I was baptised at three years of age, a ceremony performed, if I am honest, more for appearance and worldly standing than for any conviction of the soul.

My mother did not believe in God; a rather startling contradiction against the faith I was formally brought into.

My father never spoke to me of things divine, though silence is not always denial, and I do not presume to know what dwells in his heart.

As for me?

I believe in a Creator.

I believe with all my being that this world, and the order and wonder woven into it, is the work of a higher intelligence.

I must speak plainly:

I find the tales of chance and chaos utterly preposterous

That from nothingness, an explosion should spring forth without cause, without source, and from that empty fury fashion the living world; this I cannot accept.

That a single cell appearing from nowhere should grow into a fish, then as if by miracle forge legs and lungs, forsake the deep, and become beast, then ape, and then ourselves; this is not science, it is a fable woven from assumptions.

I shall not dwell longer upon such things, for we have moved far beyond the need to argue them, curious mind.

This evening, however, brings something that may well be among the most profound and important truths we have yet uncovered together.

Of all the wisdom kept from our sight, of all the truths never taught to us, what follows stands among the greatest.

It is not locked away in some vault, you may find it with but a few keystrokes.

Yet it remains almost entirely unknown, seen only in quiet circles and among those who seek the old books.

Or so it seems to me.

And so I shall speak no more of preliminaries.

Let us turn now to what was written, there is no better time than the present moment to begin.

The Gospel of Thomas 📜

Translation:

“GOSPEL OF THOMAS

These are the secret sayings that the living Jesus spoke, and Didymus Judas Thomas wrote down.

And Jesus said: Whoever finds the true meaning of these words shall never know death.

Jesus said: Let the one who seeks keep on seeking until they find. And when they find, they shall be deeply troubled; and once troubled, they shall stand in wonder, and shall rule over all things.

Jesus said: If those who guide you tell you, "Look, the Kingdom is in the heavens," then the birds of the heavens will reach it before you. If they tell you, "It is beneath the earth," then the fish will find it before you. Rather, know this: the Kingdom is already within you, and also all around you. When you come to know yourselves truly, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you yourselves are that very poverty.

Jesus said: An old man need not hesitate to ask a seven-day-old child about the place of life, and he shall live. For many who are first shall come last, and all shall become one and the same.

Jesus said: Understand what lies before your eyes, and what is hidden from you shall be revealed. For nothing remains hidden that shall not be brought to light.

Then his disciples asked him and said: Should we fast? How should we pray? Should we give to those in need? What ways should we follow?

Jesus said: Do not lie, and do not do what you despise. For all things lie open before the light of heaven. Nothing is hidden that shall not be made known, and nothing is covered that shall not be uncovered.

Jesus said: Blessed is the lion eaten by a human, for the lion shall become human. And woe to the human eaten by a lion, for the lion shall become human still.”

And so, dear reader, let us first understand what this document is; this extraordinary collection known as:

the Gospel of Thomas

This is not a text that was passed down openly through the ages, nor one you will find resting between the gospels upon the shelf.

For centuries it was known only through faint whispers and scattered references, its very existence debated, doubted, and ultimately set aside, as though those in authority had decided it was not meant to be read.

Then in the year 1945, within the dry and quiet earth of Nag Hammadi in Egypt, a great treasure was unearthed, curious mind.

An ancient library sealed within clay jars, hidden away perhaps by those who feared what it contained, and there preserved across seventeen hundred years lay this Gospel written in the ancient Coptic tongue, waiting patiently through all those centuries for the moment when the world might once again be ready to hear it.

It opens with words that carry the weight of a doorway, telling us these are not teachings shouted to the crowds upon the mount, but sayings shared privately with those who were ready to understand beyond what is commonly taught.

And the very first promise is profound beyond measure, for it tells us that to grasp the true meaning of these words is to touch something beyond death itself.

Consider that, dear reader.

It does not say that belief alone shall grant you life, nor that adherence to a creed, nor the performance of sacred rites.

It says that whoever finds the meaning shall not taste death.

Understanding itself is the key.

Truth itself is the doorway.

To truly comprehend is to partake in something eternal, and that alone tells us how different this teaching is from everything we have been accustomed to.

It speaks then of the journey itself, that we must keep seeking until we find, and when at last we do find we shall be deeply troubled.

This is such an honest and beautiful truth, one so rarely spoken.

Real truth does not comfort us at first; it unsettles us.

It undoes everything we once held certain, everything we were taught from childhood, everything upon which we built our understanding of the world.

And only once we have been shaken, once we have stood in that holy disturbance, do we begin to marvel.

And from wonder comes a kind of sovereignty, where we begin to understand our true place within the whole of existence.

We are not meant to accept what we are told.

We are meant to seek, to be shaken, to marvel, and at last to rule over our own understanding.

There follows perhaps the most luminous insight of all, one that turns every temple and every hierarchy entirely upon its head.

We are told that the Kingdom which people have been taught to seek in the distant heavens or beneath the earth is actually closer than breath itself, lying within us and all around us.

Those who point elsewhere are guiding you toward a place the birds and the fish will reach before you ever could.

The Kingdom is not somewhere you must travel to after death.

It is not a place far away that only the righteous may enter.

It is here; it is within you.

And to know yourself truly is to be known, and to understand that you are of the very substance of the Creator.

Then the warning that follows is clear and terrible.

If you never come to know yourself then you dwell in poverty indeed.

There is no greater destitution, no poorer state of being, than to walk through your entire life unaware of who and what you truly are.

Age and wisdom are then turned entirely upside down, when we are told that an old man heavy with years may learn from an infant only days old.

The child carries a clarity the world has not yet managed to obscure.

It has not yet learned all the things that are not true.

And so all the status and learning accumulated over a lifetime may count for nothing beside that pure unburdened vision; from this there comes a great reversal.

Those who consider themselves first, greatest, most learned and most important may find themselves last.

In the end all shall be recognised as one and the same.

All distinctions fall away.

At the very source of things we are equal.

We are told further that what is hidden shall be revealed if only we have the courage to look at what stands plainly before us.

There is nothing concealed that shall not be brought to light.

Truth does not forever hide in deep caverns or distant skies, it waits to be seen.

It stands before your face plain as day, if only you will open your eyes and truly look.

And then the disciples ask the questions we all ask:

What must we do?

What rules must we follow?

What rites must we perform?

What observances shall keep us right?

And the answer comes stripped of all ceremony and ritual, stripped of all complexity and intermediary.

Do not lie.

And do not do what you despise.

That is the whole of the law; no lengthy list of duties, no complicated forms of prayer, no fasts at appointed times.

Just this:

be true and honest to your own heart

For all things lie open before the light; there is nowhere to hide that does not eventually reveal itself.

And so the entire way, the entire path, is simply to be true to yourself.

Then to end, there is the riddle of the lion and the human, deep and shifting, meant perhaps to be pondered rather than simply explained.

It suggests that within each of us there is a wild nature, a force that may be consumed and uplifted, or that may consume us in turn.

If you master the beast within it becomes part of you, and rises with you.

If the beast masters you then you become as it.

Either way one nature becomes the other.

And so the choice is always yours.

Which transformation shall you choose?

These then are the teachings; they are not history, they are not dogma, and they are not commands to be obeyed without question.

They are mirrors held up to your own soul, curious mind, inviting you to look inward, to seek, and to understand.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, what we have learned this evening are the keys to life, and we must, as always, reflect on our time spent together tonight.

We have been shown that the greatest truths are not distant and hard to reach, nor locked away in temples or spoken only by those set in authority.

They are close at hand, dwelling within the very heart of who we are.

We have seen that to know oneself is the highest knowledge of all, and that until we truly look upon ourselves with honesty and compassion, we remain in poverty, no matter what riches the world may heap around us.

I would ask you then to stand before your own mirror, not in judgement, nor in vanity, but simply with wonder.

Look deeply into your own eyes and remember.

Remember that you are not just flesh and blood, nor only the sum of your habits and your days.

You carry within you the same Kingdom that the birds and the fish know by instinct.

You are stitched through with the very substance of the Creator.

And yet, like the child who has not yet learned to forget, you hold a clarity that all the learning of the world cannot improve upon.

Be gentle with yourself upon this journey, dear reader.

When the truth comes and troubles you, do not turn away in fear.

When all that you once believed begins to shake and fall away, stand firm in that holy disturbance, for it is the very ground upon which wonder is built.

To be shaken is not to be broken.

It is to be made ready for something far greater.

Be kind to others also, for in the end we are all one and the same.

The distinctions we draw between us are but shadows cast by a light we do not yet fully see.

At the source of every living thing there is but one breath, one light, one life flowing through us all.

To harm another is to harm yourself.

To lift another is to rise also.

This is the great reversal the old words spoke of.

The first shall become last, and all shall stand equal at the feet of truth.

Do not lie to yourself.

Do not act in ways that would bring you shame when you stand alone in the quiet hours.

Treat the wild and living nature within you not as an enemy to be cast out, but as a force to be understood, uplifted, and made noble; so that the beast may become the human, and the human may rise to become something greater still.

That transformation is the choice laid before you, day after day, in every thought and deed.

Let nothing be hidden within you.

Let all things be brought into the light.

Stand before your own soul plainly, and see it as it truly is.

For when you know yourself, you shall be known; when you understand who you are, you shall understand the whole world also.

These are the gifts held within these ancient words.

They were hidden away for a reason, for they grant you something that no earthly authority can ever give.

They remind you that the Kingdom is within.

That the truth stands before your face.

That understanding is the key to life eternal.

And that you are, in your own quiet and eternal way, already whole, already free, and already home.

Your presence here and your attention are the greatest support this work could ever receive, and I value them above all else.

There is no obligation to give, and no one need ever feel they must contribute to be welcome here.

If however you are able to offer something, your kindness helps me seek out these ancient words, preserve them, and share them freely with all who come seeking truth.

Every contribution, small or great, becomes another page uncovered, another voice brought once again to light.

Thank you, for being here, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

As a child, my grandparents taught me the foundations of gardening, the very art of cultivation.

A joy it was, curious mind, and how fortunate I am to receive such a blessing in my earliest years.

I wish I could recount the tales and stories from my youth for you, dear reader, but those times evade me.

All I can reach for are faint, lingering memories of my garden corner, the tomatoes and strawberries I grew with the knowledge passed down from my grandparents.

Perhaps as I age, these memories will relinquish themselves from the shadows and expose themselves to me once more.

My admiration for the green things faded in my teenage years, cast aside for the hollow lure of computer games and later, the darkness of hard drugs.

Being clean from drugs now, for nearly five years, I find myself with an inkling, curious mind.

It feels as though I have found myself again, that little boy standing with his granddad; the drugs took my true self away, or perhaps, more truthfully, the world distracted me from what truly mattered.

I suspect many lost souls in the world have lost touch with their true self, for the world is full of things to distract you, full of things that, in essence, are meaningless.

So then, a poignant moment to introduce today’s lesson, dear reader, as, like always, our daily encounters are packed full of meaning and intention.

We will be revisiting Nicholas Culpeper’s absolutely remarkable publication:

A Complete Herbal

Earlier in the week, we perused a list of remedies held within this book; some truly bizarre examples too if I may say, curious mind.

This evening, however, we shall cast our gaze over the start of the book, and what a treat we have in store.

Alongside coloured engravings, we have a section for every plant regarding its occult history; its attributes and astrological associations.

As the wording is old English, and I would like everyone to be able to read and understand what the pages say, I shall provide you, dear reader, with a modern English rewrite of each page.

Now we begin.

Agrimony

This plant bears long, narrow leaves, some larger and some smaller, growing upon a stalk; all of them are deeply indented or notched around the edges. The leaves are green on top and of a greyish colour underneath, with small, pale yellow flowers growing upon short, slender stalks, standing two or three together at intervals along the upper part of the stalk. After the flowers have faded, there appear many small, round heads or seed-vessels, each bristling with tiny hooks that will catch upon clothing or anything that brushes against them. The root is black on the outside, somewhat woody and tough, with many spreading fibres. It puts forth fresh leaves every spring, and the root, though small, possesses a pleasant, mild flavour.

Where it grows: It thrives upon banks and hedgerows, and is commonly found by the sides of paths and fields.

When it flowers: It blooms in July and August, and the seed ripens shortly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: It is moderately hot and moist, and belongs to the planet Jupiter. It strengthens the inward parts, clears the complexion, and is excellent for the liver and kidneys. It is of great value in treating all kinds of wounds and bruises, both inward and outward. It gently opens obstructions, cleanses the blood, and strengthens the body. It is particularly helpful for those suffering from the effects of excessive heat or cold, and is highly regarded as a remedy for weakness and debility. It also helps to break down and remove stones and gravel from the kidneys and bladder. A decoction of the leaves is excellent against the bites of snakes and venomous creatures, and purges choleric humours. It is also recommended for those suffering from dropsy and jaundice.

Externally, the leaves may be used in baths or fomentations to soothe and strengthen the skin and underlying tissues. I have rarely seen any harm come from its use, and I have observed very few instances where it produced any unpleasant effect. It is safe to use as a gentle and effective remedy.

Water-Agimony

This plant has divers large, long leaves rising from the root, standing upon long, slender foot-stalks, deeply snipped about the edges. The stalks rise two feet high or more, bearing many small leaves set along them, and at the top grow tufts of yellow flowers. The root is composed of many long, slender fibres spreading in the ground.

Where it grows: It grows by the sides of waters, ditches, and moist places, and is common in the west and north of England.

When it flowers: It flowers in July and August, and the seed ripens shortly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: It is under the government of Jupiter. It opens obstructions of the liver and spleen, cleanses the blood, and is of excellent use in the jaundice and dropsy. It strengthens the inward parts, provokes urine, and is good against the stone and gravel. The decoction of the herb is good against the biting of venomous creatures, and to expel choleric humours.

Amaranthus

This plant rises up with slender, upright stalks, beset with long, narrow leaves of a bluish-green colour. At the tops of the stalks grow tufts of flowers which retain their colour long after they are gathered, from which it takes its name. The seed is small and black, and the root fibrous.

Where it grows: It is sown in gardens, and delights in a warm, sunny situation.

When it flowers: It flowers from August until the frost comes.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Saturn. It is of a cooling and binding nature. A decoction of the flowers is excellent to stay all fluxes of blood, and to strengthen the heart and spirits. It is also of good use in all inflammations, burns, and scalds.

Anemone

This plant rises up with leaves divided into many segments, appearing before the flower, which stands upon a naked stalk, bearing at the top one flower consisting of several leaves of a white, reddish, or purplish colour. It is called the windflower, because it is said never to open but when the wind blows. The root is tuberous.

Where it grows: It grows in gardens, orchards, and woods, delighting in a loose, rich soil.

When it flowers: It flowers early in the spring.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Mars. The leaves dried and taken as snuff provoke sneezing and cleanse the head of rheum. The flowers gathered before they open and dried are good to be used in poultices for the head and to ease headaches.

Garden Arrach

This plant rises up with soft, succulent stalks, beset with broad, somewhat triangular leaves of a pale green colour. The flowers are small and greenish, growing in clusters along the stalks, and are succeeded by small, black seed. The root is fibrous and annual.

Where it grows: It is commonly sown in gardens throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers from June to the end of August.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of the Moon. It is exceedingly cold and moist, and therefore softens and relaxes the body, eases hot swellings and inflammations. It may be eaten boiled, or the leaves bruised and applied outwardly to hot pains and swellings.

Wild and Stinking Arrach

This plant rises up with slender, branching stalks, beset with broad, somewhat triangular leaves of a dark green colour. The whole plant has a strong, offensive smell when bruised. The flowers are small and greenish, growing in clusters along the stalks, and are succeeded by small, black seed. The root is fibrous.

Where it grows: It grows wild in waste places, by way-sides, and among rubbish.

When it flowers: It flowers in June and July, and the seed ripens quickly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: It is hot and dry in the third degree. It provokes vomiting and purging, and must be used with great caution.

Alkanet

This plant rises up with rough, hairy stalks, beset with long, narrow, dark green leaves. The flowers grow in clusters at the tops of the stalks, of a reddish-purple colour. The root is long, thick, and of a deep reddish colour within, which is the part used.

Where it grows: It grows upon dry, stony grounds in many places, and is also cultivated in gardens. It grows near Rochester, in Devonshire, and in Cornwall.

When it flowers: It flowers in July, beginning of August. The root is in its prime when the seed is ripe, and before the herb runs up to stalk.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Mercury. The root is of excellent use to cool and temper heat and inflammations. It is of great virtue in burns, scalds, and all hot swellings, being applied outwardly in ointments and oils. It may also be taken inwardly to cool the heat of the stomach and inward parts.

All-Heal

This plant sends forth many small, creeping stalks that take root as they run, beset with pairs of broad, oval, dark green leaves, roundish at the end and slightly indented about the edges. The flowers grow in thick, short, round heads at the tops of the stalks, of a purplish colour, standing out from the heads in whorls. The root is fibrous and creeping.

Where it grows: It grows abundantly in meadows, pastures, and by the way-sides throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in June, July, and August.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Jupiter. It is a special herb for all sorts of wounds, both inward and outward, being of great virtue to stop bleeding and to heal and unite the lips of wounds. It is also of great use in bruises, falls, and blows, to dissolve congealed blood and ease pain. It cleanses inward wounds and ulcers, and is of value in treating spitting of blood and all manner of internal bleeding. It may be used both internally as a decoction and externally as a wash or ointment.

Prickly Asparagus

This plant grows up with tender, green shoots in the spring, which rise to be tall, branching stalks beset with many small, fine, needle-like leaves. The flowers are small, greenish-white, hanging down from the sides of the branches, and are succeeded by round, red berries. The root is large, fleshy, and spreads deep in the ground.

Where it grows: It delights in light, sandy, well-drained soil, and is commonly cultivated in gardens throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in June and July, and the berries ripen in autumn.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Jupiter. The young shoots eaten are nourishing and grateful to the stomach. The root boiled in wine or water is excellent to provoke urine, to cleanse the kidneys and bladder, and to break and expel stone and gravel. It eases pains in the loins and hips, and is of good use in the gout and rheumatism.

Ash-Tree

This large and well-known tree grows to a great height, with a straight, smooth trunk and spreading branches. The leaves are composed of several pairs of small, oblong, pointed leaflets set along a middle rib, with an odd one at the end. The flowers appear before the leaves in the spring, and are succeeded by long, flat, winged seeds which hang in clusters and remain on the tree all winter. The bark is of a greyish colour and smooth when young.

Where it grows: It delights in a rich, moist soil, and grows plentifully in woods and hedgerows throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in April and May, and the seeds ripen in September and October.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of the Sun. The bark and leaves are cooling, binding, and drying. The bark boiled in vinegar is good against the gout and joint pains. The leaves boiled in wine are good to open obstructions of the liver and spleen, to provoke urine, and to expel stone. The ashes of the bark boiled in water are good to wash old sores and ulcers.

Avens

This plant rises up with many large, rough, deeply divided leaves from the root, and smaller leaves upon the stalks, which are slender, upright, and branched toward the top. The flowers are large and yellow, standing each on a slender foot-stalk at the top of the branches, succeeded by round heads of seed armed with small hooks. The root is long, slender, and of a reddish colour, smelling like cloves.

Where it grows: It grows in woods, hedgerows, and shady places throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in May and June, and the seed ripens shortly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Jupiter. The root is of great virtue to strengthen the heart, to warm and comfort the stomach, and to help digestion. It is of excellent use in all weakness of the stomach and digestion, and is said to be a special preservative against the plague and all infectious diseases, being taken every morning in wine or broth.

Adder's Tongue or Serpent's Tongue

This small plant rises up with a single, smooth stalk, bearing at the top one broad, smooth, oval green leaf, and a slender, spike-like point rising from the centre of the leaf, which bears the seed. It is a small and simple plant, yet of great virtue.

Where it grows: It grows in moist, grassy meadows and pastures throughout the land.

When it flowers: It appears in the spring and early summer, and withers away as the heat increases.

Qualities and uses: It is of a cooling and binding nature. The leaves bruised and applied outwardly are excellent to heal fresh wounds, to stop bleeding, and to ease inflammations. The juice or decoction taken inwardly is good to stop inward bleeding. It is chiefly valued as a wound herb, and may be used fresh or made into an ointment.

Alehoof or Ground Ivy

This well-known herb spreads upon the ground with long, trailing stalks that take root at the joints, beset with roundish, somewhat heart-shaped leaves, deeply notched about the edges, of a dark green colour. The flowers grow in clusters at the joints, of a bluish-purple colour, and stand out from the leaves. The root is small and fibrous, spreading much under the surface.

Where it grows: It grows everywhere under hedges, by way-sides, in waste places, and about the sides of ditches and waters throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers from March or April throughout the summer, and continues green and fresh all the winter.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Venus. It is hot and sharp in the second degree, and of an opening and cleansing nature. It opens obstructions of the liver, kidneys, and spleen, and is of excellent use in the dropsy, jaundice, and all diseases arising from cold and obstructions. It cleanses the blood, sharpens the sight, and is good against all foul and scurvy diseases of the skin. It is also of excellent use in coughs, colds, and all diseases of the breast and lungs. It provokes urine and women's courses, helps to break the stone, and eases pains in the head and sinews.

Black Alder-Tree

This tree grows not to any great height, but shoots out many branches covered with a dark brownish bark. The leaves are broad, roundish, and of a dark green colour, remaining on the tree late into the year. The flowers appear before the leaves, small and purplish, succeeded by round, green berries which turn black when ripe.

Where it grows: It delights in moist, watery places, by the sides of rivers and streams, and in wet woods and hedges.

When it flowers: It flowers in April and May, and the berries ripen in September.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Venus. The bark is cooling and binding. A decoction of the bark is good to stay all fluxes of blood and humours, and to strengthen the inward parts. It is also good to be used outwardly in washes for old sores and skin diseases. The fresh bark bruised and boiled in vinegar is excellent to cleanse the skin and remove spots and wrinkles. The berries bruised and applied are good to ease swellings and inflammations, and may be preserved in sugar or honey to be taken inwardly to strengthen the stomach.

Common Alder-Tree

This tree grows to a considerable height and spreads wide, delighting in moist soil and watery places. The bark is rough and the wood soft and white; the branches are very brittle and easily broken. The leaves are broad, roundish, and of a dark green colour, remaining upon the tree until late in the year. The flowers appear before the leaves in the spring, small and reddish, succeeded by small, woody cones that remain upon the tree throughout the year.

Where it grows: It thrives in wet, marshy ground, by the sides of rivers and streams, and in low-lying, damp places throughout our land.

When it flowers: It flowers in April and May, and the cones ripen in September.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Venus. The leaves and bark are cooling and binding. A decoction of the bark or leaves, when used as a wash, is excellent for easing inflammation, stopping bleeding, and treating all manner of skin conditions. The fresh leaves laid upon swollen or inflamed areas draw out heat and reduce swelling. The inner bark steeped in water is said to be helpful in treating wounds and ulcers.

Alexander

This plant rises up with large, thick, hollow stalks, bearing large, broad leaves divided into many leaflets, of a deep green colour. The flowers are small and yellow, growing in clusters at the tops of the stalks, followed by large, ribbed seeds. The root is thick, fleshy, and of a whitish colour, with a strong, pleasant scent.

Where it grows: It grows wild by the sea-coast and upon old walls, and is also commonly grown in gardens throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in June and July, and the seed ripens shortly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Jupiter. The root, leaves, and seeds are all of virtue. They warm and strengthen the stomach, promote digestion, and are of value in treating all manner of disorders of the digestive organs. The seeds are also of value, and may be taken to ease wind and promote the flow of urine.

Aloes

This plant rises with thick, fleshy leaves that spring directly from the root, broad at the base and tapering to a point, with sharp, tooth-like projections along their edges. The leaves contain a bitter, yellowish juice which, when extracted and dried, forms the resin known as aloes. A tall flower-stalk rises from the centre bearing clusters of yellow flowers.

Where it grows: It flourishes best in warm, dry climates, though it may be grown in pots and sheltered places in our own land.

When it flowers: It flowers in the spring, though it rarely flowers in our climate.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Saturn. The juice is of great value in purging the body of excess humours, cleansing the digestive organs, and strengthening the stomach. It opens obstructions of the liver and spleen, purges choleric humours, and is of service in treating cold and watery humours. It must be used with care, for it is a plant of strong power, though when prepared properly it is both safe and effective.

Wild Angelica

This large and beautiful plant rises with tall, sturdy, hollow stalks that bear very large leaves divided into many broad leaflets, of a bright green colour. Clusters of small, whitish-green flowers appear at the tops of the stalks in summer, followed by large, flat seeds. The root is thick, fleshy, and branching, and possesses a strong, pleasant, aromatic scent.

Where it grows: It may be found growing wild in moist woodlands, by the sides of streams, and in damp, shady places throughout our land. It is also commonly grown in gardens.

When it flowers: It flowers in June and July, and the seed ripens shortly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of the Sun. The root is of great value in strengthening the heart, warming the stomach, and promoting digestion. It eases wind and colic, relieves pain and discomfort in the chest and stomach, and is of service in treating all manner of weakness and debility. It also promotes the flow of urine, eases pain and stiffness in the joints, and may be taken with benefit by those suffering from gout and rheumatism. It is an excellent remedy against poisons and infection, and may be taken each morning in wine or broth to strengthen the body and ward off illness.

Arssmaert

This plant rises with slender, upright stalks that bear long, narrow leaves of a fresh green colour, shaped like the point of a spear. The whole plant possesses a sharp, biting taste. Small, greenish-white flowers appear in long, slender clusters at the tops of the stalks throughout the summer, followed by small, black seeds. The root is fibrous and spreading.

Where it grows: It thrives in watery places, by the sides of streams and ditches, and in wet meadows and marshy ground throughout our land.

When it flowers: It flowers in June, July, and August, and the seed ripens shortly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: It is hot and sharp in the second degree, and under the dominion of Mars. It opens obstructions, cleanses the blood, and is of value in treating all manner of skin conditions. It dissolves clotted blood within the body, and is of service in treating bruises, falls, and injuries received by violence. The juice of the fresh plant, or a decoction made from it, may be taken internally or applied externally to wounds and bruises to ease pain and promote healing.

Archangel

This plant rises with slender, branching stalks that bear broad, somewhat heart-shaped leaves, deeply toothed along their edges, growing in pairs at the joints. Clusters of small, reddish flowers appear in the angles where the leaves join the stalks throughout the spring and summer. The root is small and fibrous, spreading widely beneath the soil.

Where it grows: It may be found growing in hedgerows, woodlands, and waste places throughout our land, and is also commonly grown in gardens. It delights in moist, shady ground.

When it flowers: It flowers from the beginning of the spring all the summer long.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Venus. It is of value in treating disorders arising from excess heat or moisture within the body, and may be taken to ease inflammation and promote healing. The flowers, when gathered and dried, are said to be helpful in easing nervous tension and lifting the spirits. A decoction of the herb is excellent to heal green wounds, cleanse old sores and ulcers, and stay the flowing of blood. It is also of special virtue for women's ailments, and to ease pain and swelling in the joints.

Amara Dulcis

This plant grows up with woody stalks even to a man's height, and sometimes higher. The leaves fall off at the approach of winter, and spring out of the same stalk at spring-time. The plant is composed of a whitish bark, and hath a pith in the middle of each main branch; into which many small ones divide themselves, whereon grow leaves set in order like vines; they are at first green, but when they grow ripe they are of a purple colour, or of a green colour like to violets, and they stand many of them together in knots; the berries are green at first, but when they ripen they are very red. If you taste them, you shall find them just as the crab which in Sussex call bitter-sweet, viz. sweet at first, and bitter afterwards.

Where it grows: They grow commonly almost throughout England, especially in moist and shady places.

When it flowers: The leaves shoot out about the latter end of March, if the temperature of the air be ordinary; it flowers in June, and the seeds are ripe soon after, usually in the next month.

Qualities and uses: It is under the planet Mercury, and a notable herb of his also, if it be rightly gathered under his influence. It is excellent to remove witchcraft both in men and beasts, and all sudden diseases whatsoever. Being tied round about the neck, it is one of the most admirable remedies for the vertigo or dizziness in the head; and that is the reason that the people in Germany commonly hang it about their cattle's necks, when they fear any such evils have betided them. Country people commonly use the berries of it, and having bruised them, apply them to their fingers, and thereby soon rid their fingers of troublesome swellings. The decoction of the wood and roots, or the leaves, is excellent for the liver and spleen, to cleanse the blood, and to open obstructions.

Apple Tree

This tree is so well known for its fruit that it would be in vain to give any description of it, observing the several kinds of it which are accounted more or less medicinal for use. The pomegranate and pippin, yielding a pleasant vinous juice, are most esteemed.

Where it grows: It is well known to grow in orchards and gardens throughout the land.

When it flowers: Different kinds flower at different times, between April and the latter end of May. The fruit appears soon after, and is ripe in autumn.

Qualities and uses: The leaves and fruit are under the dominion of Venus. In general they are cold, windy, and moist, and are to be digested before they are thoroughly ripe; then they are wholesome, and yield nourishment. They are very proper for hot and bilious stomachs. The juice of sour apples boiled with honey is excellent to strengthen the stomach, stay vomiting, and cool any heat or inflammation. A poultice of roasted apples applied to swellings and inflammations gives ease, and a little wine or rose-water added to the pulp makes it more cooling and agreeable.

Asarabacca

This plant rises with very short stalks that bear broad, roundish leaves growing directly from the root upon long, slender leaf-stalks. The leaves are of a dark, glossy green above and of a purplish colour beneath, smooth and of a pleasant aromatic scent. Small, brownish-green flowers appear close to the ground at the base of the leaves in early spring. The root is small, creeping, and of a pleasant, aromatic scent.

Where it grows: It thrives in shady, moist places, and may be found growing wild in woodlands and mountainous regions, as well as being cultivated in gardens.

When it flowers: It flowers in the early spring. The leaves are at their best and most potent when gathered before the plant comes into flower.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Mars. The root, when powdered and taken as snuff, provokes sneezing and clears the head. It is also said to be helpful in treating nervous disorders and headaches, and may be taken internally in small doses to ease pain and promote rest. It must be used with caution, for it is a plant of strong power. It provokes vomiting and purges phlegm and choleric humours, and is of special virtue in disorders of the head and nerves.

Asparagus, Sparagus, or Sperage

This plant sends up tender, edible shoots in the spring, which when fully grown become tall, branching stalks clothed in fine, feathery leaves. The young shoots are thick, upright, and tender, and as they grow they send out many slender branches clothed in fine, small leaves. Small, greenish-white flowers appear in summer upon the female plants, followed by round, red berries that ripen in autumn. The root is large, fleshy, and spreading, and sends up new shoots each spring.

Where it grows: It delights in light, sandy, well-drained soil, and is commonly cultivated in gardens throughout our land.

When it flowers: It flowers in July, and the berries ripen in autumn.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Jupiter. The young shoots, when eaten, are nourishing and strengthening. The root is excellent for cleansing the kidneys and bladder, and for breaking down and removing stones and gravel. It provokes the flow of urine, eases pain and difficulty in passing water, and is of great value in treating all manner of disorders of the urinary organs. It is also said to be helpful in relieving pain and stiffness in the joints, and may be taken with benefit by those suffering from gout and rheumatism. The berries are also of virtue, and being taken in wine or broth, are good to provoke urine and ease pains in the reins and bladder.

Bay Tree

This tree is so well known that it needs no description. I shall only say a word or two of its virtues. It is under the dominion of the Sun, and the celestial sign Leo, and resists witchcraft and all evil influences.

Where it grows: It thrives in warm, sheltered places, and is commonly grown in gardens and against walls throughout our land.

When it flowers: It flowers in April and May, and the berries ripen in autumn.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of the Sun. The leaves and berries are both of great value. The leaves are hot and dry in the third degree, warm and strengthen the stomach, promote digestion, and ease wind and colic. They are also of value in treating disorders of the chest and lungs, and may be taken to relieve coughs and colds. The berries possess similar virtues, and may be taken to ease pain and discomfort, promote the flow of urine, and expel worms. The oil extracted from the berries is excellent for easing pain and stiffness in the joints, and may be rubbed into the skin for relief. The berries are also of singular virtue against all poisons and infections, and are of special use in preservatives against the plague and all contagious diseases.

Balm

This herb is so well known to be an inhabitant almost in every garden, that I shall not need to write any description thereof, seeing the virtues thereof are so many, and excellent.

Where it grows: It grows plentifully in gardens throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in the summer months.

Qualities and uses: It is an herb of Jupiter, and under Cancer, and strengthens nature much in all her actions. It helps digestion, and strengthens the stomach greatly, insomuch that it is no wonder if it makes one look young at the latter end of summer. It opens obstructions of the liver, and is of special virtue to relieve melancholy and sadness of the spirits. It cleanses the blood, and is of excellent use in all affections of the heart and fainting fits. It comforts the heart, drives away melancholy, and promotes a cheerful frame of mind. The oil made of the berries is very comfortable to all cold and griefs of the joints, nerves, arteries, stomach, belly, or womb; it helps palsies, cramps, aches, trembling and numbness in every part; it eases pains and aches coming from cold, whether in the head, stomach, belly, or womb. It is also of special virtue for women in childbirth, and to cleanse the womb after delivery. The juice taken with sugar and wine preserves the complexion, and helps the falling sickness and giddiness in the head. It is also of virtue against the bites of mad dogs and venomous beasts, and opens obstructions of the spleen.

Barberry

This shrub is so well known to every boy or girl that hath attained to the age of seven years, that it needs no description.

Where it grows: It grows in hedgerows and amongst bushes in many parts of the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in April and May, and the berries ripen in autumn.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Mars. The inner rind of the barberry tree boiled in white wine, and a quarter of a pint drank every morning, is an excellent remedy to purge the body of choleric humours, and frees it from such diseases as arise therefrom, such as scabs, itch, tetters, ring-worms, and such like. It is excellent also for agues, burnings, scaldings, heat of the blood, heat of the liver, and bloody fluxes. The berries are as good as the bark, and more pleasing; they get a man a good stomach to his victuals, by strengthening the attractive faculty which is under Mars. The hair washed with the lye made of the tree and water, will turn it of a yellow colour, as Mars would have it. The fruit and rind of the shrub, the flowers of broom and of heath, cleanse the body of choleric humours, and are of excellent use in all hot and inflammatory diseases.

Barley

The continual usefulness thereof hath made all so acquainted herewith, that it is altogether needless to describe it, being yearly sown in this land. The virtues thereof are these.

Where it grows: It is sown in fields throughout the land.

When it flowers: It flowers in the summer, and the grain is ripe in autumn.

Qualities and uses: It is under the notable planet Saturn. Barley in all its parts and compositions, except malt, is more cooling than wheat, and a little cleansing. It is of great virtue in all hot and distempers of the body, especially in the stomach, bowels, and bladder. Barley-water boiled with figs and raisins is excellent to cool heat and inflammation, to cleanse the breast and lungs, and to ease coughs and shortness of breath. The meal of barley and fleawort boiled in water, and applied with honey and oil of lilies, eases swellings and pains in the joints. The water distilled from the green barley in the end of May is very good for those that have defluctions of humours fallen into their eyes; easeth the pain, being dropped therein; or white bread steeped therein, and applied on the eyes, doth the same.

Garden Basil, or Sweet Basil

The greater or ordinary basil riseth up usually with one straight stalk, diversely branching forth on all sides, with two leaves at every joint, which are somewhat broad and roundish, yet pointed at the end, of a pale green colour, and of a strong healthy scent. The flowers are small and white, standing in whorls about the stalks, and after them come small seeds. The root perisheth every year.

Where it grows: It grows in gardens.

When it flowers: It flowers in the heat of summer, being a very tender plant.

Qualities and uses: This is the herb which all authors are by the ears about, and rail one at another; Galen and Dioscorides hold it not fitting to be taken inwardly; and Chrysippus rails at it with downright Billingsgate rhetoric. Pliny and the Arabian physicians defend it. For my own part, I presently found that speech true: And now not one taster knows what coney skin is. And to say what Dr. Reason went, who told me it was an herb of Mars, and under the scorpion, and perhaps therefore it delights to look like the creature; and it is a kind of herb of justice. Being applied to the place bitten by venomous beasts, or stung by a wasp or hornet, it speedily draws the poison to it. Every like draws his like. Mizaldus affirms, that being laid to the chest, it will breed venomous humours. Hilarius, a French physician, affirms upon his own knowledge, that an honest countryman, having a scorpion breed in his brain, and nothing else would help him, died. And we know as great an enemy to poison. To conclude. It excelleth both birth and after-birth; and as it helps the deficiency of Venus in one kind, so it spoils all her actions in another. I dare write no more of it.

The Beech Tree

In treating of this tree, you must understand that which I call the green beech, which is by way of distinction from that other small rough sort, called in Sussex the smaller beech, but in Essex horn-beam.

Where it grows: It grows plentifully in woods and forests throughout the land, delighting in a rich, deep soil.

When it flowers: It flowers in April and May, and the nuts ripen in September and October.

Qualities and uses: It is under the dominion of Saturn. The leaves are cooling and binding, and may be applied outwardly to ease swellings and inflammations. The nuts, when gathered before they are fully ripe and boiled in water, are said to be helpful in certain disorders. The water distilled from the green husks is excellent to cleanse the skin and remove spots and wrinkles. The oil extracted from the nuts is of value in treating burns, scalds, and all manner of skin injuries.

Beech Tree

I suppose it needless to describe it, being already too well known to my countrymen.

Where it grows: It grows in woods amongst oaks and other trees, and in parks, forests, and chases, to feed deer; and in other places to fatten swine.

When it flowers: It blooms in the end of April, or beginning of May, for the most part, and the fruit is ripe in September.

Qualities and uses: It is a plant of Saturn, and therefore performs his qualities and proportion in these operations. The leaves of the beech-tree are cooling and binding, and therefore good to be applied to hot swellings to discuss them; the nuts do much nourish such beasts as feed thereon. The water that is found in the hollow places of decaying beeches will cure both man and beast of any scurf, scab, or running tetters, if they be washed therewith; you may boil the leaves into a poultice, or make an ointment of them when time of year serves.

Beans

Both the garden and field beans are so well known that it saveth me the labour of writing any description of them. Their virtues follow.

Where they grow: They are commonly grown in gardens and fields throughout the land.

When they flower: They flower in the spring and early summer, and the seed ripens shortly afterwards.

Qualities and uses: They are plants of Venus. The distilled water of the flowers of garden beans is good to cleanse the face and skin from spots and wrinkles; and the meal or flour of the beans, or the small beans, doth the same. The water distilled from the green husks is held to be very effectual against the stone, and to provoke urine. Bean-flour used in poultices to assuage inflammations arising from wounds, and the swelling of women's breasts caused by the curdling of their milk, and represseth their milk; flour of beans and fenugreek, mixed with honey, and applied to felons, boils, bruises, or blue marks by blows, or the imposthumes in the kernels of the ears, helpeth them all; and with rose leaves, frankincense, and the white of an egg, being applied to any blow or hurt upon them, if used with wine. If a bean be parted in two, the skin being taken away, and laid on the place where the leech hath been set, that bleedeth too much, stayeth the bleeding. Bean-flour boiled to a pulpy consistence with wine and vinegar, and some oil thereto added, easeth both pains and swelling of the sciatica. The husks boiled in water to the consumption of a third part thereof, stayeth a lax; and the ashes of the husks made up with old hog's grease, helpeth the old pains, contusions, and wounds of the sinews, the sciatica and gout. The field beans have all the aforementioned virtues as the garden beans. Beans eaten are extreme windy meat; but if, after the Dutch fashion, when they are half boiled you husk them and then stew them, they are wholesome food.

French Beans

This French or kidney bean ariseth at first with one stalk, which afterwards divideth itself into many arms or branches, but all so weak that if they be not sustained with sticks or poles, they will be fruitless or come to nothing. At several places of these branches grow footstalks, each with three broad round and pointed green leaves at the end of them; towards the top come forth divers flowers made like unto pea blossoms, of the same colour for the most part that the fruit will be; that is, white, yellow, red, blackish, or of a deeper purple, but white is the most usual; after which come long and slender flat pods, some crooked, some straight, with a string running down the back thereof, wherein is flattish round fruit made like a kidney; the root perisheth every year. There is another sort of French beans commonly growing with us in this land, which is called the scarlet flower bean. This riseth with sundry branches as the other, but they grow higher, to the length of hop-poles, about which they grow twining, but turning contrary to the sun, having footstalks with three leaves on each side, as on the other; the flowers also are like the other, and of a most orient scarlet colour. The beans are larger than the ordinary kind, of a dead purple colour, turning black when ripe and dry: the root perisheth in winter.

Where they grow: They are commonly sown in gardens throughout the land.

When they flower: They flower throughout the summer.

Qualities and uses: These also belong to dame Venus, and being dried and beat to powder are as great strengtheners of the kidneys as any are; neither is there a better remedy to prevent the stone; a draught at one time taken in white wine to prevent the stone, or to cleanse the kidneys of gravel or stoppage. The ordinary French beans are of an easy digestion; they move the belly, provoke urine, enlarge the breast that is straitened with shortness of breath, engender sperm, and incite to venery. And in regard of the glorious beauty of their colour, being set near a quickset-hedge, they will bravely adorn the same, by climbing up thereon.

Water Betony

This plant rises up with square, hard, greenish stalks, set with broad dark green leaves, dented about the edges with notches, somewhat resembling the leaves of the wood betony, but much larger too, for the most part set at a joint. The flowers are many, at the tops of the stalks and branches, being round bellied and open at the brims, and divided into two parts, the uppermost being like a hood, and the lowermost like a lip, hanging down, of a dark red colour, which passing, there come in their places small round heads with small points at the ends, wherein lie the small brown seeds; the root is a thick bush of strings and fibres growing from the head.

Where it grows: It grows by the ditch side, brooks, and other water-courses, generally through this land, and is seldom found far from the water-side.

When it flowers: It flowers about July, and the seed is ripe in August.

Qualities and uses: Water betony is an herb of Jupiter in Cancer, and is appropriated more to the heart and lungs than wood-betony, which follows. It is an excellent remedy for sick hogs. It is of a cleansing quality: the leaves bruised and applied are effectual for all old and filthy ulcers; and especially if the juice of the leaves be boiled with a little honey, and dipped therein, and the sores dressed therewith; as also for bruises or hurts, whether inward or outward: the distilled water of the leaves is used for the same purpose; as also to bathe the face and hands spotted or blemished, or discoloured by sun-burning. I confess I do not much fancy distilled waters, I mean such waters as are distilled cold; some virtues of the herb they may haply have, but being distilled in a cold manner, all that which was oil and salt is left behind, unless you burn them, and then all is spoiled, water and all, which were good for as little as can be said by such a distillation.

Wood Betony

Common or wood betony hath many leaves rising from the root, which are somewhat broad and round at the end, roundly dented about the edges, standing upon long foot-stalks, from among which rise up small, square, slender, but upright hairy stalks with some leaves thereon, to the number of six or seven pairs, which are smaller than the lower; whereon at the tops stand many spiked heads of flowers like lavender, but thicker and shorter, of a white, purple, or reddish colour, spotted with white spots both in the upper and lower part. The seeds being contained within the husks that hold the flowers, are blackish, somewhat long and uneven. The roots are many white thready strings; the stalk perisheth, with some leaves thereon, abide all the winter. The whole plant is somewhat small.

Where it grows: It groweth frequently in woods and delightful shady places.

When it flowers: It flowereth in July; after which the seed is quickly ripe, yet in its prime in May.

Qualities and uses: The herb is appropriated to the planet Jupiter, and the sign Aries. Antonius Musa, physician to the emperor Augustus, wrote a particular book of the virtues of this herb; and among other virtues, it is said to preserve the liver and bodies of men from the danger of epidemical diseases, and from witchcraft also; it helpeth those that loathe and cannot digest their meat, that have weak stomachs and shortness of breath, continual rising in their stomach, and such like as are troubled with any distempers of the head, eyes, and ears, or any other part of the body. It is of excellent use to cleanse the breast and lungs of tough phlegm, and to ease coughs and consumptions. The decoction made with mead, and a little pennyroyal, is good for those that are troubled with putrid agues, whether quotidian, tertian, or quartan, and to draw down and evacuate the blood and humours, that by falling into the eyes, do hinder the sight. The decoction thereof made in wine and taken, killeth the worms in the belly, openeth obstructions.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, a remarkably long lesson this evening, and we shall now reflect on what we can do with this knowledge.

It is easy, in our modern world, to look at a plant simply as an object; a decorative piece for a shelf or a garnish for a plate.

But to view the world through the lens of Culpeper is to recognise that we are not just observers of nature, but participants in a grand, intricate design.

When we understand the astrological associations and the occult virtues of these herbs, we stop seeing the garden as a collection of biology and start seeing it as a language.

It is a dialogue between the celestial bodies above and the soil beneath our feet.

For a man like me, who spent years running from his own skin through the haze of addiction, this connection feels like a return to sanity.

When I was younger, I thought the world was something to be conquered, or ignored, or numbed.

I traded the wisdom of the earth for the hollow dopamine of digital worlds and self-destruction.

I lost the little boy who once stood in that garden patch with his grandfather, and for a long time, I thought he was gone for good.

But the plants do not care for our human failures; they simply grow.

They wait for us to stop our frantic searching for meaning in the wrong places and realise that the meaning was always waiting in the dirt.

We carry these virtues within us, too.

Just as a flower has its season and its specific influence, we have our own cycles of growth and shadow.

The lesson here is not just about learning how to brew a tincture or interpret a chart, but about learning how to be present.

To walk into a garden with a curious mind is an act of defiance against a world that demands we be busy, distracted, and shallow.

To truly see a plant is to acknowledge that there is more to existence than what we can touch or sell.

Take this knowledge with you, dear reader.

Let it change the way you walk through the woods or tend to a single pot on your windowsill.

We are all, in our own way, trying to find our way back to the garden, back to that state of wonder where we were still capable of being taught by the world.

We are trying to remember who we were before the noise became deafening.

So, let us carry this forward.

Let us be more intentional with our observations, more patient with our own internal seasons, and more willing to listen to the whispers of the green things that surround us.

The shadows of our past will always be there, but they are not the end of the story.

Like the garden in spring, we are always capable of breaking through the surface to seek the light once more.

I am glad you have joined me on this journey, curious mind, and I look forward to what we shall uncover next.

Your presence here is what I value above all else, so please know that any donation is entirely unnecessary.

If you do choose to contribute, every penny will go directly toward the procurement of more old literature, allowing us to keep unearthing these forgotten texts together.

The sun sets on the pages we have just turned, and it is clear that our daily encounters are never accidental.

Each plant serves as a mirror for our own inner landscape, curious mind.

We are reclaiming a lost language of the earth, one that our ancestors understood as naturally as breathing.

Thank you, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

These ideas are not my own; they are thoughts that drift into the mind, unbidden guests that do not belong to me.

Allow me to elaborate, curious mind, so that you might better grasp the nature of this process.

Often, you are visited by thoughts entirely detached from your immediate surroundings or the mundane events of your daily life.

Listen to those infrequent, sudden arrivals.

It is from these fleeting moments that my work is born.

I cannot claim their source, whether it be the collective consciousness or something far more profound.

Often, it is just a name or a fragment of language, vanishing as swiftly as it appears, yet it is through these whispers that I find my path.

There is a facet of my life I hold apart from the common man:

I seek silence

It is not an exile from the world, but rather that the quiet hours spent within my own home provide a rare, resonant environment in which one might truly hear oneself.

Today’s lesson arrived in this very fashion, and I must confess, I was struck to find the Ark of the Covenant as my singular waking thought.

What we shall peruse together this evening are some truly remarkable documents.

Once restricted to the eyes of the initiated, these files contain information most curious; a startling contrast to the curated narrative of our modern era.

Without further delay, and with little more of my own rambling, we shall begin.

Executive Summary 20-24 May 2002 📁

For our first piece of evidence, dear reader, we look to a CIA Information Review & Release (IRR) executive summary, cataloged under reference C05578085.

To understand why this document draws our attention, we must consider the nature of the object it references.

The Ark of the Covenant is far more than a sacred relic; it has long been whispered to be a formidable energy generator; an ancient, sophisticated technology capable of channeling power, a power that defies our current understanding of physics.

It is the kind of object that, if brought into the light of the modern day, would do more than fill a glass case; it would validate the biblical timeline as absolute historical fact, effectively unraveling the rigid, secular tapestry we are told to accept as reality.

What we see in this file is the Agency’s response to a formal request from Catholics Allied for the Faith, Inc., who petitioned for records regarding the possibility of the Ark being located in Ethiopia.

The official response remains as cold and hollow as the corridors of the bureaucracy itself:

a search was conducted, and no responsive records were located

It is a striking realisation, dear reader, to witness how the state brushes aside such profound inquiries with the same clinical indifference it applies to the most mundane administrative tasks.

They process the search for the divine as if it were a simple matter of paperwork, filing away the quest for our greatest heritage into the void of no records found.

C05955966 📁

For our next piece of evidence, curious mind, we turn to a subsequent communication from the Central Intelligence Agency, officially cataloged under reference F-2013-00605.

If our previous document offered a brief administrative dismissal, this letter represents a further narrowing of the official narrative. Dr. M. Rothmiller, acting with a level of ambition that the Agency rarely encounters, did not just seek the Ark; he expanded the scope of inquiry to include the Holy Grail and the physical remains of Jesus Christ.

It is an extraordinary request, dear reader, one that probes the absolute foundations of our spiritual and historical reality.

Yet, the Agency’s response is a masterclass in bureaucratic deflection.

They invoke the limitations of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), stating that federal agencies are not required to answer questions posed as requests, but only to provide existing records.

By searching their database for these specific, monumental terms and returning a result of no documents located, the Agency effectively maintains a stance of total ignorance.

What makes this even more telling, dear reader, is the final maneuver of the letter:

the redirection

When confronted with a question regarding imagery of the Mt. Ararat area in Turkey, the CIA pivots, informing the requester that such imagery falls under the purview of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

They claim they are not authorised to release records belonging to other agencies, neatly passing the burden of inquiry into yet another darkened room of the government labyrinth.

It leaves us with a provocative question:

is this just the standard operation of an unfeeling machine, or is it a calculated displacement designed to ensure that the search for such transformative knowledge never reaches a destination?

CIA-RDP86T01 📁

For our final piece of evidence, dear reader, we turn to a document that offers an extraordinary, cold-eyed analysis of one of the world's most volatile sites:

the Temple Mount in Jerusalem

Documented as GIM 86-20039 on the file, and CIA-RDP86T01017R000100380001-8 in the modern archive.

I must urge you, dear reader, to explore the entirety of this document for yourself; there is a wealth of curious detail woven into these pages that extends far beyond what we have covered today.

Each administrative note serves as a silent testament to a reality that exists just beneath the surface of the official record.

Throughout these pages, the Agency maps the intense, competing claims over this sacred ground, acknowledging the historical weight of the site where Solomon once built a temple to house the Ark of the Covenant.

The document details the profound tension that persists, noting that some religious groups are actively preparing for a time when a new temple is built, with one group, the Ateret Cohanim, dedicated to training priests for that very eventuality.

What makes this so compelling, dear reader, is how this intelligence report treats the biblical narrative, not as myth, but as the foundational blueprint for modern geopolitical instability.

The report maps how the belief that the Ark was once stored in the Holy of Holies continues to dictate the policies and the extremist actions of our modern age.

When you read through the full record, consider the dissonance between the sterile, Approved for Release classification and the explosive nature of the ground it describes.

It becomes clear that, in the eyes of the state, the quest for the holy, and the potential return of its lost technologies, is treated not as a matter of faith, but as a dangerous variable to be managed in a volatile, closed system.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, what we have learned in this lesson has brought forth quite the revelation, and we must reflect upon it.

We have spent our time pulling apart the seams of these files, finding that what they present as a sterile, orderly record is a carefully constructed screen.

The reality is that these agencies operate as gatekeepers, and the documents they release are not there to educate, but to maintain a rigid perimeter around our collective understanding of history.

When they claim that inquiries regarding the Ark of the Covenant yield no results, it is a deliberate, systematic rejection of the facts.

They are not misplacing information; they are isolating it.

This becomes strikingly clear when you look at how they handle the Temple Mount, curious mind.

They treat the site as a live, unstable variable because they understand that the biblical timeline they seek to suppress is a constant threat to their stability.

By shifting these inquiries between different offices and departments, they create a bureaucratic loop that serves only one purpose:

to ensure that the truth never reaches the light of day

This is a game of containment, and every single one of their denials is a confession of exactly what they are protecting.

Do not be fooled by the emptiness of these records.

The absence of information is not a sign that nothing happened, but a sign that what happened is too dangerous to share.

Once you stop viewing these archives as a source of truth and start recognising them as a defensive wall, the entire weight of their official narrative collapses under its own contradictions.

The evidence exists, and the effort they expend to keep it hidden is proof that we are on the right track.

Read the full document through the link, and you will see the patterns for yourself; the truth is being held under lock and key, but the seams are starting to show.

Your presence here, curious mind, is what matters most; it is the vital component in this pursuit, and it is valued above all else.

A donation is never expected, though any support provided goes directly toward the procurement of historic literature and the access fee required to view certain archives.

Thank you, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

The pain was immediate upon waking, yet I chose to cycle to work, finding it a more tolerable endeavor than the simple act of walking.

Upon my arrival, my manager insisted I seek medical attention immediately, leaving me with little choice but to head to the hospital.

At the urgent care center, the prognosis was physical therapy, with the looming possibility of a syringe to drain the joint.

You may be wondering what this has to do with herbs, dear reader, or perhaps you already suspect the path I chose.

Upon returning home, I went straight to my library for a trusted companion:

The Model Botanic Guide to Health

This volume has never failed me; while my use of it has been sparing, its success with minor ailments is absolute.

Drawing from its pages, I fashioned my own herbal salve using olive oil, cayenne pepper powder, ginger juice, and raw honey.

These natural components were blended thoroughly in a shot glass with a wooden pick.

I applied this mixture to my knee every thirty minutes, curious mind, and the results speak for themselves.

As you can see, dear reader, the swelling has reduced drastically.

The pain has all but vanished, surfacing only when I apply direct pressure to the joint.

No therapy, no pills, no syringes, no injections, and most crucially, no bill.

These ingredients were already at hand, sparing me even a trip to the store.

I healed myself at home with things you likely have in your own cupboard, dear reader.

Does this make me a doctor?

NO, curious mind.

It makes me an open-minded man willing to engage with what many dismiss as folklore.

I read the books others discard and procure the volumes others overlook.

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and now, I offer that treasure to you.

This lesson mirrors our journey last month, dear reader, where we combed through the pages of the aforementioned book to compile a list of herbs and their virtues.

Indexing the Properties of Herbs 📝

Tonight, however, we turn to a fresh volume, made possible by your donations, dear reader.

What follows is a list of herbal preparations, their purposes, and the methods for their creation.

Let yourself become the doctor, curious mind; your independence depends on your ability to maintain your own health.

Important note:

Some of these formulations contain substances that are classed as toxic today.

Before we delve into the specific remedies, dear reader, I must introduce the volume from which they are drawn:

Culpeper’s Complete Herbal, and English Physician

Printed in Manchester in 1820, this work is far more than a simple guide to plants.

It is a comprehensive system of physic, detailing hundreds of herbs alongside their medicinal and occult properties, and providing the necessary rules for compounding your own medicines.

As Dr. Johnson once noted, Culpeper was a man who ranged the woods and climbed the mountains in search of these salutary herbs, and he has undoubtedly merited the gratitude of posterity for doing so.

It is a treasure of forgotten wisdom, curious mind, and tonight we are fortunate enough to gaze over its pages together.

How to make Eye‑Water

Take 140 millilitres of Lisbon wine and 28 grams of lapis calaminaris powder. Place them together in a bottle and shake well. Dip a clean rag in this mixture and apply it to your eyes. It will quickly heal and strengthen weak and sore eyes.

How to make salve for all Wounds

Take 450 grams of hog’s lard, 85 grams of white lead, 85 grams of beeswax, 55 grams of black rosin, and 115 grams of common turpentine. Place all these ingredients together in a pan and boil gently for three quarters of an hour. Remove from heat and give it one final gentle boil before it is fully finished.

This salve is excellent for burns, old sores, and ulcers, as it first draws out infection then heals the area afterwards. It is suitable for all wounds and should always be kept ready in your home.

The essential uses of the Oil of Caraways

This oil is effective against plague, poison, and melancholy. It eases difficulty passing urine, jaundice, and fluid retention. It breaks down stones in the body, stops loose stools, expels wind, and comforts the internal organs. It clears obstructions in the liver, spleen, and lungs, eases tightness of the chest, and helps those suffering from asthma. It restores appetite, and is good for all ailments affecting the head or nerves, including colds, dizziness, catarrh, and migraine.

It lifts the spirits and clears confused thoughts. It cleanses the blood, eases toothache, and relieves all kinds of pain. It has a pleasant taste and many virtues that cannot be fully described here. Use 10 to 15 drops at a time, mixed with almond oil or another suitable carrier oil.

The Oil of Juniper‑Berries

If I were to explain how these valuable oils are prepared, it would be of little use to you unless you understand the work of a chemist. It is enough to describe their virtues and tell you where they may be obtained.

This oil expels wind from the body, clears stones and gravel, eases pain in the lower back, and treats gonorrhea, jaundice, fluid retention, gout, and colic. It opens obstructions in the liver, spleen, gall bladder, and lungs, and heals ulcers and tumours in these areas. It also treats conditions of the head including dizziness, migraine, and convulsions. It promotes sweating and protects against plague and poison.

You may use it both internally and externally, at the same dose as oil of caraways.

The Oil of Rosemary

It shares all the benefits of oils made from cinnamon, nutmeg, caraway, and juniper berries. Beyond these, it is far more powerful at clearing obstructions, strengthening memory, fortifying the heart, resisting poison, and curing all types of fever.

It also strengthens the eyesight, and can restore it if it has been lost. Use 10 to 15 drops at a time, in the same way as the oil of caraways.

A Remedy for a Loading and Stuffing at the Stomach, causing loss of Appetite

Take 2 grams of calomel, 0.6 grams of extract of catechu, and 0.9 grams of jalap powder. Form these into four pills.

Take one pill at night. If you cannot prepare this yourself, a pharmacist may make it up for you.

A Remedy for cold Aches and Pains in the Bones, Limbs, or Joints, caused by Rheumatism, Gout, or Injury

Take 28 grams of friar’s balsam, 28 millilitres of tincture of myrrh, 55 millilitres of spirits of turpentine, and 85 grams of dried squill bulb. Mix all ingredients thoroughly.

Bathe the affected part of the body with this mixture.

A Remedy for a Strain or similar injury

Take equal parts oil of swallows, oil of juniper, and oil of turpentine. Mix them well together and rub into the injured area.

Remedy for the Asthma and shortness of Breath

Take 170 millilitres of milk of ammoniacum, 115 millilitres of syrup of squills, and 115 millilitres of water. Mix all ingredients together. This mixture promotes the clearing of mucus and relieves shortness of breath.

It is highly valued for treating asthma, as it thins sticky fluids in the lungs.

Take one teaspoon four or five times each day, especially first thing in the morning.

An Essence for the Head-Ache

Headaches may arise from vapours rising from the stomach, and these require treatment of the root cause.

For common headaches, take 1.1 litres of French brandy or rectified spirit of wine and place it in a strong bottle. Add 28 millilitres of lemon essence, 7 grams of camphor, and 56 millilitres of strong solution of sal ammoniac. Seal the bottle tightly and shake three or four times each day for one week.

To use, rub a small amount onto your hand and press firmly against the painful area. If relief does not come quickly, repeat as needed.

Compound Tincture of Senna, commonly called Duffy’s Elixir

Take 55 millilitres of strong senna tincture, 28 millilitres of jalap tincture, 14 grams of coriander seeds, and 14 grams of cream of tartar. Add 1.7 litres of good brandy. Mix all ingredients and leave to steep for ten to twelve days.

Strain through a fine cloth and bottle for use.

This is a gentle laxative, and it is wise to keep a supply ready for household use.

Godfrey’s Cordial

Take 3.2 litres of water, 450 grams of sassafras shavings, 450 grams of aniseed, 225 grams of caraway seeds, 70 grams of opium, and 680 grams of coarse sugar. Boil all ingredients together until half the liquid has evaporated. Strain through a coarse cloth, then add another 1.4 litres of rectified spirit of wine.

You may make smaller or larger batches by adjusting these quantities proportionally.

Stoughton’s Bitters

Take 55 grams of dried gentian root, and prepare according to standard methods for herbal bitters. Take 70 grams of orange peel, 3 grams of cochineal powder, 2 grams of salt of tartar, and 900 millilitres of proof spirit or brandy.

Let the mixture stand for ten to twelve days, then decant the clear liquid for use.

Friar’s Balsam, commonly called Turlington’s Balsam of Life

Take 35 grams of gum benjamin, 225 grams of gum storax, 85 grams of balsam of Tolu or Peru, 55 grams of socotrine aloes, and 2.3 litres of proof spirit or brandy.

Let the mixture stand for twelve to fourteen days, then strain and bottle for use.

Pills for Giddiness, Palsy, Head-Ache, and similar conditions

Take 3 grams of levigated cinnabar, 3 grams of gum arabic, 15 drops of marjoram oil, 15 drops of balsam of Peru, and enough syrup of peony to form a mass.

Divide this into nine pills.

Take three pills each day.

Remedy for Hooping or Chin-Cough

Take 35 grams of fine gum benjamin, 35 grams of strained opium, 1.5 grams of camphor, 1.5 grams of aniseed oil, 1.1 litres of rectified wine spirit, 55 grams of powdered liquorice, and 115 grams of honey.

Mix all ingredients, leave to infuse, then strain to form the elixir.

Another Remedy for the same condition

Take 170 millilitres of musk julep, 28 millilitres of paregoric elixir, 28 millilitres of volatile valerian tincture, and 1.5 grams of cinnamon oil. Mix well.

Take two spoonfuls three or four times each day.

Take 170 millilitres of milk of ammoniacum, 55 grams of gum ammoniac, 55 grams of castor oil, 1.5 grams of balsam oil, and enough syrup to combine.

Mix thoroughly, and take one spoonful as needed.

Towards the later stages of the illness, a strong decoction of bark may be given in full doses with good effect.

These medicines may also be used successfully for any other old, dry, persistent cough.

How to cure Warts 🤨

Go into the fields and find a black snail. Rub the snail over the wart nine times in one direction, then nine times in the opposite direction. After this, impale the snail on a black thorn. It is also said that using a black snail found in cornfields works well. Rub the snail over the wart as before, then bury the snail in the earth when finished.

For warts known as blood warts, take a piece of raw beef that has never been salted, and rub it over the wart in the same way you used the snail. Bury the beef in the earth afterwards.

For the falling down of the Almonds of the Ears

Mix a little powdered sal ammoniac with Venice turpentine. Spread this mixture onto a piece of sheepskin large enough to cover the area, and apply it from the throat to the ear.

A Remedy for St. Anthony’s Fire

Take a standard gentle purgative first, then apply melted mutton suet to the affected area.

For an Ague

Make a decoction of camomile and sweeten it with treacle. Drink this while warm, stay in bed, and keep warm for two hours.

A Cure for an Asthma or Shortness of Breath

Take 1.1 litres of brandy or strong spirit, 28 grams of bruised aniseeds, 28 grams of sliced liquorice, and 450 grams of stoned raisins. Seal all ingredients in a jar and leave to infuse for ten days.

Strain the liquid into a bottle, and add honey to taste if desired.

Add two spoonfuls of fine sugar to the above mixture, and store it ready for use.

For a Bruise or Scald outwardly

Take 900 millilitres of neat’s-foot oil, 450 grams of red lead, 55 grams of beeswax, and 115 grams of oil of elder.

Boil all these ingredients together for three hours, stirring all the while.

Add the oil of elder last, then let the mixture cool. Apply to the affected part.

A Cure for a Bruise inwardly

Drink a strong decoction of comfrey, taken with bread and butter.

A Cure for the Piles or Sores

Eat rosemary and sage with bread and butter, and apply wheat flour and oil by way of a plaster.

For a Cancer in the Mouth or a sore Mouth

Take juice of plantain and rose water, mix them in equal measure, and rinse your mouth frequently.

If your gums are sore, take equal parts gum arabic, rochelle salt, and honey. Mix them well together, then rub this mixture onto your gums.

Let the excess run out of your mouth.

For the Scurvy in the Gums

Make sage tea, and dissolve a little alum in it. Dip a cloth in this liquid and rub your gums.

If you wish to whiten your teeth, mix a little burnt alum with six spoonfuls of honey and two spoonfuls of juice of celandine, then rub this mixture onto your teeth.

For Heartburn

Take salts of tartar dissolved in a little water.

You may add an equal amount of magnesia if you wish.

For the Black Jaundice

Take a handful of long leaves that grow on artichoke stalks. Bruise them and place them in a pot with 850 millilitres of ale.

Cover the pot and set it in a warm place for twelve hours. Strain the liquid, add 28 millilitres of white wine, and take this each morning on an empty stomach for nine days.

Tie a piece of saffron to a small cloth bag and place it in the pot alongside the leaves.

How to cure the Yellow Jaundice without Medicine

Take the patient’s first urine of the day and place it in a bottle.

Add a piece of saffron, tie the bottle in fine linen, and set it in the bottommost part of the patient’s bed.

The patient must drink neither milk nor malt liquor for one month.

This remedy has been proven effective many times.

How to help those whose monthly courses are stopped

Take 55 grams of grains of paradise, 28 grams of long pepper, 28 grams of steel filings, and enough honey to combine.

Take a pea-sized amount each night and morning, or drink a glass of decoction of garden rue, wormwood, and horehound for several days.

How to remove small red Pimples from the Face

Take 55 millilitres of lemon juice, 55 millilitres of rose water, and 3 grams of mercury.

Mix these into an ointment and apply to the face each night before bed.

In the morning, rub fresh butter over the area, then wipe it clean.

Apply the same mixture at bedtime, and in the morning rub your face with fresh butter before wiping it clean.

How to make Balsam of Life

Take 28 grams of gum benjamin, 28 grams of strained storax, 28 grams of balsam of Peru, 28 grams of balsam of Tolu, 28 grams of myrrh, 28 grams of elecampane root, 28 grams of St John’s wort flowers, and 4 grams of socotrine aloes.

Place all these in a jar of brandy.

Set the jar near a fire for one week, shaking it once each day until the gums dissolve. Strain and bottle for use.

This is a good remedy for many illnesses and strengthens the whole body.

How to kill Worms in the Body

Take half a glass of brandy and add as much fine sulphur as will lie on a shilling. Mix well.

Burn a piece of bread crust until it is black, chew it for five minutes, then swallow it.

Take the brandy mixture immediately afterwards, and repeat early the next morning.

A Remedy for Consumption, if taken in time

Take one handful of horehound and the same amount of garden rue. Add 900 grams of coarse sugar and 1.1 litres of water.

Boil all together until reduced to one quarter of the original volume.

Take three large spoonfuls each morning on an empty stomach.

An excellent Remedy for a Burn or Scald

Mix levigated calamine with fresh snow water and shake well.

This draws heat out of burns effectively.

You may prepare enough to last through the winter.

For a Person prone to Constipation

Take cream of tartar mixed with honey, and take this frequently.

How to make excellent Eye-water

Take 450 millilitres of good brandy, 450 millilitres of spring water, and 28 grams of sugar of lead.

Mix all ingredients together.

How to stop Bleeding from any Wound

Take powdered gum dragon, powdered bole ammoniac, and dragon’s blood powder.

Mix these with brandy, then apply the mixture to the wound with soft linen.

Scotch Pills

Take 55 grams of hepatic aloes and dissolve in a little warm water.

Add a spoonful of honey and cook gently until thickened.

Form into pills, with or without liquorice powder.

Emetic Tartar Vomit

Take 1 gram of emetic tartar and dissolve in 450 millilitres of hot water. Stir well.

When cool enough to drink, take two spoonfuls every fifteen minutes until vomiting begins.

Do not take more than four doses.

After vomiting ceases, drink a cup of weak gruel or camomile tea. For children, use half this amount.

One teaspoon of emetic tartar dissolved in warm water is sufficient for children, adjusted according to age and strength.

This amount is suitable for adults.

It is harmful practice to drink strong liquids after taking this vomit, as it may cause lasting damage to the stomach.

Emetic tartar works gently when prepared correctly. If it acts too strongly, drink more brandy and water, and eat a raw onion.

The best time to take this vomit is on an empty stomach in the morning, or at eleven o’clock, or in the evening.

Those prone to constipation should first use a gentle laxative or clyster.

For consumption, dysentery, and similar conditions, this is the best remedy known.

It is also effective for treating fevers, heaviness, and pain.

When prepared properly, it is one of the safest medicines available.

An excellent Eye-water

Take 14 grams of zinc flowers and 14 grams of white copperas, and 450 millilitres of water. Mix well.

This eases inflammation of the eyes, both internal and external.

If it stings too much, add a little more water.

An excellent Remedy for the Stone or Gravel and stopping of Urine

Take 28 millilitres of sweet spirit of nitre, 2 millilitres of laudanum, and 14 millilitres of juniper oil. Add one teaspoon to a cup of linseed tea with honey.

This remedy has helped many people restore health after long-term illness.

It works by clearing blockages and strengthening the body’s natural functions.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, a long list of some very intriguing remedies; a list we shall now reflect on.

What we have traversed tonight is more than archaic instruction; it is a testament to an era when the physician’s craft was tethered to the natural order rather than a balance sheet.

We live in an age where health has been distilled into a transactional business, a clinical theater where the body is viewed as a machine to be serviced by technicians rather than a vessel to be understood by the self.

Modern medicine excels at the acute and the surgical, yet it has systematically severed the roots of our ancestral autonomy.

Think of what has been stripped away:

the simple, profound reliance on the sun as a primary light therapy, or the conductivity of materials like copper cups and pipes

These are not just curiosities; they represent a lost frequency of living.

We have traded the rhythmic, seasonal wisdom of the earth for the sterile, predictable confines of a prescription pad.

Even the history of innovation is paved with the forgotten.

One cannot help but contemplate figures like Royal Raymond Rife, whose electromagnetic frequency machines offered a radical vision of healing; an approach that sought to vibrate the body into harmony rather than poisoning it into submission.

It is a revealing truth that such inquiries, which challenge the established industrial paradigm, are so often relegated to the shadows of history.

As you look upon these recipes, you will undoubtedly note that some of the compounds listed are deemed toxic by today’s rigid standards.

Yet, there remains a lingering curiosity:

is it possible that in the precise, ancient methods of preparation, what we label as poison might, in the right hands, act as a catalyst for restoration?

It is a dangerous, fascinating thought, a testament to a time when humans were not afraid of the fire, but rather understood how to control it.

I am not advocating for the ingestion of mercury, dear reader, nor am I courting disaster; I am simply observing that the line between remedy and harm is far more porous than the modern world would have us believe.

The true treasure of this compendium, curious mind, is not just the oil or the elixir.

It is the realisation that your sovereignty over your own physical being is the most precious commodity you possess.

To heal yourself is an act of defiance.

It is a rejection of the system that profits from your dependence and a reclaiming of the inherent right to be whole.

Keep your books, study the discarded, and never forget that one of the most radical things you can do is to remain in control of your own health.

Before I conclude, a final word on our work together.

Please know that financial support is never a requirement for your continued presence here, dear reader.

Your engagement and curiosity are, and always will be, valued above all else.

Should you choose to contribute, however, understand that every donation goes directly toward the procurement of the historic literature, like the ones we have been perusing together recently.

With gratitude and grace in my heart, thank you, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

Though I was baptised at two, do not mistake that for faith; as the truth is quite the contrary.

My mother holds no belief in the divine, and my father has never voiced his conviction in my life.

I wonder if my baptism was a guise; a prerequisite in order to secure a seat at the local school.

We inherit our ideologies like heirlooms we never asked for, expected to mirror the beliefs of our kin and live our lives through the borrowed opinions of others.

It is a hollow sacrifice for something that, in practice, means nothing.

Religion dictates that the almighty is confined to a building; a church, a mosque, a synagogue.

Preposterous it is, dear reader, to assume that the creator of this realm is only accessible within the stone monuments of man.

We are imbued with that same essence, curious mind, there is no need for a structure to commune with the Almighty when you can speak in the quiet of your mind.

Your body is the temple, not a pile of stone.

As we arrive at the holy trinity of religions:

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

We shall reflect on them lightly.

Judaism came first; Christianity was a reformation of the Torah; and six hundred years later, Islam arrived, retooling those same structures for the Quran.

In reality, curious mind, these are not three distinct paths; they are the same game.

Think of Monopoly; different editions, different aesthetics, but the same mechanics.

Or look at our modern political theater:

the Left and the Right, the Liberals and the Democrats, the Labour and the Tory

They speak different languages, but the outcome is always identical.

If the result wasn’t fixed, why are we sold promises before every election, promises that disintegrate the moment the victors take office?

Donald Trump campaigned on releasing the Epstein files, only to claim they didn’t exist once he held the keys.

In Britain, over 2,500 people have died in the last two years because they could not afford to heat their homes.

Meanwhile, over 300,000 are homeless, including veterans, men and women who sacrificed everything under the banner of Queen and Country, only to return to an inheritance of being forgotten.

We will leave the preamble there, curious mind, and move into the history that explains how we arrived at this state of managed confusion.

The history detailed in these pages, dear reader, exposes the exact mechanics of the game we have been discussing.

It is not a tale of divine progress; it is a clinical demonstration of how power shifts, how the editions of the Monopoly are swapped, and how the masses are weaponised to serve the interests of the elite.

The text begins by detailing a period of relative prosperity for the Jews under the munificent Caliphs of the East, yet this ardour was a precarious position, ultimately acting as a catalyst for future tragedy.

Babylonian lords, driven by envy of the state and splendour of the Princes of the Captivity, fabricated a fear that Jewish leadership might usurp their own power.

The Sultan Gela le Doulat did not act out of necessity; he acted to consolidate control by destroying seats of learning and forcing doctors into exile, reducing an entire nation to a handful of men.

This demonstrates the same pattern seen today:

when a group gains too much cultural or intellectual capital, the machinery of the state is weaponised to dismantle them

The power of the Caliphs was fleeting, and soon replaced by the rapid advance of the Turkish hordes who swept from the deserts of Tartary across Western Asia; an inclusion that is as intriguing as it is jarring.

To find a direct reference to Tartary in a chronicle on religious history is to acknowledge that the forces moving through this era were not confined to the narrow, sanitised borders we are often sold.

It suggests an underlying, sprawling reality behind the events that the standard narrative desperately wants to leave in the shadows.

The Kings clothes change, but the impact on the populace remains identical.

The expansion of these new rulers brought an intolerable tax, a system where the poor were exploited while the wealthy could continue their pious pursuits.

This created the environment for a new kind of institutional exploitation:

the Crusade

The narrative shifts to the arrival of Peter the Hermit, who channelled the grievances of pilgrims into a larger, more destructive objective.

Peter the Hermit used the genuine suffering of travellers to arouse Europe to a common revenge, effectively rebranding the political ambition of the Papacy as a holy mission.

Pope Urban II took this indignation and codified it at the Council of Clermont, offering plenary indulgence, the remission of all sins, to anyone who would join the crusade.

The result was an insane enterprise where prince and peasant, noble and serf, joined in the overwhelming enthusiasm to march under the banner of the cross.

The text highlights a chilling detail:

a secondary, even more undisciplined force, led by a man named Godeschal, followed the example of Peter

This force was so detached from reality that their leaders were a goose and a goat, which the credulous mob believed to be inspired.

This is the ultimate indictment of the game.

Whether it is the Caliphs, the Turkish hordes, or the Crusading zealots of the West, the architecture is the same.

They rely on the same credulous mob to fight for ideologies that, at their core, serve only to maintain the status quo of those holding the keys.

These are not historical accidents; they are the predictable, recurring machinery of managed confusion.

As we continue, dear reader, the account of these massacres unfolds with a grim, and clinical precision; noting how the fervour originally intended for Jerusalem was redirected toward the enemies nearer home.

These mobs were led by self-elected figures who convinced them that purging Christendom of the descendants of those who crucified Jesus was a prerequisite for their holy mission.

This manufactured directive turned religious enthusiasm into a localised wave of carnage, mirroring how contemporary state apparatuses often incite polarised segments of the population to strike at domestic targets before shifting their focus to broader, state-sanctioned objectives.

It seems clear that financial desperation acted as the engine beneath this religious mask, curious mind.

As unsparing creditors to a legion of needy debtors, the Jewish population became a target for those coveting their rumored wealth, illustrating a blueprint that remains active today:

the weaponisation of economic resentment against specific classes to justify the seizure of their influence and assets

When the violence reached cities like Cologne, Mentz, and Trèves, the authorities, excluding the rare, isolated exception from the Bishop of Spires, remained largely complicit or indifferent, leaving the victims to face a total collapse of protection.

The sheer horror in Trèves, dear reader, where mothers are said to have killed their own children to spare them from the invaders; stands as a stark testament to the reality of what happens when a community is abandoned by those entrusted with their safety.

This cyclical violence served a functional purpose for the elite, operating as a recurring apparatus of managed confusion.

By the time of the Second Crusade, the pattern was solidified; the monk Rudolph whipped the masses into a frenzy with the cry of Hep! hep! (Jerusalem Destroyed) while the nobility and clergy remained entangled in debt to the very people they sanctioned for slaughter.

This pound of flesh was ultimately resolved through the erasure of the creditor.

Despite the performative objections of figures like Bernard of Clairvaux, the system ensured the destruction of the victims to settle the ledger, much like how modern agitators are encouraged to dismantle the foundations of their own society without realising they are the disposable fuel for a status quo that will eventually consume them as well.

And now the narrative deepens, dear reader, as we confront the reality of how these cycles of managed confusion were imposed upon the soil of England and beyond.

What we see here is not just a record of religious intolerance, but a masterclass in the engineering of social and economic predation.

The initial conditions were simple, yet insidious.

In early England, the presence of the Hebrew race was minimal, and they lived largely in peace alongside the Saxon population.

This harmony, however, was an obstacle to the centralisation of power, which required the manufacturing of external and internal threats to maintain control.

Figures like the Archbishop of York, Egbrich, became the architects of this discord, promulgating the doctrine that the very presence of this community was contaminating, and using archiepiscopal bulls to enforce segregation even in rural regions where these people had never even been seen.

It is a stark reminder that the machinery of hatred does not require actual interaction to function; it only requires a manufactured narrative and a fearful, credulous populace.

The transition to the Norman era reveals the next stage of the game:

the monarch as the ultimate beneficiary of this engineered alienation

William the Conqueror and his successors, notably William Rufus, did not extend a hand out of benevolence, but out of a cold, extractive calculus.

They brought these individuals into the kingdom to act as sponges, capable of soaking up the nation’s wealth through commerce and lending; wealth that the crown could then squeeze out into its own coffers whenever it pleased.

The monarch effectively held the persons and property of these individuals as appendages of the crown, granting them a precarious protection only as long as they remained useful.

The escalation of this tragedy, curious mind, followed a predictable, terrifying pattern.

When the Crusades failed, the resulting intensity and economic desperation was redirected inward, fuelled by accusations that painted these sponges as practitioners of sorcery, ritual crimes, and desecration.

These claims served a functional purpose:

they provided the moral cover for the crown to issue edicts annulling all debts owed to these creditors, effectively erasing the state’s own financial obligations through the violent liquidation of the lender

The irony of the holy mission is laid bare when one observes that even when the monarch issued decrees to banish these people and seize their property, the populace was left to suffer the aftermath of these artificial upheavals.

In the end, the system ensured that interest rates were tightly controlled and the practice of lending was restricted to those favored by the king, turning a once-autonomous group into a state-managed industry.

It is the ultimate testament to the game’s endurance:

whether through the thundering anathemas of Rome or the cold, fiscal decrees of the monarchy, the goal remains the same

To incite the masses into a frenzy of destruction, ensuring that the ledger is balanced at the expense of those who can be discarded whenever the crown requires a new source of fuel.

The chronicle of this era seems to be nothing more than a record of how effectively the elite can weaponise human desperation, dear reader.

When the coronation of Richard the Lionheart was turned into a stage for slaughter, it wasn't a sudden, chaotic explosion of passion; it was a calibrated demonstration of how easily the law can be suspended to suit the interests of the mob and their masters.

The authorities knew exactly what would happen when they baited the crowd, and when the houses of the Jewish population were beset, the civil power stood by, watching the treasury of gold, silver, and pearls flow into the hands of the rabble while the true architects of the misery kept their hands clean.

It is the same game played at York, where the fiery zeal of wandering friars and monks was stoked until the common man felt he was doing the Almighty a favour by burning his neighbour alive.

The governor’s attempt to offer sanctuary was always doomed, because the moment the troops, the very people meant to uphold the law; were infected with that same state-sanctioned madness, the protection of the crown became a death sentence.

Even the historians of the time were in on the act, curious mind, writing their accounts from the safety of their cloisters to frame this mindless butchery as an act of divine mercy, ensuring that no one ever looked closely at who actually benefited when the creditors were removed from the ledger.

These accounts are not just tales of past cruelty; they are a blueprint for how a society is kept in a state of permanent, managed confusion.

It is a brutal, repeating cycle where the elite manufacture the hatred, the mob provides the violence, and the official record provides the justification.

As we saw in the earlier pages, the accusations of sorcery, ritual murder, and the poisoning of wells were never about the actual crimes, which the text admits were often utterly improbable, and even absurd, but were instead the necessary fuel to stir the mob into a frenzy that served the state's fiscal needs.

When those accused tried to appeal to the king or seek sanctuary, they found only a system designed to strip them of their wealth, their dignity, and finally, their lives, proving that the sovereign's protection was just a convenient way to hoard all the spoils before the inevitable purge.

It is a sickening, clinical efficiency, and it explains exactly why the cycle never truly ends; it is not meant to end, it is meant to sustain the very structure that the architects of the game rely on to remain in power.

The outrage expressed over the unavenged slaughter of the Jews, dear reader, was, in truth, an outrage born only of the Crown's lost revenue.

Because all debts owed to the Jews became the property of the Crown upon their deaths, the destruction of the bond records meant that the wealth those debts represented had vanished into the fire along with their holders.

Richard’s subsequent investigation, which stripped local officials of their commissions for failing to protect this property, made it clear that the royal exchequer viewed these subjects not as human beings, but as aspects of the state, to be preserved only as long as they remained profitable.

This cycle of state-managed predation, curious mind, where monarchs exploited this mine of wealth to replenish the treasury, reached its zenith under King John.

John initially affected great lenity and encouraged their immigration into his dominions, acting as a benefactor only until they had settled and grown confident in the royal faith.

By 1210, he stripped away all such pretense, declaring all their property forfeited and ordering the imprisonment of every individual, regardless of age, sex, or condition, to wring out their hidden fortunes through state-sanctioned cruelty.

The King’s ingenious brutality is perfectly illustrated by the case of a wealthy man in Bristol, who was seized and thrown into prison.

When he pleaded an inability to pay the astronomical sum demanded, the King ordered that one of his teeth be drawn every day until he produced the cash.

After seven days of this torture, the man’s resolution finally gave way, and he paid the fortune to buy his freedom and save his remaining teeth.

This success emboldened the unprincipled monarch to repeat the horror on a wider scale, demonstrating that the Crown did not need the frenzied violence of the mob when it could simply use the cold machinery of the state to torture the wealth out of its captives directly.

It was a relentless cycle:

the sovereign protected them only to fatten them up for the next extraction, ensuring that whenever the treasury ran dry, there was always a fresh victim ready to be broken

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, a long and detailed lesson this evening, one we will now reflect on.

What we have traced this evening is the trajectory of power from the frantic, bloody chaos of the mob to the cold, calculated efficiency of the sovereign’s exchequer, and in doing so, we have laid bare the architecture of a machine that has never truly ceased its operation.

History is often presented as a series of moral progressions, a steady climb toward enlightenment, yet the ledger of the Middle Ages reveals a far more cynical truth:

that the state’s primary interest in its people has always been as an instrument of extraction, a resource to be cultivated, harvested, and discarded at the whim of the treasury

This mechanism, the systematic fattening of the populace only to facilitate their eventual plucking, is not a relic of a bygone, barbaric era, but the blueprint for the modern world.

We see today the same subtle dance:

the state provides the appearance of stability, the illusion of protection, and the promise of legal standing, all while engineering complex systems of taxation and regulation that ensure the surplus value of the individual is always redirected toward the centre

The cruelty of King John, who saw no distinction between a man’s life and his coin, has just been refined, abstracted, and sanitised by modern bureaucracy, yet the intent remains identical.

It is a system that thrives on the dependency of the governed, ensuring they are wealthy enough to be exploited but sufficiently vulnerable to be broken whenever the state finds its own coffers in need of replenishment.

When we look at the history of these persecutions, we are not looking at the plight of a specific people, but at the universal condition of the subject under the thumb of absolute power.

The lesson is stark:

safety, under the gaze of such a sovereign, is never a right, but a temporary reprieve bought with compliance and capital

We live in a society that mirrors this dynamic, where the structures of authority, masked by the rhetoric of public interest or national necessity, function primarily to insulate themselves from the consequences of their own gluttony, shifting the burden of their failures onto those they claim to protect.

To recognise this is to lose the comfort of believing we are citizens rather than assets, and once the veil is lifted, the realisation that our modern comforts are predicated on the same predatory logic is perhaps the most dangerous knowledge one can possess.

While your support is deeply appreciated, it is never expected; your presence and engagement are valued far above any material contribution.

Should you feel inclined to offer assistance, those funds are dedicated entirely to the acquisition and preservation of rare, historical texts; such as the one we have viewed together this evening.

Thank you, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

What is left to fight for, dear reader?

Everything

Is life itself not sufficient cause?

The cadence of a child’s laughter, the golden weight of sunlight upon the skin, the melodies of birdsong and the rhythmic pulse of the sea; are these not some of the very things a soul should stake its existence upon?

When you press a seed into the soil and watch the miracle of green life break through, do you feel the pulse of a truth that no machine can replicate?

We stand upon a shifting precipice, curious mind.

The world we inhabit is being steadily colonised by structures that hold no reverence for the renewal of man, nor any design for the elevation of our species.

We find ourselves enclosed within invisible, digital ramparts, where the God-given liberty of speech is not just stifled, but actively dismantled.

Even our most basic elements are being commodified, dear reader; vast artificial intelligence data centers siphon the lifeblood of our communities, leaving us to suffer the indignity of mandatory hosepipe bans.

They command us to watch our gardens wither and our cultivated earth turn to dust; all under the cold, unyielding banner of the greater good.

But please, pause, and sit on this question:

Whose greater good?

Does the monolith of metal and plastic near your home serve the people who cherish the land, dear reader?

Was your voice invited into the counsel that decided your community’s fate?

Of course not.

We have been relegated to the position of mere observers, expected to consume the decay without protest.

I do not cast these words from the well of paranoia; I speak from a deep, aching hunger for peace and a future that belongs to our children.

We fight for those who have yet to inherit this world; our children and theirs, so that they might possess a home that sustains them rather than one that consumes them.

When the world asks you why you resist, curious mind, you need not offer a defense.

You need not argue.

You know the truth in the architecture of your own heart.

Think of the instinctive grace of holding a door for a stranger or reaching for an object a fellow traveller cannot reach.

Consider the visceral, suffocating weight of the dark cloud that settles over the spirit when you betray your own conscience to appease a wrong.

The path becomes clear in the reflection of your own nature.

You may ask why I begin this lesson with such heavy questions, and your curiosity is well-placed.

Today, we turn the pages of a nineteenth-century manuscript, a chronicle of the Jewish people that serves as a harrowing mirror.

It is a dense, complex history, and I warn you; the parallels you will find within these yellowed leaves will strike a familiar, shivering chord.

What is documented here, in the ancient archives of human folly, rings with a resonance that echoes through the streets of our modern nightmare.

Perhaps history was never a straight line, pulling us toward some distant salvation.

Perhaps it is a carousel, and we have simply circled back to the beginning of the storm.

The volume before us, dear reader, resting in its weathered binding, is:

The History of the Jews, From The Christian Era to The Dawn of the Reformation

Penned by Philip Henry Gosse and published in London in 1855.

It did not reach the public through a solitary, independent voice; it was produced under the formal direction of the Committee of General Literature and Education, appointed by The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

To hold this book is to touch a relic of institutional intent; a time when the narrative of history was being curated and disseminated to solidify a specific moral framework.

Gosse’s work, sold at the Depository at Great Queen Street and the Royal Exchange, served as an instructional guide to the past.

Looking at the hand written inscription from a former owner, dated January 28th, 1857, we are reminded that this book once occupied someone’s hands, providing them with the very sense of familiarity that now, over a century and a half later, strikes us with chilling relevance.

I offer my thanks, dear reader, for it is through your contributions to this newsletter; through your generosity, that I was able to secure this copy and bring it into our shared focus.

As we open the cover, we are examining the blueprint of a perspective that sought to define the way to interpret the rise and fall of nations.

We will find, soon, curious mind, that a new question arises:

how much of the curiously familiar problem described was an objective observation of the era, and how much was a narrative construct designed to ensure the reader thought a specific way?

We begin, dear reader, at the Introduction, and Gosse opens by placing the Jewish people on a pedestal of unrivalled interest, anchoring them in a claim of indubitable truth, truth, he says, demands total, uncritical acceptance.

By framing their four-thousand-year history as a continuous, binary struggle, swinging between a pinnacle of moral elevation and an abyss of crime, he creates a high-stakes narrative that leaves no room for the mundane areas of human development.

This, curious mind, is his primary maneuver:

establishing the scale as absolute, ensuring that we are locked into a framework that feels far too heavy to question

He then pulls a sharp bait-and-switch, insisting that this is not just a history of man's actions but a record of God's dealings with man.

This is a clean way to wipe away any political or systemic reality, replacing the messy, human reasons for why empires rise or collapse with an invisible, ever-watching hand.

For those of us looking for the blueprint, this is the first glimpse.

By framing global shifts as divine and fixed, he creates a narrative where human agency is secondary, making it far easier to steer the audience toward a specific, pre-approved moral outcome.

The most potent instruction, dear reader, happens when he commands that we approach this history not with the light of philosophy, but with an humble and teachable spirit.

It is an explicit instruction, dear reader, to leave our critical faculties at the door.

We see this dynamic echoed everywhere today; whenever a modern institution insists that the only correct way to understand a situation is to abandon your own skepticism and adopt their perspective, they are simply utilising the same old playbook.

It is a calculated move to ensure that, no matter what information follows, the reader remains firmly within the authorised guardrails.

The text on these pages, dear reader, moves from the heavy, judgment-filled atmosphere of the previous into a specific theological framework.

Gosse uses the parables of the vineyard to illustrate a pattern:

God establishes a structure, expects a specific fruit of obedience, and when that expectation is unmet, he views the result as a failure that demands a severe response

This is the foundational logic of this historical map.

He frames the selection of a specific lineage not as an open journey, but as a proving of man's obedience under what he defines as the best possible circumstances.

By doing this, he effectively removes the ambiguity of human experience, recasting historical events as a series of tests where the stakes are absolute, and where the only acceptable outcome is total alignment with the prescribed law.

When he writes of the severe school of Egyptian bondage leading to signal deliverance, he is reinforcing a narrative of suffering as a necessary prelude to a covenant.

It is a narrative that demands the reader accept the entire structure; the bondage, the deliverer, and the law, as a singular, inseparable package.

For those of us looking at this as a mirror for our modern reality, this is the moment where the curiously familiar mechanism becomes clear:

it is the art of framing any social or political challenge as a moral test, ensuring that the only correct path forward is the one defined by the architect of the system

Here, dear reader, Gosse deepens his narrative by framing the history of the Jewish people as a supreme probation.

He argues that every possible condition for success was provided, from the dramatic, terrifying manifestation of the Divine at Mount Sinai, designed to secure the utmost certainty in the law, to the promise of material prosperity.

By emphasising these most favourable circumstances, he effectively constructs a trap:

if the people fail, the fault cannot possibly lie with the system or the provider, but must reside entirely in the inherent, miserable nature of man himself

It is here that the modern resonance becomes chilling.

Gosse isn't just recounting ancient history; he is establishing a theological precedent for total accountability where the individual is always wrong and the structure is always justified.

He asks the touching inquiry:

What could have been done more to my vineyard, that I have not done in it?

This is the ultimate rhetorical shield, the same one used by modern institutions today when they demand our compliance while claiming to provide for our greater good.

By rendering the people's failure as absolute, Gosse ensures that any dissent or struggle against his curated framework is framed not as legitimate resistance, but as an indictment of human nature itself.

It leaves us with a stark, unsettling question:

how often are we told that the system is perfect, and that our only duty is to be faithful to it?

The text proceeds, curious mind, and we see the carousel of human failure in full motion, a cycle Gosse uses to flatten the history of the Jewish people into a repetitive, grim march toward ruin.

He characterises their entire existence as a sequence where constant divine intervention is met only with faithlessness and ingratitude, framing this collective as perpetually defined by a structural inability to maintain the mandated order.

By describing their history as a picture full of lights and shadows, he effectively strips away nuance, reducing millennia of Jewish experience to a simplistic, moralised binary of obedience versus inevitable disaster.

Most telling is his assertion that the abominable iniquities of the people left no remedy but their own destruction; a phrasing that presents the collapse of their autonomy as the logical, deserved outcome of their nature.

He is not just recording a history of the Jews; he is instructing his audience to view the behaviour of such groups through a lens of suspicion, where any sign of dissent or failure is cast as the necessary prelude to an evil day brought upon them by their own hand.

This historical framing serves as a cold, instructional blueprint, training the reader to look upon the rise and fall of these people with the detached, analytical gaze of one watching a predictable experiment in moral failure, where the consequences follow directly from their documented actions.

The story deepens, dear reader, outlining what Gosse describes as the worsening state of the Jewish nation, following their return from Babylonian captivity.

Rather than learning from their history, he portrays their moral character as having proceeded from bad to worse.

He notes that while they eventually moved away from open idolatry, they replaced it with a haughty contempt for divine ordinances, characterised by sorcery, adultery, false-swearing, oppression and murder.

Gosse places particular blame on the religious leadership, noting that the priests, who were expected to be fountains of knowledge and examples of holiness, were instead eminently selfish and covetous and led the nation in atheistic hostility to God.

He then transitions to the emergence of specific religious sects, the Sadducees and the Pharisees, to illustrate a fractured, failing society.

The Sadducees are framed as freethinkers who rejected divine authority in favour of unassisted reason, an approach Gosse suggests was embraced by the wealthy and high-born due to its alignment with a sensual and luxurious lifestyle.

Conversely, he describes the Pharisees as creating an interminable succession of heavy burdens through a scrupulous, performative adherence to traditional rites.

He concludes that this religion was just an outside show, where public displays of piety masked the fact that they devoured the inheritance of the widow and the fatherless and were, internally, full of extortion and excess.

For Gosse, these groups were blind leaders of the blind, and he presents their ultimate collapse as an inevitable consequence of such deep-seated hypocrisy and corruption.

The narrative reaches a breaking point as Gosse describes the arrival of the meek and lowly Son of Man.

He paints a picture of the nation as consumed by an insufferable, hollow pride, looking down upon all other nations, the impure Gentiles, as nothing more than dogs and unclean beasts, while they arrogantly clung to their own imagined holiness.

When the Messiah stood before them, they were so blinded by their own bitterness that they could discern no form nor comeliness in Him.

Instead of receiving Him, they turned on Him with the suicidal fury of a maniac, actively choosing to outrage His power and attribute it to Beelzebub.

Gosse makes it clear that this was not just a lapse in judgment but a calculated rejection that made the total, crushing ruin of their city inevitable.

It culminates in what he describes as the crime of crimes, the moment they imbrued [their] hands in the blood of the Son of God, and killed the Prince of Life!.

This was the final, damnable act of a people who had long since abandoned the path of true righteousness.

Even then, he notes a final, lingering reach of mercy, as the disciples were commanded to take their message back to the very place where this horrific deed was done, beginning the work of repentance at Jerusalem.

It is a stark account of a nation that had become so thoroughly corrupted by its own conceit that it was willing to destroy its own salvation in favour of maintaining its bitter, exclusionary grip on power.

The narrative, dear reader, continues to emphasise what the author frames as the irredeemable nature of the Jewish people, even in the face of apostolic efforts.

While the apostles laboured to offer repentance to Israel, the text insists that the nation remained a disobedient and gainsaying people.

It highlights a singular, damning moment of moral corruption:

the account of more than forty men, with the full support of the chief priests and elders, binding themselves under a curse to neither eat nor drink until they had assassinated Paul

Then the text moves into an explicit discussion regarding the prevalence of demoniacal possession during this era.

It is argued that this phenomenon was far more than simple mental illness, characterising it instead as a manifestation of evil spirits and Satan dwelling within the people.

The author posits that just as the personal presence of God was once the chief glory of the nation’s history, the later personal presence of Satan dwelling in manifested power and malignity in the same people serves as the ultimate indictment of their spiritual depravity.

This framing suggests that the nation’s entire trajectory was characterised by a transition from divine favor to a state of being effectively occupied or possessed by malevolent forces.

The text asserts that this was not just a historical curiosity, but a central, horrible trait of that age.

When drawing parallels to modern contexts, such as the actions of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), critics often utilise similar language of the totalising moral decay to describe the suppression of Palestinian populations.

For instance, international observers and human rights organisations have documented systemic practices such as the use of human shields, the widespread destruction of residential neighbourhoods in Gaza, and the reported use of torture and humiliation in detention facilities, which are frequently cited as evidence of a disregard for basic human rights and international law.

In both the ancient narrative provided by the author and in contemporary critiques of state violence, dear reader, the underlying argument is that the institutional machinery, whether priestly authorities or modern military structures, has descended into a state of unrestrained brutality, brutality that systematically dehumanises those it views as enemies, resulting in cycles of violence that are entirely devoid of mercy or moral restraint.

As we draw to the final pages for today, dear reader, the narrative chronicles the final descent of Judea into a state of total structural, and moral collapse following its transition to a formal Roman province.

As Roman authority tightened, the initial friction between the occupying forces and the local population ignited into cycles of violent rebellion and indiscriminate slaughter.

The situation reached a breaking point under the emperor Caligula, whose demand to have a colossal statue of himself erected in the Temple of Jerusalem pushed the Jewish people to the brink of despair, averted only by his timely death.

Beyond this external oppression, the text describes a society cannibalising itself from within.

With the bonds of society effectively dissolved, the country was overrun by bandits and professional assassins who operated with total impunity, even emboldened enough to kill during religious festivals.

This environment of absolute lawlessness turned everyone into a target; citizens lived in a state of perpetual, agonising suspicion, unable to trust neighbors or friends as death could come from anywhere at any time.

This collapse reached into the very heart of the religious establishment.

The priesthood, intended to be the nation’s spiritual anchor, instead splintered into factions that waged their own private civil wars in the streets of Jerusalem.

In a final display of depravity, these chief priests forcibly seized the tithes designated for the inferior priests and Levites, leaving them to starve.

This pervasive chaos and the resulting desperation created the perfect vacuum for a surge of false Christs and impostors to manipulate the suffering populace.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, a rather profound lesson this afternoon; we will now ponder upon the pages we have looked at.

We have traced the destructive descent of a nation that had lost its way, a people who, having been cradled in divine promise, chose instead to embrace the cold shadows of arrogance and the hollow comfort of their own perceived exceptionalism.

We’ve witnessed a pride that grew into blinding, suffocating vice, a pride that looked upon the stranger and the neighbor alike as nothing more than animals.

How tragic it is to witness a heart, once capable of reflecting the infinite, turn inward, until it becomes a tomb of bitterness.

The air in these pages is thick with the scent of ruin, curious mind, the kind that arrives when the sacred is bartered for the profane.

We have watched on as the structures meant to uphold justice and mercy, the temple, the priesthood, the very bonds of society, were dismantled by the insatiable appetite for power, and the cruel logic of the strong devouring the weak.

It is a sorrow that echoes through the corridors of time, a reminder that when we trade our humanity for the security of the dagger, or when we allow the temple of our moral compass to be overrun by the money-changers of greed and hate, we are not just hurting our enemies; we are hurting ourself.

And left wandering we are, in a world we have rendered unrecognisable, governed by the law of the sword and the silence of the dead.

Yet, as the ink dries on this chapter, let not sadness settle into apathy; let it be the kindling for a fire that burns within the marrow of your bones.

Look at this history, the collapse, the pervasive fear when even the high-priest is an assassin, and recognise the terrifying familiarity of the human capacity for cruelty.

It is a mirror held up to our own age, to the towers of iron and the walls of glass that rise while the innocent wail.

We are the stewards of what remains, the guardians of a light that is perpetually threatened by the darkness of our own making.

For the children of tomorrow, for the ones whose eyes are not yet clouded by the cynicism of this broken hour, we must stand.

To be right is not a passive existence; it is an act of courageous, defiant love.

It is the refusal to view any human soul as an unclean beast.

It is the relentless pursuit of a justice that does not serve the high-priest or the emperor, but the broken, the starving, and the forgotten.

Let us go forward from this place, not with heads bowed in sorrow, but with spirits tempered by the tragedy of the past, ready to build a world where the sacred is not just a word, but the very ground upon which we walk, and where the future is not a ruin we leave behind, but a garden we have dared to plant, protect, and cherish with every breath of our lives.

A final note before we depart for the day; while many have asked, please know that donations are never expected.

Your presence here, and the intellectual companionship we share in these readings, is valued above all else.

However, should you feel compelled to contribute, those resources are dedicated exclusively to the procurement of historic volumes like the ones we have been examining together these past few days.

This mission to preserve and study old works is only possible because of your continued engagement.

Thank you, dear reader, we shall pick up where we left off tomorrow.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

I suspect, however, that only a small minority of people truly find joy in reading, and subsequently curating, the publications of our shared past.

Yet, curious mind, I have noted that these prices have been steadily climbing over the last two years.

Coming from a motor background, it was common knowledge that most vintage machines appreciate simply because they are rare and enduring; artifacts of a bygone era.

I suspect the same applies to old books; they are no longer in production, and those that remain are the only ones left in existence.

There will soon come a time when I shall digitise and share the many volumes I have collected; for this endeavour is made possible entirely through your generous support, dear reader.

So then, curious mind, this evenings lesson will be an intriguing one.

It is a period-correct release regarding medicine, yet it contains an incredibly fascinating, and revealing, discussion regarding the practice of inoculation.

But before we begin, curious mind, I must point out that the publishing house chosen by the author was owned by a Freemason.

He was a man named William Smellie, the so-called master printer, who is also credited with editing the very first Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Furthermore, the author of the text we are about to examine learned his medical trade under two doctors at the University of Edinburgh:

Dr. William Cullen and Dr. John Gregory

You guessed it, dear reader; both were Freemasons as well.

While the author himself may not have worn the apron, it is not difficult to see how he was influenced and positioned to inject pro-vaccination propaganda into what was otherwise framed as herbal literature.

Now, with our preamble settled, curious mind, let us cast our gaze over the evidence you have helped me bring to light.

The volume before us is an edition of Domestic Medicine; or, The Family Physician, dear reader, a work authored by the Scottish physician William Buchan.

First published in 1769, it was intended to serve as a comprehensive guide for the common person, aiming to bring medical knowledge out of the restricted domain of the professional physician and into the household.

While the original edition of this influential work dates to 1769, the copy in my possession is a later edition, though its exact origins remain obscured by the fact that the initial pages have been lost to time and the front cover has long since detached from the spine.

By demystifying health, Buchan sought to empower families to manage their own ailments through diet, hygiene, and herbal remedies, ostensibly reducing their reliance on the expensive and often dubious interventions of the established medical guild.

However, when we scrutinise the text; such as this page regarding Absinthium (common wormwood), we see the clinical precision of the era transitioning into the analytical language of the laboratory.

While the book claims to be a tool for the common person, the inclusion of such detailed chemical breakdowns, complete with percentages of bitter extractive matter and nitrate of potassa, reveals a subtle shift in focus.

The authority of the natural, traditional herb is being gradually subsumed by the language of the chemist, setting the stage for a medical philosophy that prioritises synthetic measurement over traditional wisdom.

This framing is vital to our investigation, curious mind.

As we noted, the editorial and printing environment surrounding Buchan’s work was deeply entwined with the influential figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, including William Smellie and medical luminaries like William Cullen and John Gregory.

By placing the authority of scientific chemistry alongside the seemingly benign advice of a family physician, the medical establishment created a platform to introduce more radical theories, such as state-mandated inoculation, under the guise of trusted, domestic guidance.

It is within this transition, where the household manual begins to speak the language of the laboratory, that the seed of the modern medical mandate was planted.

We are looking at the mechanism by which the public was prepared to accept institutional intervention, conditioned to believe that their health was best managed not by nature or personal sovereignty, but by the expertise and chemical formulas of a centralised guild.

Let us delve deeper into how this specific text bridges the gap between the humble herb garden and the cold, unyielding machinery of the state.

The narrative takes a dark turn here, curious mind, as we step into the section dedicated to the Vaccine or Cow-Pox.

The text shifts from the botanical to the ideological, framing the cow-pox as a remarkable and important phenomenon in the history of nature.

It cobbles together reports from Göttingen and oral traditions from Cork to manufacture a sense of universal legitimacy, ultimately placing the weight of its argument on the shoulders of figures like Dr. Jenner.

The text attempts to anchor its authority by invoking the late Dr. Buchan himself, asserting that the benefits of inoculation could only be realised by making the practice general.

This is the pivot, curious mind:

the moment the focus shifts from the individual's well-being to the mandate of the collective

When the author addresses the adversaries of this new practice, the tone drops the facade of medical inquiry and turns to open mockery.

They recount the testimony of Dr. Rowley, who courageously stood before a committee of the House of Commons to detail the disastrous circumstances and physical suffering, including abscesses and scrofula, that followed in the wake of this inoculation.

Rather than addressing these harms, the book dismisses Dr. Rowley’s warnings as inconsistent and fallacious, mocking his concerns by likening them to a hysterical fear of growing ox-like countenances or horns.

It is a chilling display of rhetoric.

The text explicitly admits that the procedure does not work in all cases and fails to prevent infection for many.

Yet, it declares this failure to be no solid objection to the practice at all.

You see, the individual child is no longer the priority, curious mind; they are just the fodder for a general experiment.

They were conditioning the public to ignore the evidence of their own eyes, demanding that they prioritise the dogma of the guild over the health of the family.

The transition from the herb garden to the laboratory was not about progress; it was about securing the power to enforce compliance, regardless of the cost.

The text continues its crusade, dear reader, by employing a clever, and frankly manipulative, false equivalence.

It attempts to normalise the failures of vaccination by comparing them to the occasional failure of traditional remedies, like the Peruvian bark in treating ague or mercury in treating Lues Venerea.

By framing vaccine failure as a simple uncommon peculiarity or a result of unskilful management, the author seeks to inoculate the practice itself against any genuine critique.

The narrative then leans heavily on the Report of the Medical Council of the Royal Jennerian Society, a document clearly designed to whitewash the controversy.

Through this report, the Committee systematically dismisses every concern raised by critics, branding reports of illness and failure as unfounded or grossly misrepresented or erroneously stated.

It is a textbook example of institutional self-exoneration, curious mind; the governing body investigates itself, finds no fault in its own creation, and effectively labels all dissent as perverse and disingenuous.

Notice the recurring tactic of shifting the blame onto the individual.

If a patient suffered, it was because the vaccinator was unskillful or the vaccination was performed in a negligent manner.

If the vaccine didn't take, it was because the observer was wholly unacquainted with the history of the procedure.

By creating an environment where only the initiated are competent to decide what constitutes a successful vaccination, the establishment effectively shielded itself from any accountability for the disastrous circumstances they initially tried to ignore.

The logic is circular and suffocating:

the practice is perfect, and any evidence to the contrary is simply evidence that you are doing it wrong

The committee uses these final declarations, dear reader, to erect a legalistic shield, admitting that cases of small-pox have occurred in the vaccinated, yet swiftly neutralising the weight of those failures by labelling them as deviations from the ordinary course of nature.

They rely on the sheer scale of the practice, citing the immense number of vaccinated individuals in the Army and Navy; to overwhelm specific reports of harm, ultimately dismissing any lingering evidence of illness as the result of neglect or personal prejudices against the procedure.

By insulating themselves in this way, the Council ensures the practice remains untouchable, concluding with a solemn Declaration that their collective experience proves the benefits of vaccination are incalculable.

This pivot from defensive reportage to prescriptive mandate marks the arrival of the Instructions for Vaccine Inoculation.

The reader is no longer being offered medical counsel; they are being issued instructions.

It is stated that an accurate knowledge of the signs of infection and the progress of the vaccine vesicle is essential to the success of the procedure, effectively placing the burden of monitoring and certifying the success of the state’s intervention onto the practitioner.

As the text begins to describe the physical manifestation of the vaccine, the small red spot with a degree of elevation which may be felt, the focus shifts entirely to the procedural, training the observer to verify that the state's mandate has been properly performed on the human body.

The text now descends into the granular, almost industrial minutiae of the procedure, curious mind, obsessing over the precise physical lifecycle of the vaccine vesicle.

It treats the human body as a controlled environment, detailing how the lesion should appear, from its initial light pink hue to its transformation into a mahogany-colored scab, with the clinical detachment of a quality-control report.

By establishing these rigid, visual benchmarks for what constitutes success, dear reader, the authors create a narrow path for the practitioner to follow, where any variation is immediately flagged as suspect.

The focus quickly pivots to the categorisation of Spurious Pustules, anomalous reactions that do not conform to the expected aesthetic of the vaccine.

Here, the rhetoric is particularly revealing; rather than acknowledging that these might be legitimate, adverse reactions, the text dismisses them as failures of the process itself.

If the vesicle is too soft, the colour is off, or the scab is wrong, the fault is redirected toward the rude and unskilful methods of the practitioner or improper handling of the lancets.

This creates a rigid feedback loop:

when the vaccine succeeds, the system claims the victory; when it causes harm or manifests strangely, the system blames the operator

The final portion of these instructions transitions into the logistics of preserving and conveying the vaccine matter, treating it as a commodity to be harvested, dried on glass, or trapped in ivory instruments to exclude the air.

The human element has been completely stripped away, replaced by a technical manual that prioritises the continuity and purity of the vaccine matter over the lived experience of the patient.

The narrative now deepens its industrialisation of medicine, dear reader, meticulously detailing the logistical challenges of preserving and conveying vaccine matter.

The text treats the contagion as a tangible commodity, describing how to store it on threads, inside quills, or on specialised ivory instruments designed to exclude air.

This transition highlights a shift from personal health care to a standardised, regulated process where the efficacy of the vaccine relies on the precise mechanical handling of the matter by the practitioner.

The instructions further delineate the Modes of Inoculation, specifying exactly where on the body the intervention should occur, typically the upper arm, and dictating the physical technique of the lancet strike to ensure the virus is successfully lodged in the wound.

This prescriptive approach even extends to the patient's wardrobe, with warnings to avoid tight sleeves or friction that might cause extensive inflammation or ulceration

By framing these precautions as essential, the authors maintain their strategy of shifting blame for complications onto the patient or the operator, rather than the procedure itself.

The manual concludes its medical guidance by addressing potential constitutional symptoms, such as chills, thirst, or fever.

While it dismisses these as slight and transient, it provides a rigorous protocol for Medical Treatment should the site of the inoculation turn into a foul and obstinate sore.

The suggested remedies include applications of aqua lythargyri acetati or cerussa acetata, and even the use of nitrated quicksilver or lunar caustic for deep ulceration.

Throughout these pages, the language remains firmly clinical, treating the human body as a site of managed biological activity.

The final paragraphs reaffirm the perfect security of the practice, insisting that any doubts be resolved by simply repeating the operation.

It is a system that effectively seals itself off from failure; by asserting that the advantages of vaccine inoculation are now fully ascertained, the text demands complete compliance, portraying any lingering issues as mere technical errors that can be solved with more precision, more medicine, and more repetition.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, quite the revealing lesson this evening, and we must reflect.

We have journeyed through the sterile, calculated language of the nineteenth century, tracing the birth of a cold, mechanical orthodoxy that learned, early on, how to silence the grieving and sanitise the catastrophic.

We see it laid bare in these yellowed pages:

the blueprint for an institution that places its own preservation above the sanctity of the human frame

a machine that defines success not by the vitality of the person, but by the proper appearance of a vesicle

the standardised response of a system that demands we ignore the evidence of our own eyes

It is a haunting inheritance.

We are living in the shadow of that very mechanism, expanded now into an industrial, global titan that brushes aside the sudden silence of a young heart, the inexplicable fraying of a life in its prime, and the cruel acceleration of illness that ravages the body with a ferocity we are told not to name.

We see the patterns repeating:

the same dismissals, the same desperate attempts to categorise the tragic as rare or coincidental

The same cruel demand that we trust the procedure while the cost is paid in the currency of our own kind.

How chilling it is to recognise that we have been here before, trapped in a loop where the system is never wrong, only the people are; either too unskillful to perform the task, or too unlearned to comprehend the incalculable benefits they are being forced to accept.

The world we inhabit now is one where the dignity of the individual has been subsumed into a data set, where health is no longer a personal sovereignty but a matter of state-regulated compliance.

We watch, heartbroken and heavy, as the youth, those who should be our dawn, are struck down in their vigor, and the authorities offer only the same hollow, bureaucratic defenses that were printed in 1769.

This is the end of the road we were steered onto centuries ago, dear reader.

It is a world stripped of its humanity, where the machinery of intervention has outpaced our ability to mourn, and where questioning the orthodoxy is branded as heresy against the public good.

As we hold these old books in our hands and feel the chill of history, we realise that the coldness we fight against today was not born in our time, but was carefully cultivated, watered, and grown by those who convinced themselves that they were the sole arbiters of life and death, and that every soul lost was simply a price worth paying for their own perfect, sterile design.

Regarding our journey through these texts, please know that your presence and engagement are valued above all else.

Donations are never expected or necessary.

Should you ever feel moved to contribute, please understand that every fund is directed solely toward the procurement of rare, historical volumes like the one we have been examining together this evening.

Thank you, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

In my spare time, I often browse the vast reaches of the internet in search of old books; primarily those published before the 1800s.

This is not to say I disregard works from the 19th century; far from it.

I do tend, however, to avoid geopolitical history written in the later part of that era.

Instead, my focus lies with natural history; books about plants, animals, and the living world around us.

I also seek out texts on botany and herbology, for there is much wisdom to be found in these pages.

I share this with you, first for the sake of transparency, but also because one of the many books I ordered recently has arrived.

It is a 19th-century English work, dedicated to describing the plants and creatures of the land.

This book is not a book about secrets or mysteries, nor does it reveal any contradictions in the modern narrative.

It is a work of education, yet when read with care, we find that it offers us, dear reader, with far more than simple facts about nature.

Before we begin, curious mind, I ask you to take notice of the clarity, and the depth of expression found in these older writings.

Our ancestors wrote with a rare combination of scholarship and grace.

They possessed a way of describing the world that blends observation with understanding; a quality you will soon see for yourself.

This is The Every-Day Book of Natural History, dear reader, first written by James Cundall, then revised and expanded by Edward Step, F.L.S.

This is the sixth edition, published in London by Jarrold & Sons.

The book was created not as a work of abstract science, curious mind, but as a practical guide for everyday observation; offering a short entry for every day of the year, describing the plants, birds and creatures most commonly found in the English landscape.

You can see from the opening page, with its lovely photograph of a figure in the woods, listening for the nightingale, how respectful and reverent this book is.

It captures the sense of peace that comes from being up-close with nature.

Within it are over 60 original illustrations, from artists such as Alfred Parsons and Charles Whymper, bringing the natural world to life, in detail, on each page.

This is not a book that tells you what to think, dear reader, is an invitation to look closer, to notice more, and to understand that there is far more to nature than what meets the eye.

Reading the original preface, curious mind, written by James Cundall, we immediately understand the heart and intention behind this work.

He did not set out to write a heavy academic text for experts alone; instead, his aim was far more humble and far-reaching:

to make the beauty and wisdom of the natural world accessible to everyone

He recognised that many people have no interest in complex scientific classification, yet they still carry within them a deep, lasting love for the living world around them.

That is the true purpose of this book; to speak to that quiet wonder that exists in all of us.

He wanted to offer us not just facts, but simple, clear descriptions, paired with the gentle charm of legends and stories that have always been tied to nature.

The goal was to create something that could be carried anywhere, used from month to month, day to day; a companion for anyone who walks through the countryside, and wishes to listen to the voice of nature itself.

A beautiful reminder, indeed, that there was once a time when knowledge of the natural world was not about power or control, but about connection.

It was simply about seeing, appreciating, and respecting the life that surrounds us.

Even today, this intention remains clear.

We are given the opportunity, curious mind, not to study nature from a distance, but to step closer, to observe with care, and to find peace in the simple act of noticing what grows, flies, and lives all around us.

This lovely verse from Edmund Spenser, dear reader, reminds us that the seasons have always been tied to the rhythms of human life.

January is more than just a month on a calendar; it is a moment of turning; a time to look back with gratitude, and forward with hope.

It is this very feeling that lies at the heart of this book, curious mind.

Nature is never outside our experience; we are all part of the same cycle of life.

Turning to the first entry for January, we find Cundalls appreciation for the world around him.

He begins not with cold facts, dear reader, but with warmth that makes nature feel familiar and alive.

We read of the robin, that most beloved of British birds, a creature that has long been a friend to anyone who walks the countryside.

We learn of its bright eye, its bold presence, and how it stays close even in the coldest time of year.

There is gentle detail in its habits and song, but always with a sense of respect and wonder.

This is not just a guide to identify what we see; it is an invitation to notice the small things, the things most of us pass on by without a second thought.

The accompanying illustration brings this moment to life perfectly; showing the robin perched among the branches, quiet and still, as if listening to the world around it.

It captures something rather special:

seeing nature not as something distant or scientific, but as a living, breathing part of our daily lives

We learn that even in the depths of winter, there is life, there is colour, and there is always beauty waiting to be seen.

Here, dear reader, we see how the natural world has always shaped human thought and expression.

The Daisy is not just a small and common flower; it has long been cherished as a symbol of purity, constancy, and beauty.

Poets from Chaucer to Wordsworth have turned to it, recognising in its quiet presence something that speaks to the very heart of creation.

What strikes me is the way the Cundall invites us to look beyond what we might consider ordinary.

He reminds us that even the smallest and most familiar things hold a hidden richness.

The daisy, though delicate, is actually a complex and wonderful creation; made up of many parts, working together in perfect order.

It also reveals how nature was once understood not just as something to be studied, but as a source of wisdom and meaning.

The daisy was held as an emblem of faithfulness, even worn by knights as a sign of honour.

It continues to bloom through the changing seasons, a gentle reminder that life persists and beauty remains, even when the year grows cold.

This page in its entirety shows us that there is no such thing as something insignificant in the natural world.

Every plant, every creature, every detail holds a place in the greater design; offering us something to wonder at, if we only take the time to notice.

This marks the final page for this evening’s lesson, dear reader, and it concludes with the closing words regarding the daisy; reminding us once again that even the most ordinary plants hold beauty and purpose.

Cundall speaks of them as a gift from the Creator, simple yet full of grace, enduring through every month of the year.

It serves as another assurance that nothing in creation is ever insignificant or without value; every living being carries its own unique virtues and meaning.

From there we turn to the entry on the fox, a creature that has long been surrounded by wonder and respect.

He describes the fox as an animal of remarkable instinct, sharp senses and incredibly cunning; perfectly fitted to its life in the countryside.

We learn that in those times, nature was seen not just as something to be observed, but as a living order with its own rules and dignity.

We also see how closely human life was once woven into the rhythms of the land.

The stories and traditions surrounding the fox show that people did not see themselves as separate from the natural world, but as part of the same whole; recognising both its wild freedom and its place in the greater scheme of things.

Finally, we come to the moss:

small, unassuming yet persistent

It grows in soft tufts, clinging to stone and earth, thriving where many other plants might fail.

It teaches us a quiet truth; that true strength often comes from simplicity and endurance.

Life finds a way to flourish even in the quietest corners, reminding us that beauty and meaning are everywhere, if we only take the time to see them.

Throughout all these pages, we are brought back to the same profound truth:

nothing in creation is random or insignificant

Every living thing, great or small, you and me, has its own place within a connected and purposeful design; waiting only for us to slow down, look closer, and pay attention.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, a special lesson this evening, one made possible by your support; and one we shall now reflect upon.

In turning these old pages, we are given far more than just a guide to the natural world.

We are offered a glimpse into a time when knowledge was not measured by what we take from the earth, but by what we learn from it.

There is a subtle dignity in these writings, a sense that every living thing; from the smallest flower to the wildest creature, carries a place in a grand, harmonious order.

It reminds us that we were once closer to the truth of our existence; that nature was not seen as something separate to be conquered, but as a mirror in which we see our own place and purpose.

We have walked through the rhythm of the seasons, met the creatures that share our land, and marvelled at the simple beauty that surrounds us.

Yet as we read, we begin to understand something deeper still:

that the study of nature is never really just about plants or animals

It is, in truth, a journey of self-discovery.

For to truly see the world around you is to begin to understand the qualities that lie within yourself; resilience, gentleness, balance, and the strength that endures through every change.

History shows us that once, humanity lived in harmony with the land, not as masters, but as part of the same living whole.

These old books preserve that wisdom for us, keeping it alive long after the world has moved on.

They speak to us not as distant facts, but as a legacy of how we were meant to see; with respect, with wonder, and with a heart open to the mysteries that still surround us.

This work would not have been possible without your generosity.

Your support allows these precious volumes to be brought back into the light, and their wisdom to be shared once more.

In helping to keep these old texts alive, you are also helping to keep alive a way of seeing the world that is so desperately needed today.

We do not just learn about nature when we read these words.

We learn about ourselves, and we are reminded that we are never truly alone in this journey.

Every lesson, every observation, every page turned brings us a little closer to understanding not just where we came from, but who we are meant to be.

May this wisdom continue to grow within us, as natural and enduring as the seasons themselves.

And may we carry this understanding forward, not just as knowledge, but as a way of life; gentle, grateful, and forever connected to the beautiful world that holds us all.

Your presence here, your attention and your curiosity are worth far more than any contribution.

Please know that donations are never expected; your monetary support is always entirely optional.

Any funds given, however, go directly towards sourcing rare old books, such as the one featured in this lesson, and maintaining access to historical archives.

Above all else, simply being here and walking this path with me is the greatest gift of all.

Thank you for reading and for keeping this spirit alive, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

As I scrolled endlessly, a video caught my attention; old stone buildings, wild claims, and a name I hadn’t heard before:

Tartaria

I was gripped, not by the bonkers theory’s, but by the historical evidence presented on that video.

Old maps specifically; I thought it seemed illogical that it was simple ignorance, considering some of the maps bearing the name were highly respected.

So I set out on a new endeavour, to learn, for myself, if this was really a genuine empire in history.

My initial idea was simple, I thought to myself, I’ll find a really old geographical dictionary, and if Tartaria was a real place, it’ll be in there.

So I bought a 1788 copy of Thomas Salmon’s Modern Gazetteer, curious mind, on eBay for £78.

Within that book are a number of foldable maps, so I looked upon them first; as expected, a particular name was on the map:

Tartary

I wanted to start at the beginning, dear reader, going through the book page by page until I reached T, in hopes I’d find Tartary there.

So, to the introduction I went, and here, dear reader, is what I found.

It was awfully surprising for 24 year old me, who expected nothing more than the maps; this page outlines the divisions of Asia.

You’ve probably already noticed it, dear reader, this page doesn’t even mention Mongolia; and even though Mongolia was a country then, it wasn’t Tartaria.

We still acknowledge Turkey as a country, same with India, Persia is what Iran was previously called, China is still China, and Astrakhan, historically, was a country too, which is also confirmed in the modern narrative.

So then, we are left with Tartary, and you must ask yourself, dear reader:

why would Tartary be any different?

All the others are countries, all recognised, and many are even still called the same thing today:

so why would Tartary be any different?

It wouldn’t, and it’s far more ludicrous to believe that the scholars who wrote works like this were confused than it is to simply believe what the page says.

But let us not base all our assumptions with a singular book, let us use the books I’ve collected, with diligence, since that very first moment of discovery.

This evening we shall be looking for something rather specific:

documented evidence regarding the Great Wall and the Tartars

Fortunately for us, dear reader, I have located, scanned, and documented every single reference I have discovered, digitally, for our viewing pleasure.

So without further ado, curious mind, let us cast our gaze upon some true history.

Newsman’s Interpreter 📖

General Gazetteer 📖

These references, dear reader, come from two of the rare geographical works in our library:

Laurence Echard’s Newsman’s Interpreter, published in 1739, and Richard Brookes’ Universal Gazetteer, from 1795

These volumes have been made possible through your support, curious mind.

Thank you.

What we’ve found here aren’t just simple facts on a page, it is the way the world was understood for centuries.

When we look at the description of Peking, we see that the capital was clearly split into two distinct parts:

the New City, known as the Tartar City, and the Old City for the Chinese

This is no small detail; dear reader, it shows that Tartary was a recognised division, acknowledging that the Tartars were a separate people who held their own territory within the very heart of this empire.

Then we read how China was defined geographically:

bounded on the north by Tartary, and separated by a great wall

In these records, this structure was not just seen as a barrier, but as the monumental line that divided two separate and distinct lands.

There is no mention of any other name; only Tartary, standing as its own recognised territory to the north.

This pattern repeats again and again across both books.

We find references to cities across different regions, even far to the south, where the same division holds true:

parts belonging to the Chinese, parts belonging to the Tartars, with their own authority and garrison

What this shows us is clear, dear reader; for hundreds of years, right up until the end of the 18th century, Tartary was treated as a real, separate country.

The Great Wall was understood as the border between them and China, and their identity as a distinct people was never in question.

These are not just words from old books; they are the common understanding of a world that existed before the narrative began to change.

And when you read them, you have to ask yourself:

why would Tartary be the only one that disappears from the map?

These records show us the truth that was once obvious to everyone; and it is far more reasonable to trust what they say, than to believe that generations of scholars were somehow confused about the shape of their own world.

From Richard Brookes’ Universal Gazetteer, dear reader, we find even clearer definitions of just how distinct this territory was.

We read of Leao-tong, or Chen-yang, described as one of the three departments of Eastern Tartary, belonging to the Mandshur Tartars; the very people who entered and conquered China.

It is bounded on the south by the Great Wall of China and the Yellow Sea; and enclosed on the east, north and west by a clear line of demarcation.

Even here, curious mind, the border is drawn explicitly, separating Tartary from the empire to the south, showing that this was understood as a separate and defined land.

Elsewhere in the same work, we are told of Cambay, a fortress of Great Tartary, situated between the Southern Sea and the Northern Mountains; and stated plainly that:

the famous Wall begins which separates China from Tartary

This is direct confirmation from the same volume that the Great Wall was not just a structure, but the official, recognised boundary line between two separate and distinct countries.

For centuries, right up until the end of the 18th century, this was the common understanding.

Tartary was a real, recognised territory; divided into regions, governed by its own people, and clearly marked as a separate nation from China.

These records do not lie.

They show us that the map we are given today is not the same map that was used for hundreds of years.

And the question remains the same:

if Tartary was never real, why was it written about, mapped, and recognised as a country for so long?

Again, dear reader, from Richard Brookes’ Universal Gazetteer, we find even more precise descriptions of how these lands were mapped and understood.

China is described as a vast empire, bounded on the north by the territories of Tanguth and Naiman; and separated from them for hundreds of miles by that massive, famous wall.

The text also notes that from 1640 onwards, this entire region came under the rule of the Tartars.

We also find the capital city recorded explicitly as belonging to the Tartarian Kingdom of China.

Turning to Laurence Echard’s work, we see this same division confirmed in a northern province called Xanfi.

It is written clearly that the great wall, the structure that separates China from Tartary, runs directly along this border.

What these records show us is consistent and unmistakeable, curious mind.

For century after century, the Great Wall was accepted as the official border between two separate, distinct and recognised nations.

Tartary was not a made-up term or a vague idea; it was a real, defined territory, split into departments, governed by its own people, and acknowledged as a separate entity.

We are not looking at one or two isolated references here; this pattern runs through every reliable geographical source we have examined.

If Tartary had never existed as a genuine country, there would be no logical reason for it to appear in every map, dictionary and reference book of that time.

If it was simply a confusion or a mistake, then why is it described so clearly; with its own borders, its own regions, its own identity?

These are not the words of conspiracy theorists.

These are the words of the geographers, cartographers and scholars who built our understanding of the world.

What they tell us is that before the narrative changed, Tartary was a known, accepted part of our history; and the Great Wall was the line that stood between two distinct worlds.

Our next reference, dear reader, is from a book written by Joseph E. Worcester, titled:

Elements of Geography

Published in 1819; it is here, curious mind, we find a clear explanation of the Great Wall’s purpose.

It is written clearly that the Chinese built this massive structure specifically to defend themselves against the Tartars.

It is described as extending over 1500 miles, stretching across rivers and lofty mountains; wide enough for several persons to ride abreast.

This is not just a description of a building; it is an admission of the reality that stood behind it.

For the author makes no attempt to deny the separation, or to redefine the relationship between China and Tartary.

Instead, he confirms exactly what we have seen in every other source:

the wall existed as a direct line of defence against a distinct, neighbouring people

We also see that Tartary is formally divided within these works into Independent Tartary and Chinese Tartary, listed clearly alongside China, Persia, Turkey, Thibet and other separate nations.

It is given its own borders, its own geography, its own identity; treated with the same clarity and certainty as any other country on the map.

What we are seeing is not a confusion or a mistake.

It is a consistent, deliberate and recognised fact across centuries.

If Tartary was never a real country, then why would every single geographical textbook, dictionary and map from the 1700s and 1800s make this distinction?

Why would they describe the Great Wall as a barrier against them, and split the land into separate territories?

The answer is simple:

because it was true

These records show us the world as it was understood for generations; before the narrative began to be rewritten.

Geographical Grammar 📖

Our next reference, dear reader, comes from Pat Gordon’s Geographical Grammar, first published in 1704; one of the earliest and most respected geographical works of its time.

Here we find some of the clearest and most detailed descriptions yet.

As we’ve come to expect, curious mind, it states plainly that the great wall separates China from Tartary, and was celebrated across the world as a marvel that surpassed every ancient fortification ever built.

What stands out most is the history given here:

it tells us this barrier was begun nearly 300 years before the Christian era; meaning its foundations were laid more than 2100 years ago

We also read an account from the Jesuit missionary Le Compte, who wrote that in its prime this entire line of defence was guarded by one million soldiers.

This alone shows how seriously the separation was taken.

It was not just a line on a map; it was a massive military border, requiring an enormous force to protect.

Even as time passed, the text notes that when parts of Tartary came under different rule, they still only guarded the strongest and most critical sections of the wall.

This tells us the boundary remained significant, even after political changes.

This is evidence that stretches back over 300 years.

From 1704 right through to the 1800s, every reliable source tells the same story:

Tartary was a distinct and separate territory, and the Great Wall was the official dividing line between it and China

This is not a recent invention, nor a mistake.

It was the accepted fact for generations; and when you look at all these records together, from different authors, different times, and different sources, the picture becomes impossible to ignore.

The world we live in today has been rewritten.

Our next reference, dear reader, comes from Brook’s work, and it brings yet more clarity to how these lands were defined.

Here we find a detailed description of China Proper, and it is made explicitly clear that the land beyond the Great Wall was once known as Chinese Tartary.

Even as the terminology shifted slightly over time, the distinction remained absolute.

The wall continued to be recognised as the dividing line, and the land to the north was still formally identified as Tartary; separate, distinct, and recognised as a separate region.

What these sources show us is that this division was not something that changed overnight.

It was consistent, clear, and accepted fact across generations.

We are not looking at guesswork or outdated terminology here.

We are looking at the way the world was mapped, named, and understood for centuries.

The Great Wall was the border. Tartary was the territory; and for hundreds of years, this was written, mapped, and taught without question.

Freemason Magazine June 1793 🗞️

And finally, dear reader, we come to this remarkable extract from The Freemasons’ Magazine, published in June 1793.

This is not another geography book; this is a publication from the Freemasons’ own library.

What we find here confirms everything we have seen so far, but adds even more detail and context.

It opens by describing the history of the Chinese monarchy, and explicitly names Chinese-Tartary as a core part of the empire’s geography; just as clear and official as any other territory.

We are told of the great conquests:

how the King of Tartary came to power, united lands, and how the Eastern Tartars were recognised as a distinct people with their own identity, living beyond the Great Wall

It explains how the emperor moved entire communities, pushed tribes back three hundred miles beyond the wall, and divided the land into provinces under his rule.

And perhaps most revealing of all:

it notes that the people of Western Tartary lived entirely differently; they were nomadic, dwelling in tents, moving with the seasons to graze their animals, surviving on milk, cheese and game

This is not a myth or a theory, this is a detailed, factual account from 1793; written by an author with access to archives and records of the time.

It describes Tartary as a real, inhabited region, with its own way of life, its own people, and its own clear borders defined by the Great Wall.

We also read that the emperor even set up a system where judges were drawn from both Chinese and Tartar peoples, deliberately placing them side by side to govern the empire.

This shows that Tartars were not just outsiders or enemies; they were recognised as a legitimate part of the empire, with equal status and representation.

This source takes us right up to the end of the 18th century, long after many people assume Tartary had been forgotten or disproven.

And what it tells us is simple:

for centuries, right up until 1793, Tartary was treated as a real, distinct and vital part of the world

It was written about in official publications, described in detail, mapped clearly, and accepted as fact by scholars, historians, and even the institutions that held great influence.

When you stand back and look at all this evidence together; from the 1700s to the late 1800s, from dictionaries, textbooks, official records and even Freemason publications, one truth becomes undeniable.

Tartary was not a mistake.

It was not a confusion.

It was a real place, a real empire, and a real part of human history.

And if this is the case; if it was so clearly recognised, mapped and recorded for hundreds of years, then we have to ask the most important question of all:

why has it been erased from our history today?

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, as we draw to a close this evening, we must reflect on the reality of this new and true history.

What we have uncovered together is not just a collection of old names or forgotten borders.

It is a picture of the world as it was truly understood for centuries; a world where Tartary was a recognised, distinct and powerful territory, where the Great Wall was the clear dividing line between separate nations, and where the geography of Asia was written, mapped and taught without question.

For generation after generation, from the earliest gazetteers and dictionaries of the 1700s right through to the school textbooks of the 1800s, this was the accepted fact.

Scholars, cartographers, historians, and the institutions of great importance, from geographers to the Freemasons themselves, all agreed on this truth.

And yet today, we are told none of it existed.

We are taught that Tartary was nothing more than a mistake, a confusion, or a myth.

We are taught that the Great Wall was built against vague barbarian hordes, and that the land beyond it was empty, unknown or irrelevant.

But the evidence does not lie.

When we look at these records; clear, consistent, and coming from every kind of source, we are forced to face a difficult truth:

the history we are given in our schools, our universities, and our official narratives is not the whole truth

It is a version that has been edited, rewritten, and stripped of names, borders and identities that did not fit the story they wanted us to believe.

If this could happen to Tartary; if a whole nation, a whole territory, could be so completely erased from the map of history then:

what else has been hidden from us?

We live in a time when we are told that history is settled, that science is absolute, and that what we are taught is the unchangeable truth.

But these old records prove something else entirely:

that the past is not fixed

It is malleable, it can be reshaped, and it can be rewritten.

When that happens, we are not just losing old names or old places; we are losing our connection to who we really are, and to the true story of our origins.

The Great Wall was not just a stone barrier.

It was a symbol of how the world was divided, how nations were defined, and how power was understood.

And when that division was erased, so too was a huge part of our collective memory.

But these books remain.

The maps still exist.

These words are still printed on pages that have survived for hundreds of years, waiting for someone to open them and see what was once obvious to everyone.

We do not need to guess or speculate.

We have the proof.

And that is why this work matters.

It is not about believing in conspiracy theories or chasing wild ideas.

It is about going back to the source, reading what was written, and asking:

if this was true then, why is it not true now?

The implications are huge.

If the basic geography of our world has been altered, then perhaps much of what we have been taught about empires, borders, civilisations and history is also not as it seems.

We are living inside a version of reality that has been carefully constructed for us; but the truth is still there, hidden in plain sight and waiting to be rediscovered.

In the end, this is not just about Tartary or China or the Great Wall.

It is about the nature of truth itself.

It is about the courage to look beyond what we are told, and to trust what the records show us.

Because until we are willing to question the story we have been given, we can never truly know where we come from; or where we are going.

The world we live in today is not the world our ancestors knew.

But the old maps, the old books, and the old truths still remain.

And one day, they will speak again.

Everything you have read here (excluding the Freemason magazine) comes from rare, old books I have collected over time.

Each one was bought with care, requiring diligent searches through auctions, old bookshops and thrift stores to find.

I share this work freely because I believe that knowledge belongs to everyone, not just those who can afford it.

If you have found this information valuable, or if it has made you look at history differently, then you are welcome to support this work.

It is never required, and your presence here is the greatest gift of all.

Any contribution will go directly towards acquiring more historical texts, preserving these fragile volumes, and making sure even more forgotten truths available for everyone to see.

Thank you for reading, and for keeping curiosity alive, dear reader.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

Would you trust the old accounts, or the new one that insists none of it was true?

The reality is, curious mind, you need not imagine this, because it is Tartaria.

A country mapped, defined, and acknowledged all throughout documented history.

The CIA referenced this location in their classified archives as recently as 1960.

So then, Tartaria was written about since the dawn of recorded history, consistently and repeatedly, right up until the late 20th century.

It is our own age that has sought to erase all record of it.

So I ask again, dear reader, but in a different way; if a country was documented for over a thousand years, yet in the last fifty years you are told it was nothing but a fiction:

Could you be convinced?

I began this journey with a single book, curious mind, it was an 18th-century geographical dictionary.

My intention was not to challenge the narrative, but simply to satisfy my own curiosity.

I had no idea then that what I was about to discover would lead me on a journey of such deep meaning and truth.

And now here we are, dear reader, two years on from that first discovery; I could never have imagined that a single word found within an old book would alter the direction of my entire life.

Tartary appeared in that book 214 times, curious mind; a fact that the modern narrative dismisses, claiming the author, like thousands of others, was mistaken.

So let us look once more at official documents.

Like I mentioned yesterday, if the books cannot be trusted, and the maps are held to be nothing more than fictions born from ignorance; then surely even one piece of classified evidence is enough to give us cause to pause.

CIA-RDP80-00809A000600200215-2

We turn now, curious mind, to this official CIA document, declassified and preserved within the agency’s historical archives.

This is not the popular retelling or a casual text; it is an intelligence report, compiled to trace the origins and influence of secret societies within China across thousands of years, and to understand how these groups shaped events through the ages.

It states plainly that such societies were already active as far back as the time of Ch’in Shih Huang Ti; the emperor credited with ordering the construction of the Great Wall, dear reader, built around two centuries before the Common Era.

Woven into this history is a critical observation that links this massive structure directly to the movements of the Tatar and Mongol tribes.

This single detail opens a door that changes everything we have been taught, curious mind.

For generations we have been told the Great Wall was built as a single barrier; a line of defence meant to keep one unified group of nomads out.

But this official record reveals something far more meaningful.

Its noted clearly that construction began in the 2nd century BC, born from the threat posed by both the Tartars and the Mongols; in doing so, it draws a sharp line between the two groups modern history has worked so hard to blur, merge and simplify.

What this page makes undeniable is that Tartars and Mongols were not the same people.

They were distinct nations, with their own identities, homelands, customs and place in the world.

For centuries they were recognised as separate forces, and their names were used clearly in records, maps and accounts.

Yet today we are given a different version, dear reader, these names are said to be interchangeable, one and the same, and the idea of Tartaria as a separate country is dismissed as a modern invention.

Yet here, in this official document from the mid-20th century, written long after the narrative began to shift, we see the truth laid bare.

The record does not confuse them; it names them separately, acknowledging them as two distinct groups that demanded attention and defence.

This is no small detail, curious mind, it is a key that unlocks a much larger picture.

If Tartars were a separate people and Tartaria was a recognised territory, then the story we have been taught about the Great Wall and the history of this region begins to unravel.

We start to realise that this massive structure was not built against one vague enemy, but in response to a complex world where different powers existed, moved and interacted.

The document also confirms what we have found in the old geographical books and historic maps:

Tartaria was real

It was a country known, mapped and respected.

The Great Wall becomes more than just a fortification; it is a silent witness to a history that has been carefully rewritten to erase the existence of that vast eastern land.

It reminds us that history is never just one story; it is a collection of truths, some kept alive in old pages, some buried, some deliberately distorted.

When we look closely at these official records, we begin to see that gaps and silences are rarely accidents.

They are part of a process to hide the full truth of who we are, and where we come from.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, a shorter lesson this evening, yes, but perhaps one of the most telling.

This single page from an official document holds within it a truth that shifts the very ground beneath what we are taught to believe.

For centuries, Tartaria was never a myth or a figment of Western imagination.

It was a land recognised by every mapmaker, recorded in every geography, acknowledged by governments and scholars alike; a country that held its own place upon the face of the earth, with its own people, boundaries and history.

Even in mid-20th century official records, the distinction between the Tartars and the Mongols remains clear, showing two separate peoples with distinct identities that were recognised as forces shaping the region.

This pattern repeats again and again across old books, historic charts, and reports written by those who lived at the time, long before the narrative began to be reshaped.

When we look at the Great Wall, we see more than just a defensive structure built against a single vague enemy; it stands as a witness to a world far more complex and vast than the simplified story we are given today.

This massive work was erected in response to a region of many distinct peoples and powers, each with their own territories and influence.

The erasure of Tartaria was not a random event, but part of a deliberate and sustained process:

the removal of names, redrawing of borders, and a rewriting of what humanity is allowed to remember

This is not a case of simple error or forgotten detail, it is a clear, systematic effort to alter the way we perceive the past.

This is not about politics or ideology, it is about the very nature of truth itself.

We are told that history is simply what happened, recorded as accurately as possible, yet the records show otherwise.

When a truth does not fit a certain preferred narrative, it is not corrected; it is removed.

The world is made to appear rearranged, so that the land once clearly named and mapped simply ceases to exist in the official account.

Yet truth has a way of surviving even when buried.

It lives in old pages that have not yet been destroyed, in the faint lines on antique maps that still show the shape of a country taken away, and in the small clear details that official documents carry long after the story around them has been altered.

These fragments do not lie; they bear witness to a reality that was once common knowledge.

History is never a single fixed story, but a collection of many truths held alive by those who care enough to look beyond what is told.

Tartaria was real.

A land of great extent, curious mind, rich in history and meaning; its erasure does not make it any less real, it only reveals how powerful the desire to control our understanding can be.

The structures that still stand, the words that remain, the traces that cannot be fully wiped away; all speak still, reminding us that there is a natural order to things, a reality that does not depend on what is written in textbooks or hidden in archives.

The land does not change its shape, the rivers do not flow differently, and truth does not disappear simply because some wish it would.

There remains but one path:

to know the world as it truly is, one must look beyond the version presented

One must read the words that were never intended to be forgotten, trust the evidence of the eyes and the records of our ancestors, in doing so we begin to see that the world is far greater, far older, and far more mysterious than we have ever been allowed to know.

The clues are all around us, if only we have the courage to see them.

Just a short note on donating, curious mind, you are under no obligation to contribute in any way.

Your presence here is already the greatest gift you could give, simply by walking this path and keeping these truths alive.

Any support you choose to offer goes entirely toward sourcing rare historical books and gaining access to the archives that hold these obscure records.

It is how we continue to uncover the stories that were never meant to be lost, and preserve them so they remain available to all who seek the true history of our world.

Thank you, dear reader, for being here and for caring enough to look deeper.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

You are familiar with this concept, curious mind, I have no doubt of that, given the company you keep here.

In all honesty, disproving the modern narrative is not as difficult as one might think.

We must remember that falsifying history is no small task, and it could never truly be watertight.

No lie is enduring.

I have shared many historic works relating to Tartaria; from medical journals to travel guides; noble dispatches to religious treatises, geographical dictionaries to grammatical aids.

Yet even with this abundance, it remains that many still refuse to accept what is plainly recorded.

If Tartaria wasn’t a real country, it would never have been described as one; that’s the simple truth of it.

Across both Western and Eastern records, we find references to the Great Wall of China, noting that it was built to defend against the Tartars.

Yet the modern story claims this massive structure was erected to repel unnamed barbarians.

Does that explanation hold any weight for you, dear reader?

Would a nation spend centuries building a wall against an enemy they cannot name?

Or is it far more likely that they knew exactly who they were building against…

Some will argue:

the Tartars were simply Mongols and Turks

But if that were the case, they would never have been given a distinct name in the first place.

Primary sources consistently record all three terms; Tartar, Mongol, Turk, each used in different contexts, and never interchangeable.

I hear another counter-argument arise:

Tartaria was nothing more than Western confusion

It is comical, really, because if that were true, how is it that the name appears clearly within a 15th-century Chinese manuscript:

the Wen-hsien-t'ung-k'ao

That single fact alone completely destroys the idea that this was a case of European misunderstanding.

It would have been impossible for such a name to appear within Chinese historical records if it were simply a mistake from the West.

Perhaps some will insist that every generation before us was wrong in their understanding of the world, and only we, living after the fact, hold the truth.

They ask us to disregard the geographers, the travellers, the botanists, the soldiers, the scholars, the clergymen, the merchants and historians who recorded this location for almost a thousand years.

To accept their version, you must believe that tens of thousands of people across centuries were all under a collective illusion, and for no logical reason, they consistently documented the existence of a country that never actually existed…

It is far more reasonable to conclude that our ancestors understood the world very well, and we are the generation that has been deceived.

We live in a time where 1 in 5 children are born with developmental conditions; where chronic illness is now the norm for anyone over 40; and the greater majority of people remain completely unaware of what is actually happening around them.

We are told this is the pinnacle of human progress; even as the world is filled with poverty, sickness and disconnection.

I believe in something else, curious mind.

The true height of human achievement was reached in the ages before ours, when great minds raised structures of such beauty and permanence, such skill that many of them still stand today.

We are, in truth, living in the rubble of what was once a magnificent civilisation.

In an effort to preserve and reveal the true history of our world, let us turn now to evidence of a different kind:

documents that once lay hidden behind official secrecy

If the books of the past are dismissed as unreliable, and the maps are written off as errors, let us stand on ground that cannot be disputed:

official, declassified government records

I’ll make this clear now, dear reader:

the documents we are about to examine prove beyond doubt that Tartaria was a real, defined territory with clear borders

For me, the evidence is already overwhelming.

If Tartaria did not exist, then whose customs, traditions, and territories were being described across so many historic texts?

When the Mongols are defined in one way, the Turks in another, and the same records also consistently speak of a distinct Tartarian identity; then their place in history becomes impossible to dismiss.

CIA-RDP78-02771R000200090002-8

We will begin with this, dear reader, a document you may well have seen already, as I’ve shared it a number of times.

It is a declassified CIA report, dated June 1957, titled:

National Cultural Development Under Communism

Officially released in 1999.

Within its pages lie what can only be described as a smoking gun, curious mind, cutting straight through the sanitised narrative we are all taught to accept.

Clearly highlighted in the text is an explicit order issued by the Communist Party on 9 August 1944, right in the middle of World War II.

It directed the Party’s Tartar Provincial Committee to:

proceed to a scientific revision of the history of Tartaria, to liquidate serious shortcomings and mistakes of a nationalistic character

In plain language, the document admits:

Tartar history was to be rewritten

Not corrected, not clarified, but deliberately falsified.

The true purpose is laid bare for anyone willing to read it:

to eliminate references to great Russian aggressions and to hide the facts of the real course of Tartar-Russian relations

This is not speculation.

This is official, written proof that the erasure of Tartaria was not an accident, nor a simple case of misinformation or confusion.

It was a planned, centralised, and deliberate campaign.

What makes this even more striking is the timing.

This directive came in 1944, at the height of the global conflict.

It was not something done in peace time, when history is quietly adjusted.

It was done while the world was at war, when nations were being reshaped, borders redrawn, and identities were being controlled.

If this had been simply a case of a name being misunderstood, or a region being incorrectly labelled, there would have been no need for such a specific, urgent order to change the record.

There would be no need to actively remove it from the books, to erase the name entirely, and to alter the very memory of what existed before.

But here it is:

undeniable evidence

It confirms exactly what we have suspected all along:

Tartaria was not a myth, a legend, or a mistake

It was a real, defined territory with its own identity, borders, and history.

And there was a deliberate, top-down effort to make it disappear from the official record.

They actively set out to destroy it, and they did so while the world was watching something else.

This document tells us that the history we are given today is not the whole story; it is a version that has been shaped, edited, and censored for a specific purpose.

In doing so, it proves beyond doubt that the truth of Tartaria was never lost, dear reader, it was deliberately taken away.

CIA-RDP82-00047R000200090002-7

Following that clear admission of deliberate historical manipulation, dear reader, we now look at a second document, dated 1952 and titled:

Assessment of Soviet Research on Porosity of Sediments in Relation to Oil Structures

Within this file we find the work of Soviet geologist A.B. Vistelius, whose research was published between 1944 and 1947.

The paper carries the title:

On the Correlation of Mesorhythms in the Lower Permian Deposits of Trans‑kara Tartaria and their Stratigraphic Significance

This is no passing mention, curious mind, it is a formal scientific study by a leading expert, produced at the exact same time the order was issued to rewrite Tartar history.

This proves beyond doubt that even in the mid‑20th century, Tartaria was recognised as a distinct and defined geographical territory.

It was not a myth or confusion.

It was a real region with its own boundaries and features, studied and classified by official science.

Vistelius treats it as a tangible, mapped location worthy of detailed analysis.

This leaves us with an unresolvable contradiction.

Today we are told that Tartaria never existed, yet not so long ago, official government reports and professional research clearly named it as a real place and examine it in detail.

This is the very nature of a cover‑up.

The name is removed from public education and mainstream records, but preserved and documented within restricted archives.

It remains on file, even as it is erased from the story we are given.

These documents do not suggest Tartaria was real, they confirm it; they show us that its disappearance from the official narrative was not an accident, but a deliberate and systematic removal of the truth.

RDP84-00581R000100 350026-1

Moving forward, dear reader, we find another reference, this time from a document declassified in 2001.

It lists a technical paper published in 1955, titled:

Hydraulic Destruction of Rock Layers in the Petroleum Fields of Tartaria and Bashkiria, written by engineer C.K. Maksimovich

This is a formal engineering study, focused on oil extraction, while explicitly naming Tartaria alongside Bashkiria as a recognised region with active petroleum fields.

Here we see it treated as a legitimate geographical and industrial location; part of the same geological and economic landscape as its neighbouring territory.

We are shown again that this was not some forgotten mistake, dear reader, but a name that remained in official, professional use well into the mid-20th century.

This further destroys the idea that Tartaria was ever just a myth or a confusion.

It was a place that was mapped, studied, and operated within; right up until the moment it was systematically erased from the public record.

Every single one of these documents acts as another brick in the wall of proof.

They show us that the history we are given today is not the full truth; it is a version that has been carefully edited, and the name of Tartaria was one of the first things to be removed.

We find this final reference, dear reader, within a document cleared for release in 2000, which studies geological formations in the Melekes region.

It includes a clear statement:

Analogous profiles most probably exist in Tartaria

This sits within a formal scientific review, where Tartaria is identified as a distinct geological zone; a defined area where specific rock layers and structures were known to be present.

The material was created long after the date when the name was said to have been removed from common knowledge.

Yet it remains present, used as a recognised location within professional research.

Across every document we have reviewed, curious mind, from official orders, geological surveys, engineering reports and academic studies, one clear picture emerges.

All sources treat Tartaria as a real, mapped territory.

It was never a misunderstanding or error.

It was a place with its own boundaries, features and identity, studied and classified by experts in their fields.

This is simply the record of how the world was understood and documented, later, the name was left out of general education and popular history, but it was kept safe in official and technical records.

It was never truly lost from the written account.

These sources do not just hint at the truth, curious mind, they expose it; there is no room left to doubt that Tartaria was a real place, with its own borders and clear place in history.

Subscribe

And so, dear reader, this evening we have looked over some rather specific documentation, documentation we will now reflect on as a whole.

What these records reveal is not just a forgotten name or a disputed boundary.

It opens a door to something far greater; the realisation that much of what we have been taught about our past is built not on the truth, but on a carefully constructed narrative.

When a place like Tartaria is deliberately removed from the map of history, it is not just a name that disappears.

It is a whole chapter of human potential that is erased.

It suggests that our understanding of who we are, and what we are capable of achieving, has been limited and shaped by forces that prefer us to remain in the dark.

We are asked to believe that humanity has always progressed slowly, step by step, from primitive beginnings to our current modern state.

Yet the evidence we find in old maps, scientific papers and official documents tells a different story.

It hints at a time when knowledge was deeper, when engineering was more advanced, and when civilisations existed that we have been told never existed at all.

Think of the structures that stand all around us; the massive cathedrals, the intricate monuments, the enduring works of stone that have survived centuries.

We are given simple explanations for how they were built, but often those explanations do not add up.

The truth is that we do not truly know how they were raised, nor who built them, nor what they truly represented.

If the history books can hide a whole country from us, then what else are they hiding?

If a territory with clear borders, identity and purpose can be made to vanish from the collective memory, then it follows that our entire view of reality may be built on fabrication.

We live in a world where we are told what to think, what to believe, and what is possible.

We are told that we are at the peak of human achievement, yet we struggle with sickness, division and disconnection.

But when we look behind the curtain, we begin to see that we are not standing on the shoulders of progress alone; we are standing in the shadow of a past that was much greater than we have been allowed to know.

The implications of stolen history go far beyond just geography.

They touch the very soul of humanity, and they challenge us to question everything.

If the past is not what we were told, then the future is also open to new possibilities.

It means that human beings are capable of far more than we have been led to believe.

The documents we have examined are not just old papers; they are fragments of a truth that was meant to be lost, but was never fully destroyed.

They remind us that no matter how hard they try to rewrite the story, the evidence always remains; hidden in archives, buried in records, waiting for those who dare to look beyond the official version.

We are not the first, nor are we the most advanced.

We are simply a chapter in a much longer, richer history; one that is slowly beginning to reveal itself again.

And in that realisation, there is hope.

Hope that we can learn to see the world as it truly is, not as we have been told it is.

If you have found this information valuable, there is no obligation to contribute in any way.

Your presence, your attention, and your willingness to seek the truth is more than enough.

However, should you wish to support this work, any contribution will go directly toward sourcing rare historical texts, old maps, and accessing the archives where these truths are kept alive.

Thank you, dear reader, for being here.

BUY ME COFFEE ☕️

Comment

Share

For it is only in the unvarnished words of our ancestors that we may separate the facts from the carefully woven fable we are taught.

It strikes me as plain, unarguable truth, curious mind:

the ill‑health that plagued our distant brethren was never born from the absence of pus‑filled vaccines

It sprang from the utterly revolting conditions they were forced to endure; conditions so foul, so neglectful, and so inhuman that disease became not a chance visitation, but a constant, inevitable companion.

And here lies a glaring contradiction, dear reader, one that has weighed heavily on my mind for a while.

If the masses of the 18th and 19th centuries were truly so wretched, destitute, and broken:

how did they raise the great and enduring structures we attribute to those very times?

We stand before buildings across England, grand and endur…

Read more

our state of being is never separate from how we choose to live

Illness visits us all, yet I have learned that our susceptibility to it is a faithful reflection of our way of life.

What we do, day by day, writes itself upon the body.

I know this truth firsthand.

At the height of my addiction, I consumed upwards of five grams of cocaine each day; I scarcely slept, ate almost nothing, and rarely drank even a drop of water.

My thoughts were tangled and fractured; my lips were parched and cracked; my sense of smell had vanished entirely, and my nose ran without ceasing.

I was unwell, there was no mistaking it.

Today, nearly five years clean, I sit in my garden, surrounded by the fragrance of flowers I planted myself, while birds sing their gentle morning song.

I dwell now in robust health; my diet is pure, my rest is sound, and my mind is clear…

Read more

vaccines cured nothing in history

We are all taught that Dr. Edward Jenner restored the world to health with his so‑called new practice.

Yet this man, a high‑ranking Freemason, claimed that taking pus from a cowpox ulcer and injecting it into a human would grant lifelong protection against smallpox.

So successful was this method, curious mind, that Jenner’s very first child patient died, followed soon after by his own son.

It’s curious isn’t it, that these grim facts are conveniently omitted when this tale is taught as gospel.

It sounds absurd because it is absurd; yet when the world was gripped by fear of disease, any promised cure was seized upon without question, and its creator hailed as a saviour.

When a soul is desperate, common sense falls away.

When death surrounds you; when you are hungry, thirsty and weak, anyone who claims to hold the answer is welcomed with open arms.

Look now to our own t…

Read more

Africa

This narrative is reinforced at every turn.

Western media may seldom discuss African politics or history directly, yet it subtly weaves a consistent picture through endless repetition.

Africa appears most often in charity appeals; urging donations while showing images of malnourished children, their faces beset by flies.

A heartbreaking sight, no doubt; yet this is the only face of Africa most in the West are ever permitted to see; if we accept what we are shown, that is.

But I do not watch the news, and so this subconscious conditioning holds no power over me.

Tonight, we shall instead uncover some truly extraordinary accounts; all drawn from the land once known as Barbary, in Africa.

From tales of giants to unsolved mysteries, from vast riches to royal lineages; these records reveal a reality worlds away from the story we are taught.

Let us cast off t…

Read more

One name, in particular, has followed me for some time now:

Barbary

From the earliest days of my searching, some two years past, right up to the present hour, I have found this name again and again, printed plainly in works that were never written for mystery, speculation, or romance, but for education, navigation, geography, and public knowledge.

It appears not as some vague whisper from the margins, but as a known and commonly referenced part of the world.

And yet, if one turns to the modern record, Barbary is generally explained away as a loose term; a broad region of North Africa, never truly a country, never a single defined empire, and certainly not something to be spoken of in the same breath as those old geographical works so often sug…

Read more

Whether it is in the gentle melody of the birds, moving from branch to branch, or the soft, lingering scent of flowers drifting upon the air, it offers a stillness that settles deep within the bones; a kind of peace that, for so many years, I thought I would never know.

There was a time, not so long ago, when this very scene would have felt like a torment rather than a blessing.

In those dark days, when I lived entirely enslaved to a desperate dependency on powder, I would lie awake through the long, empty hours of the night, dreading the very first light of dawn.

When the birds began to sing, it was not a joy to me; it was a sentence.

It signalled that the night was gone, that I had not slept a single wink, and that another day fuelled entirely by cocaine lay heavy and inevitable before me.

I never truly wanted t…

Read more

There was never anything in it that felt worth knowing, nothing that held my attention for even a moment.

Maybe I was just a naive child, or perhaps subconsciously I knew that much of it was made up.

Either way, most of my younger days were spent feeding the ego and partying, so perhaps it never mattered what the lessons contained anyway.

Yet if my teachers had taught me the kind of material I now share here, dear reader, I think I would have developed an insatiable thirst for history long ago.

Sadly that was never the case, and it may remain this way in schools for many years to come; so it is just as well I find such pleasure and purpose in seeking these things out myself.

As you well know, dear reader, the historical record is absolutely overflowing with documented accounts that are far more interesting than the watered‑down, sanitised stories we are handed in sch…

Read more

Set aside the danger of Western democracy being forced toward every corner of the world, with the end result being:

a technocratic, surveillance‑driven single system

Instead; look up.

You are asked to focus your whole existence upon a threat arriving from above.

I wrote democracy there, curious mind, but what I ought to have written was oligarchy.

Consider the term itself:

extra‑terrestrial

Broken down simply, it is not a word meaning creature from lands beyond our skies; quite the opposite.

Extra = More / Additional

Terrestrial = Anything belonging to, or living upon, the Earth itself

Perhaps the definition has always told us the truth, yet for decades, or more honestly for centuries, we have been handed a word and told how to use it, without ever stopping to examine exactly what it describes.

More life existing upon Earth, perhaps?

Is there also extra‑territ…

Read more

Classical piano unfolds in the background, while I abide in a quiet glory; surrounded by plants I myself placed into the soil and let flourish.

I am well‑rested and deeply content, having returned only recently from my time away; last night I slept for longer than is my custom.

Though I hold myself to a steady and disciplined routine, I have learned that wisdom also means knowing when an exception must take precedence.

Upon entering this existence, every single one of us is bestowed a precious gift:

the gift of intuition

That inner voice which speaks not in language or argument, but through feeling and recognition.

Over time, many of us lose touch with this subtle form of guidance, and I am certainly no exception.

Yet when the petals fade and fall, we know well that this is not the end of the plant’s story.

With patience, care, and enduring hope,…

Read more