First Draft: Dragon Court Forward

[numb3r_5ev3n]

PART I: FORWARD.

Back during the late 90s, a written work appeared on the internet during its infancy - one which would inspire furious speculation and debate in its readers. It was perhaps aided in its transmission by the fact that the internet itself felt like the Wild West back then. It was a new frontier, we were all taking part in a grand social experiment, and this book was part of the whole formative internet "early adapter" experience for a lot of people.

The work dealt with a lot of tantalizing and even disturbing themes, during a time when glimpsing some kind of cosmic truth or forbidden knowledge on this new medium felt like something that could really happen. Later on, the work would see publication as an actual print-and-paper book.

Of course, I'm talking about the novel House Of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski.

But around this same time, another written work was making the rounds in occult and conspiracy theory circles. This one would end up being claimed as the true source for Laurence Gardner's book Bloodline Of The Holy Grail, published in 1996. Eventually it would be titled From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells, with an appendix or afterword called The Origin Of The Dragon Lord Of The Rings, by one HRH Prince Nicholas de Vere.

And like House Of Leaves, it would eventually see print - albeit in a truncated, heavily edited version of itself. But the original online essays would persist in one form or another, long after being removed from the sites on which they had originally appeared.

And like Johnny Truant, the protagonist(?) of House Of Leaves, I feel like I've been haunted by this work ever since, often to the point of losing my grip on reality.

Trying to make sense of this combined work feels to me like Johnny Truant trying to make sense of Zampanò's commentary on The Navidson record from House. And the conclusion I've come to is this: Nicholas de Vere's claims may not, and most likely are not, historically true or accurate. Regardless of this, the meme, or current, or consciousness, or paradigm or force that exists within the story he told within his narrative of the Dragon Court wants to be real. It wants to exist, and be expressed in reality.

And it's bigger than Nicholas de Vere - he was but one of the many vessels, or messengers, who was caught up in this current, through which this current was trying to express itself. I know this because I've known others. I was/am one myself.

I honestly think that this current has something to do with the cultural wound that was inflicted on the British by the Roman Empire when they wiped out the Druids during the second century AD. A lot of groups have come along claiming to be the spiritual or literal descendants of the Druids - but the truth is, the British Druids were wiped out 1800 years ago.

We don't know what they really believed or practiced because they committed everything to memory, and most of what they knew or believed died with them. The only things that are written down about them were written by other people, all of whom were not Druids - and most of whom were biased against them in some way. People have tried to reconstruct what the Druids probably thought or believed since then. But no one can ever really know for certain, unless some new, heretofore-undiscovered information is found.

People connected to the British collective cultural consciousness have been trying to fill the hole left by the extinction of Druidry with something ever since. I think that the Arthurian Legends and the Holy Grail Mythos are probably the first iteration of this, and forms of Witchcraft and Wicca are others in a long series of attempts to stanch this cultural wound.

Lewis Spence's book The Magic Arts In Celtic Britain was apparently recommended to people by Clan Of Tubal Cain founder Robert Cochrane. Robert Plant names it as one of the inspirations for Led Zeppelin's hit Stairway To Heaven. And it's as good a place to start as any.

Unlike Nicholas de Vere, I'm not against anyone who wants to put on a robe and nemyss and call themselves a Druid. But now that I've taken a more critical look at the history of "Druid Revivalism," a lot of the Reconstructionist or Revivalist groups do just feel like there was a point in the 1930s and beyond when certain members of the Golden Dawn were like "it's such a nice day, why don't we just do the ritual outside?" and then they decided to just make that a thing and call it Druidry. And it also became a thing for a while around the same time for Freemasons to try and claim that Freemasonry was a direct descendant of Druidry, and the AODA came directly out of this.

And the more I've found out about Iolo Morganwg and his Barddas, the less I'm able to take either one of them seriously at all. And this goes for anything based on them, or which draws inspiration from them as well.

At the same time: what if Druidry could somehow be reconstructed as it was 1800 years ago? What if it could somehow be rescued, pulled back out of the Ether somehow?

I've started to look into Teresa Cross's Druidactos stuff and I like it so far. But she and others have commented on how the above examples of Neo-Druidry feel like misappropriation in a way, especially when enacted by descendants of another people who conquered and displaced the ancient Britons after the Romans withdrew from Britain in the 4th century - the Anglo-Saxons. It feels tacky in a "I'm a culture, not a costume," kind of way, which is probably kind of harsh considering how many people have legitimately found spiritual solace and meaning from these Neo-Druid groups. And for people who are interested in Druids or who feel a spiritual calling to this type of Druidism, this is all that remains of Druidry right now.

In 2004, after Tracy Twyman and the OLE's failed takeover of the dragoncourt dot org website, I told Greg, our new webmaster, that I was working on new material to put up on the website since Nicholas de Vere's original manuscripts, From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells and The Origin Of The Dragon Lord Of The Rings had to be taken down. He said that would be great, and to let him know when it was done.

Then my ADHD interfered, and real life interfered, and he passed away at the beginning of 2005.

But the real problem was, I was having trouble finding sources for any of Nicholas de Vere's claims. There were tons of references to people like Margaret Murray, Kenneth Grant and Austin Osman Spare, George Pickingill (albeit via a coded reference, which had to be pointed out to me by someone else in the know) and the Royal Windsor Coven. But none of it was really sourced or annotated properly; and those references which did exist within the works were themselves often the results of wishful thinking, poorly understood history, shoddy research, cultural biases, and UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis.)

The most recent version of the Dragon Court Current, as I've taken to calling it, is also a product of the Baby Boomer counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. Even if Nicholas de Vere's own take on it was an expression of his personal loathing of that counterculture and his backlash against it; particularly the "Boomer Wiccan" and New Age movements.

I didn't really want to read or touch any of Tracy Twyman's books, which just seemed like tabloid conspiracy theory stuff; but the little I'd seen indicated just derived from and fed back into the whole "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" and Da Vinci Code paradigm, in circular fashion.

And by 2005, most of us on the dragoncourt dot org forum knew that the "Bloodline of Jesus"/Priory of Sion" angle that Tracy Twyman and a lot of the other "Grail Historians" had run with was pseudohistory. There were forum discussions at the time about how it was pseudohistory. Also, "Prince Michael Stewart of Albany" was exposed as a fraud a year later.

So where did that leave us?

It's been almost 20 years, and I'm still asking that question. And it would seem that, due to recent events, I am fated to be both a critic of the writings of Nicholas de Vere, and a sort of self-appointed warden/archivist whose job it is to scowl disapprovingly at those who would attempt to misappropriate the content and themes of those writings for their own shady or egotistical purposes.

The thing is: one of the first truisms that most Chaos Magicians learn to embrace is that if an occult symbol-set or belief system works, who cares if it is "factually true" or is based in verifiably proven historical precedence? If the car runs, what's the point of looking under the hood?

And it wouldn't be such an issue to me personally if Nicholas de Vere hadn't repeatedly hammered on the idea that his version of Witchcraft was real, and all the others were fakes. His story was the one that was true, and everyone else were a bunch of deluded fluffy bunny Wiccan pretend "Lifestyle Witches," phony LARPers in Druid Drag, and simpering New Age saps.

In light of this, I'm not going to sit here and pretend to be an authority on any of this. And this was a major reason why I couldn't finish that material for the Dragoncourt dot org website in 2004. I realized even back then that the "Grail Bloodlines Subculture" was all one big self-referential echo chamber. There were almost no sources outside of it to refer to in order to verify or corroborate it.

And part of the reason I keep screaming into the void about this stuff is in the vain hope that at some point, someone will emerge from the void who can set me straight about what the facts really are.

So strap in! As the Vine says: ya'll better get on this bitch. We bout to gooooooo."

I've been having trouble figuring out how to break this down, because if you read the original manuscripts, it does come off like a repetitive info dump overload, like a lot of (his Senpai) Kenneth Grant's material.

And in those manuscripts, you will read:

- That according to Nicholas de Vere, the Anunnaki of Meopotamian myth were not space aliens, but a caste of Proto-Indo Europeans who migrated down to Mesopotamia from the Black Sea area during the Bosporus Flood Event around 8000-6000 BC or so. But they were somehow "hybrids" with a species of interdimensional origin.

- That the descendants of the Anunnaki were the Nephilim or "men of great renown" from Genesis in the Bible, and that they spread out and married into many of the dynasties of the ancient world; including the ancient Egyptian Pharonic bloodline of the 12th Dynasty, the Celtic Druids (who he claims were not just a class of learned natural philosophers and sorcerers, but the Celtic equivalent to the Brahmin Caste of India) and the Hebrew Davidic Bloodline, who eventually gave birth to the bloodline of Jesus, who married and had children with Mary Magdelene, whose progeny eventually spawned the Merovingians, who eventually spawned the House of Anjou and the Plantagenet Kings of Medieval England. And that the English Traditional Witch families are supposed to be their descendants, according to Nicholas de Vere's version of events. And that this is the so-called "Bloodline Of The Holy Grail."

- But it's also the Satanic bloodline of Cain, because "Satan" or "The Devil" was really just the Anunnaki Priest-King known as Enki. He fathered the biblical Cain, the original patriarch of this entire bloodline, who passed down secret arts and knowledge to his descendants. Which were 1. Witchcraft and 2. Metalworking. Which in ancient times was viewed as magic, see also: Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law ("Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic.")

- And that only those who can tie their genealogy back to the House of Anjou (and through them, back to Enki and Cain) are real Witches, and everyone else who claims to be a Witch is just delusional, misinformed, or lying.

- These "Real Witches" are also the Elves of European folklore, and were thus symbolically encoded into pop culture by J.R.R. Tolkien in his fantasy novels about Middle Earth. But they were also the inspiration for the Vampire myth, especially as it developed in Eastern Europe, due to their practices of ritual cannibalism and drinking blood.

I know. It's kind of a lot to take in. And for people who are not inclined to entertain these kinds of ideas, it must seem like like a lot of the conspiracy theories that were popular around the late 1990s and early 2000s combined to form Conspiracy Theory Voltron in Nicholas de Vere's narrative.

First, full disclosure: I have no actual background in English Traditional Witchcraft. I am a Texan of primarily Scots/English/Welsh ancestry, in that order (according to my own research, and Ancestry dot com.) I had reason to believe that I was descended from the House of Anjou, which was later verified. I am RH Negative. My occult background was primarily in Chaos Magick, Hermetic-style Ceremonial Magick, and Wicca.

So when I was first reading this stuff, I had no idea if this was what actual Trad Witches believed or not. But I've done a lot of study since then, and there's a lot more info available than there was in early 2000s when I was really getting into this stuff.

One aspect of Chaos Magick that I tend to apply a lot (whether I really intend to or not) is "paradigm shifting." This is the ability to shift between different belief systems depending on the need or the circumstances. To be able to see things from more than one point of view at the same time.

Or in this case, to be able to look at Nicholas de Vere's claims, and ask if there is something here that can function as a workable belief system - and to ask what or whom it serves to tie English Traditional Witchcraft to the "Da Vinci Code"/Bloodline Of Christ" paradigm. I can see why this story would be attractive to a lot of people. As it was to me, to whom it resonated very strongly; even as I can see and acknowledge that it can never be factually proven. As far as we can tell, no one seems to have any actual proof that this "Bloodline Of Christ" narrative existed before the 20th century, starting with Pierre Plantard and the Priory of Sion Hoax, and the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail which followed.

The thing is: the whole "Dragon Court" paradigm wasn't really the first time I'd been exposed to these concepts. A schoolmate of mine back in High School during the early 90s had described a "history of the Elves" that sounded very similar to the one I would encounter later in Nicholas de Vere's and Laurence Gardner's work.

Of course it was possible she'd read about it in Holy Blood, Holy Grail" or possibly in one of Laurence Gardner's articles in Nexus Magazine. But looking back, it kind of feels like this whole paradigm was something that was trying to exist. Like the meme or idea of it was almost sentient somehow, and it was trying to find expression amongst different groups who were on the same wavelength in the 1990s. Nicholas de Vere and his Dragon Court were one. The group I found myself involved with in High School was another. And as many problems as I had with Tracy Twyman and her group (the OLE) when they tried to take down the original dragoncourt dot org website, I am now fully aware that they were a catalyst for this current, too.

I think my main mistake was in deferring to Nicholas de Vere and Laurence Gardner's version of it, instead of doing whatever I could to preserve the group mythos that my own circle of friends had embraced when we were together in school in the early 1990s.

Nicholas de Vere's manifesto, which I discovered years later on Laurence Gardner's old Mediaquest website, was circulating just as the initial backlash against Wicca, particularly the "fluffy bunny" version of it, was starting to gain momentum. People were already calling into question the story that Wicca was an unbroken tradition going back for hundreds or maybe thousands of years. At that time, there were still people among the living who had personally confronted Gerald Gardner about his story regarding the supposed existence of the New Forest Coven, and his initiation into the same. And, to maybe oversimplify things, it seemed like he'd cribbed a lot of his material from Aleister Crowley.

But aside from Crowley - I was kid raised in the Bible Belt during the Satanic Panic. When I was encountering the Occult for the first time, the Heavy Metal Satanism/Anton LaVay-style Satanism stuff just seemed like a magnet for some of the worst people I knew. That's not the case now, but it sure felt like it when I was sixteen. So that particular brand of occultism wasn't attractive to me at all.

But the drive to really interrogate the religious framework I was raised with, to dig deeper, was very powerful.

My mom had a kind of crisis when she was a young person dabbling with the occult, a frightening experience that caused her to dash back to the safety of the evangelical religious framework she was raised in. The same thing happened to me. And like my mother, I dashed back to the threshold of the Church...but then I looked back. And kept on looking.

The idea that there was a Real Secret, something hidden that upended the evangelical or Nicene or Pauline Christian narrative entirely, was exactly what I was looking for. I was searching for the thing that said, "Not only is mainstream Christianity wrong, it is, as Clive Barker wrote in his novel The Great And Secret Show, a lie that was invented to hide or obfuscate a deeper truth."

And for a long time, and especially after I read Laurence Gardner's books, and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, it seemed like the real truth was that Jesus had been a real guy, a political agitator descended from the Davidic bloodline and a religious leader who had really lived, but who was persecuted and killed as a political prisoner by the Romans - who then had a change of heart a few hundred years later and reworked the story to fit their cultural mythos after the collapse of the Western half of their Empire.

They needed a new cultural story, and the Jesus Story sort of fit it - but the idea that he was married and had kids didn't work for them. He couldn't be a regular guy. He had to be a remote, pristine figure who was above all that. The idea that they had been the ones who had killed him was kind of embarrassing, so they blamed the Jews. It wasn't the Romans who had refused to accept him and had eventually killed him, according to this new narrative. They put the blame on the Jews. And, Mary Magdalene, a woman of means who quite possibly came from a noble family, was smeared as a prostitute whom Jesus had saved from a life of iniquity.

And this idea that the Romans had misappropriated and lied about everything to suit their own agenda was extremely attractive to me in the early 2000s, especially as I was watching political figures tell baldfaced lies to support a march to war and conquest (and later, blame the Jews for it.) It just fit. It rhymed, somehow.

No one is quite sure where the "Mary Magdalene fled to France after the crucifixion, and her and Jesus's descendants were the Merovingian Dynasty" came from. According to Nigel Jackson in The Pillars Of Tubal Cain, claims that it is an "ancient esoteric teaching referenced many times through the centuries, but his books refer back to Laurence Gardner's books, which refer back to Holy Blood, Holy Grail - and this is the main problem of trying to entangle this narrative, or track down where the story actually originated. It's all one big self-referential echo chamber. All of these authors just keep quoting and referring back to each other, and Tracy Twyman quoted and referenced all of them as if this wasn't even a problem.

And yet the people making this claim seem to have no problem with this. It's as if they're hoping that the reader will just go with it without interrogating their claims too deeply.

Of course, an Atheist would say that all of it is fake, both the mainstream Christian narrative and the Gnostic or heretical ones. It's all hogwash that people use as a ridiculous pretense to harm and enslave and kill each other, and waste energy trying to appease a being that doesn't exist, and never did.

But I'm also a fan of Carl Jung, and Terry Pratchett, and I'm aware that things can "exist" in the collective subconscious or as part of a "cultural truth" narrative if they don't exist or didn't happen in a factual or historical sense. The problem arises the moment when those "cultural truths" are employed as an excuse or a justification to kill and oppress other groups, as they are with frequent and distressing regularity.

At the time, I had no way of knowing what English Traditional Witches actually believed. I didn't know any. I knew Wiccans and Thelemites and OBOD Druids and Chaotes, and fans of the "Simon Necronomicon," and Satanists and Otherkin from Texas, where I am from.

Now of course, there are dozens of books by English Traditional Practitioners. Michael Howard and Nigel Jackson do reference the Bloodline in The Pillars of Tubal Cain, and gave me the only references I have ever seen outside of just references to other authors on the subject - namely Julian Evola (caveat lector with this one, for real guys. Steve Bannon is a real big fan,) and Walter Stein.

But one idea that kept popping into my brain over the years was: what if the "Jesus and Mary Magdalene" story was not meant to be taken literally at all, but was a cipher of some kind? What if it was a kind of coded reference to the bits of the old Celtic Druid belief system that had embedded themselves in the "Celtic Christian" phenomenon?

And, caveat lector again, this thread leads to another philosopher/Grail Researcher who ended up associating with Nazis, to his detriment and eventual end: Otto Rahn, who in his book Crusade Against The Grail described exactly that, in the context of the 12th and 13th century Gnostic Cathars in the South of France.

TO BE CONTINUED.