Good morning, I hope all of you had a pleasant weekend. We start off the new month with a new work titled Talisman: Sacred Cities, Secret Faith a collaboration by Graham Hancock and Robert Bauval.

..‘The boat of Isis, a feast which was celebrated in Rome with great pomp, was known as Navigium Isidis; after it had been launched in the water, it was brought back to the temple of Isis and prayers were made for the prosperity of the emperor, for the empire and for the Roman people…’ (F. Noël, Dictionaire de la fable, Paris, 1823)

‘No one ignores that Paris was originally enclosed in the island (de la Cité). It was thus, since its origins, a city of navigation… As it was in a river rife with navigation, it took as its symbol a boat, and as tutelary goddess, Isis, goddess of navigation; and this boat was the actual one of Isis, symbol of this goddess.’ (Court de Gebelin, Monde Primitif analysé et comparé avec le monde moderne, Paris, 1773)

On 14 July 1789 a furious crowd ran riot on the streets of Paris and stormed the great prison known as the Bastille. Less than an hour later the fate of France hung in the balance and European history seemed set on a new and alarmingly unpredictable course.

Contemporary engravings of the Bastille show a forbidding rectangular structure flanked by eight tall towers. It does not look easy to storm. Built in the late fourteenth century as a fortress to protect eastern Paris, it was converted in the seventeenth century into a squalid and ghastly prison for dissidents. By the time of the Revolution it was firmly established in the public mind as an instrument of tyranny and as a powerful symbol of the despotism of the French Crown.

The day after the storming of the Bastille an enterprising local contractor, Monsieur Pierre-François Palloy, 1 took it upon himself to mobilize a workforce of 800 citizens to dismantle the hated prison stone by stone. 2 The work was so well done that within a month most of the structure had been reduced to rubble with only a small part of the perimeter wall and foundations still intact.

At this point something curious occurred. The suggestion was made, and for a while taken seriously, that the stones of the Bastille should be salvaged in order to construct a replica of an ancient Egyptian pyramid on the site. 3 And although the project later stalled for lack of funds, the core idea of making a symbolic connection with ancient Egypt persisted behind the scenes. If a pyramid could not be managed, something less would have to suffice. Thus it was that on 10 August 1793 a group of revolutionaries ceremoniously installed a large statue of the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis where the Bastille had formerly stood. Depicting the goddess seated on a throne flanked by two lions, the statue had been conceived by Jacques-Louis David, the famous artist and propagandist of the Revolution. It was to be one of the props in a macabre republican feast hastily put together in order to celebrate the decapitation of Louis XVI six months previously and the forthcoming guillotining of Queen Marie-Antoinette still two months ahead.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/08/part-1-talisman-sacred-cities-secret.html