Manna, that mysterious, white, bread-like substance that the Old Testament Israelites found scattered on the ground each morning to save them from starvation (according to certain priests and elementary-school teachers I was too dumb to question – not you, Lydia) is now for sale on the Internet. The Lord works in mysterious ways, right up to and not excluding eBay.
It turns out, to the immense relief of seekers everywhere, that manna, the Golden Fleece and the elusive Philosopher’s Stone of the medieval alchemists are all one and the same thing. And it’s now being made in large batches for you and me by a pile of people who evidently need only study up a little on physics, chemistry and plumbing to churn out what is being referred to as Ormes, or Orbitally Rearranged Monatomic Elements, or in some cases, “white gold powder”. The payback for their technical toil is a compound that not only cures AIDS and cancer and at the very least helps with things like muscular dystrophy and Gehrig’s disease, but lifts the mind to a higher plane of awareness, not to mention having levitational properties and holding the promise of intergalactic travel to boot! Simply too magnificent to be true? It certainly seems so, but read on anyway. Did I mention the incredible orgasms?

I received this, er, wisdom from the 2003 book “Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark” by Laurence Gardner. It’s a truly compelling reinterpretation of the biblical ark and what’s happened since, with the capper arriving in the form of one David Hudson of Arizona. If you Google “white gold” you’ll find all kinds of people treading various paths to and from Hudson and Gardner’s doors, and many of them gathered in a Yahoo Group called Ormus.

Having doggedly if meanderingly tracked the spirit myself over the years, following the ley line from Nazareth to Calvary, thence from Allen Ginsberg to Siddartha to yoga to Alan Watts, then to an Indian so-called guru who gave me a secret meditation technique in a downtown Toronto hotel room, from banana peels to pot to peyote, from kundalini to Kirlian snapshots and from Grail stories to Glastonbury stalkings, and finally carrying around with me the glassy shard of a meteorite before ultimately resigning myself to a mere but wonderfully cheerful post-stimulant existence in a quaintly chaotic Buddhist country, it’s a bit of a surprise finding myself lured back to the olde existential trackways. But then, curiosity knows no bounds, eh what?
And besides, I just finished reading and reviewing Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale”, in which he articulates best my growing feeling that matters of the divine are fine as long as science can back them up. And sooner or later, I believe, science gets around to backing up everything. Here’s what Dawkins has to say, referring to his book’s reliance on a “Canterbury Tales” motif:
“Pilgrimage” implies piety and reverence. I have not had occasion here to mention my impatience with traditional piety, and my disdain for reverence where the object is anything supernatural. But I make no secret of them. It is not because I wish to limit or circumscribe reverence; not because I want to reduce or downgrade the true reverence with which we are moved to celebrate the universe, once we understand it properly. “On the contrary” would be an understatement. My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer. I suspect that many who call themselves religious would find themselves agreeing with me.

Laurence Gardner is a lot of things, although he’s no scientist. I’ve seen him referred to as “Sir Laurence”, but I don’t think that’s official for a “a Knight Templar of St Anthony”, or even the “Presidential Attaché to the European Council of Princes”, whatever the hell that is. He is a good writer, and had a huge bestseller with “Bloodline of the Holy Grail”, which was serialised in a UK newspaper and had thousands of Brits claiming direct descendancy from Sir Galahad or someone like him. Somehow worryingly, he’s also done writing for the British Tourist Association, the government of Ontario and the Russian Ministry of Culture.
Oddly, for the online vendor of a rustic-looking Grail genealogy scroll (£17 plus handling) that depicts a chalice – when he knows full well that the grail was no chalice – Gardner posts a notice on his website that he’s “taking the necessary action” against an American publisher of “Bloodline” for plopping “an inappropriate new cover” on it showing da Vinci’s “Last Supper”. The book, he points out, does not discuss da Vinci’s artwork or “The Da Vinci Code”.

But hot on the gilt heels of “The Passion of the Christ” and the “Da Vinci Code” phenomenon (the movie version of that is due in May), Hollywood’s basing a film on “Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark”.

Here’s how Gardner rather lengthily encapsulates the book on his Graal.co.uk: “From the royal tombs of pharaonic Egypt, to the laboratories of modern science, comes the extraordinary account of gravity defiance and teleportation in the ancient world. ‘The Book of the Dead’ refers to a hyper-dimensional realm called the Field of Mfkzt, which is now determined as a superconductive energy field of high-spin metallurgy. Liaising with modern physicists, Laurence Gardner has ascertained that mfkzt (known today as monatomic gold) was the secret of the pharaohs’ rite of passage to the Afterlife, and was directly associated with the pyramids and the biblical Ark of the Covenant, as revealed by inscriptions at the Sinai mountain temple of Moses.
“With the old science now rediscovered, gold is fast becoming established as a logistically placed source material to the detriment of its traditional value as a currency reserve. As Laurence Gardner details, the advantages of the revived technology are astounding, especially in the fields of medicine and space travel, but the political and social implications of IMF-approved national bullion sales could be very threatening if not contained.
“No reason is given in the Bible as to why the Ark of the Covenant was so richly contrived. It is portrayed as having awesome and deadly powers, but these are not satisfactorily explained. There is, however, no mystery to the Ark. Laurence Gardner explains that its story is wholly related to the dynastic House of Gold – the Messianic bloodline of ancient Grail Kings from the Old Kingdom pharaohs to King Solomon and the descendant Royal House of Judah …
“In the field of quantum mechanics, NASA scientists have recently confirmed that matter can indeed be in two places at once. It is now an established fact that, through quantum entanglement, particles millions of light-years apart can be connected without physical contact. Space-time can now be manipulated; teleportation is becoming a reality; gravity-resistant material is now heralded for air transport, and virtual science has led to a greater understanding of hyper-dimensional existence … Gardner reveals that the keys to all this are: (a) Mfkzt – referred to by the Institute of Advanced Studies as ‘exotic monatomic matter’, and (b) the amazing technology of Superconductivity – acclaimed by the Center for Advanced Study as ‘the most remarkable physical property in the universe’.”

Phew, Sir!

That’s the writer writing. For something completely different on the same subject(s), you have to hear the farmer talking physics. I gather that the best way to meet David Hudson is through Barry Carter’s
ORMUS site, and this one is truly bulging with information, as well as being the launching pad for the aforementioned Yahoo group. (If you join the group, as I did to see what was up, make sure you don’t have its messages relayed to your email inbox – the chatter among these DIY alchemists is an incessant roar.)

Some genuine scientists, apparently, are taking notice of the new substances that Hudson discovered on his Arizona spread in the 1980s that don’t show up on the Periodic Table of Elements. Derived from gold, platinum group metals and other transition elements, these white powders are referred to as “monatomic” (a single atomic state). Hudson cane up with the acronym ORMEs and patented all 11 of them, after a little waltz with the US Defence Department over restrictions on superconductors (which the ORMEs also appear to be). “New understandings in physics suggest, however, that the powders might actually be ‘diatomic’ or small atomic cluster ‘condensates’,” Gardner says. “It is now generally accepted, therefore, that the materials might be more universally referred to by the generic terms ORMUS or ‘M-state’ elements.
“In Greek mythology the quest for the secret of this substance was at the heart of the Golden Fleece legend, while in biblical terms it was the mystical realm of the Ark of the Covenant … the Egyptians described it as ‘mfkzt’, while the Alexandrians venerated it as the Paradise Stone. Made into conical cakes, or suspended in water, the enigmatic fire-stone powder was a ritually ingested supplement of the ancient kings and pharaohs. It was revered as the food of the ‘light body’ (the ka) and was reckoned to heighten general aptitudes of leadership, such as awareness, perception and intuition. It was further considered to be a key to active longevity.
“Today, there are a number of companies manufacturing products containing M-state substances,” and Gardner then mentions a few with guarded recommendations, such as “Priestess Alchemy for superior Quintessential Elixirs, formulated to bring ancient science into the new millennium”.

Barry Carter’s website has a link to a transcript of a 1995 lecture and workshops that Hudson conducted in Dallas for some group called the Eclectic Viewpoint. It’s a tortuous read, but you certainly get a sense of the self-described “ultra-ultra-right-wing conservative dirt farmer” who seemed at the time to have found himself in a position to heal the planet. He started out just tring to make his property more arable, discovered gold and platinum traces in the soil, figured there was enough to make a decent buck, and then found to his widening amazement that he’d stumbled into new scientific territory. He studied up on physics, tramped all over the country twisting arms and getting opinions, invested more than $5 million of his own and other people’s money and ended up with what looked like a miracle on his hands.
He gets a little shivery in his lecture talking about how his cousin traced the family genealogy back to his great-great-great grandmother, one of the de Guises mentioned in “Holy Blood Holy Grail” as part of the Grail lineage descended from Solomon and Jesus, and the de Guise clan apparently had Nostradamus do a little work for them. Nostradamus, Hudson notes, prophesied that by 1999 the “occult gold” would be known to science, “and a descendent of this family, a latter-day David, is the one who’s to plant the Golden Tree of Life. And I didn’t know any of this when I filed my patent. And so when you realise what this is, and you realise what it does, and you realise why it’s here, then you realise why my job is not to make money with it – I can’t make money with it – my job is to tell those people who are ready for it what the state of things are and when it’s going to be available. I can’t sell it, I will solicit donations to cover our costs in producing it. But it has to be made available for those people who are ready for it.

“You no longer have to die to literally come face to face with the angels,” Hudson intones. He can get quite dramatic at times.

“We have over 2,400 ounces per ton of platinum group elements,” he told the Dallas group. “Now if this had just been five or six ounces per ton I probably would have laid it down and walked away from it. But because the numbers were so preposterous, so ridiculous, so unbelievable, I said, you know, ‘Let’s go for it. Let’s find out what really is going on’. We’re talking about 12-14 percent of this rock was these elements.” Many more months of studies followed, and “what we found is when the material goes snow white, it weighs 56 per cent of the true weight. Now that should bother you, I hope. You say, where’s the mass going? Why isn’t it weigh-able anymore? And by repeated annealing we could make the material weigh less than the pan weighed it was sitting in, which was less than nothing, or we could make it weigh 300 or 400 times what it’s beginning weight was, depending on whether we were heating or cooling it … Yet if you take this white powder and put it on a quartz boat, and heat it up to the point where it fuses with the quartz, it becomes black and it regains all its weight again. This makes no sense, it’s impossible, it can’t happen. But there it was.”
Then someone handed Hudson a book on alchemy, and he realised he was treading an ancient path. “Curious enough, in the ancient Egyptian text it was always referred to as the ‘What is it?’, and if you read in the papyrus of Ani that was found in the tomb of Pepe II in old kingdom Egypt, it says, ‘I am purified of all imperfections, what is it, I ascend like the golden hawk of Horus, what is it, I come by the immortals without dying, what is it, I come before my father’s throne, what is it, and it goes on and on, page after page, talking about all these attributes that you acquire as you ascend, but they always stop and ask the question, ‘What is it?’ Well when I found the Hebrew dictionary, I found out that the Hebrew word for ‘What is it?’ is Ma-Na. Manna literally means the same thing, ‘What is it?’ And when you understand that the Hebrew people were actually, lived in Egypt for generations, they were the artisans, they were the metallurgists, they were the craftsman. And when they left out of Egypt they took this knowledge with them.”
Hudson then cites an historian’s claim that the Egyptians, having thus lost the secret of eternal life, began mummifying their dead kings in the hope that they could be restored to life once the secret was recovered. “Did you know that they’ve never found the body of a pharaoh or a high priest from Old Kingdom Egypt? And they claim in their literature that they never died, that they ascended the stairway to heaven. And when you read about where they went, they were going to the very same place that the people in the Tigris-Euphrates valley went to, to an island called Bahrain just off the Sinai peninsula. There was a city by the name of Kilmun or Dilmun and do you know that they have excavated the city and found that it does exist, and it’s supposedly the land of the crossing, where the fresh water and the sea water mix. And they have found the fault, right underneath the island where fresh water exits under the ocean and mixes with the sea water.”
But Hudson and I digress. There are many, many aspects to this story, so it’s easy to wander off – Ethiopians, Solomon’s bastard son, powerful orgasms …

He talks about the first guy to give his product a try (Hudson wanted to be the first, but his wife wouldn’t let him, so he got a bachelor). The guinea bachelor recreated the old Egyptian rite of passage with a 42-day fast, “and on the 10th day we began to give him 500mg a day of this material. Now this was not gold. This was rhodium and iridium because it naturally was in his body. It’s in aloe Vera gel. It’s in carrot juice, it’s in grape juice, it’s in grape seed extract, it’s in slippery elm bark, it’s in sheep sorrel, it’s in many, many materials …
“After five or six days this fellow began to hear this very high-frequency sound, and every day the sound gets louder. By the time he finished his fast, he said it’s like loudspeakers in my brain, literally roaring this sound. It’s the same sound that many of the meditators have heard, that you’re told to listen for when you meditate, to find this sound, but when you think about it most people don’t hear it anymore. And I said, ‘Doesn’t this disturb you? Isn’t this an irritating sound?’ and he said, ‘Not at all. It’s just like nectar’, because it doesn’t come through the ears. He said, ‘It’s inside the brain. It’s something that you literally want to go within the sound and just let it exclude everything out of your life’.”
Even after the 42 days the sound is still getting louder, and “after 60 more days the dreams begin, the revelations begin, and then the visions begin. And this is going to sound a little far-fetched to some of you, but there are light beings that come to this man and teach him. They never open their mouth but they telepathically are communicating with him. And with the hope that I’m not going to offend anyone, there actually is a female being that comes to him and has sex with him. And I didn’t understand this until I found in the ancient Vedic texts that it talks about this, having sex with the angels. After about seven months, he begins to have orgasms … He’s now having about seven or eight a day.”

For reasons that aren’t fully explained, Hudson has been in limbo since 1999. He stopped asking “What is it?” and instead announced “That’s it!” after being fined when a nitric acid tank at his plant sprang a leak and the fire department sprayed foam on it, prompting a huge cloud of orange nitric acid gas that forced the evacuation of hundreds of neighbours. Then Hudson had a heart attack and six bypasses and was obliged to move his factory. He issued a “final” newsletter in 2000 titled “Enough is enough” that suggested his plant has been “regulated out of existence”.

How about other people who’ve tried it? Barry Carter’s site has a bunch of testimonials. Some folks feel merely lethargic, and “some feel that it puts them so much in the moment that they forget to do the things which are important to make their lives work” (sounds like a drug, alright). But most are enthusiastic.
“Larry” sez: “It has an anaesthetic effect; so it stops pain in open wounds immediately. At first I noticed that it shifted my perceived time base to a slower clock. I suspect that this would correspond to a shift to theta waves, which are the more spiritual and creative rhythms of the mind. When thinking, it makes many possibilities appear simultaneously. I was able to visualise or imagine and integrate simultaneously many related clouds of data, and in a moment understand the whole system.”
“Sharon Rose” sez: “It’s like taking my best day and magnifying it 10, 25, 50 times. I feel spiritually tingly. Alive … Wow! With a total of only FOUR drops inside me, I felt an incredible presence within.”
“Dave C” sez: “I have used this white powder gold for over a year now. My smoker’s skin has been gradually replaced by soft, yet tough skin that does not tear or bruise like before , and it heals quickly. Every time I look in a mirror, I marvel at how much younger I appear, because this has literally taken most of my facial wrinkles and my grey hairs away.”
And from WhitePowderGold.com (half-ounce bottle $49.95 plus $7.50 shipping and handling): “The ancients believed this substance would facilitate extraordinary lifespans, and cure many diseases by allowing the body to operate as close to perfection as possible. We would say today that it would vastly increase the ability of each cell to conduct electrical impulses, almost like a high-performance re-wiring job for the entire body … It can be found as a residue at crop circles, and it has been collected by NASA astronauts as Stardust.”
WARNING: WhitePowderGold.com has a section called “Prophecy” that offers a collection of bull faeces of truly biblical proportions. You’re taken on a chapter-and-verse tour of Old Testament pseudo-forecasts via “Brian’s House” and “Brian’s Annex”, and unfortunately none of it’s as funny as “The Life of Brian”.

Anyone fancy a little taste of manna, then?