1

The

Jesus Voyage
The REAL Curse of the Mummy
How Christianity came from Western Europe to Egypt about 8000
years ago, and not from Israel-Palestine only 2000 years ago.

Artists concept from detailed construction drawings. The Jesus Voyage Curragh
of Europes Neolithic and megalithic era (circa 10,000 to 3000 BC). This 40-50footer, about 10-12 feet in beam (width), is based on the Tanum, Boslund, Volos and
Danilo-Hvar depictions of early ships. Note the simple tree trunk-and-branch
ram and bow construction (Tanum and Boslund glyphs, Sweden), two masts,
leather hull and reed mat sails (Danilo-Hvar potsherd, Croatia). The general shape
is that of the Volos Mycenaean galley from Ancient Greece.

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The Jesus Voyage

The REAL Curse of the Mummy
In late November 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter was
stunned when he found Christian artifacts in the tomb of Tutankhamun
(dated to about 1350 BC). Since the 1940s, further discoveries have
shown that true and original Christianity came from Atlantic Europe
into the Mediterranean world in very ancient times.
The Father of Church History, Bishop Eusebius, knew this, as did
Saint Augustine. It is no accident that both were educated about
Christianity in Alexandria in Egypt. Eusebius and Augustine wrote the
simple truth about Christianitys very long history, but few modern
Christians have paid any attention.
The so-called Judeo-Christian Tradition was born in purposeful
religious deception and deliberate historical distortion. It has even been
protected by assassination in both ancient and relatively modern times.
Tutankhamun himself was murdered. About 3300 years later his longdead mummy was blamed for committing over twenty other murders.
On September 5, 2002 letters written by Howard Carter were published
as The Exodus Conspiracy in Great Britain and revealed an 80-year-old
scandal that still influences Middle Eastern conflict today. Howard
Carter had been forced by the British Government to lie about some of
his discoveries, including obvious Christian artifacts, in the famous
Tomb of Tutankhamun that he had opened in 1922. Why? To preserve
the credibility of Britains 1917 Balfour Declaration and to prevent
destabilization of the three great Western religions.
ButHoward Carter and his sponsor, Lord Carnarvon, had been
understandably enthusiastic about their momentous and unexpected
discoveries. They had already told some colleagues, close relatives and
experts about Tutankhamuns Christian associations. Carnarvon had

been incautious enough to write, in late December 1922, to Dr. Wallace

Budge of the British Museum revealing that papyrus records had also
been found in the tomb. These records told a very different story about
the biblical Exodus. We will cover some of this in the following pages.
The famous and ridiculous Curse of the Mummy solved the problem
of Western Civilizations most world-shattering leaks. Lord Carnarvon
was its first victim in early 1923, and by 1934 some 25-28 other people
all of them close associates or relatives of either Carter or Carnarvon
had succumbed to the mummys curse. Most of them, including
Carter himself, complained of symptoms like slow arsenic poisoning.
After these revelations in September 2002, three British MPs have so far
publicly called for the exhumation of some relevant bodies to determine
whether mundane arsenic poisoning, not ancient mystic incantations,
had caused the Curse of the Mummy. And did Zionist agents or
British agents administer the poison? This British scandal has played its
part in eroding public support for Prime Minister Tony Blairs
seemingly unconditional alliance with U.S. Middle Eastern policies.
The Exodus Conspiracy has received absolutely no coverage in North
American media, although Carters letters have caused a sensation in
Europe. Time magazine did run a late 2002 story about Who killed
King Tut? but rather pointedly stayed clear of the most likely culprit
the Old Testaments Moses.
We are presently, in 2003, living out the dangerous repercussions of
Judeo-Christian deceit.
The current U.S. president, George Bush, takes sincere pride in being
what he unfortunately and ignorantly calls a Christian. He readily
admits that he habitually prays for guidance. Praying seems easier for
him than developing the strength of clear thought, and much easier for
him than the emotional shock of learning truly Christian principles.
Fanatically accepting Judeo-Christian myths, and perhaps therefore all
too easily manipulated by those who benefit most directly from these
myths, George Bush threatens the world with war over a supposed
Iraq Crisis. Iraq is, of course, no direct threat to the security or
survival of the United States. Iraq is, however, a self-confessed and
serious threat to the security and survival of modern Israel. George
Bushs war, like his fathers, is quite transparently about Israel and oil.

Thus, the conflict that literally dominates todays newspaper headlines

is a showdown between Judeo-Christian myths and Judeo-Islamic ones.
Everyone should realize that Judaism is the common denominator of
both Orthodox Christianity and Islam. This has ironic implications
in terms of todays Middle East conflict, and more crucial ramifications
for the pattern of human evolution and history in the Western world.
But the historical truth supported by archaeological evidence is that the
Neolithic Revolution, Christianity and alphabetic writing seem to be
parts of one cultural package that was brought into the Mediterranean
world from Western Europe about 10,000 BC. This maritime migration
of Atlantic people laid the foundation of Western Civilization.

The Jesus Voyage Route

The Christian artifacts found in Tutankhamuns tomb absolutely prove
that this migration brought recognizably modern Christianity to Egypt
long before Judaism was even established and codified. And, of course,
Egyptian Christianity was known and practiced thousands of years
before the New Testament was written. This is the real curse of King
Tuts mummy for all Judeo-Christians.

An American-Canadian author and boat designer has been researching

and organizing The Jesus Voyage since 1997. It is a search for our
true Western beginnings, an odyssey from Brittany across the
Mediterranean to the Nile Delta aboard an authentic replica Neolithic
curragh.
The project is scheduled to begin in April 2003 with the construction of
the Neolithic-megalithic canvas-hull test curragh in Canada. The
curraghs frame will be air freighted to Brittany in August-September
where it will be reassembled and the vessel will be completed with
authentic Neolithic materials (like the sewn leather hull).
The Jesus Voyage will use the Canal du Midi to go from Brittany to
Narbonne. From Narbonne, the curragh will visit the islands of
Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Hvar and Crete en route to Egypt and
the all-too-flexibly and ill-defined Middle East.
The Jesus Voyage project will be completed in the summer of 2004 with
the arrival of the expedition in Egypt. The adventure will be presented
by an illustrated book and by a multi-part television documentary,
video and DVD.
The Jesus Voyage project quite obviously has immense relevance for
our time, and possibly crucial significance for encouraging future
geopolitical stability in the world.

Note:
The Jesus Voyage was begun on schedule in
early April 2003 in Herring Cove, Nova Scotia. It
had been decided to make a test curragh in
Canada because of the much easier availability of
proper wood for the frames. A canvas hull would
be made for sea-testing. The frame would be flown
to Brittany to be reassembled and completed with
an authentic Neolithic sewn leather hull.

But on April 14, the authors wife fell suddenly

and seriously ill with what turned out to be a lifethreatening disease, dictating an immediate return
to Toronto. Joelle Bradley-Lauriol has made a
full recovery after almost two years.
In December 2004, the author is once again
planning how to do The Jesus Voyage, possibly
this time in southern Ontario using Lake Ontario
for testing the curragh, again with a canvas hull.
___________

CONTENTS

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About the Author, page 7

Historical Perspective: Light from the West? Background of The Jesus
Voyage, including
The Neolithic, Atlantis, Reed Vessels and Curraghs, pages 8-17
Mapmakers, pages 18 to 23
Christianity, pages 24 to 38
Black Jesus? Black Madonnas? 39-41
The Albi Portage between Heaven and Earth 42-43
The Jesus Voyage with a map of the route, pages 44 to 46
The Jesus Voyage Replica Curragh, pages 44-64
Stonehenge, page 65
Genetics in Western History and Religion, pages 66-86
A New Church of Old Christianity, page 87-88

About the Author

Michael Bradley is the pen name of Michael de
Sackville (biography in Canadian Whos Who 19932003), author of 19 published books and hundreds of
newspaper articles, mostly on the subjects of voyages,
traditional vessels, archaeology and anthropology.
His books include The Cronos Complex (1974), The
Iceman Inheritance (1978 and revised editions 1991,
2001), Holy Grail Across the Atlantic (1988) and Grail
Knights of North America (1998).
He has delivered guest lectures on
these subjects at major North
American universities, including
Princeton (Institute for Alternative
Futures), Yale and Vanderbilt.
He has designed and manufactured
several types of traditional vessels,
rendered in modern materials, for Third World fisheries
development projects in association with the Canadian
International Development Agency. He therefore has
extensive experience in project planning and in sailing
ancient replica watercraft.
Michael Bradley,
P.O. Box 79651,
1995 Weston Road,
Toronto, Canada
M9N 3W9
michaelbradley2003@yahoo.com

To view the additional and more detailed information on The Jesus Voyage,
Click here to go to the Index page or click here to continue.

(these pages may not be proofread and edited as of March 31, 2003)

Historical Perspective: Light from the West?

In August 1999, conventional notions of Western history suffered a massive blow that
could prove to be a knockout punch.
The data is too recent to have come into general public awareness yet. But the fact is that
the Judeo-Christian tradition, undisputed champion of Western civilization for two
thousand years, may eventually be replaced by a very old and all but forgotten
contenderunless, that is, it can be patched up before the next round of controversy.
In August 1999, the Neolithic site of Viols-le-Fort was discovered about 100 airline
kilometers north of Narbonne in southeastern France. By June 2000, Frances CNRS
(Centre National de Recherche Scientifique) had C-14 dated some of Viols-le-Forts
domesticated pulses (peas), kernels of grain and sheep bones to a shocking 10,000 BC,
making this site the oldest Neolithic village so far discovered, older by a thousand years
than the site of Jerf el-Amar in Syria.
Most unfortunately, however, all the stone-built Neolithic houses of Viols-le-Fort, which
had once been neatly arranged along both sides of what was excitedly called the oldest
street in the world, had collapsed due to an ancient earthquake.
But, more dramatic yet, traces of an early alphabetic script had already been discovered
at two nearby sites, Pech-Maho and Ensrune. Some of the characters of this script had
previously been recorded as being incorporated in the famous French cave paintings of
the Dordogne that have been dated to the Magdalenian Cultures (I, II and III) between
about 15,000 and 10,000 BC. Some of these written characters recurred on the stone
slabs that had formed the doorways of Viols-le-Forts Neolithic houses. Dr. Marija
Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-American anthropologist at the UCLA has demonstrated in over
twenty books that this Old European script affected writing traditions as widely
separated as Scandinavian runes and Cypriot scripts.

Capitelle houses from the Rennes-le-Chteau site in France are much

like Viols-le-Forts Neolithic stone houses.

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Viols-le-Fort is on the watershed between the Gironde-Garonne-Tarn system of rivers
that flows into the Atlantic at Bordeaux and the Aude system of rivers flowing into the
Mediterranean at Narbonne, Bziers, Montpellier and so on. These Atlantic-toMediterranean river systems began to be canalized in the 1680s to form the present route
of the famous and beautiful Canal du Midi across southern France.
The extremely early Neolithic date of Viols-le-Fort was just one more indication, among
an ever-increasing amount of data, that important aspects of Western Civilization had
come from the Atlantic region into the Mediterranean world along the Garonne-Aude
waterway. And, if so, there should be Neolithic sites even older than Viols-le-Fort further
west back along the Garonne River in the direction of Bordeaux and the Atlantic coast of
France, Spain and perhaps especially Brittany.
The cultural assets apparently brought along this waterway from the Atlantic toward the
Mediterranean included the Neolithic arts of agriculture, animal domestication, organized
village living, surprisingly sophisticated survey mathematics and geometry incorporated
in megalithic monumentsand even, apparently, the secret of alphabetic writing.
It seems that not all the light of civilization came from the East, although the JudeoChristian Light From the East cultural dogma is still taught in almost all North
American universities. Much of the light of civilization seems to have beamed from the
Atlantic coast of Northwestern Europe.
But this Northwestern European region is an unlikely candidate for the actual original
development of advanced culture. This is due to many factors: a relatively poor climate,
geographic isolation of land masses, poor soils, presumably a scanty early population and
also the relative poverty of vegetable and zoological species available for domestication.
These Neolithic innovations most probably came from some more favourable
environment that was once out in the Atlantic Ocean itself.
And this Western torch of civilization seems to have been carried by maritime refugees
from a world-changing cataclysm that ended the last so-called Ice Age rather abruptly
almost precisely 11,500 BC, according to the very latest dating.
The persistent legend of lost Atlantis springs to mind, of course, as being the primary
cultural casualty of this era-changing tectonic catastrophe.
However, we are not compelled to accept the continent-sized Atlantis in the middle of the
Atlantic Ocean that Plato described in his Critias and Timaeus dialogues any more than
we must choose between the hundreds of locations proposed for Atlantis in over 25,000
published books and articles. Various authors have argued for an Atlantis in Norway,
Peru, Antarctica, Newfoundland, the Bahamas, India and the Andes Mountains, not to
mention Central Asia.
A relatively recent theory of the Greek archaeologist Constantin Marinatos is that
Atlantis was the volcanic island of Thera/Santorin in the Mediterranean. This idea has
earned a certain measure of support by respected academics, but we are not compelled to
accept it either.

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According to Marinatos, this small island, which exploded with tremendous force about
1500 BC, ended the Minoan Empire centred on Crete by destroying Cretan agriculture
under a blanket of volcanic ash. According to Marinatos, the later Greeks of Platos time
equated the Minoan Empire on Crete with Atlantis. But they exaggerated both the age
of the volcanic explosion of Thera/Santorin and the size of Minoan capital city of
Knossos by a factor of ten.
Aside from Platos possible mid-Atlantic continental land mass, and aside from the
documented explosion of Thera/Santorin, there truly were sizable sea mounts out in the
Atlantic at about the latitude of France, Iberia and Morocco.
Sea mounts are a particular kind of underwater geological feature, not just any submarine
mountain. Usually of fairly large extent, several hundred or even thousand square miles
in area, they resemble the nearly flat-topped mesas on land. This is because sea
mounts are thought to have been near sea level for several centuries or millennia. Oceanic
waves washing over them for many years eroded their surfaces to a nearly level state.
Geologically recent sea mounts are typically about 100-300 feet beneath present sea
level. They often form well-known fishing banks such as those off Newfoundland, the
Grand Banks, and the somewhat smaller fishing banks in the North Sea and off the
southern coast of Brittany.
It is thought that the existing ironically named Atlantis and Plato sea mounts,
submerged plateaus off North Africa and Spain, were well above sea level during the last
so-called Ice Age. When this last Ice Age ended about 11,500 BC, the melting of its
huge ice caps gradually inundated these sea mounts as the worlds sea level rose by about
300 feet within 6000 years. Two of these sea mounts in the Atlantic, Plato and
Atlantis, were fully large enough to have nurtured human culture in a nearly ideal
environment.
These sea mounts and their associated island archipelagoes, of which only the Madeira
and Canary Islands remain, had a mild climate, good soil and were surrounded by a
bountiful ocean. From their geographic position and because of many smaller islands
leading to them, the sea mounts called Atlantis and Plato would have boasted a
mixture of North European, Iberian and North African flora and fauna. These species
would have included prime candidates for domestication: sheep, goats, cattle, horses,
dogs and cats as well as a variety of grains, fruits and vegetables. Therefore, the light
from the West may have developed on these sea mounts and islands. Their inhabitants
may have fled to the European coasts as refugees when their roomy islands began to sink
beneath the Atlantic about 5600 BC.
One thing, at least, seems certain. These sea mounts, or some land mass out in the
Atlantic Ocean, had apparently been inhabited by morphologically modern people for a
very long time. These people seem to have visited Europe sporadically over thousands of
years because their skeletal remains have been discovered on the European mainland, but
only in scattered locations in the extreme West of continental Europe on the Atlantic
coasts of Spain and France.

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They have been dubbed Cro-Magnon people after the name of a French village near
which most of their remains have so far been found. The very earliest of these bones so
far discovered date from about 33,000 BC.
These Cro-Magnon people may have been of the so-called Saan (Bushmen) type or
race of humanity, originally from Africa, which used to be much more numerous and
widespread than they are today. Or, these Cro-Magnon people may have been a separate
race that had thoroughly intermixed with the Saan. No one really knows. But most art
authorities are willing to grant that Western European (at least) cave art exhibits very
remarkable similarities with cave and rock paintings known to have been created by
Bushmen.
What is known is that these Cro-Magnon people, whoever they were, continued to at
least trickle into extreme Western Europe for thousands of years and intermixed with
truly native European residents called Neanderthals. In 1999, the so-called Lapedo
child skeleton, a hybrid of Cro-Magnon and native European Neanderthal races who
had lived about 23,000 years ago in Portugal, was very widely publicized. But there had
been scores of such hybrids discovered previously whole local populations, in fact
that did not generate so much public interest. Some anthropologists even assert that all of
identifiable Western humanity or Caucasians are composed of intermixed CroMagnons and Neanderthals.
It is evident, however, that Western Europeans are generally more Cro-Magnonish in
their outward appearance, stature, body type and bone structure while the Caucasian
people of Eastern Europe and the ill-defined Middle East are more Neanderthalish in
these same physical features. There may be differences between them in the matter of
emotional and intellectual orientation, too. This is presently a matter of great scientific
debate and controversy perhaps also involving much pseudo-scientific evidence laced
with purposefully manipulated DNA and Y-chromosome statistics.
The problem is, really, that almost everyone excepting only physical anthropologists
remains under the long-outmoded popular delusion of the 1930s that Neanderthals were
primitive. And because of that, no one wants them as ancestors. But Neanderthals
were not primitive and, in fact, they had larger brains than most living Europeans and
Western Asians (Caucasians) today. They had, however, adapted to the intense cold of
the last Ice Age and this gave them special physical and mental characteristics.
As we shall learn, genetic differences in Western humanity may have had a significant
impact upon Western religion. These possible or probable differences have therefore
also had at least some influence on the rationale behind The Jesus Voyage.
At the end of the last Ice Age about 11,500 BC, there seems to have been a major
influx of these Cro-Magnon people onto the coasts of Western Europe. Cultural
innovations are known to have coincided with their various arrivals.
We may as well call these Cro-Magnon people Atlanteans, if not because they came
from Platos lost Atlantic continent, then simply because they seem to have come from
large sea mounts and islands out in the Atlantic Ocean. They may also have originally

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inhabited the general Atlas Mountain region of North Africa another reason for calling
them Atlanteans. These Atlanteans, then, apparently stimulated much of what we call
Western civilization whenever they arrived on the Atlantic coasts of Western Europe.
Although it is a relatively minor point, there is an almost proof that the Neolithic and
megalithic foundations of Western civilization could not have come from the Middle
East.
Thor Heyerdahls three experiments with Egyptian and Mesopotamian reed ships (Ra I,
Ra II and Tigris) showed conclusively that these clumsy vessels could not have coped
with the variable currents and winds of the Western Mediterranean and Europes Atlantic
coast.

Thor Heyerdahls replica reed ship Ra II under sail, 1971.

Reed vessels probably could not have managed the east-to-west voyage across the
Mediterranean at all, or only very infrequently. Adverse winds in the summer sailing
season, the force of the almost continual summertime Meltemi blowing from the north
down onto Egypt, exceeds their sailing capability against headwinds. And adverse winddriven and tidal currents in the Western Mediterranean, and even more often on the
Atlantic coast, sometimes equal or exceed a reed vessels top speed of only about 3 knots.
Reed vessels were also much too heavy to be portaged over the Garonne-Aude watershed
to reach the Atlantic coast of Europe, and this is by far the shortest, safest and most
convenient route between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Reeds themselves may be
light in weight, but they rapidly absorb water when afloat. The tied bundles of reed
comprising a vessel also trap water between the individual reed stalks.

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Two days after launching Ra II at the Moroccan port of Safi, once the vessel had
absorbed and trapped water to reach her initial capability of long-term flotation,
Heyerdahl estimated that the 38-foot reed ship weighed over 12 tons. Quite obviously,
the crew of Ra II could not even pull the vessel halfway ashore, never mind portaging it
over a watershed.
With Ra I, Heyerdahl also discovered that reed ships dont travel well over land. This
first reed vessel of Hyerdahls was built in Egypt beside the Giza pyramids to test Thor
Heyerdahls theory that the Ancient Egyptians had perhaps sailed across the Atlantic to
America. But Heyerdahl wanted to launch it on the Atlantic coast of Morocco because he
rightly doubted the vessels ability to sail to and through the Straits of Gibraltar. Also,
being uncertain about how long the papyrus reeds would remain afloat before becoming
waterlogged, he was naturally concerned to have the shortest possible distance for the
ship to voyage in the water.
So he transported the reed ship across North Africa to the Atlantic by truck. He
discovered that the bundles of reeds settled and distorted the vessels shape. And as the
truck jolted over poor roads, the worst impacts sometimes burst the ropes tied around the
bundles so that many reeds were lost en route. Heyerdahl thought that this truck trip
might have contributed to the fact that Ra I broke up after crossing most of the Atlantic
from Morocco to the West Indies. Reed vessels would not survive the experience of an
even more primitive overland portage even it could somehow be accomplished.
Reed vessels were undoubtedly one of humanitys first types of ocean-going ships. They
are depicted on Egyptian, Assyrian and Indus Culture frescoes and cylinder seals. They
had their advantages: immense carrying capacity (Sumerian Ma-gurs would carry up to
70 tons), simplicity, low cost of manufacture and great seaworthiness. They were good
for carrying very large amounts of cargo on relatively long ocean passages -- so long as
there was a reliable following wind, that is, and gentle sand beaches without strong tidal
currents at each end of the trip.
They were good for tropical Trade Wind and Monsoon zones. They plied the trade routes
back and forth between Africa-Arabia in the west and across the Indian Ocean to the
Indus Cultures in the east. Perhaps they went even further east. No one knows. The
occasional reed vessel may also have crossed the Atlantic from the very ancient port of
Lixus in Morocco to the New World using the Northeast Trades.
But speed and maneuverability were not among a reed vessels virtues, and these
characteristics were precisely what was crucial for navigation in the Mediterranean and
even more so along the Atlantic coast of Western Europe. Also, there are no suitable
boat-building reeds in Europe that could have sustained a viable and ongoing Middle
Eastern-type reed-vessel maritime culture. But aside from all this, the first depictions of
Middle Eastern reed boats date from only about 5000 BC on Nagadeh II pottery from
Upper Egypt. The Neolithic site of Viols-le-Fort in France is 5000 years older.
However

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Atlantean, Atlantic or Northwestern European curraghs could easily have managed
culture-carrying voyages in the opposite direction...from west-to-east...across the
Mediterranean. Wood-framed and leather-hulled sailing curraghs were (and are)
lightweight vessels that could be rowed effectively in order to cope with coastal
Atlantics variable winds and tidal currents. They were also lightweight enough to have
been portaged over the Garonne-Aude watershed. Curraghs could have travelled from
the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and they could have reached the Middle East.
Curraghs are conventionally thought to have evolved from the primitive skin boats
possessed by European Paleolithic hunters about 50,000 years ago. The Eskimo Umiak
or womens boat may be a direct survival of these very early hunters skin vessels.
Alternatively, skin boats or curraghs could also have been developed at an early date by a
cultured people who inhabited some now lost Atlantic Ocean land masses. If not Platos
Atlantis itself, could these land masses have been represented by the now-submerged sea
mounts so ironically named Atlantis and Plato?
Or, perhaps, as a third possibility, cultured Neolithic people may have inhabited offshore
islands of the European mainland, islands distributed in an arc between the south coast of
Brittany and Ireland. Most of these islands have been submerged since the fifth century
AD, but they are still remembered as the lost and magical land of Lyonesse.
But wherever they originated and however and by whomever they began their
refinement, some early examples of skin boats are thought to have been depicted on the
rock drawings of Boslund and Tanum in Sweden. These drawings are now thought to
date from the so-called Bronze Age which, until very recently, was believed to have
begun about 3000 BC and to have ended roughly 1000 BC (but see pages 42-59).

Tim Severins Brendan replica Irish curragh under sail, 1976.

15
Curraghs remained in use as the typical kind of cargo carrying vessels up until the
Medieval Period in Irish waters. The Navigatio Sancti Brendani Abbatis (circa AD 600700), recording adventures attributed to St. Brendan, described the building of the saints
curragh in detail. Curraghs persisted until the mid-20th century as small fishing boats on
Irelands western coast. In 1976-1977, the replica Irish curragh Brendan proved its
seaworthiness by crossing the North Atlantic. In the early 1980s, I designed and built
neo-curraghs rendered in modern materials as inexpensive fishing boats for Third
World development projects in association with the CIDA, the Canadian International
Development Agency. Curraghs are currently enjoying a cultural revival in Ireland,
judging from the number of sites on the Internet; there are scores of amateur builders and
several curragh regattas.

Authors neo-curragh design that was manufactured as an inexpensive Third

World fishing boat with the involvement of the Canadian International
Development Agency (CIDA), 1979-1983. Epoxy tube frame and canvas hull
skin replaced the traditional curraghs ash-wood frame and leather hull.

16
Given this long time-span for their evolution, since about 50,000 years ago, some
authorities assert that Northwestern European sailing curraghs had been developed in
some places (Ireland, Scotland, and maybe Brittany) by 7000 BC or even much earlier.
And this date of 7000 BC happens to agree with the time of the first arrival of Neolithic
and megalithic colonists on the larger Mediterranean islands.
And, as swift and nimble sailing vessels, curraghs can explain the very rapid Neolithic
colonization from the Northwest European coasts of the Atlantic, across southern France,
and then from Mediterranean France (around Narbonne and Viols-le-Fort) to the islands
of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Malta.
For example, Tim Severin's replica medieval Irish curragh Brendan attained a speed of
12 knots on at least two occasions. And one of my "neo-curraghs" topped 13 knots while
being filmed by CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) news cameras on May 21,
1981. These "neo-curraghs" sailed at a speed of 6 to 7 knots on a regular basis when
used by Caribbean fishermen in the Trade Winds.
At this sort of speed, curraghs could easily sail from France to Egypt, even including
brief island-hopping visits, in just one summer's sailing season. This makes The
Jesus Voyage a feasible project both financially and administratively.

One of the authors 32-foot CIDA-supported curraghs sailing fast

to windward. From International Fishing News, February 1983.

The leather for ancient Atlantean and/or Northwestern European curraghs came from
domesticated cattle, and an Atlantic-to-Mediterranean migration of Neolithic people
would help to explain the distribution of some European breeds of cattle, many of which
originated on Atlantic Coast islands (Guernseys, Jerseys, Herefords, Highland cattle,
Charolais, etc.).

17
A migration from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean by the Western worlds first
Neolithic people also explains why a Magdalenian III painting is presently the earliest
known depiction of a domesticated cow. This painting comes from the North African
Mediterranean coast opposite Spain and is dated to roughly 12,000 BC. This is some
4000 years older than any evidence of cattle domestication in the Middle East where
animal husbandry (at Catal Huyuk and Hacilar in Turkey) is dated to about 8000 BC.
Below is the famous Magdalenian IIIb rock painting of the Battle for the Holy
Cow, as the nearly legendary French prehistorian, Abb Breuil, called it. Note the
cows well-developed udder indicating at least semi-domestication. Dated at
roughly 12,000 BC, this painting predates any presently known Middle Eastern
cattle domestication by about 4000 years.

The most surprising and perhaps the most important cultural asset that apparently
travelled from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean along the Canal du Midi was the
religion of true Christianity later to become much better known as the infamous
heresy of the Holy Grail.
This is the crux of The Jesus Voyage and why the implications of the project are so
immense for an understanding of Western history and religion. But there is a troublesome
matter some nagging questions which must be dealt with first.

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Mapmakers
An increasing amount of recent archaeological data suggests that Neolithic innovations
came into the Mediterranean world from the West, from the Atlantic coasts of Western
and Northwestern Europe. The sites of Viols-le Fort, Pech-Maho and Ensrune, which
are all clustered along the watershed between the Garonne-Tarn and Aude river systems,
hint that these Neolithic innovations were accompanied by what has been called the
megalithic idea or even the Megalithic Culture. This was a cohesive religious
outlook, apparently involving worship of a Neolithic Great Fertility Goddess, that was
shared by Europes Post-Ice Age migrants and colonists who used this river route that
has become todays Canal du Midi across southern France.
We have tried to demonstrate that boats called curraghs could have been made within the
limitations of Neolithic technology, could have been portaged over river watersheds
because of their light weight and could have sailed island-hopping across the
Mediterranean because of their speed and seaworthiness.
But we have not suggested why these Neolithic migrants with their megalithic ideas
should have chosen to colonize Europe at this time, that is, around 10,000 BC. We have
not suggested why they island-hopped across the Mediterranean, choosing an itinerary
that included the Northern Adriatic detour to the island of Hvar en route. And why did
they carry out their colonization with such speed and determination that they were well
established on Mediterranean coasts and islands within, say, a millennium or so?
It may be, of course, that this migration just happened and there was no particular reason
for itor for the particular route that the Neolithic colonists chose. Or, it may be that we
will never really know what dictated their migration and what seems to be their primary
route from the Atlantic into the Mediterranean.
On the other hand, we already have at least some hints, which have fascinated a few
curious scholars, as to why these Neolithic-megalithic folk decided to colonize the
European mainland that was inhabited by Neanderthals and why they island-hopped
across the Mediterranean to the Middle East. And, above all, there are a few clues
pointing to why they should have apparently detoured to colonize the island of Hvar off
the present Croatian coast in the Northern Adriatic Sea. These hints and clues are maps
called Portolans.
Portolans are a special class of maps that first appeared, and very suddenly, in Europe in
AD 1327 (The Dulcert Portolano), just on the brink of the so-called European Age of
Discovery. They are distinguished from other cartographic products of the High Middle
Ages and the Renaissance by their inexplicable accuracy. Portolans usually show the
Mediterranean world from Iberia (Spain and Portugal) to roughly the Black Sea, but they
do so with an error of less than 30 miles over a west-to-east distance of about 3000 miles.
This is not the place to go into the long struggle to determine longitude, the distance east
or west of any given point on the earths surface. The Arts and Entertainment Networks
2001 documentary Longitude dramatically presented the revolution in navigation and

19
mapmaking that was made possible by John Harrisons invention of the chronometer
during the AD 1750-1780 era.
But, as I pointed out in Holy Grail Across the Atlantic (1988) and Grail Knights of
North America (1998), someone beat Harrison to finding the key for determining
longitude and they did it by at least 10,000 years.
The Portolan maps show correct longitude more accurately than most pre-satellite road
maps of the 1950s and, so far as we know, there was no cartographer in Europe or
anywhere else in the world who could have accomplished this feat at the time. There are
only about 30 known true Portolan maps. They were first studied by the great
Scandinavian scholar, A.E. Nordensjold, in 1898. He concluded that all of the known
Portolans had been copied from just one original.
The next scholar to become fascinated with Portolans was Dr. Charles Hapgood of Keene
State Teachers College in New Hampshire. During the 1960s, working with the
assistance of the U.S. Air Forces Strategic Air Command Cartographic Service,
Hapgood discovered several things about Portolans that were even more amazing than
their inexplicable accuracy. Hapgoods Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1968) analyzed
all the known Portolans using the latest mathematics and satellite photographs.
He demonstrated three other things about Portolan maps without any possibility of doubt.
Firstly, all the Portolans had been drawn using the Great Pyramid at Giza as their
centre (0 latitude and 0 longitude). Secondly, Hapgood demonstrated that
Nordenskjold had been right back in 1898. All the Portolans had been copied from just
one original map that, somehow, had been preserved for thousands of years. This had to
be true because, thirdly, they showed the geography of the earth as it was during and just
after the last Ice Age and not how the earth was during the Late Middle Ages, the
Renaissance and presently.
As we have seen, a very major change in the earths geography was the melting of the
larger Ice Age glaciers starting about 11,500 BC and a rise in the worlds sea level of
about 300 feet within about 6000 years. As we have seen, this rise in the worlds sea
level flooded the Atlantis and Plato sea mounts and the islands of so-called
Lyonesse off Brittany. The Portolans all reflected this lower Ice Age sea level. They
show islands larger than they are today, river deltas smaller than they are today and they
show parts of continental land masses that are no longer above sea level.
This project proposal and description of The Jesus Voyage is definitely not the place to
discuss Portolans in any great detail. Portolans have already inspired several fascinating
and lengthy books in their own right. But Portolans do have great relevance for The
Jesus Voyage and the rationale behind it.
This is because of the Ibn Ben Zara Portolan map that was drawn in AD 1487 in
Toulouse in southern France. Toulouse is on the Canal du Midi near the portage in the
vicinity of Albi/Carcassonne (we will get to this portage, see pages 36-41 below) and is
thus conveniently and significantly on the route of The Jesus Voyage.

20
Both Nordensjold and Hapgood concluded that this Ibn Ben Zara map of AD 1487 came
closest to the original from which all the other Portolans had been copied. That is, Ben
Zaras map was the best copy of it. If so, the priceless original Portolan template map
may still be somewhere in Toulouse.

Ben Zara Portolan (left) and modern (1997) map of the end of the Eurasian Ice Age showing the
small melt-off lakes around the periphery of the Ice Age ice cap. Rivers leading from these small
lakes drain into the modern Black Sea. Modern map by Walter Pitman and William Ryan.

Above, the Ibn Ben Zara Map of 1487 compared with a map prepared in 1997 by the
Columbia University oceanographers Walter Pitman and William Ryan. Most
unfortunately, the original Ibn Ben Zara map is very faded and does not reproduce well.
Note, however, the definite glaciation on England (painted white on the original). I have
emphasized the faded maps line of the ice cap from England eastward for purposes of
this comparison. These maps are virtually identical except that the modern (1997)
Pitman/Ryan map was drawn on a polar projection and the AD 1487 Ben Zara map was
drawn on a flatter projection because its centre was not the North Pole, but the Great
Pyramid at Giza.
The situation is further obscured by the fact that poor Ben Zara was himself apparently
confused by the map he copied. He knew quite well that it was more accurate than other
maps showing his Mediterranean world, but he also knew that in AD 1487 there were
thriving cities in England, Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Therefore, his solution was
simply to draw in the ice cap and to add existing cities known to him under the
glaciers, as it were!
But both maps show Northern Europe glaciated, and show the many roughly circular
lakes around the periphery of the ice cap that gave the sources of the present great
Russian rivers. One naturally wonders how Ben Zara had all this modern geophysical
information about the Ice Age back in AD 1487. The only plausible answer is that Ben
Zara had a map, during his lifetime in AD 1487, that showed the conditions of Ice Age
Central Europe as long ago as about 11,500 to 10,000 BC when the Ice Age ice cap
was starting to melt.

21
So, we have a decision to make, and it is not a very appealing one for conventional
historians of the Judeo-Christian Tradition. This is either all coincidence or, our
putative Atlantean migrants and refugees of the 10,000 BC era knew where to go,
and why in order to re-establish their culture along their own traditional lines.
We have been informed by Plato in his Timaeus and Critias dialogues that the Atlanteans
had a technology based upon, basically, the Bronze Age. That is to say, their
technology was based on what Plato called mountain copper (the orichalcum of the
Critias and Timaeus dialogues). This would make sense if, as seems possible or
probable, Atlantis per se had been the Atlantic land mass now represented by the
present Azores Plateau. The present Azores Plateau, as charted by modern sonar, is
about the size of France or California (about 157,000 square miles in area) and is
presently about 10,000 feet beneath the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and about the same
distance above the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. It was (and is) surrounded by the major
fracture in the earths tectonic plates. This fracture is called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge by
modern geophysicists.
If the now-submerged Azores Plateau was ever above sea level, then one could expect
that copper, especially, would have welled up from the major tectonic fractures of the
same so-called Mid-Atlantic Ridge that surrounds the Azores Islands presently.
An astute reader might ask, at this point, that if Portolans shows the earths geography
during the Ice Age or just after the end of it, then why dont we have the land mass of
legendary Atlantis shown on at least one or two Portolan maps?
The truth is that we do, indeed, have such maps, but they have been ignored as much as
possible and, whenever possible, they have been discredited as hoaxes. The Buache
Map of the Atlantic shows land masses out in the Atlantic that are no longer there, but
they dont resemble Platos description of Atlantis very much either. Buaches large
islands may, however, actually represent, and seem to represent, the present Plato and
Atlantis sea mounts just before they submerged completely.
The most notorious or infamous map of Atlantis was disclosed by Dr. Paul Schliemann in
1908 and made headlines until 1912. He was the grandson of the famous Heinrich
Shliemann, discoverer and first excavator of Troy. According to Paul Schliemann, his
grandfather had found at Troy a vase of some odd metal (orichalcum, he suggested)
that was dedicated to the King of Troy, Priam, from the ruler of Atlantis who was
Poseidon. This vase, supposedly made of orichalcum, very quickly disappearedand
many experts, who were too polite to call Paul Schliemann an arrant liar, would have
liked to examine it.
Along with the orichalcum vase, Paul Schliemann disclosed his supposed Map of
Atlantis hinting, but not claiming outright, that it was based on a pottery sherd that his
grandfather had also discovered at Troy. This map vindicated Platos description of
Atlantis in the Critias and Timaeus dialogues almost too perfectly. Most scholars
dismiss it as a hoax and quite truthfully, Im inclined to agree with them.

22
However, two things about this map are interesting. The major city of Atlantis (exactly
as per Plato) is depicted on the southeastern coast of Atlantis opposite the mainland of
Atlantic Europe. The circular patterns of the city are boat canals, traversed by bridges,
that served the citys various quarters by delivering produce and cargo. Plato described
Atlantis as a great naval and maritime power that used rowed and sailed triremes for
warfare and used sailing vessels for merchant ships.
Plato was thinking of his own days naval architecture (about 400 BC). Atlantean ships,
if there were any, may really have been curraghs back in its heyday of about 9500 BC
(according to Platos chronology, that is). But the general Celtic Cross shape of this
city will concern us again in Genetics in Western History and Religion, pages 66-86.

Also, Plato did get another thing right about the Azores Plateau, and this map faithfully
reflects Platos ideas. All the mountains of todays sunken Azores Plateau are actually in
the north. They are the Azores Islands of today. If the Azores Plateau had ever been at
sea level, as depicted above, then the Azores Island known as Pico Alto would have been
the highest mountain in the world, not Mount Everest. How did Plato know that the
highest mountains of his Atlantis were toward the north?
By the way, this is one of the several points that argue against the academically respected
theory of Marinatos that Platos Atlantis had been Minoan Crete. In Crete, the White
Mountains of the extreme southern coast are the highest elevations.
These mountains of the now-sunken Azores Plateau have been pushed up from the MidAtlantic Ridge by continually seeping flows of metal-bearing magma. The Mid-Atlantic
Ridge is the largest and most ancient tectonic fracture on the planet. It was formed when
Gondwana split off from Pangaea to begin the drifting of the continents into their
present configuration. One could, indeed, expect to find large deposits of orichalcum
(i.e. mountain copper) in the fractures surrounding the Azores Islands and the presently
sunken Azores Plateau, including the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.
Modern and highly profitable metal prospecting companies find copper today by tracing
these tectonic fractures. I have worked with Billiton International Metals of The Hague
helping to find sources of copper for modern mines. Readers can access Esaus Empire

23
I and II on this website. I give a couple of examples of my armchair metal prospecting
activities.
And now, at last, we come to it.
Accustomed to a copper-based technology, and maybe even metabolically adapted to
copper as a separate strain of humanity that used copper and not iron as the oxygencarrying ionic agent in their blue blood, did our putative Atlanteans push across
southern France and on into the Mediterranean?
Did they know, from maps like Ibn Ben Zaras, that non-glaciated copper-bearing lands,
like the Danube Rivers lower reaches, existed and had suddenly been left free for
colonization by the retreat of the Ice Age ice caps?
Historians of technology have always been somewhat puzzled as to why the so-called
Chalcolithic (Copper and Stone Age) and Bronze Ages came first and were the initial
stages of known metallurgy. Iron is much more common in geological deposits and is a
harder metal than copper or even the alloy of copper called bronze. Why, then, did the
so-called Bronze Age come earlier in human metallurgical history?
Maybe this anomalous technological evolution started simply because our hypothetical
Chalcolithic Atlanteans felt more healthy holding copper-based jewellery or weapons
in their hands, just like some people today still wear copper bracelets to ward off the
effects of arthritis. Bronze was called The Royal Metal long before iron began to be
smelted and used about 750 BC.
Did a map something like Ben Zaras launch an Atlantean Age of Discovery about
10,000 years ago? That seems farfetched, maybe, but maps like Ben Zaras certainly
launched Europes own Age of Discovery in the late 1400s.
I have written above that the 30-odd genuine Portolans depict the Mediterranean world
from Iberia to about the Black Sea. This is true. But there are some good reasons to
think too complicated to cover here that the Mediterranean portion was taken from an
original map that showed the entire world, and thus showed land westward from Europe
across the Atlantic. Columbus possessed such a map before he set sail from Palos on
August 3, 1492 (it is mentioned in his Log). Magellan had such a map before he set sail
1519 and it is mentioned in the account of the around-the-world voyage written of one of
his navigators, Pigafetta. Is this priceless Pre-Columbus map of the whole world
somewhere in Toulouse?
In any event, a visit to Ben Zaras old house in Toulouse is an absolute must for The
Jesus Voyage.

24

Christianity
To return to our major theme, true or original Christianity was the basic belief in a
Neolithic good shepherd or teacher of righteousness. He was traditionally put to
death by being hung on a bush (or tree, or cross) by a Wicked Priest.
And, by the way, obviously even the very concept of a good shepherd is possible only
within a culture that had achieved the domestication of sheep. And also, because sheep
and lambs are relatively vulnerable, the idea of a good shepherd would probably be
among the very first conceptions of a Neolithic culture that had managed to domesticate
this species. But the notion and necessary reality of shepherds inevitably leads to certain
Christian principles and moral values: the strong protecting the weak, the need to heal
sick and injured lambs, the obligation of selfless leadership and so on.
It is easy to show that these associations attached to the Neolithic Good Shepherd
thousands of years before either the Old Testament or the New Testament was written.
The Jesus Voyage intends to follow the actual apparent route of true Christianity
from the Atlantic to the Middle East and, with a real-life adventure, vividly re-create how
todays so-called Judeo-Christian Tradition evolved.
Egyptian-educated Bishop Eusebius (AD 263-339?), usually accorded the epithet Father
of Church History, seems to have known something of the very ancient origins of
Christianity. He wrote that Christianity is nothing new and outlandish, but was the
oldest religion in the world.
St. Augustine (AD 354-430), a former North African pagan who eventually became the
Bishop of Hippo in modern Algeria, elaborated on the above-quoted comment by
Eusebius:
That which is called the Christian Religion existed among the Ancients,
and never did not exist, from the beginning of the human race until Christ
came in the flesh, at which time the true religion which already existed
began to be called Christianity.
There is mounting evidence that this prehistoric and Neolithic saviour was held to be
the consort of the Great Fertility Goddess, her continually regenerated husband-son. The
Neolithic Good Shepherd and consort-son of the Great Goddess was doomed to be
ritually sacrificed and replaced by a new king at various intervals of months or years,
depending on the specific Neolithic cultural group or tribe. Both Sir James Fraser in
The Golden Bough and Robert Graves in The White Goddess have discussed this custom
in great detail. It might have been inevitable that the Good Shepherd himself would
come to be equated and associated with his own lambs. Thus Jesus came to his fate like
a lamb to the slaughter and a metaphor for Jesus is the Lamb of God, and so on.
The first known name of the Great Goddess seems to have been Dana (though Robert
Graves says it was Anna). She was known in Egypt as Isis and to the Greco-Romans as
Aphrodite-Venus. In the Middle East, she was also called Cybele, Astarte, Ishtar and had
many other names in many languages extending into western India. The first Grail was

25
her womb, a vessel that continually regenerated humanity and the whole world. And,
ultimately, all subsequent historical representations of the Holy Grail referred back to this
ancient symbolic motif.
There are some purely zoological reasons for thinking that this belief in the Great
Goddess and her Good Shepherd consort-son seems to have originated either on
Atlantis itself, or (at least) somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean. Or, and perhaps
even more probably, it may have originated on the now-sunken islands of lost
Lyonesse off the coast of modern Brittany. This location of Lyonesse may explain
why, in Roman Catholic oral tradition (for it is not written in any known New Testament
source) St. Ann of Brittany is held to be the mother of Virgin Mary. That is, St. Ann
of Brittany was held to be the maternal grandmother of Jesus.
This folk belief is something of a minor puzzle in itself because it is difficult to imagine
how orthodox Early Christians in the Middle East, Greece and Rome could even have
learned of far-away Brittany. And why choose a woman from Brittany, of all places, as
the mother of supposedly Palestinian Mary?
But St. Ann of Brittany may be an allegorical personification of the very first phases of
Neolithic development, a time before even Good Shepherds became widely known and
generally necessary. St. Ann may symbolize a time when the domestication of sheep
had just barely been accomplished and it may have been an achievement that was first
introduced in Brittany. There are, in fact, several intriguing linguistic reasons for
thinking so.
The religion of the Neolithic Earth Goddess and her Good Shepherd consort-son
apparently appeared in Northwest Europe first and quickly travelled through southern
France. Then it travelled with Neolithic colonists from the Viols-le-Fort and Narbonne
region on across the Mediterranean Sea via the islands of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and
Malta by about 7000 BC.
An important centre of this belief was established in the northern Adriatic Sea within the
maritime so-called Danilo-Hvar Culture by 7000 BC. And it was here, apparently, that
the Great Goddess was worshipped as a Fish Goddess similar to the fish goddesses of
the Danubian Vinca and Lepinski Vir cultures. The problem is that we dont know
whether the idea of Isis was inspired by Danubian fish goddesses or whether the cultural
borrowing went the other way.
From the northern Adriatic, this form of Goddess worship and true Christianity was
taken even further south and east to Crete, Cyprus, Egypt and elsewhere on the mainland
Middle East. We know this, or we can (more or less) safely conjecture it, because
Balkan-style sheep and goats from the northern Adriatic arrived in the Nile Delta at the
same time as the basic Christian story. And in the Nile Delta, the Great Goddess was
simultaneously and very firmly established as Isis, originally a Fish Goddess, by about
6000 BC.
An intriguing question, but one that may never be answered and one which is also well
beyond the specific focus of The Jesus Voyage project, is the origin of the Great

26
Goddess as Isis... who eventually transmuted into the Virgin Mary. Was this fishy and
maritime notion of the Great Goddess conceived somewhere out on the Atlantic Ocean,
or on the Atlantic coast of Northwest Europe? Or, on the northern Adriatic Sea coast in
close proximity to Danubian cultures? No one knows.
We know only that Isis was the identity by which the Neolithic and megalithic Great
Goddess was known in Egypt from at least 6000 BC. We can also safely conjecture that
Isis was brought directly to Egypt by maritime colonists from the northern Adriatics
so-called Danilo-Hvar Culture. But we do not know where belief in Isis actually
originated.
It should also be mentioned that at some time, maybe between about 7000 BC and
perhaps 4000 BC, the Neolithic belief in true Christianity of the Goddess and the Good
Shepherd extended all the way to western India. This accounts for the many uncanny
similarities between Jesus Christ, Lord Krishna and even Buddha as good shepherds
and teachers of righteousness.

Greek sculpture of Apollo-like

youth as the Good Shepherd,
3rd century BC.

Boddisattva as the Good Shepherd.

India, 3rd century BC.

Scholars of comparative religion have long noted that teachings, parables and sayings
attributed to Jesus, Buddha and Krishna are not just generally similar. Given the
uncertainties of translation, they seem actually to be identical in literally scores of
instances. Some esoteric groups, notably the Rosicrucians, have tried to explain the
situation by speculating that Jesus must have travelled to India in his youth in order to
teach and to learn before he began his ministry in Palestine. But this assumption cannot,
of course, explain why the many statues of the Good Shepherd are pre-Christian by
centuries.
The Atlantean, or (at least) Atlantic, origin of this true Christianity may be hinted by
a rite that was performed even as late as the 1920s in some parts of India. An interesting

27
story was told by the famous British novelist, E.M. Forster. He was once a secretary and
general factotum for a minor Indian Raja and was charged with organizing the local
religious celebrations. Forster recounts that the ten days commemorating the birth of
Lord Krishna culminated in the ceremony of sinking of a mud-built model of a city in a
pond.
This incident is related in Forsters little known collection of letters entitled The Hill at
Devi (1927), written long before his much more famous novel, A Passage to India. Did
this ancient but so recently living custom reflect some localized Indian flooding? Or, did
it reflect Platos version of the end of Atlantis? Did it recall the similar sinking, on a
smaller scale, of the lost islands of Lyonesse? Perhaps it is only coincidence that the
traditional capital city of Lyonnesse was most anciently called Kris.
It is very much worth noting before we continue with this over-view of The Jesus
Voyage that people believing in the Old Religion or true Christianity were, by our
present standards, remarkably peaceful. What Dr. Marija Gimbutas has termed the
Civilization of the Goddess once extended from Ireland to India between about 10,000
BC and about 4500 BC when Indo-European Language speakers from the Caucasussteppes of Russia began to encroach upon it.
As of the time this is being written (February 2003), over 100 sites of this Goddessworshipping culture have been excavated in Northwest Europe, the Mediterranean coasts
of France, Italy, the Balkans, Greece and a scattering of sites through Syria, Iraq, Iran and
on into western India. Just recently, in August 2002, the discovery of the oldest city in
the world, underwater just off the Kathiawar Peninsula of extreme western India, was
somewhat over-enthusiatically announced. It has so far been dated to about 7500 BC.
There were no empires, although there was a definite and cohesive religious conception
among these far-flung people and many cultural affinities from one site to the next. They
lived in apparently independent townships, some of which could accommodate up to
10,000 people. In some places they constructed stone-built houses or cottages laid out
along identifiable streets, as at Viols-le-Fort, Rennes-le-Chateau and many sites in the
Balkans. In other places, they built wooden houses. There are always megalithic
structures near their settlements and dotting the countryside between villages.
There could have been very little organized warfare during this 10,000 BC to 4500 BC
era because weapons represent less than 1% of the tens of thousands of artifacts so far
recovered. During this long period from 10,000 BC to 4500 BC in Europe and Western
Asia, not one walled town or city has so far been discovered. They were peaceful
artisans, farmers, orchard-tenders, herdsmen, beekeepers and, above all, traders by both
land and sea. The bulk of artifacts (65%) presently tabulated consists of wooden, stone,
copper and sometimes bronze tools and implements (including boat paddles with long
handles). About 30% of the artifacts are personal adornments and some things have not
been identified.
City and town sites are predominantly coastal or located on navigable rivers leading to
the sea. It is very evident that people of this Old European Civilization much preferred to
settle on islands near a mainland whenever possible. Groups that penetrated inland even

28
built artificial islands out in lakes -- large wooden platforms supported on wooden pylons
with only a narrow bridge to the shore.
Literally tens of thousands of clay-moulded votive offerings to the Great Goddess have
been recovered from the period 10,000 to 4500 BC, the majority of them clustering
around 6500 to 4500 BC, a fact that seems to indicate the heyday of the Old European
Civilization. The Great Goddess is always depicted naked, sometimes reclining and
sometimes in the process of giving birth. She has wide hips and hefty breasts, and there
may well be a definite cultural affinity with, and evolution from, the Venus figurines of
some Upper Paleolithic European hunting cultures of the last Ice Age about 23,000 BC.
Votive offerings of the Neolithic Good Shepherd usually show him with a proud erection
and swollen testicles appropriate for the consort of a fertility goddess.
It may be that Hesiod, a Greek poet who was a near contemporary of Homer, was
referring to folk memories of this Old European Civilization when he wrote of a past
Golden Age of humanity. During this Golden Age, he wrote, men then lived on
honey and acorn-bread and were subject to their mothers their whole life long, but at least
they did not make war upon one another.
The Jesus Voyage intends to visit Neolithic-megalithic sites (and museums) on
Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta and Hvar where hundreds of artifacts of this Old
European Civilization of the Goddess can be seen. Archaeologists began to realize with
great excitement back in the 1970s that an entirely new civilization had been discovered.
The previous lost civilizations of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece, not to mention
the excavation of Homers Troy, had generated immense fascination among scholars and
the general public. But the very recently discovered Civilization of the Goddess was
immeasurably older than Minoa, Mycenae or Troy and was the deepest taproot of
Western culture.
French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen have documented the fact
that the basic Christian story had come to pre-dynastic Egypt by at least 6000 BC. By
1400 BC in Egypt, specific motifs of recognizable modern Christianity had evolved.
These motifs included initial baptism with the water of life, the Triune nature of the
Divinity (Father, Son and a female Holy Spirit) and the similarly triune Holy Family.
The Egyptian saviour was called the meseh, or crocodile, because he was ritually
anointed with crocodile oil. He became a crocodile. Personally, I suspect that his
association with crocodiles was because of the obvious fact that crocodiles are
voracious predators of fish. They seemed eager and determined, therefore, to fill
themselves (in a way) with the essence of the Fish Goddess Isis.
The Ancient Egyptian practice of Christianity also included some specific liturgical
vestments that are still used by some Christian priests todaysuch as the Christian
dalmatic style of ceremonial robe (from Dalmatia on the Adriatic coast).
Archaeologist Howard Carter was stunned when he discovered a genuine Christian
dalmatic and other priestly Christian trappings during his excavation of Tutankhamuns
famous tomb (dated about 1350 BC). Naturally, todays popular television and

29
supposedly educational documentaries avoid any mention of Tutankhamuns Christian
associations and usually offer titillating disinformation about the curse of the mummy
instead.
The Israelites, during their well-known sojourn in Goshen (Northeastern Egypt) about
1400-1300 BC, picked up this Egyptian belief in a world saviour and modified the
Egyptian word meseh into the Hebrew word messiah, meaning the anointed one. But
the biblical Hebrews, while accepting the male Egyptian Messiah easily enough, felt
compelled to change the sex of the supreme deity to conform with their male-dominant
mindset. Earth Mother Isis became our father Jehovah.
The Son and saviours proper name seems always to have been Essa or Issa (as used in
the Koran), and this is still the Arabic/Aramaic for our word Jesus, which is merely a
Latin form of the same name.
The prophets of the Old Testament are thought to have come out of the wilderness (as
the Bible calls it) around the Dead Sea where the so-called Essene community was
located. These people were really and more properly Essa-enes...that is, hermit and
ascetic believers in the world-saving messiah. One of the most famous prophets, Hosea
(circa 750 BC), makes no bones about the messiahs originally Egyptian originsfrom
the Israelites point of view, that is. Out of Egypt have I called my Son, wrote Hosea.

Left: Isis holding infant Horus as the Madonna and Child Greco-Egyptian,
3rd century BC.
Right: Familiar later Christian Madonna and Child, 5th century AD.
Note (arrow) that even the horns of Isis are replicated, but as wheat sheaves, on this
Christian Madonna. The halo was originally the light-essence of divinity in Isis.

30
Obviously, however, so-called prophecy was not any sort of factor here. There was
never any such thing as the pre-existent Christ. This was merely a conception of
desperate Christian theologians who had to explain away so much pre-Christian evidence
of Jesus. Essenes like Hosea were actually historians of an already ancient religious
tradition, although Israelite knowledge of it apparently did not reach back beyond the
Ancient Egyptian adoption of a much older creed.
This is why the Dead Sea Scrolls have caused so much controversy for orthodox
Christianity and Judaism and why the complete translation of them was withheld for over
half a century. The full translation was finally leaked on the Internet. The Teacher of
Righteousness, Jesus, is mentioned in Dead Sea Scrolls that have been Carbon-dated
to 250 BC. This did not suit the purposes of either modern Christians or Israel.
This name of Essa or Issa means, quite literally, the issue or essence of the Goddess
Isis and it is a muted and distorted whisper from prehistoric Neolithic times when the
son-husband of the Great Fertility Goddess was believed to be Her consort.
Theres biblical evidence that this name, Iesu, which the Hebrews rendered Yshua or
our modern Joshua or Jesus, was in usage by at least about 1400-1350 BC, or
roughly the time of Tutankhamun. But this evidence requires an explanation.
Sigmund Freud, the discoverer of psychoanalysis, applied his methods to the Old
Testament and fundamental Judaism. In Moses and Monotheism (1939), he concluded
that the biblical Moses had been the Egyptian heretical Pharaoh known as Akenaten.
Akenaten tried to impose his own fanatical monotheistic belief in the Egyptian god
Aten on all Egyptians. But Aten may really have been a genuine Hebrew conception
because worship of him actually predated Akenatens birth and was localized in
northeastern Egypt, or Goshen, where the biblical Israelites traditionally resided for a
time. See Genetics in Western History and Religion, pages 61-80, below.
Akenatens attempt to impose monotheism was a most unpopular move among the vast
majority of Egyptians who had, by about 1375 BC, created a numerous and highly
regional pantheon. Akenaten was deposed and chased into exile. Sigmund Freud
suspected that this flight of Akenaten and his followers had been the Exodus of the
Bible. The biblical name Moses was just the well-known Egyptian suffix mosis as in
Thothmosis, for example. The word meant roughly rightful heir or rightful child in
Ancient Egyptian. It was used in some XVIII Dynasty legal documents. Thus, the biblical
Hebrews of the Exodus regarded Moses as the rightful child of Aten, or even the rightful
king, even if most of the Egyptins had repudiated him and had chased him into exile.
The successor of biblical Moses was, of course, Joshua ben Nun (or Joshua, son of the
Fish), just as the successor of Akenaten was known to have been Tutankhamun, the
theoretical son of the Fish Goddess Isis. Therefore, Tutankhamun must also have been
Joshua or Issa or Jesus.
Freud personally knew the British archaeologist Howard Carter, the excavator of
Tutankhamuns famous tomb, and met him several times at various European scientific
conferences. Freud and Carter also conducted a long correspondence. Freud knew that

31
Tutankhamun had tried to reconcile Egyptians by permitting and restoring worship of the
traditional gods and goddesses, even though he himself apparently believed in Aten
during all of his brief life. Freud also knew that Tutankhamun had been murdered by
dismemberment while being hung on a tree, an ancient Israelite form of punishment
reserved for particularly odious criminals or particularly dangerous enemies.
The Talmud mentions Jesus or more often, a certain person over twenty times.
According to the Talmud, Jesus had been a false prophet or evil magician who styled
himself king and who was executed for trying to lead Israel astray. The Bible then
immediately mentions Joshua as the successor to Moses. Freud the psychiatrist
suspected immediately that this Joshua, the Israelites biblical conqueror of Canaan, had
been a compensating psychological projection on the part of the Hebrews.
The Hebrews, probably under orders from the deposed and exiled Akenaten, executed
Tutankhamun as a traitor and apostate to Aten-worship. The High Priest of Aten who
officiated was called Panhesy. But, guilt-ridden at having killed a Pharaoh and Messiah,
the priests then psychologically transmuted their real victim into their mythic champion.
Freuds conclusions were given much support because archaeology from the 1930s to the
1950s (and still) has failed to find any evidence of Joshuas military conquest of Canaan,
or any Hebrew military conquest of Canaan. In fact, theres no evidence whatsoever of a
specifically identifiable Hebrew presence in Palestine until about 850 BC.
Theres no real mystery about where the biblical Israelites were from the time of the
Exodus about 1350 BC until the first signs of them in Palestine about 850 BC, a period of
roughly 500 years. However, Jewish religious and socio-economic leaders have taken
great trouble to suppress this knowledge because it undermines any justification for the
creation of the modern State of Israel in former Palestine.
But, aside from all that, it is clear enough that Joshua didnt exist in his Old Testament
role. However, his name Yshua or Jesus was equated in time with Tutankhamun.
Both biblical Joshua and Tutankhamun lived about 1350-1330 BC. The identification
of Joshua with Tutankhamun seemed to be clenched when Carter discovered obviously
Christian priestly garments and obviously Christian symbolism in Tutankhamuns
tomb. Modern medical examination of Tutankhamuns mummy has also confirmed that
the boy king, who was about 19 years old when he died, had been virtually dismembered.
So, the name Issa, Yshua, Joshua or Jesus had been applied to the Messiah as
early as about 1350 BC. In the modern Greek version of the Bible, for example, there is
no such person as Joshua ben Nun in the Old Testament. In the standard Greek version
of the Old Testament, straightforward Jesus supposedly conquered Canaan for the
Israelites. Latin-speaking Romans and Palestinians of John the Baptists time would have
written the name as Iesus or Jesus, but they still would have pronounced it something
like Yesus.
This ancient and Egyptian Christian belief in Jesus son of Isis was appropriated and
distorted by Hebrews living in Palestine during the confused time of Roman take-over

32
from the Greeks. This change in the political domination of the Mediterranean world
followed the Roman victory over Antony and Cleopatra in 31 BC at the Battle of Actium.
The Jews very quickly discovered that the Romans were much less tolerant of Jewish
behaviour than the easy-going Ptolemaic Greek rule of Antony and Cleopatra had been.
The Romans had no patience with fanatical Hebrew religious beliefs that continually
inspired Jewish zealots to undertake armed revolts against Caesar Augustus and his
successors. The Roman response was a strong military presence, quick crucifixion of
militant dissidents and even the eventual expulsion of Jews from Judea.
Both Greeks and their Roman successors have been presented in Judeo-Christian
literature as immoral and decadent oppressors of righteously God-fearing monotheistic
Jews who lived according to the strict morality of The Law of Moses. Well, thats one
way of looking at it.
But another way of looking at it is that both the Greeks and Romans sought to create
what Alexander the Great had termed a Cosmopolis, a World City, where diverse
people from different countries could live together with a degree of social and sexual
equality (given the conceptions of that era, that is) and where an open interchange of
religious, intellectual, cultural, literary and scientific ideas could flourish. This is
precisely similar to the modern ideals of tolerant Multiculturalism and our recognition
of the so-called Global Village in our own time.
The great Library of Alexandria, founded by Alexanders immediate successor in Egypt,
Ptolemy I, was a tangible manifestation of Alexanders dream. And the teeming,
sophisticated and cosmopolitan city of Alexandria was itself the living proof of a
world city where scholars from all over the known world, representing most known
cultures and religious ideas, studied and taught freely.
The Jews wanted no part of this so-called Cosmopolis unless, that is, their own
religious Law, which was the only possible righteousness in the eyes of their God, was
absolutely imposed upon everyone.
They fought first the Greeks and then the Romans with fanatical determination to avoid
any acceptance of, or assimilation within, any such world community. On a very basic
level, they refused to intermarry with non-Jews, and they generally still do. The Greeks
and Romans viewed this behaviour as a blatant form of we what would now term
racism. Because they were the self-proclaimed Chosen People, the inference was,
and must be, that Jews considered themselves superior to the rest of humanity. Where
did this unbending religious intolerance and cultural chauvinism come from? A possible
geographic and genetic answer to this question is offered in Genetics in Western History
and Religion, pages 61-80.
The belief in Isis and her Good Shepherd son and consort, the so-called Messiah, had
already made considerable inroads in Palestine before the Battle of Actium. This was
completely understandable because both Palestine and Egypt belonged to Marc Antony
under the division of formerly Greek territory approved by the Roman Senate.

33
In fact, it is more than just a little interesting to note, in view of subsequent Christian socalled history, that Marc Antony gave Palestine to his lover, Cleopatra, in 44 BC.
Cleopatra, then, personally ruled Palestine up until the victory of Octavian, much better
known to New Testament readers as Augustus Caesar. It was Cleopatra, not Antony,
who established Herod the Great as a Jewish puppet king over part of Palestine.
This leads to an extremely interesting possibility that is, admittedly, just a speculation.
The famous and beautiful Cleopatra who captivated both Julius Caesar and Marc Antony
was actually the seventh in a succession of Cleopatras. She was, in the belief of
Egyptians at least, a direct descendant from the ancient Great Goddess Isis.
Egypt had a semi-matriarchal system. A male aspirant to the Egyptian throne could
become Pharaoh (literally the light, but by usage king) only if he married the current
descendant of Isis. He then automatically also became the Meseh or Messiah. This
usually meant that a brother married his sister (the supposed matrilinear descendant of
Isis) in order that royalty and wealth would remain all in the family. But occasionally,
usurpers managed to become Pharaoh by marrying an Isis-descended princess.
At least one of Cleopatra VIIs brothers married her to become Pharaoh of Egypt and he
was apparently either accidentally or purposefully drowned in the Nile. She appears to
have married a second brother, too, and he seems to have been assassinated. All this
happened before Julius Caesar arrived on the Alexandrian scene. He was the uninvited
Roman protector of the grain-rich formerly Greek-ruled territory of Egypt that was so
avidly coveted by Rome.
Caesar also married Cleopatra in order to solidify his position as Pharaoh. At least, he
married her by Egyptian rites. However, he wisely didnt advertise this fact to the SPQR
(the official and ponderously ubiquitous abbreviation for Senatus Populusque
Romanorum or the Senate and People of the Romans). Nonetheless, in Egyptian eyes,
Caesar was Pharaoh...for a short time, anyway. After the assassination of Julius Caesar,
his dashing cavalry commander, Marc Antony, also promptly succumbed to Cleopatras
charms, married her, and so became the last Pharaoh of Ancient Egypt.
As we know, with Octavians victory at Actium and his immediate invasion of Egypt,
Marc Antony fell on his sword and Cleopatra clasped a poisonous snake (traditionally an
asp) to her bosom. Her son by Julius Caesar, Caesarion, was summarily killed by
Octavian since Caesarion was Caesars legal heir and this made Augustus Caesars own
legal position more than just a little iffy. Naturally, being a Roman from a patriarchal
culture, Octavian paid little attention to Cleopatras daughters.
There were at least two daughters of Cleopatra VII and they were of crucial importance
within the Egyptian matriarchal scheme of things because they were (supposedly, that is)
direct descendants of Isis through their mother. Anyone who married them would have
become the legitimate Egyptian Messiah. One daughter, thought to have been the eldest,
was called Cleopatra Selene and is known to have married King Juba I of Mauretania.
She is therefore accounted for.

34
But one daughter is not accounted for and this brings us to a matter that all Christian
historians and theologians have been very careful to avoid. According to the JewishRoman historian Flavius Josephus in his Antiquities of the Jews (Book XVIII), John the
Baptist from Egypt attracted crowds of up to 50,000 people in Jerusalem and Judea at
some date after AD 21 (but before AD 52), the exact duration of Johns ministry is
uncertain. John offered the Ancient Egyptian rite of Baptism in running water (i.e.
living water) as a prerequisite for the eternal life of the soul. This was before the days
of mass media and therefore John must have had some obvious claim to fame among
those people who fondly remembered the tolerant rule of Egypt and Palestine under
Cleopatra.
First of all, it is important to realize that, in theory at least, only an Egyptian PharaohMessiah could offer and conduct the rite of Baptism. The Pharaoh and Messiah was also
the Chief Priest of Ptolemaic Egyptian life. And, although his secular title was Pharaoh
and his spiritual title was the Messiah, his more popular or familial name would have
been something like Iessu or Issa or Essa that is, the essence or issue of Isis.
This may sound complicated, but it is roughly analogous to the custom that the Prince of
Wales is traditionally Heir Apparent to the British throne and the present one is
popularly known by his family-given name of Charles. All three are the same person.
Was the figure we know as John the Baptist a legitimate Messiah of Egypt the
legitimate Messiah at the dawn of the Christian Era?
Was he the longed-for Messiah of those Palestinians who were either of Egyptian
extraction themselves or who were Jewish sympathizers of Cleopatras former regime?
Given the harshness of Octavians (Augustus Caesars) policy in both Palestine and in
Egypt, there almost must have been some sort of Palestinian-Egyptian Liberation
Organization in John the Baptists lifetime. To stress how close in time Cleopatra was
to the start of the Christian Era, we should realize that at least a few Palestinians alive
in John the Baptists day could have retained a genuine living memory of Cleopatra. She
had been dead only fifty-one years in AD 21.
It is not at all unlikely that at least some Jews in Palestine would have also gravitated to
this Egyptian Messiah in spite of his Egyptian origin, or maybe even because of it. There
was a sort of Messiah madness infecting the Jews of the day and, referring to the
advent of the Messiah, the prophet Hosea had said it clearly enough: Out of Egypt I
have called my Son. Such Jews would have expected the Messiah to rally the
Palestinian-Egyptian Liberation Organization and kick the hated Romans out of both
countries.
Several things should be emphasized here, if only because they have been so deftly sidestepped by both Jewish and Christian writers. First of all, Palestine at the time of the
Roman take-over from the Greeks was not predominantly Jewish. The impression
given, and purposefully given, in Judeo-Christian literature is that Palestine of the time
was almost wholly a Jewish territory.

35
Biblical Hebrews did represent a sizable minority of the Holy Lands population, but
not the majority of it. This is clear from Roman taxation records. Also, when the Romans
expelled the Jews from Judea in AD 70, well, the place wasnt in any way desolated or
depopulated. All sorts of people lived in Palestine: Jews, Greeks, Egyptians and native
Palestinians who worshipped all sorts of gods and goddesses. There is undoubtedly a
much greater proportion of Jews in the territory of Palestine today than there ever was
at any time in the past.
The Messiah madness that affected the Jews of the time has been attributed in JudeoChristian literature solely to the Jewish expectation of the Messiahs advent that had been
prophesied in the Old Testament. But this is also a distortion of reality and one that has
been achieved by the simple expedient of ignoring everyone except Jews who inhabited
Palestine and by ignoring everything that was not Jewish-related in Palestine. But the
truth of the matter is that so long as the Ptolemaic Greeks ruled Palestine there had
always been a Messiah as a savoiur who could offer baptism and life to the people.
The Messiah madness of the first century was due to the lack of a Messiah, not due
mostly to ancient biblical prophecies of one to come at some undefined time in the future.
Remember that Palestine had traditionally belonged to Egypt and was considered an
Egyptian sphere of influence. Marc Antonys rule of Palestine and Egypt had been
confirmed by the SPQR and he, in turn, had given Palestine to Cleopatra (it was
already hers and Egypts by tradition). But since the time Marc Antony and Cleopatra
had been defeated in 31 BC, and since Egypt had been occupied a year later (30 BC), a
great proportion of Palestinian people had been bereft of their Messiah.
If there was Messiah madness in Palestine during and after the time of Augustus
Caesars long reign, it was because there had been no Egyptian Messiah for about forty
years and yet one was suddenly rumoured to be alive, well and active.
This excitement would have gripped the many Egyptians in Palestine most directly, but it
would also have fascinated some Jews because of their own Old Testament prophecies.
Even some Greeks and pagan Palestinians would have been at least curious about this
rumoured Messiah because Roman rule was oppressive. The Messiah, in some peoples
opinion, would end Roman domination.
To have been the legitimate Egyptian Messiah meant that John would most likely have
been born to a daughter or granddaughter of Cleopatra and also be married to his own
sister. Cleopatra VII died in 30 BC and one of her daughters, Cleopatra Arsino, is
thought to have been about 10 years old at the time. This would have made her about 40
years old when John could have been born at about the time of the New Testaments
nativity story. We are specifically informed in the New Testament that Jesus and
John were born within six months of each other.
According to the New Testament, Johns mother was named Elizabeth and she was
stricken in years so that her husband was amazed to think that she could have a child.
Forty was a fairly old age back then, but did not necessarily compromise a womans

36
fertility. Elizabeth could certainly have conceived a child at that age, or even more than
one, and could also have borne them successfully.
Most books supplying names for girls say that the name Elizabeth means something
like Oath of God. It does not. At least, not in Hebrew. It means El (god or
goddess)-isa (Isis)-beth/bat (girl or house). So, we have House of the Goddess
Isis as Elizabeths real name in Hebrew. Oath of God is not just ridiculous, it is
serious disinformation. Perhaps this misdirection has been intended to obscure and
disguise any possible connection between Jesus and Cleopatra.
The meaning of House of the Goddess Isis is fairly clear anyway, but becomes even a
little clearer with an insight into Egyptian usage. And any daughter of Cleopatra VII,
Queen of Egypt (even deposed and dead), would not have forgotten her own Egyptian
origins. In Egyptian, even any ordinary married woman was regarded as the house of
her husband. The Queen of Egypt was the house of Pharaoh. A descendant of Isis
would certainly, therefore, have been the house or dwelling place of the Goddess.
It would not have been so odd if a daughter (or granddaughter?) of Cleopatra happened to
reside in Palestine and called herself Elisabeth (i.e. Elishabat in the local HebrewAramaic pronunciation). Palestine had just recently belonged to Egypt and Cleopatra,
after all, and Cleopatra had even resided there for a time. It is even possible that
Cleopatra Arsino had actually been born in Palestine if, as seems probable from her
assumed age, she was the daughter of either of Cleopatras two early husbands or Julius
Caesar. And as far as danger from the Romans was concerned, they occupied Egypt just
as thoroughly and brutally as they occupied Palestine. Egypt was no safer than Palestine
for the matriarchal heir of Cleopatra.
I have always found it a bit curious that two of the most dominant personalities of the
early Christian Era, the near-contemporaries Cleopatra and Jesus, are almost never
mentioned in the same breath or sentence by historians. But here we have a definite
indication that John the Baptist may have been related to Cleopatra, we have some reason
to conjecture that John could have been the legitimate Egyptian Messiah and we have
several very good reasons to think that the Messiah had always been called Jesus from
at least 1350 BC.
The figure we know as Mary Magdalene, therefore, may well also have been John the
Baptists sister and wife. We know nothing much about her except that, according to the
Gospel of Philip from the Nag Hammadi texts discovered in 1945, she was the Messiahs
special and beloved companion and that he often kissed her on the lips.
Perhaps it only has to be added that Cleopatra Arsino is thought to have died in Ephesus
in modern Turkey at the age of 67...just like the Virgin Mary. It is recorded that
Cleopatra Arsino ended her days as a priestess in the Ephesus Temple of Artemis.
Artemis was the local Turkish name and identity of the Great Goddess.
Because of the popularity of John the Baptist, the Egyptian religion of the Messiah was
thus already threatening the dominance of Judaism in some areas of Roman-ruled
Palestine. Less than three generations after the Battle of Actium, for example, Paul went

37
to preach Christiantity in Ephesus...and found that Christians were already well
established there. But in Ephesus the Christ was the Egyptian Messiah named John
who had offered the Ancient Egyptian rite of baptism as the prerequisite for eternal life.
John the Baptist, by the way, is the only major personality of the New Testament to be
mentioned in any historical source outside of the New Testament itself. John is
favourably described by Flavius Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews (Book XVIII).
Something had to be done about the threat to Judaism posed by Egyptian Christianity.
And something was, indeed, done about it. The originally Ptolemaic-Egyptian religion of
Christianity or Messiah-worship was given a specifically Judaic origin by Hebrews
living in Palestine in order to disguise its legitimate Egyptian content and especially to
disguise any possible connection with Isis. This historical distortion and imposition
became so-called orthodox Christianity that we think we know today.
This distortion occurred simply because Saul, a Jewish rabbinical student under the great
Rabbi Gamaliel (grandson of Hillel), suddenly converted to Christianity and became
Paul.
And, as Paul (later St. Paul), he wrote almost all of the original New Testament which
modern scholars technically call Marcions Canon. Hyam Maccoby, a rather famous
modern Jewish scholar at the Leo Baeck Talmudic Institute in London, England, has
admitted and demonstrated Saul/Pauls hijacking of Christianity in his book The
Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity (1986).
Paul rather obviously used the truly historical career of John the Baptist as the basic
structure of the New Testament story because he could hardly do anything else. Johns
activities were quite well known to literally thousands of people living in Palestine in
Pauls time. Johns existence and activities had also been acknowledged by one of the
most respected historians of the time, and a Jewish one at that.
But then, using the age-old proper name of the Messiah, Paul invented a fictitious true
saviour named Jesus Johns other name. This Jesus came from a purely Jewish
background and had no connections with Egypt at all (except for Hoseas awkward
prophecy). Paul played it even safer by writing that John and Jesus had been born only
six months apart and to mothers who were actually related. It was thus fairly easy to
confuse the real career of John with the fictional addition of Jesus and then to meld one
with the other. The ruse worked simply because very few people in either Palestine or
Rome were literate and Paul was an extremely prolific and equally gifted writer.
He wrote almost all there was to read about Christ, including almost certainly the
Gospel of John (theres an internal almost proof of Pauls authorship) and probably
also the Gospel of Luke. In addition, Paul wrote the majority of Epistles in the New
Testament. Subsequent Early Christian priests and bishops, having little recourse except
to rely upon Pauls writing, preached Pauls version of the Christian story and it became
orthodox.
Although the Romans initially persecuted Christians, whom they viewed as a slightly less
obnoxious sect of hated Judaism because of Pauls historical disinformation, Pauls

38
version of events was highly propagandized and its popularity grew rapidly in Rome.
This was because it was just on the cusp of being politically correct for the times.
Romes relatively young culture was contending against both the antiquity of Egyptian
civilization and the prestige of Greek intellectualism. But there was more to the eventual
victory of orthodox Roman Christianity than merely that. Genetics came into play again
with the barbarian invasions of Rome, and in a very big way. See pages 61-80 below.
Since first Rome and later the Roman Church thoroughly conquered Egypt, well, history
has always been written by the victors. The Roman conquest of Greco-Egyptian
civilization was not merely military with Caesar Augustus defeat of Antony and
Cleopatra in 31 BC. This military victory was capped by intellectual conquest in AD 391
when the Roman Bishop Theophilus thoroughly destroyed the Alexandrian library and
killed all the Egyptian (or Coptic) Christians he could find. In Europe, therefore, the
true origin of Christianity was all but lost beneath highly publicized Roman Church
orthodoxy based on the New Testament.
Nonetheless, some inexplicable and embarrassing loose ends remained.
Why did the Irish Druids revere their Yesu, a good shepherd and teacher of
righteousness, some three centuries before Romes (Pauls) historical Jesus was
supposedly born? How are the pre-Christian parallels between Christ, Krishna and
Buddha to be explained? Why must orthodox Roman Church Christians eat fish on
Friday (until recently), if not to honour the Great (Balkan?) Fish Goddess Isis, mother of
the Messiah? Why were Roman Catholic nuns (Hebrew: fish) allowed to keep only
fish as cloister pets? Answer: because, as brides of Christ, they are also the spiritual
descendants of Isis, the ancient Fish Goddess and the Messiahs wife. Thats why.
And why was the very first Christian symbol the sign of the fish? At least that must be
more than obvious by now.

39

Black Jesus? Black Madonnas?

We now come to something that must be dealt with at least superficially in order to satisfy
the increasingly strident demands of racial politics in North America and even the world.
Was Jesus Black that is to say, Negro as African-American historians have claimed
with ever-increasing vehemence since Marcus Garveys assertions?
As early as 1924, the Italian anthropologist Alessandro Biasutti concluded from his forensic
study of several dozen pre-dynastic (natural, before 3200 BC) and dynastic (artificially
mummified, after 3200 BC) Ancient Egyptian mummies that racially the Ancient Egyptian
population had been a mix. It had been about equal thirds Caucasian, Saan and Negroids. A
slight preponderance of Caucasians was marked in pre-dynastic times, but gradually changed
by the Eighteenth Dynasty (roughly the 1400-1300 BC era) to become a bit more than onethird Negroid. Biasuttis observations entirely agree with the very latest archaeological and
geographic data from the 1970s and 1990s.

If we choose to regard Tutankhamun as a highly refined Jesus figure because of the

Christian artifacts that Howard Carter discovered in his tomb in late 1922, then we also have
to admit that Tutankhamuns facial features do display definite Negroid physical
characteristics.
These could hardly have come from his putative father (Akenaten) and his putative
mother or step-mother, Nefertiti. Akenaten had definite Caucasian characteristics, but with
anomalies that have caused some archaeologists to think that he suffered from Froelichs
syndrome, Marfans syndrome or both. These metabolic conditions could explain his own
intolerance and also the monotheistic fanaticism of biblical Moses assuming, as Sigmund
Freud concluded, that they were almost undoubtedly the same person. Negroid characteristics
in Tutankhamuns facial and skeletal features could also not have come from his putative
mother, Nefertiti, the wife of Akenaten. Her bust is the prize of the Berlin Museum and
clearly shows a particularly exquisite example of a purely Caucasian, not a Negroid, type of
beauty.
These facts reinforce the idea that Tutankhamun wasnt the actual son of Akenaten and
Nefertiti, but was possibly the son of Amenhotep III (Akenatens father) and his original
wife, Sitamun. This idea is given some support by the fact that Akenaten and Nefertiti were
often depicted with their six obvious daughters, but never with an obvious boy child as well.
Therefore, Tutankhamuns definite Negroid features would seem to have come from
Amenhotep III and Sitamun (or some other princess).
It is known, however, that Tutankhamun married the youngest daughter of Akenaten and
Nefertiti, a girl called Ankhsenpa-Aten, and this would have been politically necessary, or at
least desirable, in order to legitimise his reign after the deposition of Akenaten. It is also
thought that Tutankhamun died too young to have a child by Ankhsenpa-Aten and this may
be of interest to students of Masonic and Grail lore. The Masonic code phrase Son of the

40
Widow Lady refers to a spiritual son of the actual son that Ankhsenpa-Aten never had a
chance to bear.
Therefore, if we regard Tutankhamun as the original Jesus figure, then he was at least
partly and definitely Negro, if not purely Black.
And what about the first century Messiah, John the Baptist? If he were, indeed, a descendant
of Cleopatra VII, then he would have been at least Blacker than your average Egyptian or
Palestinian. Roman historians like Plutarch and Suetonius make the point that Cleopatra was
notably dusky and this tradition persisted up until Shakespeares plays. John the Baptist, as
the real New Testament Messiah, was very probably just as dusky as Cleopatra if not pure
Negro.
Then, we are faced with the fact that there are several hundred Shrines of the Black
Madonna scattered throughout Caucasian Christian Europe. One naturally wonders why
unless there had been an ancient and enduring belief that the mother of the first century
Messiah had been dusky.
Thus, the Judeo-Christian Tradition not only distorted real religious history by obscuring the
Egyptian origin of recognisably modern Christianity. And it not only promoted a false
perspective of Palestines secular and ethnic history. It also changed the Messiah from being
a racially mixed saviour for all people into a purely Caucasian Son of a purely Caucasian
God. This change of racial affiliation was dictated by the Judaic Talmuds so-called Hamitic
Curse (circa 400 BC) which began the Judeo-Christian doctrine that Negroes were
inferior. This was a doctrine that subsequently justified slavery on the basis of race, a
uniquely Judeo-Christian cultural legacy that resulted in immense human misery.

41

The Albi Portage between Heaven and Earth

Only on relatively isolated islands in the Mediterranean and off the Atlantic coast of
Europe, did the Old Religion continue to survive within the nominal context of Roman
orthodox so-called Christianity. Many scholars of religion have noted and accepted
that Christianity in Ireland and Sicily, and on the much smaller islands of Corsica,
Sardinia and Malta, is really just thinly disguised Mary worship. Except that she has
been draped in decently Christian clothing for 2000 years, Mary is recognizably the
ancient and formerly naked Earth Mother. Her consort-son, though in orthodox Christian
dogma of crucial importance, is very much a secondary focus of daily reverence in these
places. The Jesus Voyage intends to visit Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Malta.
The most determined adversary of Romes version of events remained a force to be
reckoned with until the thirteenth century AD. These were the Cathars or Albigensians
who lived along the Canal du Midi, in the French regions known as Provence and
Languedoc. This region is the very first stage of The Jesus Voyage.
These southern French heretics knew very well where true Christianity had once come
from, and they also knew that it was much older than Romes first century Jesus.
Although the Cathars and Albigensians were defeated in what has often been called the
bloodiest religious war the West has ever known (AD 1209-1244), their version of true
Christianity has lived on in the romanticized legend of the Holy Grail.
On the simplest level, this was the Medieval tradition that the New Testaments Jesus
and Mary Magdalene had been married, and had had children and that this Holy
boodline was the living cup or chalice called the Holy Grail. In French, the words
Holy Grail are still rendered Saint Graal and this is merely a pun on the similarsounding French words sang real or holy blood.
But the Grail legend that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had been married reaches back to
a much older Neolithic belief that a Mary had to be both the mother and wife of the
Messiah. This is because the word mery in Egyptian (from which both the Hebrew
Miriam and Mary derive) means beloved of the sea and was a title of the Great
Goddess Isis. Therefore, even orthodox Christianity preserves the fact that the Virgin
Mary was the mother of Jesus and that Mary Magdalene was his devoted disciple, if
not wife (as in the heretical Holy Grail tradition).
And, curiously, this legendary Holy Grail may provide the final and unarguable proof
that much of Western civilization, including Christianity itself, came from the Atlantic.
This is because of the mundane fact that a curragh portage should exist somewhere on the
watershed between the Garonne and the Aude river systems.
The German historian Paul Hermann (Conquest by Man, 1954) has identified two very
ancient portages, probably for hauling Neolithic curraghs and dugout canoes over river
watersheds. One portage followed the route of todays Kiel Canal linking the North Sea
with the Baltic through southern Denmark. Another haul-over linked the Danube River
with the northern Adriatic Sea.

42
There should be a curragh portage or haul-over linking the Garonne and Aude River
systems, too, although these watercourses have changed over the past 13,500 years since
the end of the last Ice Age. Butwhere to look?
The Grail-believing Cathar heretics were sometimes called Albigensians because the
small town of Albi was a noted centre of belief in the Holy Grail. This may be a crucial
clue. Albi, fifty kilometers north of Carcassonne and twenty miles southwest of Viols-leFort, is presently on the watershed of two rather small streams.
Specifically, these streams leading respectively to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean
almost meet at a village called Castelnau-de-Levi, a suburb or quarter of the slightly
larger town of Albi itself. This Castelnau-de-Levi means very roughly in French the
new (or small) fortification at the lifting place. The two streams almost meeting here
may have been much larger during and immediately after the last Ice Age. But they are
still almost large enough to float a curragh. The present Canal du Midi, intended for the
much larger and heavier barges of the 1680s, by-passed Castelnau-de-Levi completely
and chose the route of the larger Garonne-Tarn-Aude rivers about twenty miles south.
Albi had special sanctity among the Cathar heretics because it supposedly stood between
heaven and earth. In mundane and non-spiritual terms, this may mean only that the
town of Albi may have marked the location of a curragh portage. This portage must once
have both separated and linked rivers leading to the lost world of the Atlanteans
(naturally, the land of the dead or heaven) with rivers leading to the living world of the
Mediterranean. Thus, in a way, the location of the village of Albi did, indeed, link
heaven and earth. The Mediterranean Sea and its islands and coasts were, at Albi, almost
within sight of Neolithic colonists as a beckoning new beginning for cultured humanity.
From the hills at Albi, on a clear day, one can actually see a haze of blue on the distant
eastern horizon. Surveying the Garonne-Aude waterway from Bordeaux to Narbonne on
a combined honeymoon and research trip during November-December 1999, my new
wife, Joelle Lauriol, and I may have pinpointed the ancient curragh portage near Albi.
We discovered a cluster of suggestive place-names not far from Albi and local rumours
of a previously unrecorded Neolithic settlement nearby.
Goddess willing, with The Jesus Voyage we plan to return to the Narbonne area in the
near future to look for artifacts that will prove the existence of a Neolithic portage or
haul-over near Albi and Viols-le-Fort. This portage could well date from the end of the
last Ice Age about 11,500 BC.
This portage could be even older yet, because as weve seen theres anthropological
evidence that an apparently Atlantic race (the so-called Cro-Magnons) occasionally
visited Western Europe as early as about 33,000 BC. They, too, may have left presently
unknown and datable artifacts, if only one knew where to look.
The discovery or confirmation of an ancient curragh haul-over at Castelnau-de-Levi
would add to the accumulation of data that much of Western Civilization came from the
direction of the Atlantic Ocean and not from the Middle East.
Perhaps it is not too much of a blasphemous digression to make an unspiritual suggestion.

43
The Hebrew priesthood of Levites, who supposedly paraded the Ark of the Covenant
up and down the steps of the Temple once a year, were actually only re-creating the
portage of curraghs over this Castelnau-de-Levi watershed between heaven and earth.
The Hebrews probably picked up this ritual from the Egyptians during their sojourn in
Goshen. Every Egyptian pharaoh had his solar bark (a smallish model of an ark or
ship) carried before him in any state procession. Egyptian Christians, called Coptic
Christians today, still parade their Arks once a year in the spring, the start of the
navigation season. Every Coptic Christian church has its own ark, whether the church is
in Egypt, Ethiopia or North America. In Toronto, this celebration is held in March at the
Coptic Church at Dufferin Street and Eglinton Avenue.
If this train of association is at all valid, then the famous Jewish Ark of the Covenant
was only Pharaoh Akenatens solar bark that he carried with him into forced exile and the
Levites Songs of Ascent probably replicate phonetically some very ancient Neolithic
sea-chanteys and megalithic sailors hauling songs. The God who gave the covenant of
hope for a new life to those fleeing from the inundation of Atlantis was, of course, Isis.
And so, so much for Graham Hancocks very profitable but equally misleading book
about his search for the Ark of the Covenant as if it was in any way special or unique.
Every pharaoh had his ark and every Coptic Church has one today.

44

The Jesus Voyage

We intend to reassemble and complete the replica Atlantean refugee curragh of the
Neolithic-megalithic era. Almost certainly, we must do this in the modern French region
of Brittany because of the availability of some authentic materials there (oak bark tanned
leather, flax thread, beeswax).
Having completed the constructed an authentic curragh of the immediate post-glacial era
of about 10,000-7000 BC in Brittany, we then plan to duplicate the ancient culturecarrying voyages through southern France and on across the Mediterranean. We will
follow the trail of the Great Goddess Isis, who was to become the Virgin Mary, and her
Good Shepherd son and consort who came to be known the Christ, the Messiah.
The Jesus Voyage has already begun to recruit an international crew of volunteers to
build and sail the curragh. Some will be university students and others just enthusiasts.
But there will also always be a core of experienced boatbuilders, sailors and oarsmen to
augment and direct the amateurs. Unlike some earlier replica voyages, we plan to try to

Map of The Jesus Voyage.

include participants of both genders and this has, admittedly, sometimes proved to be
both difficult and inconvenient.

45
We intend to re-discover the suggestive evidence of a west-to-east flow of Western
civilization and true Christianity. Basically, our route will be from coastal Brittany south
to the Gironde River. We will ascend the Gironde to Bordeaux and enter the Garonne
River that will take us to the watershed near Carcassonne at Albi. Specifically, we will
re-discover the ancient portage near Albi in order to cross from the Atlantic-bound
watershed into the Mediterranean-bound rivers. We will travel the route of the Canal du
Midi to Narbonne with side trips for exploration and documentation. This may include
actually hauling the curragh over the Castelnau-de-Levi watershed.
Time and finances permitting, we would extend the expedition further than Narbonne.
The curragh would sail along the coast from Narbonne around the Gulf of Lyon to
Marseilles and then island-hop via Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and Malta.
The expedition would then sail north up the Adriatic Sea to visit the island of Hvar with
its early Fish Goddess associations and its connections with the Balkan Danubian
cultures. The final stage would be to retrace the route southward in the Adriatic and then
sail on from Greece to Crete and finally to Egypt.
These beautiful coasts and islands still preserve ancient Neolithic innovations in the strata
of excavated sites and megalithic monuments still punctuate their geography. These
special places really form a beaded strand of culture pearls flung west-to-east across the
bright blue Mediterranean Sea.
One end of this precious strand of Western civilization is in Egypt and the Middle East.
There, Christianity was transplanted and flourished, and alphabetic writing was
refined. But the clasp that firmly secures this cultural thread in Western history seems to
be on the Atlantic coast of Northwestern Europe where Christianity, alphabetic writing
and other cultural assets began. And then, carried by colonists in curraghs, these cultural
and technological innovations rapidly spread to influence all of Western civilization.
A replicated ancient curragh voyage from Brittany to the Middle East will demonstrate
that the past decade of archaeology has resulted in what can be called a genuine version
of the Protocols of the Elders of Cyan.
Cyan is the artists and technical name for the colour blue, one of the three so-called
primary colours. Until a few decades ago, cyan was the word for the bluest blue, a
Prussian or Cobalt blue. But these days, with the advent of 3-color printing (actually four
colours with black), and especially with the advent of digitalized processes, cyan was
the word chosen to mean the turquoise blue used by modern technology. Just like
magenta was the word chosen to substitute for earlier bright Chinese red. And this
turquoise-like blue is what people associate with cyan today. This is appropriate
because this colour more closely approximates most blues of the sea.
The Protocols of Cyan is not an entirely fanciful or romantic way of labelling Western
civilization, although the very phrase may sound politically and religiously offensive to
some people. Throughout the Western world, the colour blue has actually symbolized the
first culture heroes and heroines, and has always represented the first and the best.

46
A blue ribbon is reserved for first prize. Bluebloods are aristocrats. The deepest
Atlantic blue, or purple is reserved for royalty. Blue chip stocks are the most
valuable assets in any portfolio. Blue stockings tried to emulate their own ideas of
blue blood behaviour. Both North African Berbers and Ancient Britons painted
themselves blue in honour of their post-glacial culture-heroes from the sea. The Virgin
Mary must be depicted in blue clothing (according to a papal bull). And blue was the
colour of Cathar perfects from Languedoc and Provence, the country of the ancient
culture corridor of the Garonne and Aude Rivers, now traversed by the Canal du Midi.
It is no exaggeration to say that the true origins and values of Western civilization have
always been unconsciously remembered as the lore of ancient culture heroes and heroines
who appeared from over the blue sea in olden times. Artifacts recovered from riverside
sites leading to the indigo Atlantic and along rivers leading to the azure Mediterranean
constitute a revelatory and revolutionary view of real Western history. The past decade
of archaeological and anthropological discoveries lends more historical truth to the Holy
Grails allegorical story of Jesus the Good Shepherd than two thousand years of
purposeful propaganda promoting the Bibles Judeo-Christian Tradition.

The protocols of cyan still beckoning at Narbonne, France. A canal scene

along the Canal du Midi (Narbonne). Authors photo, December 1999.

To view the additional and more detailed information on The Jesus Voyage,
Click here to go to the Index page or click here to continue.

47

The Jesus Voyage Curragh

Of immense interest to students of early marine architecture and the history of cultural
diffusion in the Western World is the task of building a supposedly "authentic" Neolithic
curragh.
The traditional materials themselves have been well known for decades. Replica
curraghs built during the past half-century have demonstrated the proper method of
construction using these traditional materials. "Neo-curraghs" made of modern materials,
such as my own curraghs designed and manufactured in association with the Canadian
International Development Agency, have also contributed to an understanding of what
might be called "basic curragh engineering".
But what would a "Neolithic" or "megalithic" curragh of about 10,000 to 7000 BC have
looked like?
No one knows because there are no known ship depictions that ancient in the entire
world, and certainly not in Europe. We know only that reed vessels could not have been
portaged over European watersheds and could not have coped with adverse winds and
currents of the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
Of vessels within the capability of Neolithic technology, only rafts, dugouts and curraghs
remain as possibilities. Rafts are even clumsier than reed ships (which are technically
rafts anyway). And Europe has never boasted trees of sufficient girth, combined with
straight trunks, to result in dugouts of seagoing size and reasonable cargo capacity.
Nonetheless, one of the world's acknowledged authorities on early naval architecture,
Bjorn Landstrom, has suggested that some of the Mycenaean vessels drawn up on the
beach at Troy (circa 1250 BC) may actually have been large dugouts. Thus, Homer's
"black ships" of the Iliad and Odyssey may not have been planked vessels at all. They
may have been nothing more than glorified canoes. They would not have carried many
heroes like Achilles and Agamemnon to Troy, and they could have carried even less
booty back to Greece.
But since we know that the post-glacial folk of Neolithic and megalithic Europe were
able to use French rivers for transport as early as 10,000 BC and to colonize
Mediterranean islands in force and to bring some livestock with them as early as 7000
BC, they must have used curraghs. That's the only answer that makes any sense and, in
fact, the only answer left.
And, with all due respect to Landstroms towering reputation in historical naval
architecture, I am also inclined to think that some of Homer's "black ships" were much
more likely to have been curraghs than dugouts. Bjorn Landstrom, in fact, never once
mentions curraghs in his authoritative book The Ship (1961) and seems never to have
even heard about them.
The first known depictions of Northwestern European vessels are scratched on rock near
the towns of Boslund and Tanum in Sweden. These petroglyphs show skin boats.

48
Curraghs. They are shown with a characteristic upturned projection of the keel extending
both fore and aft. These projections are always absent in Eskimo "Umiaks", by the way,
and this may suggest that the early Scandinavian skin boats came from a completely
different cultural tradition.
Replication of these vessels using a skin hull stretched over a wooden frame quickly
demonstrated the function of these curious projections. The front upcurve created a
"false bow wave" starting a few feet beyond the bow or front of the actual hull. This
"false bow wave" allowed paddlers or oarsmen along the side of the boat to work in
flatter, calmer water. They could therefore ply their paddles or oars more efficiently.
The upswept rear or stern projection may have had no purpose other than providing
symmetry that was pleasing to the eye, but both upward projections may also have had
another function. These curving branches of wood may have provided flotation if the
boat was capsized, and such craft must have capsized fairly often.

Tanum boat glyph.

My own opinion, for what it is worth as a designer and manufacturer of over two hundred
curraghs, is that curraghs intended for fairly frequent paddling or rowing would have
usually incorporated such projections. But the specific shapes of these projections may
have gradually evolved throughout the thousands of years of curragh development. This
is because curraghs are an inherently ultra-lightweight type of vessel. Properly designed
and built, curraghs can carry an immense amount of cargo without breaking up.
But they can also be capsized fairly easily when they are not laden. Adding purposeful
ballast in the form of rocks doesn't make much sense in a boat with a sewn skin or leather
hull. Obviously, carrying ballast is just asking for trouble. Bulging rocks could easily
rupture the sewn seams of the hull. Besides, a prime advantage of a curragh is that it is
easy to propel by oars or sail because it is so light in weight. Purposeful ballast only
negates this characteristic.
Therefore, I think, curraghs intended for rivers and coastal voyaging where paddling or
rowing was a frequent necessity would have been fitted with some form of "anti-capsize"
flotation such as we see on the Tanum glyphs. This would have become even more
urgently required when sails began to be used as alternative propulsion.
My own view is that curraghs actually dictated the general appearance of Mediterranean
vessels in the so-called "Ancient World" even after wood-planked hulls began to
supercede sewn-leather hulls. This began to happen about 2000 BC in the Aegean,

49
according to the evidence of pots and potsherds, and probably progressively later
elsewhere. Wooden planking gradually became feasible with the percolation of bronzeedged tools down to the artisan classes like boatbuilders. At first, of course, bronze
would have been used exclusively for the weapons and jewellery of the elite. Once wood
became easier to shape with bronze tools, wood planking could begin to substitute
generally for sewn leather hulls.
It is probably not just a cultural oddity that Ireland was the last stronghold of curraghs.
Sailing curraghs were the usual type of Irish cargo vessel well into the medieval period.
And in Ireland, metal was also both scarce and expensive well into the medieval period.
But I think that curraghs dictated the general shape of vessels in the Mediterranean's
"Ancient World" for a long time after wood planking became the usual method of
construction. In my view, the beautifully upturned stern curves, the forward-projecting
"rams" and the high forecastles of Mediterranean vessels were all a legacy from earlier
curraghs. They were "anti-capsize flotation devices", an evolution of the curious
projections shown in the Tanum glyphs. Here's the so-called "Volos Ship" that was
scratched on a potsherd about 1600 BC or so in Mycenaean Greece.

The Volos ship.

This ship was sketched on pottery clay about three or four centuries before Jason sailed to
fetch the Golden Fleece and faithless Helen's lovely face "launched a thousand ships"
against Troy also, these epic events supposedly took place at roughly the same time as
the biblical Exodus.
I think that with the "Volos ship" we are looking at an evolved curragh that was intended
to be sailed (cautiously) and rowed when necessary. The softly rounded shapes of the
vessel, I suspect, depict a sewn leather sheath covering an internal wickerwork hull over a
framework of curved wood branches. The rather bulbously curved upswept stern may
actually have been hollow and filled with something that would float -- reeds, packed
brushwood or inflated bladders. The same goes for the prominent "forecastle". The
curragh could be knocked flat and the hull might partly fill with water, but (with luck and
wise cargo stowage) it could not actually be capsized or turned completely over.
We see that the forward projection or "ram" is also more bulbous than the Tanum
projections, much like the bows of some modern ships, in fact, and for exactly the same
reason: this shape is easier to move through the water. This evolution of the "ram"
suggests a lengthy period of trial and error refinement before 1600 BC. For a boat that
had to be rowed fairly frequently, however, the bulbous shape was even more efficient

50
than for a modern motor vessel. As with the Tanum skin boats, the artificial bow wave
created out in front of the true bow made a wider "vee" wave that left the oarsmen in
relatively flatter water along the sides of the hull.
Tim Severin used the "Volos ship" as a basic configuration when he planned his Late
Bronze Age replica Mycenaean 20-oar galley for The Jason Voyage (1985) in the early1980s. The British naval architect, Colin Mudie, turned the general configuration into the
54-foot wood planked sailing galley Argo. Again, it was confirmed by scientific tank
testing in Southampton that the "ram" made the galley significantly easier to move.

Tim Severin's replica Mycenaean sailing galley.

We must remember that the epics attributed to "Homer" were written about five hundred
years after the events related in the Iliad and Odyssey. Although Jason's voyage to steal
the Golden Fleece traditionally happened one or two generations before the Trojan War,
and Homer himself mentions Jason's exploit, the first known written version of the
Argonautica wasn't composed by Apollonius of Rhodes until the third century BC. This
was about a thousand years after Jason supposedly lived. By the time these tales were
actually committed to writing, wood planking had become the standard method of
construction and their respective authors, Homer and Apollonius, would have described
ships and shipbuilding that were common in their own day. But the actual ships and
shipbuilding at the time of Jason and Odysseus may have been very different.
If some of the "black ships" drawn up on the beach before Troy were curraghs, it may be
that Jason's Argo was really a curragh too. In fact, there are definite indications of this in
the Argonautica.
It has always puzzled scholars that, according to the Argonautica, Jason returned from
Colchis to Greece by sailing along the south coast of the Black Sea, then sailing up the
Danube River and then somehow crossing over the Balkan mountains to reach the
northern end of the Adriatic Sea. This is, of course, an impossible route geographically.
But it also apparently wasn't just a simple error of ignorance by the Mycenaean bards.
They preserved the tale of Jason and the Argonauts by rote repetition so that it could be
handed down some forty generations until the time of Apollonius. Thus, the curious
error was repeated, and even emphasized. Was it really an error?

51
Jason did not only steal the Golden Fleece. He also made off with Princess Medea,
daughter of the King of Colchis, who had fallen hopelessly in love with him. The king
sent his son and Medea's brother, Prince Apsyrtus, in pursuit of Jason. Apsyrtus had
orders to bring both the Golden Fleece and Medea back home to Colchis. It is
noteworthy that Apsyrtus also somehow crossed the Balkan mountains from the Danube
River system and, like Jason, ended up in the northern Adriatic Sea. Cutting a long story
short (or editing an epic down to size), Jason and Medea contrived to murder Apsyrtus on
one of the islands in the northern Adriatic.
In Classical times, and even on some modern maps, a group of islands in the northern
Adriatic is still labelled the "Apsyrtus Isles". This place-name in this location indicates
that there once must have been way of passing, by a portage for lightweight curraghs,
from the Danube to the Adriatic. The Argonautica also says that in another adventure
the Argo was portaged across the "Libyan Desert".
Not only that, but Tim Severin in The Ulysses Voyage (1987) notes that some traditions
attaching to Odysseus insist that he, too, returned home from Troy to Ithaca by way of the
northern Adriatic. In fact, Severin's retracing of The Ulysses Voyage in a genuine
Mycenaean sailing galley (and not by armchair academic speculation), cleared up the
always-disputed geography of Odysseus' route home. But with the idea of Odysseuss
Danube route home, Severin presented yet another puzzle about the Odyssey that no
one else had identified during the previous 2300 years of literary criticism.
The last part of the Odyssey, what might be called the true homecoming or last leg, is
really a separate epic involving Circe's island, Calypso's island, Scylla, Charybdis, the
entrance to Hades and a few other incidents. These places and incidents have only one
thing in common: they all take place either in the Adriatic or further south in the Ionian
Sea.
Severin came to the surprising conclusion that Odysseus must have been a personality
that was intimately and specifically associated with the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. His
story was woven into the saga of the Trojan War, true enough, but he was also (or even
mostly) used to inform audiences about the extent of Mycenaean seafaring and
geographical knowledge. And this knowledge and seafaring, in turn, had much to do
with the northern Adriatic Sea, the Balkan mountains and the Danube River.
We have touched on this very region before.
This corner of the extreme Northern Adriatic Sea was where Isis may have become a Fish
Goddess like the fishy divinities of the Lepinski Vir and Vinca Danubian cultures. It is
this region where the supposedly later Christian dalmatic style of ceremonial robe
originated, the oldest known example of which was discovered in Tutankhamuns tomb
by Howard Carter.
And, although we have not mentioned it yet, this is also the general region from which
the so-called Bogomil sect, according to some authorities, brought the legend of the
Holy Grail into southern France during the AD 1100s. It now seems clear, however, that
the Bogomils more properly injected a shot-in-the-arm of vitality to a native southern

52
French tradition that was still surviving, but just barely, under the onslaught of Roman
Church orthodoxy Christianity.
The so-called "Danilo-Hvar Culture" has been identified as existing about 7000 BC in
this area, centred on the large island of Hvar just off the Croatian coast. Not only that,
but the oldest known boat depiction in the world as of this writing comes from a potsherd
from the island of Hvar. It is dated to 4000 BC and, in my opinion based on
reproductions supplied to me by Dr. Miha Bujic of the University of Ljubljana, shows a
very sophisticated diagonal-framed and two-masted curragh.

Left: a University of Ljubljana photo of the original Hvar island pot sherd. Right: Line
rendition by a University artist of the sherds detail showing a two-masted ship. This is
presently one of the oldest ship depiction in the world, dated at about 4000 BC.
Some idea of the very imprecise science of trying to interpret very early drawings on
clay pots and rocks may be gleaned from the fact that Yugoslav (now Croatian)
scientists at first thought that this sketch had been an attempt to draw a mammoth or an
elephant! Look at the things upside down. Maybe the scientists were right the first time
around.
However, two things gradually changed their opinion.
First, the sherd had been reliably C-14 dated to about 4000 BC because of organic
remains found in close association with it. Mammoths were confidently thought to have
been extinct by then in Croatia, whereas elephants per se (i.e. technically speaking, the
loxodonts of Africa; two species and maybe three) had never, and still have never,
extended their range to Croatia.
Secondly, many rather similar drawings were subsequently discovered on the island of
Hvar and all these looked even more like ships. So, a ship it was voted to be. And,
during 2000-2002, I was asked my opinion about what kind of ship was being
represented. My long replies to Dr. Bujic probably seemed a bit balmy to him and his
colleagues, but heres the gist for what it is worth.
Me, I think that this is not just a side-on crude profile sketch of a ship. I looked at the
line rendition with a squint and, to me, it suggested a possible and purposeful artistic
composition involving ships, not just an amateurs side-on drawing of a ship.

53
Are we seeing a ship sailing aheadfrom the point of view of a passenger on another
ship sailing behind the leading ship? To me, the strongly marked diagonal lines leading
to an apex at the top of the drawing may be a frame for the composition. They are
possibly the shrouds that support the mast of a following vessel and, if so, the artists
point of view is at deck level from beside the mast of this following boat.
If this much is allowed, or is at least grudgingly conceded with a shrugged well, maybe
so then we can also say that both ships are on the starboard tack or gybe that is, the
wind is coming from the viewers (your) right. The ships are heeled over to leeward
away from you because of the wind. That is to say, the hidden side of the leading ship,
the side away from you the viewer, is much lower in the water than the side of the ship
facing you (the viewer). Much more of this windward side is visible to the viewer
because the ship is leaning over in the water due to the press of wind in the sails. Anyone
who has seen sailboats heeling (leaning) over in the wind will realize immediately what
Im describing.
If my squinting has not distorted my eyesight too much, we can say even more. We are
not looking at the actual front end of the leading ship, were seeing the bulge at about its
widest width its beam from this perspective. The true front or bow curves away out
of sight in front behind the body of the ship. If so, we have a true Mycenaean galleytype of upturned stern and even the suggestion of a bowsprit at the true front of the ship
or bow. This bow seems to be about as high as the stern, judging by the angle of the
bowsprit, suggesting a forecastle of sorts. But we cannot really see it, and neither could
the artist, because the windward side of the ship is so high.
If this isnt all sheer imagination on my part, we are seeing evidence of the anti-capsize
front and rear flotation devices that were also suggested by the Tanum glyph and the
Volos ship.
The crisscrossed lines on the hull are, in my opinion, an attempt to show double diagonal
framing under a curraghs leather hull skin. This in itself is an extremely sophisticated
solution to the problem of dealing with stresses, particularly if there are only Neolithic
tree branches, rawhide lashings and dubiously sewn leather to hold the ship together.
Double diagonal framing of the main hull skeleton if this is what were really seeing
represents sophistication in design equal to Medieval Irish curraghs like Severins
replicated Brendan, and more sophistication than my own neo-curraghs made with
CIDAs help. Brendan, however, was made with power-sawn and power-planed ash
lathes of uniform width and thickness. These lathes made a closely spaced double
diagonal frame matrix for Brendan. A true Neolithic curragh, or even a truly authentic
poor monks Medieval Irish curragh, would have probably had to make do with a lashed
framework of rounded saplings.
I have tried this double diagonal framing, using rounded dowels of bamboo, on a model
curragh and the hull is about twice as strong than using conventional rectangularworking longitudinal keel-and-stringers and with the usual transverse frames. I might
attempt this kind of diagonal framing on The Jesus Voyage curragh using ash saplings.

54
On this Danilo-Hvar potsherd, were also seeing two masts with sails. This isnt
surprising in itself because woodcuts of curraghs in medieval books also show two masts
and two sails. Traditional curraghs made on the West Coast of Ireland until the 1900s
also still retained two mast steps, even though the foremast was actually never made and
never used. Colin Mudie, doing some sophisticated calculations, gave the Medieval
replica Brendan two masts and two sails.
And, although it is difficult to be certain because the viewers angle is foreshortened due
to the heeling of the leading ship, the sails appear to be very sophisticated fore-and-aft
sails. That is, they are attached on the rear side of the mast just like sails on modern
yachts. Not only that, but they appear to be full-battened sails that are characteristic of
Chinese junks and also just like the ultra-modern rendition of full-battened mainsails
on the current (February 2003) Americas Cup contenders Alinghi and New Zealand.
Battens are slats of wood (or plastic or carbon-fibre in the Americas Cup) that keep the
sailcloth flat and smooth. The ancient Chinese of about 1000 to 500 BC could even bend
these battens with ropes called parrels in order to curve the sail to the proper aerodynamic
chord or shape. This last refinement has not yet reached even the Americas Cup.
These sails are not just the simple, downwind, square sails used by St. Brendan for his
curragh, used on Tim Severins Brendan replica curragh, shown on artwork depicting
Mycenaean sailing galleys and designed for Tim Severins Argo replica.
Frankly, these masts and sails on the Danilo-Hvar ship stunned me, and I said as much
to Dr. Miha Bujic. This kind of sails, fully battened ones (and they may be made of
woven reeds, cloth or leather), are known only from the Far East culture area but about
3000 years later than the Danilo-Hvar potsherd. Further, the shape of the sails, almost
rectangular, plus the number of battens a foreshortened six (6) on each sail suggest
North Chinese sails, of all things.
These North Chinese sails were specifically designed for sailing on rivers where the
available wind often came from over high banks on shore. These sails had to use what
little wind they could catch on the water, and this was usually fairly high up in the sails,
and they had to use this wind as efficiently as possible in order to make headway against
a rivers currents. Going upstream against the current means an obvious need for power.
But landlubbers dont realize that a ship must go faster than the current even downstream
as well. Rudders cannot steer the ship unless the ship is travelling faster than the water
floating it. So, ships require power to go downstream under control. They cant just drift
with the current.
Therefore I suggested to Dr. Bujic that these ships, if they truly were typical Danilo-Hvar
vessels, must have done a lot of voyaging on large rivers. The only nearby one that I
could think of was the Danube. And this suggestion was made before I learned much
about the supposed cultural associations between the Danilo-Hvar and Danube cultures.
Quite honestly, this Danilo-Hvar ship raises more questions than it answers. One almost
wishes that it had remained a mammoth! But I hope that it wasnt meant to be a
mammoth, for I must rely upon this ship depiction for The Jesus Voyage replica.

55
Because it is the oldest known European depiction of a ship, and especially because it
comes from the Danilo-Hvar Culture (an offshoot of the first French Neolithic and
megalithic Cardial Culture), it must be taken into account in any design for a replica
curragh of about 7000 BC.
We may recall that the German historian, Paul Hermann, identified a Neolithic or Early
Bronze Age haul-over or portage from the northern Adriatic over the Balkan mountains
to the Danube River drainage basin. According to Paul Hermann writing in 1954, the
Adriatic-Danube haul-over was established in order to facilitate the amber trade about
3000 BC. But since the 1970s we know, as Hermann did not, that the prize may have
been a commodity that was even much more valuable than amber. Copper and bronze
seem to have been the incentive.
Fairly recently, since the 1970s, it has been discovered that the first known metalsmelting cultures were located near the mouth of the Danube. It came as something of a
shock for archaeologists to learn that the habitual use of metal had begun about 6500 BC
in modern Romania and Bulgaria and not in the ever-popular "Middle East". The reason
for this was the geological presence of copper salts and oxides actually on, or relatively
near, the surface of the ground.
These copper-bearing minerals were apparently used initially for making glazes with
which to decorate clay pots. Since women's fingerprints have been characteristically
discovered impressed into the clay of these ceramics, it is reasonable to assume that
women also invented the first metallurgy. By about 6000 BC, metallic copper was being
extracted for use as ornaments, tools and some weapons (which, however, could also
have been used for hunting), although most things were still made from stone and wood.
This first stage of metal technology has sometimes been called the "Chalcolithic Age"
meaning the "Copper and Stone Age". The first true bronze was also smelted in Romania
and Bulgaria about 5500 to 5000 BC, or about 2000 years before anyone had previously
thought.
So, for Neolithic colonists at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea about 7000 BC, a very
valuable commodity soon became available over the mountains separating the Adriatic
Sea from the Danube. River At a very early stage of metal usage, enough copper and
bronze ingots to satisfy a very modest demand could have been carried over the
mountains in sufficient quantity by only a few men. But what were the Adriatic DaniloHvar folk to give in exchange for it? They were agriculturalists, herdsmen and
fishermen. All their potential trade goods were bulky.
It may be that at a very early date, say 7000 to 6000 BC or so, the Cardial Culture or the
immediately succeeding and related Danilo-Hvar Culture, constructed a portage or haulover so that their curraghs could reach the Danube from the Adriatic. There are good
reasons to think so, or at least to know why such a project would have seemed
worthwhile to the people of the time.
My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the Danilo-Hvar people established the haul-over
so that they could carry their bulky commodities over the intervening Balkan mountains

56
in their curraghs. They could then sail down the Danube to where the metal magicians
lived not far from the mouth of the river which would have been a magnificent
waterfall before 5600 BC (because of the Great Black Sea Flood, see pages 58-76
below). They could have used cattle to help pull the boats up the portage, and the cattle
would also have been a trade commodity on the hoof.
Most unfortunately, although Paul Hermann mentioned the Adriatic-Danube portage or
haul-over, and although he documented its use in "amber trading times", he neglected to
draw a detailed map of the route or to explain exactly where it was. As of now, I have
not been able to locate anyone who claims to know where it had been. Perhaps, if there's
time, interest and funding, finding the route of the Danube-Adriatic portage might be
worked into "The Jesus Voyage".
Therefore, when all has been said, the puzzling and anomalous Chinese-type full-batten
sails may have been accurately depicted by the Danilo-Hvar artist because these ships
frequently navigated on the Danube River as well as sailing true sea routes.
Taking the Tanum glyph, the Volos ship, the known appearance of Mycenaean galleys
and the strange Danilo-Hvar sails into account, we come up with a composite picture of
what an early Neolithic-megalithic curragh might have looked like.

An idea of The Jesus Voyage curragh of about 10,000 to 7000 BC.

I see it as a kind of tubby Mycenaean sailing and rowing galley. It will have the
upcurved stern and forecastle flotation devices and the ram of the Tanum and Volos
ship to make paddling or rowing more effective. Because of the evidence of the DaniloHvar pottery sherd, it will have two masts and full-battened sails set behind the masts.
Note the use of a tree trunk-and-branch in the bow. An extension of the tree trunk is the
ram while a naturally curving branch provides the profile of the bow.
I believe that in this design study, it is easy to see the progressive influence of the Tanum
glyphs, the Volos ship on the Early Mycenaean pot and the Danilo-Hvar contribution. I

57

think this is a reasonable replication of an early Neolithic Mediterranean curragh, but it

is not necessarily a correct one.
I think, at least, that the idea of using the butt of a log for the ram and a convenient
upcurving branch to define the prow (as above) must have been used in the construction
of Neolithic curraghs. I cannot imagine any other source for the later distinctive shape of
Mycenaean galleys like Argo.
In fact, with The Jesus Voyage curragh, naturally curved tree trunks and branches must
serve for the majority of major keel-and-frame members. Neolithic stone axes have been
discovered by replication and experiment to be surprisingly effective. But one wouldnt
like to chop down a large tree with a Neolithic axe. And one doesnt want to shape large
tree trunks and branches with them for fear of breaking the stone axe-head, even a hard
diorite one. But the bark could be sliced off and smaller branches could be safely
trimmed with these implements. Trees and branches of the right size, with the natural
curves required, are essential to building the Neolithic curragh as an authentic vessel.
There is evidence from all over the world that ancient boat builders grew their frames
into the proper shape by tethering growing saplings into the desired curves with ropes.
The Lombok islanders of modern Indonesia, who use outrigger canoes for their fishing,
still grow hibiscus frames into the beautiful curves of their outrigger struts.
Obviously, The Jason Voyage project does not have the time to employ this method of
growing Neolithic curved frames for the curragh. We will have to search for suitable
frames among the naturally curved branches of woodland trees. Looking for this wood
may take time, even in Brittany. I have therefore toyed with the idea of actually making
the basic curragh keel-and-frame in Canada where there is much more timber to choose
from and then shipping or air freighting the labelled pieces to France. The basic keeland-frame could then be re-assembled in France and then the hull and rigging could be
completed.
My opinion is that curraghs intended for rivers, coasting and headland-to-headland short
open water passages in generally sheltered waters would have looked something like the
later sailing and rowing galleys of the "Ancient World". Except for the two-masted rig
with Chinese-type sails (better for river navigation), they would have looked something
like Tim Severin's modern Argo replica...or, even better, like the "Volos ship".
When Tim Severin built his Argo replica sailing-and-rowing galley in the early 1980s, he
intended to use it, first, for The Jason Voyage in 1984 and then for The Ulysses Voyage
a year later. Severin decided on the smallest size of galley mentioned by Homer, a "20oared" vessel.
Nonetheless, Severin's modern Argo replica weighed some eight tons. And, even so,
Severin remarked several times how fragile and lightly built she seemed. Yet, of course,
a crew of twenty could never have portaged an eight ton planked vessel over either the
Balkan mountains or across the "Libyan Desert".

58

Severin's Argo under sail.

It seems more likely to me that tales like the Iliad, Odyssey and Argonautica, in addition
to being the popular entertainment of the time, also served as compendiums of "Greek"
(Mycenaean) geographical knowledge. But it is also evident, at least in my opinion, that
some of this knowledge was so old that the details and implications of it had been lost by
the time these epics were written down.
"Homer" must have known that there was no passage for wood planked galleys from the
Danube River to the Adriatic Sea in his own time. Apollonius Rhodius, a renowned
geographer and head of the great Alexandria library when he wrote the Argonautica in
the third century BC, also knew well enough that a passage from the Danube to the
Adriatic did not really exist for the wood planked galleys of his day. Nonetheless, both
of them faithfully recorded the legendary Danube-to-Adriatic route that neither of them
could have understood.
In short, both "Homer" and Apollonius were consciously or unknowingly recalling some
lost and very ancient lore about curraghs and curragh portages when they composed their
epics.
There was probably just one major difference in general configuration, not to mention the
radical difference in construction between Severins replicated Argo and my notions of a
very early Neolithic-megalithic curragh of about 7000 BC or so. Tim Severin's sailing
and rowing galley Argo had a length to beam (width) ratio of almost 6 to 1. That is, it
was almost six times as long as it was wide. But I do not think that a curragh should be
more than 4 to 1 in terms of length to beam (width). My "neo-curragh" prototype, built
in 1974, incorporated this ratio and the curraghs manufactured between 1979-1983
retained it.
My experience, and the British naval architect Colin Mudie apparently thought the same
way when he designed Tim Severin's replica curragh Brendan in 1976, is that curragh
construction inherently requires a wider beam in relation to length than wood frame-and-

59
plank construction in order to achieve sufficient strength. Mudie gave Brendan a lengthto-beam ratio of about 4:1.
I also tend to think that very early curraghs, say circa 10,000 to 7000 BC, would have
been somewhat smaller than wood planked galleys of the later "Ancient World". I also
suspect that they may have been paddled rather than rowed although the greater power
of oars must have been recognized at a very early date, so it is unwise to be dogmatic on
this point.
To cut a long train of analysis and interpretation short, the replicated curragh for "The
Jesus Voyage" is envisioned as being about 48 to 50 feet in length (including a 3-foot
"ram"), and having a beam (width) of about 12 feet. I envision a hull "depth" from
gunwale to keel at about 3-4 feet. Given the hull cross-section envisioned, the curragh
will draw about 1.5 feet and be capable of carrying about 5 tons with 2 feet of freeboard
remaining.
The upswept curved "tail" or stern will rise 3 or 4 feet above this gunwale-to-keel height,
as will the forward "castle". These upward projections would traditionally have contained
some sort of flotation device -- the packed bark of Mediterranean cork oaks, bundles of
hollow reeds with their ends sealed by tree resin or pitch, animal bladders or intestines
inflated with air. There are numerous possibilities depending on what materials might
have been most readily available. This flotation capability in these upswept projections
prevented a sailing-and-rowing curragh from capsizing completely. For "The Jesus
Voyage" we could use traditional flotation materials...or carved styrofoam.
These upward projections may serve another purpose on The Jesus Voyage curragh.
With careful design, at least part of their volume can be devoted to a small but private
toilet compartment containing a modern Porta Potty. This will reduce one of the
problems of having both sexes represented aboard. Given the size of the crew
envisioned, there might be room for two Porta Potties one under the upcurved stern and
one in the forecastle. Since these portable toilets have an additive like Elsan Blue as a
disinfectant, they can be kept sweet-smelling aboard. And since they can be pumped out
at most ports-of-call, they also eliminate any pollution by The Jesus Voyage.
It is well to remember that all dimensions must be related to so-called Megalithic Yards
of 2.72 English feet and simple fractions (one-half, one-quarter, etc.) that could be
measured by folding a length of rawhide strip in progressive halves. This unit of
measurement, according to the latest analysis of the several earlier Woodhenges that
have been discovered from Wales to Germany, was established and standardized
throughout the Neolithic Civilization of the Goddess at least as early as 5000 BC.
The curragh is therefore tentatively planned to be 18 Megalithic Yards in length (48.96
feet), and 4.5 Megalithic Yards in width (12.24 feet), which yields a length to beam ratio
of exactly 4 to 1.
The keel and ribs will be of pine. I think I would attempt a crisscrossed diagonal framing
of ash saplings once the keel and ribs had defined the basic shape of the boat. A lightweight wickerwork "hull shell" would be fastened outside the basic frame matrix in the

60
form of removable panels (although this is not strictly necessary). The actual waterproof
hull sheath will be oak bark tanned leather sewn with waxed flaxen thread. Possibly, it
would be "authentic" to coat the leather hull with pitch and, if so, we have then
probably also authentically replicated Homer's famous "black ships" of the "Achaeans"
(Mycenaeans) that attacked Troy.
Severin's planked Argo galley replica wasn't black, or at least not at first with The Jason
Voyage, because it needed no covering of waterproof pitch. Argo was painted black for
The Ulysses Voyage merely in order to give the ship a new look for the new project and
also, of course, to conform to Homers usage about the black ships of Odysseus.
The planks swelled to seal the hull (more or less), although Argo still leaked
significantly. But a Neolithic leather hull, sewn with Neolithic thread, would probably
leak even more profusely than a Late Bronze Age wood planked hull. The seams
connecting the individual hides would have to be sealed with tree resin, at least, but
where pitch was available it would have been easier and better to just smear the entire
hull with it.
All fastenings of "The Jesus Voyage" curragh will be genuine Neolithic stretched
rawhide lashings, possibly treated with alum (but that was a much later Roman
refinement).
In the matter of masts and sails, Im inclined (at the moment) to follow the very obvious
two-masted configuration of the Danilo-Hvar ship on the potsherd. At 4000 BC, and
being from the European coast, it is closer in time to the curragh needed for The Jesus
Voyage than any other known European depiction of a ship. There will be two
relatively short masts and simple full-battened fore-and-aft sails (probably woven reed
mats, but possibly leather or leather-reinforced flax linen). I have not decided yet. Im
still in correspondence with experts about the quantities of very early Neolithic cloth
weaving. Could enough woven flax linen cloth for a sail have been made back then?
Total sail area will be only about 200-300 square feet in area. And, following the DaniloHvar drawing as a guide, Im inclined to give roughly 45% to the foresail and 55% to the
mainsail but is this apparent difference in area due to an attempt at perspective? I will
first play it safe and make both sails the same sizeand then reduce the foresail by trial
and error if necessary to achieve reasonable balance on the steering oars.
Now, as it happens, I know without any doubt that curraghs will sail very well to
windward with a single-sail fore and aft rig so long as they also have sufficient lateral
surface stuck down into the water to prevent leeway. The CIDA-supported 32-foot neocurraghs carried a Polynesian lateen or crab claw sailing rig of 200 square feet. The
lateral surface of these mass-produced neo-curraghs was supplied by twin lee boards
that pivoted down from out-of-the-water horizontal outside the gunwale to 5 feet of
vertical immersion.
I suspect that Neolithic paddles secured along the gunwale of Neolithic curraghs may
have provided precisely similar lateral surface in order to the reduce vessels leeway
under sail and especially when tacking to windward. It is partly because shorter paddles

61
can serve dual usage as either paddles or lee boards that I suspect that early curraghs
may have used paddles rather than longer oars.
Paddles can therefore have been used as leeboards on curraghs of the Neolithic era, just
as they were once used on large Polynesian sailing double-canoes to serve the same
function. It is an obvious idea and one that would have occurred to all boating peoples
within hours of being afloat.
All the ropes (cordage) for the rigging will be woven rawhide set up on wooden
deadeyes. Anchor and mooring warps will have to be woven rawhide as well.
Not genuinely Neolithic but necessary, the curragh will carry an adequate selection of
survival gear for the crew. There is admittedly and unavoidably some risk involved in
sailing a replica "Neolithic-megalithic" curragh. Prudence to anticipate and avoid
potential danger is essential, and the patience to outwait adverse weather is crucial.
Probably the most valuable safety feature will be that the project must be sufficiently well
funded so that the organizers and crew do not feel financially pressed to keep to a rigid
timetable of progress.
However, curraghs are inherently extremely seaworthy provided that their construction is
reasonably strong. Neolithic technology should prove to be adequate in the replica, just
as it has been proved adequate by the historic colonization of Mediterranean islands and
by one modern Atlantic crossing. During The Jason Voyage in the replicated galley
Argo, Tim Severin considered that modern radio communications and a life jacket for
every crew member was sufficient.
Constructed and equipped in this fashion, I estimate that the finished curragh would
weigh only about 1800-2400 pounds. That is, it will be about one-eighth (1/8) the weight
of Tim Severin's slightly larger wood planked Argo sailing and rowing Mycenaean galley
replica.
I envision a crew of about 20 people: one steersman/"captain", 18 "oarsmen" (paddlers?)
and one cook/quartermaster. There would normally be only 16 paddlers or oarsmen
working at any given time with two being relieved every 10 minutes. These two would
therefore be immediately available for sail handling, emergency bailing, anchoring and
mooring. This would be the ideal roster, although the crew will comprise different
individuals from country-to-country and from port-to-port.
This size of crew would be able to row or paddle the curragh effectively under most
"summer sailing season" conditions in the Mediterranean. This size of crew would also
be able to portage the curragh over the Garonne-Aude watershed by either pulling the
vessel over log rollers or by using the shipped oars or paddle handles to pull and lift the
vessel along by brute force. Thus, there would be infrequent bouts of hard work when
each crew member would have to exert from 50 to 120 pounds of force in order to move
the curragh over a land portage if it actually had to be lifted off the ground for any
reason. Using lengths of log rollers or inflated leather tubes would usually make the
hauling much easier.

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The usual daily routine will entail daylight sailing and sleeping ashore. Except for a
small store of emergency rations, food will ordinarily be purchased in the evening for
supper and for use the following day at breakfast and lunch. The organization of food
purchase and usage is the reason why the expedition requires a full-time
cook/quartermaster. Many details of "The Jesus Voyage" have been worked out, but
there is (of course) much to do. Modern voyagers lack the freedom of Neolithic or Early
Bronze Age mariners in at least some respects.
An important distinction has to be made here, and hopefully without promoting any
confusion. It should be noted that curraghs intended for long open-water oceanic
passages out of sight of land must have been designed and made somewhat differently
from curraghs intended for river work and coasting navigation like the proposed "Jesus
voyage" curragh.
This differentiation must have been an early development. Ocean-going curraghs were
intended to use sails almost exclusively. They were not intended for extended periods of
propulsion by oars or paddles. They did not require the "anti-capsize" upswept stern, high
foward "castle" or the "ram" projecting out in front. In fact, these projections of the hull
could prove dangerously counter productive in oceanic waves. They typically, in
consequence of using sail, also carried a smaller crew than river and coasting vessels. All
this means that ocean-going sailing curraghs could have higher freeboard and a deeper
hull section. Supplies needed for a long oceanic passage provided the necessary ballast
low down in the hull to ensure stability under sail.
A glance at the photograph of Tim Severin's Brendan curragh replica shows a "banana
shape" that was obviously developed through much experience with true oceanic
conditions. The general configuration of Brendan was inspired by existing curraghs still
used by some fishermen on the stormy Atlantic coast of Ireland and by illustrations in
Medieval manuscripts about St. Brendan "the Navigator".
This replica successfully crossed the Atlantic from Ireland to Newfoundland in 19761977 with a winter's layover in Iceland. Likewise, my CIDA-associated neo-curragh
design was initially intended for use in the Southwest Caribbean. This is a region where,
according to Columbus, he encountered the largest ground swell he had ever seen.
These ground swells are the result of the Northeast Trade Winds blowing for 3000
miles across the Atlantic.
Huge waves are set in motion and, when the ocean bottom starts to become shallower
around the islands and mainland of the New World, a very large ground swell results
about three storeys high. These mountains of water are not storm waves and they are not
particularly dangerous. Once you get used to it, it is rather fun to be lifted gently up 30 to
50 feet and be just as gently lowered slowly down again. The usual oceanic Trade Wind
surface waves of 4-6 feet are superimposed on this groundswell.
My neo-curraghs were intended to operate in this sort of environment, quite different
from the Mediterranean and Baltic. Obviously, even the most energetic rowing or
paddling will not be very effective in such groundswells or rolls as the Caribbean

63
fishermen call them. Only very effective sailing ability can navigate in such waters.
Therefore, the rams of Tanum and the Volos ship were of no use and would even
have been counter-productive in oceanic waves. My CIDA-associated neo-curraghs,
like Brendan, had a banana shape and a fairly high freeboard to reduce water coming
aboard. In fact, because the neo-curraghs were painted a bright yellow, the Caribbean
fishermen actually came to call them banana boats.
From very early times, then, Northwestern European curraghs were differently designed
and made depending on their function. This alone argues a lengthy and sophisticated
seafaring tradition from the earliest times of Western civilization.
But to emphasize it yet again The Jesus Voyage curragh is intended to ply very
different waters and conditions from the open Atlantic or the Southwest Caribbean. The
Jesus Voyage curragh s intended for rowing and sailing along rivers and along the coasts
of Mediterranean. It cannot have a particularly deep hull section and it must be designed
to have a relatively low freeboard so that paddles or oars can easily reach the water.
Something of subtle importance should at least be touched upon. The Chinese-type sails
and double diagonal framing of the Danilo-Hvar curragh suggest that, in some respects,
there was a decline or degeneration in naval architecture from time of the Old
Civilization (10,000 to 4500 BC) to the later Mycenanean culture (3000 to 1000 BC).
There was advance in material technology, yes, and the gradual widespread use of bronze
(for example) illustrates this. I have suggested that wider use of bronze allowed the
construction of wood-planked vessels that replaced curraghs. But there was also a loss of
something more ephemeral and perhaps more valuable. There was degeneration in the
understanding of the principles that govern the interaction of natural forces and
humanitys technological creations. Mycenanean ships were planked with wood, yes,
and this made them larger, longer lasting and able to carry more cargo. But the superior
principle of double diagonal framing was lost until it was rediscovered by the aircraft
industry during the 1930s. The aerodynamic principle of Chinese-style full battened sails
was lost until it was finally rediscovered by yacht designers (again during the 1930s) and
gradually came into racing and then cruising use. Material progress against natural
forces was made at the expense of working with natural forces. I offer a possible
reason for this in Genetics in Western History and Religion on pages 61-80.
In conclusion, I should emphasize that curraghs really are sea creatures.
Not only can a curraghs frame closely resemble an animals skeleton, the traditional hull
material was actually animal hide or leather. As both Tim Severin and I can testify
from experience, curraghs also move and flex in the water. They are not so rigid as solidhulled boats. Further, the action of oars or paddles resembles the movement of legs or
fins. I believe that curraghs of the era 10,000 BC to perhaps even 2000 BC stimulated
the imagination of early sailors to regard their boats as being living sea creatures.
Tim Severin observed that leather-hulled Brendan seemed to attract whales and
porpoises. He conjectured that Brendans frame and hull returned a sonar echo that was
similar to that of small whales. Caribbean fishermen in my neo-curraghs reported the

64
same thing, their banana boats were frequently escorted by dolphins. This made the
curraghs seem even more like just one kind of sea creature among many others.
It may be that myths such as that of Andromedea and Perseus actually referred to
curragh-using people. The sea beast who swam upriver to threaten helpless
Andromedea was probably a curragh-borne raiding party. Naturally, Perseus rescued her
in the nick of time.
It would have seemed quite natural, in my opinion, to make curraghs appear to be even
more like living animals. The upturned sterns would have suggested tails and the
addition of eyes painted near the ram must have been too tempting to resist. My own
emotional experiences while sailing curraghs have been vivid and perhaps even
therapeutic excursions into a younger and more vital world. The curragh sailor
becomes a more natural organism in a symbiosis with his almost-living sea creature that
carries him. The conceit that humanity is separate from nature, and disdainfully superior
to it, is difficult to maintain in a curragh. The boat becomes almost a totem and the sailor
tends to feel like a curragh creature himself.
These animal-like features of curraghs, reflected in the curved tails, snout-like rams
and painted eyes of later Mediterranean galleys may have lingered because of their
psychological appeal even after planked ships with ballast superceded curraghs.

To view the additional and more detailed information on The Jesus Voyage,
Click here to go to the Index page or click here to continue.

65

Stonehenge
Although it is not part of "The Jesus Voyage" per se, there has been some British media
and public interest in moving a "bluestone" from Wales to Stonehenge using a curragh.

Stonehenge, photo by Author, 1983.

This interest was stimulated by the British so-called "Millennium Project" of April 2000
when a volunteer horde of "neo-slaves" failed to drag a bluestone from Wales to
Stonehenge using the conventional land route.
I wrote a full-page article in Toronto's National Post newspaper (April 2000), with maps
and illustrations, arguing that the job had been fairly easily done in megalithic times, and
with a fraction of the people necessary for land haulage, using curraghs and shallow
canals.
Once "The Jesus Voyage" curragh has been constructed at a suitable site in Brittany, the
vessel could be either sailed or pulled by trailer to Britain and used to move a bluestone
from the Preseli Mountain quarry in Wales to the Stonehenge site. In fact, if this aspect
can be firmed up with interested British organizations and individuals, then the
bluestone-moving could be worked into the larger project as part of the pre-voyage
testing and shakedown procedure. Bluestone-moving would be a good test of the vessel's
strength. The experience might also decide the issue of using oars or paddles.

To view the additional and more detailed information on The Jesus Voyage,
Click here to go to the Index page or click here to continue.

66

Genetics in Western History and Religion

In two books, The Iceman Inheritance (1978) and Chosen People from the Caucasus
(1992), I have argued that there was also an increasingly genetic component to the
immense but elusive cultural difference that marks the boundary between the
Mediterranean so-called "Ancient World" and the so-called "Judeo-Christian Era".
The Hebrews invaded Palestine about 2000-1700 BC, or so most scholars think, as part of
the Hyksos migration southward from the Caucasus Mountain region. Until as recently as
1997, however, no one (including me) could make any constructive or sensible
suggestion as to why the Caucasus tribes living around the Black Sea should suddenly
have decided to migrate from their presumably original homelands. But migrate they
certainly did and they inundated modern Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine
and even part of Egypt as "Hittites", "Mitanni", "Hurrians", "Hyksos" and "Hebrews".
But in 1997, Noah's Flood by Columbia University oceanographers Walter Pitman and
William Ryan was published. Their massive collation of diverse evidence placed beyond
any shadow of scientific doubt the fact that the Black Sea Basin had been flooded out in
5600 BC.
During the last "Ice Age", the present Black Sea had been a fairly large freshwater lake
about the size of Lake Ontario (roughly 7500 square miles in surface area). But with the
end of the "Ice Age" about 11,500 BC, the larger ice caps of the glacial era began to melt
and the world's sea level began to rise. After about 6000 years of glacial melting, or
about 5600 BC, the sea level had risen by 300 feet world wide and this was enough for
the Mediterranean to break over the present Bosphorus and cascade down into the Black
Sea Basin. As we have already seen in the Atlantic, this same 300-foot rise in world sea
level flooded the "Plato" and "Atlantis" seamounts and also progressively flooded
Brittany's group of offshore islands once known as "Lyonesse".
Salt water poured down into the Black Sea Basin at the rate of roughly 200 Niagaras for
almost two centuries. The fertile steppe land around the wide margins of the former lake
were flooded at a rate of about 1.5 kilometres per day until the present now-salty Black
Sea reached world sea level, its present surface area of about 275,000 square miles and its
present average depth of about 1500 feet.
Underwater archaeology presently in progress by the famous Titanic-finding Ballard
team, using remote television cameras and also recovering artifacts from the sea bottom,
has already proved conclusively that the margins of the former lake had been very thickly
populated before the flood. The bottom of the Black Sea is dotted with numerous woodbuilt homes and farmsteads. The former inhabitants around the lake, and skeletal
evidence shows that they had marked Neanderthal physical traits, had to flee for their
lives as their former grasslands disappeared beneath a gradual but inexorable deluge of
Mediterranean salt water. These people were primarily herdsmen of sheep and horses.
Hyksos means "shepherd kings" and Hi-bi-ru apparently signifies minor herdsmen in the
Ancient Egyptian language.

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These particular shepherds, however, could not have been very gentle and tolerant. The
Caucasus Mountains were the last refuge of the Neanderthal genetic strain, or "race", of
people because the glacial climate to which the Neanderthals had adapted lingered in the
Caucasus region after the last "Ice Age" had ended elsewhere in Europe and Western
Asia. This was due the relatively high average altitude above sea level of this
mountainous Caucasus region.
The Alpine foothills and the Balkan mountains were also something of a refuge for
European Neanderthals, and they are remembered as the mountain trolls and gnomes of
European folklore. So, fairly pure Neanderthals must have lingered in the higher
mountains of Europe until relatively recently. But the Caucasus Mountains and the
complex jumble of Taurus, Zagros and Elburz mountains leading from them was the
biggest and most recently existing refuge for Neanderthals.
Whether fairly pure Neanderthals still exist or not is a highly controversial matter. As of
the 1950s, it was accepted by anthropologists that some local populations in the
mountainous regions of Europe (Italys spine, the Massif Central of France, the Balkans,
etc.) were very close to being Neanderthals for all practical purposes. Some
populations of the Caucasus and other Middle Eastern mountain chains still exhibit more
extreme Neanderthal skeletal characteristics than the type specimen, a French
Neanderthal dated to about 50,000 BC. It is now politically incorrect even to suggest such
a thing.
Neanderthal culture and society has already been shown to be extremely aggressive and
xenophobic toward anyone who was different in culture or physical appearance from
themselves. There are both theoretical reasons, and also actual cultural/religious
evidence, indicating that "strongly Neanderthaloid" people have an anti-feminist mindset
and tend to worship male sky gods, not female Earth Mothers. The evidence is too
complex and too specialized to cover in this Appendix, and can only be touched upon (if
it is mentioned at all) in a book about "The Jesus Voyage".
But there is one Neanderthal characteristic that is not shared by any other fossil or living
human population. This must be explained at least superficially if we are to understand
Western civilization. And it may also be of crucial importance to an understanding of the
Western World's religious history. Although literally dozens of "Ice Age" Neanderthal
cave sites and rock shelters have been excavated and investigated, not one Neanderthal
cave painting has ever been found.
Although they were large-brained and "intelligent", their intelligence was not artistic or
creative in a visual way. This makes Neanderthal intelligence and mental orientation
significantly different from all other ancestral human populations.
There may be an evolutionary reason for this. The National Geographic (September
2002) reported that many skeletal remains of a hominid similar to Homo habilis had
rather surprisingly been discovered in the Caucasus Mountains of the former Soviet
Republic of Georgia. Homo habilis was previously known only from East Africa and
dated to about 1-3 million years ago. Some features of these bones, notably the lower
jaws, seem to me quite similar in some characteristics to typical Neanderthal jaws.

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Neanderthals may (note the emphasis), therefore, have evolved from this early hominid.
Homo habilis is thought to have been human, all right, but not the branch of Homo that
evolved into present and modern humanity.
Although there is presently much controversy about it, Neanderthals were once classed as
Homo sapiens neanderthalis, that is, a separate race or subspecies of modern
humanity, Homo sapiens sapiens. These days, though, it is not polite to suggest that
there are physically identifiable genetic races of humanity with different mental and
emotional characteristics. Unfortunately, however, The National Geographic article at
least suggests that the older politically incorrect perspective was probably factually
correct after all Neanderthals may have come from another type of Mankind.
Neanderthals may not have been able to draw or paint, but they were, however, obsessed
by numbers. Like "The Count" on Sesame Street, they could not help but tally and
enumerate things. The first known human evidence of "time-factored living" are
Neanderthal records of lunar phases (or menstrual cycles) scratched on bone that date
from about 50,000 BC. This predates the famous Western European cave paintings by
about 20,000 years.
Alexander Marshack in his The Roots of Civilization (1961) illustrated many examples
of Neanderthal numerical notations and he showed that they were just as important to the
development of civilization as the "artistic" intelligence of Western European cave
painters. In fact, as Marshack demonstrated, the Neanderthal penchant for playing with
numbers was probably more important for the development of mathematics, surveying,
physics, science and technology than Western European artistic ability.
In terms of easily seen and proved cultural impact on Western Civilization, this means
that it is still possible to draw a line on a map from about the German-Polish border on
the Baltic Sea to the Italian-"Yugoslav" (now Croatia, I think) border on the Adriatic Sea.
You will find that acknowledged world-class artists were generally born west of the line,
while a disproportionate number of world-famous mathematicians, physicists, musicians
and composers lived east of it. Music is, of course, an appreciation of numerical
proportions expressed in sound.
This line is also the boundary that separates good chess players from obsessive ones and
which also separates the extremely wide EEE men's common shoe size of Eastern Europe
from the narrower men's feet of the West. EEE shoes are not normally manufactured
west of todays Czech Republic. Neanderthals had very wide feet, a wide "plantar index".
This line was more true before 1800 than it is today, of course. Two centuries of
relatively fast and inexpensive travel have allowed people to intermarry and mix their
genes. Nonetheless, even now (February 2003), the line remains at least roughly valid.
I have suggested in various writings, including The Iceman Inheritance and Chosen
People from the Caucasus, that Neanderthals must have been fascinated with the number
"One" or 1. It is the sudden difference between nothing and something. "Everything"
that exists can be viewed as multiples of "One", but without "One" there is nothing. I
have suggested, therefore, that Neanderthal and "highly Neanderthaloid" people, had an

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inbred or genetic tendency toward monotheism, the conception of just One God who
created "Everything". And, because they apparently could not render anything visually,
this Neanderthal One God would have been a totally abstract entity.
And also, simply because they could not draw or paint very well and did not value or
respect that ability, the Neanderthals and "highly Neanderthaloid" people would have
tended to have viewed the figurative art, particularly the religious art, of other people as
blasphemy and idolatry.
So, in sum of Neanderthal characteristics, we have a very high numerical and logical
intelligence, high aggression, male-dominance, anti-feminism, xenophobia, materialism
(if you can count em, theyre real) and a proclivity toward monotheism as Neanderthal
mental traits. They remain as mental tendencies of "highly Neanderthaloid" populations.
The Great Black Sea Flood of 5600 BC caused the Hyksos and Hebrews to scrabble over
the coastal mountains of modern Turkey and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and
trek down the Euphrates Valley. This led them, eventually, to Sumeria. This was not a
purposeful migration toward a known destination. The Caucasus and Taurus Mountains
had insulated these people from the outside world and it is highly unlikely that they knew
anything about the cities of civilized Sumeria. At least, no evidence of cultural contact
between the Caucasus and Sumeria before about 3000 BC has so far been discovered.
These cities had been founded by representatives of the "Old European" Goddessworshipping civilization, called the "Ubaid Culture" by archaeologists, sometime around
8000-7000 BC while en route toward India. The Black Sea refugees simply moved
slowly down the Euphrates Valley as available grazing for their herds dictated. They
reached the vicinity of Ur in Sumeria by about 3000 BC. By about 2000 BC they crossed
Syria into Palestine. By 1700 BC, they had invaded the northeastern part of Egypt's Nile
Delta (adjacent to Palestine and called "Goshen" in the Bible).
Archaeologists can roughly trace and date this migration by a trail of domesticated horse
bones. These Caucasus people had domesticated the wild Ice Age horses (tarpans)
which lingered on the steppes. The first domesticated horse skeleton so far discovered in
Ancient Egypt dates from about 1650 BC in the Nile Delta, giving archaeologists a rough
date for the arrival of the Hyksos and associated Hi-bi-ru there.
This quasi-military occupation may be the real reason why the Hebrew tribes resided in
Northeastern Egypt for a time (the Bible is confused about the length of their residence in
"Goshen"...four centuries or four generations?). To complete the story, these Hyksos and
Hebrews were expelled from Egypt between 1550 BC and 1350 BC by a counteroffensive launched by the Egyptian Princes of Thebes. This counter-offensive was
initially led by Amose I and its success founded the XVIII Dynasty and began the socalled New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt. After two hundred years of sporadic fighting,
the expulsion from Egypt of hated Asiatic "shepherds" was finally complete. This final
expulsion seems to have been the Exodus of the Bible.
After the Exodus, the Old Testament of the Bible bears ample witness to the Hebrews'
aggression toward neighbouring tribes, their absolute certainty of righteousness if they

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served their God. He was the only "true God" in a big world filled with many other
peoples and cultures which had their own gods and goddesses.
The Bible also bears ample witness to the fact that women had very little social or
religious enfranchisement in Hebrew society. Hebrew heroines of the Bible are, almost
without exception, women who sacrificed themselves sexually to attacking enemies in
order to win some advantage for the Israelites. That was the highest service that women
could be conceived of performing among the Hebrews.
The Old Testament also records the fact that many early Hebrews retained marked
Neanderthal physical traits from their Caucasus Mountains origin. Hairy Esau is known
to most Bible readers, but what most of them do not know is that Esau was not alone.
Esau-like people were very common among the early Hebrew population. According to
the earliest Hebrew commentators, there were enough "Esaus" to contest Jacob's
leadership of the Israelite tribes. Levitecus Rabba, the oldest exegetical work in Hebrew,
calls these people "the destroyers, the sons of Esau" and Zohar says that they were "the
beast within Israel" that had to be eradicated.
The biblical Hebrews must have come originally from some extremely concentrated
source of Neanderthal genetic stock back in their old Caucasus homeland. But
unfortunately, not enough is known about early human populations in this area to
pinpoint the probable geographic location of Hebrew ancestors. But the many Esaus of
the Old Testament and commented on in ancient exegetical works indicate this extreme
degree of Neanderthal genetic material in the Israelite tribes.
One other characteristic of Hebrew culture also testifies to the same thing. Of all known
early peoples or nations of Europe and Western Asia, only the biblical Hebrews
mounted a concerted effort to establish or (retain) a purely male-dominant Godhead in
their also-unique monotheism. Although they apparently suffered frequent lapses of at
least part of their people cleaving unto idolatry and even worshipping the goddesses of
neighbouring nations, the mainstream of Judaism remained faithful to the One God. And
He was commonly known as Adonai and secretly as vowel-sounds that approximated the
name Jehovah. That is why vowels are not written in Hebrew and in some other
Semitic languages.
These physical, intellectual, emotional and religious Neanderthal characteristics
remained relatively pure and undiluted because of Hebrew cultural and religious taboos
against intermarriage with any other peoples.
Elsewhere, the same Black Sea Caucasus people, driven by the flood and by the desperate
jostling of other refugees, began to percolate into the Balkans and Greece in various
waves that scholars identify as "Mycenaean", "Dorian", "Thracian" and "Aeolian" socalled "Greeks".
The decipherment of the so-called "Linear B" Mycenaean script by Michael Venris in
1954 showed that the Mycenaean language was, indeed, basically an early form of the
Indo-European dialect of "Greek". It came originally from the "Russian" Caucasussteppes. But the Mycenaeans were a transitional phase of the Caucasus inundation, a

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warrior elite who imposed themselves upon a much larger population of indigenous
people and who at least partly adopted the religious conceptions of the conquered
natives. We know that the Mycenaeans, for example, geneally worshipped a Great
Goddess as the supreme deity, although there were also lesser gods and goddesses.
But the rapidly subsequent invasions of yet other tribes of "Greek-speaking" steppe
barbarians, especially the so-called "Dorians", ended the Goddess-worshipping
Mycenaean world and inaugurated a rude "Dark Age" about 1000 BC. It was within this
Greek "Dark Age" from about 1000 BC to 700 BC that the poet (or a collection of poets)
called "Homer" wrote about the Trojan War, the homeward voyage of Odysseus, and
other magnificent seafaring heroes and beautiful heroines of the vanished and glorious
Mycenaean Age that had flourished about five hundred years earlier.
Perhaps there were not so many of these Caucasus-steppe "Greeks" as was the case with
the main Hyksos/Hurrian/Hittite/Mitanni/Hebrew horde which seems to have travelled
southward along the broad valley of the Euphrates River. Therefore, although they
certainly introduced their male sky gods into Greece, they not only tolerated but also
accommodated to the prevailing "Old European" Goddess-worshipping major religious
orientation. Gradually, however, the ancient goddesses (all of whom had originally
represented only some aspects of the Great Goddess) became mere unwilling "wives" of
the invaders' sky gods. The stormy relationship between Zeus and Hera in the transition
to the Classical Greek pantheon illustrates this process clearly enough.
Roughly the same situation played itself out in Italy. Believers in male sky gods from the
"Russian" Caucasus steppes gradually percolated into Europe, went across or around the
Alps and then migrated southward down into the Italian Peninsula. They also
encountered Old European worshippers of the Great Goddess and her Good Shepherd
consort-son, but they reached an accommodation by which a pantheon of roughly equal
gods and goddesses was achieved. Nonetheless, as in Greece where male Zeus was ruler
of all gods and goddesses on Olympus, male Jupiter was Chief of the pantheon in Italy.
At about the same time as the Hyksos and Hebrews arrived in biblical Goshen, say about
1700 BC or so, other close relatives of Indo-European speaking Caucasus-steppe people
reached India from Persia. Known as Aryans, they over-ran the older so-called Indus
Cultures represented by the cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, which had been
founded by Goddess-worshipping people of the Old Civilization. There, too, after the
Aryan invasions, a great pantheon was established.
Aside from Greece, Italy and India, a similar evolution of religion took place all over
Europe and Western Asia. Pantheons were established with initially strong
representation by goddesses. As mentioned before, however, only the Hebrews
repudiated polytheism and goddesses completely.
Is any human psychological insight to be gleaned from this pattern of religious evolution?
Objectively, one can say that the Old Religion was somewhat balanced "psychosexually"
because both the Great Goddess and the Good Shepherd were revered -- but it was
skewed somewhat toward female dominance and was therefore notably peaceful. The

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Greco-Roman and Indian kind of pantheistic accommodation of gods and goddesses also
struck a socio-religious psychosexual balance of sorts -- even though it was somewhat
skewed toward male dominance and was therefore more warlike than the "Civilization of
the Goddess" had been.
But the retention of pure Caucasus-steppe worship of only male sky gods, and especially
a monotheistic male sky god, must be considered seriously unbalanced or even disturbed
psychosexually. Monotheistic male-dominant societies have always been ruthlessly
aggressive because there is no compensating and effective feminine representation in
either the Godhead or in the earthly culture that conceived the nature of divinity. These
observations would seem to be objective facts, not mere personal opinion. It is no
accident, therefore and for example, that the most serious crisis threatening world peace
presently is the confrontation between Jews in Israel (supported by Jews in the United
States) and Moslem Arabs in the Middle East.
Only in Egypt, Northwestern Europe and Mediterranean islands during Greco-Roman
times, did the Old Religion continue to flourish in relatively pure form with Isis as the
Great Goddess and the Messiah as her Good Shepherd consort-son. This Egyptian
Christianity survived and developed to became the official religion of Ptolemaic (Greekruled) Egypt about 320 BC.
This version of Messiah worship achieved some popularity in Rome not long before the
"Christian Era" because of the emotional impact that Cleopatra had made on the common
people of Rome when she entered that city as Julius Caesar's consort. Roman veneration
for Isis and "the Crestus" continued even after Julius Caesar was assassinated. Only when
Julius Caesar's legally-appointed successor, Octavian ("Augustus Caesar"), defeated
Antony and Cleopatra at Actium did belief in Isis and "the Crestus" begin (AD 19) to be
suppressed in Rome.
Within three centuries after the lifetime of orthodox Christianitys St. Paul, or only
about eleven generations, barbarians began to over-run the Roman Empire. Called
"Visigoths", "Ostrogoths", "Lombards" and "Vandals" in our history books, they were
distant relatives of biblical Caucasus-steppe people who had fled from the Great Black
Sea Flood and who had invaded Palestine and Egypt as Hyksos and Hebrews about two
thousand years earlier.
It has become increasingly clear, as research into the obscure steppe histories has
tediously and slowly progressed, that the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards and Vandals
were pushed into desperate migration, in a kind of "domino-effect", by the terrible
"Huns" to the north and east of these other tribes. Greco-Roman writers first heard of the
Huns and mentioned them in AD 272, possibly because of stories told by scattered
Visigothic refugees trickling into northern Greece. These Huns were located in the
vaguely known lands at the northern end of the Caspian Sea.
It is now known, however, that the Huns were a Caucasian steppe tribe that had, during
the third century BC, made an earlier onslaught against China. The Ch'in Dynasty of that
time built the Great Wall in order to hold the Huns at bay. This apparently worked
because the Huns then turned westward to return to what seems to have been their

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original homelands north of the Caspian. But Chinese culture, from then onward, tended
to be inward looking and not typically expansive. Perhaps they had been seriously
intimidated by the Huns. In any event, as late as AD 1325, Chinese maritime expansion
was halted by Imperial decree for fear of "encountering the barbarians" that were known
to exist in the Middle East.
The Visigoths, set into terrified motion by the Huns, made their debut on the stage of
European history at the Battle of Adrianople in Greece in AD 273 where their cavalry
thoroughly defeated a Roman army. It soon became apparent that the usual Roman
infantry legions were no match for the new Visigothic armoured horse warriors armed
with long lances and long swords. The Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards successively
over-ran Greece and Italy. The Visigoths sacked Rome itself in AD 410.
However, the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards, although fierce warriors in the own
right, could appreciate civilization to some degree, at least, and could be assimilated.
Many of these barbarians became officers in the Roman army and became Roman
citizens. They helped Imperial Rome to develop its own corps of armoured cavalry,
called in Latin clibanarii (Western Empire) and cataphracti (Eastern Empire), with
which to oppose the inevitable onslaught of the Huns.
Even the fierce and warlike Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards who settled in
conquered Rome doubted that the Huns were fully human, according to reports preserved
in the chronicles. The Huns were described as extremely hairy goblins with big heads
and short legs. Christianized barbarians described them as "the Scourge of God" because
of their ruthless extermination of enemies and the hideous atrocities they visited on their
hapless captives.
The long-dreaded onslaught came a generation later when Attila led his Huns through
Central Europe between AD 449 and 451, leaving behind a swath of destruction and
genocide. In that latter year, AD 451, Attila's horde of predominantly mounted bowmen
was somewhat surprisingly defeated at the very closely fought Battle of Chalons in
central France. The victors were a desperate coalition of Romanized Visigoths,
Ostrogoths, Lombards, Roman infantry, native Celtic levies and Teutonic forces from
east of the Rhine. The Teutons had already experienced the terror of the Huns and the
Rings of the Niebelungen cycle of epic poetry prominently refers to this conflict.
For those readers with literary interests, it is at least interesting and it may also be of
unsuspected social importance, that in Year 2000 J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings
was voted "The Most Important Book of the Century" and "The Most Important Book of
the Millennium" by two separate groups of book buyers and readers. One group was
British, the other American, and both were polled by a major international book retailer.
The epic trilogy is now being made into a 3-part feature film which has so far released
the first two parts, "The Fellowship of the Ring" and "The Two Towers". The Lord of
the Rings has smashed all previous theatre attendance and box office records.
Tolkein's "Middle Earth" was rather obviously the "Elder Days" of the Old European
Neolithic-megalithic Civilization. Specifically, "The Shire" was meant to be pre-

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industrial England. The "High Elves" who had come from the West bringing civilization
to Middle Earth were our putative "Atlanteans" from the West who brought civilization
to Western Europe.
The Eastern realm of Sauron's "Mordor" in J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings was
modelled on a mixture of early medieval Hun/Khazars and modern Western
industrialism. The soldiers of Mordor were called orcs...which is Gaelic Irish (the
Goidelic branch of Celtic) for pigs. The word Khazar itself also means pig in the
Gothic branch of Germanic that influenced Yiddish (i.e. Yid Deutsch or Jew German)
so much and we will soon learn the significance of this. Tolkein therefore told an
allegorical, but nonetheless true, history in his masterpiece. It was the West's ancient and
continuing battle against genetic domination by ferocious Caucasus-steppe barbarians.
Even the "Civilization of the Goddess" was reflected in Tolkein's work because such
rings of power as still had strength to do at least some good in the world were wielded by
High Elven queens, Arwen Evenstar of "Rivendell" and Galadriel of Lothlorien.
It can be no accident, therefore (for a man of Tolkein's erudition), that the Evening Star is
the planet Venus and that "Galadriel" is the "Elvish" name for the Morning Star...again,
the planet Venus. But you have to read Tolkein's long appendix "On the Language of the
Elves" to discover this. The Latin word "Venus" was given to the planet, but the name is
interchangeable with Aphrodite, Ishtar, Cybele and...Isis. The planet was named in
honour of the Great Goddess because of its beauty. Our present symbol for the female
sex is also the sign for Venus, and both come from the shape of the Ancient Egyptian
ankh, the symbol of life itself.
But Tolkein, the Oxford scholar of Teutonic and Celtic lore and literature, knew that even
this Ancient Egyptian symbol for life, the ankh, was apparently brought to Egypt along
with basic Christianity by Neolithic and megalithic migrants from the Atlantic West. We
have covered this West-to-East maritime migration in the Historical Perspective: Light
from the West? first section of this presentation. It is the basic rationale of The Jesus
Voyage.
A very well known German scientist with the unfortunate name of Dr. Otto Muck went
further than Tolkein. Muck suggested that the shape of the Celtic Cross, the ankh and our
symbols for both the planet Venus and the female sex all derived from, and are slight
distortions of, from the city plan of Atlantis as described by Plato. The Jesus Voyage
will illustrate the similarity of these symbols, but for the moment you can return to Paul
Schliemanns dubious map of Atlantis on page 19 and see for yourself that Otto Mucks
argument is clever even if it may not be true.
Therefore, Tolkein was apparently correct in naming his Elven Queens after the planet
Venus and the Western Great Goddess.
The Good Shepherds are also well represented in The Lord of the Rings. Gandalf, the
Wizard, and Strider, the disguised King Aragorn of the West, escort the vulnerable
hobbits toward Mordor. Perhaps it is not going too far to think of the hobbits as innocent

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and pretty ignorant sheep. Poor Frodo the Ringbearer carried what seems suspiciously
like the orthodox Christian burden of Original Sin, being Bilbos heir.
But, to be fair to Tolkein, he disliked and mistrusted allegorical interpretations of his
work which has not prevented many people from making them (including me).
However, I have had the great honour and immense advantage of corresponding with
Robert Graves during his last years on Majorca. Graves had been a special friend and
confidante of Tolkeins and they had often discussed The Lord of the Rings because it
had so much resonance with Gravess own work. Graves received one of the first copies
of The Iceman Inheritance and he wrote (through his wife Beryl because he was too ill)
that the theory was the history that Tolkein had chosen to tell in an allegorical form.
Therefore, Ill stick to my guns with my interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. And, to
continue with it, soon, I think, it will become very clear why Tolkein very obviously
equated Huns and Khazars with rampant Western industrialism.
What may be considered surprising is the immense and overwhelming popularity of The
Lord of the Rings by a generation at the apex of our technology. This may indicate a
strong subconscious desire to rediscover the West's true history and, at least partly, to
return to its original values and religious orientation. President George Bush should
reflect that a great social change might be taking place at the very time that he is trying to
equate war and U.S. industrial globalization with "The American Way of Life".
But we must return momentarily to the Huns because of their unsuspected importance to
the modern Western world and even todays newspaper headlines.
Perhaps the nominally "Roman" participants at the Battle of Chalons were surprised at
their bloody victory. They were certainly relieved. The Huns trickled back through
central Europe to their former homeland near where the Volga River empties into the
Caspian Sea. The "Roman" victors at Chalons were not anxious to follow them for a rematch. Attila, High King of the Huns, died in his Volga capital in AD 453.
Like the Hebrews themselves in back in Palestine about 2000 BC, these later Caucasussteppe Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards and Vandals of the third to fifth centuries AD
had a male-dominant mindset and worshipped male sky gods...Visigothic Thor was not
very different from Judaic Jehovah, for example. And just like the Hebrews, they tended
to reject the idea of any serious reverence for goddesses. Among these invading
barbarians, as among the biblical Hebrews previously (and still), ordinary women had
little enfranchisement in their societies because there was no strong female representation
in their cultural conceptions of divinity.
Orthodox "Judeo-Christianity" of the Roman Church grew at phenomenal speed during
the first few centuries AD. This was partly because the Emperor Constantine accepted it
as an official religion of the Roman Empire in AD 337. But it was also because the
already-encroaching barbarians were genetically and emotionally predisposed to accept
its male Saviour and male Godhead.

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This predisposition is due to the fact that patriarchal societies, like those of the biblical
Hebrews and the invading barbarians of the first few centuries AD, have a built-in flaw
that threatens male identity. A woman knows that she is the mother of any given child,
but a father can never have absolute certainty of his paternity. That is why all maledominant and patriarchal societies impose restrictions, sometimes very severe, on female
social and sexual activity. In a patriarchal society, a man must feel confident that any
given child is actually his. The child might be his heir, after all.
Therefore, all patriarchal societies also zealously guard against possible sexual relations
between family members of the oposite sex. In patriarchal societies, incest becomes a
crime and a sin, whereas in matriarchal societies incest is usually regarded as mere
normal and healthy sexual experimentation. In matriarchal Polynesia, for example,
mothers were expected to introduce their sons to sex and fathers did the same for
daughters. Brother-sister alliances may even be elevated to the status of an obligation
among royalty within matriarchal societies, as in Ancient Egypt and in Peru. But such
relationships become despicable sins in all patriarchal societies and within their maledominant religions.
As the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Lombards and Vandals inundated the Mediterranean world,
it was natural that belief in Egyptian Isis, the Great Goddess with her Good Shepherd
consort-son, was emotionally and "religiously" abhorred, emotionally repudiated and
historically all but erased. Pauls version of the Christian story shifted the Ancient
Worlds emotional, religious and social focus to Palestine and Rome, making Egypt
increasingly irrelevant.
It was both an intellectual and also a genetic shift in demographic emphasis that divides
the Mediterranean "Ancient World" from the orthodox Christian Era's mindset. And this
orthodox Judeo-Christian Tradition started Europe's inexorable evolution toward the
modern world.
Nonetheless, the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards do not appear to have been quite as
aggressive and primitive as the Huns and Vandals we will hear about the Huns (again)
and the Vandals shortly. This is probably because the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and
Lombards had a less concentrated dose of Neanderthal blood in their veins and fewer
Neanderthal characteristics encoded in their DNA. They established themselves as a
warlike aristocracy (Feudalism) over the existing European inhabitants who were
mainly descended from the Old Civilization, just like the Mycenaeans had done in Greece
about 1600 BC. And, like the Mycenaeans also, the Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards
did not exterminate the conquered inhabitants of Europe.
They were gradually converted to the "Judeo-Christian Tradition" of the Roman Church,
gradually intermixed with the native people around them and therefore at least some of
their aggression was genetically diluted over the centuries. Most modern Westerners are
probably not much more aggressive than other (coloured) peoples of the world but,
most unfortunately, some Western Caucasians are.
From the Jewish point of view, St. Paul's moulding of the New Testament ensured that
emerging Roman "Judeo-Christianity" in Europe would have a fundamental and

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hopefully sympathetic relationship with Judaism. This hope was largely fulfilled
although Christians have occasionally indulged in bouts of so-called "anti-Semitism".
Europe under the "Judeo-Christian Tradition" also, however, notably reduced the former
social status of women and even indulged in massacres of women as "witches".
Now we must return to the Hunsand discuss the Vandals.
The Jewish position in the Western world was to be immeasurably strengthened when, in
AD 740, an estimated 1-3 million people from the "Russian" steppes, called "Khazars" by
chroniclers of the day, were converted to Judaism. The aggression, chauvinism and
militant xenophobia of biblical Judaism apparently appealed to their ferocious
psychology, although there were also geopolitical and economic factors that contributed
to their preference for Judaism.
This so-called "Khazar" tribe is known to have been just a later name for Attila's Huns,
the so-called Scourge of God. And as we know, the Huns had actually started the
barbarian invasions of Rome by terrorizing neighboring tribes of Ostrogoths, Visigoths,
Lombards and Vandals. The Khazars/Huns are also thought to have been very closely
related to their immediate steppe neighbours, the Vandals.
The descendants of these Khazars are todays so-called "Ashkenazi Jews". They now
represent the vast majority of modern "Jewry" (95%), although they have no direct
genetic or historical relationship at all with biblical Israelites. These "Ashkenazim" were
the prime victims of Hitler's so-called "Holocaust" and are the so-called "Jews" of Central
and Eastern Europe and particularly of the United States to which they emigrated in great
numbers about 1870. And, of course, they also constitute the vast majority of modern
Israel's population.
The Khazars/Huns had ruled the steppes between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea just
at the northern end of the Caucasus Mountains. They started the barbarian invasions of
Rome by setting in motion the terrified tribes to the south and east of them, and their
nearest neighbours are thought to have been the Vandals. The Vandals began to move
out of the Huns path first, and so they entered the Mediterranean world last.
It must be said, and maybe here is the place to say it, that of all the barbarians that
invaded the Roman Empire (aside from the Huns, that is), the Vandals in particular were
also destined to play a crucially important role in the development of our modern world.
Because of their original location on the western side of the Caucasus Mountains, their
route of invasion into the Roman world took them southward down the Eastern Shore of
the Mediterranean. They invaded modern Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Israel-Palestine,
Egypt and then continued all across North Africa to the Atlantic coast at Morocco.
Although a Christian mob led by Roman Bishop Theophilus burned the great Alexandria
Library and massacred Egyptian Christians in AD 391, the Vandal invasion about half a
century later completed the total destruction of any vestige of living Ancient Egyptian or
Greco-Roman culture. Our modern word "vandalism" aptly recalls the wanton
destruction wrought by this particularly ferocious tribe of Caucasus-steppe barbarians.

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There was not much intermixing between the Vandals and indigenous people. Unlike the
Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Lombards in Europe, Vandals (like the Huns) tended to
exterminate the native peoples they encountered in the Middle East.
The Vandals were nearly as fiercely aggressive, xenophobic and "anti-feminist" as the
Huns/Khazars themselves. And it was directly from this "Vandalized" emotional and
cultural outlook that Mohammed drew his inspiration and that Islam took its root.
Islam, at least among the original "Vandalized" Middle Eastern people who developed
and embraced it, is no less aggressive, anti-feminist and monotheistic than Judaism. This
is not surprising since both Judaism and Islam were conceived and developed by very
closely related Caucasus-steppe people.
Therefore, as far as the history of the world is concerned, we are faced with a
significant and terrifying genetic fact. Just one group of very aggressive Caucasussteppe barbarians has played an inordinately large role in moulding the general
pattern of world history. The Huns attacked China in the third century BC, but they
were thwarted by the Chin Dynastys Great Wall. However, in memory of the hairy
barbarians, Chinese civilization remained psychologically inhibited and relatively
(relative to the West, that is) non-expansive territorially.
Then these same Huns returned to their Caucasus-steppes, terrorized their neighbours
and brought about the Fall of Rome. They brought about the European Dark Ages
following the barbarian invasions. Then, pushing the Vandals to over-run the Middle
East, they inspired the religion of Islam. This resulted in the Moslem jihad that
conquered the Middle East from the Mediterranean to India and also conquered East
Africa and North Africa.
In a new guise, as Khazars, they were to mould the modern Western Worlds
technological, financial, military and cultural geopolitical expansionas we will see.
What happened to these Khazar-Hun steppe people who converted to Judaism as
Ashkenazim in AD 740?
It should be emphasized here that the Khazars were hated by their Slavic neighbours in
the Ukraine, Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe because they were raiders and
slavers. In fact, they gave the word slavery to the world by capturing and selling Slavs
in truly staggering numbers.
Joseph Jacobs in his somewhat ironically entitled Jewish Contributions to Western
Civilization (Jewish Information Service, 1921) described what he called the wretched
business, including the way that the Khazars processed their captives. They castrated
the men, raped the women and then killed the children in front of their mothers eyes.
Khazar atrocities are responsible for the chronic anti-Semitism, as one Jewish writer
put it, of Eastern Europeans.
After about five centuries of terrifying the Slavs, the brief but intense Mongol invasion of
modern Russia and the Ukraine in AD 1218 crushed the Khazars as a cohesive Caucasussteppe power. In company with lesser steppe tribes (Magyars, Bulgars, Alans, etc.) the

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Khazars were either dispersed within Russia and the Ukraine, or were pushed into the
territories of Eastern Europe.
They lost their warlike cohesion as Khazars, but they retained their Judaism and some
steppe customs. Surrounded and hated by their former victims, they congregated in socalled rural stetls (small sometimes stockaded villages) or in definite sections of the
cities that were just starting to develop.
These Ashkenazi Jewish enclaves became the Jewish ghettoes of Eastern Europe.
Because they were outnumbered and surrounded by their former victims who hated them,
they had to give up Khazar-style armed aggression. In order to survive, they developed a
veiled pushiness combined with hard work, utter disdain for the values and customs of
their neighbours and a will to survive and succeed by using their Neanderthal traits of
logical intelligence, materialism and skill with numbers.
They more or less changed one of their own genetic and cultural traits: in order to
survive, they began to treat their women a bit better than they had on the steppes. Back
on the steppes, a woman had had less value than a good horse. But it was naturally a
male dominant kind of caring that slightly improved a womans material welfare while
preserving a sense of male superiority. The result was a sort of maudlin sentimentality
about mothers that restricted female social interaction of any cultural importance.
Starting in the late 1870s, these Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews emigrated to
America in huge numbers and settled mainly in New York City. From there, they spread
to Florida and California (Hollywood particularly) where, among other things, they
started Americas media and movie businesses. They put their Neanderthal traits to
quick and effective use.
Although they represent only about 4% of the U.S. population, they account (no pun
intended) for 35% of all corporate VPs and CEOs, 30% of all university professors, 30%
of all media reporters and editors and 35% of all American millionaires and billionaires.
These figures come from Charles E. Silbermans A Certain People: American Jews and
Their Lives Today (1984).
In short, they became inordinately influential in American society
It should be said, in fairness, that there have been many recent attempts to discount any
Neanderthal or other "racial" proclivities in "modern humanity" (always conveniently
undefined). Most of this research has been undertaken since The Iceman Inheritance
was published in 1978 and Chosen People from the Caucasus was released in 1992.
These politically correct studies have, of course, been highly promoted, and especially on
North American television and in North American newspapers and magazines.
Typically, they involve complicated statistical analysis of DNA genetic comparisons.
Whether these studies are science or "pseudo-science" is a matter of highly controversial
opinion. Most of the public cannot grasp the difficulties of making DNA comparisons
between living people and ancient human populations. Then, too, statistics are so easy to
manipulate and distort that they can usually be made to "prove" whatever the researcher

80
wants to prove. As someone once put it, "first come lies, then damned lies and then
statistics".
Obviously, The Iceman Inheritance and Chosen People from the Caucasus have very
definitely placed me on the currently "politically incorrect" side of the matter. My view
is that the truth will become, and is fast becoming since Year 2000, quite clear to most
people...and in spite of all the statistics and propaganda that has been so well
disseminated by media since about 1980.
This gradual triumph of anthropological and genetic fact is not because the so-called
"truth" somehow has some mystical and omnipotent power to manifest itself. It is a
matter of self-evident events, common sense and clear dangers to our world's continued
existence.
People have begun to realize that, for some reason, Caucasians have expanded all over
the world at the expense of other races. This reason cannot be a higher level of socalled intelligence because our own Western IQ tests show that Far East Asians score,
on average, about 10% higher than Caucasians do.

The Iceman Inheritance offered an explanation that made sense a higher average level
of aggression, not intelligence, in Western humanity. This was an observation that also
conformed, as it still does, to many other interlocking anthropological facts. The
frontispiece was a map of The Iceman Inheritance that graphically and unarguably
showed the gradual but inexorable expansion of Western humanity from the Neanderthal
homeland about 80,000 BC until todays globalization of technological, financial,
military and cultural conquest. Unfortunately, reduced to this size, youll have to squint
to read the caption (or magnify the text).

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Prominent episodes in this expansion have included the Arab-Islamic conquest of the
Middle East and North Africa between AD 622 and about AD 1550.
Then there was the conquest of North and South America by Europeans between AD
1492 and about AD 1880 and the genocide of an estimated 10-20 million native people.
Connected with The Conquest, transatlantic slavery of Black Africans stands as the
most terrible of all human tragedies. It is noteworthy that Iberian Jews, Ashkenazi Jews
and American Jews were very major players in both the genocide of The Conquest
and in subsequent transatlantic slavery of Black Africans. According to both Jewish and
Iberian sources, from 50% to 75% of the Spanish and Portuguese Conquistadors
were actually Jews who has been expelled from Iberia. It has been estimated that
between 20 and 100 million people died in slavery and because of it.
To modern Westerners who are dulled by hundreds of thousands or even millions of
casualties in two major world wars and the much worse potential of nuclear and
biological warfare, these figures of Black African deaths by slavery might seem
meaningless. But then we have to remember that the worlds population was
considerably smaller between 1492 and 1860.
Because the Jews have appropriated the word Holocaust to propagandize their
casualties under the Nazis during World War II (supposedly 6 million died), Africans
have had to fall back on the Swahili word Maafa to refer to their much greater
victimization. As for the decimated Amerindians of North and South America, they have
been too stunned and demoralized even to coin a word for their catastrophe.
Simultaneously, the Far East was discovered and then dominated by Europeans, but the
people of East Asia were too advanced technologically and culturally to be exterminated
completely. Their territories were colonized or partitioned and their natural resources
were stolen. Only Japan remained independent in practical termsuntil 1945, that is.
Australia was colonized during the 1800s and the native population was virtually
exterminated by slavery and bounty hunting. They hauntingly remember their world
before Caucasians came as Dreamtime.
It has been noted previously by many historians that the actual rationale or excuse for this
expansion, slavery and genocide was to spread the Judeo-Christian Tradition to the
benighted coloured people of the world.
After two thousand years of unremitting brainwashing of Christians using the Bible,
including Paul's historically bogus New Testament, this supposed "Judeo-Christian
Tradition" still dictates the United States' and some Western European anti-Arab and
anti-Islamic policy in today's Middle East. The ongoing and current "Israeli-Palestinian
confrontation" and the "Iraq crisis" are directly related to two thousand years of
purposeful Judeo-Christian myth that has both distorted the facts of "Christian" religious
history and has also therefore moulded modern Western geopolitical alliances.
And now?

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Well, now weve come down to the nitty gritty of the planets survival. The major
competitors in historical Caucasian expansion, the Islamic Arabs and the JudeoChristians, are finally facing each other and doing so with high-tech weaponry.
Nuclear and biological weapons would wreak destruction and havoc that could affect the
entire world. Some people are fond of calling this impending war the Armageddon of
biblical prophecy. But is a genetic proclivity toward aggression, and not Gods
supposed Will, behind the inevitability of Armageddon?
Initially, the Islamic Arabs expanded throughout the Middle East and much of Asia. And,
initially too, the somewhat later European maritime expansion avoided the Arab-Islamic
sphere of influence in the Middle East.
Butduring the last near-century or so, it has become quite evident that a "certain" group
has been inordinately instrumental in the establishment of modern Israel in the Middle
East (1917, Balfour Declaration). This same group has had an inordinate influence in the
development (1940-1945) and deployment (1945-1960s) of nuclear weapons. This
"certain" group orchestrated the actual proclamation of Israel's existence in the Middle
East (1948) and has been disproportionately influential in the financially motivated
rampant expansion of modern Western industrialism all over the world (1960s to the
present). This certain group is active throughout the West, but has been most
influential in the United States since about 1870. And, technologically, the exponential
expansion of Western industrialism has been fundamentally and increasingly dependent
upon the exploitation of Middle Eastern oil since about 1960.
Quite obviously, this onslaught against the Middle East's and entire world's resources and
peoples cannot continue without eventual Arab-Islamic policies of resource self-defence
and cultural preservation...or "rogue opposition and terrorism", as the United States
prefers to term it.
It isn't at all surprising that violent reaction to late Twentieth Century Western aggression
has manifested itself most forcefully among highly "Vandalized" Arab-Islamic Middle
Eastern people. They are themselves just as aggressive, chauvinistic and xenophobic as
that "certain" group of people who have played an inordinately influential role in
moulding Western policies. Except for the Vietnamese, the Moslem Arabs and
Palestinians have borne the brunt of that certain groups aggressive machinations since
1950.
Gradually, however, even some Westerners in company with most other peoples of the
world have begun to realize the fundamental cause of the most serious threats to the
world's safety and peace. They will either quietly withdraw from helping with the United
States' and Israel's so-called "War Against Terrorism"...or else they will actively join the
militant opposition to American-Israeli Middle Eastern and globalization policies.
We see this process already starting in current newspaper headlines. There is mounting
opposition to the War Against Iraq momentum that has been promoted by that
certain group within American industry and media, especially CNN, The New York
Times and The Wall Street Journal. This international opposition has begun to isolate
the United States and Israel from the world community. And it is only a matter of time

83
before there will be yet another so-called and highly inaccurately termed Anti-Semitic
backlash in the West.
So, the genetic profile of today's Middle Eastern confrontation actually involves mainly
the descendants of some Caucasus-steppe barbarians (Jews) initiating financial,
military, territorial and cultural aggression against descendants of yet other Caucasussteppe barbarians (Islamic Arabs). No wonder the conflict is so merciless.
It is as dishonest and as useless to ignore this self-evident anthropological fact as it is to
deny the truth that the salient characteristics of these contending barbarians are their
shared Neanderthal cultural and physical traits. In spite of all the statistical goodfacts
promoted in North American media, both Jews and Islamic Arabs are fiercely
monotheistic. Both Judaic and Islamic religious law is anti-female in because womens
social and sexual activities are rigidly curtailed and both Jews and Moslems permit
polygamy. Both Jews and Moslems have been major players in enslaving conquered
people they didnt exterminate. If North American, Western European and Israeli Jews
seem more modern and democratic these days, it is only because they have had to pay
lip service to Western European ideals in order to ensure Western tolerance and
continued Western military and financial support for Jewish and Israeli goals.
But the immediately obvious clencher of their shared Neanderthal traits is that both Jews
and Moslems have severely limited visual artistic ability. Both Judaic and Islamic
religious law prohibits the representation of any living thing as idolatry. Islamic art is
purely geometrical and, as for the Jews, modern art (non-representational abstract, neoprimitive and linear art) had to be invented before they could contribute to Western
culture as visual creators. It is only because Jews control so much of the Western artistic
press that some modern Jewish artists are highly regarded, and I defy anyone to name just
one world class Moslem painter or sculptor.
Also, both Judaic and Islamic religious law and custom demands sexual mutilation as a
symbol of religious affiliation (I have not covered this particular repercussion of
Neanderthal physical traits in this Appendix).
In these cultural and psychological characteristics, the Jews and Islamic Arabs differ
from all the rest of the worlds people. Only people from Eastern Europe and parts of
the Middle East can claim Neandertals per se in their direct ancestry. So wrote the
worlds acknowledged authority on Neanderthals, Dr. Eric Trinkhaus, at the conclusion
(page 451) of his monumental work The Neandertals (1996).
If we pull our focus back from specifically "Middle Eastern" conflicts, however, we can
also perhaps perceive an even larger truth about the evolution of the European West since
the dominance of the orthodox "Judeo-Christian Tradition".
Our modern world, with its rampant industrial pollution and concomitant environmental
destruction, derives directly from the Old Testament's assurance and supposed divine
purpose that all the earth's plants, minerals, animals and people existed only for the good
of the "Chosen People". They did not, according to Jehovah, exist for any other
reason...and certainly not to create a balanced biological environment within which

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human life could flourish. Vandalized Islam took roughly the same values directly from
Judaism. Neither Jehovah nor Allah can be considered ecologists.
The Great Goddess and the Good Shepherd knew better.
The present world could rather obviously use a revival of Neolithic "true Christianity".
Only some sincere reverence for the ancient Great Fertility Goddess and her Good
Shepherd consort-messiah can save us lost lambs that have gone astray. We have turned
our over-exploited world into a life-threatening geopolitical, religious and environmental
mess because of the gradually increasing influence of a Caucasus-steppe, male-dominant,
monotheistic and anti-feminist mindset.
Compassionate and responsible Neolithic "true Christianity" has always been opposed by
psychosexually unbalanced and purely materialist monotheistic barbarians. Our major
problem is that we have always been purposefully misled and confused about which
religious orientation really represented which genetic and psychological perspective.
We have been propagandized into believing that male-dominant monotheism represents
the apex of compassionate spirituality, while polytheistic paganism reflects the depths of
moral and materialist depravity. But the present state of the world's political security and
environmental purity vehemently argues otherwise.
We really do have Saviours, and all we must do is pay them the respect they are due in
objective reality and also modify our behaviour to what we know is true and right
anyway.

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The only truly demonstrable Salvation is, of course, the continual regeneration and
maintenance of a vital environment. That was always the message symbolized by the
original Madonna and Child. And this message has absolutely nothing to do with socalled Scriptural promises of eternal cloud-riding and harp-playing in the biologically
sterile non-environment of some male Gods monotheistic heaven.
But it has everything to do with the Great Fertility Goddess and the Good Shepherd. This
10,000-year-old truth is what The Jesus Voyage is all about.

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87

A New Church of Old Christianity

The Jesus Voyage has been in the planning stage since early 1997.
I have reviewed curragh construction, the Danilo-Hvar ship depiction, the Christian liturgical
clothing and symbolic motifs in Tutankhamuns tomb, the real curse of the mummy caused by
arsenic poisoning administered by Zionist agents between 1923-1937, and so on.
This period was also filled with research in, and about, France. The timber for building the
replica curragh were assessed in Morbihans Paimpont Forest, the last vestige of the oncemagical Forest of Brocliande the Forest Perilous of the Grail Legends. And, in truth,
Brocliande remains just as perilous today for orthodox so-called Christians as it did over 2000
years ago when Merlin traditionally resided there.
In November-December 1999, the Garonne-Aude River route was surveyed by Joelle Lauriol
and me from Bordeaux to Narbonne to discover the Neolithic portage at Albi and also to
determine whether the route was still feasible today for a replica Neolithic curragh.
We also took the time to learn something about the famed Garonne River women healers who
seem to have been there since the Ice Age (according to a 2001 French TV5 television
documentary). They employ herbal knowledge that seems to have come from the Atlantic West
to their region. As it happens, Joelle was born in the French Department of Lot-et-Garonne, just
where these women healers are concentrated. Her own female ancestors may have been among
these healers and she has conducted genealogical research since 1987 to determine whether the
line of women healers may extend back to the last Ice Age.
Joelles fluent French and local knowledge established a few interesting hints that the route of
the Garonne-Aude River system was used by Neolithic mariners in early times.
The town of Marmande just east of Bordeaux means men from the sea in a very early form of
Gaulish. Aiguillon, a small town further to the east at the confluence of the Garonne and Lot
Rivers, was named after a long pole used by Neolithic cow-pokes to herd cattle. The larger town
of Agen still further to the east was named after the star Agena (as in the Atlas-Agena
missile) which suddenly became visible at that latitude because of a great shift that changed the
world. This was probably the same tectonic catastrophe at ended the Ice Age and Atlantis
simultaneously about 11,500 BC.
Gradually, during this long period of seven years, some people in Great Britain, France, Canada
and the United States learned about our low-profile and virtually private project. Enthusiasm for
the project began slowly, but has snowballed since Year 2000.
This may be because of the rapidly deteriorating Middle East situation since September 26, 2000.
That date was when Ariel Sharon purposefully provoked the current Palestinian uprising with his
illegal visit to Temple Mount under the existing Peace Protocols then in effect. Then came
911, which many people in Europe believe to have been a joint U.S.-Israeli operation and ploy

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to justify what has happened and continues to happen. The so-called War Against Terrorism
conveniently just happens to target Israels enemies and oil-rich nations.
The upshot has been, since then, that some of the ever-increasing number supporters want to take
The Jesus Voyage project further much further than I ever envisioned.
They have suggested, using The Jesus Voyage and the research behind it, as the foundation of a
New Church of Old Christianity. Many people have written by snail mail and e-mail
suggesting that Joelle and I should establish such a Church.
They envision using the oldest known Christian symbol (the symbol of The Jesus Voyage) the
ancient vesica piscis or the sign of the fish of Goddess Isis (also called the eye of Horus)
flanked by crossed shepherd crooks to symbolize the Good Shepherd. The crossed shepherds
crooks would forge at least some resonance with orthodox Christianitys symbol of the Cross of
Calvary.
Personally, I think that The New Church of Old Christianity isnt a very snappy name,
promotion-wise, in our 21st Century. And I have more than just a few personal second
thoughts about founding any such Church. Im not a religious leader and never even imagined
such a development! Few people who know me would agree that I am pure enough to be a
religious leader. And, quite frankly, I both agree with them and will state that I have never
wanted to, or have achieved, such spiritual purity anyway.
On the other hand, such a Church is rather desperately needed in our time. It may well be that
only the Western worlds re-dedication to True Christianity can prevent a Third World War and
save the planets environment. Is there a Priestess (not a doctor) in the House?
Perhaps only a resurrection of ancient Isis can do the trick. Only SHE might shock Western socalled Civilization out of the commedia dellarte of stock characters and predictable conflicts
that have dominated Western cultures predominantly Jewish-scripted Theatre of tragi-comedy
over the past 2000 years. And this applies most vehemently to modern Hollywood movies.

To view the additional and more detailed information on The Jesus Voyage,
Click here to go to the Index page or click here to continue.