Alban, Roman Soldier

A Roman soldier, Alban hid a fugitive priest, was converted by him, then sentenced to death for disguising himself as the priest and allowing him to escape. A great multitude gathered to witness his execution--too many to pass over the narrow bridge that must be crossed. Alban prayed and the river parted--whereupon his executioner, being converted, begged to die in Alban's place. His request was denied and he was beheaded that day alongside the saint.

Master Teacher of the Neoplatonists

But Saint Germain was not always to be counted in the ranks of the Church. He fought tyranny wherever he found it, including in false Christian doctrine. As the Master Teacher behind the Neoplatonists, Saint Germain was the inner inspiration of the Greek philosopher Proclus (c. A. D. 410-485).

He revealed his pupil's previous life as a Pythagorean philosopher, also showing Proclus the sham of Constantine's Christianity and the worth of the path of individualism (leading to the individualization of the God flame) which Christians called "paganism."

As the highly honored head of Plato's Academy at Athens, Proclus based his philosophy upon the principle that there is only one true reality--the "One," which is God, or the Godhead, the final goal of all life's efforts. The philosopher said, "Beyond all bodies is the essence of soul, and beyond all souls the intellectual nature, and beyond all intellectual existences the One." Throughout his incarnations Saint Germain demonstrated tremendous breadth of knowledge in the Mind of God; not surprising was the range of his pupil's awareness. His writings extended to almost every department of learning.

Proclus acknowledged that his enlightenment and philosophy came from above--indeed he believed himself to be one through whom divine revelation reached mankind. "He did not appear to be without divine inspiration, his disciple Marinus wrote, "for he produced from his wise mouth words similar to the most thick-falling snow; so that his eyes emitted a bright radiance, and the rest of his countenance participated of divine illumination."

Thus Saint Germain, white-robed, jeweled slippers and belt emitting star-fire from far-off worlds, was the mystery Master smiling just beyond the veil--mirroring the imagings of his mind in the soul of the last of the great Neoplatonic philosophers.

Merlin

Saint Germain was Merlin. The unforgettable, somehow irretrievable figure who haunts the mists of England, about to step forth at any moment to offer us a goblet of sparkling elixir. He the 'old man' who knows the secrets of youth and alchemy, who charted the stars at Stonehenge, and moved a stone or two, so they say, by his magical powers--who would astonish no one if he suddenly appeared on a Broadway stage or in the forests of the Yellowstone or at one's side on any highway anywhere. For Saint Germain is Merlin.

Merlin, dear Merlin, has never left us--his spirit charms the ages, makes us feel as rare and unique as his diamond and amethyst adornments. Merlin is the irreplaceable Presence, a humming vortex about whose science and legends and fatal romance Western civilization has entwined itself.

It was the fifth century. Midst the chaos left by the slow death of the Roman Empire, a king arose to unite a land splintered by warring chieftains and riven by Saxon invaders. At his side was the old man himself--half Druid priest, half Christian saint-seer, magician, counselor, friend, who led the king through twelve battles to unite a kingdom and establish a window of peace.

At some point, the spirit of Merlin went through a catharsis. The scene was one of fierce battle, the legend says. As he witnessed the carnage, a madness came upon him--of seeing all at once past/present and future--so peculiar to the lineage of the prophets. He fled to the forest to live as a wild man, and one day as he sat under a tree, he began to utter prophecies concerning the future of Wales.

"I was taken out of my true self," he said. "I was as a spirit and knew the history of people long past and could foretell the future. I knew then the secrets of nature, bird flight, star wanderings and the way fish glide." Both his prophetic utterances and his "magical" powers served one end: the making of a united kingdom of the tribes of the old Britons. His pervasiveness is recalled in an early Celtic name for Britain, "Clas Myrddin," which means "Merlin's Enclosure."

By advising and assisting Arthur in establishing his kingship, Merlin sought to make of Britain a fortress against ignorance and superstition where Christ achievement could flower and devotion to the One could prosper in the quest for the Holy Grail. His efforts on British soil were to bear fruit in the nineteenth century as the British Isles became the place where individual initiative and industry could thrive as never before in twelve thousand years.

But even as Camelot, the rose of England, budded and bloomed, night shade was twining about its roots. Witchcraft, intrigue and treachery destroyed Camelot, not the love of Launcelot and Guinevere as Tom Malory's misogynistic depiction suggests. Alas, the myth he sowed has obscured the real culprits these long centuries.

'Twas the king's bastard son Modred by his half sister Margawse who with Morgana le Fay and a circle of like sorceresses and black knights, set out to steal the crown, imprison the queen, and destroy for a time the bonds of a Love that such as these (of the left-handed path) had never known nor could --a Reality all of their willing, warring and enchantments could not touch.

Thus it was with a heavy heart and the spirit of a prophet who has seen visions of tragedy and desolation, fleeting joys and the piercing anguish of karmic retribution endlessly outplayed, that Merlin entered the scene of his own denouement, to be tied up in spells of his own telling by silly, cunning Vivien--and sleep. Aye, to err is human but to pine for the twin flame that is not there is the lot of many an errant knight or king or lonely prophet who perhaps should have disappeared into the mists rather than suffer sad ignominy for his people. Roger Bacon 

Some say he still sleeps but they grossly underestimate the resilient spirit of the wise man rebounded, this time in thirteenth-century England disguised as Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294). Reenter Merlin--scientist, philosopher, monk, alchemist and prophet--to forward his mission of laying the scientific moorings for the age of Aquarius his soul should one day sponsor.

The atonement of this lifetime was to be the voice crying in the intellectual and scientific wilderness that was medieval Britain. In an era in which either theology or logic or both dictated the parameters of science, he promoted the experimental method, declared his belief that the world was round, and castigated the scholars and scientists of his day for their narrow-mindedness. Thus he is viewed as the forerunner of modern science.

But he was also a prophet of modern technology. Although it is unlikely he did experiments to determine the feasibility of the following inventions, he predicted the hot-air balloon, a flying machine, spectacles, the telescope, microscope, elevator, and mechanically propelled ships and carriages, and wrote of them as if he had actually seen them! Bacon was also the first Westerner to write down the exact directions for making gunpowder, but kept the formula a secret lest it be used to harm anyone. No wonder people thought he was a magician!

However, just as Saint Germain tells us today in his Studies in Alchemy that "miracles" are wrought by the precise application of universal laws, so Roger Bacon meant his prophecies to demonstrate that flying machines and magical apparatus were products of the employment of natural law which men would figure out in time.

From whence did Bacon believe he derived his amazing awareness! "True knowledge stems not from the authority of others, nor from a blind allegiance to antiquated dogmas," he said. Two of his biographers write that he believed knowledge "is a highly personal experience--a light that is communicated only to the innermost privacy of the individual through the impartial channels of all knowledge and of all thought."

And so Bacon, who had been a lecturer at Oxford and the University of Paris, determined to separate himself and his thoughts from the posing and postulating residents of academe. He would seek and find his science in his religion. Entering the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor, he said, "I will conduct my experiments on the magnetic forces of the lodestone at the selfsame shrine where my fellow-scientist, St. Francis, performed his experiments on the magnetic forces of love."

But the friar's scientific and philosophical world view, his bold attacks on the theologians of his day, and his study of alchemy, astrology and magic led to charges of "heresies and novelties," for which he was imprisoned in 1278 by his fellow Franciscans! They kept him in solitary confinement for fourteen years, releasing him only shortly before his death. Although the clock of this life was run out, his body broken, he knew that his efforts would not be without impact on the future.

The following prophecy which he gave his students shows the grand and revolutionary ideals of the indomitable spirit of this living flame of freedom--the immortal spokesman for our scientific, religious and political liberties:

I believe that humanity shall accept as an axiom for its conduct the principle for which I have laid down my life--the right to investigate. It is the credo of free men--this opportunity to try, this privilege to err, this courage to experiment anew. We scientists of the human spirit shall experiment, experiment, ever experiment. Through centuries of trial and error, through agonies of research... let us experiment with laws and customs, with money systems and governments, until we chart the one true course-until we find the majesty of our proper orbit as the planets above have found theirs.... And then at last we shall move all together in the harmony of our spheres under the great impulse of a single creation--one unity, one system, one design.

Christopher Columbus

To establish this freedom upon earth, Saint Germain's lifestream took another turn--as Christopher Columbus (1451-1506). But over two centuries before Columbus sailed, Roger Bacon had set the stage for the voyage of the three ships and the discovery of the New World when he stated in his "Opus Majus" that "the sea between the end of Spain on the west and the beginning of India on the east is navigable in a very few days if the wind is favorable."

Although the statement was incorrect in that the land to the west of Spain was not India, it was instrumental in Columbus' discovery. Cardinal Pierre d'Ailly copied it in his Image Mundi without noting Bacon's authorship. Columbus read his work and quoted the passage in a 1498 letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, saying that his 1492 voyage had been inspired in part by this visionary statement.

Columbus believed that God had made him to be "the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth of which He spake in the Apocalypse of St. John, after having spoken of it by the mouth of Isaiah."

His vision went back as far as ancient Israel, perhaps even further. For in discovering the New World, Columbus believed that he was the instrument whereby God would, as Isaiah recorded around 732 B.C., "recover the remnant of his people....and shall assemble the outcasts of Israel, and gather together the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth."

Twenty-two centuries passed before anything visible happened that seemed to be the fulfillment of this prophecy. But late in the fifteenth century, Christopher Columbus was quietly preparing to set the stage for the fulfillment of this prophecy, certain that he had been divinely selected for his mission. He studied the biblical prophets, writing passages relating to his mission in a book of his own making entitled Las Proficias or The Prophecies-in its complete form, The Book of Prophecies concerning the Discovery of the Indies and the Recovery of Jerusalem. Although the point is seldom stressed, it is a fact so rooted in history that even Encyclopaedia Britannica says unequivocally that, "Columbus discovered America by prophecy rather than by astronomy."

"In the carrying out of this enterprise of the Indies," he wrote to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1502, "neither reason nor mathematics nor maps were any use to me: fully accomplished were the words of Isaiah." He was referring to Isaiah 11:10-12.

Thus we see that lifetime by lifetime, Saint Germain, whether his outer mind was continuously cognizant of it we know not, was re-creating that golden pathway to the Sun--a destiny come full circle to worship the God Presence and reestablish a lost golden age.

Francis Bacon

As Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the greatest mind the West has ever produced, his manifold achievements in every field catapulted the world into a stage set for the children of Aquarius. In this life he was free to carry to its conclusion the work he had begun as Roger Bacon.

Scholars have noted the similarities between the thoughts of the two philosophers and even between Roger's Opus Majus and Francis' De Augmentis and Novum Organum. This is made even more astounding by the fact that Roger's Opus was never published in his lifetime, fell into oblivion, and not until 113 years after Francis' Novum Organum and 110 years after his De Augmentis did it appear in print!

The unsurpassed wit of this immortal soul, this philosopher/king, this priest/scientist, might easily have kept its humor with the stubborn motto drawn from tyrants, tortures and tragedy: if they beat you in one life, come back and beat them in the next!

Francis Bacon is known as the father of inductive reasoning and the scientific method which, more than any other contributions, are responsible for the age of technology in which we now live. He foreknew that only applied science could free the masses from human misery and the drudgery of sheer survival in order that they might seek a higher spirituality they once knew. Thus, science and technology were essential to Saint Germain's plan for the liberation of his Lightbearers and through them all mankind.

His next step was to be nothing less bold than universal enlightenment!

"The Great Instauration" (restoration after decay, lapse, or dilapidation) was his formula to change "the whole wide world." First conceived when Bacon was a boy of 12 or 13 and later crystallized in 1607 in his book by the same name, it did indeed launch the English Renaissance with the help of Francis' tender, caring person. For over the years, he gathered around himself a group of illuminati who were responsible among other things for almost all of the Elizabethan literature--Ben Jonson, John Davies, George Herbert, John Selden, Edmund Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh, Gabriel Harvey, Robert Greene, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, George Peele, and Lancelot Andrewes.

Some of these were part of a "secret society" that Francis had formed with his brother Anthony, when the two were law students at Gray's Inn. This fledgling group, called "The Knights of the Helmet," had as its goal the advancement of learning by expanding the English language and by creating a new literature written not in Latin but in words which Englishmen could understand.

Francis also organized the translation of the King James version of the Bible, determined that the common people should have the benefit of reading God's Word for themselves. Furthermore, as was discovered in the 1890s in two separate ciphers--a word-cipher and a bi-literal cipher embedded  in the type of the original printings of the Shakespearean Folios--Francis Bacon was the author of the plays attributed to the actor from the squalid village of Stratford-on-Avon. He was the greatest literary genius of the Western world.

So, too, was Bacon behind many of the political ideas on which Western civilization is based. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jeremy Bentham took Bacon as their ideological starting point. His revolutionary principles are the engine that has driven our nation. They are the very essence of the can-do spirit. "Men are not animals erect," Bacon averred, "but immortal Gods. The Creator has given us souls equal to all the world, and yet satiable not even with a world."

Francis Bacon also continued the task he had begun as Christopher Columbus, promoting the colonization of the New World, for he knew that it was there that his ideas could take deepest root and come to fullest flower. He convinced James I to charter Newfoundland and was an officer in the Virginia Company, which sponsored the settlement of Jamestown, England's first permanent colony in America. And he founded Freemasonry, dedicated to the freedom and enlightenment of mankind, whose members played a large part in founding the new nation.

Yet he could have been an even greater boon to England and the whole world had he been allowed to fulfill his destiny. The same ciphers which run throughout the Shakespearean plays also run through Francis Bacon's own works and those of many of his circle of friends. Both ciphers contain his true life story, the musings of his soul, and anything he wished to bequeath to future generations but could not publish openly for fear of the queen.

Its secrets reveal that he should have been Francis I, King of England. He was the son of Queen Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley, Lord Leicester, born four months after a secret wedding ceremony. But she, wishing to retain her "Virgin Queen" status and afraid that if she acknowledged her marriage, she must give power to the ambitious Leicester, also lest the people prefer her male heir to herself and demand the queen's premature withdrawal from the throne, refused to allow Francis, on pain of death, to assume his true identity.

The queen kept him dangling all his life, never giving him public office, never proclaiming him her son, never allowing him to fulfill his goals for England. No, she would not allow her son to bring in the golden age of Britannia that was meant to be but never was. What cruel fate--a queen mother unbending, contemptuous before her golden age prince!

He was raised the foster son of Sir Nicholas and Lady Anne Bacon and at age 15 heard the truth of his birth from his own mother's lips in the same breath with which she barred him forever from the succession. In one night his world was in a shambles. Like young Hamlet, he pondered over and over the question, "To be or not to be!" That was his question.

In the end, he determined not to rebel against his mother or later, against her ill-fitted successor, James I. This despite the great good he knew he could bring to England, despite his vision of the land "as she might be, if wisely governed." He knew he had within himself the power to be a monarch such as the land had never known, a true father of the nation. He wrote of the "impulses of the godlike patriarchal care for his own people" he would exercise--shades of the golden age emperor of the Sahara.

Fortunately for the world, Francis determined to pursue his goal of universal enlightenment in the avenues of literature and science, as adviser to the throne, supporter of colonization, and founder of secret societies, thereby reestablishing the thread of contact with the ancient mystery schools. The outlet of his wounded spirit was his cipher writing in which he poured out his longings to a future age.

By the time of his death in 1626, persecuted and unrecognized for his manifold talents, Francis Bacon had triumphed over circumstances which would have destroyed lesser men, but which for him proved the true making of an Ascended Master.

The Wonderman of Europe

May 1, 1684, was Saint Germain's Ascension Day. From heights of power well earned and beyond this world's, he still stands to turn back all  attempts  to  thwart  his  'Great  Instauration' here below.

Desiring above all else to liberate God's people, whether they would or no, Saint Germain sought a dispensation from the Lords of Karma to return to earth in a physical body. They granted it and he appeared as the Comte de Saint Germain, a "miraculous" gentleman who dazzled the courts of eighteenth century Europe as "The Wonderman." His goal: to prevent the French Revolution, effect a smooth transition from monarchy to a Republican form of government, establish a United States of Europe, and enshrine the fleur-de-lis as threefold flame of God-identity in every heart.

Though admired throughout the courts of Europe for his adeptship--removing the flaws in diamonds, disappearing into thin air, writing the same verses of poetry simultaneously with both hands, accomplished in many languages, fluent in any subject, recounting any history as an eyewitness--he failed to secure the anticipated response. Though willing to be entertained, the royalty were not easily prodded to relinquish their power and move with the winds of democratic change. They and their jealous ministers ignored his counsel and the French Revolution ensued.

In a final attempt to unite Europe, Saint Germain backed Napoleon, who misused the Master's power to his own demise. The opportunity to set aside the retribution due an age thus passed, Saint Germain was once again forced to withdraw from a karmic situation. In this episode, though clearly visible as the mediator, Saint Germain with his miracles en main and his prophecies fulfilled could still be ignored! What would it take to turn people's hearts?