The Mark of the Beast: The Continuing Story of The Spear of Destiny
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The Mark of the Beast: The Continuing Story of The Spear of Destiny
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609258511 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 01/15/1997 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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THE MARK OF THE BEAST
THE CONTINUING STORY OF THE SPEAR OF DESTINY
By Trevor Ravenscroft, TIM WALLACE-MURPHY
Red Wheel/Weiser LLC
Copyright © 1990 Trevor Ravenscroft and Tim Wallace-MurphyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60925-851-1
CHAPTER 1
THE SPEAR AT THE THRESHOLD OF THE NEW AGE
The solitary iron spearhead black with age still rests on a faded red velvet dais within an open leather case. Its long tapering point is supported by a wide base with metal flanges depicting the wings of a dove. Within a central aperture of the blade a hammer-headed nail is secured by a cuff threaded with gold, silver and copper wire. On the side of the lowest portion of the base golden crosses are embossed.
The Spear of Destiny has an altogether different presence to the crowns, sceptres and other rich and gaudy paraphernalia on display in the Treasure House in the Hofburg in Vienna. The various items of royal regalia are but mementoes of a bygone age. The Spear of Longinus however is no mere historical artifact but a resonator of great spiritual power as relevant to the destiny of mankind today as it was when the Roman Centurion Gaius Cassius pierced the side of Christ with it two thousand years ago.
The illustrious claimants to the Spear throughout two thousand years were aware of its magical powers to shape the destiny of mankind. Today these powers are no longer the sole preserve of an élite chain of good and evil initiates, but belong to each and every human being of any race or creed who seeks to understand them. Any sensitive human soul who beholds the Spear today and becomes aware of its powers finds himself at the threshold between the terrestrial world and the spiritual world. This dramatic change in the role of the Spear has been brought about by the Spirit of the Time to enable each individual to face and understand the working of good and evil in the apocalyptic age which has already begun.
Because mankind now stands at the very threshold of the spiritual world, the purpose of this volume is to enable the reader to understand the spiritual powers behind the Spear in order to gain a new and deeper insight into the unfolding pattern of his life. It will also serve to interpret the symbolism of the Revelation of St John and to transform it into a magic mirror revealing the dread countenance of the Apocalypse within the unfolding fabric of contemporary and coming events.
Few people yet realize that the first phase of the Apocalypse began in the opening years of this century at the time when the young Adolf Hitler stood before the Spear of Destiny in the Hofburg. This moment of insight enabled him to lift the veil to perceive how he could harness its powers to rule the world. Thirty years later Adolf Hitler, now Führer of the German Reich, conquered Austria and became the successor to the Habsburg Emperors. On this occasion when he entered the treasure house there were no guards, petty officials or attendants to keep a suspicious and wary eye as there were when he first saw the Spear as an unkempt outcast. Now he was free to remove the ancient weapon from its faded red velvet dais behind protecting glass. One can only presume that he held the Talisman of Power in his own hands, feeling the black metal of the tapering point which two thousand years before had pierced the side of Christ at the crucifixion.
It was surely a scene which that genius of the bizarre, Charlie Chaplin himself, would never have dared to stage. And yet it was a happening so potent with evil that it would cause an eruption more violent and destructive than the entire world had ever known: a happening which caused the first incendiary flicker of a merciless 'Will to Power' that would quickly spread in blazing desolation to turn a whole continent to rubble. An unseen communing with dark Principalities and Powers which would inspire a demonic reign of terror and cold-blooded butchery outstripping in primitive savagery and bestial cruelty all previous ages of tyranny and oppression in the entire history of mankind.
This very night when Hitler secretly claimed the Spear of Destiny was to become known in Vienna as 'The Night of Terror'. He left the treasure house to initiate a most dreadful pogrom against the Jewish population and some one-hundred-thousand Jews were arrested. Such were the scenes of sadism and brutality in the streets of the city that many Jews even fled into Germany itself to find refuge. A new concentration camp was set up on the north bank of the Danube which was to earn an infamous reputation – Mauthausen. Here the official execution list was to be longer than any other camp within the confines of the Reich. It was revealed at the Nuremberg trials that the decision to go ahead with the plans for the 'final solution' dated from that night. For Adolf Hitler this was the night of decision. He no longer needed instruments of guile and political cunning for he now used the powers of the Spear as a catalyst and became completely ensouled by the Leviathan who struck out openly to achieve the ultimate aim – the conquest of the world.
The conflict which came a year later quickly became global in its effects as no other previous war had ever done, not only involving the belligerents but also every nation in the world including those who remained neutral. No one was exempt from its reach. Entire civilian populations were subject not only to the terrors of aerial bombardment but also to the deliberate and calculated policy of genocide. The concept of crimes against humanity resulting from these events led to the Nuremberg trials where for the first time leaders of defeated nations were arraigned. Yet these trials failed to identify the nature of the evil at work behind the outer façade of National Socialism.
The Allied prosecutors apparently lacked the moral imagination to perceive the apocalyptic countenance of the civilization which had arisen in Germany between the two world wars – a civilization based on a magical Weltanschauung which had substituted the Swastika for the Cross. It appears there was a unanimous agreement among the judges to treat the accused as an integral part of the humanist and Cartesian system of the western world. This was the outward reinforcement of a deliberate and covert political decision taken at the highest level to explain the most atrocious crimes in history as a result of mental aberration. It was thought expedient to speak in dry psychoanalytical terms when considering their motives for incarcerating millions of human beings in gas ovens rather than to reveal that such practices were an integral part of a dedicated service to evil powers.
To have admitted even for an instant what their defeated enemies were really like, to have lifted the veil to reveal the real motives for such an astonishing reversal of values would have opened millions of people to the risk of a terrible corruption. In such a way the real apocalyptic countenance of the twentieth century was deliberately kept hidden from the masses. It remains so to this day! And this is why the first phase of the twentieth-century Apocalypse came upon us without its warning identity being revealed.
As if this were not tragedy enough, the next phase has already begun and will culminate in another attempt by the Leviathan to take over the planet:
One of the heads of the Beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was astonished and followed the Beast.
This new and yet more critical phase of the apocalyptic age will be characterized by disasters and chaos culminating in the reappearance of the Beast who will ensoul the coming World Dictator and achieve world conquest where Hitler failed.
The Beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise his authority ... He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them. And he was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. All inhabitants of the earth will worship the Beast.
The Revelation of St John (New International Version): 13, verses 5-8
CHAPTER 2THE SPEAR AS SYMBOL OF THE APOCALYPSE
The masses of humanity are as yet totally unaware of the spiritual realities that they now must consciously confront. They stand unknowingly at the threshold. Not even the events of this century so far have awakened them: for them physical life is always completely absorbing and usually exhausting. The masses in their blindness have become hopeless victims of a whole series of world disasters and today they stand bewildered and alarmed and ready to panic into any plausible policy of violence. It is the tragedy of the ordinary man that he never listens to the warnings of the prophets until doom is upon him, and then he is too terrified to listen and too stupefied to understand, and in any case too late. One would have thought that he would need no prophet to convince him that he is faced with world catastrophe and disaster. The problem is that the average person is unable to read the changing scenes of the times. Even when the whole civilization of Europe lay in ruins, across which the two colossi of East and West growled alarmingly at one another in the aftermath of World War II, the man in the street was quite unable to see that humanity had already passed through the first phase of the Apocalypse – the Hitler era of the Seven-Horned Beast.
The science, invention, organization and techniques of the twentieth century have opened up boundless possibilities for the widespread comfort of mankind. Yet, besides these great benefits, the present technological age has brought in its wake modes of pollution and weapons of destruction that threaten the extinction of all life on this planet.
An increasing number of intelligent people feel a growing unease that this nuclear age is charged with a spiritual significance far more riveting than any previous historical time. Many such people, who have recognized how our century is becoming increasingly apocalyptic in character, have sought guidance from the Book of Revelation of St John, the Divine, but have been quite unable to interpret its strange symbolism. For what sense can the rational mind make of this mysterious work which describes the destiny of mankind in terms of Seals, Trumpet Blasts and Vials of Wrath, Winged Horsemen and Beasts from the Abyss? With the utmost goodwill what can the rational mind make of such unworldly pictures. Modern thinking with its dialectic materialism and cold computer calculation, which reduces even man himself to a statistical cypher, can only regard the visionary symbolism of the Revelation as crass superstition, bizarre to the point of absurdity or, at best, the outworn mythology of an age long past.
Last century it was the Russian philosopher Soloviev who wrote a prophetic book on the Anti-Christ inspired by the Book of Revelation. Living at the dawn of the Apocalypse, Soloviev's Anti-Christ is no mythical figure but inhabits the soul of a man of flesh and blood in everyday reality. A man dressed in ordinary clothes and outwardly so inconspicuous that he could pass unnoticed in a crowd. Soloviev saw that the greatest danger would be just this: 'The Beast doesn't look what he is.' He is young and vigorous and his voice rings out with magical power which, like the seductive tones of the pied piper, can seduce great leaders into a terrifying condition of diminished responsibility, and at the same time excite the masses to rise up and turn a dying culture into a heap of rubble and ashes. Beneath a banal and disarming exterior – 'He may even wear a comic moustache' – he is a blood-hungry tyrant and a mighty demagogue.
Soloviev's Leviathan does not take over the soul and the body of a Jew as the Nazis falsely proclaimed. On the contrary, he had the insight to see that precisely the most enlightened Jews, retaining the piety of their age-old wisdom, would be among the few people who identified and denounced the Beast before he sought to conquer the world. Soloviev also foresaw that it would be the Jewish race who would be the victims of the dreadful pogrom initiated by the Anti-Christ. He includes in his shattering prophecies even such details and descriptions of how the skins of the Jews would be turned into household articles, just as it came to pass in the concentration camps of the Third Reich in which swaggering SS murdered their Jewish slaves and used their skins to make table lamps.
The date in which Soloviev predicted these things should come to pass? 1921! The age of this human vehicle of hell? Thirty-three years old! Adolf Hitler celebrated his thirty-third birthday in 1921, the year he assumed the uncontested leadership of the National Socialist party.
Hermann Rauschning, a Nazi gauleiter who defected to the West, recognized Adolf Hitler as the first appearance of the Beast of the Revelation. Rauschning, an authentic biographer of the Führer, entitled one of his books The Beast from the Abyss. Rauschning knew that Hitler had abandoned himself to forces which were carrying him away
— apocalyptic forces of dark and destructive violence. 'Hitler imagined that he still had freedom of choice but he had long been in bondage to a magic which might well have been described, not only in metaphor but in literal fact, as that of Evil Hierarchies of Spirits. Instead of a man emerging step by step from the obscurity of youth, and freeing himself from its dross on an upward course, we witnessed the development of a man possessed, the helpless prey to powers of darkness.'
The most revealing flash of insight into Hitler as a vessel of the Beast was found in a poem written by a man who was executed for his part in the plot to assassinate the Führer. The poet was Major Albrecht Haushofer whose father initiated Hitler into the Secret Doctrine. The sonnet entitled 'The Father' recalls an ancient legend of the Orient which bears a striking resemblance to a verse in the Book of Revelation: 'When the thousand years are over Satan will be released from his prison' (Chapter 20, verse 7).
Albrecht Haushofer had learned about this ancient legend on a pre-war journey to Tibet. Apparently according to this legend the Spirits of Unholy Powers were incarcerated and sealed countless fathoms below in the darkness of the ocean. There they remained imprisoned by the beneficent hand of God, until, once in a thousand years, it was fated that a fisherman had it within his free choice to release the dreaded Beast unless he cast his terrible catch straight back into the depths.
For my Father the lot was cast.
Once again the demon had to be repulsed
And thrust back into his prison.
My father broke the seal –
He sensed not the breath of the Evil One
But set him free to roam the world.
These primitive insights arose in men who were not themselves able to relate the symbolism of the Apocalypse to the historical process. Their problem was that they were unable to perceive the indications given in a hidden manner within the pages of the Revelation itself as to when and how the most critical phase of the Apocalypse would take place. The clue rests in the order of appearance of. 'The Four Horsemen of The Apocalypse', the most widely known and the least understood symbols of the Revelation.
The Revelation is by nature a form of mythology predicting the future destiny of mankind using the symbolism of its own time, and the horse which figured so prominently in all ancient mythology represented human intelligence. Presumably this came about because the horse was so closely linked to the development of man and the civilizations he inhabited. Anyway, the horse was considered to be the most intelligent of beasts. St John himself regarded the horse as an outward physical symbol of human intelligence and projects four striking examples of the horse to indicate the changing nature and quality of human consciousness throughout history.
'The Four Horses of The Apocalypse' represent four critical stages in the quality of human consciousness and the very nature of thinking which have taken place during the last five thousand years. These four stages in the evolution of human consciousness are like four great arches across the millennia through which the faculty of thinking has passed in its descent from universal mind to individual man. If we can identify in succession each of these crucial changes, we will be able to date precisely the Holocaust which is predicted to take place under the sinister symbolism of 'The Pale Horse' at the very threshold of a new and more enlightened age.
And I saw, and behold a white horse: and he that sat on him had a bow; and a crown was given unto him: and he went forth conquering and to conquer.
Revelation (King James Version): 6, verse 2
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE MARK OF THE BEAST by Trevor Ravenscroft, TIM WALLACE-MURPHY. Copyright © 1990 Trevor Ravenscroft and Tim Wallace-Murphy. Excerpted by permission of Red Wheel/Weiser LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PROLOGUE,
INTRODUCTION,
SECTION 1 FROM GOLGOTHA TO HIROSHIMA The Spear as Key to History,
1. The Spear at the Threshold of the New Age,
2. The Spear as Symbol of the Apocalypse,
3. The Spear and the Destiny of Nations,
4. The Spear and the Two Faces of Evil,
SECTION 2 THE HEART OF THE MATTER The Pathway to Spiritual Perception and the Meaning of Personal Destiny in Our Time,
5. The Spear as Resonator of Spiritual Faculties,
6. Prophetic Pillars of the Apocalypse,
7. The Changing Face of Initiation,
8. The Key to the Unveiling of Personal Destiny,
9. The Drama and Symbolism of History as the Result of the Interweaving of Reincarnation Patterns,
SECTION 3 THE SEEDS OF TERROR They Know Not What They Do! Atomic Physics. 666–1945,
10. The Academy of Hades, 'The Number of the Beast is 666',
11. The Spear and the Karma of the Atom Bomb,
SECTION 4 LIFE IN THE SHADOW OF THE PALE HORSE The Outpouring of the Vials of Wrath,
12. There shall be Wars and Rumours of Wars, But the End is Not Yet Nigh,
13. Scenario for World Disaster,
SECTION 5 GATHERING AT THE THRESHOLD The Aquarian Age Takes Root,
14. 'The Road Less Travelled' 'Safer than a Known Way',
SECTION 6 THE PROPHESIED FUTURE? Nightmare or Reality?,
15. 'The Mark of the Beast' The Great Dictator and the Anti-Christ,
EPILOGUE,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
INDEX,
ABOUT THE AUTHORS,