Introduction:

Discovering Château de Chambord

SOMETIMES we hear someone say something and we almost fall out of our chair. This was sort of like that. Only it wasn’t a chair that I almost fell out of—but a staircase. Two of them, actually.

The staircase duo in question can be found at Château de Chambord in the Loire Valley of France. They are fused together as one, without ever meeting or becoming tangled. I suspect one chap could walk up and another could walk down without ever meeting in the middle. Astonishingly, they make up a spiraling double-helix.

Now, if that doesn’t cause you to twitch your head slightly sideways, kind of like a dog who just attempted to digest a peculiar sound, then I probably need to pause here and explain something. The coiling double-helix was not discovered as our DNA molecule until geneticist James Watson and molecular biologist Francis Crick came along in 1953. Construction started on Château de Chambord in 1519. Four hundred years earlier.

I can only speculate how many tens of thousands of tourists visit the Château every year. And I can likewise only conclude, when faced with these discrepancies, that cognitive dissonance and an uncomfortable thought—forcibly brushed aside—comes with the ticket price. 15 Euros. Just so we’re clear, Francis and Crick didn’t discover anything. What they essentially did is repackage an esoteric concept and make it a reality. If you’re trying to understand what I’m talking about, then do an Intel-net search on the staff of Hermes. It’s sort of a staple of the Mysteries.

In 2019 I moved with my family to Europe. COVID-1984 was just beyond the flat horizon, and so it was the calm before the storm. Long before arriving at Normandy (actually, unlike my grandparents, it was Charles De Gaulle International Airport, and I wasn’t running alongside a tank), I had written up the original draft of this very paper: The Molecular Path of Shamanism, which deals, as the title suggests, with the shamanistic origins of the coiling double-helix. DMT and other hallucinogens comes into the narrative. It ended up in the lap of an online atheist magazine. They didn’t really know what to do with it except to repeatedly cry nuh-uh—nuh-uh, and so an article was written. Atheists have a habit of advertising themselves as intelligent, but bright minds did not win the day. If anything, robots were breaking down of their programing. Good times.

One of my self-appointed tasks in Europe was to target architectural structures that would help me become better acquainted with enlightenment thinking. This was before I even knew what the mud flood was. I ended up at Château de Chambord based upon little more than a hunch. The castle was designed in part by Michelangelo. Mm-hmm, one of the Ninja Turtles. It was the early sixteenth century, and the guy was obsessed with the double-helix. He would doodle it all over his diary pages like the crazed ravings of a Manchurian candidate.

So, imagine this.

The castle was designed to represent the New Jerusalem, with its four corners reminding us of the four corners of the Earth. You’ll find the staircase dead center. As one ascends the coiling double-helix through each floor, he finally reaches the domed ceiling in the sky. Firmament. But the staircase doesn’t end with a mere heavenly gaze, as one might imagine of the domes in Orthodox cathedrals.

It keeps going up.

The individual who has paid some 15 Euros to venture this far has hopefully already observed the various spirit entities carved into the stairway. He may have drifted off on each floor to appreciate the dragons carved into the doorways, and which represent the castle’s emblem, as well as the Apollo clock in one room, or the oddly placed Pan-endorsed date rape kit in another. He may have even noticed the Kabbalah texts as a centerpiece of knowledge in its library. But now that he has reached the firmament at Chambord, the very top floor, it should not surprise him to count hundreds of fire-breathing dragons in the heavens above, as well as half men-half beasts. Centaurs and mermen. Nephilim creatures who have only now begun to materialize.

The staircase of course does precisely what my reader is likely already suspecting it would. It breaks through. Finally rising into the sunlit world of a glass tower (or Willy Wonka’s elevator, you tell me), Michelangelo is apparently letting us in on Enlightenment cognition. At the very heart of its Scientific revolution was trans-humanist and evolutionary thinking.

They not only wanted to conquer all four corners of the earth, but heaven itself. They want New Jerusalem. And they want it on their own terms.

Part 1

Discovering the Double-Helix Molecule

GENETICIST James Watson and Francis Crick, a molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist by trade, conducted no DNA experiments of their own, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. And yet in 1953, in the final few years leading up to the space race, they discovered the DNA molecule known as the Double Helix by “drawing upon the experimental results of others” and relying on “brilliant intuition, persistence, and luck.” But there is a missing ingredient here.

As the story goes, Francis Crick burst through the front door of his Cambridge home spouting barely-legible gibberish to his wife about “two spirals twisting in opposite directions from one another.” Being herself somewhat of an artist, Odile Creek put vision to paper. And like Walt Disney with Mickey Mouse, the coiling double helix was promptly born. To celebrate, the couple met up with research partner James Watson, and the trio drunk themselves silly at a local pub. It should be noted that Crick was a devoted groupie of author Aldous Huxley. He famously threw nude parties throughout the 1950’s and 60’s. But most importantly of all, Crick was a devoted connoisseur of LSD.

What Francis Crick essentially discovered, ironically enough, is the caduceus—the staff carried by Hermes Trismegistus throughout ancient Greek mythology. One might immediately recognize the caduceus, should he have observed a pair of two intertwined snakes imprinted on ambulances and medical buildings across the world. Though—one needn’t only look there. The twin serpents of the double helix seem to slither frequently throughout the annals of Science, from the subatomic scale to the motions of celestial mechanics and even the coils of entire galaxies. There’s simply no escaping the ancient Serpent.

In Mutants & Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, author Jeffrey J. Kripal doesn’t mince his words when writing on the over-saturation of the caduceus: “It is at once the double-helix scepter of the DNA molecule, the phallic serpent who brought sex and death into the world in the myth of the Garden of Eden, and a sign of the kundalini, the two-spiraled currents of energy that are likened to a serpent as they spark and spike up, down, and around the central channel of the spinal column in Tantric yoga. Most of all, though, the caduceus is the staff of Hermes, the ancient Greek god of language and, later, occult philosophy, alchemy, and Western magic.”

The staff of Hermes has been a favorite for British comic book writer Alan Moore, who openly advertises the arts in its many varying forms to be deeply rooted in occultism. His comic book series Promethea (1999-2005) was a cauldron for occult philosophy, Jewish mysticism, the Tarot, Tantric yoga, psychedelia, sex magic, and infamous “spheres” of the Kabbalah. Regarding his use of the caduceus, Moore explains: “Magic, after all, is ruled by Hermes, his symbol, this caduceus, its double-helix serpents representing mankind’s evolution. They wind apart, and then recombine, progressing towards their ultimate synthesis—towards winged blazing Godhead.”

Yet Crick’s double-helix discovery ventures even further back than the Olympian who supplied Hermeticism to western civilization. To this the snake-worshiping Chaldeans deserve due-credit. In Babylonian Origin of Hermes, the Snake-God, and of the Caduceus (1916) A.L. Frothingham writes: “The proto-Hermes was always a snake-god, and before the era of complete anthropomorphism he was thought of in snake form. But it is an essential element of his function that he was not a single snake—for the great single Earth Snake was the Mother goddess—but the double snake, male and female, the most prolific form of copulation in the animal kingdom.”

But let’s not forget, the Egyptians also had a part in Crick’s discovery. Did Pharaoh not wear a cobra on his crown as a symbol of the divine word and third eye—the pineal gland—by which true hidden knowledge might be discovered to the initiate? In his book, The Secret in the Bible, author Tony Bushby suggests the capstone of the Great Pyramid was once a clear crystal or glass that produced a visible beacon of light from its apex. To this effect he writes: “Whenever a light is shone down into a glass pyramid in exact scale or proportion as the Great Pyramid, a ‘Rainbow Serpent’ is created. The light provides a type of force or energy that, in turn, creates the vertical spiral of light, a serpent upraised, invisible in rock, but visible in a clear substance. That is what the Ancient Egyptian Priesthood meant when they said, ‘A serpent lies coiled in the Great Pyramid.’” Bushby’s conclusion is as you might now suspect. The Rainbow Serpent, directly referenced by the priesthood, was non-other than Francis Crick’s strand of DNA.

Every continent seems to have a role in ancient serpent worship. Claude Lévi-Strauss writes of the Aztecs: “In Aztec, the word coatl means both ‘serpent’ and ‘twin.’ The name Quetzalcoatl can thus be interpreted either as ‘Plumed serpent’ or ‘Magnificent twin.’” Throughout shamanic religions, from Australia to Tibet and eastern Asia, back into Egypt again, throughout Africa, and finally North and South America, visions of “spiral ladders” or “braided ropes” cannot be overlooked either. Authors Mircea Eliade, Willard R. Trask, and Wendy Doniger write in Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, “the symbolism of the rope, like that of the ladder, necessarily implies communication between sky and earth. It is by means of a rope or a ladder (as, too, by a vine, a bridge, a chain of arnyaw, etc.) that the gods descend to earth and men go up to the sky.”

In 1961, anthropologist Michael Harner journeyed to the Peruvian Amazon rainforest to study the shamanistic religion of the Conibo Indians. In the Amazon, he encountered a world of hallucination. Upon finally ingesting the hallucinogenic substance, and according to his own account, “giant reptilian creatures” resting “at the lowest depths of his brain” began to project a series of scenes and images before his eyes. According to Harner:

“First, they showed me the planet Earth as it was eons ago, before there was any life on it. I saw an ocean, barren land, and a bright blue sky. Then black specks dropped from the sky by the hundreds and landed in front of me on the barren landscape. I could see the ‘specks’ were actually large, shiny, black creatures with stubby pterodactyl-like wings and huge whale-like bodies…. They explained to me in a kind of thought language that they were fleeing from something out in space. They had come to the planet Earth to escape their enemy. The creatures then showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant and animal creation and speciation – hundreds of millions of years of activity – took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe. I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man.” Here comes the crucial part of Harner’s testimony to the drug. “In retrospect one could say they were almost like DNA, although at that time, 1961, I knew nothing of DNA.”

Author Jeremy Narby also testifies to this bizarre Double-Helix knowledge among the shamans of the Peruvian rainforest when he writes:

“By ritually ingesting mind-altering plant mixtures, Peruvian Amazon shamans take their consciousness down to the molecular level and gain access to biomolecular information.” Elsewhere he states: “The first [plant] contains a hallucinogenic substance, dimethyltryptamine, which also seems to be secreted by the human brain; but this hallucinogen has no effect when swallowed, because a stomach enzyme called monoamine oxidase blocks it. The second plant, however, contains several substances that inactivate this precise stomach enzyme, allowing the hallucinogen to reach the brain. So here are people without electron microscopes who choose, among some 80,000 Amazonian plant species, the leaves of a bush containing a hallucinogenic brain hormone, which they combine with a vine containing substances that inactivate an enzyme of the digestive tract, which would otherwise block the hallucinogenic effect. And they do this to modify their consciousness. It is as if they knew about the molecular properties of plants and the art of combining them, and when one asks them how they know these things, they say their knowledge comes directly from hallucinogenic plants….Most remarkably, what they gain access to is the DNA strand itself, which appears to be conscious and capable of bestowing real knowledge about botany, medicine, culture, and life itself. Nature is minded. Hence the ladders and snakes seen in the shamanic visions and the cosmic serpent creation myths found around the world.”

See, this is what irks me about modern Scientists—their shameless denial. When I had the opportunity to sit down for breakfast at the Flat Earth International Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina with the resident astronomer at “Answers in Genesis,” Professor Danny Faulkner, I brought up the role in which Hermeticism and the Mystery Schools had in the shaping of western philosophy and the sciences. He immediately quipped: “No! No! No!  You have it backwards. Science came first and then the occult twisted and contorted it!”

And yet, in light of what I’ve written—and so much more which has been left out—I can only conclude the U.S. National Library of Medicine is mocking us when it writes: “The double helix has not only reshaped biology, it has become a cultural icon, represented in sculpture, visual art, jewelry, and toys.” Oh dear.

The double-snake helix, wherever it is found—from the staff of Hermes to the capstone of Egypt’s Great Pyramid, and not to be overlooked, India’s kundalini—is a “conscious entity,” if the occult has a say in it.

And let us not forget (thanks for reminding me), Francis Crick was not a fan of the Serpent’s great competitor. Being ever so disdainful towards the Gospel which promised to crush the head of the Beguiler, he once quoted: “I do not respect Christian beliefs. I think they are ridiculous. If we could get rid of them, we could more easily get down to the serious problem of trying to find out what the world is all about.”

Crick later joked: “Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.”

The man who most certainly explored the doors of perception with LSD and other narcotics would rather indoctrinate our children. Crick was pushing occultism and Freemasonry for the uninitiated.

Part 2

Discovering the Double-Helix Drug of Choice

AMONG the “Sixty” of Dr. Rick Strassman’s critical New Mexico study into the religious effects of DMT, even further evidence of the double-helix’s residency throughout “inner-space” can be found—as well as the occultist reality behind outer-space itself. Somebody named Karl was Strassman’s first volunteer.

Within two minutes of receiving his first low dose of N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, Karl is said to have reported: “There were spirals of what looked like DNA, red and green.” Strassman found that his subjects were prone to get entranced, perhaps even paralyzed, by the initial display of tie-dye colors. To this he states, “If they can go through the curtain that the colors seem to represent, there often is more information and feeling than just the colors themselves.” Upon receiving a high dose of DMT, Karl would accomplish that very task. Strassman’s first volunteer passed the cosmic curtain and entered the mystical land of machine elves once famously traversed by psychonaut Terence McKenna.

Of these elves Karl reports:

“There were a lot of elves. They were prankish, ornery; maybe four of them appeared at the side of a stretch of interstate highway I traveled regularly. They commanded the scene, it was their terrain! They were about my height. They held up placards, showing me these incredibly beautiful, complex, swirling geometric scenes in them. One of them made it impossible for me to move. There was no issue of control; they were totally in control. They wanted me to look! I heard a giggling sound—the elves laughing or talking at high-speed volume, chattering, twittering.”

Cleo was forty years-old and legally blind due to a genetic eye disorder when she volunteered for Dr. Rick Strassman’s study. Though born into a Jewish family, Cleo later turned to the Wiccan religion, and once while on LSD claimed having visions of a “past-life” experience where she burned at the stake for her participation in witchcraft. Recent experiments with mushrooms also presented otherwise forgotten memories of her father sexually molesting her as a child. So yeah, Cleo arrived with baggage.

She too met up with visions of the double-helix. “There was a spiral DNA-type thing made out of incredibly bright cubes,” she said. “I felt the boxes at the same time that my consciousness shifted.” Cleo reported going into every cell in her body. “It was amazing. It wasn’t just my body…. themselves…themselves…it’s all connected.” At the 30-minute mark, she could feel the DMT burning in her veins. She also began to speak, as Strassman reports, with more clarity. Then the patterns began. “I said to myself, ‘Let me go through you.’” Unlike Karl, Cleo journeyed into outer space.

“At that point it opened, and I was very much somewhere else. I believe it was at that point that I went out, into the universe—being, dancing with, a star system. I asked myself, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’  And then there was, ‘This is what you’ve always been searching for. This is what all of you has always been searching for.’ There was a moment of color. The colors were words. I heard what the colors were saying to me. I was trying to look out, but they were saying, ‘Go in.’ I was looking for God outside. They said, ‘God is in every sell of your body’…. The colors kept telling me things, but they were telling me things so I not only heard what I was seeing, but also felt it in my cells. I say felt, but it was like no other felt, more like a knowing that was happening in my cells. That God is in everything and that we are all connected, and that God dances in every cell of life, and that every cell of life dance in God.”

Yet another of Strassman’s “sixty” reported seeing the familiar double-helix pattern. Philip states: “The visuals were dropping back into tubes, like protozoa, like the inside of a cell, seeing the DNA twirling and spiraling. They looked gelatin-like—like tubes, inside which were cellular activities. It was like a microscopic view of them.”

And then there’s Sara, forty-two years old when she volunteered for Strassman’s New Mexico study. She claimed an “angel” had visited her once when she was stricken with a high fever as a child, and now reported “spirit guides” with whom she communicated with for advice and support. As part of Strassman’s “sixty,” Sara also claimed an excursion with the double-helix.

“I felt the DMT release my soul’s energy and push it through the DNA. It’s what happened when I lost my body. There were spirals that reminded me of things I’ve seen at Chaco Canyon. Maybe that was DNA. Maybe the ancients knew that. The DNA is backed into the universe like space travel. One needs to travel without one’s body. It’s ridiculous to think about space travel in little ships.”

Strassman writes of her low-dose experience being somewhat typical; “pleasant, relaxing, with a sense of more to come.” Actually, what began with “lots of spinning colors,” also included clowns—lots of animated clowns, which Strassman insists is a common experience for DMT travelers. On her second of four trips, Sara passed through the curtain of “the aggressive spinning colors” which were “almost familiar” by this point. She reported seeing “a pulsating entity (which) appeared in the patterns,” looking somewhat “Tinkerbell-like,” and which coaxed her to go with it. Though she did want to go with it, the drug had begun to wear off, “and I wasn’t high enough to follow it. I told it, ‘I can’t go with you now. See, they want me back.’ It didn’t seem to be offended and, in fact, followed me back until I sensed it had reached its boundary. I felt like it was saying goody-bye. Reentry was slow….”

While she agreed that “the most intense part of each trip was spent tangled up in these colors,” on her third trip she “quickly blasted through to the other side. I was in a void of darkness. Suddenly, beings appeared. They were cloaked, like silhouettes. They were glad to see me. They indicated that they had had contact with me as an individual before. They seemed pleased that we had discovered this technology. I felt like a spiritual seeker who had gotten too far off course and, instead of encountering the spirit world, overshot my destination and ended up on another planet. They wanted to learn more about our physical bodies. They told me humans exist on many levels. I needed to reconnect with my body in time for the blood pressure check and blood sampling. It was as if they, rather than Laura, were collecting the information and they appreciated my doing it for them. Somehow, we had something in common. They told me to embrace peace.”

Sara’s fourth and final DMT trip is perhaps the most interesting:

“I went directly into deep space. They knew I was coming back and they were ready for me. They told me there were many things they could share with us when we learn ow to make more extended contact. Again, they wanted something from me, not just physical information. They were interested in emotions and feelings. I told them: We have something we can give you: spirituality. I guess what I really meant was Love. I tried to figure out how to do this. I felt a tremendous energy, brilliant pink light with white edges, building on my left side. I knew it was spiritual energy and Love. They were on my right, so I reached out my hands across the universe and prepared to be a bridge. I let this energy pass through me to them, I said something like, See, there I did it for you. You have it. They were grateful. I was coming down off the DMT, losing altitude. I would have to go back.”

Sara didn’t feel comfortable in her role as an earthly spiritual emissary. To this she concluded: “I thought that the only way to encounter them is with bright lights and flying saucers in outer space. It never occurred to me to actually encounter them in our own inner space. I thought the only things we could encounter were things in our own personal sphere of archetypes and mythology. I expected spirit guides and angels, not alien life-forms.”

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Noel