Tracking the Grail Legend
11 September 2021: Recorded with Venus close to Spora, the Grail Star, and the Shodashi crescent moon conjunct Kambhalia.
Anomaly: At my first sighting, Day 4, the moon is low to the southwest but the arch of the ecliptic line shows that it will set considerably to the west, if it follows that line. Two and a half months ago at full moon, the moon set at a point slightly right/west of due south here. Due south looking from the galleria can be identified by a small stone church on the hillside. The moon set to the right of that church, far to the east from where the sun had set. Ceridwen noted this anomaly, associated with other bizarre anomalies of the rising moon and elevation we had noted.
So, this evening I reckoned that the crescent stood almost exactly vertically from where it set so close to due south, as Ceridwen had observed. What is it doing now on a course of the ecliptic aiming to set more to the west as would be “normal?” I was not up when the moon set this evening but I am starting a log of lunar observations and will record its behavior this month.
Ceridwen signaled me to the crescent around 7:30 and I came upstairs to look at it at 8 PM. We sat in the galleria for a good half hour to 8:30 or later. During that entire time the moon did not appear to move at all. It was as if the sky was frozen in place, the earth not moving. The moon shifts to the west at a rate of 1 degree every four minutes: translated, the rotation of the earth rolls the visual field through 1 degree every four minutes. In an hour the moon ought to have shifted west by 15 degrees. It did not appear to move at all.
Controversy on the Grail Narrative and its Origins:
On Flegetanis, the author of the book Kyot found in Toledo see: 3.101 The Last of the Magi
I identify Flegetanis as Thabit, Thebit, Thebith, Tebit: Al-Ṣābiʾ Thābit ibn Qurrah al-Ḥarrānī. Born 826 – Died February 18, 901. In my reading of the historical-astronomical evidence supporting the Grail Legend, he wrote the Toledo Book discovered by Kyot, and had it sent to the Grailkeepers in refuge in Europe. The arrival of the book, which eventually ended up in the Toledo library, electrified the Company of the Grail and signaled them to a decisive moment in their sacred calling to preserve the Mysteries for the future. Wolfram’s Parzival describes these events, which might have included a breach in secrecy regarding the use of entheogenic plants in telestic practice — possibly the sub-text of the legend of the Magic Garland.
The Steinerites identify him as Mā Shā’ Allāh ibn Athari (c. 740–815 CE) an eighth-century Persian Jewish astrologer, astronomer, and mathematician. He is known for his treatise on the trigons of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions. Willi Sucher and other Steinerites attach huge significance to tracking these conjunctions through history revealing things which (to them) confirm the permeating effect of the ‘Christ Impulse” in historical events.
Some scholars explicitly infer that the author of the Toledo book was Jewish. But heathen and Arabian do not necessarily mean Jewish. Certainly heathen does not. On the other hand, Wolfram does say that Flegetanis belonged to the line of Solomon. Strictly proving he was Jewish, right? Wrong. After all, who was Solomon, racially defined? He was an Armenoid, the racial stock including both Arabs and Jews. But if he was Armenoid, he cannot have been a Persian, i.e., Aryan, as I claim, right? Could the author of the Toledo Book really have been Jewish? Wolfram’s explicit description, “born of Solomon’s line, begotten of age-old Israelite stock” (IX, 453), seems to settle the case. But does it? How can I argue against that evidence?
I will take up this tricky issue in another talk or in some forthcoming unit in Grail Studies. Part of my argument goes to the unquestioned assumption about the three Wise Men who followed the “Star in the East” and recognized the birth of the Jewish messiah/king. Would the Persian Magi of the Gnostic movement have revered a Jewish king?