According to the Secret Dossiers of the Priory of Sion, discovered by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail in the Parisian Bibliotheque Nationale, the Priory broke away from its military arm, the Knights Templar, in the year 1188, during a ceremony called the Cutting of the Elm.
The relationship between the above account and the separation of the Order of Sion from the Knights Templar is not exactly clear. But the separation from the Templars was not the only change to occur at this time for the Ordre de Sion. They are said to have changed their name to the Prieure de Sion, and to have appended to that title two subtitles. One was the Ordre de la Rose-Croix Veritas or the Order of the True Rose-Cross. The other was Ormus, the name also given to a Gnostic mystic from Alexandria who founded, according to Masonic tradition, an order of initiates in the year 46 A.D., and who employed the Rose Cross as his symbol.
The name Ormus is itself very suggestive, for the word orme is French for elm. But the word orme in more ancient languages, such as Sumerian and Babylonian, means worm, or serpent. Therefore, cutting of the elm could be a play on words referring to the cutting of the serpent. The serpent was a symbol of both the night sky, and the alphabet.
The mystical significance of the Hebrew alphabet has become a science studied not just by Jews, but by all Hermeticists for at least the last few centuries. When the Knights Templar invented the system of the Tarot, each card corresponded to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. When the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn created their extremely complex system of the Rose-Croix symbol, the rose in the center contained three rings of twenty-two petals, each ring consisting of three, seven, and twelve petals, respectively. On each petal was placed a letter of the Hebrew alphabet. These corresponded to what are traditionally called the three mother letters of the Hebrew alphabet, followed by the seven planetary letters, and the twelve letters corresponding to the zodiac.
However, it is my opinion that the story of the Cutting of the Elm refers to a similar cabalistic system using not the Hebrew alphabet, but our modern twenty-six letter alphabet, and to a zodiac system that has been kept secret by the Priory of Sion for over a thousand years. This system was revealed by the discovery of the Compass of Enoch with the English Alphabet, arranged according to the Atbash cipher.
This 26-pointed configuration provides an obvious number correspondence for each letter of the alphabet, although it does not merely go in chronological order, with A being 1 and Z being 26. When the alphabet is placed upon the Compass of Enoch according to certain clues, it is split in half at the M, and then the rest is turned backwards, mirroring the first half in perfect symmetry, giving Z the value of 14, and N the value of 26. Therefore, A is on the opposite side of the wheel to Z, showing a reflective relationship between the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. Between the letters zigzags a continuous line that connects each letter to its opposite. This line is the equivalent of the Teli serpent (the Orm) which encompasses the Hebrew alphabet, and the zigzagging is similar to the way in which the Serpent of Wisdom zigzags its way up the Tree of Life in the Hebrew cabala. The reason why the serpent zigzags in this fashion is exactly because the alphabet has been cut at the M. Is this division of the alphabet what the Cutting of the Elm story is supposed to signify? The title Ormus that the Priory of Sion took on after the Cutting of the Elm was written with the letters O, R, and E placed inside of the middle letter, M, which was written like the astrological symbol for Virgo – a sign that resembles an M combined with an Ichthys fish symbol. Since M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, and five plus eight equals thirteen, it has been speculated that this was a code for MM – Mary Magdalene, but in another sense, it could also be a code for this particular cipher system. Thirteen plus thirteen is twenty-six, i.e., the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, which, on the Compass of Enoch, is split at the thirteenth letter, the M. And the Compass of Enoch also creates a geometric shape that includes a pattern of thirteen oblong M’s.
The number thirteen is very important in the occult, but especially to the Freemasons, the Knights Templar, and the Merovingians. The number thirteen is also integral to the founding of the United States, which began with thirteen colonies that turned into the first thirteen states, and which were represented on our first flag as thirteen hexagonal stars.
However, this translation appears to have no basis in reality. All one needs is a simple Latin dictionary. “Annuit” means circuit – like the circuit of the zodiac in the night sky, and the precession of the equinox. This meaning is further encoded into the word “Annuit’ itself. “Annu” relates to “Anno”, which means circle, and year, while “Nuit” means night in French, and is related to the Egyptian word for night, “Nut”. “Coeptis” means new beginning. So the statement being made here is, perhaps, that at the beginning of the new astrological age – Aquarius – we will have a new secular order on Earth, symbolized by the eye and the pyramid.
In the magazine called CIRCUIT, published in the forties and fifties by the Priory of Sion, they describe a thirteen-house zodiac system, with the insertion of the constellation of Ophiuchus – “the Serpent-Holder”, constituting the extra house. They also published a poem called Le Serpent Rouge (The Red Serpent), written, it would appear, by their Grand Master, Jean Cocteau. This poem consisted of thirteen stanzas, each dedicated to one of these zodiac houses, starting with Aquarius and ending with Capricorn. Here we have two very distinct references to the zodiac and the serpent. Ophiuchus, the Serpent-Holder, was the constellation that traditionally rules over the science of medicine, just like Mercury. It therefore makes sense that Ophiuchus would be a zodiacal representation of Mercury, and should be symbolized, just like the god and planet Mercury, by the caduceus, a winged staff intertwined with two serpents. The serpent of the thirteen-house zodiac could be equated with the implied serpent, or Orm, of the Compass of Enoch, and the twenty-six-letter alphabet could be applied to this thirteen-house system, with two letters assigned to each house. Since there was so much emphasis in the clues to the Grail mystery equating the sign of Virgo with the letter M, it made sense to make that one of Virgo’s letters on the wheel.
Thirteen. There’s that number again. It occurred to me that the “Thirteen Rose-Croix” might relate to the cabala of the modern alphabet implied by the Compass of Enoch, and that this shape might, in fact, play the same role as the rose cross which contains the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet in the Hebrew cabala. It could be considered a “thirteen-petaled rose” containing the twenty-six letters of our modern alphabet. The average number of petals on each type of flower is always Fibonacci numbers, a number sequence that reflects the growth pattern of nature, and which includes the number thirteen. Stan Tenen (whose pet theory is that all ancient alphabets were based upon the Fibonacci spiral) refers in one of his lectures to a structure which he calls the “thirteen-petaled rose”, a set of twelve spheres arranged around a thirteenth sphere, which is the most compact three-dimensional structure possible, and which occurs repeatedly in nature.
How might these numbers from the Priory of Sion relate to the thirteen-house zodiac? I decided to subtract thirteen from each of the numbers that would not divide evenly by nine, and then try the division again:
28 is the average number of days in a lunar cycle, and there are thirteen lunar cycles in a solar year, making the 364-day lunar calendar observed by some of our ancestors, with thirteen months of exactly 28 days each. 364 is the exact number of days it takes for the Moon to travel through the zodiac. Also, 364 is very close to the number of days (365.2424) in our current solar year. Throwing caution to the wind, I decided to speculate: What would happen if we actually did observe a 364-day calendar? What would happen if, at some time in the past, the solar year had corresponded precisely with the lunar year?
The answer is that then we could have a perfect calendar, consisting of thirteen months of 28 days, each dedicated to one of the thirteen houses of the zodiac. Also, we could still have 7 days in a week, exactly four weeks in each month, and exactly 52 weeks in each year. But in this system, all months would begin and end on the same day of the week, and would match each other perfectly. Since each zodiac sign would correspond to a single month, all zodiac periods would be of equal length, with no “cusps”, and everyone could easily determine which sign a person was born under simply by knowing the month of their birth. One could even break down the hours in a day into a thirteen-based system. We could split the day into twenty-six hours, each consisting of fifty-two minutes, which would in turn consist of fifty-two seconds each. That would give you a total of 25, 590, 656 seconds in a year.
For thousands of years, men have been trying to create an “aliquot calendar”, a perfect system that would synthesize both the solar and lunar cycles with exact, whole numbers. But as Duncan Steel remarks in Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar, “We have been stymied by the fact that the solar day and the lunar month are not an aliquot part of the year. That is, there does not appear to be an exact integer number of days in the year defined by Earth’s orbit or lunations in that year. However, he also remarks that, “it has not always been this way. About 1.5 billion years ago there were precisely fourteen lunar months in a year, each lasting for thirty-one solar days, but there was no one around to notice the fact and construct a calendar based upon it.”
One of the most significant factors, however, is called “tidal drag”, a force caused by the ocean tides, which are in turn caused by the gravitational attraction of the Moon. This is causing the rotation of the Earth to slow down, making it probable that we will reach a 364-day solar year at some point.
The Priory of Sion is a secret society preserving ancient knowledge, most of which originated during the “Golden Age”, at least 10,000 years ago – an age associated with the utopian empire of Atlantis, and the fabled Garden of Eden. This “Golden Age”, in which the Hermetic sciences supposedly originated, was dominated by the concept of “As above, so below”, the idea that the heavens and the Earth are connected via a harmonious relationship, one reflecting the other, and the idea that nature tends to create mathematically harmonious relationships between all aspects of creation. One of the most consistent harmonious relationships recurrent in nature involves what’s known as the Phi ratio, or, more commonly, the “golden ratio”.
The Fibonacci sequence is the basic growth pattern of nature. Expressed in whole numbers the sequence begins with 0 and 1, mimicking the creation of the universe, in which the whole of existence emerged as the undivided Monad out of the unmanifested Void. Then, another 1 is added, making 2, the next stage in the creation of the universe, in which the undivided Monad split into the duality of two opposing aspects (such as light and dark, male and female.) When the numbers are divided by one another to form ratios (1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 5/3, 8/5, 13/8), the results, graphed on an x/y axis, form an undulating wave that starts out large and flattens out at an exponential rate towards an asymptote of 1.6180339, with an endless series of decimals at the end. This number called in mathematics “the Phi ratio”.
The golden spiral, sequence and ratio can be found in the visual color spectrum, and in the thirteen-note musical scale. The vibration of each note is the sum of the vibrations of the two notes previous. The structure of a piano keyboard reflects this, with eight white keys, representing whole tones, and five black keys, representing sharps and flats, arranged in groups of threes and two, for a total of thirteen notes in a full octave. This contains the Fibonacci sequence of 2, 3, 5, 8, and 13.
Perhaps, our solar system also contains Fibonacci relationships. It is like a whirlpool, or vortex, with the Sun as its “calm eye” in the center, the asymptote of the spiral that is always approached but never reached. Leonardo da Vinci, a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion, once said: “A vortex, unlike a wheel, moves faster towards its center”, and this is true of our solar system as well, where Mercury has a year that lasts for 88 of our days, while Pluto’s year lasts for 248 of our years. But there is also a “golden relationship” between the orbits of each of our planets. This Phi relationship can be found between each of the planetary orbits in sequence, although the pattern gradually breaks down towards the outer planets, while still approaching Phi. This relationship between the planetary orbits is expressed in Johannes Kepler’s “Third Law of Planetary Motion”. which states that:
Clearly, planets orbiting our Sun tend towards a circular orbit. Venus’s orbit is the most circular, with an eccentricity of only .0068, while Earth’s is still a mere .0167. As with the Golden relationship between the orbits, the tendency towards a circular orbit lessens as the planets get further away from the Sun. Is that just a property of the lesser gravitational pull from the Sun? Or was there some cataclysmic celestial event that may have occurred to “mess up” the beautiful symmetrical orbits that all planets once had, and also messed up the Golden relationships between their orbits? Whatever the case, I began to wonder, for the sake of the perfect calendar, what it would be like if the Earth had a perfectly circular orbit. Furthermore, assuming that the cataclysm had also tilted the axis of the Earth, I factored in the possibility that the Earth’s axis may have been perfectly perpendicular to its orbital plane.
So what would happen? Such conditions would create a virtual Paradise on Earth, a true golden age. There would be no seasons. The middle portions of the Earth would be perfectly temperate all year round. Daylight and nighttime would always last for the same amount of time every day. But during this proposed golden age, these properties would have been easy to observe with the naked eye. Also, because the day is always the same length, there would be no solstices, just a perpetual equinox, and without the wobble in the Earth’s axis, there would be no Precession of the Ages.
I had been wondering for some time how the 364-day calendar would fit in with the precession. The number of years in the precession is usually rounded up to 26,000, which is, of course, a multiple of 13. If it did take exactly 26,000 years and we did have a thirteen-sign zodiac, there would be exactly 2000 years between each astrological age. It could be joined with the symbol of the alphabet on the Compass of Enoch, and each of the letters would represent a 1000 year period, two of them then representing an astrological age.
But currently, the precession takes exactly 25,920 years, a multiple of nine, as well as 360 x 72 (reminding one of the angles found in a golden triangle, and in a pentagram, which are 72º and 36º). This is because the zodiac is a perfect 360° circle, split up into twelve houses of 30° each, in which it takes 72 years to travel from one house to the next.
If you were to draw a pentagram inside of this circle, it would split the sky into five sections of 72° each. It occurred to me that the Priory of Sion numbers that were divisible by 9 might multiply evenly into 25,920. This worked for 27 and 81, but not for any of the higher numbers. However, there was a much larger number, derived from the precession of the equinox that every single one of these numbers multiplied evenly into. It is called “the Nineveh Constant,” and the relationships that it bears to the revolutionary cycles of the heavenly bodies are rather amazing.
What if the Earth’s orbit had originally been 360 days, like the Sumerians believed, and had been perfectly circular? That may be why they based their 360° circle and metric system on it. It also would have matched up with the zodiac cycle and with the circumference of the Earth. There may have been no moon to slow down the rotation of the Earth at that time. All of the other planets would also have perfectly circular orbits, with perfect golden relationships to one another. Then the unknown calamity occurred, which disturbed these orbits. Perhaps it was a large comet that passed through the solar system, bending the perfectly circular orbits with its gravity, smashing into the planet that once stood where the crumbled asteroid belt now lies, tilting the axis of the Earth and depositing the Moon into our orbit.
Perhaps this event, if it did indeed occur, is what is memorialized in the story of the Garden of Eden. During the Golden Age, the Earth itself was Eden, lush and temperate all year long. Man had no knowledge of hardship or climatic change. Then came the cataclysm and the appearance of the Moon. This event is synonymous with the “Cutting of the Elm (or Orm)” story, which also involves an (implied) serpent, and a sacred tree. The serpent of the night’s sky was “severed in half” by the tilt of the Earth, due to the cataclysm, which skewed our view of the zodiac ring, whereas before, the Earth had traveled through the zodiac in a perfect loop perpendicular to the axis of the Earth. Furthermore, the wobble in the axis was introduced, and the Earth began to precess backwards through the zodiac. Perhaps this is why, in the Compass of Enoch alphabet system, the last thirteen letters are wrenched backwards. The relationship between the Earth and the serpent of the zodiac (from which, I have postulated, many ancient alphabetic and numerical systems were derived) became upset, and thus the meaning of both the letters and the numbers became lost.
In this theory, prior to the “Cutting of the Orm” there were no “equinoxes” or “solstices” to be observed. The Earth was in a perpetual “equinox” every day. The French word for “midday” is based on the Latin “meridian”. The Sun is always at its meridian in regards to Freemasonry, states an old Masonic motto.
The acquirement of the Moon introduced a new “silver” element into a world that was previously “golden”, or entirely solar-based. The Sun is always associated with gold in Hermeticism and the Moon with silver. The relationship between the Sun and the Moon, from a Hermetic point of view, is a reflective one, similar to the “As above, so below” relationship between Heaven and Earth. The Moon produces no light in itself, but merely reflects the light of the Sun, like a mirror, making it a male/female relationship as well. The union of the Sun and the Moon is considered to be one of the greatest secrets of the Hermetic science of alchemy, which creates the Philosopher’s Stone perhaps referring to the new harmony that is now still forming between the Sun and the Moon in relation to the Earth.
With the introduction of the Moon, the tilted axis, and the elliptical orbit, we began to have seasons, with regular periods of death and rebirth in nature.
The Priory of Sion numbers, based on both 9 and 13, are pointing towards this equilibrium between the Sun and the Moon. Nine would naturally be, for a number of reasons, associated with the Sun. The Sun is the eye in the vortex, providing the gravitational glue that keeps the solar system together – a solar system made up of nine planets. Each of these planets contains in its orbit and rotation the nine-based Nineveh number, and these number correspondences occur because of the 9-based geometry of the 360° circle, which is what all planetary orbits in our solar system tend towards.
The interaction between the Sun, the Moon, and the planets amongst the serpent of the zodiac is what gave ancient man his understanding of time, and forms the basis for the systems of time-keeping which we still observe today. Of all the signs of the zodiac, it was Virgo which was seen by ancient man as being the herald of new times and ages, and she had a very particular relationship with the celestial serpent.
It is Virgo who was the inseparable companion of Mercury, a figure I have identified not only with the planet named after him, but with the constellation Ophiuchus, because Mercury’s symbol was the caduceus, and Ophiuchus was “the Serpent Holder”. Virgo also bears a resemblance to the goddess Isis, who is identified with the planet Venus so sacred to the Priory of Sion, and who is described in the poem Le Serpent Rouge as being the “eternal white lady of legend”.
Clearly, this 9 and 13-based system, the Compass of Enoch, and the 364-day calendar that they imply are among the greatest secrets preserved by the Priory of Sion, revealed for the first time in the pages of this publication.
The reaper is not a thief, he reaps only according to his duty. But he also may let the soul pass. This is the lesson. It is all about how people approach him and usually people approach him exactly the way they lived. This is known since forever and thats why he is ruling the world, why any religion, philosophy and economy is based on his rules. He is the boss.
