The Story Begins.

An Introduction

I am a writer and academic specialising in the hidden and controversial aspects of Religious and Spiritual History, Ancient History, Egyptology, Ancient Linguistics, Acoustics and the origins of monotheism.

In the past 17 years my main work has been in the analysis and understanding of a series of ancient documents made of lead and of gold called the Lead Codices - which are the earliest known documents of Christianity and also comprise the earliest known books.

So how did a curious seeker, a scholar with an independence of spirt and enquiry start a trail of discovery which eventually led to his receiving threats from eminent figures in the political and biblical worlds? Threats that would only spur him on in the face of character assassination and ridicule, amid accusations of forgery and fraudulence. Why is it that they sought so earnestly to shoot the messengers?

Let me explain.

Since my childhood spent in far-off countries, I have had a fascination for the power of place, the vicissitudes of ancient history and the rise of formalised religion up to the modern era. 

Let me start by saying that I am an independent academic.  I originally trained at art-school which gave me a wider view of the world via the use of perspective, contrast, colour, line and texture, plus the human factors interwoven into works of art, than I might have received in a straight-forward history class. 

In this sense, good historians will strive to paint a living picture of the society and era under their scrutiny. It is no surprise therefore that the earliest forms of writing were pictorial, as in the case of Egyptian ideographs referred to as hieroglyphs, meaning ‘sacred script’. They offer us an insight into the ways of thinking of their creators, their perspective on the world around them and the issues important or troubling to them.

In short, the images, signs and symbols subsumed in writing and recording form a complete cultural compendium for those coming upon them down the line. The very words you are reading are themselves symbols which, projected into your classroom learning as a child, have formed pictures and concepts by now so familiar that their symbolic origin is overlooked. 

This, the exploration of language and its origins, is the key to my work. 

I repeat, I am an independent academic. That is to say I am not tenured, I am not answerable for my funding in having to conform to a particular view, whether spoken or unspoken. My mind and my interests may range freely over a broad swathe of connected and unconnected subjects. Non-tenure, I believe, allows me to make the disparate connections to which my dyslexic mind draws me.  As an Anglo-Irishman, my demi-Celtic blood spills out in words and creativity. 

I have a black-belt in the Irish martial art of humour! Humour is the merging of conceptual opposites and, in the grey area where they cross over, the only option is to laugh, for the ‘clash’ can be chemical, volatile and very, very funny; but it may also be visceral and profound. This is the true nature of language, both spoken and written.  

What rendered me independent, (or perhaps I should say ‘unorthodox’) in the first place was a simple matter of poor and unreliable health – ‘rude health’ sounds to my ears like a swearword! The condition I have is permanent and lifelong. It spurs the immune system into attacking the physical system, which rather inconvenient fact has led me into a routine requiring me to work around the ever-present battle going on in my body as best I can. However, I am grateful not to be wheelchair-bound; I have lost no limbs and can lead a relatively normal life. With apologies to Moses, it is a simple matter of taking the tablets.   

I have lived an unorthodox life, and this has spilled over into what has turned out to be an unorthodox career. I have been a copywriter, a creative director, a portrait painter, and award-winning landscape-garden designer, a political consultant and speechwriter for a party, whose name will remain here unspoken. I have studied particle physics in depth and have been fortunate enough to travel the world widely and observe many different environments and cultures. Yet nothing has fascinated me more than the sacred sites of antiquity. 

Why, at the outset of civilisation, did we construct these huge facilities, almost as a matter of urgency, as opposed to merely building homes, farms, healthcare facilities, villages, towns and cities? Why again are all of these ancient sites built around sacred architecture? If you look at the average European town or city, you will see that this is precisely the case at the centre of them all, or in a few cases just beyond their walls there will be a place of sanctity, be it a church, cathedral or temple of some description. 

This was the question that haunted me for many years, until I decided, thanks to an extraordinary experience, to pursue it until I had my answer. Little did I realise at the time that would it would lead me on a voyage of discovery which would propel me from realm to realm of existence, indeed of consciousness itself.

What surprised me most was that the questions I was asking were not to be found upon the lips of other archaeologists, historians or the like, albeit quite as intrigued and mystified as I by human origins and by these extraordinary and enigmatic places. 

As of the 1980s, I have been listed as a member of the Egypt Exploration Society in London, where I struck up a friendship with Julia Samson, under whom I took a crash course in all things Egyptological. Julia was a world authority on the Amarnan period, the period of Tutankhamun and his remarkable father, Akhenaton: the first recognised monotheist in history. Julia herself had trained under ‘Father of Archaeology’, Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie who had died in 1941. She delighted in telling me the story of his self-declared genius and how, having donated his brain to science, his widow Lady Petrie was to be seen travelling through war-torn Europe with her husband's head in a hat-box.

Julia herself had been active in the forces during the Second World War, and we would often meet in the smoke-filled yet atmospheric interiors of the Army and Navy Club in central London. The feel of the place was as if the war had only just ended and that khaki was still in fashion. 

I loved it. I also loved the British Museum Egyptian rooms, which in those days still had frescoes, imitations of Egyptian tomb scenes in friezes along the tops of its walls, so that as you walked into the Egyptian galleries you actually felt that you were there. The immediate effect was to cast the mind back, in idealised fashion perhaps, to those far-off, long distant days. 

These were the days before modernity, or rather, our thoughts of modernity, began to intrude upon our idea and concept of the deep and ancient past. It was a sad day when these delightful galleries were ‘updated’. 

Many years, and much experience later, I finally sat down to write my first major book, which brought together years of travel and years of further study, to draw together all of the loose strands of world culture, mythology and history, alongside the heart of it all, the science of the acoustical properties of those aforementioned extraordinary places, leading to a conclusion which I believe has wide ramifications for the way in which we think about ancient humanity.

This book was updated and republished in 2021 as The Ancient Language of Sacred Sound. 

We are living in an age of environmental crisis where the issue of climate-change has become nothing other than a political football, an excuse to raise taxes whilst ignoring the devastation caused by certain corporate concerns. Our age is also one of increasing secularisation, in which religion has become polarised and in certain instances, extreme.

Science likewise seems to have become prone to the same extremism; to my mind, this expresses the great tragedy of the separation of science from spirituality, as brought about in the wars of religion from around about the 1400s onwards.

As George Orwell wrote in 1984, ‘he who controls the past controls the future’. Thus, if we look at the past with a broader sweep of the lens, I believe that we can find many answers that parallel where we are today. History might well be linear, but only in terms of being more like a spring, coiled yet fixed; viewed from a distance it might come across as a straight line. We parallel each era behind or beyond us by dint of being at a certain location on the spiral of the present, with the spiral below representing the past and that above thrusting into the future. 

Ancient humanity had a greater care towards the environment than we do today. Our ancestors saw the Earth as a living, breathing entity to whom praise must be given alongside respect and understanding, in as much as could yet be understood. 

It is my thesis is that we were anatomically and consciously linked by evolution to our home planet. This can be attested by the fact that our brainwave frequencies have developed solely by virtue of contact with our home environment. They are octaves of earth frequency.

This one bald fact provides the answer as to why sacred places were constructed in the first place – they were points of communication between humans of those days, and what they considered to be our mother, the Earth.  

For me James Lovelock’s Theory of Gaia was profound; it made sense – but has been misrepresented terribly by all of the usual suspects.

What we call religion was nothing more than a language of ancient science.

A language that was at once poetic, resonant and harmonious. A language that allowed us to explore complexities and contradictions, but also a language that eventually found resolution as religion – a word which means to bind back to the source.

What is equally curious about these places is that they are associated with the myth of the hero, and it is the hero who brings the art of written script. This hero is associated very intimately with the concept of The Word. The complexity of this extraordinary legend, within its individual societies and civilisations is such that, when centralised, those civilisations began to grow into larger, cultural entities and empires, Greece and Rome, being just two examples.

Essentially, myth was the unconscious action of entire peoples spurred on by something that ultimately was spiritual and eventually religious. 

This, in turn, became the realm of science and intellectual inquiry. And yet today we dismiss myth as fantasy: how tragic.

As a painter in either oil or watercolour, I have a deep love of landscape and an equally deep feel for its numerous qualities. When I stand in a special place – and there is nothing like a newly ploughed field in autumn ringed around by trees, standing tall and bare, standing in naked testament to what has come – I can actually feel the thrill of the energy of place as it runs up my spine and sends me all a shiver. It is something vital, something to which I have become quite addicted. I can understand why poets held the landscape in such awe or were able to exude such power in their words throughout all of the ages.

It was the same thrill that caught me when I journeyed many years later into a valley in northern Jordan, called by locals, the Valley of the Skull. 

It was here, that we found an extraordinary testament of the early Christians - in the form of the earliest known Christian documents. They came in the shape of lead books or codices, and quite often they also came in solid gold. 

These are the first books of history in the form that we have so come to love and enjoy – and yet they have caused such enormous controversy. 

Throughout the ensuing years, Jennifer – my partner in crime in the project that we have labelled the ‘Jordan Lead Codices’ - and I have continued to analyse and carefully understand what they are and the significant role they have to play in the rise of modern civilization, taking the greatest possible care to try to gain an accurate understanding of the Codices’ message and function at the time they were made

I have had to learn that the passions of the religious are far from objective, in terms of truth or fact. 

I have even myself been called a fake. However, I have been to various doctors and they have assured me that I am indeed authentic!  

I have received death threats, from surprisingly eminent people within the various sectors of the Christian faith, and yet, without seeming to be patronising, I believe that like Christ, they know not what they do.

Frankly, nor did I, when I first encountered these profoundly beautiful objects in that profoundly beautiful setting.

It is very easy to be terrified by any newly discovered testimony of history. What is difficult is to subsume it into all that we know by the merest act of understanding. I had never appreciated up until now that the act of understanding is also an act of courage an act of defiance against the lower self in order to become the higher self.

To this effect I have had to learn a certain humility in order to receive, a certain reverence in order to appreciate their inner beauty – and in the hope that they might reflect something within all of us.

The codices do not challenge faith - they merely change the history behind the rise of the Church at a critical juncture within our own times.

Yet after 17 years of involvement with this project there is very little in the Codices that challenges that faith.

However, the codices do offer one vital ingredient: and that is renewal and, in our present era, where everything appears to be breaking down, such renewal is surely a gift…

…as you will shortly find out.