Interview the author

- Let’s talk about the research that began twenty years ago.

-Everything began with the reading of “El enigma de la Mesa de Salomón” (The mystery of the Table of Solomon) by Juan Eslava Galán, although I was already interested several years ago in the old Arts and Sciences, above all Alchemy, Kabala and Tarot, and not as much in Astrology. I was interested since I checked that it takes the human being and the cosmos as a whole and that, although we think nowadays that they were product of ignorance and superstition (you know, the arrogance of the illustrated), they were arts and holistic sciences that enlightened the mind of their practitioners through millennia. What we consider today as science hardly has several centuries of existence. It is very silly to think that men were previously idiots dominated by superstitions. But is that what the positivists think. What absurd and complete nonsense! I don’t know if they realize the stupidity that is implied from such a belief.

-But why do you call them sciences? In fact, they are not real sciences.

-They are not in the sense that we use the word “Science”. That is why I add “old”. Of all the definitions that the Dictionary of the Real Academy gives the word “Science”, none has the exclusive sense given it today by the scientists. Science means knowledge and its meaning includes that of the positivist science. The dictionary says that science is a “ordered knowledge and, generally by experiment, of the things” or a “collection of knowledge and doctrines ordered methodically”, but it doesn’t say in any case, because it would be really stupid, that science is only the western science of the last two or three centuries.

-And you come from the positivist tradition.

-And I still believe in it, I don’t think that there is a contradiction between both levels of knowledge. What is wrong is when they mix, when it is pretended to investigate what belongs to the area of the old sciences, and I say positivists, and not empiricists because old sciences are empirical as well.

- Fine. I suppose that that would need to be explained a bit further; however, let’s go to your research.

- No, wait a minute. I will clarify it in a moment. Positivism is the philosophical system formulated by August Comte that considers that the human knowledge can be based only in the senses, while Empiricism takes the experience as the only base of the human knowledge. I say that the old science is empirical, not empiricist, in the sense that take the experience as base of its knowledge, although not as the only base. In other words, in addition to being based in the experience, it considers that there are other methods for the human knowledge. It is not exclusive.

Furthermore, its technology was more developed that we think. Astronomical observatories as exact as Stonehenge, constructions so perfect as the pyramids of Egypt or machines like of the Antiquitera, to give some examples that cover approximately from the 3rd millennium to the 2nd century A.D, should make us think that we have underestimated their knowledge. We should recover from it their focus, their method that conceives that men were not separated from their environment and try to relate the different dimensions of the reality, not only the physical.

-Yes. Lets go back to your research. You affirm that there was an Original Model that can be considered origin of all the others which is the base of all knowledge, even of the scientific, as we understand this concept today.

-Yes, more or less. I have to qualify that a bit.

-And that that Original Model was created in a certain moment of the human History by a specific civilization, the original culture, which gave place then to the other historical cultures, religions and civilizations with their cosmologies, myths systems, symbolical, ritualistic, etc…

- I recognized that I don’t count with definitive demonstrations, only signs. However, they are quite clear and specific. They approximate very much to authentic evidences.

-For example…

-It is difficult to sum up all the information taken through twenty years of research in an interview like this… Summarising very much: according to the archaeologist, in the Spanish south-west, which now we call East Andalucía, in the Calcolítico or Copper Age there was a civilization which gave names to its more important sites. It’s about the Culture of the Millares. Although, it is possible that Plato refers to them in the myth of the Atlantis. I know that we are introducing a very controversial subject, but I’m interested as much to make categorical affirmations than to make indications. The case is that one of the sites of that culture was found some years ago near the city of Jaen. It is about the low Marroquies, a town of the Calcolítico constructed according to the architectural scheme that Plato described for the Atlantis. Then we have the persistent tradition that points Jaen and Granada as references of a series of legends over the original garden (the Hesperides Garden, Iram of the columns, the kingdom of Agarta, the table of Solomon…) and many other legends that point Andalucia as the origin of the alphabet (the forest of the alphabetical columns of the Tartasside, etc). And finally, the identification made by me of the signs of the zodiac in the landscape of Jaen with the letters of the Greek alphabet and the Tarot symbols.

-Are you suggesting that that culture invented the alphabet…

-There are a lot of signs of that… I tell it in the Notebooks of Jana:

according to Strabon, the Turdetans, successors of the Tartessios, possesed a grammar, poems and laws in verse around 6.000 years ago… Robert Graves in the White Goddess says that the Ogham alphabet “used in Britain and Ireland some centuries before of the Latin ABC” came from Spain. The invention of this alphabet was attributed to “Ogma-cara-de-Sol hijo de Breas, Ogma-sun-face son of Breas)”, which he represented as a veteran Hercules, with the club and the lion skin”. Having Perseus/Mercury won against the Gorgone Medusa, he takes, poetically, the alphabet in a sack to the Tartasside. Graves relates, as many other authors, this land (Tartessos) with Cadiz, as many others situate it between Huelva and Cádiz (Schulten) or in the surroundings of the estuary of Guadalquivir, in the lower Andalucia. They doesn’t consider that all ends have their beginning; in other words, that the sacred river had a birth of “silver roots” where it was situated the sanctuary of the Goddess Mother, which according to a primary vision will be identified with the “origin”. Where it maybe comes from the old name of Jaen (Auringe). What is true is that in the Tartesside there was a sanctuary to Hercules, Robert Graves says: “It is probable that the Hercules of the Phoenicians of the Tartasside was Palamedes (Greek hero related with the invention of the Alphabet), or with the God Ogmios with the lion skin, to which the Irish attributed the invention of the alphabet which they “received from Spain and that Gwion, in his elegy about “Ercwlf”, celebrates as a planter of alphabetical columns. The inhabitants of the Tartesside were famous in the classical period because of the respect they show to the old people, and Ogmios, according to Luciano, was represented as an old Hercules. That the Gorgones lived in a grove in the Tartesside can only mean that they had to hide an alphabetical secret”.

It is not difficult to realise that the “planter of alphabetical columns”, like a builder of megalithic monuments, has a symbolic meaning in relation with events of astronomical type. In Jaen there could be an observatory of this type (as suggested by a great variety of signs; moreover, guarded by a lizard, or dragon, according the popular legend of the city of the Lizard of Malena. The Gorgonnes were Greek monsters that Hesiodus represented as three sisters. The relationship between the number three and the Goddess Mother is documented enough by the specialists.

As Hesiodus tells, one of the sisters, Medusa, was killed by Perseus and her body mutilated (he cut her head) when the monster Geriones appeared, a giant that lived in the island of Eritheia and that possessed three heads and three bodies till the waist and was killed by Heracles for stealing his herd of oxen. Geriones sends us to Gerion, the first of the legendary kings of Tartessos.

And although Eritheia is Cadiz, Hesiodus could refer with the name of a part of the kingdom to all the kingdom of Tartessos. That the Gorgonnes kept a secret alphabet in a grove of the Tartasside recall us again the legend of the lizard of Malena, in which a monster defends, attacking whoever approximates to his den, some secret was hidden. That the blood of the Medusa, took by Athenea and given to the God of the Medicine Asclepius, had the power to resuscitate the death, and recall us to what was said before about the spring of the Magdalena situated in the roots of the Tree of the Immortality and to the resurrection of the Sun in the summer solstice.

At the other side, two traditional legends exist in Jaen that label it the owner of a secret and the home of a group of people that, through the centuries, dedicated themselves to transmit, or better said, to guard. It is about those that look for the Cava, a name that appears in a list that Eslava Galan found in the Diocesal Archives of the Jaen Cathedral. In other words, that all the civilizations that stood in its territory had a notion of the meaning of that geographical space and of that city.

- But, why has nothing been heard about it before?

- Because, as I said, that group of people who Eslava Galán was referring to had the mission to protect that secret, since they considered it gave power to who posses it. In fact, the Royal Families of Aragón and Castille were in the secret…

- Then, the old sanctuary, is it something like a model of the world that reflects the old vision of the Cosmos in the same disposition of its geographical features?

- Yes, but it is worthless to know that if we don’t identify with precision, correctly, what it means for each one of its elements in the all and the relations that exist between them.

- And that is what do you do in the Arkegram. What, then, is the Arkegram?

- A model described as a diagram or mandala that considers each one of those elements and it relates them with the letters of the sacred alphabet, the articulated sounds or phonemes, musical notes, colours, symbols, old myths, the archetypical principles…

- But, wouldn’t there be a grade of arbitrariness in all that, an purely assignation… how to say…

- Imaginary? No, look, there are too many coincidences. At this point, I find it a bit embarrassing to talk about it. I wouldn’t like anyone to think I’m crazy. I’m perfectly conscious of the transcendence of the discovery. I know that it would be the key that the alchemists, occultists… have been looking for through millennia, and it resolves the mystery of the Table of Solomon, and that makes me feel a big responsibility because I can give proof that demonstrates it.

But what interests me more is the way that it can serve the men of our period, because that model is in the base of what Jung called the collective unconscious and of our analogical thinking, symbolical, archetypical… for it can be use as a table of correspondences that clarifies… I don’t know if I’m explaining myself… The case it is that when I started to check the existence of precise correspondences between the geographical features of the landscape of Jaén-Granada and the symbols of Tarot, the shapes of the Greek letters, etc. I started, as is logical, to ask questions to myself. The answers to those questions were the content of my investigations through those years.

- But you affirm much more and that it is its relation with the new paradigms.

- Of course, because it is a description of the basic structure and dynamics of the energy, because the old Cosmo vision was ecological, systemic, holistic…

- And what about its applications?

- Having the frame of correspondences perfectly clear, after a meticulous and reasoned demonstration we can establish a map of conscience based in the observed energetic process, the place and function of the archetypes, the meaning of symbols and myths, the last sense of dreams, which would allow us to establish precise and exact correspondences in technique and energetical therapies like Tai-Chi, Chi-Kung, bio energy, etc. and maybe can be a help to us in the study of the deep structure of the matter.

- Don’t you think that you take your discovery too far, that your implications and proposed applications are too far of your object of study?

- No, I don’t think so. It is true that I’m not a historian, nor an anthropologist, nor a professional scientist, only an artist, a musician, maybe a creator, a poet, that as Robert Graves says in his book the White Goddess “I don’t belong to any religious cult, to any secret society, to any philosophical sect”, and if I felt compelled to study these specialties I was motivated by that first poetic intuition (sounds that remit to other sounds forming a net of meanings that seems to be related with the life of humanity and my life). When I made my first discovery, in which there was already the seed of the conclusions that I offer now, I was like the kid who has just received a toy and doesn’t know how to use it, nor what it is for. The necessary books arrived to me, in an unpredictable way, like Graves said that arrived to him: I came across with them, without looking for them. Literally, I entered to a bookshop, and like in trance, something was taking me directly to them. I didn’t even read the most of them, but I knew where to find them when I needed them. As Graves says, “this presupposed that the knowledge existed and it was accessible and, consequently, the books coincided then with my necessities” and then “I could form reasonably an order of the ideas into which I arrived without reason”. Despite that, I tried the possible combinations after all, such that the first intuition passed all the obstacles of the methodical doubt.

The case is that, as I progressed in my investigations, I saw that it could have certain transcendence, since, surprisingly the discoveries indicated certain class of relations between the geographical features of the surroundings of Jaén and the model in the Tarot, the symbols used in the Alchemy, the signs of the zodiac, the letters of the sacred Greek alphabet… and then the musical notes, the colours, the old myths, etc. The symbolism impressed in the landscape and the disposition in the city, inherited from the old sanctuary became so clear that any doubt seemed to me superfluous, while the information they were adding reinforced that first discovery. I discovered afterwards that myths and symbols lived inside me, that they were the matter of my dreams, but, as well, that they could transmit facts that happened before History. Facts that for not being historical were not less real: love affairs between the rivers, mountains and cities, towns named as their national hero, their king or the capital of their kingdom… confusion in the names, never in the concepts, nor a mistake in the genealogy. It was then my obligation to follow them to the primordial garden, to the origin.

Now I have a treasure in my hands, but am incapable to take all the use my own. That is why I decided to reveal it to the public, that is why I published this blog, that is why I’m giving lessons about it, that is why I look for an editor for the Jana Notebooks, and that is why I’m giving this interview.

- But to my understanding you still haven’t given any definitive proof. And without proofs I think it is too ridiculous to affirm things like you say.

- Proof; I’m afraid that what you can call definitive proof is never going to be presented. There are no documents; maybe the last one was lost with the unburied bishop (the bishop Suarez) from the Cathedral of Jaen. That is why I don’t think that historical proofs can be given, for me or anyone else, at least for now. What I affirm it is based on, however, is signs and evidences that I can’t develop here completely and some others that I don’t tell just for precaution. On the other side, I’m not the first nor the only one that affirms that, as Ortega and Gasset said, “indicios que se acumulan nos hacen entrever que antes de soplar el viento de los influjos históricos desde Egipto y, en general, desde el Mediterráneo oriental hacia el occidental había reinado una sazón de ráfagas opuestas”. I don´t know if you know about the book El Jardín de las Hesperides by J.M. Paredes Grosso, in which he affirms: “Este misterioso Jardín de Occidente (…) es el escenario de grandes mitos, algunos de trascendencia universal en el Mundo Antiguo. Y es probable lugar de origen de una antiquísima religión, eco de una civilización anterior a la Helénica, y de la que ésta tomaría muchos de sus fundamentos”.

I assure you that if there is not conclusive proof that this territory, which today we call Andalucía, was in the past (with the meridional east and the Portuguese Algarbe) the territory of the first civilization (at least in the etymological sense of civis, city) and that the sanctuary of Oringi (which the pre-roman natives use to call Jaén) was used as the reference for the platonic myth of Atlantis, there is proof to reveal the mystery related with its landscape (which the old cultures, as today the traditionalist, considered sacred), in which their vision of the world was represented, and consequently, could be considered as the original model of the old art and science. Of this last one I can give proof since I have deciphered what each one of its elements mean and their relation with the group.

It is curious that the territory of Jaén was the only one in the Christian West that received the title of Sacred Kingdom, that its cathedral was built to house the relic of the Sacred Face, the true face of God; where the name Veronica, vera icon (from the “true image”), comes from. I already explained that I would need a book to expose all the information available to me. Eslava Galán exposed some, although he relates the mystery with a concrete object, a table… when in reality the secret it is in the landscape and the design of the city, in its disposition, measures and orientation of its monuments… As I described in my blog the Jaina are lined up to the direction of the sunset in the solstice of summer pointing in straight line to Finisterre or end of the earth, which religious enclave is as anyone knows Santiago de Compostela, and it passes through significant places like Arjona (where the famous gravestone is found), the sanctuary of the Virgin of the Head, the monastery of Guadalupe, Yuste… This is to the Northeast and in the opposite direction: Mágina, Guadix, Almería (concretely the village of the Millares).

On the other side, the towers of the cathedral of Jaén point with an angle in relation to the axis North-South of 23º, which is of the ecliptic in respect to the celestial Equator, to Quiebrajano (the quebrada of Jano, the double roman God related with the circle of the year and with the solstices), Colomera (town of Granada where the shepherd that discovered the Virgin of the Head, Granada, the Alhambra, Sierra Nevada, came from). They are leys, as the English call them (check for La memoria de la Tierra, The Memory of the earth, by Paul Devereux) that relate the territory with the movement of the stars, and in the case I mentioned, they are linked with the origin and the end of the line of the sunset and sunrise in the solstices, in which centre the megalithic astronomical observatory or the old sanctuary of Oringi (Origin)is situated; a reflection or model of the world.

We talked about the Cosmic Tree already present in the vision of the cosmos of the Chamans (check for example Chamanism by Mircea Eliade), then represented as the Tree of the Paradise, which is the one sculpted in the gothic cenefa of the Cathedral of Jaén. By understanding one we understand the other. Do I explain myself? I’m only trying, by summarising a lot, to give clues. And what I mentioned is only part of the mystery, do you understand? Maybe he was referring to Manuel Muñoz Garnica “maybe the last of those who looked for the Table of Solomon”, according to Eslava Galán, or the last one that discovered its secret and, by the way, got rich through the archaeological treasures he found -when he said in one text date in 1846: “the Mezquita and the library of the moor were the temple and the science of the East and the West”.

- From which we can deduce the true name of God or Name of Power, the Hebrew Shem Shemaforash.

- Evidently, that is why I keep it quiet.