ANCIENT MYSTERIES :.

SOLVED: THE ARK'S LAST SECRET

  Posted March 23.03

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The implication seems to be that this elusive field was an alternative dimension, free from the normal bonds of earthly life: This is exactly the kind of door the alchemists were trying to unlock.

Coincidence? I doubt it. The writings of the Egyptians, the story of the golden calf and the literature of alchemy all seem to be talking about the same thing: the amazing power of white powder gold.

To prove it; let me offer another astonishing link - the sacred manna on which Moses and his followers fed while, living in the wilderness. The Bible says this mysterious substance sustained them when they had no other source of nourishment.

In the book of Exodus, it is described as being white, resembling seed and having a sweet taste like honey Moses : referred to it as `bread'. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

According to Jewish historians, the word `manna' comes from the Hebrew for the phrase: `What is it?' This was a natural question for the Israelites to ask about. this enigmatic substance, but it also takes us back to the world of ancient Egypt.

Sacred texts describe the same question being ritualistically repeated by dead pharaohs at every stage of their journey into the afterlife - a journey apparently dependent on their having ingested that mysterious white bread while still alive.

In the Christian tradition; too, manna is explicitly referred to as a spiritual food Revelations states: `To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone.'

Could this white stone be the same `noble precious stone' of the - Egyptians? The same Philosophers' Stone pursued by the alchemists? I am convinced that it is.

Indeed, I believe that what Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie actually found in 1904, on the mountain where God's Ten Commandments were delivered, was the alchemical workshop of generations of Egyptian pharaohs.

Alchemical lore was well established in Egyptian times. Its aim was the achieving of enlightened consciousness - or, to ut it in language that later alchemists would have understood, to turn base human ignorance into spiritual gold.

To aid the process, the temple workers devoted themselves to producing a miraculous `powder of projection'. I believe that this is what Petrie found at Mount Horeb.

It explains why the temple contained such items as a metallurgist's crucible, not normally associated with a place of worship. And it explains the extraordinary description of Mount Horeb also known as Mount Sinai in the Book of Exodus.

And Mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because the Lord descended upon it in fire, and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of. a furnace, and the whole mountain quaked greatly'

I believe the mountain smoked and quaked because there was a mighty furnace hidden within it. And I also believe Moses knew its secrets.

The Bible states that Moses was raised in Egypt within the pharaoh's family. Many scholars believe he was originally a follower of the rebel pharaoh Akhenaten. Some even equate him with Akhenaten himself.

One way or another, he was ideally placed to inherit the esoteric knowledge of ancient Egypt. This is how he had the means to turn the golden calf to white powder This is how he could conjure up manna to feed his followers in the desert.

And this is how he - or, more probably, specialist craftsmen drawing on the alchemical lore in which he was expert created the Ark of the Covenant.

According to the somewhat ambiguous specifications in the Bible, the Ark was probably around 4ft 6in long by 2ft 6in wide and high.

It was constructed of shittim wood (generally reckoned to mean acacia) plated on the inside and outside with pure gold. There was a thick lid made entirely of gold, with a solid gold cherub sitting at each end, their wings stretched inward to meet each other

That is a phenomenal amount of gold. To avoid sagging beneath the cherubim, the block used as the lid would have had to weigh more than a ton, giving that metal alone a current market value of around $I0.5 million.

Only something very special indeed could justify such a costly container And as every schoolboy knows, the Ark was built to carry the tablets of stone on which God had written the Ten Commandments for Moses.

At least, every schoolboy thinks he knows that. But it is, in fact, an obvious historical fallacy In religious terms, the whole lore of the Ark has been based on a mistake. The Book of Exodus makes it clear that the original tablets, written with the finger of God, were smashed apart by Moses in a fit of rage when he descended from Mount Horeb and found his followers misbehaving.

God commanded him to make replacements, but these mere copies by Moses, the work of a human hand, which hardly warranted the construction of a richly adorned gold coffer to carry them.

So what did warrant it? According to ancient tradition, confirmed by the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament, the Ark also contained a golden pot of white manna.

Given everything we have already discovered, this is clearly a significant clue. And it leads us directly to one of the Ark's strangest features - the power of levitation.

As we have already seen alchemists believed that powdered white gold had the ability to defy gravity.

According to scriptural tradition, the Ark of the Covenant hovered three fingers' distance above the ground at all times, keeping it uncontaminated by the earth.

The Bible also suggests that the Ark could be carried on wooden poles by four men. Given the sheer weight of gold it contained, it is impossible to see how this could have happened without extra help.

Even if the bearers possessed superhuman strength, the poles or their fittings would have buckled. Not for nothing does Jewish tradition insist that `the Ark bore its bearers'.

Levitation may sound like the stuff of fantasy, but it isn't. We all know the very smallest magnet can lift pins and paperclips with a greater force than the Earth's entire gravitational thrust can muster in opposition. A more substantial example is the Maglev train, one of which was commercially operated in Birmingham in the Nineties. Such trains float above the track by means of what is known as superconductive magnetism.

I believe that this phenomenon - one of the most exciting areas in modern science - was the source of the Ark's astonishing powers.

Superconductors are materials that have no resistance to the flow of electricity. The fields of energy they can produce are so powerful that levitation results.

Indeed, in principle, the amount of energy a superconductor can store is infinite.

The phenomenon was first observed using mercury in 1911. Since then, other superconductive metals, alloys and compounds have been discovered. Their potential is still being explored, but some see them as the answer to the world's energy needs.

Could the white powder gold mixed into manna have possessed superconductor qualities?

Could this explain the Ark's ability to levitate - and also to throw out bolts of energy that killed enemy soldiers and destroyed city walls?

Controversial evidence from America suggests this is, indeed, A team of chemists and researchers from Arizona claim to have turned conventional gold into superconductive white powder by blasting it between electrodes.

The team's leader David Hudson, has filed worldwide patents for a range of such powders derived from gold and other precious metals.

He says that tests during the patenting process produced extraordinary results that seemingly defied the laws of physics.

Initial heating could raise a sample to 103 per cent of its starting weight, only for it to plunge to 56 per cent when it broke down into white powder Where on earth the scientists wondered, did the other 44 per cent go?

Further heating could then restore the material to its starting weight, only for this to soar to 400 per cent after repeated heating and cooling.

And, amazingly, when heated still further, the material's weight would plunge to below zero. When it was removed from the measuring pan, the pan actually weighed more empty than it had when full. In other words, it had been levitating.

Hudson says that extensive checks revealed the scales were in perfect order, and, the results could not be replicated with any other substances. Only his white powder behaved this way.

He believes that the intense heating process can rearrange the atomic structure of gold and certain other metals, turning them into a `monatomic' form that unleashes superconductive properties.

The resulting powder is utterly different from any type of matter we are used to and defies conventional chemical analysis (which simply registers it as a mixture of iron, silica and aluminium).

While sceptics may scoff, I have witnessed the production process and watched with my own eyes as a gold bullion coin was transformed into the powder

Hudson has even managed to turn the powder back into pure gold the equivalent of turning apple sauce back into an apple.

The implications are breathtaking. After centuries of trial and error, the Philosophers' Stone has at last been rediscovered.

So why do so few people know about it? Tragically, Hudson's researches have been curtailed by ill health, vast costs (he has spent millions of dollars on his quest) and repeated harassment by U.S. government agencies.

His pioneering work has also gone largely unacknowledged in scientific journals. But he and his team are in no doubt that it is being pursued, in secret, by the U.S. government's own scientists.

Certainly, if his theories are correct, then all the pieces of this extraordinary story fall into place.

The medicinal properties of white powder gold - apparently so prized by the ancient Egyptians - are causing great excitement among those who know of Hudson's work.

A number of internet sites offer powders and solutions claiming to contain monatomic elements, said to be effective against everything from diabetes to kidney disease.

I would advise great caution over all such claims, since this is an area wide open to quacks and conmen. But mainstream medicine is increasingly accepting the role that precious metals can play in the fight against disease, including cancer

It seems clear that the Egyptians discovered this knowledge many thousands of years before we did. And what we have learned about white powder gold throws up another fascinating possibility

It concerns the Egyptians' greatest achievement of all - the construction of the pyramids. Received wisdom has it that these massive stone edifices were raised up by hundreds of thousands of slaves using nothing but ropes and ramps.

Unsuccessful attempts to replicate this process prove the idea is absurd. To construct an inclined plane at an acceptable gradient to the top of the Great Pyramid at Giza, just outside Cairo, would have required a ramp 4,800ft long.

In which case, how was it done? I feel sure that the Egyptians used some form of technology involving white powder gold and its powers to overcome gravity.

This would certainly explain why such great quantities of the powder were found at the Egyptian temple on Mount Horeb. And it was here, in the alchemical laboratories of the pharaohs, that I believe that the Ark of the Covenant was constructed.

The whole design of the Ark lends itself to the storing of electrical energy. Its walls, remember, were made of two sheets of gold - an excellent electrical conductor sandwiching a layer of acacia wood, a good insulator

Several theorists have suggested that this explains the death and destruction associated with the Ark. They say it was a device for collecting and discharging static electricity, which builds up quickly in the hot Middle Eastern climate, especially around the stormy heights of Mount Horeb and the Sinai desert.

Certainly, the deaths of those who touched the Ark are consistent with electrocution.

But for the Ark to be a weapon of mass destruction on the scale the Bible suggests, levelling city walls and scattering whole armies, something more was needed.

It is the powdered gold in the sacred manna that holds the key. It would have turned the whole Ark into a powerfully generative superconductor, capable of delivering truly massive amounts of energy.

Faced with such a device, the walls of Jericho would have fallen like a house of cards.

All of this begs one last question -- where is the Ark now?

Famously, after four centuries of action-packed history, it disappears without explanation from the historical record. The quest to find it is as fabled as the hunt for the Holy Grail.

Personally, I believe the answer may lie where this story began: in the temples and pyramids of Egypt.

Think back, first of all, to those ancient hieroglyphics that spoke of a `field of mfkzt' - the strange alternative dimension where pharaohs were thought to go in the afterlife.

This, you'll recall, seemed closely associated with the equally mysterious white powder gold.

Now let's return to the Great Pyramid at Giza. One of the biggest oddities about it is that no bodily remains were found in its burial chamber Nor were bodies found at the two other Giza pyramids.

Instead, all that could be found was an empty granite coffer lined with a mysterious white powder. Could this possibly have been powdered gold?

Maddeningly, all traces of it were removed by those who entered the tomb. Understandably, they thought it was worthless, but I can't help suspecting it had played a crucial part in the pharaoh's funeral rites.

So is it too fanciful to suppose that the Egyptians had found a way to harness the energy of superconductors to project their dead kings into another dimension?

It sounds like science fiction, but the idea of parallel dimensions is commonplace in modern quantum physics. And many scientists talk freely of the potential use of superconductors in futuristic efforts to bend and distort the fabric of the universe.

Did the lost science of the Egyptians enable them to achieve similar wonders? And if it did, could the Ark of the Covenant have been spirited into another dimension in the same way, there to remain until we find some way to beam it back?

The possibilities are mindboggling. But I believe that if we ever discover the full truth about white powder gold, there will be even bigger surprises to come.

EXTRACTED from Lost Secrets Of The Sacred Ark by Lawrence Gardner (ISBN: 0007142951 Element Books, £18.99). To order a copy, tel: 0870 161 0870.