Templars Announce Reunion Tour of France

No updates for a while, as I've been busy with my two film projects, Folie à Deux and Lanterna Magicka. Plus I've also just come back from la belle France - belle that is, apart from their appalling non-vegetarian friendly cuisine and smug, lying waiters - where I have been appearing in a new documentary that will air on Channel 5 in September. Secrets of the Cross will be a four episode series, featuring programmes on Mary Magdalene, the so-called 'Jesus Tomb' in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate and our old friends the Knights Templar. This is the one I will be in, and sees me holding forth in such belle locations as Troyes, Chinon and La Rochelle. It was a great trip, made all the more so by the fact that we were allowed into the dungeons at Chinon to see the mysterious carvings made my imprisoned Templars in 1308. Very strange indeed - they're either the C14th equivalent of naive art, or they're something esoteric; definitely not standard Christian iconography. (Chinon, incidentally, is Rabelais' hometown, what he called his 'old cow country'.)

My next book, the one after New Waves in Cinema, which I am still working on when the Man from Porlock is not hammering at the door with more trivial merde to distract me, is going to be on the Templars' chums, the Teutonic Knights. I hope this will be an excuse to get some nice pagan illustrations in the book - the TKs crusaded against pagans in the Baltic - preferrably either from Marketa Lazarova or the pagan episode of Andrei Rublev.

Anniversaries

It's 13th March again. Comes round quicker than ever, or so it seems. It is, of course, the anniversary - the 406th to be precise - of the fabled Enkhuizen transmutation, which features in Part I of Elias. It's come to be something of an important date for me, along with two other dates from the novel, 26th August and 27th December, both of which appear in Part IV, in the narrative concerning Dr Helvetius. Time may pass, but the secrets of the Art remain intact; at least that is the feeling I get more strongly the more I work on this, which makes it all the harder to find the time to settle down and actually spend some quality time with the project; furthermore, any ETA at the end of the beast is purely hypothetical. When will it be finished? Can it be finished? Mercurius is still toying with your humble author, it would seem, and will probably continue to do so for a little while yet. But at least observing the anniversaries makes me still feel some deep, unspoken connection to the Royal Art.

The Cathars - New Edition

My book The Cathars: The Most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages is being reissued in an illustrated edition. It will appear sometime next year in the States, and possibly the UK too. Before that, hopefully around this August/September, the illustrated version will appear in French, German, Dutch and Spanish. The publisher will be Taschen.

Meanwhile, your author is being visited by Gentlemen from Porlock, meaning that his next effort, New Waves in Cinema, is being constantly delayed, interrupted and generally buggered around with. Hopefully I can get the beast slayed by the end of next month. Or the month after that.

No novel-writing news to speak of, although I hope to spend a week with Lindsay and various hand-picked lost souls in Devon in September for an intensive session on Elias. Ideally, progress will have been made by then, and hopefully more than just 'oh dear, he's signed his name again', if I may quote the scriptures.

New Podcast

A new podcast, featuring myself and Gordon Strong, is available as of today from Geoff Ward's Mysterious West page at the Western Daily Press. Scroll down and look for 'Week 42'. The interview was recorded in the middle of last month, and features your author holding forth on a short film he is currently making about Gordon, and also talks about the usual (Gnostics, Cathars and a few other pet obsessions).

Richard Leigh 1943-2007

Sad news: Richard Leigh, co-author of The Holy Blood & the Holy Grail and all-round Dan Brown nemesis, has passed away. Apparently he had been suffering from diabetes, and resolutely refused to have anything to do with doctors (given the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, I can't say I blame him). Richard was good enough to meet me when I was writing The Knights Templar and offer me sage advice on some of the more arcane elements in the Templar story; it was a meeting I have fond memories of, and had even hoped to interview Richard in a documentary about the Templars that never quite happened. (He was enthusiastic about the idea of the film, and agreed at once to the interview.)

You can read The Independent's obituary here.

I'm sure Richard would want well-wishers to donate to the Vancouver Institute for Lycanthropic Children. Or, failing that, the Pushkin Trust, of which he was a trustee.

Gnostics Interview

I have just recorded a second interview for the US radio show Coffee Cigarettes and Gnosis, discussing The Gnostics: The First Christian Heretics, which has just been published in the States. The show goes live this Saturday, 17 November. For anyone who missed the first interview, on the Cathars, you can purchase a download of the show here.

I am currently not writing a novel, no surprises there, perhaps, as we approach the third anniversary of this blog, but am writing a book on new wave cinema for Kamera Books and editing the text of The Cathars down for an illustrated edition, which is due out next summer. I am also struggling to get a feature film completed before men in white coats come and take me to the nearest funny farm. As excuses go for not completing Elias, I think that's a pretty good one. Or a pretty bad one, depending on your point of view.

In the Virtual Alexandria

The US radio show Coffee, Cigarettes and Gnosis interviews me this week on the Cathars. Go here, scroll down to the eye, and click on the musical note to hear the show.