THE STAR

Chapter 1

"Eliminate the impossible. Whatever remains, however improbable must be true"

Sherlock Holmes

FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

G Hancock

1995

Page 287

"What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them - and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics."

"Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked,

what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3"

WHAT ONE WOULD LOOK FOR THEREFORE WOULD BE A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE THE KIND OF LANGUAGE COMPREHENSIBLE TO ANY TECHNOLOGICALLY ADVANCED SOCIETY IN ANY EPOCH

SUCH LANGUAGES ARE FEW AND FAR BETWEEN BUT MATHEMATICS IS ONE OF THEM

I

THE

NINTH

 HIEROGLYPHIC

A

MAZE

IN

ZAZAZA ENTER ZAZAZA

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

ZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZ

THE

MAGIKALALPHABET

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA

12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262625242322212019181716151413121110987654321

THE

UPSIDE DOWN

OF

THE

DOWNSIDE

UP

ZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZZXSONIHHINOSXZ

987654321999999999123456789 ZXSONIH987654321999999999123456789 HINOSXZ87654321999999999123456789

H I N O S X Z Z X S O N I H 8 9 14 15 19 26 26 19 15 14 9 8 H I N O S X Z Z X S O N I H

8 + 9 + 5 + 6 + 1 + 6 + 8

I

I AM THAT THAT AM I

ZAZAZAAZAZAZ

THE

DREAM

OF

THE

RAINBOW COVENANT

 AZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZAZA

WITH EPISODIC SENSE OF DE JAVU THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE AND OFT TIMES SHADOWED

SUBSTANCES WATCHED IN FINE AMAZE

THE

ZED ALIZ ZED

IN SWIFT REPEAT SCATTER THE SACRED NUMBERS AMONGST THE LETTERS OF THEIR PROGRESS

AT THE THOUGHT OF THE NINTH RAM WHEN IN CONJUNCTION SET THE FAR YONDER SCRIBE MADE

RECORD OF THE FALL

LOVE DIVINE DIVINE LOVE

9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 9 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6

THAT LIGHT THAT

THAT LOVE THAT

THAT DIVINE LOVE LIGHT THAT

EARTH LIGHTS

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS

Paul Devereux 1982

Page11

"And Albion knew that it was the Lord, the Universal Humanity& Albion saw his Form a Man

William Blake Jerusalem

THE GALACTIC CLUB

INTELLIGENT LIFE IN OUTER SPACE

Ronald N. Bracewell

Page 41

PROJECT CYCLOPS

"I think there is no question that we live in an inhabited universe that has life all over it"

George Wald

Page52

" After this initial detection took place, perhaps their beacon would be turned on. What frequency might they choose for their beacon?

Where Is Their Beacon?

Possibly they would choose to tune their beacon somewhere in one of our TV bands. Therefore, we should all be alert for the first message, which may show up on the TV set of anyone of us. During regular program hours we might interpret extraterrestrial signals merely as troublesome interference; conditions would be more favorable for re-ception late at night after the local stations have gone off the air. Occa-sionally one may catch glimpses of programs on vacant channels, usu-ally coming from another station. Such reception of a remote station can occur due to unusual atmospheric conditions, or as a reflection from transient trails of meteors plunging through the upper atmosphere. In view of these exceptional possibilities it would be helpful to know what to expect in the way of an extraterrestrial message as distinct from a terrestrial program.

What Will Their Message Say?

In 1941 Sir James Jeans reasoned that we could attract the attentIon of the Marti:lns "if any such there be" by shining a group of searchlights toward Mars and emitting flashes to represent a sequence of numbers such as 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17,19,23 . . . , the prime numbers. Subsequently, other authors have suggested that extraterrestrials might use this same type of message to contact us. Personally, I think it would be rather anticlimactic for designers of some high-power radio transmitter in space to use their program time trying to prove to me that they could also count! At the least I would expect a little poetry or art. In any event, let's give them credit for enough imagination to put on a program that would rivet our attention.
Another thought regarding the message's content is based on the sup-position that the beacon will have to remain turned on for a very long time before any acknowledgment is received. A dilemma faces our extraterrestrials. A long story runs the risk that we tune in near the end. A short one repeated again and again bores us to tears for decades while we try to acknowledge. This dilemma has led to a further idea: mes- / Page 53 / sages might be nested within messages-short items, frequently re- peated, sandwiched between episodes of a longer story repeated less frequently, all of which is contained within an even longer communi-cation, and so on. Thus, no matter when we tuned in there would al- ways be enough variety and recapitulation to keep our attention."
                

EARTH LIGHTS

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS

Paul Devereux 1982

Page 62

"
Keel coined the term 'ultra-terrestrial' to describe UFO entities that he feels are 'elementals', other denizens of the Earth sharing it with us on another level and interacting with us through various geophysical gateways, perhaps influencing or even con-trolling the way we think and perceive reality." 

" In his classic Operation Trojan Horses Keel tells us that some-where in the vast range of the electromagnetic spectrum '. . . there lies an omnipotent intelligence. . . able to manipulate energy. It can, quite literally, manipulate any kind of object into existence on our plane.'
Along with many other researchers, I feel that Keel's ideas are nudging us in the right direction. He has begun to direct our attention towards telling aspects of the phenomenon."

" In this book he does not put forward a theory to explain the nature of UFOs-in fact he goes out of his way to avoid doing so: he simply but very effectively demonstrates that the basic motifs in modem UFO accounts parallel those to be found in ancient folklore. Like Keel, and at about the same time, Vallee pointed out that the faeries and elementals, devils and visionary personages of former times bear'striking likenesses to today's UFO entities. Vallee writes:

Page 64

When the underlying archetypes are extracted from these rumours, the saucer myth is seen to coincide to a remarkable degree with the fairy-faith of Celtic countries, the observations of scholars of past ages, and the widespread belief among all peoples concerning entities whose physical and psychological descriptions place them in the same category as the present-day ufonauts⁶
There are three ways of interpreting the implications of this crucial observation made by Vallee: (a) modern UFO patterns match those of earlier folklore because UFOs and their entities have been visiting our planet for thousands of years; (b) the patterns match because today's UFOs and entities are merely repeats of earlier generations' encounters with Earthbound elemental beings that have subtly changed their appearance to correspond with current images of what other-worldly beings should look like; or (c) the archetypal, universal nature of UFO entities suggest that profound mental processes are somehow at work in the whole UFO phenomenon." 

GODS OF THE DAWN

THE MESSAGE OF THE PYRAMIDS

AND

THE TRUE STARGATE MYSTERY

Peter Lemesurier 1997

AFTERWORD BEYOND ALL BELIEF

Page 227

"Yet as I said earlier, it is precisely the unthinkable that I have dared to think in this book. To that extent it goes beyond all con-ventional belief. In the final upshot, though, something rather sur-prising has happened. The unthinkable has paradoxically turned out to be - if in surprising and disturbing ways - remarkably simi-lar to what has always been thought before. Indeed, it is precisely the extent to which this book's outline of humanity's future des-tiny turns out to mirror the immemorial beliefs of antiquity that is most likely to worry the religious in particular.
It is as if we always knew what the eventual outcome might be. Some seed, planted in our ancient consciousness by who knows' whom, long ago gave us an inkling of the end of the story even be-fore we knew how to begin it.
That, of course, is how visions work. They posit a goal and erect a signpost. They do not tell us how to put one foot in front of the other. They do not tell us what to believe. They do not tell us what dragons and precipices we shall encounter. Often they do not even tell us how far it is to our goal.
Yet where there is no vision (as the Authorized Version of the Bible incorrectly but perspicaciously translates it) the people perish.
The ancient signpost of imagination whose finger we have been following is one such. It is a signpost that has led from the twilight of the last ice age, by way of the dawn of pre-dynastic Egypt and the sunrise of Greece, via the respective lights of classical Rome ahd the much later European Renaissance to the blinding light-ning flashes of the atomic era and the space age.
And its function has always been to face us with the inconceiv-able and present us with the impossible. Its message has been that we are limited only by our own imaginations, hemmed in only by our own beliefs.
In the event, we have gone on to learn both - the hard way. The ancient message has been first ritualized, then questioned, then ig-nored, then forgotten, then encountered anew. What should have set us free has been turned into religions that have bamboozled us, dogmas that have enslaved us, mumbo-jumbo that has passed us by, then new babblings that have invited our credulity all over again.

Page 228

But the real function of the Elohistic initiative, if I have recon-structed it aright, is not to subject us to beliefs that shackle us, but to blast apart our imagined limitations. Its purpose is not to en-chain us, but to set us free - not by telling us, like most religions, what we cannot do, but by hinting, however remotely, at what we can.
Somehow it has managed to adumbrate what the world's reli-gions have only managed dimly to foreshadow - that humanity's potential is unlImited provided that we let go of our self-imposed limitations, that our greater identity is served only by identifying ourselves with each other and with our world, that we have a des- tiny that is not confined to Planet Earth, that there are friendly in-telligences elsewhere in the universe, and that our consciousness may yet be raised to levels beyond our wildest dreams.
In all this, imagination is the key. That is what visions are about. The future described by the Great Pyramid has something of the substance of a dream. To this extent, at least, my unthinking critics will be right, and possibly nearer to the truth than most.
The humanity of the future may well encounter the mooted superior beings 'out there'. But it will also have encountered a dream in the mind of man - or of the universe. For dreams, too, can take on concrete form. Light, motion, relativity and the whole of the perceived universe are all dreams, all functions of human consciousness. If there is a universe beyond our perceiving we cannot perceive it. Even the Elohim themselves are a dream made manifest.
Though who the original Dreamer was is, of course, not appar-ent to those within the dream itself.
Dreams in due course become reality. What we dream today we experience tomorrow. The science-fictionists, no less than the scientists, are the creators of our future. Let them take care, then, what they dream. For mind is the maker of worlds. Yet, just as in the case of the atomic bomb, it can be their dissolver, too.
Mind - the selfsame Mind that we share with the Elohim and with all other sentient beings - is Brahma the Creator. It is Shiva the Destroyer. It is blue Vishnu in the sky, Orion in the flesh, the /Page 229 / starry bones of God, the forger of destiny, the embodier of all that humanity has ever been and is ever likely to become."

GREAT ENCOUNTERS

Page 165

"Much, clearly, has to do with expectation. As at least one Star Trek episode did manage to recognize, the best way of avoiding such cosmic xenophobia is carefully to tie in the features of your arrival with existing planetary beliefs regarding the future advent of benevolent beings from the sky. On Earth, certainly, such beliefs are almost universal.
But then, as we have seen, this fact may originally be due to the Prime Initiative itself.
Thus, the best way for such an advent to be widely welcomed on Earth would be for the incomers to conform to the manner, timing and even the appearance of the Messianic return, as long ex-pected by the religious who have preserved the ancient tradition. Since the Elohim seem to be capable of varying and controlling their appearance at will, this ought to pose no problem. In this way Jews, Christians and Muslims would alike have their expectations confirmed: the Awaited Saviour would descend from the clouds arrayed in robes of glory and, wielding positively magical powers, / Page 166 / set up his everlasting kingdom on Mount Zion. Then he would send out his 'angels' (i.e. his messengers) to gather together his chosen from all comers of the planet to inherit a new world entirely - a heavenly kingdom, or sky dispensation, that would never pass away.
The general parameters of the archetypical mission certainly ac-cord astonishingly exactly with those long since laid down in the Great Pyramid's enduring stone.
The Elohim,. in short, must either incarnate the Messiah in person, or visibly 'take over' a pre-existing human being. He must be no self-deluded megalomaniac, but manifestly their sanctioned vehicle. He must appear in Palestine, sport a beard and long hair, wear flowing robes, speak Aramaic and Hebrew and set up his headquarters in Jerusalem. The Terrans will permit nothing less. In accordance with long tradition - though not with likely historical fact - he must even be white-skinned. As a result, he will be seen either as a living blasphemy or as the Messiah in person - just as, in his day, Jesus himself was.
It is even possible - just possible - that he will actually be the Messiah. Perhaps it is in reality his advent that the biblical prophets always dimly glimpsed. True, it is always challenging to face the actualization of your ideals. It is almost as if ideals were really re-served for 'up there', not 'down here'. Certainly this fundamental clash was something that Jesus's own contemporaries found par-ticularly hard to stomach - and especially the more religious of them.
So that if, in case of the Elohim, the unedifying experience is re- peated, it will be no surprise.
But there are other Messianic traditions, too, and all of them will need to be satisfied if the initiative's effects are to be as uni-versal as they will need to be. The new overlord will need, for example, to embody the long-awaited Buddha Maitreya and the traditions associated with him. Nor should the venerable traditions
of Hinduism - perhaps the most ancient high religion in the world - be ignored. He will need to be the very incarnation of Kalki, the last and greatest of the avatars of Vishnu.

Page 167
But then, it seems, he is set to do that anyway.
For Kalki's role will indeed be to bring to an end the current 'Age of Iron' and inaugurate the re-absorption of humanity and the world that it inhabits into the primal Absolute. A positive gi-ant, he will wield a fiery sword like a comet as the instrument of his office. And, even more to the point (as we shall see), he will have a horse's head...
According to the symbolic features of the antechamber, how- ever, there will be not merely one Messiah, but several. Evidently this is not so much a prediction as a promise. Jews, Christians and Muslims will no doubt be suitably surprised. Nevertheless, there it stands in solid stone.
Presumably, then, this veritable succession of other-worldly beings has a purpose. It is not merely some kind of ritual advent, designed to impress the religious. There is deadly serious business to be done. And indeed, according to the remarkable modem French seer Mario de Sabato, ^{19, 36} the visitors will have a truly vital task to perform. It will be no mere moral crusade. Their role will not be to separate the righteous from the unrighteous - even though the effect of their initiative may well be to separate those who are prepared to leave Earth from those who are not. Finally resolve our religious and metaphysical problems as they may, they will certainly resolve our scientific and technological ones, too. Emissaries from a part of the universe that will already have achieved its final flowering of consciousness, they will bring with then vast knowledge and almost unbelievable technologies. Thanks to their patient efforts, humanity will advance by several centuries in as many years.
It will need to. For time, evidently, is growing short. A major planetary extinction looms..."

DAILY MIRROR

Jonathan Cainer

Article

John Michelle

March 13th 2004

BELIEVING THE IM-POSSIBLE

Page 59

SOME people get angry when I say I do not believe in extra-terrestrials or intelligent life in space. They point out that the universe contains billions of stars and planets.
Some of these must surely be, like earth, able to support life. And what about those thousands of "UFO sightings" over the years?
The problem is that beyond our solar system the distances are far too great to allow space travel. These vast distances are measured
in light years.
Light travels at 186,000 miles a second. It takes 1.5 seconds just to reach us from the Moon, eight minutes to travel from the Sun, and four years to reach us from the next nearest star. So that star is four light years away.
Beyond that the distances become so enormous that, even if we could travel at / the speed of light, it would take millions of years to explore other galaxies. No physical body can approach the speed of light, and if there are extra-terrestrial beings, the same goes for them.
Even so, we are not exactly alone. I have seen UFOs several times but I have never met "aliens". But back in 1966, while writing my first book, The Flying Saucer Vision, I interviewed several "contactees".
They had all been changed from' their meetings with other-worldly beings. Some had become psychics, others were mentally disturbed. Their experiences were genuine.
But who are these beings and where are they from?
The Psychologist Carl Jung concluded that they are signs of coming changes. He said, these changes take place when one sign of the zodiac gives way to another. Such periods are always marked by 'signs and wonders' - strange things in the sky.

I agree with Jung. The creatures reported by UFO contactees were quite familiar to our ancestors. They knew them as "elves, imps, or mischie-vous spirits". We may no longer believe in these things, but we never got rid of them, and now we call them extra- terrestrials."

The above articlc covers 2 columns first column contains 27 lines the second 34 

I = 9 x 6 = 54

SERVED ON A PLATO

"THE Greek philosopher Plato said that the arts and skills of civilisation were first made known by the gods. They came down to earth and governed it and we lived in a state of perfect order and contentment.

 Then, one day, / they left, but before going they trained certain people to maintain state rituals and standards. Things were allowed to slip and eventually the great civilisation crumbled.
It is tempting to see this as a record of extra-terrestrial in-tervention. Although / I do not really believe in extra-terrestrials, I do believe in the gods. We may think we have banished them but they are still active in our lives. Plato was right in saying that the gods imparted to us the secrets of civilisation, but they were the real gods, and we can expect them back."

This articlc covers 3 columns first column contains 11 lines the second 11

I = 9 x 2 = 18 

GODS = 9 x 4 = 36

A HISTORY OF GOD

Karen Armstrong

1993

Page 251

" The symbol of an ascent indicates that worldly perceptions have been left far behind. The experience of God that is finally attained is utterly indescribable, since normal language no longer applies. The Jewish mystics describe anything but God! They tell us about his cloak. / Page 252 / his palace, his heavenly court and the veil that shields him from human gaze, which represents the eternal archetypes. Muslims who specu-lated about Muhammad's flight to heaven stress the paradoxical nature of his final vision of God: he both saw and did not see the divine presence.¹⁰ Once the mystic has worked through the realm of imagery in his mind, he reaches the point where neither concepts nor imagination can take him any further. Augustine and Monica were equally reticent about the climax of their flight, stressing its transcend- ence of space, time and ordinary knowledge. They 'talked and panted' for God, and 'touched it in some small degree by a moment of total concentration of heart'. " Then they had to return to normal speech, where a sentence has a beginning, a middle and an end:
Therefore we said: If to anyone the tumult of the flesh has fallen silent, if the images of earth, water, and air are quiescent, if the
heavens themselves are shut out and the very soul itself is making no sound and is surpassing itself by no longer thinking about itself, if all dreams and visions in the imagination are excluded, if all language and everything transitory is silent - for if anyone could hear then this is what all of them would be sa}ing, 'We did not make ourselves, we were made by him who abides for eternity' (Psalm 79:3,5) . . . That is how it was when at that moment we extended our reach and in a flash of mental energy attained the eternal wisdom which abides beyond all things.¹²

This was no naturalistic vision of a personal God: they had not, so to speak, 'heard his voice' through any of the nonnal methods of naturalistic communication: through ordinary speech, the voice of an angel, through nature or the symbolism of a dream. It seemed that they, had 'touched' the Reality which lay beyond all these things.¹³
Although it is clearly culturally conditioned, this kind of 'ascent' seems an incontrovertible fact of life. However we choose to interpret it, people all over the world and in all phases of history have had this type of contemplative experience. Monotheists have called the climactic insight a 'vision of God'; Plotinus had assumed that it was the experience of the One; Buddhists would call it an intimation of nirvana. The point is that this is something that human beings who have a certain spiritual talent have always wanted to do. The mystical / Page 253 / experience of God has certain characteristics that are common to all faiths. It is a subjective experience that involves an interior journey, not a perception of an objective fact outside the self; it is undertaken through the image-making part of the mind - often called the imagination - rather than through the more cerebral, logical faculty. Finally, it is something that the mystic creates in himself or herself deliberately: certain physical or mental exercises yield the final vision; it does not always come upon them unawares.
Augustine seems to have imagined that privileged human beings were sometimes able to see God in this life: he cited Moses and St Paul as examples. Pope Gregory the Great (540-604), who was an acknowledged master of the spiritual life as well as being a powerful pontiff, disagreed. He was not an intellectual and, as a typical Roman, had a more pragmatic view of spirituality. He used the metaphors of cloud, fog or darkness to suggest the obscurity of all human knowledge of the di..ine. His God remained hidden from human beings in an impenetrable darkness that was far more painful than the cloud of unknowing experienced by such Greek Christians as Gregory of Nyssa and Denys. God was a distressing experience for Gregory. He insisted that God was difficult of access. There was certainly no way we could talk about him familiarly, as though we had something in common. We knew nothing at all about God. We could make no predictions about his behaviour on the basis of our knowledge of people: 'Then only is there truth in what we know concerning God, when we are made sensible that we cannot fully know anything about him.". Frequendy Gregory dwells upon the pain and effort of the approach to God. The joy and peace of contemplation could only be attained for a few moments after a mighty struggle. Before tasting God's sweetness, the soul has to fight its way out of the darkness that is its natural element:

It cannot fix its mind's eyes on that which it has with hasty glance seen within itself, because it is compelled by its own habits to sink downwards. It meanwhile pants and struggles and endeavours to go above itself but sinks back, overpowered with  weariness, into its own familiar darkness.'s^15"

SOUL

SO YOU LIVE SO YOU LOVE LOVE YOU SO LIVE YOU SO

A HISTORY OF GOD

Karen Armstrong

1993

Page 254

"God could only be reached after 'a great effort of the mind', which had to wrestle with him as Jacob had wrestled with the angel. The path to God was beset with guilt, tears and exhaustion; as it approached him, 'the soul could do nothing but weep'. 'Tortured' by its desire for God, it only 'found rest in tears, being wearied out'.¹⁶ Gregory remained an important spiritual guide until the twelfth century; clearly the West continued to find God a strain. , In the East, the Christian experience of God was characterised by light rather than darkness. The Greeks evolved a different form of mysticism, which is also found world-wide. This did not depend on imagery and vision but rested on the apophatic or silent experience described by Denys the Areopagite. They naturally eschewed all rationalistic conceptions of God. As Gregory of Nyssa had explained in his Commentary on the Song of Songs, 'every concept grasped by the mind becomes an obstacle in the quest to those who search.' The aim of the contemplative was to go beyond ideas and also beyond all images whatsoever, since these could only be a distraction. Then he would acquire 'a certain sense of presence' that was indefinable and certainly transcended all human experiences of a relationship with another person.¹⁷ This attitude was called hesychia, 'tranquillity' or 'interior silence'. Since words, ideas and images can only tie us down in the mundane world, in the here and now, the mind must be deliberately stilled by the techniques of concentration, so that it could cultivate a waiting silence. Only then could it hope to apprehend a Reality that transcended anything that it could conceive."

THE HOLY BIBLE

HOSEA

C2-16

"AND IT SHALL BE AT THAT DAY SAITH THE LORD THAT THOU SHALT CALL ME ISHI AND SHALT CALL ME NO MORE BAALI

17

FOR I WILL TAKE AWAY THE NAMES OF BAALIM OUT OF HER MOUTH AND THEY SHALL  NO MORE BE REMEMBERED BY THEIR NAME

ISHI = 9+19+8+9 = 45 4+5 = 9

ISHI = 9+1+8+9 = 27 2+7 = 9

BAALI = 2+1+1+12+9 = 25 2+5 = 7

BAALI = 2+1+1+3+9 = 16 1+6 = 7

BAALIM = 2+1+1+12+9+13 = 3+8 = 11 1+1 = 2

BAALIM = 2+1+1+3+9+4 = 20 2+0 = 2

THE

HOLY BIBLE

JEREMIAH

C 33 - 3

"CALL UNTO ME

AND I WILL ANSWER THEE

AND SHEW THEE GREAT AND MIGHTY THINGS WHICH THOU KNOWEST NOT"

THE BULL OF MINOS

Leonard Cottrell 1953

"Furthermore, after he (Theseus) was arrived in Creta, he slew there the Minotaur (as the most part of ancient authors do write) by the means and help of Ariadne; who being fallen in fancy with him, did give him a clue of thread, by the help whereof she taught him, how he might easily wind out the turnings and cranks of the Labyrinth.

THE QUEST CONTINUES

Page

90
       "Out in the dark blue sea there lies a land called Crete, a rich and lovely land, washed by the waves on every side, densely peopled and boasting ninety cities. . . . One of the ninety towns is a great city called Knossos, and there, for nine years, King Minos ruled and en-joyed the friendship of almighty Zeus."
So Homer makes Odysseus describe Crete, in that famous passage from the Odyssey in which the "Cunning One" pre-tends to Penelope that he is the grandson of Minos. Homer had almost certainly visited Crete, for, with one of those topographical details of which he is so fond, he tells us, on the same page, that his hero..."

                               Plutarch (North's translation)."

Page 183

"THE FIGURE-OF-EIGHT-SHIELD"

18th line up

THE

EIGHT

Katherine Neville

1988

  452
"The Doge had paused again.
"This is the statue of Mercury, Messenger of the Gods," said Casanova as we came up to the dancing bronze figure. "In Egypt, they called him Thoth, the Judge. In Greece they called him Hermes, Guide of Souls, for he conducted' souls to Hell and sometimes tricked the very Gods by stealing them back again. Prince of Tricksters, Joker, Jester - the Fool of the Tarot Deck - he was a God of Theft and Cunning. Hermes invented the seven-stringed lyre, the Octave Scale, whose music made the Gods weep for joy."
'I looked at the statue for quite some time before moving on. Here was the Quick One who could free people from the Kingdom of the Dead. With his winged sandals and bright Caduceus, that staff of twined serpents forming the Figure Eight, he presided over the land of dreams, worlds of magic, the realms of luck and chance and games of every sort. Was it coincidence that his statue faced this staid pro-cession with its wicked, grinning smile? Or was it, some- where in the dark mists of time, his ritual?"