Tuesday, December 9, 2008

The Nine Unknown Men - The Background and Pope Sylvester the II

The secret society was first described in 19th century works by Louis Jacolliot, and in the 20th century by the fantasy writer and Theosophist Talbot Mundy. In 1960, Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier wrote about the Nine Unknown Men in their Morning of the Magicians. In their works, they claimed that the society occasionally revealed itself to wise outsiders such as Pope Sylvester II who was said to have received, among other things, training in supernatural powers and a robotic talking head from the group. In more recent times, according to this circle, the Nine assisted humanity by revealing the secret of the cholera vaccine.

Pope Sylvester II, known also by the name of Gerbert d'Aurillac. Born in the Auvergne in 920 (d. 1003) Gerbert was a Benedictine monk, professor at the University of Rheims, Archbishop of Ravenna and Pope by the grace of Ortho III. He is supposed to have spent some time in Spain, after which a mysterious voyage brought him to India where he is reputed to have acquired various kinds of skills which stupified his entourage. For example, he possessed in his palace a bronze head which answered yes or no to questions put to it on politics or the general position of Christianity. According to Sylvester II this was a perfectly simple operation corresponding to a two-figure calculation, and was performed by an automaton similar to our modern binary machines. This "magic" head was destroyed when Sylvester died, and all the information it imparted carefully concealed.