Lynn Picknett: The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code

18. Ibid.

19. Rossell Hope Robbins, Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, New York, 1959, p. 316, quoted in Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, New York, 1983, p. 811.

20. Summers, p. 73.

21. Colin Wilson, The Occult, London, 1973, p292.

22. `A Aix, par Jean Tholozan, MVCXI', quoted in Summers, p. 82.

23. Ibid.

24. Russell, p. 299.

25. See Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Immanuel Kant, Berlin, 1914.

26. Published in paperback in 2000, subtitled: `How Leonardo Da Vinci Fooled History'.

27. Thomas Humber, The Sacred Shroud, New York, 1978, p. 120.

28. It is know that he had a mysterious room in the Vatican, in which he built a `machine made of mirrors'. No one would have been any wiser but for the German mirror-makers he employed on the project - they were foreign because they wouldn't understand much of what was going on - who, convinced he was practising sorcery, locked him in the room and ran away. Such was Leonardo's controlled physical strength that he merely lifted the heavy door off its hinges and strolled away. But what was the `machine made of mirrors'? In the experiments conducted into Leonardo's possible modus operandi by Clive Prince and his brother Keith in the early 1990s, it soon became obvious that any device that concentrated heat and light would be very useful in producing an image using a very simple pinhole camera - a camera obscura, one of which we know from his notebooks that Leonardo built.

29. Codex Atlanticus.

30. See Josef Maria Eder's 1945 History of Photogaphy.

31. Tobias Churton, The Golden Builders - Alchemists, Rosicrucians and the first Free Masons, Lichfield, 2002, pp. 34-5. I am indebted to Clive Prince for finding this for me.

32. Ibid. and ditto.

33. BSTS Newsletter 42 (January 1996), pp. 6-8, reproduced from Avenire, 7 October 1995.

34. Picknett and Prince, pp. 187-90.

35. Maurice Rowden, Leonardo da Vinci, (London), p. 1975, p. 117.

36. Picknett and Prince, p. 167.

37. Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London, 1964, p. 435.

38. The history of the Rosicrucian Manifestos and the growth of the movement is told in Frances Yates' The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London, 1972, which includes full translations of the original text. Another excellent book on this subject is Tobias Churton, The Golden Builders.

39. C. J. S. Thompson, The Lure and Romance of Alchemy, New York, 1990, Chapter XXII.

40. Dr Christopher McIntosh, Foreword to Churton, The Gnostic Philosophy, p. xii.

41. Ibid.

42. Clive Prince and I remain indebted to the insights of Abigail Nevill, who at the age of eleven, inspired us to really look at the Shroud image with a child's eye - and suddenly a great deal fell into place. See Picknett and Prince, pp. 136-7, 157, 235, 240, 242, 245, 252.

43. I am indebted to the research of Steve Wilson for this interesting fact.

44. Thanks to the computer wizardry of Andy Haveland-Robinson, who had no particular axe to grind and viewed our project with complete objectivity.

45. As Abigail Nevill asked when viewing the Shroud image in negative: `Why is his head too small? And why is it on wrong?'

46. The head at the back is thrown backwards, the hair falling away from the face. At the front the chin is level.

47. Actually the hair appears to have been lightly touched up or painted in using the light-sensitive chemicals that created the photograph. When Clive and Keith Prince discovered that the fish-eye effect renders the hair invisible, that's what they did.

48. Of course Leonardo had the strong sunlight of Italy if he cared to use it, although as this work was undoubtedly of the highest secrecy, he would have chosen to create the Shroud behind closed doors, probably in the Vatican (see note 28, above). We had no such possibilities, having only a garage in grey and unromantic Reading, Berkshire, for our experiments, and a strong UV light bulb or two.

49. See Picknett and Prince for instructions on how to recreate all the so-called `miraculous' characteristics of the Shroud using the simplest of methods. However, you do need an abundance of light - and time! We were the first researchers ever to publish details of our own Shroud recreation, although at roughly the same time Professor Nicholas Allen was completing his similar photographic work in South Africa.

50. For a time we were annoyed at the image of the lens appearing on our experimental `Shrouds' - until we checked with the image of the Turin Shroud and saw it in exactly the same spot! Then, of course, we were overjoyed.

51. Such as Maria Consolata Corti. See Picknett and Prince, pp. 161-3, 331.

52. In 1898 a lawyer from Turin, Secondo Pio, took the first photographs of the Shroud, which was being displayed as part of the celebrations to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy. Seeing the Shroud in negative was a true epiphany for Pio: previously a lukewarm Catholic, after seeing all the intricate detail of the horrific crucifixion leap into life, he abruptly became passionate about his religion. Unfortunately, like millions of others, he had been duped by possibly the world's greatest psychological conman. The Shroud of Turin is not testimony to the truth of the Christian faith, but quite the opposite.

53. Serge Bramly, Leonardo: The Artist and the Man, London, 1992, first published as Leonardo da Vinci, Paris, 1988, p. 445.

54. Although the image was clearly not created with paint, there is a small amount of pigment on the cloth, probably due to the custom of laying religious paintings on it to imbue them with extra holiness.

55. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists,1550. This is quoted at the beginning of Chapter Five of Picknett and Prince, `Faust's Italian Brother'.

56. See Picknett and Prince, The Templar Revelation, p. 198.

57. Paracelsus, De Natura Rerum, 1572, Book 3.

58. Ibid.

59. Gian Battista della Porta, Natural Magik, 1658, Second Book.

60. Ibid.

61. Paracelsus.

62. Andre Nataf, The Wordsworth Dictionary of the Occult, London, 1994, p. 161.

63. Ibid.

64. Lynn Thorndike, `A History of Magic and Experimental Science', New York, 1929, vol. VIII, p. 629, quoted in Clara Pinto-Correia's online essay `Homunculus: Historiographic Misunderstanding of Preformationist Terminology', www.zygote.swarthmore.edu/fert I b.html.

65. Ibid.

66. The robot was a result of Leonardo's studies in anatomy, which are described in the Codex Huygens.

67. See www.w3.impa.br/-jair/e65.html.

68. Ibid. This online article is sponsored by the Istituto e Museo di Storia delta Scienza, Florence, and The Science Museum, London.

69. Dee himself had what is believed to be the perfect astrological chart for an occultist, being born with the Sun in Cancer and his ascendant in Sagittarius.

70. Montague Summers indefensibly describes `the work of rehabilitation so nobly initiated by Queen Mary'. Summers, p. 22.

71. Nevertheless, Dee persuaded Queen Mary to establish a national library, bestowing on it 4000 of his own books. It would ultimately become the British Museum.

72. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1, c.1608.

73. Elizabethan spelling was notoriously inconsistent, even for personal names.

74. See www.johndee.org/charlotte/Chapter6/6pl.html. This is extracted from a page from The Alchemy Website, www.levity.com/alchemy/kellystn.html.

75. This appeared in three parts from 1663 to 1678.

76. Their magic mirror can now be seen in the British Museum.

77. From the Fama Frateritatis, quoted in Churton, The Golden Builders, p. 99.

78. Ed. Meric Casaubon, A True & Faithful Relation of what passed for many years between Dr John Dee and some Spirits, London, 1657, quoted in ibid. Churton notes: `Casaubon took his material from Dee's diaries, chiefly from those of 1583-4'.