Note: The following article is published with permission.

On the Forbidden Letters - by Jos Winter

'In this Stone (of Alchemy) lies hidden all that God and Eternity, heaven, the stars and the elements contain and are able to do.'[Jacob Boehme].

'I wonder whether that Stone could have the words Big and Bang written on its back. It must have consciousness anyhow.'[Forum-post on the Forbidden Letters] 

'Adonai (i.e. God/Winter) is sometimes called lapis (i.e. stone/Winter), for the latter is the foundation of the whole fabric of the world.'[Jung quoting from the Cabala Denudata]

Part 1                                                 

[ Graham Hancock ]  

1.  

'The idea Graham Hancock presents, namely that the Holy Grail was in fact the Ark of the Covenant, manages to bring together the story of the two most important Biblical artifacts in history. If you have an open mind and a zest for understanding, then this book should definitely be included on your reading list. Believe Hancock's opinions or not, the tale he tells is fascinating, dramatic, and intellectually enlightening.'[Daniel Jolley on Amazon]  

2. 

'As von Eschenbach says, this stone is called the Grail. But how can we look upon something that is within ourselves? Clearly, we are not to take this literally.'[Philip Gardiner and Gary Osborn]  

3.    

'What I like most about those (Forbidden) Letters is that they reveal the tremendous ignorance of the Grail-industry. All these so called experts like Hancock, Bauval and Gardiner, who appear to have been completey in the dark.'[June Reynolds]  

4.  

'There have been numerous attempts to relate the Grail to Alchemy.'[Richard Barber: 2004]
[ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Barber ]   

5.  

'Barber's book masterly restores all the Grail's gravitas, giving it an exciting new lease of life.'[Independent]  

6.  

'Why should the Grail be a stone?'[Barber, 2004]  

7.  

'Barber is an Arthurian expert whose purpose is to hack a path through the muddled, corrupted and conflicting versions of the Grail Story.'[Daily Telegraph]  

8.  

'With Wolfram von Eschenbach nothing is straightforward. He used his arcane knowledge to add to the mystery of the Grail, not to define the object itself.'[Barber, 2004: passim/italics mine]  

9.  

'By the power of that Stone the Phoenix (i.e. the human body in Kundalini fire/Winter) burns to ashes, but the ashes quickly restore him to life again.'[Wolfram von Eschenbach] *)  

10.  

'The Phoenix is only present (in Eschenbach's version of the Grail Legend) to emphasize the power and unique nature of the Grail; it is the rarest and most splendid of birds, just as the Grail is the rarest and most splendid of precious stones. Beyond that, it is difficult to construct any kind of symbolic argument (here), since the Phoenix is interpreted in the bestiary as a token of the resurrection of the dead, which has no obvious relation to the Grail's function.'[Barber, 2004:passim]  

11.  

'Barber's book is a fascinating compendium of theology.'[Sunday Times]  

12.  

'All the information used (in my book) is genuine and verifiable. There is no one 'truth' about the Grail. All we can do is suggest how (its legend) may have arisen, and what it may mean, because the force that shaped it was imagination. The creative thought that subtly built on an unfinished story (the one by Chretien de Troyes/Winter), and invented the Grail.'[Richard Barber, 2004:passim]  

13.  

'The stone is produced about where the liver is. It ignites the Kundalini fire. It is pointy and about the size of a child's fist.'[The Paris 4: passim]   

14.  

'The Grail is beyond human language.'[Richard Barber, 2004]  

15.  

'I believed that the first shape of the Grail would be dimly discernible in the remote past. Instead, I found myself offering a very different picture, indebted to medieval theology (only).'[Barber, 2004:369] 

16.  

'In her 1953 book The Ancient Secret, Flavia Anderson points out that although the cities of Phoenicia had at one time successfully freed themselves from Egypt's imperialism, they had kept Egypt's Gods. And the very city, Toledo, where, as Wolfram von Eschenbach claims, the true story of Parzival and the Grail was found, was originally a Phoenician settlement, meaning, therefore, a settlement with its religious roots initially firmly planted in the theology of Ancient Egypt and its Pantheon. This all is a strong indication, ladies and gentlemen, that at least one line leads directly from the Benben Stone of Heliopolis to von Eschenbach's Grailstone.'[Maria El Safti on the Forbidden Letters] 

Part 2

17.  

'By the power of that Stone the Phoenix (i.e. the human body in Kundalini fire/Winter) burns to ashes, but the ashes quickly restore him to life again.'[Wolfram von Eschenbach]  

18.  

'Come to him, a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God, and, like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.'[I Peter 2]  

19.  

'Jung believed the Grail to be a thoroughly non-Christian image.'[Richard Barber]  

20.  

'To be effective, a symbol must be an unsurpassed container of meaning; it must be sufficiently remote from comprehension to resist all attempts of the critical intellect to break it down. For a certain time the Grail symbol clearly fulfilled these requirements.'[Carl Jung]  

21.  

'Carl Jung thought that the alchemical mystery represented some kind of psychotherapy.'[Maud Perkins on the Forbidden Letters]   

22.  

'As a psychologist you have an understandable timidity of all realities which are not exclusively psychic. And just as everything became gold that King Midas touched, so it seems to me sometimes that everything you have observed becomes psychic and only psychic.'[Wolfgang Pauli in a 1952 letter to Carl Jung] [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Pauli ]  

23.  

'At no time, however, did the established church make any reference to what was clearly an important and widely recognized object (i.e. the Grail/Winter), either to confirm or to deny its existence. This, in an age of relic hunting, is more than just unusual.'[John Matthews, 1981]  

24.  

'The redemption of mankind is precisely the object of the Grail quest.'[Ibid]  

25.  

'End of august till September 4 1986: our gay man becomes a child. That is, psychologically during certain minutes. During those minutes, and to his own surprise, he even produces a child's voice. (pupulus nudus means the naked young boy and this reminds us of the words of Jesus too: you must become like a little child again if you want to enter the Kingdom of God .)'[The Paris 4]    

26.   

'It is symbolized by the child-hero, who, as the alchemists knew, would unify the dark and the light.'[David Lindorff]  

27.  

'The Kundalini energy exists in every atom of the universe.'[Ajit Mookerjee]  

28.  

'Heraclitus [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus ] declared that nothing was static. From the eternal fire, of which we are a part, there was only a becoming.'[David Lindorff]  

29.  

'Pauli referred back to Heraclitus, saying to Jung "it is the fire of Heraclitus that now appears to you on a higher plane as the dynamics of the Self."'[David Lindorff]  

30.  

'And the fire will, when it arrives, judge and handle everything.'[Attributed to Heraclitus]  

31.  

'He bare him up, he bare him down.
 He bare him into an orchard brown.  

 In that orchard there was a bed;
 It was hung with gold so red.  

 And in that bed there lieth a knight.
 His wounds bleeding day and night'.  

 And by that bed there standet a stone
 'Body of Christ' written there-on.'  

[The Body of Christ Carol/emphasis mine]  

32.  

'It is the electromagnetic force (i.e. light/Winter) that binds atoms and molecules together and gives shape to form and matter. The palm trees that are waving outside; the flowers that open to the sun; radios, cell phones, TVs; the ability of your eyes to see (...) illustrations; all of chemistry and biology, all the plants, animals, humans and their brains; all of the collected behavior of gases and solids  - everything is held together by the electromagnetic force. Life is choreographed by the electromagnetic force. [Stephen Hawking, 2001:44]

                            
[ Max Planck ]

33.  

'Photons who form a beam behave like intelligent beings.'[Max Planck]  

34.  

'Light has a purely teleological character.'[B. Hommersen,
see http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/teleological ]  

35.  

'A living cell emits light when damaged and when it dies it emits all its light at once.'[Arie Bos, 2007] 

_____________________________________________________________

^*) The Paris 4 tell us that Stone is 'pointy and about the size of a child's fist.'
That it ignites the resurrectional fire of Kundalini and 'that it is produced about where the liver is.' This last remark by the Paris 4 reminded me of a remark by Georges Dumezil .
Dumezil conjectured that the Titan Prometheus stole not the chemical fire for our ovens, but the fire of immortality. Zeus then punished him for this by having him bound to a rock while a great eagle (central bird in Alchemy representing Spirit/Winter) ate his liver every day, only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day.