One of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World is reported (many years after all but the Great Pyramid had vanished) to be the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. This great goddess has what many archaeologists and historians have interpreted to be nearly a thousand breasts on her body. It is being commented on in this very manner as I type this. The Discovery Channel is interviewing an esteemed Cambridge scholar who looks to know his words are as wise as Solomon. The stupidity of such absurd explanations is not unusual but still it draws a smile from those who know better.

In the past few months I have read over two hundred books in whole or in part and only the authors of Carthage have an idea about the import of these 'cosmic eggs'. They also wonder why the Berbers painted so many ostrich eggs and then threw them in garbage pits, near Cyrenaica. The Keltic serpent's eggs from the Druidic education might provide a little insight. This next quote mentions 'Pelota' which we mentioned in reference to a game that took place at Chichen Itza to prevent unnecessary tribal conflict. It has other meanings and depths relating to life and the passage of the soul that are touched upon in this quote from 'The Mistletoe Sacrament' by W. B. Crow in 'A Celtic Reader' which has been a constant source of mine; for the last ten months as I have explored the origins of the 'Red-Heads' with an obsession some might call mania:

The Druids themselves were known to the Welsh bards by a word that means adders, and Lewis Spence is of the opinion that the ridiculous statements of Pliny really refer to the manner in which the Druids manufacture these eggs. Later bards also refer to a ceremony in which a ball was snatched and carried across the water.

The Druidic custom just mentioned, we cannot help thinking, may have been the origin of the curious mediaeval rite of 'pelota', which took place in certain Catholic churches in France and Italy on Easter Monday. The ceremony consisted in bringing a ball of considerable size into the church and after solemnly presenting it before the altar, certain of the clergy beginning to dance and throwing the ball about in a special manner {It would be good to know if this originated in Mayan lands or if the Druids like Quetzalcoatl and the Toltecs took it there. They are the 'messengers' referred to in many Indian legends like those of Grey Owl.}. The ceremony symbolizes both the passage of the sun and the planets through the heavens and also the vicissitudes of the soul of man (the causal body of the theosophists). In Egyptian mythology the trial of the soul after death is associated with the passage of the sun through the underworld. The whipping of a spinning top, representing Alleluia on the Saturday before Septuagesima, a ceremony not uncommon in this country in former times, is related to this practice.

Madame Blavatsky has some interesting remarks on the connection with the serpent cult {A serpent goes up the side of the pyramid at Chichen Itza in specific ways as the sun and shadows create the effect that the building was re-built to create by the Toltec designers after the original pyramid had been built by the Jaguar cult centuries earlier. Chichen Itza became an international court of the whole of Central America if not more.}, which was at one time widespread and which is still widely practiced in South India. The serpent is a symbol of regeneration {And the orobouros of the alchemists is a serpent holding its tail and making the infinity type of immortality symbol: or the Mayan mathematical concept of zero they are credited with discovering over a century before the people of the sub-continent of India.). Not only does it lay eggs from which new life arises after having been preserved in the dormant state, but the reptile itself sloughs its skin at regular intervals. The initiate, in the ancient mystery religions, went through certain occult processes where his vehicles {Solar body, soul, allies and 'doppelganger' to name a few.} were actually renewed, and in the symbolism thereof cast off his old clothing and was clad in new vestures. What better symbolism than the serpent could be chosen to represent this change in the personality? Besides this, the regeneration by sloughing refers to the regeneration of the physical body by reincarnation and the regeneration of races and worlds of the theosophic cosmogony.

Some primitive peoples, after a death has occurred, perform a ritual in which the performers are divided into two groups and a struggle for the body takes place between the parties. This refers to the struggle between the powers of light and darkness for the spirit o? the deceased, an eschatological myth of many ancient peoples. In the course of the evolution of this ritual it became a game in which the skull alone was the object of combat or had to be kicked into the goal. The various forms of the game of football and polo, and perhaps other ball games, are supposed to have originated from this, the original religious significance having become lost. The Druidic ritual of snatching an egg and running away until one got over a stream (which acts as the goal) suggests a similar game and connects up with funeral games. The egg or ball is an excellent symbol of the causal body, if one can believe clairvoyants, who see it as a kind of rounded or egg-shaped structure, in fine matter {Similar to ectoplasm as seen in ghosts.} of the higher mental {I would definitely NOT use this word.} plane. After death, according to accounts of occultists, there is a kind of play of forces, good and evil, which do seem to struggle for the possession of the causal body and to determine whether it goes to a good or bad incarnation when next it descends to clothe itself with coarser matter.

The Druid's egg, says Pliny, was unknown to the Greeks {They certainly knew about the Temple of Artemis with all the eggs some current Cambridge scholar thinks is breasts, and Pliny the Roman is not an initiate in the Eleusinian or Cabiri, mysteries, to my knowledge.}. But other kinds of eggs are mentioned in Greek and Hindu mythology, and the consecration of an egg was one of the most important acts in the secret ritual of the Eleusinian mysteries. The Christian Church continued the use of the same symbol, as we see in the so-called Easter eggs, and in the ostrich eggs which are still to be seen hanging in Orthodox Catholic Churches in the East. In fact a whole lecture might be devoted to the symbolism of the cosmic egg."

We must delve into many things this quote engages. In some ways I am squeamish about doing so in this book. I have written about my experiences and research on the stele I found behind the Pelota at Chichen Itza in other books and that makes re-telling the story something redundant. The matter of good and evil and 'Some primitive peoples' this author is talking about is most troublesome. How can I do what millions of philosophers throughout history have been unable to fully explain? It is clear that the Christian church borrowed almost all the supposedly pagan rituals. The communion is admitted by de Vere and Gardner (Genesis of the Grail Kings and the Sarkeny Rend Rosicrucians) to be similar to their earlier adept Count Dracul or 'Vlad the Impaler' and the vampire practices. My experience with exorcisms is extensive enough to know that the Catholic Church takes advantage of some pretty easy situations and makes them a big issue for the purpose of self-promotion. I recommend reading The Devils of Loudon by Aldous Huxley for a documentary trip down that road. The matter of the fight over the soul that sounds like some of Dante Aligheri's "HELL" is not the matter of Druidic cosmogony. It is the tactic of FEAR-mongering by Christianity such as the 'sins and demons' we touched upon in the issue of medical ailments and Paracelsus.

Mr. Sharkey spoke about 'representing each world within the other', as he described the Druids. There was a guided spiritual ritual part to some of what went on at the Pelota in Chichen Itza with the big ball, that goes into the realm of the time-space continuum, and free choice that students of the Nagual's Way from Castaneda might understand that I won't delve into, again. Are there really 'Other Worlds' as the quantum physics 'Many Worlds Interpretation' assures us and Wigner or Schr?dinger (Nobel Laureates) say the Mandukya Upanishads describe accurately? Have you read the Tao of Physics by the physicist Fritjof Capra and seen what he says about S-Matrix theory of Math and the 'I Ching'? Believe me this author (Mr. Crow) might have to turn into a raven if his 'whole lecture' would do the trick in explaining the cosmic egg.

We have made it clear the Kelts believed in the afterlife and spirit world or they wouldn't have made loans to be repaid after death. We have said they didn't fear death and that they had no punitive 'unmerciful God. But there are leprechauns and the Fianna of the great ancient Irish king Finn who the Phoenicians liked and named themselves after. So we are caught in this quandary of making seeming conflicting statements come together. We said the spirits might take a child or their energy if the parent let the spirits know the child's name. That doesn't sound like the work of a leprechaun! You have heard about 'witches' and you know we've been defending them, too. You probably wonder if this isn't all 'hocus-pocus' and barbaric things anyway.

There are good people that I know who deny and avoid these facts like they are 'THE PLAGUE'! It isn't going to make your life easier when you open these doors and see the thousands more that await you beyond. Occultists are often 'sophists' or will engage in sophistry too. Who can say what things God might be capable of? Who really believes in such a force anyway? Most people pay lip-service to it. The Kelts we have said (and Admiral Morison ridiculed) were different. Clearly the Phoenicians demanded the greatest personal commitment to their beliefs, at least from their average person or citizen. When their kings are seen having to give their first born to the god Baal (Bel = BL) are they just babel-ing (BBL and later the Bible)? Some of these kings were front men or women and there is adequate proof they did these things, but that doesn't mean they all did it. Carthage had a democratic type of government according to Aristotle and maybe this was the cross kings had to bear like the Keltic practice of burning the leader at the end of their term in office (25 year term, and this made for less fraud and 'cronyism'). This can become pretty barbaric as we have seen with the 'Devoted Ones' but it became a celebration and the forerunner of the 'wake'. That seems proof enough that death was not feared anyMORE than the North American warriors who 'counted coup' feared their 'maker'. So what if all these cultural beliefs are shared across the oceans? What does it matter to you now if you are 'getting yours'? Why 'open a can of worms if you can't close it'?

Maybe we should leave this kind of talk to another book and just point fingers at the church that hides these truths from us. Maybe our happiness and freedom are better under their ministrations. If there are spiritual forces that can mess with us. There is a lot of merit in my concerns about this and there is a law of the Magi that says 'Know, Will, Dare, Keep Silent'. We've already given a lot of places to look for the answers to esoteric questions like these and it might be best to keep this book on the academic level of ethnology or anthropological denial of the reasons and realities that actually', are the nature of everyday life. We could talk about laws and minstrels and make cute poems to amuse the reader and still have done a lot to help people see the culture was no more barbaric than we are. Why did the Druids follow this law and keep so much of their knowledge in 'verbal traditions' such as the Qaballa was made from? Were they really so afraid of this knowledge being abused by unethical or un-disciplined 'posers'? Did they really think their soul would be judged as unworthy of progress if they broke this law? Surely if they could sell the knowledge of shape-shifting and the 'Lost Chord' they could have made life a lot better for a lot of people.

The truth is they could have done anything or had anything they wanted at the point they rose to the highest level. In fact the moral strength to have such knowledge is more important than the mental or chemical knowledge in reference to the 'Stone'. I am sure money and power is a pursuit that blinds people through their ego. This 'blindness' that closes the soul to 'what is' or as Jesus said 'the living father within', will prevent any politico from getting their hands on anything really harmful you might say. That might be true, too. There were some things that they knew which could be abused though, and it was (and is) important to do what is RIGHT. That is another law of the three laws of the Magi. RIGHT THOUGHT=RIGHT ACTION!

He's dodging and waffling, you might say. What about the things this guy said about the battle over the soul when we die? What kind of authority do I have to disagree with occultists like Madame Blavatsky who heralded my favorite teacher Jiddhu Krishnamurti and helped Annie Besant teach him? In the final analysis you might say I'm a person engaging in 'sophistry' and ego too. We know that no one person can really know God or all these things so why read what I have to say? For now I choose to say that we are going to cover the religion of the Druids who were the dominant force in thousands of years of human culture in a later chapter. But I don't want the reader to think the Druids or Kelts were so ego driven or fearful as to worry about spirits capturing their souls once they had grown enough to know their name; they also were 'protected' from the lesser obsessive forces of the limbo or interstitiary state of the spirit world which may possess a soul.

Yes, they had a lot of scary legends and tales about evil acts of mischievous and other forces. Sometimes these tales are like the accounts of war on the friezes or frescoes of the Mayan, who wanted people to know the stupidity of war. Sometimes there were people who needed this motivation to take the time to learn enough to protect themself. In all cases as long as the Druids were still around (before the Roman 'bounties') they had recourse to protection if something really bad occurred. At the same time there was a greater element of 'fate' and 'destiny' in this religion than I think is real. I cannot say for sure that there were people at the highest level who knew better the import of 'free will'. I cannot even be sure what degree or level of free will or 'world mind' existed in their collective unconscious (Jung). There are lots of Celts and people from post Druidic times who write about Druids as if they know them. Some of these people are definitely 'far gone' when it comes to the inevitability of the cyclical nature of the 'forces'. The Etruscans are good examples of this and the Carthaginians who allied with them or were their 'brothers' surely had a lot of that in them too. But that is a time when the macho power-trippers had already made great inroads into the original nature-worshipping culture, too.

The historians have little to go with in the records of history. We often are left with the words of Caesar in the first century BC. to confirm that there were numerous schools of Druidry as the best recorded insight to earlier times. In Gaul the best knowledge seems to go back no further than the fifth century BC. and ornamentation is the hardest proof. Gimbutas has the Old European alphabet that takes us back a long way but many scholars aren't convinced because they don't understand the esoteric symbology. There are those who laugh and point to Stonehenge or Carnac in Brittany, and of course the Pyramid they know it's the work of the Red-Headed League of Megalith Builders. But they can't prove a definite connection to the Druids. At least not in the eyes of those who establish the required standards of proof in the halls of academia. They note that the term 'goddess-worship' or Wicca may not even have existed until the 18th century. We can say the term isn't the point and the records of historians are propaganda.

Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest 'expert' for World-Mysteries.com