Shaun de Waal
FROM THE ASHES OF ANGELS by Andrew Collins (Michael Joseph, R149,95)
MAGI: IN SEARCH OF A SECRET TRADITION by Adrian G Gilbert (Bloomsbury, R149,95)
THE TOMB OF GOD by Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger (Little, Brown, R139,95)
A TEST OF TIME by David Rohl (Arrow, R139,95)
THE kind of books that used to be shelved under “Esoterica” are now making the bestseller lists, and the success of Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods seems to have encouraged a range of imitators. Such investigations into the pyramids, lost civilisations, astrology, ancient cults, and so forth, have long had a keen readership, but recently they seem to have caught a millennial mood. There are, at least, several new ones out for Christmas.
Andrew Collins’s From the Ashes of Angels takes as its starting point the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which tells the story of the rebel angels’ fall from heaven, how they cohabited with humans, and how the world was destroyed by water.
In what is essentially an exercise in comparative mythology, Collins finds every possible echo or extension of this “mythographeme” in other traditions, and argues, la Hancock, that these angels or giants were actually a technolgically advanced civilisation that existed some 12 000 years ago.
Collins’s book will be interesting to anyone who hasn’t yet encountered this strain of mythographical and archaeological speculation, though the proof of his theories is thin. He is keen to discover descendents of the “angels” in the Yezidi cult of Kurdistan, apparently unaware of JG Bennett’s journey there in the mid-1950s for different occult reasons.
Perhaps in thrall to Hancock’s adventure- tourist style, or just being the purveyor of a “unique brand of urban shamanism”, Collins over-dramatises his own quest-narrative (“I knew it was taking an enormous gamble to assume …”). He also writes badly: for instance, he seem to think the word “abstract” means something like “symbolic” or “stylised”, which leads him to talk absurdly of “abstract representations”.
Adrian Gilbert’s book Magi: In Search of a Secret Tradition tries to recover in Christianity the traces of an ancient astral religion – the “secret tradition” represented by the three travelling kings of the Biblical Nativity. Rehashing what is known of the Gnostics and the Templars, and also pressing the Kurdish Yezidis into service, Gilbert speculates wildly on various archaeological and mythological themes.
Unfortunately, it is unclear whether he is reading events historically or astrally, though for Gilbert almost everything has an astrological meaning. By the book’s end he has not managed to pull his ideas together, instead dumping any surplus notions into a bunch of appendices.
Like Collins, Gilbert makes much of his own “quest”, which includes visions – compared without irony to those of the Grail knights – while struck down by food poisoning in Turkey. As far as prose goes, Gilbert is even worse than Collins, and Magi is a confusing plod. Moreover, the editing is way below Bloomsbury’s usual standard: there are typographical lapses galore, and the text suffers a particularly bad case of comma- dysfunction.
By comparison, The Tomb of God is a relief to read, despite its taxing elements. This is a much more sober work than the foregoing pair, much less dependent on airy mythical conjuring, and it is written in firm, no- nonsense, clear English. The explanations of the masonic geometry of certain old texts and paintings are indeed difficult to absorb, but the authors (one an archaeologist, the other a surveyor) contrive to present it all in a reasonably lucid manner.
Their investigations revolve around the location of the tomb of Christ, indicated by some traditions – including a royal French dynasty – to be in the Languedoc region. The Gnostics and the Templars feature, as they do in Magi, but here their actions and beliefs are understood with infinitely greater historical and theological sensitivity. In fact, The Tomb of God does more to uncover – and make meaningful – a “secret tradition” at the heart of Christianity than Magi ever could.
Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger have not, as they claim, proved that the body of Christ lies in France, but they have certainly shown that many people believed, for a long time, that it was there.
A Test of Time, compared to the other three books, looks like a heavy archaeological treatise without the entertaining aspects of hidden tombs or secret cults. It is, indeed, a most serious work, but it is written in an exceptionally lively way, and the many illustrations and photographs help to make it both comprehensible and readable.
Rohl’s starting point is the paucity of hard archaeological evidence for any of the events related in the Bible until well after the united monarchy period of Saul, David and Solomon. Much of what happened before the Captivity is presumed to be purely mythical, or at least greatly exaggerated. By reordering the conventional chronology, however, Rohl shows that existing evidence can be re-evaluated to show clear reinforcement of the Biblical narrative.
Some readers will be put off by the dense detail and careful argumentation of Rohl’s investigations, and if you have no interest in the minutiae of Egyptology A Test of Time will not appeal. But if you wish to read something a little more solid than the “esoteric” would-be bestsellers, A Test of Time provides a fascinating and convincing view of the ancient past. And it may prove more ground-breaking than any breathless theories about angels, magi or hidden chambers.