At the forefront of this mood of escalating doom and disaster is the unique, febrile excitement generated by the very idea of the Millennium. It is as if the year 2000 marks the pinnacle of all our hopes and fears, although the negative aspects are constantly emphasised at the expense of more positive and optimistic expectations. The Millennium, as such, only makes sense in a Christian context, supposedly marking 2000 years since the birth of Jesus, but now virtually everyone is caught up in the hysteria. With all eyes on the next few years, what a pity it would be if nothing happened, and what a temptation for certain individuals and cabals to ensure that it does...

For Christians the endtimes fever means the Second Coming of Jesus, as predicted in the New Testament, with the concomitant apocalyptic events described with perhaps excessive zeal in the Book of Revelation. We are led to believe that if Jesus, believed to be the epitome of Divine Love, returns to Earth in glory then he comes to initiate the final conflict between the forces of good and evil — the battle of Armageddon.

The Christian expectation is only part of the story. For example, New Agers have been prepared for this time - the dawning of the Age of Aquarius - for years, largely because of their acceptance of the prophecies of the sixteenth-century French occultist, Michel de Notre-Dame, more familiarly known as Nostradamus. From his psychic interpretation of astrological data, he singled out the year 1999 as a particularly disastrous one for mankind if the usual New Age interpretation of his obscurely worded ‘quatrains’ is accepted. Critics have pointed out that virtually any prophecy can be read into his words, rather like the ‘code’ read recently into the words of the Hebrew Bible.¹ Yet to question Nostradamus to a New Ager is rather like criticising the Bible to a fundamentalist Christian. Even so, if the author of the Book of Revelation - believed to be St John of Patmos - may be one of the two major creators of the Millennium, Nostradamus is very much the other. On to these gnarled roots have since been grafted all the other endtimes expectations drummed up so expertly by the many characters now revealed to be integral parts of the great conspiracy to exploit Millennium fever.

Even materialists, who scorn all religious or quasimystical beliefs, are experiencing pangs of increasing uncertainty about the future. Perhaps a global economic collapse will open the door through which will burst the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Famine, Pestilence, War and Death. They point to the current economic upheavals in the Far East, in Russia and elsewhere and fret about the future of the worldwide money markets, nervously projecting disaster around the time of the Millennium. If nothing else, the materialists point out that, at best, the Millennium Bug will cause chaos; because of a simple (if disastrous) lack of foresight on the part of many computer-builders, the software will not recognise the year 2000. (Ironically, thanks to the prevailing hysteria, it will be the only thing that doesn’t.) It may well lead to utter financial collapse on an international scale and at worst to rioting in the streets and martial law. And of course it is the Millennium itself that will activate the Bug.

One does not have to be a rabid fundamentalist or even an overanxious businessperson to suffer from Pre-Millennium Tension. We have seen in recent years — even recent months - an acceleration of global warming and its associated disturbances in weather patterns. Earth has been battered by a series of hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves and tornadoes, and there is a sense that even this is just a curtain-raiser to some much larger natural cataclysm. One is left wondering whatever next? Never before has so much tension, so much vulnerability been felt by so many, and never before has such desire for action been so cynically harnessed on such a scale.

Not everyone is dreaming, though. In a world of dreamers those who rarely sleep are kings. Where there is vulnerability, there will always be those who cynically seek to exploit it, and where there are those who seek to exploit, they will cynically create the vulnerability in the first place.

We are undoubtedly approaching the twenty-first century with increasing anxiety, which is the way our puppetmasters want it. The collective mood of heightened expectancy is a breeding ground for precisely the sort of belief system whose emergence we have charted in this book.

What we call the stargate conspiracy is the fostering of a belief that extraterrestrial ‘gods’ created the human race and presided over its civilisation - and that those gods are about to return. This belief is being promoted in different ways to different groups of people, but the underlying themes are always the same. Once these beliefs have entered into the collective consciousness, it will be relatively easy to use them as the foundation for a new religion. The ultimate aim of every organised religion has always been social control, and this one, we fear, will be no exception.

Against this background we must now set our discoveries about the Egypt — Mars conspiracies and the machinations of various groups. Make no mistake: the Millennium is absolutely central to their secret agenda - although the onset of the year 2000 is likely to mark only the beginning of a process that will reach its climax in the early years of the twenty-first century. James Hurtak, for example, highlights 2003 as a particularly key year.

Throughout this investigation different subjects, which appear at first to be independent of each other, seem to come together quite naturally. Carrying us along with the apparent logic, these links may seem to be reasonable, so that we are not surprised or disturbed when a coherent picture emerges. As we have seen, its main components are:

Each of these major strands is based on a genuine mystery: the mysterious knowledge of the Dogon concerning Sirius; the evidence that the Sphinx is of far greater antiquity than is officially believed; the Viking images of Cydonia that appear to show genuinely unexplained features; and the apparently ‘miraculous’ phenomena surrounding the Council of Nine. These strands appear to be naturally coalescing: apparent connections have been found between the Cydonian monuments and those of Giza. The major raison d’être of Richard Hoagland, this element is now creeping into the works of others, notably Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock.

Into this developing picture come the Nine. They, too, place much emphasis on the Great Pyramid and Sphinx, even claiming to have built them. And, through the work of James Hurtak, the Martian monuments have been introduced into this increasingly complex web of connections. There is no doubt that Hoagland and Hurtak’s work is directly driven by the Nine, but what of Hancock and Bauval’s? Certainly, because it largely endorses Hoagland’s work, The Mars Mystery is indirectly promoting the Nine - and to a much wider audience.

The over-riding message is that the gods are back. The Message of Cydonia as promoted by Hoagland is that those monuments were designed to encode information for us today. When this is added to the ideas promoted by Hancock and Bauval that the Egyptian monuments also encode messages for our times, we can see that the two reinforce each other. And communications from the Nine are actually happening now.

The conclusion seems inescapable: the Nine gods who built not only the Pyramids and the Sphinx but also the structures on Mars are back. These are not just the creators of the ancient Egyptian civilisation, but of the entire human race.

However, this conclusion relies on the assumption that these strands began totally independently, that each of the discoveries were made in isolation, with connections between them only becoming apparent as time went on. But this is not the case. The entire picture seems to have been contrived according to a complex, long-term plan. For example, Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery was inspired by Arthur M. Young, who was present at the initial contact with the Nine in 1953. Young’s own inspiration came from Harry Smith, a high-ranking member of one of Aleister Crowley’s magickal orders in which extraterrestrial intelligences, Sirius, Mars and ancient Egypt were the great pillars of their beliefs. The Nine’s communications, particularly in the initial stages, seem to continue those of Alice A. Bailey, of which James Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch is essentially an update. Hurtak has been the prime mover in the Face on Mars debate and in the New Egyptology, and The Keys of Enoch comes from the Council of Nine.

Only in 1987 did Communion first catapult the alien abduction phenomenon into public consciousness. In the few years since we have seen such an explosion — virtually an epidemic — of claimed abductions that the image of the Grey alien is now firmly embedded in our minds as, at the very least, a cultural icon. But to many people the Greys are considerably more than semi-cartoon characters: at least 35 per cent of all Americans now believe that these sinister extraterrestrials are repeatedly abducting humans on a vast scale.³ This belief has, virtually overnight, begun to take on quasireligious overtones. Strieber, in The Secret School, passes on nine lessons given to him by the aliens for all mankind, specifically linking their message to the Face on Mars, which he claims to have been shown by his alien captor/tutors when he was a child, and to the New Egyptology of Hancock, Bauval and West. It is, as we will see, no accident that The Secret School enthusiastically, even incongruously, carries an endorsement by none other than Graham Hancock: ‘Everyone concerned with the awesome mystery of what we are and what we may become should read The Secret School.’ (Perhaps significantly, we have already identified the ‘Secret School’ as an alternative title of the Synarchist ‘Council of Nine’ of the 1930s.)

Hancock and Strieber may simply admire each other’s books, and the matter may end there. But other, thought-provoking connections lie just under the surface, allowing many of the pieces of the jigsaw to fall finally into place. For example, Strieber had worked with Richard Hoagland, and funded Mark Carlotto’s image enhancement work at Hoagland’s request as early as 1985, two years before his first ‘abduction’ book, Communion, was published. ⁴

Strieber was introduced to Richard Hoagland by a mutual friend in the summer of 1984, but he makes some puzzling comments about the Mars research in his account in Breakthrough (1997). In discussing Mark Carlotto’s enhancement of the Viking images, which used the advanced equipment made available to him through the intelligence division of The Analytical Science Corporation, he writes: ‘The fact that the Mars face was reimaged on the best equipment known to man in 1985 and came out looking even more like a sculpture had been efficiently suppressed.’⁵ It is difficult to begin to understand how the subject could be described as having been ‘efficiently suppressed’ given that Hoagland has been telling anyone who would listen about the Face — including the United Nations — besides lecturing and selling books and videos on the subject ever since.

The Secret School, however, reveals the subtext of Strieber’s writings, and adds another piece to our complex jigsaw. This 1997 book describes the recovery, beginning in 1995, of further memories of his lifelong alien abduction experiences, specifically those long suppressed from his Texan childhood in the mid- to late 1950s. He recalls being part of the ‘Secret School’, a group of child abductees who were given lessons by their Grey captors. Although Strieber believes that he ‘attended’ this school for a number of years during his childhood, the memories recovered and lessons presented in the book were those given to him at the age of nine.

He recalls that, when first shown the image of the Face on Mars by John Gliedman, a scientist friend, he remembered seeing the image before, and later realised that the aliens had shown him that same image during his schooling.⁶ (This may be nothing but the honest truth, but it is hard to see how the new images of the Face that reveal it to be nothing more than a large rocky outcrop fit into this scenario. Were the aliens playing a cruel joke on him? If so, it would not be the first nor the last time that apparent discarnate entities amused themselves by toying with human gullibility. Remember that Colin Wilson called such beings ‘the crooks and conmen of the spirit world’, while Uri Geller called the Nine ‘a civilization of clowns’.)

Most significant is Strieber’s attribution of the onset of his recall of the abduction experiences - which led directly to Communion — to being shown the picture of the Face by Gliedman. He writes:

Surely Strieber is virtually inviting us to make connections with the Council of Nine?

The Secret School described the nine lessons he was given from childhood in three triads, but he adds a tenth, a new lesson given to him by the ‘visitors’ on 12 November 1995: a vision of the future in 2036 (in which the United States has become a military dictatorship after terrorists have destroyed Washington with an atomic bomb). It is, by now, a familiar pattern: there are ten significant numbers, but the tenth is only there to complete and make sense of the other nine, and also to provide continuity to the next sequence.

The first lesson began with a dream in which he flew above the surface of Mars, looking down on a gigantic, sculpted face and pyramids. (He also records that, at the same age, suddenly, for no reason he can remember, he became intensely interested in ancient Egypt.¹⁰)

The eighth lesson of The Secret School relates the great monuments of Egypt and other early civilisations to forthcoming changes in the world. As in Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby’s The Mars Mystery, they were built to encode the memory of global catastrophes and to serve as a warning to future generations that such cataclysms might well come again. Strieber writes:

Clues suggest who really runs the Secret School. Tellingly, Strieber also introduces the work of Robert Bauval and the erosion of the Sphinx, fully accepting the argument that the geological evidence and the astronomical correlations of the Sphinx and the pyramids pinpoint the date of ... that familiar year 10,500 BCE. Not surprisingly, he also dates the beginning of the Age of Aquarius as shortly after the year 2000. Perhaps that is why The Secret School is endorsed by Graham Hancock.

The point of Strieber’s lessons is that they show a way out of the nightmare scenarios of the future, through the shift in consciousness that comes with being a Chosen One, this time as a repeated abductee who accepts the alleged meaning of the Martian monuments, the Sphinx and the pyramids as well as the reality of the ‘visitors’. He writes, with real endtimes fervour:

So what is Whitley Strieber’s part, consciously or unwittingly, in the conspiracy to insidiously create a new religion and prepare us for some imminent takeover by its adherents? An integral part of the new belief system is the blending and exploitation of all the most potent modem myths, and surely there are few more powerful than the alien abduction scenario. Here we see one of the most successful icons of our times — the Grey alien - brought together with the Face on Mars and the ubiquitous emphasis on the 10,500 BCE dating of the Giza monuments. This is all linked to the imminent Age of Aquarius and, one way or another, to the return of the space gods, or of a quasi-Christian god who will save us from all evil - especially from ourselves — if we believe in him.

The reality or otherwise of the abduction experience has been much debated, and goes beyond the scope of this book. One other little known connection should give us pause for thought. When American veteran journalist Ed Conroy set out to investigate objectively the story behind Whitley Strieber’s Communion in the late 1980s, he explored all the possible connections, including parallels with such matters as folklore and the occult. He writes in Report on Communion (1989) that according to Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley claimed, in 1919, to have contacted an extraterrestrial being named Lam connected with the Sirius and Andromeda star systems. Conroy continues:

We believe that genuine mysteries, real unanswered questions are, ironically, being obscured by the half-truths and inventions of this new ‘religion’. The Giza monuments present huge problems for orthodox Egyptology. Even the case for the Martian monuments - especially the pyramids — retains some merit. We have no argument with real intellectual curiosity challenging these subjects. What concerns us is the presence of a campaign to impose a meaning on all these disparate subjects, to create synthetic answers that build all too easily into a new belief system that also appears to offer glib solutions to mankind’s present problems, pointing the way to the future. Yet the message is always the same, and the inherent dangers are incalculable.

Whitley Strieber and Richard Hoagland played a considerable part in spreading the belief that there was something anomalous trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.¹⁴ One result of this belief was the suicides of the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who were convinced that a spaceship had come to collect their souls and take them to a better life. This was an extreme scenario, and their deaths cannot be blamed on the likes of Hoagland, Strieber or Courtney Brown, but surely the cult’s madness is even more tragic because they died for nothing - to go to a nonexistent spaceship.

And Robert Temple claimed that the CIA had tried to interfere with his work on the Dogon by stealing essential research material, and that then, after his book was published, it continued to harass him over a fifteen-year period. But why should it do this? It makes little sense. If it intended to obstruct his research, it was singularly unsuccessful. And why, after failing to stop the publication of his book, did it continue its campaign of harassment? The book was already in the public domain, so nothing could be done to prevent people from reading it. Neither did the CIA stop the new 1998 edition, which also describes the story of its previous interest in the book.

What did the CIA achieve by all this? If it had really wanted to stop The Sirius Mystery, not only did it fail miserably, but it also managed to achieve the opposite. It appears that its real intention, from the very first, was not to prevent publication, but to promote it. Its actions convinced Temple himself of the importance of his research, and the 1998 edition has now convinced his readers too. Introducing this air of intrigue, by implication the significance of the ‘message’ today is reinforced. It must be remembered that intelligence agencies are the masters of such psychological games.

In this category we include the behind-the-scenes activities of high-level politicians such as Henry Wallace, and the often undeniable Masonic agenda that underpins so much of this, including the ‘prophecies’ of Edgar Cayce.

For example, the very mention of the CIA will, to many people, immediately identify the overall culprit as either that agency or the United States government itself. However, recent history has shown that the CIA has often pursued policies and objectives about which it has happily kept its political masters in the dark. The CIA is not synonymous with the United States government. Moreover, there have been many examples of cabals within the CIA, often reaching to the very highest level, which have used the privileges and resources of that extremely powerful organisation to further their own agendas.¹⁵ So we can conclude that the presence of individual CIA agents does not necessarily imply that they are acting in accordance with agency or governmental policy.

Similarly, individual politicians and business people may be involved in this story for their personal satisfaction. There is no way of knowing who is the player and who is the played. And in the same way, Freemasonry figures largely throughout this book, but whether or not this is the fabled Masonic conspiracy is more open to question.

Most conspiracy theorists (we are not denying that we fit the description ourselves) tend to think in terms of one identifiable group behind every plot and hidden agenda. Unfortunately for such theorists and romanticists alike, real life is not so simple. Where conspiracies exist they are likely to involve various individuals and groups who have a vested interest in a particular outcome. It may be that the stargate conspirators include CIA Operatives, Freemasons, politicians and their wealthy backers, who believe they have something to gain by creating this belief system, or fear they have something to lose if it does not happen. This conspiracy is bigger than one group or set of individuals.

What is clear is the nature of the conspiracy’s objective. It is to push a particular system of belief on as many levels as possible, from the general public to genuine dyed-in-the-wool New Agers. ‘They’ are after all of us - hearts, minds and souls.

What is particularly significant is that this report was produced by SRI International at the very time that they were heavily involved with the CIA and the US Defense Department. Imagine how it must have made alarm bells ring in the corridors of power, especially as it stressed that such a transformation of society was inevitable. The only recourse for those in positions of power and authority was for them to actively hijack the belief systems that underpinned this social unrest, moving it in whatever direction gave them the greatest advantage and retaining their control over the masses.

An important component of the new belief system is the use of the symbolism of Freemasonry. The movement has traditionally claimed to have its roots in ancient Egypt and lays particular emphasis on the esoteric significance of Sirius, which decorates every Masonic Temple in the form of the ‘Blazing Star’.

Wallace, Cayce and SRI’s Changing Images of Man report each stress the importance of the role of the United States in promoting Masonic ideals, effectively creating the ideal Freemasonic state.^{19 20} This was the over-riding motivation of many of the originators of the Declaration of Independence, such as Thomas Jefferson. (In fact, of the fifty-six signatories to the Declaration of Independence, fifty were Freemasons, as were fifty of the fifty-five members of the convention that drew up the American Constitution.) Willis W. Harman, at one time a consultant to the White House and one of the editors of the Changing Images report - who was also involved in SRI’s experiments with Uri Geller in the early 1970s, and, as president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, in their first remote-viewing experiments - went on to write An Incomplete Guide to the Future (1976). In his book he discusses the role of Freemasonry in the founding of the United States and defines what he calls the ‘American symbols’ - predominantly Masonic ideals.²¹ In discussing the future of America he advocates a very similar scenario to that of Changing Images of Man, in other words, a society based on the principles of Freemasonry. He says:

The fact that the SRI report draws attention to the Masonic symbolism on the back of the dollar bill is particularly interesting. The seal — originally incorporated into paper money by Henry Wallace - shows an incomplete pyramid, with its detached capstone, encompassing an open eye, floating in a halo of light. Under the pyramid are inscribed the Latin words novus ordo seclorum - ‘new order of the ages’.

To repeat Wallace’s words of 1934:

There are thousands of enthusiastic believers in the hypotheses that rely upon physical evidence: measuring angles of the D & M pyramid, or aligning the Great Pyramid with Sirius. They do not, as a whole, realise that they are also tacitly opening themselves up to the spiritual message of James Hurtak, which in essence also means that of Alice Bailey. This prompts a worrying thought: will the Bailey/Hurtak The Keys of Enoch become the Bible of the new Millennium?

Many would see that as no bad thing, believing the teachings of both Bailey and Hurtak to be revelatory, enlightened and truly good. And it is this aspect of the whole issue of the Council of Nine that is, in our view, by far the most important. For while the objective reality - or otherwise — of the Nine is a fascinating subject, surely it is far less important than an analysis of their spiritual message. After all, it is their teaching that drives their followers, and their actions, in turn, could impinge upon us all either directly or indirectly.

No matter how compassionate, eccentric or essentially harmless the channelled material of the Nine may appear on the surface, it actually hides a most disturbing subtext. James Hurtak in The Keys of Enoch describes an apocalyptic scenario in which a universal battle between the forces of light and darkness will inevitably manifest on Earth. He writes of ‘a galactic war and housecleaning that is being completed throughout the universe’.²⁵ But is not the term ‘housecleaning“, like ‘cleansing’ - really rather sinister? It would be comforting to be able to dismiss such suspicions as paranoid, but Hurtak also defines the Last Days in rather worrying terms:

He makes the situation clearer in these words: ‘For those not working with the Light, it will be a time of great tribulation.’²⁷ As with all dogmatic, pulpit-thumping statements, there is a real, hidden danger here. Who is of the Light and who is not? More to the point, who decides? One assumes that Hurtak has no doubt about his own status, and the implication remains that he has inside knowledge about where the rest of us stand. Presumably anyone who refuses to accept his or the Nine’s words are children of darkness, although his writings do suggest which groups can expect to suffer the greatest tribulation in the near future.

Hurtak’s ‘housecleaning’ is similar in some respects to the idea of the great imminent ‘harvesting’ of souls that was a central theme of the teachings given by Ra through his channeller Carla Rueckert.²⁸ This taking up of the righteous will take place in the early years of the twenty-first century — another version of the ubiquitous Christian fundamentalist ‘rapture’.

The Nine often appear to be disturbingly racist, but they are too clever to parade the fact like some New Age Goebbels ranting from the rooftops. Old-style rabble-rousing by dictators drowning in seas of braid currently stands no chance of achieving influence in the democratic West. The Nine simply imply - very strongly - the identity of those who are the Enemy. For example, in The Only Planet of Choice, Tom does not state baldly that the black races are inferior. Indeed, he appears to be saying quite the reverse, merely stating that they are the only ones to have evolved on Earth without any ‘seeding’ from extraterrestrial civilisations. Then he draws attention to this ‘fact’ by stressing that this should not be construed as meaning that blacks are inferior²⁹ — an interesting example of reverse psychology. Tom is saying, in other words, that we should not run away with the idea that blacks are inferior in any way just because they are the only members of the human race who happen not to be descended from gods. Given the human race’s track record in abusing racial ideas, why should such a wise being even take the risk of putting the idea into our heads? Why share such potentially inflammatory information at all, if it is merely of academic interest and not intended to be the basis for any action in the future?

The racism implicit in The Only Planet of Choice is suspiciously reminiscent of Alice Bailey’s writings, or rather, the teachings of the Tibetan she channelled. Superficially, like the words of Tom in The Only Planet of Choice, the message of the Tibetan — whatever one may believe about its origins - seems to stress peace, goodwill and universal brotherhood. The intentions of the Hierarchy are of the highest good. But sometimes disquieting ideas sneak in under the guise of esoteric lore. For example, in A Treatise on Cosmic Fire (1925), the Tibetan explains that in the coming phase of development, the Hierarchy ‘will not individualise animal man as in the previous round, but will stimulate the mental germ in those members of the present human family who - as H.P.B. [Madame Blavatsky] says — though apparently men, are without the span of mind.’ To this sentence the following footnote is added: ‘Such are the Veddhas of Ceylon, the Bushmen of Australia, and certain of the lowest of the African races.’³⁰

Madame Blavatsky, as a Victorian, might be expected to hold what are today politically incorrect views about race. She reflects the thinking of the era on the subject. Even after the abolition of slavery, people of African origin were still considered mere beasts of burden, although it was admitted that they had souls, for were they not forcibly converted to Christianity, often at gunpoint? There remains the nagging doubt that, like Blavatsky, Bailey and Schlemmer, those who claim to channel superior beings should, surely, transcend the vagaries of racial attitudes that change with the years, speaking only timeless unchanging truths. Modem adherents of the Nine, and of Bailey, defend the implicit racism by saying bluntly that this is the way it is.

Racism has no scientific, sociological or anthropological support, no matter who suggests otherwise. Racism can take many forms; we have now come to realise that patronising attitudes can be, in their own way, just as degrading and dangerous as blatant incitements to racial hatred. The argument for ‘benevolent racism’ — that blacks are incapable of self-government and need the fatherly guidance of whites - was often used by the apartheid regime in South Africa to justify the well-known excesses of their somewhat less than paternal rule. In any case, surely truly wise Masters would keep quiet about it simply to avoid its potential to cause havoc, in the way that the Aryan concept was used by the Nazis. (Both the Tibetan and Tom frequently withhold other information for which, they claim, we are not ready.)

Acceptance of such ideology from alleged discarnate entities is, of course, extremely dangerous, both for the recipient and for society as a whole. It is bad enough to accept such evil from raving fanatics like Adolf Hitler, but taking it from invisible beings surely borders on criminal naivety, yet adherents of the Nine are content to accept Tom’s teaching on such complex and enduringly divisive issues as the Jewish failure to accept Jesus as Messiah, abortion, homosexuality and the spiritual inferiority of Islam. The invisible, insubstantial — and for all we know nonexistent — Tom’s pronouncements on such subjects is taken as, quite literally, gospel.

James Hurtak does not actually call the Muslims the ‘Children of Darkness’ in so many words, but talks instead about the ‘anti-universe’, or ’the violation of the Living Light exemplified in the Kabba, the Black Cube in Mecca.‘³¹ He claims it represents ‘the anti-power of life’ and, most tellingly, ‘the anti-Christos’. The nearest he gets to a bald statement is when writing that the Black Cube ‘functions with Alpha Draconis [for Hurtak, one of the seats of the “fallen spiritual powers”] for the Children of Darkness’.³² By damning the most sacred object of Islam he is, of course, also implicitly damning Muslims themselves as the ‘Children of Darkness’. One of his ‘Keys’ dealing specifically with the symbolism of the Black Cube, states:

Hurtak does refer to the ‘higher message’ of some parts of the Koran,³⁵ but he seems to say that only the passages that accord with the Old Testament are worthy of note. Considering that even his more New Age pronouncements only partly obscure his own version of Christian fundamentalism, this validation of whatever agrees with the Old Testament should hardly surprise us. So what is Hurtak’s view of Judaism?

Hurtak uses the word ‘Israel’ often and is fond of mentioning the Old Testament, but it is clear that, like Tom speaking through Phyllis Schlemmer, he thinks that the Jews were a specially holy people who made a terrible mistake by rejecting Jesus as the Messiah. And, not surprisingly, he announces that followers of the Keys are the ‘True Israel’.³⁶ Hurtak — and others — make much of a prophecy in Isaiah 19:19-20 in relation to the Great Pyramid:

It is very odd that we have never seen any of these writers continue the quotation. After saying that the Egyptians will ‘know the Lord’ — that is, be converted to the worship of Yahweh — it goes on (verse 22): ‘And the Lord shall smite Egypt: he shall smite and heal it.’ But shall he smite it in the form of the self-appointed ‘righteous’, like Hurtak, for its Islamic devotion? And what form shall the subsequent healing take?

We recognise with a sinking heart that recent Internet postings of Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval have taken on a new, stridently messianic tone. For example, as we noted earlier, Bauval wrote on 29 July 1998:

The millennium is rushing in. There is much work to do for all who feel part of the same quest, namely to bring about a new and much needed spiritual and intellectual change for this planet. Giza, without a doubt, has a major role to play.

Presented with such authority, it is tempting to take this on face value, but does that statement bear closer scrutiny? Has not humanity always faced that ‘stark choice’? And isn’t the ‘unparalleled’ nature of twentieth-century wickedness the result of, not some quantum leap of evilness, but the invention of the means to inflict suffering on an unparalleled scale - whether the atom bomb or the Blitzkrieg bombers? We have also seen a great upsurge in matters of the spirit, of the light, in the form of unparalleled social and medical advances, in welfare reform and sensitivity towards the mentally and physically sick, and understanding of the needs of cultures so cruelly oppressed in previous epochs. It has not been all bad.

In fact, the twentieth century was simply ‘unparalleled’. It was one of extremes. When it was evil it was astonishingly so, but when it showed its heart, great things were achieved that outshone all the noble writings of the most luminous and self-denying saint. It was a century of action, of communication, of enormous energy, often wrong-headed and usually wrong-footed, but - at least in the West - it was a century of hard-won freedom, a great upwelling of self-expression and an unprecedented hunger for information. It may have been corrupt but it also exposed corruption; it was certainly evil but it brought down evil with unprecedented vigour; and if it was greedy, it was happier than ever before to share more of its wealth with the less fortunate. Previous centuries would have turned their backs and left them to get on with it.

So why are Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval so keen to implant in us the idea that modern man is in a uniquely fallen state? Why do they place a sweeping — and what many would feel to be an inaccurate — emphasis on the ‘unparalleled evil’ of the times in which we live? Are they implying that we need to be rescued from it, and that our rescuers — our saviours — are merely waiting in the wings for us to welcome them in? Hancock and Bauval appear to be preparing us for some imminent spiritual upheaval. As Bauval portentously ended his announcement of the setting up of the Magic 12: ‘The World is with Child ...’.³⁸ Wittingly or unwittingly, he perfectly echoes Aleister Crowley’s vision of the coming Aeon of the Child.

But is their agenda the same as Hurtak’s? They are certainly familiar with him and his work, including The Keys of Enoch, although of course this does not mean that they are disciples of his. What is clear is that the essential message in their books - from The Orion Mystery to The Mars Mystery — fits the same overall agenda, bringing it to a much wider, global audience and helping to pave the way for the acceptance of Hurtak/the Nine’s ideology.

There is the same emphasis on the apocalyptic battle between good and evil, light and dark, the expectation of the imminent advent of some kind of saviour figure, and the rapture that will carry the righteous off into heaven for eternal life while the sinners are damned forever. Although it may appear odd that James Hurtak would have so much in common with Lambert Dolphin Jr, in fact, they share many attitudes and aims. And in The Only Planet of Choice and The Keys of Enoch there is a special emphasis on Israel, both place and people, which is likely to appeal to Jewish fundamentalists. As we have seen, Lambert Dolphin Jr shares many aspirations with right-wing Israelis, which led to collaboration on investigations beneath the Temple Mount.

We have also noted that Hurtak’s system embraces all the major religions of the United States — even welcoming such exclusivist groups as the Mormons. This new hybrid belief system also incorporates the main esoteric developments of the last two hundred years, such as the Great White Brotherhood, Ascended Masters, root races and Atlantis, besides major twentieth-century phenomena including Grey aliens and UFOs. This elite has notable exceptions: it does not include a major religion of African-Americans or of the Arab world. Muslims are not invited.

Skilfully puppetmastering the complex process of drawing all these threads together are, in many cases, the intelligence agencies, whose interests and involvements in the development of belief systems is now firmly established. Time and time again the anti-Muslim strand of this conspiracy becomes blindingly obvious, but why would the likes of the CIA be actively encouraging it? The whole tenor of this plot is one of preparation, of sowing the seeds of a certain mindset in as many people as possible in advance of some global event.

The possibility must be seriously considered that the conspirators are preparing the ground for some kind of major occurrence, a revelatory event that will suddenly, dramatically and radically change the world forever. What form this might take is uncertain - a carefully stage-managed ‘return of the gods’ to Giza before a mass audience, perhaps — but what is certain is that these people have the resources and technology to present such an event.

With or without such a stupendous moment, our minds are nevertheless being prepared to accept the beliefs and dictates of a coming new world order, whether it takes the form of stage-managed theocracy or some other kind of insidious fundamentalism. As the stories of Hitler’s Germany and countless other examples from history prove beyond doubt, ordinary decent folk can only too easily be persuaded to commit atrocities against their fellow man if they truly believe it is part of a grand design — in Nazi Germany’s case, the triumph of the master race. Brute force is not enough to turn the masses into monsters baying for blood; this will only happen if they are won over, hearts, minds — and souls. People are more easily persuaded by invitations to join a glorious gang, whether the Nazis or the ‘righteous’, by an appeal to the spirit than by mere empty rhetoric, or even brute force. Why, we wonder, is the CIA so keen to help promote anti-Islamic material? Why does it want us to think like that?

What any kind of fundamentalism does quite deliberately and explicitly is create divisions in society: Them and Us, the Light and the Dark, the Righteous and the Wicked, the Nazis and the Jews, the Israelis and the Palestinians... There is no room for rationality, intellectual questioning, challenge to the status quo, progress. More significantly, fundamentalists are easy to control — and their leaders have absolute power.

Control of the masses is ultimately what this is about. The idea that powerful and incredibly advanced beings will come to snatch us from the brink of disaster and make the world a better place for the future is, of course, enormously attractive. It sounds too good to be true. It may give us comfort and hope - but it comes at a price. Belief in the space gods and the heightened expectancy of their benign intervention undermines our collective self-esteem. It implies that the human race was given civilisation because it was too feeble to civilise itself, and that it has needed subtle guidance from the extraterrestrials throughout history. Now that humankind has really made a thorough mess of things, its only hope of salvation is to await the return of the gods to rectify the situation.

The image it promotes of mankind is essentially negative. It is basically the same message that made Christianity such a success as a state-sanctioned religion, taking away the autonomy of the individual and halting intellectual, scientific and cultural progress for centuries. The Christian message maintained that we were all born sinners and live only by God’s grace; our only hope is the promise of post-mortem bliss, provided that we surrender to the dictates of the priesthood.

The end result is a population of willing victims, brainwashed into believing they are little better than worms, at the mercy of God or space beings, without means of salvation except through them - or, of course, their human agents. The members of the tragic cult Heaven’s Gate, who happily took poison, represent an extreme form of this mode of thought: life as a mere human on Earth is worth nothing compared to escape in a spaceship, even if you have to commit suicide to reach it.

The enormous potential of space gods or UFO cults should not be underestimated. As the ever-perceptive Jacques Vallée writes (the emphasis is his) in his Messengers of Deception (1979):

The potential for population control is disturbing enough ordinarily, but taken together with the hysteria of endtimes expectation surrounding the Millennium, a truly explosive future is, we fear, guaranteed. Again, Jacques Vallée gets to the heart of the matter. In Revelations (1992), he writes: ‘As we reach the Millennium, the belief in the imminent arrival of extraterrestrials in our midst is a fantasy that is as powerful as any drug, as revolutionary as any delusion that marked the last millennium, as poisonous as any of the great irrational upheavals of history.’⁴⁰

Vallée goes on to compare this belief with the ideology of the master race that drove the Nazis to commit their worst atrocities. And in Messengers of Deception he lists six ‘social consequences’ of the hold of the UFO cults. These include ‘The contactee propaganda undermines the image of human beings as masters of their own destiny’ and ‘Contactee philosophies often include belief in higher races and in totalitarian systems that would eliminate democracy.’⁴¹

Once before, a similar millennial mood was successfully harnessed in a way that changed the world: two thousand years ago, in a backwater of the Roman Empire, one man tapped into the prevailing hysterical messianic expectation and the result was Christianity. Theology and personal belief apart, the effect of this was to create generations of happy slaves who believed they came into the world as sinners and required the Church to order every detail of their lives. From that point of view at least, Christianity has been a huge success. But now it is largely losing its grip, something new, but similar, is required.

Could the early years of the twenty-first century see the emergence of a new Jesus or a new Moses to make sense of our puny, worthless lives and hand down from above a new set of commandments? Will the prophesied ‘return of the Great Initiate’ become a reality, thanks to some carefully contrived stage management? This new leader or Messiah figure will be backed by a massive politico-religious movement — a New World Order of zealots - the infrastructure of which is already in place.

Significantly, Ira Einhorn, who had a unique position as an observer of the Nine during the 1970s and who has no doubts about their reality as discarnate intelligences, warns that they are dangerous. He told us:

This hypothesis depends on the nature of the gods themselves. Who are they, and why should we listen to them? As we have seen, they claim to be the Nine, the ancient Ennead of Heliopolis, each representing a different kind of sovereignty, ruling a distinct area of human life and emotion. Isis was the mother goddess, who also governed magic, and Geb was the Egyptian Jove, who ruled all fruits of the earth. Those gods are bringers of good things, and we might reasonably welcome them to our planet in the expectation of the end of heartache and destitution. But what if the Nine are a Trojan Horse - it may seem harmless enough, but how do we know what really lies in wait inside?

This suspicion also occurred to Jon Povill, when he was subcontracted by Gene Roddenberry to write the movie script of The Nine in 1975. According to Roddenberry’s biographer, Joel Engle, when Povill had completed the script:

The second of our two scenarios is that the arrival of the gods or ‘space brothers’ is entirely and deliberately manufactured. Real space gods may never land on Earth, but the expectation of their imminent arrival could well be an end in itself, with potentially the same benefits for those who seek to control us.

In this scenario the activity at Giza could be explained merely as an attempt to control the most magically potent place on Earth - when all eyes are turned on it, and when expectations of some great revelation are at their highest. What proof could the man and woman in the street ever have that the gods really are coming? We would have to take the authorities’ word for it, and by the time it had dawned on us that no god had landed - and probably never would - we could already have been effectively enslaved by a very terrestrial power, under the guise of ‘strong leadership’ in an alleged state of emergency.

A new religion is taking shape in the name of the Great Heliopolitan Ennead. Already, as we have seen, many obey their instructions to the letter. But in that case, the Ennead must have undergone a remarkable metamorphosis over the millennia, since it was not the custom of the Egyptian deities to give orders or commandments. One distinctive feature of the religion was that its gods did not demand to be worshipped like the later wrathful and tyrannical Yahweh. As Michael Rice points out in Egypt’s Legacy:

Had the gods of ancient Egypt ever looked at the true heart of mankind, with all our flaws, they would not have seen slaves but proud sharers in an eternal divinity - not merely, as Whitley Strieber says, the ‘companions of the creator’, but each of us bearing a part of godhood ourselves, carrying the divine, creative spark. Just as the Nine gods of the Ennead represent different aspects of the One, so we are all fragments of that endless energy.

While - or perhaps because - we personally have no problem with the concept of the Egyptian gods, and, in fact, have enormous respect for that ancient religion, we have no hesitation in denouncing the Council of Nine as imposters. They are not and could never be the Nine gods of the Great Ennead because, among many other reasons, they are ignorant, divisive and show none of the true characteristics of the archetypes they are supposed to represent. But even if - suspending disbelief temporarily — they really are who they claim to be there is still, surely, a case for rejecting them: if the mighty Isis herself were to utter the same kind of pernicious nonsense as do the Nine, it would be within our rights as fully mature, thinking human beings to reject not only the message, but even the great goddess herself. Whether or not this is the only planet of choice, free will is our greatest weapon against the wiles of the insidious and subtly corrupting Nine. No one needs gods like that.

And even if - in the most unlikely scenario - the Council of Nine really are the ancient Egyptian gods, then there is yet another problem. We have no way of knowing whether their imminent return was their own idea, or whether they have been summoned by the conspirators to coincide with their own private programme of events for the future. If this is the case, then the puppetmasters of the Millennium are not only creating, then exploiting, our own expectations, but they are also exploiting the gods themselves.

Exploitation of the Ennead is not to be recommended, particularly as Set, the god of destruction who killed Osiris, is one of them. A wrathful, Yahweh-like god of the desert, he was loathed and feared, although it seems that he had his own secret cult. It is telling that while the Council of Nine - if, indeed, they are the Great Ennead - should include Set, he never appears in their channelled material. Are they saving Set up for later? Has he arrived already, hidden away in the Trojan Horse that is the Nine? Is Set here? And if so, what role will he play in their plans? Will he be on the side of Them - or Us? There is something sinister in the Council of Nine’s avoidance of this dark god, the ultimate archetype of destruction.

Andrija Puharich, in The Sacred Mushroom, wrote that Sirius was the star of the god ‘Sept’,⁴⁶ which we found puzzling, because the ancient Egyptians deified Sirius as the goddess Sothis, who was linked with Isis. In other words, Sirius should be linked with the feminine, not the male, principle. But there are two authorities who do make the connection between Sirius and a male god — the Crowleyite writer Kenneth Grant and Aleister Crowley himself (who connect the star, and Sept, with Set).⁴⁷ We find it intriguing that, to our knowledge, the only authors to do so are Crowley(ite) and Puharich, despite the complete lack of Egyptological evidence for this belief.

This is, in our view, symptomatic of a disturbing undercurrent of the new belief system. There is a suspicious lack of any emphasis on the feminine, even where, as with the Sirius connection, goddesses should be given their due. The puppetmasters of the new religion have effectively censored the feminine. Even though the Heliopolitan Ennead includes four goddesses - Tefnut, Nut, Isis and Nepthys - Tom never, to our knowledge, even refers to them, let alone encourages due reverence to them. Yet the worship of at least one of these goddesses, Isis, was a major part of the ancient Egyptian religion. How the Nine have changed over the centuries!

As our investigation proceeded, we began to realise how insidiously male this conspiracy is, and how its message is implicitly anti-feminine, especially as expressed in James Hurtak’s The Keys of Enoch. Perhaps in order to emulate the patriarchal writings of the Old Testament — and so to appeal to both fundamentalist Jews and Christians - its tone is resolutely male-centred, and if nothing else, in our opinion, it is doing the world a great disservice by continuing to propagate such a dangerous attitude. We, among many others, have come to believe that if there is any one cause of today’s ills it is the legacy of 2,000 years of orchestrated repression of women and the hatred and fear of the feminine principle. If a new belief system is necessary, surely it would be better to use it to correct past errors, not to compound them by preaching yet more patriarchal dogma?

Yet, as we have seen, there are many who want our future society to be based on Freemasonry, in the belief that it bestows spiritual and sociological enlightenment on its members - that is, with very few exceptions, on men. Masonic ideas about women tend to be resolutely outdated, unenlightened and at best patronising. Once again, we are faced with the possibility of having our society re-made in the image of male dominance, thus perpetuating many of the least admirable trends of the West’s history, and in fact preventing the advent of true spiritual progress, which - if we are to take the ancient Egyptian knowledge at all seriously - must always be based on the opposite and equal balance of male and female principles.

We find it offensive that the ancient Egyptian religion has been cynically exploited by the conspirators, especially because what it taught, above all, was the necessity for balance - light and dark, male and female, as exemplified in the duo of the good goddess Isis and her dark sister Nepthys, and Isis and her consort Osiris. Although their worshippers may have had their favourites, the gods themselves were deemed to be absolutely equal, eternally maintaining the divine balance. All this has been ignored by those who have hijacked the Heliopolitan religion, repackaging it for a mass market, and irreverently using the gods as brand names for their new gimcrack products. The names may be the same, but this Isis is merely a new label obscuring the same old, profoundly dangerous patriarchal attitudes.

We do not deny that humanity faces enormous problems, many of its own making. But precisely because we have decisions to make we must not abdicate personal responsibility and hand over our autonomy, both individual and collective, to those who come bearing messages from the space gods, but whose strings are being pulled by the cynical puppetmasters of government cabals and military and intelligence agencies. To hand over our own power is, we argue, entirely to miss the point of being human.

The extraterrestrials, as claimed by the believers, take all the credit for all the achievements of human civilisation, but blame us for all the failures. Why else would they have to come to rescue us (in their nuts-and-bolts spacecraft)?

Even if the Council of Nine turn out to be real, in our own view, they - and their pernicious message - should be roundly rejected. Even if the human race began as their inferiors we seem to have out-evolved them, certainly where basic morality is concerned: at least in principle we now know the difference between good and evil, and unity and division - or we should, by now. Recent history gives us no excuse. If Earth was ever colonised by the star people, surely now is the time to claim our independence from them, not to welcome them, starry-eyed and ignorant, like members of some galactic cargo cult greeting the pilots of supply planes.

Perhaps there is no better time to realise that all men and women themselves are godlike heroes of almost unlimited potential. And if there is any one over-riding message for the Millennium, it is that the time for mankind to come of age is long overdue.