'New Insights' The Turin Shroud Revisited
March 2002
by Norma C.Weller
"And the angel of the Lord descendedI have before me the introduction by Mark Antonacci to his book The Resurrection of the Shroud, an interesting and oblique title for the momentously controversial issue of the resurrection of Jesus Christ himself, and having read his initial paper, I can think of few people more capable of dealing with the subject as it at present stands with so much courage and intelligibility, nor indeed so much credibility.
Drawing upon the conclusions and findings of such an eminent biophysicist as Dr. Jean Baptiste Rinaudo, and Dr Kitty Little, a nuclear physicist at the Grenoble Nuclear Centre in France, as well as Mario Moroni in conjunction with the Isotrace Radio Carbon laboratory in Toronto, his findings should be taken extremely seriously.
It is with respect and profound acknowledgement of the work he and his colleagues have done that I now respond with my own discoveries, which lie in a complementary though quite opposite direction to Mark Antonacci, since I am neither a scientist or experienced in the domain of Nuclear Physics.
I do however have an awareness of the need for absolute objectivity in the field of spiritual research and since science today provides us with a scale of perspective upon the subject, I have myself attempted to view all aspects of the Turin Shroud in correlation to relevant developments m the realm of atomic research and all round contemporary viewpoints.
In such a sphere as spiritual interpretation and indeed in any area of so-called paranormal phenomena, it is a well known fact that things are seldom what they seem and looked at under the microscope often yield explainable physical realities that the laymen knows nothing about, to which the specialist is readily cognisant.
The general public and non-specialist can therefore easily fall prey to all manner of gullibility and naive speculations, which in the night of imagination seem true, but when viewed in the clear light of day become traps for the unwary.
There is however, a real and false world of spiritual investigation and when we enter this world, as we undoubtedly do when we encounter the extraordinary nature of the Turin Shroud reputed to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, and the visual record of his resurrection, we must do so armed with the most advanced findings of contemporary science as well as a thorough understanding of quite other aspects of human experience not understood in the West but a natural way of comprehending the Universe to people living in the East.
We should not, at the exclusion of one half of mankind, so concentrate on the conclusions of Western science that we ignore the equally legitimate though inner subjective path to knowledge, which in earlier times was experienced as revelation and known as Gnosis.
Another complementary but essential way of perceiving
Christianity has been revealed to us through the exceptional
significance of findings at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.
The papyri found in jars by local peasants and sold in Cairo
have changed the course of religious history.
It is these fragments and their remarkable revelations which not only throw new light on the Canonical Gospels but indirectly and sometimes with great clarity point to quite a new understanding of the man of the Shroud and even that the Shroud played a quite dramatic and central role in shaping the religious awareness of early Christianity.
To those early Gnostic thinkers, the purpose of life was to find truth and to understand it through ascetic disciplines, interior prayer, and profound contemplation in which reality was not merely known but above all experienced. It was the actual experience of the spiritual dimension that offered the ultimate key to knowledge.
Today we do not approach metaphysical truth directly. The West is not orientated to finding the Universe within as indeed the founder of early Christianity has advocated.
Yet in the Nag Hammadi finding of the Gospel of Thomas we may be supported in our approach by those other words of Jesus when he says:
"If those who lead you say to you: See, the kingdom is in heaven: then the birds of the air may precede you. If they say to you it is in the sea, then the fish will precede you, but the Kingdom of Heaven is within you and without you. (Log. 1-4)".
It is to be found therefore in two ways though deduction and experiment, but also revelation. It is through the revelation bestowed upon the gnostic followers of Jesus during the time of his ministry in the Holy Land that we may come to know whom we are addressing in the Image of the Turin Shroud and what powers of being and insight this unique individuality must have experienced and known.
Did not Jesus say when addressing his disciples:
"To you I give the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven, but to those who are without I speak in parables".
Considering the great mystery of the Turin Shroud itself we should not wonder then, that we are dealing with a revelation of a singular magnitude, and one that will not be dispensed with so easily for it has been waiting for a voice in the 2lst Century to speak in images intelligible to the mind of Man.
Not only is there the technology with which to interpret, but there is also the psychological preparedness, for which we have, for instance, the works of Carl Gustave Jung and the discoveries of Qumran. There are indications everywhere if we do the research and read the signs.
There is a tremendous cross-cultural source of communication from East to West and widespread sharing of information from all over the planet. Mark Antonacci is absolutely right in saying that if any era is in a position to understand the phenomenon of the Shroud it is today.
We should therefore use every means at our disposal to do so, and the Church is by no means the only repository of wisdom in this respect and should be willing to open its doors fully to new insights from all quarters. Nothing should be held back in terms of traditional authority nor from the impulse to be the sole custodian of the truth.
Not to exaggerate, nor to put too fine a point on it, the destiny of Man is in question, who we are and by what we are to be measured as Mankind. If the Resurrection is a reality it must not be a source of religious separateness but rather a realisation of human potential, a unique opening of our understanding of what it is to be a Human Being and the nature of our Humanity.
Our exploration therefore of Eastern Tantric Yoga and the vast potential of the Kundalini power lodged in a nucleus of energy at the base of the spine is a most meaningful field of enquiry and is being discussed in centres of Kundalini research worldwide. The ground breaking experiences of Gopi Krishna and Hiroshi Motoyama have opened the door to new dimensions of cosmic energy and consciousness.
So much has happened since the first Secondo Pia photographs in 1898 and the world has changed radically since then. If Mark Antonacci's most significant work is to bear fruit, we must have further testing, not only on the Shroud, but also a closer examination of the data in the photographs and a deeper interpretation.
Even my own discoveries will receive no further results if my own hypotheses cannot be supported, since they involve visual data that could unlock the mystery of Jesus as Nazarene, the sect to which we know he belonged.
It is of the utmost importance that we should prove this, and that the visual data might be accepted because it would mean a number of things:
On both accounts a veil must not be drawn on these connections but they should have a chance to reach their own level of comprehension by those who might confirm or expand my conclusions through their own insights. Only then would the all-important feedback be possible.
Unfortunately certain public bodies do not adopt such an attitude. For instance I recently visited the Museo del Sindone in Turin (The Turin Shroud Museum) and found them to be completely non-committal on the subject of the Nazarenes.
And yet in the very heart of the museum's galleries I found, firstly, around one of its central pillars a large inscription in French, evidently evinced by a tradition from the nuns in Chambery around 1500, and I translate:
"That the beard of Jesus was neither too long or too short according to the manner of the Nazarenes".
This fact was so generalised and yet so supportive of my findings that I could not understand why more specific and general information was neither accepted nor rejected.
Secondly, at this museum, I was also able to see an example of Gundelia Tournefortii (the crown of thorns) that Avinoam Danin had discovered in the pollen grains collected by Max Frei, the criminologist, in 1978, at the first testing of the Shroud.
As I said to Ian Wilson, if we look at the entire circle of plant elements around the head reputed to have shown up on the Shroud as a crown of thorns, it is totally evident that it could not be the same plant, since anyone, with any perception of sharp or rounded images and who is not visually impaired, can see that what is shown on the Secondo Pia photographs is a circlet of remarkably rounded forms and could in no way be that of the Gundelia Tournefortii.
Had Jesus been wearing a crown of
thorns during his burial, Avinoam Danin would certainly have
discovered pollen traces of such, but as it happened, the
position where the pollen grains were indicated did confirm
my hypothesis as they were near the right shoulder and the
periphery of the Shroud. I will explain later the significance
of this.
Thirdly, there was an example in the museum of the kind of crown that Jesus would have worn and to my astonishment it was so unlike the shape on the photographs that I realised the traditional viewpoint was so entrenched as to render the real shapes invisible. This, surely, must not be so. As an artist myself with extensive experience of drawing, the difference was immediately discernible.
These observational divergences disturbed me greatly and the more I look at the Secondo Pia and Enrie photographs, the more struck I am by the inconsistencies between the Shroud and what has been concluded to exist on it.
Let me now recapitulate my own findings on the Shroud:
The myrtle wreath is worn to this day by the Mandaens, so too is the Padan.
The Skandola is no doubt in a museum somewhere and if traced to the Holy Land and dated to the First Century would be proof positive and open up unprecedented fields of research on the roots of Ancient Christianity.
I have seen similar though not identical iron rings near Petra in Jordan.
As to the striking physiological data to be seen in the life size Enrie photographs which have once again never been identified, I was able to determine these merely by the simple expedient of using a colour film rather than monochrome which suddenly brought to life with an extraordinary intensity what had been in evidence from the beginning. I had discovered that colour frequencies, as of course we all know, have the property of enhancing detail in a most revealing manner and I was frankly astonished at what can be only be described as a heightened sense of Time.
It was as if the moment at which the event took place was actually frozen on film. I could see the light spreading out from the front and back of the body as if passing through the bones and the flesh and when I read Mark Antonacci's remarkable explanation of the event in terms of radiation consisting of protons, neutrons and alpha particles, it seemed to be all very real, present and simultaneous. Indeed what came over above all else was this astonishing quality of simultaneity in the face and body, incomprehensible in terms other than the Image itself.
In what other photographic image do we see half open eyes as if awakening from the sleep of death, irradiated arms and hands emitting light, the back view of a spinal cord bursting with out flowing energy which in Eastern terms would have been seen as the cosmic sunburst of Kundalini energy pouring out into the Cosmos at the dissolution of the body. We are looking at the most tremendous event it is possible to witness, and it is there for all to see if we have eyes to see.
I can imagine that every possible objection will be placed on this perception, I can already hear every single one, but I am convinced that what we are looking at is the event of the Resurrection captured as it happened: we are looking at the neutrons, gamma rays and electrons, at the moment when they passed through the cloth.
It is interesting that if we attempt to return to the state of being, prevalent amongst the 1st Century followers of Jesus, we might feel just a little of what we may possibly no longer be able to experience in an era of requisite proofs and purely rational explanations, and it certainly is in that condition of heightened consciousness that we ought to truly view the locked images on the Shroud.
It would appear to all Bible accounts that Jesus did in fact reveal himself to his disciples after the resurrection. We may believe it or not, but the Shroud at that time had a far greater natural impact in its raw unphotographed simplicity than it could possibly have today.
What is more, there are strong indications of the overwhelming effect of the Shroud in the Gospel of the Hebrews.
According to this gospel:
"When the Lord had given the linen cloth to the
servant of the priest, he went to James and appeared to him.
For James had sworn that he would not eat bread from that hour
in which he had drunk the cup of the Lord until he had seen him
risen from among them that sleep. And shortly thereafter the
Lord said: Bring a table and bread and he blest and brake it,
and gave it to James the Just and said to him, eat your bread
for the son of Man is risen from the dead"
(From "The Other Bible"
edited by William Barnstone. Harper. San Francisco)".
There is also a very curious and extraordinarily revelatory account of the Shroud in a kind of metaphor regarding the apostle Thomas. It is particularly curious because when considered factually or even physically, it makes little sense and even verges on the macabre, yet it has been accepted as bible truth.
We are told of Jesus' post resurrection appearances in John Chapter XX verses 24-28:
"(24) But Thomas, one of the twelve called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came
(25) The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hands into his side, I will not believe
(26) And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: then came Jesus the doors being shut, and stood in their midst, and said: Peace be unto you
(27) Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hands, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless but believing.
(28) And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God".
It is no coincidence therefore that the Shroud is reputed to have existed in the Church of Thomas in Edessa in Turkey, and recently there has been a major affirmation of this which appeared in a British Society for the Turin Shroud newsletter.
It relates to a discovery by Archbishop Gewargis Silwa, the head of the Church in the East in Baghdad, Iraq, of a collection of letters written by Archbishop Isho-Yahb, head of the Nestorian community between 620 and 658 AD in which there is a letter addressed to this community referring to the presence of the Mandylion (or in my terms a face cloth or Padan).
It reads as follows:
In the city of the mighty Lord, the city of our God (Edessa).
He granted us the simple designation of venerable exile
(banishment)
In other words, in the Holy place from which the
omnipotent God chose from amongst the countries of the world,
so as to render it a sanctified throne for the Image of his adorable face
and his glorified incarnation.
It has been said that the transfiguration of Christ on Mount Tabor was a foretaste of his resurrection, and the reference to his glorification by his disciples when he was suddenly transformed as if shining with white light. The reference to his glorification by Archbishop Isho-Yahb implies some kind of imprint upon the cloth made by light as if the keepers of the cloth somehow knew of this connection - hence the perception of glorified incarnation.
The reader may of course find the references all too fanciful, but there are too many inner correspondences not to at least consider them.
The fact is that if we look to the manifestations of Kundalini Yoga in the East which Carl Gustave Jung, one of the most celebrated psychologists of the 20th Century, saw fit to do, we may find many answers which it is quite impossible to do by restricting our understanding purely to the West. His illuminating study on The psychology of Kundalini Yoga is therefore essential.
Also essential is the life work and Kundalini experience of Gopi Krishna who himself underwent a long training by the inner and evolutionary experience of Kundalini energy in his own organism.
It is very difficult for the Western mentality to acknowledge that Man is only half realised and in the process of evolution. A man such as Jesus underwent degrees of inner fructification by the Holy Spirit often viewed as a manifestation of the Kundalini fire.
It was that force which was made manifest when Christ rose from the tomb in a blaze of light radiating inside and out transforming the body into a nuclear flash of pure radiance. Therefore unless we are willing to encompass what we at present view with suspicion and reluctance to encounter The paranormal we will make no further headway in our understanding of the Turin Shroud.
Already the orthodox church perceives and accepts in the resurrection what mankind in general cannot accept. Yet to the faithful, proofs are superfluous and almost heretical, but no one is absolute custodian of the truth, and the Church does not teach or rationally elucidate the universal and cosmic dimensions of its fundamental tenets.
However the early Gnostics of Egypt and Alexandria knew a great deal that we are just beginning to unearth, discovered by contemplative and direct experience about the energies of light in man and matter, which ancient alchemy sought to describe, the study of which engaged Carl Jung for most of his life.
Even today there exists a little known method of photographing this light and encapsulating the energy in the science of Radionics and which we will now consider. If the historical references and biblical correlations are interpreted in the correct manner much that is new and highly significant may be revealed, but we need to enlarge our spectrum of understanding further afield in order to comprehend what in other more directly spiritualised cultures would be obvious.
As to the sources of the images on the Shroud that are secondary effects made particularly portentous by the phenomenality of light we must refer back to what was said earlier about Eastern mysticism and the practice of yoga.
This is not to say that Christ was such a one, but rather that the energies made manifest spontaneously through him, are akin to those of meditating yogi in their highest manifestation. It is in the direction of such energies that we must look for not only the explanation of the Resurrection but its foretaste in the transfiguration on Mount Tabor.
Mark Antonacci has identified specific and unique qualities of the Shroud that make it totally unlike anything ever known or found in relation to a human body after death and for this we should be profoundly grateful. He states that not only are the blood serum markings uniquely encoded on the Shroud but because they are embedded upon the cloth in the same shape and form as when they were first in contact without smearing despite the intimate contact with the body of Jesus.
In fact when viewed perceptively they appear so incredibly defined and structured as to be the nearest possible image to that of an X-ray photographic plate.
Would it be possible that the precipitating factor of the entire body image could have been the vehicle of blood on the Shroud?
As for the significance of these observations there is indeed a precedent, and Mark Antonacci, in drawing attention to these singularities, has unwittingly chanced upon that domain of Radionic science already mentioned but known to relatively few.
Those who take this new and generally untapped source of new insights and virgin area of science seriously, may find some vital clues to much that is unknown, and may also encounter the manifest principles of Quantum physics actually made visible in this phenomena.
We should at this juncture at least attempt to explain the principles of Radionics with the help of Ruth Drown, one of its most innovatory exponents, and her book The Science and Philosophy of the Drown Radio Therapy Instrument published in 1933.
This is a work of unprecedented genius and a foretaste of so many discoveries that were to follow. A largely hidden prophet, she was to foreshadow much that has happened and that has still to come.
Just as television and radio waves are picked up by an aerial or antenna receptor and may be broadcast worldwide, so too by the presence of blood placed on a receptor plate in a Radionic camera, an image may be broadcast from the source of the blood sample, i.e. the patient, over any distance, sometimes hundreds of miles away without the need for the patient to be present.
This may seem impossible, but in today's climate of experimental cloning, the principle would at least be intelligible.
As a result, Ruth Drown and many other Radionic practitioners have been able to photograph a wide variety of conditions of bone, blood and the presence of malfunctioning internal organs of the body, and correspondingly heal and cure by broadcasted radio frequencies akin to the substance or energy that these require for their amelioration.
These photographs resemble far-distant X-ray photographs and are derived solely from blood samples in relation to a specially designed Radionic camera without a lens or extended source of visible light.
Now if all this sounds far-fetched and incredible, its relevance to the Shroud is even more so. In we look at the front view of the Enrie life size photographs and then to the blood serum stains on the left and right hand sides of the Shroud, under ultra-violet light they appear to have a halo like radiation around the major blood flows which look remarkably similar to the emanatory light markings of anatomical details in the various Radionic photographs we have examined.
Do they display such details or do they resemble Rorschach tests in which one may read what one resonates to internally? We know that a poker was at one time thrust through the cloth and these may be the remnants, yet if we look at the front markings on the Shroud considered anatomically, they curiously resemble the ribcage showing the manubrium and the upper rim of the pelvis.
This may of course be easily dismissed by what we already know, but it may not be as simple, since if we then turn to the blood stains on the back of the Shroud, they look quite different and there resemble not the rib cage but the markings of the coccyx, which though distorted by water perhaps spreading the image when the Shroud was doused by water in a fire, nonetheless do appear oddly three-dimensional.
Why do the front blood stains show details that would be discernible only on the front and the back blood stains details only discernible on the back? The Radionic implications are exceedingly far reaching.
Ruth Drown, a woman of unique originality and insight, with the invention of her radio vision instrument, actually took a photograph of the pineal gland of a patient far away that showed the gland appearing vertically in the head and radiating light by which she could tell that the patient was nearing death.
When the patient is dead, these images will no longer register, since they will only register from the blood of a living body.
These images in the blood are the means by which the Radionics practitioner identifies all manifest conditions of the physical organism including the presence of foreign bodies, i.e. ingested elements such as metal, and it is by recognition of these light images and other objects in the Human blood that the Light principle within the Human organism may be recognised.
Perhaps this is what
Jesus meant when he said "If thine eye be single thy whole body
will be filled with light".
Was he perhaps referring to the pineal
gland of Third eye?
In fact in no other one of the Life sciences, whether we connect the details of the blood on the Shroud with Radionic elements per se, can come closer to the reality of the intrinsic body of light common to all mankind, as the evidence provided by this obscure metaphysical branch of psychophysical medicine.
It also proves by the startling similarity of these photographs and imprints of the Life energy in Man, that whatever showed up on the Shroud was palpably and totally alive, since these registrations cannot take place if the body is dead.
Since no wires, tubes, lens or orthodox means of photographic registration were used, the only means of explaining either Radionics and the Shroud must lie in the realm of Quantum physics, since light as action functions simultaneously beyond time and it does not take time to either capture the light in the blood of a patient hundreds of miles away in a blood sample, anymore than it took time for the light body of Jesus to permeate the Shroud.
Let us consider the words of St. Basil of Caesarea writing in about AD370:
"It follows that light is of a more general nature
than time, for time is found only in the sensible world...
Because
light is not limited to time it was universally distributed at the
moment of its creation, as it fills the whole room in which a lamp
is kindled.
Between the intelligible and sensible worlds the
firmament acts as a barrier, of which the solidity implied by
its name is such that light may pass through it (but in diluted
form) but time cannot break out into the world above".
Everything about the Turin Shroud Image is a key to the mystery of Man, worthy of every effort to understand and all available resources to share. It is not the sole right of anyone but the right of everyone to comprehend.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
* All Radionic illustrations may be found in books marked with an asterisk
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