Blood Ritual: the Ark and the Shroud
This underground stream has occasionally surfaced throughout time and we can see from these trickles that the elements of truth were in fact widespread and ancient. This water of wisdom has in fact given life to the plants that have grown on the surface and sometimes even great trees have emerged and have refused to be chopped down by intolerance or bigotry. These trees are the great mysteries we know today such as the Holy Grail, Great Pyramid and Ark of the Covenant. If we grasp these growths firmly and pull hard enough we uproot the hidden secrets that first gave life to them. One of these roots I found was to branch off into Islam and it would reveal a mystical world that was connected so firmly and so obviously to the main trunk that almost everybody had missed the connection. This root had a name – baraka.
The term baraka is a Sufi one and from which our French barque and Italian barca is derived. Indeed in contemporary France the term baraka, of Algerian origin, still has connotations of luck or blessing and this would eventually make complete sense.
Egyptian Mystics
The ancient Egyptians believed that everybody was a unique individual. The people were said to have two distinct parts, the ba and the ka. These are not simple concepts and have in fact baffled and amused Egyptologists for over two hundred years. But we need to break them down, for within the names of these two human domains attributed by our Egyptian ancestors lies the truth of the term baraka.
The ba is close to what we would call the personality, the traits and acts of the man or woman developed over the course of life. The ka was the life-force or soul. It is the first, or in number,