The 13 Gates of Arcadia

THE 13 GATES OF ARCADIA

by

J.B.VALBERE

Copyright © 2018 J.B.Valbere

All rights reserved.

Published by J.B Valbere

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE 13 GATES OF ARCADIA

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

NOTES

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is dedicated to all my students and friends, for without their comments and aid these pages would be but dust collectors in my drawers.

Special thanks are due to the following people: Elodie Olson-Coons, for editorial assistance. Luz Letamendi, for her wonderful book cover. Andrea Caffiero for his spiritual sustenance and continuing support. Katerina-Hypatia, Artemis-Ilianna, Thanassis Vembos, and Maya Yonika, who tried out the material and survived.

Last, but never least, to my wife for her encouragement and patience.

THE 13 GATES OF ARCADIA

"Dreadful wreckage

Is what Oblivion promises"

The 13 Gates of Arcadia is not an autobiographical narrative; nor is it a book of poetic theology describing the myths of a Golden Age. It constitutes the core of a Knowledge preserved for thousands of years in the Arcadian Circles and pertains to a period before Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. The 13 Gates of Arcadia is the natural connection between a spiritual tradition rooted in Arcadia and the world of a timeless community that embraced authors, painters, scientists, and philosophers of antiquity, Renaissance and modern times.

The 13 Gates of Arcadia is dedicated to the Power of Life and represents a return to wholeness. It is instrumental in directly connecting us with Existence, seeing everything as living and sacred. It provides answers to basic theological, and cosmological, questions: What is the essence and source of Good? How did disharmony come into being? What are the origins of the Universe and what are its possibilities for development? What are the origins of man and what is his future?

The 13 Gates of Arcadia acts as an initiation to the cosmic mystery. It reveals the origins, the history and the destination of human civilization, as well as the conspiracy hatched with the aim of controlling humanity. This ancient and terrible plot not only led our planet to the brink of total ecological disaster but also imposed a perceptual reality meant to lead humanity into an abyss of misery and horror.

The 13 Gates of Arcadia is a coherent web encapsulating all aspects of human knowledge. At its ontological core, it places Fear, not as a psychological condition, but as the metaphysical origin of Evil. It describes the rapacious entities that come out of the depths of darkness and pass from people to people devouring the quintessence of all living things. It discloses how, and by which methods, human civilization was alloyed and controlled: by religion, philosophy, models of human relationships and education, as well as by technology, science, politics, and economics. It explains the traumatic and murky period our planet is going through and accounts for the various reasons why man uses his powers, not for good, but to yield only famine, poverty, and spiritual confusion.

The 13 Gates of Arcadia is not a nihilistic creation myth or an allegorical interpretation of history. It does not deliver a promise coming in the future, nor is it a utopia deeply rooted in the past. It demonstrates in a systematic, and comprehensive, way those areas which call for a radical review and suggests the direction and character of these necessary changes. It is a code of conduct, an account of potentiality and a seed of rebirth for all of human civilization.

INTRODUCTION

"I've known rivers ancient as the world

and older than the flow of human blood in human veins."

Langston Hughes

This book was born in the autumn of 1992. I was in Arcadia, in the Peloponnese, marking out on a map the lost Temples and Sanctuaries of the Goddess Artemis. At that time, my research on the possible relations between the flow of Terrestrial Magnetism and the positions of ancient temples had led me to the conclusion that the alignment of the rivers and the Arcadian aquifers was related to the sanctuaries of this particular Goddess, traditionally associated with water and fertile humidity.

I visited several churches built on pre-Christian sites, and, as I was exploring the surrounding area of Olighyrtos, the mountain lying north of Kandyla, I began to have a series of vivid dreams. In one of these, I was walking on the bank of a shallow brook, flowing all the way to the middle of a valley overflowing with flowers. All of a sudden, I heard a buzzing sound, like a swarm of bees. An instant later there appeared six shining revolving spheres. Four of these lambent figures transmogrified into human beings of a dazzling brightness.

This occurrence only lasted for seconds; then the visions vanished, leaving behind a misty trace which in turn quickly faded away. Similar dreams kept occupying my sleep for the following weeks. Fragments of human faces emerged from a bluish fog, only to disappear shortly afterward. When I woke up, I could not remember what they had told me. Their words always left a sense of unspeakable expectancy, however, and they spoke of things I knew to be true.

Gradually, this multidimensional experience started to escape from the confines of sleep, invading my everyday routine. Fractured, incoherent pictures would come to me, with certain recognizable figures returning time and time again. The atmosphere was always the same; the bank of a small river, the crest of an evergreen hill, or a clearing among age-old, walnut trees. Of all these dream-like figures, the most vivid presence was that of a woman whose age I could not determine. Her body was slim, with long, muscular legs, angular features, a well-formed nose, and bow-like lips. She was tall and majestic, but behind her vivacious personality, there was something mysterious and insubstantial about her, a certain fragile grace and elegance. Our encounters were always accompanied by a sense of heat going up and down my spine, a tickling sensation and a soft hissing sound seemingly coming from the base of my skull.

It was natural that I began to worry about the nature of these incidents. I wondered whether my spiritual quest had turned me into a strange attractor which, because of my natural mystical bent, attracted such uncanny occurrences. On the other hand, my studies in existential psychology led me to different assumptions. Perhaps I was to blame for all this as I subconsciously chose and wove together pieces of repressed memories, through an arbitrary and subjective process. In all probability, I thought, my brain interprets these ‘balls of light’—so often expressed in folklore and the scientific literature of the occult— as fictitious visions, filling in the blanks.

At first, I tried to come to an understanding of the experience through analysis and a classification of the facts. I attended self-awareness courses, paying attention to psychological factors, such as the role and impact of trauma in childhood and the pathogenic dynamics of familial conflict. It was a leap in the dark. The bizarre and unexpected kept affecting reality, disrupting and upsetting my everyday life. As a result, it was inevitable that I should experience a sudden, unprompted crisis of mind and soul. For a while, I was afraid that I was crossing the borderline into a psychotic condition. It was a turbid period of my life, at times chaotic and consistently unnerving.

In time, the encounters became more predictable and permanent and carried over long periods of time. I swung like a pendulum between two poles. On the one extreme, adhering to the modern theories of consciousness research, I thought that this vortex of confused pictures must have been a genuine experience of alternative realities, derived from a combination of antenatal memories and archetypal forces. At the same time, I toyed with the idea that it all boiled down to the existence of disembodied entities or inhabitants of parallel worlds who might be causing fluctuations of the magnetic field, thus affecting my temporal lobes. These daily manifestations were so unequivocal and dramatic that there could be no question or doubt about their influence on my life. In these cases, however, it is not always possible to make sharp distinctions between sanity and insanity. I began to fear that I had been abducted by the kinds of aliens we see in Hollywood films. What put my mind at rest was that I did not display the typical symptoms cited in such cases: nosebleed, nausea, thirst, or psychological phobias. On the contrary, all I felt after my dream-like encounters was a profound, almost mystical tranquility. Everything around me seemed to mellow out.

Eventually, on December 23rd, 1994, while I was on an excursion to mount Menalon, I met, quite by accident—at least, that is what I believed—the main person occupying my dreams. Here, was no longer a materialized manifestation of the unconscious, nor was this an ethereal presence that has come from the past or some other dimension. This was a woman, without a doubt, all flesh and bone. Her name was Thalgea, which, as I found out later, comes from the Greek words Thalassa (Sea) and Gaia (Earth).

From the very beginning, Thalgea insisted that this was not our first encounter. We used to meet, she said, in the past, when I was studying in Rome. Of course, I had no recollection of those meetings. What struck me as odd, though, was not her pleasingly modulated voice or her olive skin. It was her strangely long fingers and her green, radiant eyes.

After I returned to Athens, Thalgea brought me back to a forgotten part of my life through a process of what is known as Retrospective Introspection, while at the same time helping me to gain keener insights into the Arcadian prehistory.

She spoke to me about inconceivably distant eras, about shapes and forms long effaced. She laid bare the existence of hair-raising dimensions and predators coming from the fathomless depths of the Universe to drain the souls of proto-human, demented flocks. Her narrations, at times lucid, at others nebulous, but always charmingly hypnotizing, were accompanied by a series of experiences, which opened a window onto a different aspect of reality, ushering me into unforeseen temporal dimensions. Strange though it may sound, I had the feeling that the things she spoke of were not unfamiliar to me. On the contrary, I had come into possession of a functional mechanism for understanding experiences I had already mastered at some point in the past.

In the beginning, I had difficulty dating our meetings or unraveling different facets of my awareness. My memories were hazy. There were times when I was within an ace of remembering something in particular, and others when I could not connect the face in front of me with anything from my past. From a psychological standpoint, it was important that the encounters I had were no figments of my imagination or hallucinations, but real events. As for the figure I saw in my dreams, she belonged to the concrete, tangible present, being part of my lost memory.

In 1995 and 1996 I devoted the best part of my research to the recall of experiences that had occurred during some unusual states of consciousness. In the first months, the prospect of probing into this material seemed very complicated. Then, little by little, fragments of a parallel existence I had lived for a good six years began to take form in my consciousness. I started to recall incidents I had forgotten about, meetings that had taken place, quests that had blurred my memory. On her frequent trips to Greece, Thalgea would give me the chance to retrieve events that were impossible to pinpoint in an ocean of oblivion. It was only much later that I would discover more threads half-buried in the well of reminiscence.

Thalgea did not want to call our relation ‘apprenticeship.’ She gave it a long, poetic name, calling it a journey into the land of the soul yearning for its home and pointed out that the Arcadian Tradition was not a matter of intellectual pursuit but one of Self Knowledge and Inner Transformation. She assured me that during my initiation not only would drastic changes take place in my awareness but that I could get possible glimpses into other worlds.

The encounters took place in Arcadia, at specific spots and on set dates. As I later discovered, nothing was fortuitous. It took rigid discipline and perseverance. Eventually, after three years of effort and concentration, I managed to weld together my long-forgotten incidents and place them on a linear, temporal continuum.

The drift of knowledge in memory brought me back to the late ‘70’s when I lived in Rome. I had come across a list of some secret organizations centered on discussions of the occult, mysticism, metaphysics, and other related topics. I took an active part in spiritual movements, including; Zen, Yoga, and Shamanism, not to mention groups of intense experiential therapy using breathing techniques and energy-releasing bodywork. Studying in parallel, I immersed myself in a diversity of things, fascinated by the idea of transcending our cultural classificatory schemes that reduce life to strictly defined categories. I wanted to go beyond the barrier of the past and get to know the mysteries of the most primordial era.

In June 1979 I met with a group of people, keepers of a tradition, whose roots date back to prehistoric times. The Circle of Arcadia, as they were apt to call themselves, is a secret society whose aim was to transform the very human spirit through the development of supra-consciousness. Even though its members focus on their spiritual growth, in fact, they share their collective knowledge with other mystic brotherhoods, in an attempt to bring balance and wisdom to all human beings.

From 1979 to 1984 I met several members of the Arcadian Brotherhood, disguised under the mask of literary dilettanti but our relationship had been too fortuitous and brief to afford me an understanding of their real identity. As I entered into the esoteric concepts of their legacy, I realized that for those people Arcadia was not only a poetical name for a dreamland but a vast and intricate system of knowledge, connecting them to a primeval world.

Thalgea told me that Arcadianism consists of two parallel segments. The first is an effective instrument of culture, closely allied with the general Academic movement in Italy and other countries. This dates back to 1656 when it arose in Rome under the auspices of Queen Christina of Sweden: its official name is Academia degli Arcadi or Arcadian Academy.

The second is the Arcadian Circle, which claims its origins in Hellenistic Alexandria and later became a secret branch of the Academy from 1787 onwards.

Thalgea said that since the official foundation of the Brotherhood, in 1787, its members met in secrecy. Indeed, not all their names are known. They were the brightest of scientists and artists, and their influence soon spread across the continent. She insisted that one of the most important goals of this Society was to foster a primal Tradition, which she named Elysia’s Song and to open a gate into a future Golden Age. I quickly realized that although their narration was not a direct application of any established existential philosophy, they were on the side of transcendence, genuine freedom and human development.

When I asked Thalgea about the goals of this secret Brotherhood, she answered that the aim of the Arcadian Circle was not to forge a romantic amalgam of occult wisdom. Arcadianism, she said, has long sought to free itself of magical associations, of too close a relationship with spiritualistic and esoteric traditions. The reason, why the Brotherhood, discloses the core of its knowledge, to those who seek it, is that as a society, we are now moving from the old to the new. She believed that very shortly, our solar system would go through a high vibrational field that counterbalances and attunes the resonant frequencies of our planet. Apart from causing extreme geological events, this expansive energy shift would displace our habitual modes of perception. Thalgea insisted that the imminent revolution would be psychological and that things would change dramatically as our brain, unfettered by the distorted and restrictive form of consenting reality, would contrive to hone its supra-conscious potential.

Thalgea revealed to me that, if a considerable number of people are subject to a process of profound esoteric transformation, then it is inevitable that we should reach a higher level of consciousness and witness the change of reality itself. She insisted that our relation with the world, and with ourselves, is in a permanent state of disruption and that we experience reality through a false-self system, which is the outcome of psychotic developments. She also explained that our repressed models of habits, thoughts, and emotions are a kind of hook drawing similar patterns and entities from the Ocean of Existence.

According to the Arcadian Circle, the real cause for an attempt by a minority of people to control science, education, religion, economy, and world politics, is not merely wealth or power. It is something deeper. It’s a betrayal of humanity to entities that grow by drinking the essence of our life force. These invisible spirits, according to Thalgea, literally want to suck the souls of every creature inhabiting this planet. Their first victims are humans, who unknowingly, align with them, thus debasing their vibrational field.

Thalgea warned me that my initiation would be long and arduous and that I was expected to commit myself to Arcadia and follow its principles in my everyday life. She insisted that with self-discipline and unyielding intent, I could transcend the swirling tide of poetic fancy and find a spiritual reality which could provide new answers to my old questions.

My long pursuit of Arcadia was internally shattering and ecstatic. At a later stage in my progress, I was left alone, without the aid of my memory. This kind of trial is called Passage through the Abyss and is the usual practice within some mystic fellowships. It is premised upon the tenet that most important for the seeker of Knowledge is the recall of experiences lived in the past. During this process, the apprentice is abandoned to overcome the phobias and insecurities caused by the change of cognitive level and to accept the emotional load of the revelation. Thalgea later told me that her presence was the magic key to the Gates of my memory. However, she said, I had to remember that to walk on the path of Arcadia required a great deal of strength and devotion.

The time I devoted to probing this invisible core, as well as my frequent visits to Arcadia, were all an unusual adventure of disclosures and self-discovery. With the passage of time, I was to meet more members of that mysterious Circle. Much as they wanted to maintain their anonymity, deep down they wanted to communicate their existence. They resonated with humanity’s destiny and felt responsible for it. These consecutive meetings changed my personal life profoundly. By developing a different way of perceiving reality I managed to expand my consciousness. Gradually, I was induced to use a broad conceptual framework, through which an overall view of the universe came into focus, in stark contrast to what I knew at the time.

Thalgea said that the significance of Arcadia as a place of Power is grounded in the fact that the energy echoes of Elysia open the Gates of perception more easily. These pulsating waves aid the state of awakened consciousness and grant access to the ancestral heritage of human memory. My initial suspicion as to the theories about the geomagnetic influences of the specific geographical settings gradually turned into certainty, bolstered by hundreds of pieces of information, as well as personal experiences. Today, there is no doubt that Arcadia, especially the Temples and Sanctuaries of Goddess Artemis are all entrances to other dimensions. They are the geomagnetic points where the energy of the Primal Dream manifests itself in natural space, in everyday consenting reality.

As already mentioned, Thalgea is a human being with a physical, flesh and bone body. However, even now, I have not been able to ascertain her real nature. Some of our encounters still carry indeterminate riddles. In recent years, I have visited many of the places of our dream-like meetings. Some of these have changed. For example, there was no trace of the remains of temples we had visited. In other cases, some columns had been removed and their orientation was different. Whether this is important or not is anybody’s guess. Throughout all these years, I have refrained from limiting the dream-like realm of archetypal proto-consciousness to the world of Newtonian and Euclidean causality. I accepted Thalgea, Elysia and the Brotherhood of Arcadia as a magic game of revelation that combines the latest achievements of Quantum Science and New Alchemy with the Ancient Wisdom.

In the following pages, I will try to reconstruct the essence of the dialogues and share with you the Great Song of Elysia, the Magic Centre of the World.

CHAPTER I

"There is no such thing as Creation out of Nothingness.

There is no Creating Spirit outside this World.

There is no absolute, real or mathematic time flowing from its very nature.

This World is eternal. It never had a beginning. It will never have an end."

The first day of November was a foggy day. Thalgea and I were in Arcadia, a few minutes’ journey from the village of Lykouria (1) near the source of the River Ladon. (2) The dirt road was deserted and covered in autumn leaves. It was five o’ clock in the afternoon.

We were talking about the Court of Queen Christina of Sweden, (3) in seventeenth-century Rome, and her possible liaisons with Hermetic and Alchemical circles. I was adamant about the possible extensions of the Arcadian Brotherhood into art and the symbols of the time. She was listening attentively. Suddenly, she motioned for me to stop.

How do you feel reeling off, such unnecessary information? she asked me. It’s no use seeking historical evidence or studying biographies. If you want to understand the world of Arcadia, first make sure you expand your field of awareness.

We walked up to the riverbed. The path passed along a small stone bridge and then aligned itself with the water flow. Thalgea sat on a big, even rock. She invited me to sit opposite her.

I’ll tell you about the Secrets of Elysia, she said; about the deeper meanings of this World. I’ll try to give you a clear picture, avoiding oversimplifications. What you have to bear in mind, though, is that I am using a logical approach based on an inadequate verbal description which has no real bearing on the realm of experience.

I glanced at her, speechless. Her wheatish complexion exuded an ethereal, otherworldly beauty. She was wearing black cotton trousers, a jacket and a shirt with a triple layer gathered frill that ‘waterfalled’ down the front. Her shining black hair was drawn tightly back, framing the elongated, smooth features of her face.

Remember, this is not an attempt to interpret all aspects of our experience of reality, she remarked in a voice of thrilling, almost piercing sweetness. She paused for a moment. Her head was raised towards the distant vales of the mountain-borders, separating Arcadia from the rest of the world. In fact, she continued, there are no effective descriptions through words. Perhaps we need a different language, full of allusions, which would help us to get deep into the realm of poetical expression.

The low branches of the pine trees were reflected in the water, crammed as they were within the margins of the riverbank. Thalgea lay motionless for a while. Then she started waving her palms in the air as if she were trying to touch the shadows slithering on the riverbed.

Think of eternity, she said, like a golden butterfly tangled in the meshes of logic. The aim is to soothe your mind and set this butterfly free. But before you do so, you need to form a basic understanding of the Primal Essence, the transmutation of which generated the Universe.

Her voice reached my ears like a whisper. I looked at the way she moved, enchanted. Just like her long fingers, my mind cooled itself in the waters of Life. Still, it was impossible for me to control the current that disappeared through a crevice in the rocks.

May I ask you one question?

Her eyes glinted teasingly. Let me guess. It is about the birth of the Universe.

I nodded affirmatively. What is the first and ultimate state of all things? I said. What is the inexpressible principle through which life and awareness are manifest?

You see the unavoidable verbal conventions shaping the particular way we think? she replied. Saying ‘the first and ultimate state’ is like placing them at the two ends of a time continuum. Your logic functions in a linear way. It classifies data in a sequential file, so to speak, one after the other. In fact, data, events and incidents coexist in a multidimensional, a-temporal spin, a whirl that ramifies eternity within the revelation of every single moment.

What are the first lines of ‘Elysia’s Song’? I insisted.

Thalgea smiled and glanced towards a courtyard nestled in a grove of myrtle and hyacinth. Then her head turned slightly so that the nape of her neck was outlined in the soft evening light.

Before the Beginning, she said, when the ‘Egg of the Universe’ was still unhatched, the primal elements were fused together. In this fathomless Chaos, there was no separation. Everything co-existed in a timeless Fog. These are the first lines, followed by a question: Beyond the mental conception of a starting point, Beginning is but an illusion. And since there is no Beginning, how could something be initiated?

What do you mean by ‘Chaos’? I asked. I often hear this term, but it’s difficult to comprehend.

"Chaos is, by principle, difficult to portray, Ilgaios. There have been many attempts to describe it, but no one has been able to give it any attributes. It remains that which lacks anything. Chaos is boundless, infinite and indefinite. Still, this vague, indeterminate principle, supposed to have existed before the creation of the Universe, cannot be conceived as an absolute void, non-existence, or nothingness. It is the living Womb of Creation, the Eternal, Pre-existing Source and the seed of Life. Within it, intermingled, are the roots, the sources and the boundaries of what