From a book Joe Marino discovered comes a new, crazy natural hypothesis on how the image was formed.
Here is some information from/about the book, And Did Those Feet…? by Michael Goldsworthy and published in June of last year by Troubador Publishing Ltd. The paperback goes for $65.51 at Amazon and the Kindle version sells for $9.29; how did I miss this one? I didn’t, well, sort of. I touched on the subject of Michael Goldsworthy’s fertile imagination in October of last year; I just didn’t know about the book. Maybe I’ll buy and read the Kindle version.
I’ve taken the liberty of bolding some references to the Shroud of Turin in the material below:
Nobody was too sure where the island of Avalon was, but everybody knew that King Arthur and Joseph of Arimathea, were buried in Avalon. Neither William of Malmesbury nor Geoffrey of Monmouth associated Glastonbury with the Island of Avalon at the time they wrote. This was a later corruption by monks and the sole purpose of producing the fraudulent cross was to establish Glastonbury as Avalon. If Glastonbury could only be established as Avalon by the unearthing of King Arthur, then it must follow the Joseph of Arimathea was also buried within the Abbey grounds if all were convinced that Glastonbury was Avalon. To unearth Joseph of Arimathea, however, would prove difficult as it was known that he was buried with the holy Grail. Since the monks were not apprised of what the holy Grail consisted of, it was easier to fabricate the unearthing of King Arthur with a cross attesting to the fact that where he was unearthed was indeed Glastonbury and therefore it must be the island of Avalon. The reason Joseph of Arimathea needed to be associated with Glastonbury is because the monks needed funding to rebuild their Abbey after the fire.
Prior to the fire of 1184, there existed a prophecy written by a monk called Melkin. In this prophecy, (once it is decoded), Melkin supplies very pertinent information in geometric instructions, that gives precise directions to an island in Devon. This island is Burgh island in Devon. Melkin states that the body of Joseph of Arimathea lies in the southern angle of a bifurcated line. Once Melkin’s code is deciphered, it clearly portrays that Avebury is the point on the St. Michael’s ley line, which in his puzzle, he refers to as a ‘sperula’ or sphere, meaning a stone circle. This is the point within the Avebury stone circle complex which, at 13°, if one scribe’s a line through Montacute to Burgh island (which Melkin calls the island of Avalon), it is exactly one hundred and Four nautical miles, the exact number that Melkin gives. We should not forget that Father William good deposited this clue in the English college at Rome. Someone or some organisation had tried to eliminate this information from Maihew’s Trophea to prevent the Joseph line being found but luckily this clue was preseved in Stillingfleets private collection and thus acts as a confirmation that the line is Genuine. It also seems that several marker churches that identified the genuine Avalon were also destroyed to prevent this information coming into the public arena.
The location of Avalon has always been thought to exist at Glastonbury but with a recent study of some of the oldest text and the uncovering of the fraud concerning King Arthur carried out by the monks at Glastonbury, it is evident that Avalon is in Devon . The references that Melkin gives are part of a geometric riddle that once solved, points straight to the island in Devon which is obviously fits Diodorus’s description as Ictis.
This is in fact named in the Grail stories as the island of Sarras named after Judah’s eldest son Zarah, who broke the womb first. His name has the same pronunciation as Sarra in French and his descendants came to the south-west and were the primordial miners of tin on southern Dartmoor who brought their tin to this island to be sold. This is the reason that in the Grail stories, the island is called Sarras and to which the holy Grail was brought. It is to this island that after the crucifixion of Jesus, when his body was taken down from the cross by his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, it was then conveyed to a box filled with Cedar oil so that it might preserve his corpse. This box or coffin known as the Grail Ark was then conveyed with Joseph and several others from Jerusalem to the island of Sarras, which Joseph knew well, having visited many times previously on his mercantile trips with Jesus. This island had been known about in the Greek chronicles because Pytheas a Greek explorer had visited the island on his expedition to find amber which they did not realise was the sometime by product of tin and copper smelting. The island was kept secret over many years since Pytheas’ visit, until Joseph of Arimathea visited the island with Jesus on one of his trips abroad gathering metals.
It was to this island previously known as Ictis that Joseph of Arimathea chose to convey the Grail ark and place Jesus in an old tin vault that had been shut down or made redundant due to the Roman invasion. For about 1000 years, the island called Burgh island had been the place on the coast where all the tin miners up on southern Dartmoor had brought their tin to be stored in the vault. This transpired so that visiting traders could take away tin at any time and the island acted as a trading post. It is for this reason that Diodorous refers to it as an ‘emporium’. It becomes clear now the reason that Joseph of Arimathea knew the island very well. Strabo even relates the story behind the cache of tin ingots found at the head of the Erm.
The gospels relate that Jesus was laid to rest in a hewed out tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea and the rumours still persisted as eyewitnesses had seen the doubled over white shroud that covered his body as he lay in the Grail ark. One wonders if the Gospel accounts of the burial of Jesus are just the echoes of the misconstrued eyewitness accounts that existed in Jerusalem just after the resurrection. This set of events aslo explains why the flower imprints were found on the Turin shroud. This is fully explained in detail in a book called ‘And did those feet’, written by Michael Goldsworthy as new theory as to how the Grail stories, the Arthurian legend at Glastonbury and the gospels interlink and provide evidence of the whereabouts of the body of Jesus.
Melkin, who actually wrote the original book of the Grail, which ended up over in France and gave rise to the many Arthurian Grail romances now is understood to be the same person who provided the rumours of Joseph of Arimathea at Glastonbury. So now we have a tomb containing King Arthur, Joseph of Arimathea and Jesus that was last shut when Melkin moved to France in around 600AD, sometime after the Saxon invasion. However the Templars, once they have been disbanded in the Middle Ages, were also privy to this island location and they knew what was buried within. It was here on Christmas Day in 1307 that they decided, (after King Philip and the Pope had disbanded their organisation), to relocate their treasure that they had managed to recuperate and ammased it into three treasure ships that left La Rochelle on 13Tth October 1307.
While depositing their treasure in the tomb they removed the Shroud of Jesus that had been submerged in the Cedar oil for 600 years while covering his body. It is inside this vault that the image of Jesus on the Turin Shroud was formed while draped over the body of Jesus in Cedar oil. The evaporated Cedar oil has left a caramel like substance all over the Turin Shroud, but the image itself was formed by the detritus left behind by anaerobic bacteria.
Only 50 years later, one of the Templars that died with Jack de Molay near Notre Dame in Paris, had a granddaughter that produced the Turin Shroud. This is not coincidence and answers the many questions of why there is no provenance for the Shroud of Turin prior to 1354. The Shroud had existed within the tin vault until the Templars arrive and remove it. The song which became a Christmas Carol; ‘I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas Day in the morning’ is really the echo of the Templars bringing their treasure to the island of Avalon in Devon. However, this song had always been associated in Cornish tradition to the visit of Jesus and Joseph of Arimathea. It was the Templars, however, that marked out all the churches dedicated to St. Michael that lie along the St. Michael Ley line. Oddly enough, it is the other St. Michael churches that we used as markers, that confirm that the island of Avalon is indeed Burgh island in Devon
Source: Deciphering Melkin’s Prophecy
There really isn’t any way to verify these speculations but the concept that Joseph of Arimethia was a trader and vistied mines in what is now Galstonberry with his nephew Jesus is a long standing legend. What is not a legend however is Blake’s Poem Jerusalem which was set to music was sung in the movie Chariot’s of Fire. It was my late son Michael’s favorite, but that’s another story.
Blake’s poem
And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land
Well I’m glad Michael Goldsworthy has cleared up that little problem. 600 years in Cedar Oil? Who knew? But so obvious, now you mention it. Now I can give up the shroud and concentrate on UFOs instead…
An imaginative piece of syncretism! And there are many comments that could be made about it. Creation of ley lines was a common practice in ancient times (Iron Age), and there are several examples in Britain. Their retention into medieval times was accomplished by siting churches, monasteries, cross-roads and other notable features on the old sites. As well as linking various ‘sacred sites’ (e.g. stone circles) they had a practical use as aids to path finding for travellers, a sort of ancient GPS, and adjcaent features were inter-visible determined by the visible horizon, roughly 22 miles. Stephen Skinner’s “Sacred Geometry” gives a good description of them. Modrn surveying has demonstrated that they were set out extremely accurately for their time.
Linking the Shroud with the Holy Grail, Joseph of Arithmathea with Glastonbury / Avalon, and Arthurian legends, seems to have originated from about the time of the crusades, from about the twelfth century.
Encyc Brit comments re Avalon: “Avalon – island to which Britain’s legendary king Arthur was conveyed for the healing of his wounds after his final battle. It is first mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (c. 1136), while the same author’s Vita Merlini (c. 1150) described it as “the island of apples [‘Insula pomorum’], called fortunate.” It was ruled by the enchantress Morgan le Fay and her eight sisters, all of them skilled in the healing arts.”
“Geoffrey may have been attempting to connect his “island of apples” with Celtic mythology’s traditions of an elysium; and the name Avalon is certainly close to the Welsh word for apple, afal. Sir John Rhys, however (Studies in the Arthurian Legend, 1891), preferred to link the name Avalon with that of Aballach, a (hypothetical) dark Celtic divinity. Avalon has been identified with Glastonbury in Somerset, and this may be connected with Celtic legends about an “isle of glass” inhabited by deceased heroes. It is equally likely to have been an attempt by the monks of Glastonbury to exploit the Arthurian legend for the benefit of their own community.”
Jack Markwardt’s two papers linking the Shroud with his Antioch theory, provides comment on the linking of the Grail story with the Shroud and Britain. It seems to have resulted from a mistranslation referring to an alleged British king, but which actually may refer to Abgar the Great.
“A sixth-century entry in the Liber Pontificalis records that Pope Eleutherius, whose papacy extended from approximately 174 to 189, “received a letter from British King Lucius [Britannio rege Lucio] asking that he might be made a Christian through his agency In 731, the Venerable Bede reiterated this precise account and further reported that Eleutherius’ compliance with the king’s request for baptism ―was soon effected. Nevertheless, because second-century Britain was under Roman rule and had no king, these two texts presented a historical conundrum, one which remained unsolved for almost fourteen centuries and until 1904, when Adolph Harnack, a respected Biblical scholar, deduced that the Liber Pontificalis entry had been intended to reference not Britain, but, rather, the Britio Edessenorum, Edessa’s citadel, and not King Lucius, but King Lucius Ælius Septimius Megas Abgarus VIII of Edessa, otherwise known as Abgar the Great.”
“Hints of a lost Syrian sindonic history are to be found in the legends of the Holy Grail, an object which, in recent years, has been increasingly linked to the Shroud. Some seventy-five years ago, Professor Eisen concluded that the earliest Grail legends attempted to account for the loss of real sacred objects known in fourth-century Syria and that these stories reflected a passionate desire to locate and recover such objects from concealment.”
“A mere seventy years after Crusaders had discovered the Holy Lance in Antioch, Chretien de Troyes wrote the first of Western Europe’s Grail romances and coupled the mysterious Grail with a bleeding white lance. Soon thereafter, Robert de Boron mentioned an image of Christ on a shroud, identified the chalice as the Grail, and related that Joseph of Arimathea, the Shroud’s first owner, had died in Syria, in stark contrast to later tales which, integrated with the Arthurian legend, placed him in Britain.”
Markwardt’s two papers: “ANCIENT EDESSA AND THE SHROUD: HISTORY CONCEALED BY THE DISCIPLINE OF THE SECRET” 2008, http://ohioshroudconference.com/papers/p02.pdf
“Antioch and the Shroud” 1998, Dallas conference:
http://www.shroud.com/pdfs/markward.pdf
Sorry I had to spoil the fantasies!