Mysteries Magazine Reviews

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The Lost Treasure of King Juba

The Evidence of Africans in America Before Columbus

By Frank Joseph ISBN: 1-59143-006-2$18, Bear & Co., 2003

This is a story about a treasure cave. Tales about gold and jewels hidden in chambers

beneath the earth have been part of human folklore since earliest days. Remember Ali

Baba’s cave? Occasionally such underground hiding places turn out to be real, and once

in a rare while they actually contain treasure.

This book about the mysterious Burrows Cave in southern Illinois by Frank

Joseph, editor of Ancient American magazine, is tantalizing and frustrating. The historical

hypothesis underlying it – refugees from Roman-era Morocco fleeing to the New World

– is fairly well constructed and described. The problem begins when the story moves to

Illinois. Then things begin to unravel.

According to the book’s theory, the ruling elite of Mauretania (present-day

Morocco and Algeria) fled by sea from attacking Roman legions. They took with them

the royal Mauretanian treasures, including the gold sarcophagi of Queen Cleopatra Selene

(daughter of the famous Cleopatra) and King Juba II. They also took Juba’s

“encyclopedic library,” assembled from all parts of the ancient world by this renowned

scholar king and man of science. In about 40 AD, the Mauretanian fleet sailed west, usingthe same prevailing currents that carried Columbus to the Americas 14 centuries later.

The fleet sailed through the Caribbean and up the Mississippi to the Ohio River,

then the Wabash, then the Embarras River. The Mauretanians settled in what is now

Richland County, Illinois. They improved a network of natural caverns, and buried the

royal treasures and library in its chambers.

Fast-forward to April 2, 1982: Russell E. Burrows, a woodworker and amateur

caver, discovers the cave of the Mauretanians. He finds mounds of gold coins and ingots,

a bowl of diamonds, golden life-sized statues, gold coffins, armor, black discs carved

with human portraits and jugs crammed with scrolls written in a strange language.

Well, more than 20 years have passed since the alleged discovery, and Burrows

Cave remains an enigma. Controversy continues to swirl over three points:



(1) Where is the cave? Burrows apparently blew up the entrance, and won’t say where it

is. He seems to fear being prosecuted for violating burial laws.

(2) What happened to the gold? Some claim Burrows removed it, melted it down and

sold it. He says he put it back in the cave after photographing it.

(3) What are the black discs? There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of portraits of

Roman-era heads in profile. Many are now kept at the Sonotabac Indian Mound Museum

in Vincennes, Indiana. Some claim they are modern frauds.

For this reviewer, another question nags: What happened to the vast “encyclopedic

library” of Juba II? The only hint is the report of some scrolls in jars inside the cave.

Burrows claims he hasn’t touched these. But they are the one thing that could prove the

legitimacy of his claims, if the old scripts can be identified and the scrolls subjected to

carbon-14 dating.

- Bob Lebling



The Magdalene Legacy

The Jesus and Mary Bloodline Conspiracy

By Laurence Gardner ISBN: 0-00-720186-9

$27.95, Element, 2005

For fans of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, here is a serious look at the facts and

fictions behind one of the novel’s central conspiracy threads – that Jesus Christ married

Mary Magdalene and created a royal bloodline that moved from Palestine to the south of

France. The author uses very careful research to show us which elements of the novel are

based on reality and which are simply imaginative fictional tools used to advance the plot

of Brown’s book.

Gardner, a historian and author of several books on the Holy Grail and other ancient mysteries, makes a persuasive case for the claim that Mary Magdalene was

actually Jesus’s wife. He shows us that the Magdalene was not a prostitute, as Church

leaders have claimed. Her important role in the early Christian community was

suppressed and she personally was discredited during a political battle for control of the

Church between the original Jerusalem-based followers of Jesus, led by his brother James

the Just, and the Rome-based faction led by Peter and Paul. Eventually the Rome-based

leadership prevailed, and the Jerusalem church was ruthlessly suppressed. Much of this

story has never really been a secret, Gardner maintains, but the evidence has been a bit

difficult to pull together. This book does a creditable job in this area.

Jesus and Mary Magdalene had three children, according to the evidence: a

daughter Tamar (Damaris), and two sons, Jesus II Justus and Josephes. Jesus Christ

appears to have survived the Crucifixion due to a deception (as the Muslims have always

contended), carried out with the help of Simon Magus, and lived for many more years,

dying in about AD 73. He is said to have continued his ministry, preaching in such places

as Crete, Malta and central Asia Minor – perhaps even India.

The Magdalene went to Provence with her children, under the protection of James

the Just, who had been discredited as leader of the “heretical” Jerusalem-based church.

James, incidentally, went by another name familiar to all of us: Joseph of Arimathea. The

bloodline of the Desposyni or “royal family” of Jesus (descended from the Hebrew House



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of David) was reputedly carried on in Provence by Christ’s second son Josephes, and

became one of the lines that made up the Merovingian dynasty of medieval France.

Gardner sets forth his arguments with skill and with abundant footnotes. He also

deflates some of the claims set forth in The Da Vinci Code:

• Leonardo Da Vinci’s own notes about his painting, The Last Supper , prove that

the feminine-looking figure to his right is not Mary Magdalene, but indeed a

youthful John, whose appearance is in keeping with Renaissance tradition.

• Jesus’s “Beloved Disciple” was not the Magdalene but Lazarus, whose given

name was Simon Zelotes, and who was one of those in Jesus’s circle who

accompanied the Magdalene to Provence.

• The Priory of Sion registered as a French society in 1956 by Pierre Plantard and

several others, was essentially a hoax, as was the false genealogy it propagated

claiming Plantard was descended from the Merovingians.

Gardner also presents us with a number of other historical surprises, most

convincingly argued. He asserts that Mary Magdalene, far from being a prostitute, was

raised as a type of nun in an ascetic religious community at Qumran, to be joined in

dynastic marriage with eventually with Jesus. The wedding feast at Cana, mentioned in

the Gospels, was the celebration of this betrothal. Mary Magdalene is also identified as

the author of the Gospel of John.

The Da Vinci Code, of course, is a novel, whose plot was woven from various

historical conspiracy theories, some of them persuasive and some not so convincing. This

book, on the other hand, has a much greater burden, since it purports to be true. In my

opinion, the author has done a fine job of making his case.

-- Bob Lebling



The Gospel of Thomas

The Gnostic Wisdom of Jesus

Translation from the Coptic, introduction and commentary by Jean-Yves Leloup ISBN: 1-59477-046-8

$14.95, Inner Traditions, 2005

In AD 397 at the Council of Carthage, the bishops of the Christian Church, under the

direction of the Emperor Constantine, compiled the collection of scriptures we call the

New Testament. This collection consisted of gospels, epistles and other writings related

to the life of Jesus Christ and his Apostles. Many works did not make the cut at Carthage,

either because they were considered spurious or because they did not meet the doctrinal

requirements of the Roman Church.

The rejected works became known as the Apocrypha. The Church did its best toroot out and destroy these writings, but a number of them survived. One of the survivors

is the Gospel of Thomas, one of 53 ancient parchments known as the Nag Hammadi

library, discovered in the desert of upper Egypt in 1945, which have revolutionized the

study of early Christianity.

The Gospel of Thomas is not a narrative of the life of Jesus, but rather a collection

of his reputed sayings and aphorisms. The document was first translated into English

from Sahidic Coptic, an Egyptian tongue that succeeded the language of the Pharaohs, in

1959. The Apostle Didymus Judas Thomas is perhaps best known to us today as

“Doubting Thomas,” because, as the story goes, he refused to believe that Jesus had risen

from the dead until he put his hand in his lord’s wounds.

In this edition, French scholar Jean-Yves Leloup has given us a new translation of

the Gospel of Thomas, alongside the original Coptic text, as well as a commentary on

each of the 114 logia, or sayings, of Jesus (here called by his Aramaic name Yeshua) that

were collected by Thomas.

Here, for example, is one of the shorter logia (singular: logion):

Logion 82

Yeshua said:

Whoever is near to me

Is near to the fire.



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Whoever is far from me

Is far from the Kingdom.

This particular saying demonstrates well that the Gospel of Thomas is both

independent of the canonical New Testament and parallel to it. The saying was quoted by

a number of early Christian writers, including Origen.

Interestingly, in the Gospel of Thomas (Logion 12), Jesus names his brother

James, and not Peter, as Christ’s successor on earth. He tells his disciples: “Go to James

the Just: All that concerns heaven and earth is his domain.” There was in fact a

Jerusalem-based Christian church under James’s leadership, which eventually lost out to,

and was eliminated by, the Rome-based church of Peter and Paul.

The Gospel of Thomas, like the rest of the Nag Hammadi parchments, is an

example of Gnostic Christianity, a strain of belief that focuses on the quest for self-

knowledge, and on becoming one with the universe and God. This approach was

considered heresy by the Roman Church.

Leloup’s commentaries focus on these reputed aphorisms of Jesus as examples of

Gnostic wisdom, compares them with canonical New Testament materials and presents

them as nuggets for personal meditation.

Even those who do not choose to use the Gospel of Thomas for their own self-

enlightenment will find this material fascinating. The sayings, presented by Thomas asthe actual words of Jesus, offer a different and refreshing glimpse into the early Christian

world.

-- Bob Lebling

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Earth Under Fire

Humanity’s Survival of the Ice Age

By Paul LaViolette, Ph.D. ISBN: 1-59143-052-6

$20.00, Bear & Company, 2005

LaViolette, who holds degrees in physics and systems science, is president of the

Starburst Foundation, a scientific research organization based on his stunning theories

about the cosmos. For a number of years he was praised by conventional scientists for his

brilliance and creativity. Now he is viewed by these scientists with some suspicion.

LaViolette’s papers still appear in mainstream science journals. But he makes the

establishment nervous, because he believes the Big Bang Theory is obsolete, and because

he is convinced that the earth has been – and will continue to be -- slammed periodically by cosmic-ray “superwaves” from the core of our galaxy, the Milky Way.

These superwaves, according to the theory, are generated by periodic galactic

core explosions. They push vast quantities of cosmic dust to the far reaches of the

galaxy’s disc. The explosions are said to occur about every ten thousand years. The last

one, according to LaViolette, heated up the sun and brought on a period of global

warming that ended the last Ice Age. That cosmic event occurred about twelve thousand

years ago, and lasted “anywhere from several hundred to several thousand years.” He

suggests that we may be overdue for another one.

LaViolette was the first to discover high concentrations of cosmic dust in polar

ice cores dating back to the Ice Age. This discovery has not gone unchallenged; some

opponents have claimed the ice samples were somehow contaminated – but no one has

been able to prove it.

Earth Under Fire argues that human memories of the last galactic superwave and

the cataclysms it wrought are encoded in a wealth of ancient legends and myths,

including those of the ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks, Hindus and even Native

American peoples like the Mayans and Aztecs. LaViolette has been developing this

hypothesis since the 1970s, and has marshaled an impression array of information to

support it. He was first drawn to this notion by the celestial zodiac, when he discovered

that the arrow of Sagittarius and the stinging tail of Scorpio were both pointing toward



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the center or core of the Milky Way. Of course, when we deal with myths and legends,

we are in the realm of metaphor and imagination. It’s pretty unstable territory.

On a scientific level, LaViolette paints a fascinating picture of the cosmos, once

the reader has mastered his often-complex fundamentals. Basic to his cosmology is a

physics theory he calls subquantum kinetics, which still has far to go in winning support

from the scientific establishment. Subquantum kinetics provides the justification for the

galactic core explosions. He sees these eruptions not as evidence of black holes, as some

Big Bang theorists would assume, but as examples of the continuous creation of matter

and energy, a hypothesis advanced years ago by astronomers supporting the Steady State

theory of the universe, such as Sir James Jeans and Sir Fred Hoyle.

To understand where LaViolette is going with this book, it helps to read his

earlier work, Beyond the Big Bang: Ancient Myth and the Science of Continuous

Creation (1995). A concept explained in that book, etherons, furnishes the underpinning

for the constant creation of energy and matter in the galactic center of each galaxy.

LaViolette describes etherons as extremely small subatomic particles that constitute the

“transmuting ether” permeating the universe. These etherons, which have neither mass

nor charge, can change from one state to another in “chemical-like” reactions, and in fact

are responsible for the creation of matter and energy.

Readers may recall that the “ether” is an ancient concept that goes back beyondAristotle. The concept of a pervading substance in the universe has been largely rejected

by modern science, but it can’t totally be ruled out, as LaViolette argues. His etherons,

however, have a problem that this reviewer hasn’t been able to resolve.

LaViolette says that because etherons have no mass or charge, they cannot be

measured or even detected, and “thus we cannot know for sure the true nature of

etherons” ( Beyond the Big Bang , p. 61). If that’s so, then we have to take the very

existence of etherons – and the entire theory of subquantum kinetics -- on faith. That

doesn’t leave us much to be certain about.

-- Bob Lebling

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