Het elixer&de steen|Baigent Meehan,Richard Leigh 905121698X

||boek: Het elixer en de steen|De wereld van magische, occulte en onbekende krachten (met zwart-wit foto's)|Tirion

||door: Michael Baigent Meehan, Richard Leigh

||taal: nl
||jaar: 1997
||druk: ?
||pag.: 462p
||opm.: paperback|zo goed als nieuw|vlekjes aan bladrand

||isbn: 90-5121-698-X
||code: 1:000507

--- Over het boek (foto 1): Het elixer en de steen ---

In Het Elixer en de Steen beschrijven Michael Baigent en Richard Leigh - auteurs van onder andere de bestsellers Het heilige bloed en de heilige graal en De Dode-Zeerollen en de verzwegen waarheid - de rol die de magie, de alchemie en het hermetisme hebben gespeeld in onze beschaving vanaf het jaar nul. Die rol is veel groter dan hij op het eerste gezicht lijkt: zo gaat het bijvoorbeeld om invloeden in de geschiedenis, de kunst, de politiek, de media en het persoonlijk leven.

[bron: https--www.bol.com]

Poging om aan te tonen dat het irrationele in de vorm van alchemie, magie en geheime genootschappen een belangrijke rol heeft gespeeld in de ontwikkeling van de westerse beschaving.

[bron: https--www.bibliotheek.nl]

Het Elixer en de Steen [2006-09-30]

Eén van de boeken die ik in mijn vakantie heb gelezen - en die ik op mijn verjaardag heb gekregen is het boek van Michael Baigent en Richard Leigh: Het Elixer en de Steen.

Op vakantie in Frankrijk, in Rennes-le-Château in een kleine maar goed gevulde boekenwinkel / memoriabilia winkel heb ik een aantal boeken dus aangeschaft gekregen ter ere van mijn 33e verjaardag. In dit boek wordt ontzettend veel informatie hun filosofie en standpunten uit één gezet. Zoveel dat het voor mij niet lonend is hier een heel uitgebreid verslag van te doen maar dat simpelweg door de achterkant van het boek te laten doen:

In Het Elixer en de Steen beschrijven Michael Baigent en Richard Leigh - auteurs van onder andere de bestsellers Het heilige bloed en de heilige graal en De Dode-Zeerollen en de verzwegen waarheid - de rol die de magie, de alchemie en het hermetisme hebben gespeeld in onze beschaving vanaf het jaar nul. Die rol is veel groter dan hij op het eerste gezicht lijkt: zo gaat het bijvoorbeeld om invloeden in de geschiedenis, de kunst, de politiek, de media en het persoonlijk leven.

De alchemistische magie gaat ervan uit dat de loop der gebeurtenissen te beïnvloeden is met behulp van bepaalde kennis. Desondanks gaat het niet om een platte manipulatie van de werkelijkheid, maar om een innerlijk, geestelijk proces: de ware magiër verandert zichzelf - de innerlijke en de uiterlijke wereld vormen tenslotte een geheel.

De tegenhanger van de goede magiër is de Faust-figuur, die zijn ziel verkoopt aan de duivel om in te kunnen grijpen in een universum waarvan hij los denkt te staan. Zodra hij echter buiten de magische cirkel komt die hem beschermt, wordt hij slachtoffer van krachten die hij niet kan beheersen. Ook reclamemensen, geestelijk leiders en politici proberen de massa te manipuleren met subtiele en minder subtiele manieren van indoctrinatie. Datzelfde geldt bijvoorbeeld voor de CIA en popgroepen als de Rolling Stones. En hoeveel macht heeft de mensheid over de krachten die hij via de wetenschap heeft opgeroepen?

De moderne mens is een Faust-figuur. De vraag is alleen: wordt hij na zijn ziel te hebben verkocht, de slaaf van zijn ratio en van de techniek die hij niet beheerst, of is er nog redding mogelijk? Een uiterst boeiend overzicht van een stroming die ook voor de hedendaagse mens van essentieel belang is, al gelooft hij niet meer in de Steen der Wijzen.

Ik heb erg genoten van dit boek. Ontzettend veel informatie over wat er is gebeurd met de 'gnosis' door de eeuwen heen. Veel meer dan de boek cover hoef ik ook niet te zeggen lijkt me... alweer een échte aanrader!

Joeke-Remkus de Vries [bron: https--jr.devries.frl/2006/09/30/het-elixer-en-de-steen]

--- Over (foto 2): Michael Baigent Meehan ---

Michael Baigent (born Michael Barry Meehan, 27 February 1948 - 17 June 2013) was a pseudo-historian, who published a number of popular works questioning traditional perceptions of history and the life of Jesus. He is best known as a co-author of the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Baigent was born on 27 February 1948 in Nelson, New Zealand and spent his childhood in the nearby communities of Motueka and Wakefield. His father was a devout Catholic, and he was tutored in Catholic theology from the age of five years. After his father left the family when Baigent was eight years old, he went to live with his maternal grandfather, Lewis Baigent and took his surname. His great-grandfather, Henry Baigent served as a Nelson city mayor and had founded a forestry firm, H. Baigent and Sons.

His secondary schooling was at Nelson College, and then he moved on to the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, initially intending to study science and continue in the family career of forestry, but switched to studying comparative religion and philosophy.

After graduating in 1972, Baigent made extensive travels to different countries, as a freelancer. He did stints as a war-photographer in Laos and as a fashion-photographer in Spain, before arriving at England in 1976. Whilst working at the BBC photographic department and staking in night shifts at a soft-drinks factory, he came across Richard Leigh via a TV producer who was producing a series on Knights Templar. Leigh was to be his frequent co-author across his entire life, and together they sough to unravel the alleged mystery of Rennes-le-Château in France, whose details were put forward in Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

In 2000, Baigent also earned an MA in Mysticism and Religious Experience at the University of Kent. A Freemason and a Grand Officer (2005) of the United Grand Lodge of England, he was an editor of Freemasonry Today from Spring, 2001 to Summer, 2011 and advocated for a more liberal approach to Freemasonry.

Baigent married Jane, an interior designer in 1982 and had two daughters, Isabelle and Tansy along with two children from her earlier marriage. He died from a brain haemorrhage in Brighton, East Sussex on 18 June 2013.

Published on 18 January 1982, Holy Blood, Holy Grail popularised the hypothesis that the true nature of the quest for the Holy Grail was that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a child together, the first of a bloodline which later married into a Frankish royal dynasty, the Merovingians, and was all tied together by a society known as the Priory of Sion.

The theory that Jesus and Mary were in a carnal (physical) relationship is based on Baigent's interpretation of the Holy Kiss on the mouth (typically between males in early Christian times, thus signifying Mary's emancipation), and spiritual marriage, as given in the Gospel of Philip. It was earlier perpetuated by authors Laurence Gardner and Margaret Starbird.

The book was a bestseller at the time of publication in America; some Catholic countries chose to ban the work for blasphemy. It regained popularity after the publication of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and sold over six million copies.

On the day of publication, historian Marina Warner noted the book to be filled with lurid falsehoods and distorted reasoning. Soon enough, the authors had a public clash on a BBC broadcast with her and the Bishop of Birmingham. In a scathing review of the book for The Observer, critic Anthony Burgess wrote: "It is typical of my unregenerable soul that I can only see this as a marvelous theme for a novel." A Kirkus Review described the work as an intriguing phantasmagoria wherein the authors jumped "perilous heights to reach crazy conclusions". Colin Henderson Roberts, reviewing for London Review of Books, noted that the work advanced a preposterous hypothesis and made major blunders in its quest to get simple reductive answers from complex questions.

In the immediate aftermath of the publication of The Da Vinci Code, The New York Times Book Review deemed Holy Blood, Holy Grail to be among the all-time great works of pop pseudo-history. John J. Doherty, literature librarian at Northern Arizona University, writing in King Arthur in Popular Culture, describes of the work as being "thoroughly debunked by scholars and critics alike". Arthurian scholar Richard Barber commented the work to be a "notorious pseudo-history", which advanced its arguments on innuendo and fertile speculations, and would take a book of equal length to be dissected and refuted in entirety.

In 2005, Tony Robinson critically interrogated the main arguments of Brown, Baigent and Leigh over a program on Channel 4, and termed the entire episode to be a hoax. Arnaud de Sède, son of Gérard de Sède, stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of a 1,000-year-old Priory of Sion, and described the story as "piffle". With increasing proliferation and popularity of books, websites and films centered around Baigent's works, many critics regard the work to have been highly influential in the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories and pseudohistory in public psyche. Damian Thompson noted the book to "employ the rhetoric of authentic history, but not its method, to present myths as fact". Laura Miller writing for Salon (website) described the book to have advanced a preposterous idea in stages - first as a wild guess, then as a tentative hypothesis, and lastly as an undeniable fact - but entirely from within a miasma of bogus authenticity.

Some of the ideas presented in Baigent's earlier book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, were incorporated in the bestselling American novel The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown.

In The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown named the primary antagonist, a British Royal Historian, Knight of the Realm and Grail scholar, Sir Leigh Teabing, KBE, also known as the Teacher, in homage to the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. The name combines Richard Leigh's surname with 'Teabing', an anagram of Baigent.

In March 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed a lawsuit in a British court against Brown's publisher, Random House, claiming copyright infringement.

Concurrent with the plagiarism trial, Baigent released a new book, The Jesus Papers, amid criticism that it was just a reworking of themes from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and timed to capitalize on the marketing hype around the release of the movie The Da Vinci Code, as well as the attention brought by the trial. In the postscript to the book (p. 355), Baigent points out that the release date had been set by Harper Collins long before.

On 7 April 2006, High Court judge Peter Smith rejected the copyright-infringement claim by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, and Dan Brown won the court case. On 28 March 2007, Baigent and Leigh lost their appeal against this decision and were faced with legal bills of about 3 million pounds.

Bernard Hamilton, writing in the English Historical Review, described Baigent's treatment of The Inquisition as pursuing "a very outdated and misleading account", which ignored all modern development in Inquisition Studies and grossly exaggerated its power and influence, to the extent of being polemical. Writing in the Spectator magazine, Piers Paul Read deemed the authors to have penned a misinformed diatribe against Catholicism, with nil interest in "understanding the subtleties and paradoxes in the history of the Inquisition". A review over The Independent noted of it to be mostly drab and uncontroversial, in reiterating facts which were already known for decades but which progressively gave way to hysteria, in its bid to draw a parallel between the ancient institution and current abuse of power by Catholic authorities. Dongwoo Kim, writing over Constellations (journal) noted the book to not be a significant contribution in the field, in that it was an epitome of Whig historiography which sought for a binary categorization of the past between good and evil, whilst locating the Catholic Church as the "antithesis of modernity and liberalism".

Baigent himself conceded that none of his theories yielded any positive results: "I would like to think in due course a lot of this material will be proven," he said, "but it's just a hope of mine."

Later, he and Leigh co-authored several books, including The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991) in which they primarily followed the controversial theories of Robert Eisenman concerning the interpretation of the Scrolls. This was discredited by Otto Betz and Rainer Riesner in their book Jesus, Qumran and The Vatican: Clarifications (1994).

Bibliography

Sole author

• From the Omens of Babylon: Astrology and Ancient Mesopotamia (1994) ISBN 0-14-019480-0. 2nd edition published as Astrology in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Science of Omens and the Knowledge of the Heavens (2015) ISBN 978-1591432210
• Ancient Traces: Mysteries in Ancient and Early History (1998) ISBN 0-670-87454-X
• The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History (2006) ISBN 0-06-082713-0
• Racing Toward Armageddon: The Three Great Religions and the Plot to End the World (2009)

Co-written with Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln

• Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 1982, UK ISBN 0-09-968241-9

U.S. paperback: Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 1983, Dell. ISBN 0-440-13648-2

• The Messianic Legacy, 1986

Co-written with Richard Leigh

• The Temple and the Lodge, 1989, ISBN 0-552-13596-8
• The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, 1991
• Secret Germany: Claus Von Stauffenberg and the true story of Operation Valkyrie, 1994
• The Elixir and the Stone: The Tradition of Magic and Alchemy, 1997
• The Inquisition. 1999

Co-written with other authors

• The Astrological Journal (Winter 1983-84, Vol. 26, No. 1) with Roy Alexander, Fiona Griffiths, Charles Harvey, Suzi Lilley-Harvey, Esme Williams, David Hamblin, and Zach Mathews, 1983
• Mundane Astrology: Introduction to the Astrology of Nations and Groups (co-written with Nicholas Campion and Charles Harvey) 1984 (reissued expanded edition, 1992)
• Freemasonry Today, (editor) 2001-2011

[source: wikipedia]

--- Over (foto 3): Richard Leigh ---

Richard Harris Leigh (16 August 1943 - 21 November 2007) was a novelist and short story writer born in New Jersey, United States to a British father and an American mother, who spent most of his life in the UK. Leigh earned a BA from Tufts University, a master's degree from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Leigh met his frequent co-author Michael Baigent while living in the United Kingdom in the 1970s. They subsequently struck a friendship with the writer and British television scriptwriter Henry Lincoln in 1975 and between them developed a conspiracy theory involving the Knights Templar and the alleged mystery of Rennes-le-Château, proposing the existence of a secret that Jesus had not died on the Cross, but had married Mary Magdalene and fathered descendants who continued to exert an influence on European history. This hypothesis was later put forward in their 1982 book, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail achieved enormous commercial success and has been described as "one of the most controversial books of the 1980s". It popularised the idea that the true object of the quest for the Holy Grail was to find secret descendants of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. This bloodline is stated to have later married into a Frankish royal dynasty, the Merovingians, and to be championed and protected by a secret society known as the Priory of Sion. These notions were later used as a basis for Dan Brown's international best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code.

The day after publication, the authors had a public clash on BBC television with the Bishop of Birmingham and Marina Warner. The book rapidly climbed the best-seller charts, and the authors published a sequel, The Messianic Legacy, in 1986.

The book has been described as "a work thoroughly debunked by scholars and critics alike". Arthurian scholar Richard Barber has commented, "It would take a book as long as the original to refute and dissect The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail point by point: it is essentially a text which proceeds by innuendo, not by refutable scholarly debate".

In 1991 Leigh published The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, co-authored with Baigent. The book follows the controversial theories of Robert Eisenman regarding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Two books of Leigh's fictional works have been published: Erceldoune & Other Stories (2006), and Grey Magic (2007).

Some of the ideas presented in Baigent's earlier book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, were incorporated in the best-selling American novel The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown.

In March 2006, Baigent and Leigh filed suit in a British court against Brown's publisher, Random House, claiming copyright infringement. On 7 April 2006 High Court judge Peter Smith rejected the claim. On 28 March 2007, Baigent and Leigh lost their appeal, and were faced with legal bills of about 3m pounds.

Leigh died on 21 November 2007 in London from causes related to a heart condition.

Works

Co-written with Michael Baigent and Henry Lincoln

• The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, 1982, UK ISBN 0-09-968241-9

U.S. paperback: Holy Blood, Holy Grail, 1983, Dell. ISBN 0-440-13648-2

• The Messianic Legacy, 1986

Co-written with Michael Baigent

• The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, 1991
• The Temple and the Lodge, 1991, ISBN 0-552-13596-8
• Secret Germany: Claus Von Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler, 1994
• The Elixir and the Stone: The Tradition of Magic and Alchemy, 1997
• The Inquisition. 1999

Self published

• Erceldoune & Other Stories (2006, ISBN 978-1-4116-9943-4)
• Grey Magic (2007, ISBN 978-0-615-13733-9).

[source: wikipedia]

Richard Leigh, a writer who filed an unsuccessful lawsuit over the novel "The Da Vinci Code," died on Nov. 21 in London. He was 64.

The causes were related to a heart ailment, said an agent at the Jonathan Clowes Agency, which represents him.

Mr. Leigh was co-author of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail," a work of speculative nonfiction that proposed that Jesus Christ fathered a child and that the bloodline continues to this day. A best seller on its release in 1982, the book gained new readers after Dan Brown's "Da Vinci Code," which explores similar themes, was released.

Mr. Leigh and another co-author, Michael Baigent, sued Mr. Brown's publisher, Random House, saying that "The Da Vinci Code" "appropriated the architecture" of their book. A third "Holy Blood" co-author, Henry Lincoln, did not join the lawsuit.

In April 2006, Peter Smith, a High Court judge, threw out the claim, saying the ideas in question were too general to be protected by copyright.

The case sent "Holy Blood" back up the best-seller lists, but Mr. Baigent and Mr. Leigh were left with a bill estimated at about $6.2 million after the judge ordered them to pay 85 percent of Random House's legal costs.

An attempt to appeal the ruling was rejected earlier this year.

Mr. Baigent and Mr. Leigh collaborated on several other books, including "The Messianic Legacy," a sequel to "Holy Blood."

He never married.

[source: https--www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/arts/01leigh.html]