The Stone of destiny

I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve

Albert Schweitzer


On the way to Iona I had to pass through Scotland's elegant capital city Edinburgh, one of the best designed capitals in the world with its castle sitting atop a huge rock fortress in the centre. Its Scots nickname is Auld (old) Reekie (to reek=to smell a lot) because it used to smell a lot, from the smoke coming from thousands of coal fired houses. Aberdeen was in the past just as bad as we had plentiful coal , it was cheap, and we were always cold. So imagine every house had a chimney from which black smoke emitted for a lot of the year. That, combined with other industrial pollution gave Scotland the highest lung cancer rate in the world at the time when my own father was struck. His right lung was completely cuto out from his body when I was 12. Thanks to good whisky and a tough mind he survived until I was 24. In that castle on top of that hill there is a very peculiar object in a large glass case. Or at least there was the last time I saw it previous to this pilgrimage to Iona, back in the mid nineties, before Scotland received limited independence from the Uk. It is called the Stone of Destiny.

It was in 1998 that I drove into the Scottish highlands from Rosslyn Chapel, now made world famous by that movie. So famous is it now in fact, that the car park at the chapel (where the heroine of the movie discovers the documents that prove her descent from the bloodline of Christ) has been expanded to three times its original size. I had been researching a truly heretical concept. The Rosslyn Chapel had undoubtedly been a Templar ‘shrine’, disguised as a Church. No reasonable doubt exists in my mind that this is no ordinary ‘church’. Beneath its stone floors there is rumoured to be a great treasure. I had also concluded that the possibility is very high that this is indeed very possibly true. In fact scientific tests using a fiber optic cable type of camera were conducted at some expense to find out exactly what is down there in a massive underground vault.Alas, unfortunately the amount of debris was so great that the camera lens was blocked just when it looked like it was getting interesting. We must ask ourselves if anyone in the 15th century in Scotland, with churches galore, would spend a fortune and over 45 years building a small church that interestingly has the same floor plan as the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Just to add another place of worship to the Scottish landscape? Fat chance.

My many visits there, including research journeys with Japanese that allowed me full access and private use of its facilities for over two days, convince me that this is not really a church at all but a repository of something very important. At that time, in 1998 my research pointed to the inescapable possibility that beneath Rosslyn lay the preserved head or skull of either Jesus Christ or John the Baptist. The interior sculptures at Rosslyn Chapel are literally full of, heads! We may never know unless we dig up the floor but permission for that will not likely come from the private owner who is a police chief now in London. So after having spent two days at the Rosslyn Glen Hotel, near to the Chapel and having spent much time silently meditating inside the grounds and under the chapel in that crypt made famous by Tom Hanks, I headed off in a rented Ford towards the wild and mainly uninhabited central highlands. This time it was to find a rather large, rectangular stone.

My destination was a tiny village near A (cannot reveal the location here due to a promise I made)about two hours from Rosslyn. This is the highland location where the true stone of destiny still lay according to a contemporary Scottish templar who had informed me. Of course the one I had already seen on display in Edinburgh castle was a fake, he and others had assured me and recommended therefore that I make the journey to see the real one, which the templars (of course, the grail guardians) have always guarded with their lives. I arrived after several hours driving full of anticipation to find an old church for sure, but it was all locked up so that story ends in nothing more than speculation. Did he know it would be a wild goose chase? It could have been a wild goose chase yes, but the templar had nothing to gain by telling me lies and since I never met him again he received no satisfaction from seeing my disappointed face. Perhaps the real stone really is kept in that church which is no longer used, the local population having decreased with more and more people heading for the cities to find work. But the stone of destiny is definitely real-whether it is the original Egyptian/Israeli one, or the apparently fake one in an ancient fortress castle in Edinburgh. Or was it perhaps that other stone? Before the reader gets too confused let me share with you the stories of two real stones and a fake one that really do seem connected to a very important destiny-one that is historically traceable too.

The Lia Fáil in Ireland is one of those two historical stones named the Stone of Destiny. The other 'Stone of Destiny' is sometimes known as the Stone of Scone and was removed from the coronation chair of the British monarchs in Westminster Abbey and returned on loan to Scotland. Now that one is the suspicious one I mentioned earlier, the one that can be seen in Edinburgh castle but many local Scots also suggest that the one on display is indeed a replica. That makes pragmatic sense when we consider the immense value in its significance a coronation staone. Naturally the real kings' stone is of course hidden somewhere.

The Irish one now standing at the Hill of Tara is a phallic shaped obelisk-stone. I had already been to Tara and seen the big Lia Fail with my own eyes and I know for sure that nobody could sit on that to become a king! In Celtic mythology the Lia Fáil is said to have been brought to Ireland in antiquity by the semi-divine race known as the Tuatha Dé Danann.

This semi-divine race who legend tells brought it is so steeped in mythic shrouds that just about any idea can be attached to them; they were a kind of faery race (the Celts have always communicated with faeries), they were survivors of Atlantis or that the highly artistic Celts just ‘made them up. However the stone is real and is clearly very important to Irish history since the Irish descendants of Scota, as we saw earlier, were to become the Scots thus it also continued to be centrally important to their royalty. It was principally used as the stone on which Kings sat to become annointed monarchs and that is a ceremony that clearly has its origin in Pharaonic Egypt. It is thus highly likely that this stone was first carried to the distant shores of Spain and Ireland from Egypt, and then on to Scotland by Scota's descendants. The problem is the phallic one is stuck in the ground!

Researchers have long assumed that there were actually four stones representing the four cardinal points of the compass. A kind of Egyptian/Celtic medicine wheel if you will. And if that is in fact true then the phallic symbol in Tara probably represents the actual location where the kings were coronated but that other stone was used to be sat upon.

Traditionally, the stone of destiny is also supposed to have been the ‘pillow stone' used by the Biblical Jacob. Just as Akhenaten is potentially the same character as Moses, a recent and very detailed study of Biblical prophets by the aforementioned Ralph Ellis suggests that many of the the Bible heros were in fact Egyptians. Jacob might therefore be no exception to this very amazing possibility. He was very probably the last pharaoh of the 16th dynasty (the so called Hyskos period) whose name was Yacobaam. The Hyskos were known as foreigners in Egypt. Ellis has now written a very well researched set of 6 books and has done extensive field work in the middle East and Europe to back up his genealogies of Biblical characters who are in fact all, Egyptians.

According to the legend, this same‘pillow’ stone was as we said the Coronation Stone of the early Dál Riata Gaels (who I believe were the Egyptian descendants of Scota) when they lived in Ireland, which they brought with them when settling in Caledoni. Certainly we know that since the time of Kenneth Mac Alpin who was the first recorded King of Scots in 847 A.D., all Scottish monarchs were seated upon the stone during their coronation ceremony. At that time in history the stone was situated at Scone, a few miles north of Perth.

In 1296 the Stone was captured by the English King Edward the first (the bane of Mel Gibson's Braveheart) as spoils of war, then taken to Westminster Abbey where it was fitted into the old wooden chair known as St. Edward's Chair. Sure enough it was the chair on which English sovereigns were then crowned. Mmmm...

Doubtless by this act Edward intended to powerfully symbolize his claim to be "Lord" of Scotland, with the right to have power over its Scots king. Remember that at this time both countries were separate kingdoms but England was far bigger and richer than Scotland, which had a much smaller population . However, there is some doubt whether Edward I captured the real stone and it has been suggested that monks hid the real Stone in the River Tay or, alternatively that they buried it on Dunsinane Hill. This is interestingly the famous location of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’drama. If so, it is possible that the English troops were fooled into taking the wrong stone which would make it the third stone in our story so far.

Some forensic experts have claimed that historic descriptions of the destiny stone do fit the present stone. If the monks did indeed hide the real stone, they hid it well. No other stone fitting its description has ever been found, although rumors are occasionally heard of Knights Templar claiming to have the original stone in their possession, which is exactly what I discovered even though I had never been told such rumours previous to that time, not by anybody.The plot thickens like Scottish porridge on a freezing winter morn..It is generally true that anywhere that you discover a valid treasure story, whether it be the ark of the covenant or the stone of destiny you will undoubtedly find the knights templar involved. In much the same way if you get behind any major agitation of small countries in the last 50 years you will definitely find traces of the CIA.

Their original ‘temple’ from which we get the term templar was of course very likely to have been Egyptian in origin . Why is that? It was Solomon's temple of course that they venerated and as we have already considered through name changing in the Bible there is the difficult to resolve issue of a very famous king (0nly in the Bible) who unfortunately never was as far as history is concerned. There really is no historical proof, not even a mention of an Israelite King called Solomon. But an Egyptian with a different name? He would know a great deal more about building a great temple since Egypt is original home of many gigantic stone temples like Karnak for example in Thebes.

Back to Europe: In 1328 at the peace talks between the Kingdom of Scotland and the Kingdom of England, Edward III is said to have agreed to return the captured Stone to Scotland. However, this did not form part of the Treaty of Northampton and so the Stone was to remain in England for another six centuries. In the long course of time James VI of Scotland came to the English throne as James I of England but the stone still remained in London. For the next century, the Stuart Kings and Queens of Scotland once again sat on the stone but only at their coronation as Kings and Queens of England and Scotland performed in London. Since the Act of Union of 1707, the coronation ceremony at Westminster Abbey has applied to the whole of Great Britain so actually the stone may well be said to have returned to its ancient use.

In 1996 the British Government decided that the Stone should be kept in Scotland when not in use at coronations. Finally on November 15, 1996 after Tony Blair announced the semi independence of Scotland (called devolution) andit was finally returned to Scotland and transported to Edinburgh Castle where it still remains. Or does it? An agreement has been made to transport the stone to Westminster Abbey when it is required there for future coronation ceremonies. So a fake stone is used to enthrone our monrachs. No wonder the monarchy is going down the drain! Fake kings and queens sit on a fake stone. It is all a fake! But I knew that anyway....

This stealing of the real stone of destiny is highly symbolic of many things. It shows that people who want power understand the importance of ancient myths and objects associated with them. Sacred talismans of the sacred bloodline exert a profound influence on the collective unconscious of the poor saps who believe in the so calle divine rights of people who end up being silly humans like the rest of us, getting divorced and being petty, small and mean a lot of the time.Just as the US clearly stole many priceless artifacts from Iraqi museums in Baghdad through the very powerful Carlysle Group after the invasion, so the English stole a power object from its rightful owners in order to legitimatize their claim to authority. But why did the templars hide the stone in a poor kirk? They have a strong belief it seems in keeping the real stone out of the hands of a usurped monarchy who claim to be the king and queen of the land, rather than of the people. The Queen of Britain, not the Britons. She owns more real estate than any other woman on Earth, including vast areas of 'crown land' in Canada. Think about that. Is that a queen of the people? No wonder they made a movie about her. She is anomaly of nature so far removed from the people she might as well be an alien anthropolgist. The templars want to maintain the so called grail code which simply understands that only people with instrinsic values of real love to their fellow humans and an ability to die for that love, have any place sitting on any stone of destiny, real or false.

So an ancient Egyptian ceremony which is based on the idea that only blood related heirs become successive monarchs through sitting on a stone is still part of modern British society yet almost nobody knows this story I have shared. It is simply a quaint old ‘stone of destiny’ to most people. But my view is that the ancient Egyptian message, the heretical and rather more realistic one is returning at last. The destiny of that stone will be fulfilled through the correct interpretation of the spiritual message that has existed for thousands of years. It is a message of great importance because it will free our minds from the dogma of established, organizational religion in every corner of the globe. Whether you are a Christian or Jew, Muslim or a Buddhist or a modern day non-believer is not the point I am making here. Dogma is rapidly being eroded in all fields whether religious, political or historical. Dogma is what keeps us in chains and prevents us from seeing a totally new and evolved possibility for our future. Dogma, interestingly is in English spelled with DOG and symbolically thus keeps us chained to an unseen master who ends up living in our minds.

Whether we like it or not religion and politics set the course for our future on Earth right now. So it is our 'grail' responsibility to see how necessary it is to transcend both these systems of powerful psychological manipulation. Only then will we have the necessary intelligence to face our highly stressful future on Earth. This information is not about criticizing religion at all, this is about pointing out our almost total lack of awareness just when we need to be most aware. We absolutely must become aware that history is based on versions of events that really happened, so the more accurate versions we are also aware of, the better. The literal interpretation of the Bible clearly controls the policy of the current Bush regime. Meetings at the White House are often preceded by fundamental Christian Bible study and prayer ceremonies and that Bible used is as we now know one version, and a very biased one if I may suggest, of really incredible events that involved some of the greatest magicians, scientists and thinkers of any age. They began as the so called instant civilization of the Sumerians and then flowered into the genius of the Egyptians. All roads lead to Egypt.

The pilgrimage to Iona and thus my birth country of Scotland has led to a very deep rabbit hole. In the labyrinthine world of the pejoratively coined 'alternative history' movement, so alive and viable these days thanks to cross cultural research and the internet, it is close to impossible to know what exactly happened, when or where despite the apparent bedrock certainty of archaeologists. Archaeologists are humans too with a massive trove of built in mental assumptions that severely limit the images of the past and thus potentially impinge upon the future. A good example is that Egyptians could not have built the pyramids or sphinx previous to five thousand years ago. Why not? And we must not forget that the huge influence of European 'historians' like the infamous Italian Scaligeri, father of all history, who gave us most of what we know as a chronology of 'ancient' times has been largely shown (by an extremely erudite member of the Russian Academy of Science, Anatoly T. Fomenko to be Catholic-centric propaganda generated intentionally from the tiny collection of manuscripts available in the16th century. In short, previous to that we had no 'world history' at all, anywhere on Earth. we had local legends and stories that later, European-centric intellectuals developed with relish with Greece and Rome at the centre of all. So as a Scottish pilgrim I am very happy to hear that my great, great, great and so on grandpa may well have been an EgyptoIsraeliCeltic pilgrim priest who believed in the concept of what can only be called the Great Spirit. And it went way further than that, the pilgrimage went beyond the gates of the seen and onwards to the place where your heart has been finally weighed (to ascertain your true state after a life on Earth)and Anubis guides you to the place where the starshine never stops. Now that is a place fit for kings.