September already. Hard to believe. By the middle of this month, on the day of the equinox, I am supposed to have two new novels in publication. At this point, I laugh at what I suppose is my delusion. Although I’m working hard, neither book is finished and I’m months away from being ready to publish either one of them. “Patriarch”, book two of the Bible Book Club Series, is in Beta Read, which I have poorly managed. The Beta debrief should have happened months ago but when I saw my schedule slipping away, I changed my focus to “The Rift”, book two of the Gray Empire Series. That manuscript stands at 78,340 words today and, quite frankly, I’m struggling with a plot that is beginning to overwhelm me. Just getting old I guess, but the characters have wrested the story from me and run off in five different directions. That’s not unusual for a writer, but as I fight to get it back under my control, I feel like I’m weak and losing the battle.

Anyway, enough about the difficulties of the writing life. There were a few very interesting rabbit trails in the month of August. One of them regards the Stone of Destiny, also known as the Stone of Scone, which resides beneath the seat of the Coronation Throne of the British Royalty. The throne was most recently used in the coronation of Prince Charles, as King of England and has been used in the coronations of kings and queens in England for the past seven hundred years.

The legend of the stone is that it was brought to Scotland during the time of the Crusades, from Bethel, in what is Israel today. It was purported to be the very stone upon which Jacob slept when he had his vision of a ladder between Heaven and Earth. That would mean that it is the same stone that Abraham earlier used to construct an altar to the Lord between Bethel and Ai. In the minds of crusaders and kings, the stone has supernatural powers, as a portal or gateway to the heavens where one can receive higher wisdom and powers via the Almighty. Indeed, Isaiah 33:6 seems to imply the same. Thus, in the hope that the stone is the source of the supernatural “Ladder” to heaven, it has been jealously possessed by nations and kings for a thousand years. I don’t happen to agree with a thousand years of royal superstition. I mean, just look at Charles and tell me if you see any supernatural wisdom.

I believe, as does Rick Townsend, the main character in the Gray Empire series, that the supernatural portal represented by the Stone of Destiny, lies in the place where Abraham chose to build his altar to God, and where the pagan people of Canaan, before him, chose to worship their gods. The Gateway to Heaven is in the place, not the stone. That theory leads us to the phenomenon known as the “Templar Grail”, a mysterious energy vortex that exists in certain locations on the earth’s surface and can be made visible by esoteric means on the four solar events of each year, the “Gaels”, or pagan holidays. On those days, an adept can conjure an energy form that appears as, “…a conical vortex surrounded at the top by a doughnut-like torus, all spinning energetically and glowing bright, looking like a golden chalice.”

What’s more interesting is that wherever these gateways have been found, early pagan cultures erected their henges, altars, and temples. Later, the Crusaders built a chapel on the site at Bethel where the stone was found and, from that central point, the Templars branched out, locating other sites as far away as Scotland. At each of the sites where they were able to conjure the Templar Grail, they built chapels, cathedrals, and castles on top of ancient pagan structures already located at those sites. Many of those structures, both pagan and Templar, stand today. If you’ve been watching Skinwalker Ranch on the History Channel, you saw the proof of such a gateway, (portal), last season.

So the search goes on for the True Grail. Rick and his team must first overcome their opposition, both in this dimension and in those which are thinly veiled to either side of our own, before they can locate and retrieve the prize that the world and prophecy both anticipate.