The Sign and the Seal. A quest for the Lost Ark of the Covenant

Moses, that ancient Theologue, describing and expressing ye most wonderful Architecture of this great world, tells us that ye spirit of God moved upon ye waters which was an indigested chaos, or mass created before by God.

Later, referring to the efforts of the alchemists, the great English scientist had added:

Just as the world was created from dark chaos through the bringing forth of the light and through the separation of the aery firmament and of the waters from the earth, so our work brings forth the beginning out of black chaos and its first matter through the separation of the elements and the illumination of matter.(95)

Last but not least, I thought it was not accidental that Newton's favourite biblical passage(96) had been one that had hinted at the existence of some form of covert knowledge available only to initiates:

And I will give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of Israel.(97)

I reasoned that if Newton had indeed had access to the same 'treasures of darkness' and to the same 'hidden riches' as Moses, then this would imply at the very least the continuous existence over a period of millennia of a clandestine sect or cult structured to pass on an exclusive and privileged wisdom. This sounded far-fetched; it was, however, by no means impossible. On the contrary, knowledge and skills had frequently and successfully been transferred down the generations and from one region of the world to another without any concrete evidence being available to document the process. For example, Rhabdas, a mathematician who had lived in the city of Constantinople in the twelfth century AD, was known to have used a method for deriving square roots that had existed only in ancient Egypt more than two thousand years previously and that had not, otherwise, been employed elsewhere.(98) How, and from where, he had acquired this technique was not easy to explain. Similarly, I was very much aware that the transmission of esoteric information, coupled with the teaching and sharing of arcane rituals and ceremonies, had occurred for centuries within the various Masonic orders without any public record ever being available. Charting the contours of a genuinely reticent sect was, therefore, a daunting undertaking. But what I found more daunting by far was the task of guessing the real nature of the science and technology that such a long-lived and secretive institution as the cult of Thoth might have protected and preserved particularly if, as I suspected, that science and technology had originated in a historically remote and now utterly obliterated culture. As I wrote in my notebook:

It would be a mistake to assume that our own twentieth-century machinery and inventions are any guideline; on the contrary, if an advanced society did exist at some archaic period, then its wisdom is likely to have been quite different from anything with which we are familiar, and its machines could reasonably be expected to have operated according to principles unknown to us.

A MONSTROUS INSTRUMENT

It was with such thoughts, as my research moved on, that I found myself drawn to the strange passages in the Old Testament books of Exodus and Deuteronomy which described the encounters between God and Moses on Mount Sinai. Amidst thunder and fire, electrical storms and clouds of smoke, Yahweh supposedly disclosed the blueprint of the Ark of the Covenant to the Hebrew magus and presented him with the stone Tablets of the Law inscribed with the Ten Commandments. Then the Ark itself was built by the artificer Bezaleel who slavishly followed the 'divine' plan, almost as though he knew that he was forging some monstrous instrument. And this, I suspect, is what the Ark really was: a monstrous instrument capable of releasing fearful energies in an uncontrolled and catastrophic manner if it was mishandled or misused in any way an instrument that was not conceived in the mind of God, as the Bible teaches, but rather in the mind of Moses. A master sorcerer in an era when sorcery and science were indistinguishable from one another, it is after all possible (and perhaps more than possible) that Moses could have had the technical knowledge and therefore the ability to design a device of this sort. There is absolutely no proof of this, of course. Nevertheless I think that only those with a pedantic and cavilling attitude to history would insist that the ancient wisdom traditions of Egypt could have contained no special skills or ideas of a technical nature on which the prophet might have drawn in order to imbue the Ark with the awesome powers attributed to it in the Old Testament. Speculation on such matters is surely healthy and for those readers who are interested in penetrating more deeply into the mystery I offer the following hypotheses and conjectures as food for thought.

MOTIVE AND OPPORTUNITY

Assume for a moment that Moses did indeed have the technical knowledge to create 'a monstrous instrument' capable of destroying city walls (as in the case of Jericho)(99), striking people dead (as in the case of Uzzah and the 'men of Bethshemesh')(100), inflicting cancerous tumours on those who approached it without proper protection (as in the case of the Philistines after the battle of Ebenezer)(101), and counteracting gravity (as in the case of the bearers whom, on one occasion, it 'tossed into the air and flung to the ground again and again).(102) If Moses could have made such a machine then it only remains to ask whether he had a motive to do so, and whether he had the opportunity. I would like to suggest that he had ample motive. One in a long line of civilizing heroes who had been 'saved from water', there is evidence to suggest that his prime objective in life might not have been to establish the Jewish faith (although he certainly did that) but rather to civilize the Israelites who, prior to the Exodus, were little more than an anarchic tribe of migrant labourers marooned in Egypt. Suppose that the prophet decided to inspire (and thus mobilize) this primitive and almost ungovernable group of nomads by convincing them that he was going to lead them to the 'Promised Land' Canaan which he had enticingly depicted as 'a good land and a large . . a land flowing with milk and honey'.(103) If so then he was far too wily a leader, and far too astute a judge of human frailty, to take what was basically a disorganized rabble straight there. He knew that they would face formidable foes when they eventually arrived; if they were to overcome these foes, therefore, he would first need to mould and shape them, bend them to his will, and impose some discipline upon them. This reasoning appeals to me because it seems to offer a logical explanation for something that otherwise makes very little sense namely the fact that the Israelites supposedly spent forty years wandering in the inhospitable wildernesses of the Sinai peninsula.(104) There were, at the time, at least two well known and much-frequented trade routes which normally enabled travellers to cross the deserts between Egypt and Canaan in just a few days.(105) It seems to me, therefore, that Moses's decision not to use these highways (and instead to inflict a lengthy period of hardship on his people) could only have been a deliberate and calculated strategy: he must have seen this as the best way to get the Israelites into shape for the conquest of the Promised Land.(106) Such a strategy, however, would also have had its drawbacks notably the problem of persuading the tribesmen to stick together in the desert and to put up with all the difficulties and austerities of nomadic life. This problem was truly a knotty one: the biblical account of the wanderings in the wilderness makes it painfully clear that Moses had a hard time trying to keep his people's confidence and to force them to obey him. It was true that they fell briefly into line whenever he worked some new miracle (and he was obliged to work many); on other occasions, however and particularly when they faced adversity they seethed with discontent, criticized him bitterly and sometimes rebelled openly against him.(107) In such circumstances, is it not reasonable to suppose that the prophet might have seen the need to equip himself with some sort of portable 'miracle machine' to enthral and impress the Israelites whenever and wherever a bit of 'magic' was required? And wasn't that exactly what the Ark was a portable miracle machine which Moses used to ensure that the people would obey him no matter how difficult the circumstances? Examples of the sacred object being used in precisely this manner are not hard to find in the Bible. Indeed a dramatic change appears to have taken place in Moses's behaviour after the building of the Ark. Previously he had responded to the incessant demands and complaints of the Israelites with relatively minor acts of wizardry striking a desert rock with his wand in order to make fresh water gush forth from it,(108) extracting potable water from a stagnant pool,(109) delivering food in the form of manna and quails,(110) and so on and so forth. Later, however, the prophet did not bother with conjuring tricks like these. Instead, whenever the people grumbled, rebelled against him, or dared to dispute his leadership in any way he simply turned the Ark on them with predictably dreadful results. On one fairly typical occasion he used it to inflict a disfiguring skin condition on his sister Miriam because she had questioned his authority.'(111) The Bible calls this skin condition 'leprosy'.(112) 'When Miriam had been suitably chastened, however, her sores vanished. Since they had appeared in the first place immediately after she had been exposed to the mysterious cloud that sometimes issued forth from between the two cherubim mounted on the Ark's lid, it is most unlikely that they were actually caused by leprosy.(113) Might they not rather have been induced by some chemical or other contaminant released from the Ark itself? Miriam was not the only person to have been affected in this way after incurring Moses's wrath. Moreover other dissidents not lucky enough to be members of the priestly family tended to be punished with even greater severity. A particularly interesting series of events occurred in response to a mutiny in which the ascendancy of Moses and Aaron was openly questioned:

Two hundred and fifty of the sons of Israel joined forces against Moses and Aaron saying, You take too much on yourselves! The whole community and all its members are consecrated, and Yahweh lives among them, Why set yourselves higher than the community of Yahweh?(114)

Moses was at first so shocked by this insubordination that he 'fell upon his face'.(115) He quickly recovered, however, and proposed the following 'test': to find out whether the two hundred and fifty rebels were really as 'holy' as he was, he suggested that they should each fill a bronze censer with incense and that they should then come in before the Ark to burn this incense.(116) If this was done, he argued, it would allow Yahweh to 'choose the one who is the consecrated man'.(117) The challenge was accepted: 'And they took every man his censer, and put fire in them, and laid incense thereon, and stood at the door of the Tabernacle . . . with Moses and Aaron.'(118) No sooner had this gathering taken place than 'the glory of Yahweh appeared'.(119) Then the deity supposedly gave his 'favourites' a three-second warning of what he was about to do: 'Yahweh spoke to Moses and Aaron. He said, "Stand apart from this assembly, I am going to destroy them here and now." '(120) At this, the prophet and the High Priest 'threw themselves face downward on the ground . . . And there came out a fire [from the Ark] and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense.'(121) Afterwards, the children of Israel spake unto Moses, saying, Behold, we die, we perish, we all perish . . . Whosoever cometh anything near unto the tabernacle of the Lord shall die: shall we be consumed with dying?(122)

They had, it seemed, learned a salutary lesson. Subdued by the powers of the Ark, they mounted no further rebellions of any significance. On the contrary, apart from a few low-key gripes and murmurs, they fell very much into line behind Moses and did exactly what he told them to do during the remainder of their sojourn in the wilderness. So much, then, for motive. Moses clearly had great need of a portable miracle machine exactly like the Ark. Moreover, once he had equipped himself with that machine if machine it indeed was he showed no hesitation in using it. Motive and ability alone, however, do not add up to a coherent case. The next question, therefor; is this: did he have the opportunity to prepare a proper blueprint for the Ark and to fabricate some sort of 'power-pack' for it some sort of energy source by means of which it might be activated? The answer is yes ample opportunity. To understand why it is worth recalling the main events of Moses's life, in the order that they occurred:

1 He was born in Egypt. 2 He was cast adrift on the Nile in a basket made of papyrus reeds coated with bitumen and pitch. 3 He was 'saved from water' by the daughter of Pharaoh. 4 He was reared in the royal household where he learned 'all the wisdom of the Egyptians' and became an adept in sorcery, and almost certainly a High Priest.(123) 5 At the age of forty,(124) according to the Bible, he heard that his own native people the Israelites were being oppressed by the Egyptians. Accordingly he left the court and went to find out what was happening to them. He discovered that they were living a life of bondage, forced to do hard labour day and night. Incensed at this cruel treatment, and at the arrogance of the Egyptians, he lost his temper, killed an overseer and then fled into exile.(125) 6 At the age of eighty(126) i.e. forty years later he returned from exile to lead the Israelites out of their captivity.

What happened during the missing forty years? The Bible is singularly unhelpful in answering this question, devoting just eleven verses to direct discussion of the entire period.(127) It does, however, make one thing abundantly clear: in all this great expanse of time the key event was Moses's encounter with Yahweh at the burning bush an encounter that took place at the foot of Mount Sinai where, some time later, the Ark of the Covenant was to be built. Long before Moses persuaded the Israelites to follow him across the Red Sea, is it not therefore probable that he had thoroughly familiarized himself with the fearsome wildernesses of the Sinai peninsula? The location of the burning bush incident leaves no room for doubt that he spent at least part of his forty-year exile in these remote and mountainous deserts. Indeed, it is even possible that he passed most or all of this period there a view for which there is a degree of academic support. According to one learned Egyptologist, Moses could have spent as long as a quarter of a century in Sinai, living in a settlement on a mountain known as Serabit-el-Khadem barely fifty miles from Mount Sinai itself.(128) In June 1989 I visited and climbed Serabit-el-Khadem, which stands in the austere and barren highlands of southern-central Sinai. On the flat top of the mountain, completely innocent of tourists, were the ruins of the settlement in which Moses was thought to have lived ruins dominated by the obelisks, altars and graceful columns of what must once have been an extensive Egyptian temple. As a High Priest of the ancient Egyptian religion, I reasoned, Moses would have felt comfortable here and if he had indeed fled the wrath of Pharaoh after killing an overseer as the Bible claimed, then he would have been relatively safe in this remote and obscure spot. I decided to find out more about Serabit-el-Khadem and researched it in some depth after my initial visit. In the course of this work, two significant facts came to light. First, I learned that the temple site which I had seen had been thoroughly investigated in 1904-5 by the great British archaeologist Sir William Flinders Petrie and that he had unearthed fragments of several stone tablets there.(129) These tablets were inscribed with writing in a strange pictographic alphabet that, much later, was proved to have belonged to a Semitic-Canaanite language related to ancient Hebrew.(130) Second, I discovered that the settlement at Serabit-elKhadem had been an important centre for the mining and manufacture of copper and turquoise from roughly 1990 BC until 1190 BC.(131) These dates meant that there was no anachronism in the assumption that Moses might have sojourned here in the thirteenth century BC, just prior to the Exodus. And the evidence that an alphabet related to Hebrew had been in use on the site at about the same time looked like further corroboration of this view. What really interested me, however, was the point emphasized above, namely that Serabit had functioned as a sort of industrial and metallurgical complex and that the whole area had been extensively mined. It seemed to me that if Moses had indeed lived here for a lengthy period then he could hardly have failed to acquire knowledge of the minerals and metal ores of southern. Sinai. After my visit to Serabit-el-Khadem in June 1989 I drove my hired Jeep the fifty miles across the desert to Mount Sinai. In a sense the word 'desert' is a misnomer for this region, for although there are sandy expanses, the bulk of the countryside consists of steep and withered mountain ranges, red in colour, upon which almost nothing grows. The only patches of greenery are created by occasional oases in the valleys, and one such oasis, rich in date palms, stands at the foot of Mount Sinai. Here, in the fourth century AD, a small Christian chapel was erected on the supposed site of the burning bush. That chapel was greatly extended in subsequent years. By the fifth century it had become a substantial monastery under the patronage of the Coptic Church of Alexandria. In the sixth century the Roman Emperor Justinian massively fortified the monastery's walls so that it could better withstand the attacks of marauding bedouin tribes. Finally, in the eleventh century, the whole complex was dedicated to Saint Catherine.(132) It continues to be known as 'Saint Catherine's' today, and many of the structures built in the fifth and sixth centuries still stand. Before embarking on the arduous 7,450-foot climb to the top of Mount Sinai I spent some time inside the ancient monastery. The main church contained several remarkable icons, mosaics and paintings, some of them almost 1,500 years old. In the gardens was a walled enclosure built around a large raspberry bush that was believed by the monks to be the original burning bush.(133) This it certainly was not and, indeed, I was well aware that even Mount Sinai's claim to be the 'Mount Sinai' referred to in the Bible had by no means been conclusively proved. The fact was, however, that monastic traditions dating back at least to the fourth century AD had associated this particular peak with the 'mountain of God,' and had almost certainly done so on the basis of reliable sources of information now lost.(134) Moreover I knew that local tribal traditions concurred: the bedouin name for Mount Sinai was simply Jebel Musa 'the mountain of Moses'.(135) Scholarly opinion also associated the biblical Mount Sinai with the peak bearing that name today and the few dissenting voices did not favour a different region but rather other nearby peaks in the same range (for example Jebel Serbal).(136) I must confess that after climbing Mount Sinai in June 1989 I was left in no doubt that this had indeed been the mountain to which Moses had brought the Israelites 'in the third month' after leaving Egypt. Pausing at the summit, I stood on a ledge which overlooked tumbled miles of worn and jagged uplands descending to sere plains in the far distance. There was a haze and a powder-blue stillness in the air not silence, exactly, but stillness. Then a sudden wind whipped up, cool and dry at that altitude, and I watched an eagle soar heavenwards on a thermal, gliding briefly level with me before it disappeared from sight. I remained there alone for a while, in that pitiless and uncompromising place, and I remember thinking that Moses could hardly-have chosen a more dramatic or a more appropriate location in which to receive the Ten Commandments from the hand of God. But is that really what the Hebrew magus came to Mount Sinai to do? It seems to me that there is an alternative scenario. Could it not be that his true purpose all along had been to build the Ark of the Covenant and to place inside it some great energy source, the raw substance of which he had known that he would be able to find on this particular mountain top? This is a highly speculative thesis but it is speculation that we are indulging in here and there is room for a little imaginative licence. If Moses had known of the existence of some potent substance on the peak of Mount Sinai, then what might that substance have been? One suggestion put forward in a different context in Chapter 3 is that the tablets of stone on which God supposedly wrote the Ten Commandments were in fact two pieces of a meteorite. Resonant with echoes of Wolfram's Grail Stone (described as having been brought down from heaven by a troop of angels)(137), this intriguing possibility is taken seriously by several top-flight biblical scholars, who point to the worship of meteoric fragments in a number of ancient Semitic cultures(138) and add that:

concealing tables of law within a closed container [seems] somewhat odd . . . Words of law engraved upon stone were surely meant to be publicly displayed . . . [it may therefore be] supposed that the Ark held not two tables of the law but a fetish stone, a meteorite from Mount Sinai.(139)

If this conjecture is correct then the field lies open to guess what element exactly the 'meteorite from Mount Sinai' might have consisted of. It is at any rate not beyond the bounds of reason to suppose that it might have been radioactive, or that it might have possessed some chemical characteristic that would have made it useful to Moses if his purpose had really been to manufacture a potent and durable source of energy for installation in the Ark. The notion that he might have been manufacturing something on Mount Sinai is certainly not ruled out by the Scriptures. On the contrary, many passages in the relevant chapters of the book of Exodus are sufficiently peculiar and paining to allow just such an interpretation to be put on them. The so-called 'theophany' the manifestation of a deity to a mortal man began immediately after the Israelites had 'camped before the mount'. Then 'Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain.'(140) At this early stage the Bible makes no mention of smoke or fire or any of the other special effects that were soon to be brought into play. Instead the prophet simply climbed the mountain and held a private conversation with Yahweh, a conversation that was not witnessed by anyone else. Significantly, one of the first instructions that he supposedly received from the deity was this:

Thou shalt set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves that ye go not up into the mount, or touch the border of it: Whoever touches the mountain will be put to death . . . He must be stoned or shot down by arrow . . . he must not remain alive.(141)

It goes almost without saying that Moses would have had a strong reason to impose just such a rigorous and 'divinely ordained' exclusion zone if he had indeed been planning to manufacture or process some substance on Mount Sinai: the prospect of being stoned or shot would certainly have deterred the curious from venturing up to see what he was really doing there and thus would have enabled him to preserve the illusion that he was meeting with God. At any rate, it was only after he had spent three days on the mountain that the drama really began. Then:

In the morning . . . there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled . . . And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke, because Yahweh had descended on it in the form of fire. Like smoke from a furnace the smoke went up.(142)