holy grail
Is the legend of the Holy Grail a warning about earth changes told in story form? Randall Carlson argues that it is - and now is the time to have this secret revealed.

We're all familiar with the story of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, the legend of the Holy Grail - and the famous symbology that these narratives contain. Dozens of stories over many centuries have expanded on these ideas, and much has been written in academia about what meaning could be derived from them - their literary and cultural origins, their psycho-spiritual meaning. But one angle - perhaps the most important - has remained neglected.

This week on MindMatters we have a look at Randall Carlson's take on all these themes as they relate to cyclical catastrophism, esoteric cosmology and spiritual growth - in his series of articles on the symbolism of the Grail. Is it possible that all these long-lasting tales contained some essential truths about our reality? Were they designed to hold historical facts to be communicated in popular form, as in Gurdjieff's concept of a 'legominism'? And lastly, do they contain veiled warnings to those who would read them far into the future - as in right now? Join us as we discuss Carlson's series of articles on the topic, and more.


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Here's the transcript of the show:

Harrison: ...And that seems to be what Randall Carlson is saying in this article If this is what happened in the past, if this is what our ancestors are warning us about, maybe we should take that seriously and basically prepare for it.

Welcome back to MindMatters everyone. Over the last couple of weeks I've been reading some articles by Randall Carlson. For anyone who hasn't heard of him, he has made a few appearances on Joe Rogan, some by himself, some with Graham Hancock, and he's got his own podcast. I think it's still called Cosmographia.

So over the past several months, I've listened to several of his podcasts. He's a really interesting guy, looking at catastrophism, the 'Younger Dryas' impact hypothesis and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. I found a series of articles he did several years ago on the 'Holy Grail'. So we're going to be talking a bit about that, maybe some other topics, maybe not. He makes some very interesting conclusions about the Holy Grail mythos and everything surrounding it.

Maybe as a bit of background, for those who are not up to speed on the whole history of the Holy Grail, at the end of the 1,100s, around 1180 and then for the next 50 years, that's when pretty much all of the major Holy Grail stories were composed and came out. So it was this intense period for about 50 years of this creative output, all centered around the theme of the Holy Grail. The first works were by Chretien de Troyes, Wolfram von Eschenback and Robert de Boron, and some anonymous works and they all kind of center around a similar theme but they're all really different too. They all have different characters doing different things. The Holy Grail appears in different forms throughout these works but they all center around one main either an overarching storyline, or the idea of the Holy Grail as this mystery that is being sought, this item of great import that can bring healing to a blighted land.

If anyone hasn't read any of the original Grail accounts, I'm sure you've seen it in pop culture either as the cup at the end of Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, or of course Monty Python and The Holy Grail, this idea of the Knights of The Round Table - King Arthur, Merlin and the quest for the Holy Grail - going out in search, usually of this chalice, this cup.

The main storyline is that the king, Arthur or Bran, has been in a battle and his thigh is wounded by a lance or a spear. This thrusts him into a sickness and accompanying that sickness is a sickness of the land. So there's the theme of something bad happening. The king gets seriously but not mortally wounded in such a way that the land is then affected. So there is famine, death, destruction and pestilence and it is the goal of the Grail quester to find the Grail to restore the land to its original state, to heal it, regenerate it and bring it back to normal.

That's kind of the grail lore in a nutshell. Of course there are all kinds of other storylines and tales mixed into that with characters like Perceval, Galahad and Gawain, and of course Arthur and Merlin and all of their antics and all of the works that have been composed in the centuries since then - up to and including The Once and Future King, a famous series of young adult novels but good for adults too.

So, Randall Carlson looks at this and wants to find out what's behind this. What is the Holy Grail? What do these stories actually mean? What is this mystery? He comes to some interesting conclusions in line with other scholars, but these are conclusions that could only really have been made in the last 50-100 years. Once he lays out his case in this series of twelve articles, especially if you're familiar with some related works, then it should really make sense. He quotes, for instance Patrick McCafferty, I believe his name is, who wrote a book with Mike Baillie, a dendrochronologist, called The Celtic Gods. Mike Baillie had written a couple of books in addition to that, one called From Exodus To Arthur and a third one called New Light On The Black Death - all dealing with catastrophism and the historical record of dramatic climatic changes, and the hypothesis that many of these swift and sudden and often catastrophic turnarounds in population, agriculture, mortality, demographics, are associated with cometary bombardments.

This was a pretty new hypothesis because the mainstream view has been that that kind of thing doesn't happen. The last big cometary bombardment that destroyed things was the extinction of the dinosaurs. That was 65 million years ago. Even that hypothesis took a while to be accepted. I think it was Luis Alvarez who first proposed it? Not a lot of people took him seriously and now it's common knowledge.

The same kind of thing is happening with the Younger Dryas which was around 12,500 years ago, the idea that this turn around in the climate at the time and also the extinction of many species including the mega fauna, were the result of this encounter with a comet which pretty much destroyed all of North America and several other regions. It was a global catastrophe. We talked about that in the show that we did on America Before, Graham Hancock's latest book.

But when we look at the Grail legends, they refer back to King Arthur. As I mentioned, the first one was written around 1180 AD and they refer back to this time of Camelot and King Arthur which is generally placed around the year 540, so 600 years before these stories were written. That is when King Arthur was supposed to have lived and died. And yet there are questions over whether Arthur is even a historical figure. He could just be a mythical figure, a legend that was created at some point.

But the stories themselves seem to be greatly symbolic in nature. Carlson calls the language of these stories 'the language of cosmic symbolism'. One of the phrases that he uses in his articles is to call them:

"...a carefully composed code, or cryptogram that has been deliberately disassembled for purposes of concealment, preservation, and transmission". He also says that this..."cosmic symbolism has been embedded and preserved for posterity."

So he does acknowledge that there are multiple levels of meaning in these stories. One that has been analyzed already and is pretty common is the psychological/spiritual angle of looking at these stories, what it means for personal spiritual regeneration within oneself. But he argues that an important way of looking at this that hasn't been widely, either accepted, acknowledged or even discovered, is to look at the Grail as he calls it:

"...a symbol for a lost technology of individual, social and planetary regeneration. The Grail Quest then is an allegory for the search and eventual recovery of this technology for the restoration of both the debilitated king and the devastated kingdom that has devolved into an infertile wasteland."

I mentioned Mike Baillie and his book From Exodus To Arthur where, I'm not sure if he was the first, but he might have been the first, to present the idea that at around this time that King Arthur was supposed to have lived and died - 540 AD - there was again, a catastrophe. The climate, especially in Ireland and England, there was a downturn in that climate.

Carlson too, quotes a bunch of sources all around this time period, one of which relates that there was a comet in the skies for a hundred days, that it burned brighter than the sun, that the climate got colder, that the crops failed, that there was famine. And then a couple of years later there was the Justinian Plague that wiped out like one-third of the population in these areas. So there was a ton of horrible, catastrophic stuff going on in this time, mass destruction. That was the start of the 'dark ages' at this period of time.

So there was something that happened that wrecked civilization at that time and just destroyed things, and did bring 'a blight upon the land.' That there was some event that was responsible for this unprecedented rain of destruction and it lasted for years and years afterwards. Baillie and Carlson both hypothesized that the thing that wrecked civilization at that time was a cometary bombardment of some sort and that in the Grail legends written 600 years after that fact, that these ideas were basically embedded in them, in a symbolic frame work that was embedded and hidden at the same time

So there's this mystery about the Grail and behind the meaning of that mystery, is close encounters with cometary bombardments that have been more common than commonly believed in humanity's history, not just pre-humans like with the dinosaurs, but in human history cometary bombardments have played a huge role in the rise and fall of civilizations, the onset of dramatic climate change, and as Baillie shows in New Light On The Black Death, even potentially mass pandemics that wiped out huge portions of the populations at the time.

So all of these seem to be found and encoded in the Holy Grail. When I was reading this I was reminded of an idea in Gurdjieff's Beelzebub's Tales, also a bit in In Search of the Miraculous. In In Search of the Miraculous he talks about objective art and the features that objective art has, and then in Beelzebub's Tales he has a section on what he calls 'legomonisms' - that's one of the new words he came up with for this certain type of 'thing'. So in Beelzebub's Tales, Beelzebub tells his grandson Hassein that this word 'legomonism':

"'Legonomism', Beelzebub replied, is the name given to one of the means existing there on planet earth of transmitting from generation to generation information about certain events of long-past ages throughout those three-brained beings who are thought worthy to be and who are called 'initiates'."

So there's this idea in Gurdjieff of these stories or myths that contain hidden and coded information about real events of past ages that actually happened, that are then encoded for future generations to discover, and to then learn from. That seems to be exactly what the Grail legends describe, not only the Grail legends, but myths of all sorts.

Again we saw that in our discussion of Graham Hancock's latest book, and I think in those shows, maybe even the world mythology show on Witzel's book, we talked about how it's not just Hancock and Baillie, also Victor Clube and Bill Napier have a couple of books called Cosmic Serpent and The Cosmic Winter where they look at Greek mythology and not just the Greek myths but mythologies all over the place seem to encode these real events for past ages of these cometary bombardments that have devastated humanity, what happened afterwards, and maybe what we need to learn in order to either avoid or mitigate those same things from happening in the future.

And that seems to be what Randall Carlson is saying in his articles. It's past time that we re-examined these myths, took a close look at them, took them seriously enough to then realize that, if this is what happened in the past, and if this is what our ancestors are warning us about, maybe we should take that seriously and prepare for it.

Do you have anything you wanted to add to that Corey?

Corey: Yes. I just want to kind of touch a little bit on the green language or the language of cosmic symbolism that you were talking about. The way that he argues in this series of articles, is that this language of the Holy Grail is actually a code for something much deeper and that it's based on the same kind of principles that different ciphers, thieves, criminals and alchemists have used over the years in order to transmit information and to use pictorial language, very imaginal types of figures, that will describe something to one person that another person who lacked the context of the initiates, could not possibly understand.

Thousands of articles have been written about the mystery of the Grail and hundreds, probably thousands of books have been written about the mystery too, but each from a very distinct and specific perspective. You get the alchemical perspective of what the Holy Grail symbolizes for individual transformation through all these quests and different things that when people try to find the answer for spiritual transformation. But you don't get somebody with Randall Carlson's kind of background. He's an engineer, scientist, with a very nuts and bolts background in science and he also is clearly a great detective because he's read all that literature. But he's also read the literature regarding the roles of myth in life and in transmitting important information from one generation to another.

When he looks at these pictures, and he's reading the Grail legends, he's picking up on things in etymology and in history that any of us would be oblivious to. One example is the word 'sangreal' which I believe the Holy Grail comes from. Now in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the main thesis in that book was that the 'sangreal' had been split in the wrong syllable. So you could say it's either 'san grail' - Holy Grail - or 'holy blood' - sang real. And he points out that this is almost deliberate on the part of this symbolism. You're supposed to pick up on numerous aspects and different dimensions, of even one little word because they're all clues to the much bigger picture.

It's not just about the descendants of Jesus Christ and it's not just about spiritual uplift. He devotes the entire article to describing blood in the skies and blood raining from the skies even in modern times, that scientists have analyzed, blood that has come down from the sky - that's what it looks like, it's blood - and it usually follows some sort of sonic boom, some sort of cometary fragments exploding in the atmosphere. Then when scientists were actually able to analyze it, they noticed that it was just billions of micro organisms that very well could be some sort of a 'holy blood', that has been transmitted throughout the ages in order to tell people that not only are these signs to look for, but also the most intriguing thing I think about his article is that there's been some transmission of information about how all of these different biological and metallic elements that come raining down throughout history, periodically destroying the world, have also been used by life itself and by man to rebuild civilization and that there is inherent in the Holy Grail quest this, this anthropological dimension of the struggle it takes to rebuild civilization and to restore the King after the world has been turned into just a bitter, horrible wasteland by all these things.

But at the same time there's something holy and magical, alchemical, about this process itself. We still don't understand what role it has really played in not only the spreading of life throughout the cosmos, but also the evolution of life on our planet.

Harrison: There are a few different things to say about that. One, is that Carlson too points out the almost contradictory natures of the Grail, in these myths. On the one hand there is an element of destruction, but there's also an element of re-birth. It seems that the source of both of them is the same. So you have these cometary bombardments that just bring absolute destruction that can wipe out entire civilizations, and then on the other hand, comets have been seemingly - Carlson argues - responsible for not only the introduction of life into our planet and most likely elsewhere in the cosmos, but in injecting, like you said, these pre-biotic materials, amino acids, many different types of pre-biotic materials. Even organic materials have been shown to exist in cometary debris and to survive not only the dead cold of space but the very hot entry into the earth's atmosphere.

When that happens, he has another article in this series that describes the life cycle of a comet, which is interesting. Maybe we'll get into some of those in a bit, but what happens at the end of it. So finally you've got this burning bright comet, often brighter than the sun that smashes down into earth and creates a crater, and 'crater' is the root word of 'grail'. 'Grail' tracks back through several languages to the original Greek word for basically a 'platter', a 'krater', a crater, and now we've used that word as a description for the 'astrobleam', the star blemish that forms after an asteroid or a meteor strikes the earth. You get that bowl shaped thing. It's an interesting coincidence that the word we have actually lines up with the grail, one of whose symbols was a platter or a chalice, the same kind of shape.

And when that happens, all of these materials are then injected, not only into the atmosphere but also the lithosphere, the biosphere. In the years after the Tunguska event of 1908 when a comet fragment exploded over Russia, they discovered that some of the life forms like plant life and insect life, was affected in such a way that now they were growing hundreds of times faster than they ordinarily would have.

Something happened to their actual genetics, or the expression of their genetics. Carlson argues this was probably what happened throughout history, at the various times when we see explosions of speciation, of new variations in species and new species, that there's an injection of material from the heavens, a meeting of heaven and earth through the cometary bombardment that literally brings the heavens down to earth and injects all this material into every aspect of the earth.

He quotes another study that showed that the boundaries of the continents and the way they originally broke up from one single continent, were these massive cometary bombardments that broke the lithosphere right down there to create these fractures that then allowed for the separation of the continents and that by causing this rocky destruction in such a way, it essentially accessed the hydrosphere, the sources of water and the circulation of water on the planet so that whatever was injected, via that comet, could then spread throughout the entire earth. It was a network to distribute the material injected from cometary debris.

To get back to the thing about blood, the reason he ties this in is that in several of the Grail stories there is the association between the Grail and blood, not only in the 'sang real', the 'holy blood'. For instance there's one image in the procession of the Grail, I can't remember what story it was in, where Perceval is shown a procession of objects - one of which is a white lance dripping blood at the end. And then it's followed at the end of the procession by the Grail itself which is too bright to look at, it's brighter than the sun.

And that whole scene, Carlson shows, is entirely cosmic in nature. The castle in which it happens is a representation of the heavens, the night sky that we see. The Grail enters and goes through a series of progressions as different objects - a candelabra, a white lance. The lance or the spear has been one of the symbols associated with comets because that's what it can appear as in the skies, as well as a sword.

Comets can take up all kinds of different shapes in the sky and have been associated with all kinds of symbols and images, like a beautiful woman with flowing hair. That flowing hair is the tail of the comet, a spear or a sword because they can appear as these straight weapon-like objects in the sky, serpents or dragons. There's an endless series of symbols associated with this.

In the Grail, one of them is, like I said, this lance dripping blood and not only that, in recollections of encounters with comets historically, there have been these associations with rains of blood. Patrick McCafferty, who I mentioned earlier, has done a study collecting all these reports and looking at them, and like you said, even into modern times this same phenomenon happens. It happened in Kamala, India in 2001, and then in 2011, I believe in Pakistan. So these were what some scientists were able to actually because they got the 'cosmic blood' and analyzed it, and that's when they found all these microorganisms and discovered that it was actually biotic material.

So these rains of blood have been associated with comets throughout recorded history, and even up to the present time, like you said, with the association with sonic booms which are often air burst phenomena where the cometary fragment explodes in the air and then causes a sonic boom, and with reports of meteor showers and fireballs. So even today those phenomena are associated.

There's this weird biotic material that somehow rains down from space that is associated with blood, not only in legends but in historical accounts of these close encounters or very close encounters. Carlson wonders about this, about the history for all of evolution, all of human history, that there is some aspect to all of this that we don't really have a grasp on yet, but that it seems, if it's true that these initiates, these people who encoded all this information in not only these legends and myths, but in buildings like the cathedrals and the ancient structures like Stonehenge and things like that that Graham Hancock talks about.

I just want to mention, around this time, from the late 1100's to the early 1200's, this was also the period at the beginning of the building of the great cathedrals. So there was a pre-gothic tradition of building but it was around the same time where we had this explosion of buildings of these great cathedrals like Notre Dame and Chartres, I believe, and dozens of others. So that was when Gothic architecture got started. In other materials Carlson looks at that too, and the geometry, because he's big into geometry of ancient sites and things like that too. That's one of the things that he likes to look at.

Also, this is when there was, if not a resurgence, then like a blossoming of Sufism in Spain and in the Middle East. Ibn Arabi was living just around the same time. He was one of the biggest Sufi writers, theorists and practitioners of the time. His works are still renowned in Sufism. I think Carlson has a list. It was around this same time it was the rise of power of the Templar Knights, the rise and fall of Catharism in Southern France. There were the Kabbalistic and mystical schools in Spain, all kinds of stuff and of course for hermetic tradition. This was an important time for that kind of stuff too.

So there was a lot going on in this period of time and if you ever look into alchemy, or any of these secret tradition schools, you get the impression that these people know something, or at least they think they know something. They seem to have devoted a lot of attention to these details and these arcane, strange practices and theories. Not knowing what it is on the outside, there's a barrier caused by that language of the birds that you were talking about Corey, that symbolic language that makes it incomprehensible to someone who isn't an insider, essentially. But even Isaac Newton probably devoted more time to alchemy than he did to his more accepted and scientific results that he's now known for. He was actually probably more interested in alchemy than what we would now call real science.

So there's just a whole bunch of weird stuff going on there and it makes you wonder if there is something more that these folks understood and were trying to get across and how they knew it -- an interesting thing for future study.

Elan: Well at the top of the show, Harrison, you mentioned the vast number of Arthurian legends, myths and stories that became popularized as a result of all of this information. It's very hard to separate, I think, the power of those stories and their longevity from what they were actually signifying, or what they were representing for popular culture, if you will. It's fascinating to think that deep in the subconscious of writers and people who were looking at this myth and recreating it for popular consumption, there was perhaps unconscious knowing that these stories did have a power and were trying to communicate something.

And if you take stories like The Once And Future King by T.H. White for instance, which I think is probably one of the most beloved versions of the Grail myth and the Arthurian legend, you find -- whether because he's extrapolating certain truths that he understood for himself, or picked up on certain pieces of truth that he had assimilated while reading the material itself, it's hard to say -- but there are some very interesting things that he has in that book. One is knights of the round table, this idea of a circle of individuals who were committed to seeing and acting on the same truths, in the Grail quest. There's almost an esoteric significance to this inner circle of people who took it upon themselves to swear fealty to Arthur and everything that they were looking to accomplish together.

T.H. White also describes Arthur's education at the hands of Merlin. Merlin shows Arthur's connection to everything - his connection to nature. He helps Arthur assume the consciousness of a fish or a blade of grass or an animal, in order that Arthur be better connected to nature and understand his connection to it. There's also a great deal of information or parts of the story that suggests that Arthur wasn't this arrogant megalomaniac of a king. On the contrary, it was his humility that informed his rule. There's a scene where he's darning his own socks, which is an image you don't quite often see in literature - a king having the very basic understanding that he could do things for himself. He wasn't lording it over individuals because he had the power to, which in fact was, I think White is saying, what made him a real king. He had a connection to everything and he wasn't putting himself above anything.

So lots of interesting connections there, I think, and probably speaks to the fact that it was Arthur's true leadership in the way that White describes - and probably others - that would help inform his ability to see the secrets of the Grail or to find it, to make him worthy of seeing his connection to what the real state of affairs is in the world and in history.

Corey: You were just talking about the traditional elements that come out of the story. It was created by initiates back in 1080 AD or thereabouts. I wanted to get an idea of the mindset that these individuals, this era, might have had about comets. Was there public discussion? Was it academic, controversial? What was the mindset?

So I just did a little poking around and discovered that around that time John of Damascus, Albertus Magnus, the Catholic saints/alchemical super hero in history, and others, were debating the meaning of comets because it was unclear why they existed or where they came from and what their significance was in in God's kingdom. Were they just degenerate bodies coming down to earth? Or did God purposely create these, and then send them down in order to create a new world?

I thought it was very intriguing that these kinds of opinions were being discussed - John of Damascus held the latter opinion, whereas others like Albertus Magnus held the former - that there was a place for comets in Christianity, in theology, that there was a drive to understand their place in theology and that they were elevated in a way that was befitting their significance to mankind. Whereas today, if you were to even mention the kinds of things that the Holy Grail allegedly symbolizes, then talk about a lock-down! Talk about a shut down and a panic! I think there's a real good reason why these things had to be couched - if this is what it symbolizes - couched in a language that would necessitate only those who had the perspicacity and the character, like you were talking about Elan, to pull all these pieces together and to understand the significance of them.

Harrison: I agree with that. I think there's another aspect too, that something of great importance from a remote period of time, can only really be passed on in story form. Just think about the number of people who have read The Odyssey and then compare that to the number of people who have read, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, right?

Corey: Yeah.

Harrison: Or some obscure, more scientific.How many people have actually read Newton in the original, right? Probably a tiny, tiny percentage of the population has actually read Isaac Newton's works. They know some of his scientific work that's come down because it's actually practiced by scientists today and it's taught in grade school or high school. But how many people have actually read that and know what he actually wrote? Very few. But how many people have read or heard of the Grail legend?

It's almost universal to the point where it filters down into pop culture and Monty Python makes a funny movie about it, so practically everyone knows or has heard of the Holy Grail. And probably no one can name a single book written by Isaac Newton.

You also have to factor in the idea of these actual destructions that happened and what happened afterwards because civilization was essentially destroyed. All of a sudden you totally lack the social structure that you had beforehand. You lack all the institutions that you had beforehand. If you look at the way society is structured, it's very compartmentalized and specialized, and when you wipe out sixty percent of the population, you lose all of that expertise and you have to rebuild from scratch. That has probably happened numerous times in human history.

So how do you pass on the knowledge you have when you don't have the institutions, and you've lost some of your brightest lights in the spheres of education, intelligence or knowledge? Well, you tell a story about it, you embed it in a story.

So something of great importance can be passed on through generations and generations, relatively intact, to the point where we can still read those same stories that were written even thousands of years ago, but oftentimes we just lack the key to understanding. It's been preserved, hopefully or probably with the intention of being discovered and unopened. But for various reasons it had to be encoded -- either just to inject it into a popular form that could be carried on for generations, or because there was something dangerous about that information at the time that couldn't be shared widely, or it was perceived that it couldn't be shared widely.

I know this was true of cometary stuff at various times in history. I don't know if we want to get into that. It was dangerous knowledge in certain times and in certain contexts. There's a political aspect, that it could expose the weakness and the inability of current leadership to have any kind of control over the global situation because here's something for which our great leaders can't do anything to save us.

So when you have these sources of chaos that can destroy everything, there is a wish on certain people's behalf, to pretend that they have the power to preserve society and to kind of keep the peace. Whereas, cometary bombardments kind of disabuse people of that notion and people then often turn on leaders. In that sense in certain times it's been dangerous knowledge to have.

But that's still a mystery. I'm still not quite sure what I think about all of that and how it all plays out, specifically with the Grail legends. What was the real intention? Why was this encoded at this particular time in the way that it was? This was six hundred years after this destruction of 540 AD.

What I'm going to look at next, is what was the next 'big one'? When was the black death? Was that in the 1200s or 1300s? I can't remember.

Corey: It stretched on for a few centuries, right?

Harrison: Well whenever it started, it could be that this was in preparation for that. Maybe not specifically. They might not have had the ability to predict that in exactly this amount of years we're going to experience another one of these things in some form or another, but that, 'this happened in the past, it's going to happen again, we're going to at least get these ideas into the mass consciousness', and for various reasons, not just about comets. Like we said at the beginning of the show, there are multiple levels of meaning and like Elan was saying about The Once And Future King, there are other aspects to these kinds of stories that have other purposes than just giving information about cometary bombardments.

I want to get into that a little bit, but first, on the subject of the cometary bombardment I think Carlson puts something pretty well in one of the articles when he said that after giving a lot of the information on this cometary interpretation, some of these stories in the Grail myths, he says:

"It is describing an entirely natural event or phenomenon, but one that manifests on such a scale of power that it indelibly imprints itself on the religious consciousness of those who experience it directly."

So this is something that it's easy to forget or not bring to mind, what an encounter like this must have been like, from what we know of the recorded sources and then what the science tells us as well, something that we haven't experienced to any great degree in our lifetimes, or even the last hundred years. So we have no real frame of reference for it. But you can get an idea.

For instance, from the Chelyabinsk explosion from several years ago. This was something totally minor, this tiny comet fragment that exploded in the skies over Russia, and you've probably seen the dash cam footage of it where it just lit up the sky brighter than the sun.

But if you can imagine this giant comet in the sky that is shining brighter than the sun, and all kinds of weird things are going on up there. First of all you have this magical, fantastical display going on in the skies that's out of nowhere, that you've never experienced before. The heavens are supposed to be lawful. Everything is supposed to happen like clockwork, right? And then you have the introduction of this new chaos, this new element that comes out of nowhere. What is this, this comet?

It's not just a comet, a tiny little comet like we know from Halley's Comet or like the pictures we see. This is something taking...

Corey: Not a shooting star...

Harrison: It's not a shooting star. This is a new heavenly body that is prominent.

Corey:, Like a moon.

Harrison:, Like a moon or a new sun. And it is interacting with other fragments from the comet because one of the phases of the comet life cycle is this disintegration of the comet. As they enter, like happened with Shoemaker Levy in 1994, they break up into fragments. So now you have multiple comets and they can interact in certain ways in the skies. They can appear to fight each other or engage in some kind of battle. One swallows the other, one destroys the other.

So you have these accounts of battles in the heavens. Then imagine the actual destruction caused when one of them enters the atmosphere. As it's passing through the atmosphere and if it crashes into the ocean, it can be burning at up too -- what did Carlson say? -- well at some ridiculously high temperature, hotter than the surface of the sun. So it melts everything in its path. If it impacts land, it can melt stone and create this liquid mass of whatever it happens to hit. Or it can go in the ocean, dissolve a whole bunch of water and if it's strong enough, it can actually go through the entire ocean and create a crater at the bottom of the ocean, and create giant tsunamis.

And so for anyone experiencing this kind of event, it would be not even the experience of a lifetime, but of several generations, even hundreds of years, as Carlson says, indelibly imprint itself on the religious consciousness of the person experiencing it. It creates such an effect, on such a level. It's not like you're going down the street and you see some weird looking person that is kind of odd, that you then remember and tell your friends about. This is a life-changing event, not only for you but for all of humanity, or everyone in the area to experience it.

So when you get an idea of the scope of the kind of experiences that this is, you can then understand not only the imagery, but the feelings surrounding these stories. When you think about the Holy Grail or you experience the emotions, the mystery around it, and the other-worldliness of it, somehow they manage to be captured in these stories but they are directly applicable to the actual experience itself. These guys were having this discussion about it, like around 1200 and trying to figure out what was going on, but it was something mysterious,...

Corey: Marvelous.

Harrison: ...enigmatic and yeah, marvelous! And to then have that feeling encoded in these stories is, I think, just as important as whatever scientific information that might be encoded in there. There is something, like I said, otherworldly about this.

And this then ties into one of the other interpretations which is the more psychological or spiritual angle. Carlson points out that there are many correlations between the Holy Grail symbolism, that whole mythos, and alchemy. Both deal with the Philosopher's Stone for instance, and they're often equated. The Holy Grail is the Philosopher's Stone of the alchemists and the achievement of the Philosopher's Stone is then the access to this regenerative substance, or something that manages to restore the original healthy state to the fallen and sick individual, like a spiritual regeneration or rebirth that occurs within the body of the alchemist. At least that's an interpretation of alchemy that's not just limited to playing around with your alchemical instruments and creating some gold, that there is an inner gold, an inner spiritual thing going on.

It's really interesting to me that the myth manages to play itself out on these multiple levels. So in the strictly cometary interpretation, you have this heavenly body that is introduced into the earthly body, that brings new materials and heavenly materials, and injects those heavenly materials into the earthly body to regenerate and create new life. When you look at any number of spiritual traditions or esoteric spiritual traditions, or just esoteric traditions, you have a similar structure where there is some heavenly substance, whether it's the Holy Spirit or the Buraka or whatever, that through some kind of spiritual practice, gets introduced into the body and then acts as a catalyst for some kind of new process in the body, new growth that regenerates and brings life to what was relatively, in comparison, dead. What happens on the actual earthly scale and in an actual, like Carlson calls it 'an entirely natural event or phenomenon' has this correlation with this spiritual practice that happens on an inner level, or at least is purported to happen on a spiritual level.

Corey: I just wanted to add that that reminds me of the show that we did on the Crucifixion. The entire takeaway was that you can have no resurrection without the crucifixion. I remember when I was growing up, I would have dreams of comets. That was always a very interesting experience because in the dream it was always like I was watching, like it was actually happening. I still remember the emotions upon waking, of awe and terror, because the entire cosmos is under assault. When you're talking about the descriptions of comets in the sky, it's like the Gods themselves are here to wreak absolute chaos. The Gods have returned and they seem like they're pissed. There's an element to it that just shakes you to your bones.

It's something like a crucifixion. Like the crucifixion, where you're going through the disintegration of your old personality or something, it's a death that has to occur. So I can see why it would translate so well on a number of different levels, even for the earth. Perhaps the earth needs a crucifixion now and then, just as individuals we need crucifixions in order to live and to evolve.

Elan: It's been a while since I've read the stats but it seems that the comet or meteor in Chelyabinsk, in Russia, that we read news about a few years ago, is just part and parcel of what may be part of a cycle of increased activity that we're experiencing here on earth right now. We hear reports of sonic booms and sightings of fireballs of various descriptions and colors, and doing all sorts of strange electromagnetically charged activity.

We've been talking about the sun on multiple levels. So another level that would seem to be playing out at this time, or not, is this geopolitical level. Right now we have major economic, military and informational wars that are being perpetuated by various interests in the US, in China, and in Russia. And in the midst of this, it has come out recently that with all of this rhetoric and high flying accusations and efforts to seemingly undercut one another, or to work with one another and to make sincere attempts at working together - as can be demonstrated on the part of Russia and in part China with the US - Trump came out recently with an act that would basically mean the cooperation of the US, China, and Russia in identifying and eliminating a threat from asteroids, in addition to mining on the moon among other things.

So if you've ever read anything about the space wars program by Ronald Reagan and the various types of high tech weaponry that has been inserted into our orbit in order to get the advantage over other countries, this would seem to be a completely opposite intent or policy which has been largely unnoticed by the media. I read that recently and I was wondering what is it that Trump knows, that he would be so willing to buck the Washington consensus of being anti-China, anti-Russia, or not working with them, on one level, and actually signed this major level of cooperation on a cosmic scale, that no one else was covering?! I think his name is Matthew Ehret, a journalist who writes from Canada, about his observations about the US's deep state intentions and all the types of things that are pushing the Trump administration in a certain negative direction, that he's always tried to put the stops on.

But in the midst of Covid19, in the midst of all of these other many things that are going on, he acknowledges celestial intentions, and signs this act of cooperation with the almost officially avowed enemies of the US, according to Washington dictates.

So I thought that was very interesting and I wonder what that says about him, and what that says about Putin and Xi, that they are acknowledging this threat from above and would be willing to think about and work on a cooperative venture of offsetting all of these things from occurring.

Harrison: Well, to wrap up today, I'll just read something from Carlson's conclusion that recaps pretty much what he wrote about in the entire series. So he begins:

"The word employed to describe the geological formation of a great excavation in the Earth's crust caused by hypervelocity impact was the original Greek term from whence derives the term 'Grail' as in Holy Grail, referring to a special cup, plate, or saucer that confers properties of rejuvenation and longevity upon those who imbibe its contents, as well as restoring life to a barren wasteland.

We have learned that as a byproduct of the great impact events, exotic materials such as platinum group metals and biological and genetic precursors are introduced into the Earth's crust and into the biosphere. We have learned that there were ancient traditions extracting and employing the cosmic materials in various ways, possibly to accelerate spiritual processes. We have learned that as a result of these powerful impacts, the crust of the Earth is fractured and broken.

This extensive network of fracture weaknesses permeating the lithosphere allows for the circulation of subterranean waters and the dispersion of the celestial products of impact throughout the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and ultimately, the biosphere. It is through this process, I am suggesting, that evolution is catalyzed. I am also suggesting that a sophisticated scientific knowledge of these processes has existed since ancient times and has been preserved to one extent or another in the traditions of the Holy Grail and Alchemy."

So we'll include a link to Carlson's articles in the show description, so check it out if you're interested and we'll probably also include a link to his YouTube channel where you can see the stuff he's been working on lately, and podcasts relating to the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis.

So enjoy and we'll see you later.