevallier, Histoire de la Franc-Maçonnerie française, Librairie Fayard, Paris, 1974, vol. I, pp. 272 – 88.
24 Dossiers de l'histoire mystérieuse, no. 7, part 2, ed. F., Carbonnel, p. 81.
25 Ibid.
26 Dossiers de l'histoire mystérieuse, no. 6, p. 64.
27 Chevallier, op. cit., vol. I, p. 275.
28 Jacques Debû-Bridel, Lafayette: une vie au service de la liberté, Editions Nouvelles de France, 1945, p. 27.
29 Quoted from Jean-André Faucher, Les Francs-Maçons et le pouvoir de la Révolution à nos jours, Librairie Académique Perrin, Paris, 1986, p. 46.
30 Faucher, op. cit., p. 47. Faucher, like many others, also points out that there were many Masons who supported the king and actually fought against the revolutionaries. This is true of the American Revolution as well.
31 John Lawrence, Freemasonry: A Religion?, Kingsway Publishing, London, 1987, p. 15.
32 Ibid., p. 109.
33 Ibid., p. 121.
34 Martin Short, Inside The Brotherhood, Grafton Books, London, 1989, p. 72.
35 Vovelle, op. cit., p. 187.
36 Dossiers de l'histoire mystérieuse, no. 6, p. 64.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Vovelle, op. cit., p. 274.
40 Ibid.
41 Décret de la Convention, 18 Floral An II, 7 May 1794.
42 Warren Roberts, Revolutionary Artists, State University of New York Press, Albany, 2000, p. 272.
43 Grand Larousse Encyclopédique, vol. 4, p. 784.
44 Roberts, op. cit., p. 270. The language used by Robespierre is intensely ‘Masonic’. For example, he states that ‘a system of well organised national festivals would offer at once the most gentle of fraternal ties and the most powerful means of regeneration’. This is almost like bringing out on a public scale the rituals performed in lodges.
45 The Republican calendar was introduced on 24 October 1793, just after the guillotining of Quee
n Marie-Antoinette.
46 Charles Sumner Lobingier, Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, Kessinger Publishing, Kila, MT, 1931, p. 24.
47 David Ovason, The Secret Zodiacs of Washington DC, Century, London, 1999, pp. 116 – 7.
48 Bessel deduced the existence of Sirius's super-dense companion by observing its the wave-like motion, but did not actually see the ‘invisible’ companion. The latter, known as Sirius B, was first ‘seen’ by telescope by Alvin Clark in 1862, and photographed by Lindenblad in 1970.
49 Ovason, op. cit., p. 117.
50 Baltrušaitis, op. cit., p. 31.
51 Dossiers de l'histoire mystérieuse, no. 7, p. 106.
52 Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, MacMillan Press, London, 2000, p. 272.
53 Kerisel, op. cit., p. 160.
54 Robert Bauval, Secret Chamber, Arrow, London, 2000, p. 507, n. 27.
55 Sylvie Legaret & Philippe Coutines, Paris Story, Editions Denoël, Paris, 1977, p. 83, plate 3.
56 Ibid.
57 Aston, op. cit., p. 271.
58 Ibid.
59 Ovason, op. cit., p. 87.
60 Short, op. cit., pp. 121 – 2.
61 Ibid., p. 122.
PART I: THE SECRET FAITH CHAPTER TWO: LOST WORLD
1 Aubrey Burl, God's Heretics: The Albigensian Crusade, Sutton Publishing, Gloucestershire, 2002, p. 9. As early as 1198, as part of the virulent anti-Cathar propaganda of the time, Alan de Lille sought to promote an alternative derivation of the word ‘Cathar’ from ‘cat's-arse’ claiming that the devil appeared to the heretics in the form of a cat whose hindquarters they kissed. Similar acusations were later to be made against the Knights Templar – see Chapter Fifteen.