Here Be Dragons?

Continued from here.

Laurence Gardner's Nexus articles hit my brain with the force of a lightning bolt. This was exactly what I'd been looking for in the five years since the implosion of the group I'd been in. The idea that Jesus and Mary Magdelene were husband and wife felt like the "real truth" that the Church establishment had been keeping from everyone via a centuries-long campaign of suppression, smoke, and mirrors. But now that the Internet was a thing, that secret was going to get away from them - just like Lutheranism had spread like wildfire after the invention of the printing press.

I printed the articles out, read and re-read them, and immediately went on a hunt for info about the Anunnaki. I'd had to read The Epic Of Gilgamesh in college a year earlier, so a lot of the names were familiar. I went out and read all of Zechariah Sitchin's books which were available to me at that time, but I also went out and read Samuel Noah Kramer's book about the ancient Sumerians. And while "The Chariots Of The Gods"-type narrative that Sitchin was proposing was very much in line with the New Age beliefs I'd been raised with about extraterrestrial influences on the development of humanity, I started to notice places where it looked like Sitchin was mixing his myths up, or cherry-picking bits of them that fit his narrative.

And while I joked with my friends about the likelihood of someone posting Real Forbidden Truths That The Church Suppressed For Centuries on a website, I wondered if maybe this was happening because information was now moving faster than ever before, and more people than ever were getting online to share details and compare notes. And if it were all true, maybe the information was finally moving too fast for the elements in The Church who'd worked so hard to suppress it to keep up with anymore. Maybe it had finally gotten away from them, and escaped out into the wild.

After all, this was also the same summer that a lot of people who saw The Blair Witch Project came away the belief that they had just watched real found footage of a Witch killing student journalists in real time. And a story was circulating online about the ill-fated The Navidson Family, who had moved into a House that apparently contained a lot of strange hallways. A lot of people were gravitating to material posted online about a lot of strange things, things that they wanted to be true; even if it was just because the belief in those things made their world a more wonderous and exciting place to live in. (Or as I heard a lot: "sure, things like UFOs, Dragons and Unicorns may not technically exist, or maybe they don't exist anymore; but I'd rather believe we live in a world where they do.") It was a very weird time, and we all were about to find out just how tenuous people's grasp on what was real versus what was fiction actually was.

I had just watched The Matrix earlier that spring, convinced that what I had just witnessed was a Gnostic Tract disguised as a science fiction movie. Dear Reader, I came away from the movie just feeling this in my bones. "The Machines" were the Archons, agents of the Demiurge. The Agents were their enforcers. Neo was the Sacral Messiah and Bodhisattva, destined to reincarnate numerious times until humanity was liberated. Trinity was his Grail Queen, and Morpheus was Merlin. The Matrix itself was a metaphor for what Philip K. Dick called The Black Iron Prison (the physical simulation that the Demiurge had trapped us in) but it was also a metaphor for how information could be accessed via Gnosis from the Akashic Record. All the "Red Pill" really did was give those who took it the awareness of the connection, but also awareness that they were living inside a prison. But that awareness of the connection to the Akashic Record was like a weapon that could be used against the Archons, because it was possible for us to know what they knew.

(And if you can believe it, I still hadn't even seen a single issue of Grant Morrison's comic The Invisibles at this point. Nor would I for several years after that.)

But what about those of us who felt like we were Not Human, that we were Other, that we were the spirits of Elves or Werewolves or Vampires or other Mythological Beings? Well we were obviously descended from Archons who weren't doing what they were supposed to be doing in the ArchitectDemiurge's grand scheme of things - aka The Watchers, or the Nephilim. You know: Exiles. The Book of Enoch had plainly stated that the Watchers gave humanity knowledge that was considered to be off limits, and had "taken wives from the Daughters of Men." (So when the Wachowski Sisters appeared to drop an actual metaphor for that in Matrix Reloaded, with them being headed by a figure called The Merovingian, too? Mind: Blown.)

So when I read Laurence Gardner's Nexus articles, it all flowed together with that and with the stuff I'd believed in High School. The Annunaki were Archons who'd been sent to manage humanity by the Demiurge. But some of them like Enki had rebelled against the cruelty of the yoke that was being put on humanity. And they'd been recontextualized as harmful, demonic entities because of this, so that people would shun them and their Gnosis. This view would fluctuate a lot as I kept encountering material from people who claimed they were space aliens: but this was the version that had crystallized for me in the summer of 1999.

And if all of humanity were spiritual beings trapped in physical matter in the Black Iron Prison, it meant that things like racism, wealth inequality, mandatory enforced heterosexuality ("If the rich need more peasants, breeding becomes compulsory." - Romania, 1967 - Decree 770), and social injustice were created by the Demiurge in order to enforce the unjust hierarchy we were living under. In reality, everyone was equal. Any one person could achieve Samsara. Anyone could learn to access Gnosis, figure out what was really going on, and organize a resistance. And as descendants of the Archons who'd rebelled, it was our job to make sure the truth got out to "those with ears to hear."

I eventually obtained copies of Laurence Gardner's books Genesis of the Grail Kings and Realm Of The Ring Lords (i.e. the ones with info speculated to be sourced entirely from Nicholas de Vere.) It was around this time that I also found a copy of Holy Blood, Holy Grail and read it. But everyone was still leaning on me to figure out what I was going to do with my life, and "Weird Gnostic Goth Who Works At A Movie Theater And Reads Tarot Cards At Dennys" was not going to cut it. A (now-defunct) electronics chain recruited me to work an entry-level telephone customer service/tech support job during the summer of 2000, and I did that while I figured out what I was going to do next.

I now had access to high-speed internet eight hours a day while at work, within reason (nsfw stuff was out, but they didn't care about the Weird Gnostic Stuff.) And it was around this time that I found Laurence Gardner's Website, mediaquest.co.uk (mirrored in the US as mediaquest.com) It can still be seen in its late 1990s/early 2000s glory on the wayback machine. And it was on this site that I first read about Nicholas de Vere and the Dragon Court, in his own section of the MediaQuest site.

One day, I checked the site to discover that this section had disappeared. It was replaced by Laurence Gardner's own account of his falling-out with Nicholas de Vere. Which appeared as per this capture from the Wayback Machine:

"NOTICE: From Sir Laurence Gardner, Chevalier de Saint Germain and Attaché to the Grand Protectorate of The Imperial and Royal Dragon Court and Order - Ordo Dragonis, Sárkány Rend, 1408.

When publishing my book 'Genesis of the Grail Kings' early in 1999, I asked a certain Nicholas de Vere to write the Foreword to that work on the understanding that he was Magister Templi of the Imperial and Royal Dragon Court in Britain by virtue of a warrant issued by the ducal House of Habsburg-Tuscany.

It subsequently came to my attention, however, that this was not the case and I learned that Nicholas de Vere's said warrant was in no way valid since the House of Habsburg-Tuscany was not at liberty, under any legal right or consideration, to issue such a document.

On behalf of the Grand Protectorate of The Imperial and Royal Dragon Court and Order, I therefore now confirm that, despite his Internet protestations and various messages to all and sundry, Nicholas de Vere is not recognized in any capacity as being attached in any manner, formally or informally, to the Hungarian establishment of Sárkány Rend. Neither is he attached or affiliated to any of its priories in other lands. His name is not recorded in the Court's registration at the High Court of Budapest, nor in any other authentic document of the Court in Britain or any other country.

In November 1999 I was required to publicly sever my association with Nicholas de Vere, while still acknowledging the help he had afforded me with certain matters of research and reimbursing him for these services. In that same month MediaQuest, who had hosted de Vere's Web site on this current page, was similarly obliged to cease all further professional association, terminating the site. At that same time, the Webmaster, Sir Adrian Wagner (Knight of the Swan by grant and ratification of the Royal House of Stewart) duly resigned from all and any de Vere affiliation.

As detailed within the main body of this current site, the Imperial and Royal Dragon Court ceremony held at the Mansion House, York, on 21 March 2000 (with Chev. Dr. Gyorgy von varhegyi Lehr, Count of Oberberg, Chancellor of the Court, in attendance) established the truth of the matter once and for all in Britain. Also present, among various officers of the Court and Order, were Chev. Dr. Andrew von Zsigmond, Baron de Lemhény, of the Hungarian Consulate, Grand Prior of the Order in Britain, and HRH Prince Michael of Albany, the Order's Protector in the English speaking world. The City of York was formally represented by the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, while the Sheriff of York attended to represent HM Queen Elizabeth II."

Laurence Gardner, July 2000

After Laurence Gardner and MediaQuest severed their relationship with Nicholas de Vere, he soon fired back with this pronouncement, which originally appeared on the http://www.dragoncourt.org site.

"It is intended that the Dragon Court will continue to publish individual aspects of its history, along with references to the classical folklore and mythic customs of Europe and Asia which are directly linked to the Dragon tradition.

We trust that visitors to this site will find the given details sufficient to cement the facts pertaining to the Court, facts which positively disassociate this Court from other presumptuous Orders such as the recently formed Roman Catholic, Hungarian Social Club also calling itself "Sarkany Rend".

Trading off the back of the public ignorance of the Sovereign Law into which remit these people place themselves and with great emphasis for the assumed validity of such an action; they publicise the fact that their "association" was registered in a High Court in Budapest, as if this vouchsafed its authenticity, or as if such registration had some form of nobiliary significance or import, but that Social Club - for that is all it is and that is all it is registered as with the judiciary - is not recognised under Hungarian Constitutional Law as a Chivalric Order or Court, because Hungarian Republican Law is constitutionally incapable of recognising the validity of so-called Royal or Noble Courts or Orders re-established within its borders.

Having already been offered this dubious honour - that of being "registered" in the same High Court years ago - the Dragon Court ignored it because Sarkany Rend, as it is ill-named, is not a Hungarian National Order. It isn't even an "Order", so the idea of anyone being 'knighted' into it is ridiculous. We nevertheless received a letter in the mid 1990's from the Secretary of the Prime Minister of Hungary recognising this, the Angevin Dragon Court, as Sarkany Rend and desiring that he be included amongst our number as the Charge d'Affaires of the Dragon Court in Hungary.

In addition to assuming the name Sarkany Rend this Hungarian body, or its new associates or both, have apparently also misappropriated the Name and style of The Imperial and Royal Dragon Court and Order of the Dragon Sovereignty, along with numerous devices and designs which originated from, and are the copyright of this, the original Imperial and Royal Dragon Court. Purely as a legal consideration the copyright was registered in the British Law courts years ago. This dubious piece of egotistical, nationalistic Hungarian fol-de-rol was founded by some Roman-Catholic monseigneur and it has no more Royal, Nobiliary or Chivalric status than a British, Northern Working Mens Club.

Along with all the other silly so-called Royal, Noble or Chivalric Courts or Orders established or patronised throughout history by the Roman Church or its offshoots, pathetic social clubs for pathetic social climbers, both it and they all continue to be illegal by virtue of the fraudulent and consequently spurious Royal and Noble powers assumed by the Roman Church under the auspices of the equally fraudulent and spurious Donation Of Constantine.

However, as defined within the main body of the following text, the Imperial and Royal Dragon Court represented herein, which actually is legitimately recognised as the Sovereign Court of The Sovereign Dragon Nation by the relevant and appropriate Government of a European Member State, is a closed fraternity of individuals, representing those who trace their ancestry and affiliations back to the ancient Grail and Dragon families. It is not in any way a joining club or membership subscription society. Neither is it a commercial, religious, political or charitable institution."

What I think actually probably happened is that Laurence Gardner pumped Nicholas de Vere for enough information for two whole books, and got those books written and sent off to the publisher before realizing that a lot of that info probably came from information which had been channeled (which could qualify as what people in the esoteric/occult community sometimes refer to as "Unverified Personal Gnosis") until after the fact. He went ahead with Genesis of the Grail Kings and Realm Of The Ring Lords anyway, but disavowed Nicholas de Vere afterwards and severed their working relationship. There were also questions about the legitimacy of his organization and his title, some of which has been answered at last. (And now I'm going completely down the Redondan Rabbit Hole.) But the issue with "Channeled Information" would come up again and again.

Because when Nicholas de Vere kept referring to the "de Vere Family Archives" or the "Dragon Family Archives," people (apparently including Laurence Gardner at one point) assumed he was referring to actual, physical hardcopies of records preserved over several centuries. This would prove not to be the case. Nor were the dragoncourt.org forum members ever able to find enough outside information to corroberate his claims after he abandoned the site and went incommunicado, except to determine that lots of royal and noble families are apparently related to each other, and have a lot of modern descendants living what we would consider to be ordinary workaday lives.

Videos of Laurence Gardner's late 1990s-era conferences are available to watch on youtube (the last time I checked, anyway.) In one of these, he describes his meeting with Nicholas de Vere like it was an act of synchronicity taking place, because the information he provided filled in the gaps in his research regarding the topics described in the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. Laurence Gardner and Tracy Twyman both took Nicholas de Vere's words in their raw form and filtered them for public consumption; and in their own ways, they both adapted it to suit their own personal agendas.

But back then I had no idea about the drama going on behind the scenes. I was just an internet spectator rubbernecking a collision of opposing personalities. I was curious, but that was all. There were plenty of other websites alleging heinous Mardukite conspiracies and Anunnaki control mechanisms to occupy my attention, and an entire Simon Necronomicon to read.

After their falling out, Laurence Gardner maintained that his own version of the Dragon Court was the legitimate Court. The head of this Court was HRH Michael Stewart of Albany, who claimed to be the true hereditary prince of Scotland. Things got worse for Laurence Gardner when Michael Stewart of Albany was definitively exposed as a pretender in 2006. Then Laurence Gardner died in 2010. He doesn't feature any further in any of the drama that I was involved with personally.

But as around of 2001, Nicholas de Vere’s essays reappeared on his own website, Dragoncourt.org. The thing was, Dragoncourt Dot Org was itself the work of one Bill Barckley - who had not only coded the whole thing himself on Nicholas de Vere's behalf, but who had also edited and uploaded de Vere’s essays (From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells and The Origin Of The Dragon Lords Of The Rings). He worked on and paid for the whole thing out of his own pocket as a labor of love, and a desire to see Nicholas de Vere’s work reach its intended audience.

I found the website dragoncourt dot org in late 2002. I remembered the dust-up between him and Laurnce Gardner from back in 2000, and I logged onto the web forum hoping to find out more. Instead, I walked right into what looked like a Situation.

"Nick," as the other forum users called him, was already long gone, and he was going to publish his own essays in book form with the help of Tracy Twyman, a writer in the whole "Grail Bloodlines genre" who had her own zine and website, Dagobert's Revenge. This was causing quite the firestorm on the forum, one that I had kind of just blundered into. People were split between cautious optimism, and concern that Tracy Twyman and her Ordo Lapsit Exillis (OLE) outfit had orchestrated some sort of coup.

I want to clarify here that the dragoncourt.org website and forum was not the actual Dragon Court organization. The forum members were not the actual "Dragon Court" itself - at least not by the time I got there. Several people have reached out to me over the years under the mistaken impression that the dragoncourt.org website was the actual Dragon Court. But if that was ever the case, it ceased when Nicholas de Vere went completely incommunicado for months starting in 2002, and other known members stopped posting altogether.

I checked out the Dagobert’s Revenge website (now archived on the wayback machine) around this time, and it seemed odd to me that a lot of the articles and blog posts that I was interested in were paywalled; something that not even major news outlets online were doing yet. Anyway, I was a broke computer tech support call center employee in 2002, and laid off for the first half of 2003 before getting hired at another Helpdesk call center job, and I wasn’t about to shell out for a subscription to her conspiracy theory webzine. Nicholas de Vere was totally incommunicado with his own webmaster, and no one had heard anything from him for months. Rumors about what was going on with him were flying.

I have to admit that I was put off by some of Nicholas de Vere's attitudes in the first article, From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells, even back in 2003. But I eagerly devoured The Origin Of The Dragon Lords Of The Rings over the course of a single evening. Because, as one Amazon commenter put it, it felt like the Witch Primer I'd been looking for at the time (until I found Paul Huson's book Mastering Witchcraft later.) A lot of the material was similar to what I'd already read in Laurence Gardner's books on the subject (Grail Kings, Ring Lords) which Nicholas de Vere claimed were mostly composed of information that Laurence Gardner had taken from him and run with, anyway.

And in his writings, Nicholas de Vere flipped the Gnostic script I'd been working from: the Elven families had once been the stewards of the Earth and humanity. But they'd been hunted down and persecuted over the ages by the jealous Church during the Middle Ages, their lands and power seized and handed to the Church's lackeys. And the very land and the people were suffering as a result. The Church had also been responsible for the rise of consumer capitalism, which was wrecking the Earth. That part was similar to what I'd already believed. But according to his narrative, the Rich and Powerful and the Captains of Industry weren't descendants of Archons, or of the Watchers who'd lost their way; they were greedy, all-too-human assholes who'd conquered and schemed and murdered their way to the top.

In essence, Nicholas de Vere talked about magic (or magick) as if it is a mostly biochemical process, very heavily influenced by Kenneth Grant's Draconic or Typhon Tradition. But he then went on to insist that only approximately 10% of people in the world are capable of producing the brain chemicals necessary to perform this magic - the "Dragon" bloodlines, whom he claimed were actually a species separate from humanity - and that only people who could prove their connection to the Dragon Bloodlines beyond a shadow of the doubt would be admitted to the actual Dragon Court, but also that only members of the Dragon Court were real Witches, and everyone else was just deluded or faking it. Yes this is a veriation of the "Witch Blood" argument, which just comes off as a eugenicist argument to a lot of people now.

And yes, Nicholas de Vere's narrative contained similarities to the lore that developed in the group I was involved with when I was younger - mainly the part about the descendants of the Nephilim, or the Watchers, being the ancestors of the Elves and the stewards of the Earth. And I was still very much stuck on the idea of "Elves" being an entirely different species than humans - as in physically, biologically, genetically, neurologically different. And the idea of Magic being a biochemical or entheogenic process was intriguing. But, here's the thing: there was absolutely no way that I or any of my friends from the earlier group would have claimed that we had the only real magic. Not even in depths of spiritual psychosis. That idea would have been ludicrous to us, and also demonstrably wrong. After all, one thing that supposedly got the Watchers in trouble with the Almighty was the fact that they were teaching Magic to the humans!

And after the fallout of our teen coven, our ringleader - who I would say was more "tapped in" to the Dragon Consciousness than any of us - went and joined a Wiccan coven, and has been a Wiccan for decades at this point!

The Watchers - whether they were extraterrestrials, otherworldly or angelic beings, or just spirtually or psychically-gifted immigrants who'd fled the Black Sea region during a massive flood - taught Magick to other ancient peoples. They gave those people the tools to resist oppression and create their own destinies, and discover their own True Wills. And if that's not our goal in the present day, then what the hell are we even doing?

Anyway, I went to the site one day in September of 2003 to discover that Nicholas de Vere's articles had disappeared from Dragoncourt.org entirely. They were eventually replaced by two new documents: an open letter to Queen Elizabeth II from someone named Richard Dufton, and someone else’s account of Dragon descent which was never expanded upon.

Bill posted to let us know what was going on, including the fact that he had been threatened with legal action unless Nicholas de Vere's articles were removed from the website, effective immediately - as if he were just some random person who'd copied and posted the material without permission, and not Nicholas de Vere's friend and acting webmaster for three years running - and that this legal threat was the first he'd heard from Nick after almost a year of silence. This was all happening at a time when he'd just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. And he was openly and unabashadly frank about his feelings of intense hurt, anger, and betrayal at how he was being treated; especially after literally years of shelling out his own time and money to make Nick’s essays available to the public.

After Bill's death, the presence of Richard Dufton's open letter to the Queen on the website led to speculation that he had assumed control of the actual offline Dragon Court Organization - an assumption I later echoed to people when they emailed me asking what was going on with the website during the brief time I served as a forum mod in 2005, because he was the only one related to Nick's original group who had not seemingly defected to the enemy or was not dead (see below.) That's another thing that's weird about this whole time: most of the people associated with Nick or around Nick fucking died.

For many of the longtime members of the forum, the situation was like being startled out of a dream. The rug had been pulled out from under them in a very nasty way, and many of them were questioning if the whole thing hadn't been a scam from the beginning. Attempts were already being made to determine if there was any way Nick's claims from his essays could be corroborated with historical data, an initiative I jumped into. No one had managed to contact Richard Dufton, and at no point did he actually turn up to say, "Look at me, I'm the Grandmaster now." Nor was there any way to contact Nicholas de Vere personally to ask what the hell was really going on.

This was complicated by the fact that the original articles were gone from the site and the book hadn't yet been released. No one had thought to copy them or make a big PDF or something because I don't think anyone expected them to vanish so suddenly.

Eventually Nicholas de Vere's essays popped up on archive.org in 2004. The articles were now "back" in a form people could read, so I posted the links from archive.org on my personal website. But it Tracy Twyman or her followers were apparently on the lookout for people who posted links to the archived essays on their own personal websites or on Livejournal or MySpace, because her publisher (Book Tree, the Dragon Key Press) would email the offending linker suggesting that litigation might follow if they didn't take down the links. This happened to me.

The unspoken question that seemed to be on everyone's mind was, "if this was all a scam...and I'm not saying it was, but just hear me out here; is there anything in it worth salvaging? Is the Dragon Consciousness real?" Can anything that Nicholas de Vere claimed be independently verified at all? What about the "Dragon Gene Project?" Is that legit? Apparently at one point, it was. But all of the information on it has gone missing. Which may mean that there's someone out there with access to a bunch of people's genetic information that they probably shouldn't have. People just shrugged about it in the early 2000s. But the danger is more acutely understood now in the 2020s, with data breaches of Ancestry.com and 23AndMe making news.

Anyway, by September 2003 there was a message from Bill on the site:

“While we await the wheels which grind exceedingly fine . . .
From the cowardice that dare not face new truths, From the laziness that is contented with half truth, From the arrogance that thinks it knows all truth, Good Lord, deliver me.”

In 2014, Tracy Twyman would go on to tell her own side of the story in her book, Clock Shavings:

I was even more impressed when, a few days after that last séance, I received a letter out of the blue from Nicholas de Vere, whom I had not talked to in many months. In it he made two amazing requests: (1) That I accept ownership of the copyright for his book From Transylvania to Tunbridge Wells, and seek to have it published right away, and (2) That I accept, at least temporarily, the title of "Grand Master" of the Dragon Court. He would retain ultimate control by elevating himself to a different title: "Sovereign Head." But I would be the official leader of record.

All of this made no sense because, of course, I was barely involved in the Dragon Court or any of Nick's projects at all. Also, why would he want to give away the copyright to his own book, especially after Laurence Gardner had already stolen it from him? Wasn't he afraid that I would screw him over too?

Furthermore, for what reason did he suddenly want me of all people to run his Dragon operation, when I still had yet to prove or even claim any connection to Dragon blood? Why did he not want to run his own order anymore? But Baphomet had predicted it.”

I need to clarify here that throughout her account of this entire time she describes being in contact with several entities who claimed to be Cain, Baphomet, Lucifer and Satan, via ouija board.

Actually, she claimed she had reached out to the spirit of filmmaker Jean Cocteau first, who then put her in touch with Cain. After several sessions, Cain put her in touch with Baphomet. The two spirits were connected somehow, to the extent that they were basically incarnations of the same person. There are some theories that the “Baphomet” that the Knights Templar was worshiping was actually the Biblical Cain (along with a host of other possible candidates) and it’s possible that the connection happened via syncretism. Baphomet seemed super mad about it during one seance.

Anyway, Baphomet had informed her that there was a curse on her, which would not be removed until she got Nick’s book published and sold at least 1000 copies:

I called up De Vere to ask him what he meant by all of this. He said that, for reasons he couldn't explain, he no longer wanted the burden of being the Dragon Court Grand Master. He asked me to take it "just for symbolic purposes," and said that if I chose to do absolutely nothing with the Court, that would be fine. It would remain in an "occulted" position until we decided to resurrect it. I thought there was something fishy about this, like he was trying to make me the "HEAD" of the court, and since it supposedly required no sacrifice on my part, I agreed to take the title.

I felt the same way about the book. Again, was he setting me up to take the fall for something? But he said that his friend was editing it now (something that I had told him would need to be done before his crazy manuscript was ready for public consumption). So all I needed to do was find a publisher. Considering that my crushing financial problems were supposedly caused by a curse from Baphomet, all because I had so far failed to do this one thing, how could I possibly refuse?

Back in the early 2000s, Tracy Twyman had been a part of Boyd Rice’s radio show and had participated with him in paranormal research before they parted on bad terms. His own statement regarding their flameout was posted to the dragoncourt dot org forum by one of his supporters..

The ouija board sessions with Baphomet became the primary moving force behind the Ordo Lapsit Exillis after that. That was how they got all their marching orders. Tracy refers to Baphomet as the true “Outer Head” of the order. It's there in her book.

Eventually Tracy asked Baphomet how to conduct their Magickal ritual practice, and he (Baphomet is traditionally depicted as being hermaphroditic or intersex, but seems to use male pronouns here) told them to "call the Points" (Quarters or Watchtowers) and referred them to the Book of Leviathan, a part of Anton LaVey's Satantic Bible. All of this is in Clock Shavings.

And, having read about this in Clock Shavings years after the fact, this is where I realized how my own sense of imposter syndrome and overcompensation for previous cases of ego expansion had prevented me from ever confronting Tracy Twyman directly, outside of ranting on my own website and the dragoncourt.org forum about her publisher's attempts to bully me into taking down links to Nicholas de Vere's articles where they were archived on the wayback machine. It was this imposter syndrome that blocked me from writing my own material for the site. Because all I had in my corner was my own Gnosis about the Dragon Court, and my experiences as a teen. If I'd known that there were no "Secret Dragon Mysteries" that Tracy was privy to outside of Nicholas de Vere's essays, and some sessions on a Ouija board, and the Satanic Bible, I think I would have reacted very differently.

Tracy had found Nick the same way everyone else did, via Bill’s website. She claims she was commanded by Cain/Baphomet to get his book published and to sell at least 1000 copies, or she was cursed. And that’s why she did what she did. Or at least, that’s what she claims in her book.

(On a side note: after reading Clock Shavings, I attempted to see if I could finagle a vision of the past out of the Universe to try and get confirmation of any of Tracy's account of communicating with Baphomet, or the Biblical Cain living in a "giant prism in the center of the Earth." Instead what I saw was a vision of two men whom I understood to be ancient Canaanites, who were about to enter a forbidding desert wasteland. One turned to the other and said, "Pazuzu haunts this desert. We stand a better chance of making it if we split up. He can only go after one of us at a time." then the dream ended.)

After the flameout with Boyd Rice, Tracy and her associates in the OLE were discussing how to handle the situation, when Cain/Baphomet put them in touch with "Satan" himself (again, via ouija board) and that she and the other members of her Ordo Lapsit Exillis group were ordered by Satan to curse Bill Barckley and Richard Dufton.

Or, to put it another way: the Devil made her do it.

The thing is: 18th century Occultist Eliphas Levi, who popularized the image of Baphomet as as the Mendes Goat, saw Baphomet as a symbol for the Alchemical Union Of Opposites. To him, Baphomet was a benign figure, not a Satanic entity.

Aleister Crowley has this to say about Baphomet: (From Magick Book 4)

"The Devil does not exist. It is a false name invented by the Black Brothers to imply a Unity in their ignorant muddle of dispersions. A devil who had unity would be a God… ‘The Devil’ is, historically, the God of any people that one personally dislikes… This serpent, SATAN, is not the enemy of Man, but He who made Gods of our race, knowing Good and Evil; He bade ‘Know Thyself!’ and taught Initiation. He is ‘The Devil’ of the Book of Thoth, and His emblem is BAPHOMET, the Androgyne who is the hieroglyph of arcane perfection… He is therefore Life, and Love. But moreover his letter is ayin, the Eye, so that he is Light; and his Zodiacal image is Capricornus, that leaping goat whose attribute is Liberty.”

Sounds like Enki again, doesn't it? But then he goes on to say elsewhere:

"I had taken the name Baphomet as my motto in the O.T.O. For six years and more I had tried to discover the proper way to spell this name. I knew that it must have eight letters, and also that the numerical and literal correspondences must be such as to express the meaning of the name in such a way as to confirm what scholarship had found out about it, and also to clear up those problems which archaeologists had so far failed to solve ... One theory of the name is that it represents the words βαφὴ μήτεος, the baptism of wisdom; another, that it is a corruption of a title meaning "Father Mithras". Needless to say, the suffix R supported the latter theory. I added up the word as spelt by the Wizard. It totalled 729. This number had never appeared in my Cabbalistic working and therefore meant nothing to me. It however justified itself as being the cube of nine. The word κηφας, the mystic title given by Christ to Peter as the cornerstone of the Church, has this same value. So far, the Wizard had shown great qualities! He had cleared up the etymological problem and shown why the Templars should have given the name Baphomet to their so-called idol. Baphomet was Father Mithras, the cubical stone which was the corner of the Temple."

Nicholas de Vere himself referred to Baphomet as "Father Mithras" in The Origin Of The Dragon Lord Of The Rings. One wonders if this is due to some kind of insider info, or if he is just taking a cue from Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Grant.)

Baphomet is of particular importance to Chaos Magicians; at least to those who follow Peter J. Carroll's teachings. From his books Liber Null and Psychonaut, which are often sold together in one volume:

"There is a part of Chaos which is of more direct relevance to the magician. This is the spirit of the life energy of our planet. All living beings have some extra quality in them which separates them from inorganic matter. The ancient shamans mainly sought to represent this force by the Horned God. In more modern times this force has reasserted itself in our awareness under the symbol of Baphomet.

Baphomet is the psychic field generated by the totality of living beings on this planet. Since the Shamanic aeon, it has been variously represented as Pan, Pangenitor, Pamphage, All-Begettor, All-Destroyer, as Shiva-Kali — creative phallus and abominable mother and destroyer — as Abraxas — polymorphic god who is both good and evil — as the animal headed Devil of sex and death, as the evil Archon set over this world, as Ishtar or Astaroth — goddess of love and war — as the Anima Mundi or World soul, or simply as "Goddess." Other representations include the Eagle, or Baron Samedi, or Thanateros, or Cernunnos — the horned god of the Celts.

The appellation "Baphomet" is obscure, but probably arises from the Greek Baph-metis, union with wisdom. Gods with Baphometic names and images reoccur throughout Gnostic teachings. No image can fully represent the totality of what this force is, but it is conventionally shown as an hermaphrodite god-goddess in the form of a horned human that includes various mammalian and reptilian characteristics."

And I can't proceed without invoking the image of Baphomet the Baptizer, from Clive Barker's film Nightbreed:

Finally, and perhaps of the most importance in context to this essay, Nicholas de Vere himself says in The Origin Of The Dragon Lord Of The Rings:

"In Draconian Tradition (see Kenneth Grant) Baphomet is translated as Bapho Mitra or Father Mithras. Baphomet is also rendered as Head or source of wisdom. If Baphomet is rendered Father (or Source) Mithras and Mithras is identified as Samael the Dragon, then one has the Source or Head Dragon, the origin of Pendragon.

Baphomet, the "Deity" of the Templars was described as being both the Head of Wisdom, which has Celtic and Galatian origins; and the Sabbatical Goat. As the Sabbatical Goat, the Templar glyph also used by the Cathars, the medieval witches and later generally by satanists and left hand path occultists, was more complex than the simple pentagram."

Anyhow: in November 2003, the two new, unrelated articles which had appeared on dragoncourt dot org back in September (the open letter by Richard Dufton and the essay from another third party) were replaced by a Dragon Court Notice: "WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO LIBERATE THE DRAGON.”

In December 2003, this changed to “THE DRAGON HAS BEEN LIBERATED!”

Then the site was the target of a massive forum raid, inflicted by someone who apparently didn’t take too kindly to the idea of liberation.

The Battle For Dragoncourt Dot Org.

At this point, I’ll just repost the words of the late Gregory Ellison, who took over as webmaster in 2004 after Bill passed away.

"Since this website began its life primarily as a vehicle for the (free) presentation of the works of Nicholas de Vere, I suppose I should state our "official" position with regard to Mr. de Vere and his works at this time ... especially since the commercial publication of de Vere's book has re-stimulated some controversy about him and this issue.

When Dragoncourt.org was founded, Mr. de Vere had no publisher, nor any resources to make his book and ideas available to the public. Our original webmaster, Bill Barckley, kindly offered to create this site for the purpose of freely sharing these writings with anyone interested, as was Mr. de Vere's stated intention.

Accordingly, Bill, entirely at his own considerable expense in both money and work, created this domain and prepared Mr. de Vere's works for web presentation. This was a labor of love, with no commercial motivation and no compensation asked or expected, both as a personal favor to Nick and because he believed that the history of the dragon court and ideas of dragon consciousness were interesting and valuable ideas that deserved greater awareness.

The only condition Bill imposed on this work was that the works would remain free to the public rather than being sold as a commercial venture. This is not because Bill believed there is anything "wrong" with earning a fair profit on books that an author has worked hard to produce, but simply a recognition of the joint aim and agreement at the outset ... it would hardly have been fair for Bill to donate hundreds of dollars (by now thousands) of his own money, along with many hundreds of hours of his own work in paginating and producing Nick's books to be easily readable and navigable on the site, if Mr. de Vere intended to use that goodwill donation as a springboard for a commercial venture rather than the public sharing that he represented to Bill when Bill volunteered his assistance.

However, all things change, and in time Mr. de Vere found a publisher as well as other individuals (i.e., Tracy Twyman) interested in helping him promote it commercially. But since he had already agreed to make his works permanently available on this site at no charge, he thought he had a problem, believing that the FREE availability of the works here would hurt the commercial sale of his published book. (Actually, I believe that was an error in judgment ... the new book is updated and revised, and the presence of a free earlier version on the web would probably NOT have hurt its sales ... if anything it would likely have stimulated sales of the published book, as his ideas would have reached and interested more folks, many of whom would wish to own the most recent versions. However, that kind of marketing wisdom is rare, and Mr. de Vere did not take that position.)

The breaking point came when Mr. de Vere, rather than cordially speaking with Bill (who had, after all, been a great benefactor to him) about the situation, instead made other arrangements to be represented on other websites and then served Bill with legal notices DEMANDING that his works be removed from this site. Not a very friendly repayment for a great favor!

Now as it happens, under the Digital Millennium Copyright act, once permission for royalty-free web publication of a work has been given, it cannot legally be revoked. So Bill would have been perfectly within his rights to keep Mr. de Vere's books available here according to the original agreement. However, rather than go through an ugly battle about it, when the whole point to begin with had been free goodwill sharing, Bill removed Nick's works ... and that is why they are no longer on this site."

Had that been the end of the story it wouldn't be so unusual ... disagreements happen, and people change their minds, that's just life. But it wasn't the end of the story. Shortly thereafter, it became known that Bill was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and someone in Mr. de Vere's new "camp" -- I don't know for sure if it was Nick's own idea or one of his followers - apparently decided that in his weakened condition Bill would be a helpless target for aggressive action. Through Tracy Twyman, Mr. de Vere instigated legal action to seize this website and take its ownership away from Bill, on the harebrained legal theory that since it was originally intended to highlight Mr. de Vere's works and his version of the Dragon Court, it was therefore legally his property (even though it had been ENTIRELY paid for and developed by Bill). Needless to say, this claim had no legal merit and failed utterly.

Not to be undone by mere legalities, however, Mr. de Vere's supporters (and honestly I do not know whether with or without his blessings) undertook an aggressive attack on this website in an attempt to shut it down. This consisted of a concerted campaign to register under dozens of new fake usernames and post literally HUNDREDS of "garbage" messages to drown out any meaningful discussion. Most of these messages were simply irrelevant text, long copy-and-paste passages from other threads and third-party sources with no relevant purpose or content, and many of them were bitingly critical of this site while strongly supportive of Mr. de Vere and Ms. Twyman; but a large number of them were genuinely vile insults directed toward Bill personally ... calling him "Cancer-bag Barckley," for example, and referring to his "miserable sputum-filled existence."

That's when we were forced to make moderator approval of registration a requirement for posting on the site, thereby making it harder to use and less accessible to the general public ... but it was the only way to prevent it from being totally destroyed by aggressive "pro-de Vere" attackers."

The forum raid described above happened in early 2004. Some time passed with no word from Bill. Then Greg posted to introduce himself as the new webmaster, and to let us know that Bill had passed. When people on the forum asked him what had ultimately happened to Bill, he posted the above open letter to explain the whole situation.

Tracy Twyman owns up to it all in Clock Shavings (using a pseudonym for Bill Barckley and Richard Dufton):

As the leader of the Court, and as Nick's agent, I couldn't let this attempted coup and public insult go unpunished. Mr. Berkley had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor (something which probably, more than anything, explained his bizarre recent behavior). He ignored our legal notices to take down the copyrighted material and had his lawyer threaten to sue us for "harassing" him. So Brian and I decided we ought to give him something to cry about.

We spent the evening loading down the Dragon Court forums on the site with garbage messages. This included lists of funeral homes in Berkley's home town, and anything else we could think of to hasten the course of nature in the old man's cancerous brain. They had to take the site down for a while, which we took as a temporary victory.

Tracy Twyman accused Bill and Richard Dufton (she uses pseudonyms for them in her book, but yeah) of being the ones who were attempting a coup, and claimed they were egged on by a former associate of Nick's who went by the online handle "Star Of The Sea," whom she accused of stalking her.

"Star Of The Sea" was rather outspokenly denouncing Nick as a fraud on other forums; but aside from this, none of Tracy's accusations ring true. I was there. I can't answer for Richard Dufton, but Bill wasn't "attempting a coup." If anything, he was refusing to "bend the knee" because he felt betrayed. He didn't want to just hand everything over to someone who he felt had betrayed him in a unbelievably callous fashion, to be edited and published by someone who just looked like they were trying to profit from it. Especially after he'd done all the work of editing Nick's manuscripts and publishing them on the website.

And by the way: the website itself was Bill's, even if it had been created to display Nicholas de Vere's writings after he'd been evicted from Laurence Gardner's Mediaquest site. Bill paid for it and coded it himself, edited and uploaded all of Nick's essays, and then served as Webmaster and Forum Mod. As Greg Ellison said, he did this as a favor to Nick, because he believed in Nick's work. He wasn't about to just hand it all over to someone else on command.

As for Tracy's speculation that Bill's "cancer-riddled brain" had caused him to behave erratically and turn against Nick: I can confirm that he was lucid and aware of what was going on up until my last interaction with him, which was the night of the forum raid - when he told me to not engage with the forum raiders, and that he would handle it. It was the last I heard from him.

The thing is...if the timeline that Tracy Twyman provides in Clock Shavings is accurate, Bill had already removed Nick's articles from the site well before the curse (which was cast Halloween 2003) and the attack on the site (sometime in early 2004) took place. They'd already been gone for weeks by that point. Bill had complied with the request (or demand) to remove those essays, and was attacked anyway. In fact, the number one question from visitors to the site in the weeks leading up to the attack was "Where are the essays? Why are they gone?"

At the time, we figured that it was Tracy Twyman and her camp who attacked the site, because she was mad that Bill didn't just comply to her demands and take down the entire website. It wasn't enough that Bill took the essays down; she was mad that we were still talking about it on the forum. Also, the forum raid happened after some of Boyd Rice's supporters had logged on to tell his side of the story from their falling-out. And I'm not a fan of Boyd Rice's politics, but the things that his followers came and told us confirmed a lot of our suspicions regarding Tracy Twyman. And if her goal was to shut us up, she managed to do the exact opposite.

Tracy complained in her book Clock Shavings and elsewhere about people "constantly criticizing" Nicholas de Vere "for making any profit whatsoever from his own work." But as usual, she misrepresented the argument we were actually making, so she wouldn't have to address the actual point - which was that Nicholas de Vere and Bill had originally agreed to make his articles open and freely available on the dragoncourt.org website. No one objected to him ever profiting from it ever, we objected to the way that the deal that he'd made with Bill had effectively been broken. And as Greg said in his open letter, it actually would have made more sense to leave the articles up, and that sales of The Dragon Legacy likely wouldn't have been affected.

But beyond that, Nicholas de Vere spent a huge part of his essay From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells seething about the very idea of someone trying to commercialize or commodify the Dragon Consciousness the way Wicca had been commercialized - and then he just handed over the keys to the kingdom over to someone who looked like she might just be trying to profit from it. Someone who looked like she was trying to "brand" it exclusively so that the only way anyone could get the "real" info about it was to buy it directly from her.

He also lambasted the practice of buying and selling titles, and always insisted that no one would ever be able to "buy their way in" to what was a "closed fraternity." But when people went over to the new website, thedragonsociety.com, between 2004 and 2005, the first thing they saw was "First 100 applicants free!" and a link to a cafepress shop. This seemed a mite hypocritical to some of us, to the point of "The Dragon Court is a Closed Fraternity! First 100 applicants get in free!" became a running joke on the dragoncourt.org forum, and they had to put in that blurb clarifying that they meant people were just paying for access to the "Outer Court," and not the actual offline Dragon Court itself. (And why did they leave that statement up past the first few months? Did they never get 100 applicants in all that time?)

Also: Bill didn't hate Tracy "because she was American," as Tracy claimed. Most of the dragoncourt dot org forum users were American. And Greg Ellison was American. Webmaster Maria is American.

People on the dragoncourt dot org forum back then who'd been around the longest were certain that Tracy had exploited Nick's technophobia and whatever life situations were requiring him to step away from the project, and that she had gone behind his back to try and seize control of the dragoncourt website and shut down anyone else who was trying to dissiminate the original essays. This was definitely an opinion I shared after everything I'd seen and experienced. But by then it was already too late to keep the essays from circulating. They were still on the Wayback Machine, and by early 2005 other conspiracy theory websites had archived copies of them as well.

As you might imagine, when The Dragon Legacy was released in early 2004 after all of this strife, I didn't want to give Tracy Twyman any of my hard-earned Helpdesk Money. I bought a used copy from someone on Amazon Marketplace who claimed it “wasn’t what they thought it would be.” I offered to take it off their hands. And it was apparent that our distrust of Tracy Twyman was well-founded.

I mean, there's a misprint on the front page. ("Deresthai" instead of "Derkesthai.")

That was bad enough - until I noticed that she'd incorporated Fasces symbols into her version of the OLE's Dragon Society logo on the back of the book.

For the record, here is Nicholas de Vere's version, from the old dragoncourt.org site while he was still assosicated with it:

I looked at a modern high-res version of Nicholas de Vere's version of the logo recently, noticed the symbol above the heraldic rose, and my heart sank. I don't know if those are fasces symbols. They don't look like traditional fasces symbols. But if they are - I can't imagine Bill, who wrote "The Dragon Court stands in opposition to all forms of government, including world government," supporting a fascist, or someone who would have slapped an authoritarian symbol on his personal logo. Though maybe those are Thorn Runes?

Gregory Ellison changed it to this when he became webmaster:

This is the one I prefer personally, for several reasons. The warring Red and White Dragons from British mythology are depicted, (I know the white dragon is tinted blue, it was 2004 and we were still mostly on low res monitors) along with the Serpent Of Wisdom in the form of the Ouroboros. The Mark Of Cain (a cross in a circle) is still there, even if altered. And it served as a symbol of our faction being in a state of revolt after Nicholas de Vere decamped, and Tracy Twyman's faction attacked the site.

When he assumed webmaster duties, Gregory Ellison posted this statement on the the "About Us" section of the site: "We believe there is much wisdom contained in the Dragon traditions, and that this wisdom is the property of no individual or organization." This was also my credo going forward. If anything that Nicholas de Vere or Tracy Twyman said or wrote about the Dragon Court or Dragon Bloodlines could be verified within the archeological record or through historical documentation, then it didn't just belong to their organization. It was a part of history, and it belonged to the ages.

And like I stated before, in another long-ago version of this rant: all Tracy Twyman ever had to do was treat people with respect and diplomacy, and not act like Bill and the forum were enemies to be destroyed. She could have avoided negative word of mouth and profited more from the book - which was her whole goal anyway, right?

Anyway, the book The Dragon Legacy is basically just Nicholas de Vere's essays from the dragoncourt.org website in print form, with a few paragraphs tweaked here and there to make it more palatable to American readers. But some sections of esoterica which the essays had contained (including an adaption of the Middle Pillar Exercise) were completely hacked out.

As for the dragoncourt.org site, Greg served as webmaster from early 2004-2005, when he too departed the physical realm. Despite what Tracy Twyman claims in Clock Shavings, he was not a "disgruntled former de Vere supporter," but a personal friend of Bill's who took on the task of managing the dragoncourt dot org site in addition to his own astrology-themed website and forum. During this time the website underwent a site redesign that a lot of people grumbled about at the time (an aesthetic more in keeping with the aforementioned astrology site's New Age themes) but frankly we were lucky to still have the site. He swooped in and saved the day at a moment when it looked like we would lose the entire site, and for that I am forever grateful.

Webmaster Maria took over webmaster duties for both websites, until she ran out of funds to maintain the dragoncourt dot org site. From there the Dragon Court forum refugees scattered; either to Tracy Twyman and Martin Lunn’s Dragon Society site (until Martin Lunn passed) and a site set up at dragoncourt dot net by forum user Crystalsinger aka Taur Alpheus, which is still online but has not been active since the early 2010s. The dragoncourt dot org domain has changed hands several times since then.

(An aside about Martin Lunn - not to be confused with the British astronomer of the same name - who moderated the forum on thedragonsociety.com and wrote the book Da Vinci Code Decoded:The Truth Behind the New York Times #1 Bestseller: I never interacted with him, but pretty much everyone I spoke with who did agreed that he was a decent guy who somehow got roped into all of this. He passed away in 2006, and the site folded shortly afterwards.)

In 2010, a member of the old dragoncourt dot org forum sent Nicholas de Vere a message on Facebook asking for his side of the story. This was his response:

Nicholas wrote:

"Thank you Thomas. This is a load of rubbish. No legal action was ever threatened by me against Bill Barckley. No agreement to keep my work free ever existed. Bill spent virtually nothing on the site financially. No one attacked Bill. I was attacked by someone who tried to take the Dragon Court over. They befriended Bill and persuaded him to shut me out of my own website. Before the situation could be resolved, Bill died. End of story."

The thing is: Bill was attacked. He was very open about it before his untimely death, and those of us who were there when the forum raid happened saw what we saw. I had no reason to distrust his account of things. And, well, Tracy Twyman has since came out and admitted to attacking him. It's all in her book.

I did get an anoymous email in 2006 stating that Nick had been on an indefinite hiatus from the internet while all of that was going on (seeming to confirm Tracy and the Twymanistas as the instigators of all the strife, which was later confirmed in Clock Shavings.) The one time I spoke with Nicholas de Vere personally via phone in 2011, he claimed that Bill had been manipulated the whole time by Richard Dufton.

The most charitable assumption anyone can make here is the same one that many dragoncourt dot org forum members who remained steadfast in their support of Nick came to: that he must have been totally unaware of what was going on at the time, and Tracy must have been doing everything behind his back.

Also: I was in contact with Webmaster Maria before the site finally shut down in 2006. I still have those emails. The fees for the domain and hosting were quite considerable (upwards of $2000 a year by 2006, equivalent to $167 monthly) and whoever was currently serving as webmaster was having to foot the whole bill. Paypal was still a relatively new thing at this time, and gofundme was another few years out. But to this day, I don't know why we didn't just figure out some way to crowdfund it. But Maria was not able to cover the costs of both the dragoncourt site and Gregory Ellison's Astrology site, and in 2006 she shut the site down and let the domain go.

But anyway. So much for the site "costing almost nothing."

And this is all leading to one of the essential mysteries of the Dragon Court: trying to control "the Dragon Court" at all is folly, and nearly always ends in ruin - because the essence of the Dragon is Chaos, by its very nature.

I get it: one of the primary archetypal myths of the Proto Indo Europeans (Nick's "Aryan Proto-Scythians") is a great hero managing to slay or subdue a Dragon. Eliphas Levi spoke of the Biblical imagery of "stepping on the serpent's head" as a metaphor for subduing or taming the "Astral Light." But in the case of this particular "Draconic Current," I'm not even sure that's it's possible to be "Grand Master," or "Sovereign Head," or even "King" of something so fundamentally antithetical to the very idea of being controlled at all. But people keep on trying, and that's why this bullshit cycle keeps on, well, cycling. It partcularly tends to afflict people with Main Character Syndrome/Chosen One Syndrome.

I regrouped with everyone later on Facebook (this was back in the spring or summer of 2011) if for no other reason than to finally get Nicholas de Vere's side of the story since he was on Facebook at that point and finally talking to people. He told me that Richard Dufton had tried to take over the Dragon Court, and somehow convinced Bill to turn against him, and that "Bill was a victim too."

At the time, I thought it sounded a bit sketchy and evasive, especially as I reflected back on Bill's anguished post where he talked about how he was suddenly commanded to take Nick's essays down from the site. But I held my peace, hopeful that the whole story would eventually be forthcoming. I did also eventually speak with Richard Dufton over Facebook messenger in 2012, and he told me that Nicholas de Vere had kicked him out of the organization for "taking his duties too seriously" i.e. holding people accountable for their words and actions.

My hopes of gaining real answers or closure was seemingly put on indefinite hold when Nick and Charles Johnson fell out over control of the Dragon Court Facebook group in 2012. During this conflict, I resposted Greg's open letter to the group, as a reminder of what had happened on the previous place where this thing had been platformed. Also, I did it because some of the turns of phrase that Nick employed in his flamewar with Charles "Dean" Johnson seemed suspiciously reminicent of text that had been in the "junk posts" spammed to the forum during the dragoncourt dot org forum raid in 2004. I knew this could have just been because Twymanistas were copypasting stuff he had written in emails or in private posts on other forums over and over as the "junk posts." But I was tired of what felt like attempts to placate me with half-truths. I wanted answers.

Nick addressed me personally at this point and told me to pick a side. I did what any self respecting Chaos Magician would do: I hit my roommate’s bong, got too stoned to function, suggested (or tried, anyway, I was that stoned) that the whole conflict was part of a vicious cycle he had trapped himself in (and that I was also trapped in, let's be honest here) and I asked him if acknowledging him as Prince was a prerequisite to joining his side. He never contacted me again.

Nicholas de Vere died some months later, in 2013. He'd been recently hospitalized for heart trouble, but speculation ran rampant amongst his followers and on conspiracy theory websites that he was murdered. I have some regrets about how I handled our last discussion, and Charles Johnson did need to be shut down. It's very possible that his relentless hassling of Nicholas de Vere (to the point of actively stalking him) helped contribute to his heart trouble and premature death. Whatever differences I had with Nicholas de Vere, it's kind of sickening to think that someone could be hounded to their death over control of a Facebook group. I don't see his death or Tracy Twyman's death as justice for Bill or "Karma." I see this as another example of how this whole paradigm can be dangerous and toxic at times, how it sometimes destroys people, and how it seems to bring out the absolute worst in people sometimes. And absolutely none of it was necessary.

In years following his death, it seemed like Tracy Twyman was alternately claiming that Nicholas de Vere had been a dear friend, while disavowing certain aspects of his lore and gnosis that did not fit with the next phase of her career as a right-wing conspiracy theorist writer, blogger, and podcaster. She called him a sociopath and a narcissist in her book Clock Shavings, which she wrote in 2014 just a year after his death, and claimed he had been part of a plot to physically manifest the Antichrist on Earth. But just a year after that she was gushing about her "dear friend" again in a blog post she made after watching an episode of the X Files reboot miniseries in 2015, which had a character whom she insisted must have been inspired by him.

Way back in 2004, Tracy Twyman had published an interview with Nicholas de Vere on the website that she and her husband Brian Albert created to promote The Dragon Legacy, (thedragonsociety dot com) called My Kingdom Is Not Of This World. In this interview, he admits to using channeled information. As in, there are things in his narrative that he hadn’t read anywhere, that nobody in his family told to him: at least, not among the living. He was relying on genetic memory like the Bene Gesserit or the character Leto II Atreidies in the Dune series of books by Frank Herbert.

Author Alexander Rivera expands on this in the book he wrote with Tracy Twyman, Baphomet: the Temple Mystery Unveiled:

"While Twyman thought that De Vere’s work on historical and mythological matters had value, she found his claims about himself and his organization to be grandiose and unverifiable. She is also fairly positive that some of the information in his books came from channeling. The family "archives" that Laurence Gardner said he got his information from were, in fact, like the “Akashic records” of New Age western pop Buddhism: they existed on the astral plane, accessible only through the mind of Nicholas de Vere."

I'd like to state first that the concept of the Akashic Record comes from Theosophy - much of which was misappropriated and misinterpreted by the New Age movement, who stripped it for parts. But that's beside the point. Had we really endured an online war over the dragoncourt.org forum, threats of litigation, and the cruel harassment of a terminally ill man over information that couldn’t be independently or externally verified by any other external source? This seemed a mite sketchy, especially in light of his claims that membership in the Dragon Court relied on genetic testing for "Dragon genes" to confirm blood relationship to "one of the Dragon families" and that science would bear out his claims, unlike the other various “New Age” sects which he derided as scams selling "cheap crystal and snake oil."

But seriously - had we really gone all the way in on something that was based entirely on the Unverified Personal Gnosis of just one guy? Not just us, but Tracy Twyman and Laurence Gardner, actual published authors who had written several books on the subject?

Alexander Rivera continues:

"After knowing De Vere well and seeing the evidence, she did become convinced, as she still is, that De Vere was the actual author of two of Gardner’s books, and the actual progenitor of the "Dragon Court" that Gardner based his own organization on. She does not believe that it is centuries old. She says it was an informal group of De Vere’s friends who took their inspiration from him and who took on various “royal titles” that he handed out to them, supposedly based on their genealogies.”

It seems weird that Tracy Twyman was trying to downplay Nicholas de Vere as merely being the head of an “informal group of friends” after he was dead, when she was all-too willing to promote him as the Grail King/Rex Mundi/Antichrist combo platter, and to try and manifest his kingdom on Earth - not just as a UN-recognized micronation, but literally the spiritual Kingdom of Drakenberg On Earth - while he was still alive.

Tracy Twyman was found dead in 2019, apparently from suicide. Her longtime fans claim she was murdered to prevent her from single-handedly exposing the Satanic adrenochrome-drinking child-sex-trafficking conspiracy.

Suicide is terrible and tragic. And no one deserves to have their deaths politicized by a bunch of cynical, bad-faith opportunist conspiracy theory grifters trying to push an agenda. Nor should it become part of the collective fever dream that the people who have fallen victim to the Qanon memetic virus are currently trapped in. Tracy’s suicide, if that’s what it was, followed that of her first husband Brian Albert. Statistically, people who have lost a loved one to suicide are at a higher risk of taking their own lives as well. And depression is a hell of a thing to have to live with. I know.

Whatever she did or was party to in life, Tracy Twyman is survived by friends and family who love her and were no doubt devastated by her passing. But Bill Barckley was attacked, mocked, and literally cursed while he was suffering from a terminal cancer, all because he wouldn’t hand over ownership of a domain and website - and then he died from that cancer knowing his attackers were laughing at him as he suffered.

What am I supposed to do with all of this now? How else am I supposed to feel about it? Most of the major players in this drama are dead. That's the thing, though: absolutely none of this strife was necessary at all. Absolutely no one deserved to be attacked, stalked, harassed, or litigated against, or to die over this bullshit.

And years later, I'm asking myself: what was it all for? In the end, what did it accomplish?

Maybe Clock Shavings was Tracy Twyman's attempt to come clean about some of what had happened, even if she rationalized her actions with a bunch of lies. But it also reads like maybe it was an attempt to pivot away from her history with the Dragon Court and Nicholas de Vere, and reinvent herself as a right-wing conspiracy theorist content creator/influencer.

I have talked to other people who knew Nicholas de Vere personally, who say that Tracy Twyman’s assertion in Clock Shavings that he wanted to be a human sacrifice so that Cain/Baphomet could incarnate physically into this world as the Antichrist (dude, what?) to the point of seeking someone else to do it when she backed out ("Fine, I’ll find someone else to sacrifice me to Baphomet!”) sounds crazy. I’ve spoken with people who talked to him in the weeks before his death in 2013, and they said that he was rattled by his recent hospitalization from heart disease, and there was no way he was involved with anything like that.

I was never one of the ones sending harassing emails to Tracy Twyman, though I ranted a lot about the shenanigans on the dragoncourt dot org forum and on my own personal website. I wasn’t interested in directly contacting her at all. I did get the spurious email C & D from the Book Tree publishing company, threatening me with a visit from their Internet Lawyers after I linked to Nick's old articles on the Wayback Machine on my old website back in 2004. But this was the closest that I ever came to having an actual interaction with Tracy Twyman.

It did kind of hack me off though when she claimed that those of us who were hardcore dragoncourt dot org loyalists had set up a "phony imitation Dragon Court." All I did was blunder into a Situation In Progress, and then side with Bill. I sided with Bill because he had shown himself to be a very decent person, and he put up with my bullshit. This may come as a shock, but I was very outspokenly angry as a younger person about things that were happening in the world at the time, and he let me vent on the forum and speak my piece. Nicholas de Vere had already decamped before I even got to the site. And the rest of us were stuck wondering if any part of his story could be verified, and what to do with it going forward. Joining Tracy Twyman's "Dragon Society" webforum seemed out of the question, at least for me. But we weren't an "imitation court" so much as a support group for forum members who didn't like the way things had gone for Bill or the site. Dragons Anonymous?

And sure, plenty of folks who have tried to "start their own imitation court" probably did it because they wanted the attention and loyalty that Nicholas de Vere had inspired in some people for themselves. But I think some of them also felt something similar to what I was feeling after the forum raid: what if it was real, but the man himself was someone that they just couldn't stand behind for whatever reason? The Dragon Consciousness existed long before Nicholas de Vere, and it will exist long after he and the rest of us have departed the physical flesh. And as Greg had so eloquently put, it certainly doesn't belong to any one person or organization. There is a word for any organization which claims that the only path to salvation, trancendence, or enlightenment is through them and them alone, and that word is "CULT."

And what those of us who remained on the dragoncourt.org forum were looking for at the time was a way to remain connected to the Dragon Consciousness or Paradigm without having to endorse Nicholas de Vere or Tracy Twyman specifically - especially after the attack on Bill.

I admit, I was curious to see if I connected to any of the families said to be descended from the "Dragon Bloodlines," because I was actually pretty sure I was from the outset. And later research confirmed it. I'm also Rh-Negative. But that part of it was never really the main priority for me. Remember: if we are spirits in the material world, the Gnosis is what's really important. And the idea that only people of certain specific bloodlines are capable of accessing that Gnosis never rang true to me, no matter how much Nicholas de Vere insisted otherwise.

And it was the obsession with bloodline purity and royal descent which brought so many reactionary weirdos and folks who "tried to start their own imitation courts" to the proverbial yard. Nicholas de Vere declared himself to be descended from bloodlines connected to royalty, who were descended from Jesus Christ and the Merovingians and the Anunnaki, and proclaimed that it was this which gave him his spiritual power - not study or meditation or contemplation, or communion with otherworldly entities, except for one's own ancestors (and lucky for him, he's descended from literal god-kings!) That "The Great Work" wasn't necessary, he was "there" already, because his bloodline gave him access to "The Dragon Consciousness." ("Bingo.") But the takeaway for a lot of readers who are maybe crossing over from the New Age Paradigm (like I was at one point) seems to be that if they can prove their connection to Dragon heritage, they are "already there" as well - and no reflection, or introspection, or work on oneself, or personal growth is necessary.

This paradigm has also drawn in people who would like to see a return to a divine-right monarchy. But as for me, I always liked to refer back to a statement Bill made back on the dragoncourt.org website:

"The Dragon Court stands in direct opposition to all hierarchical structures of power, including world government. For all of recorded history society has been structured as a hierarchical system with a few elites at the top possessing all power. The effect of this pyramidal system of power has been that the bulk of humanity have been forced into ignorance, superstiton and slavery. The ignorance and superstition worked in the elites favor and propped up the system. Life was brutish, cruel, and short for most of history. This system of power remains in force and for most life remains brutish, cruel, and short.

The idea of an Earthly Paradise in which men should live together in a state of brotherhood, without laws and without brute labor, has haunted the human imagination for thousands of years. WIth the advent of the machine and technology the hopeless idea of an Earthly Paradise had finally become a possibility. To the elites at the top of the pyramid of power, human equality, justice, individual freedom - the fabled Earthly Paradise - was no longer an ideal to be striven after but a danger to be avoided at all costs. Why? The answer is simple, the elites would lose their power over others."

And a bunch of people trying to prove descent from royal bloodlines in order to prove their innate superiority sounds like a bunch of people trying to establish a hierarchical power structure, doesn't it? Even if just amongst themselves.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't learn about their genetic or hereditary backgrounds. No, go learn as much as you possibly can. I'm just saying that I have personally observed people in this particular paradigm obsessing over their genetic or hereditary backgrounds in an attempt to prove a connection to the "Dragon Bloodlines" to the point where it becomes all-consuming: the be-all, end-all of their entire existence. Nicholas de Vere spoke of a "Dragon Gene" that set people of the Dragon Bloodlines apart from mainstream humanity, and at one point he claimed (in a letter that was posted to the forum that Tracy Twyman and Martin Lunn ran sometime in 2004 or 2005) that it involved the genes for red hair and green eyes (specifically "the MC1R gene" because "Faeries and Witches were historically known to possess red hair and green eyes") and "the Variant Creuzfeld Jakob's Disease Resistant Gene or vCJDr." And that these had to be present in both parental lines "as a belt and braces technique to reduce the risk of selecting people with only insignificant genetic markers." But people trying to claim Dragon descent now are mostly trying to establish connections with royal houses, particlarly Anjou and Plantagenet.

But, truth be told: I never felt a stong connection to the Royal aspect of it. In my own Gnosis, I was feeling more akin to the ones who fled back into the deep forest. Not to prey on other humans, as Nicholas de Vere suggested; but in the hopes that other humans never encountered them again, and forgot they still existed - all except for those few who secretly still kept the Old Ways from before the Church held sway, with whom they would still share knowledge and fellowship. The Children of Elfhame, or Alfheim.

I first logged onto the dragoncourt.org website to find out what the truth of this whole thing actually was. 20 years later, I think I've found it. And for me, it looks a lot more like Hank Harrison's The Cauldron And The Grail, a book I have not seen referenced anywhere else, than anything in Nicholas de Vere's essays. (In short: "The Elves," at least the corporeal ones, or "The Dragons" are an ancestral memory of a class of people who guarded and curated the sacred spaces of the ancient world, as the Solar or Astral Megalithic Cult of Old Europe blended with the cult of the Oak Tree and the Lightning God of the incoming Proto-Indo-Europeans. They lived in close proximity to these liminal spaces, and guided people into and out of these spaces; into the Otherworld of the sacred Dreamspace, and from there back into the reality of mundane day-to-day existence.)

But for years, my problem was that I had trouble determining which parts of Nicholas de Vere's claims came from Traditional Witch Lore (because I wasn't raised as a Trad Witch) which parts came from Gnostcism, (and if Trad Witchcraft itself qualified as a form of Gnosticsm,) which parts of it came from his own personal gnosis and channeling, which parts came from his time with Occult organizations like The Order Of The Cubic Stone, and which parts of it had been adopted from Zechariah Sitchin and Kenneth Grant and Aleister Crowley and Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

I've started to wonder if Nicholas de Vere was a Hereditary Traditional Witch who used all of those elements to "fill in the blanks" of the oral tradition he was raised with, like how author Margot Adler described other Hereditary Trad Witches doing with Wicca or other Witchcraft Revivals in her book Drawing Down The Moon And there's nothing wrong with that. A Tradition or Practice that never accepts any new Gnosis, or never allows itself to be informed by any outside information doesn't grow or evolve. However, it's very clear that he was trying to gatekeep Witchcraft for Hereditary Traditional Witches alone; and his brand of Hereditary Trad Witches, specifically.

I think Nicholas de Vere was writing his narrative or channeling his Gnosis as a lot of ancient Sumerian and Babylonian manuscripts were being translated and made available to the public for the very first time, and people were discovering that much of what we consider to be the Old Testament has earlier origins in Mesopotamian texts. “God” becomes “The Elohim,” or the Anunnaki. What people believed were stories about a singular, supreme deity becomes myths about a pantheon of deities the further back you go. Those myths were adopted and adapted by a people who later became monotheists. This was the element of it which seemed to be ignored or forgotten, buried as it was beneath everything that was being said about the Anunnaki being extraterrestrials, or a superior race. And this was the aspect of it that cured my religious trauma: if whole sections of the Bible were adapted from earlier texts about earlier gods, that obviously meant that the Bible itself was not the literal, infallable word of God! This is an angle that is thankfully getting further notice and exploration from historical, esoteric, and Gnostic content creators on places like Youtube at the current time.

Anyway, I stepped away from all the drama in 2012. But over the years that followed, I took note of anything that synchronicity seemed to throw my way regarding the Dragon Court over the years that followed. When I first got involved with all of this, I was mainly intersted in finding out if any of Nicholas de Vere's claims could actually be verified by outside sources: or if this would all become just another account of early-internet weirdness in the historical annals of people's formative online experiences. Other (normal) people had Usenet or SomethingAwful or Runescape or Gaia Online; I had dragoncourt.org.

And if none of Nicholas de Vere's claims turned out to be true after all, I at least wanted to understand it; what it truly was and how it developed. Now I am of the mindset that his account or experience of the Dragon Consciousness was shaped by his own personal and political beliefs and interests. I think it exists; and though it may express itself wildly differently from person to person (or host to host) I think "the lore" of it is going to maintain certain similarities every time it manifests. It may very well tend to run along hereditary lines, or people with some kind of Occult or Witchcraft tradition in their family background.

My question about what the "Dragon Gnosis" was, or the "Rites" actually were, beyond "consumption of the Kalas" and an adaption of the Middle Pillar Exercise (which Tracy Twyman excised from the print book for some reason) was answered in Clock Shavings: apparently Tracy Twyman "filled in the blanks" with the Satanic Bible for her activities with the OLE. Though I think I'll stick with what works for me, thanks all the same.

However, I looked at the sources Nicholas de Vere mentioned in his essays, and studied them. They were mostly references to other texts that most serious occultists would recommend reading anyway: David Edwards and Robert Turner (the founders of of the Order Of The Cubic Stone, who wrote the books "Dare To Make Magic" and "Elizabethan Magic" respectively) Austin Osman Spare, Sir James George Frazier, Margaret Murray, Kenneth Grant, Jack Parsons, The Royal Windsor Coven (headed in its current form by Shani Oates) and Aleister Crowley. He describes corresponding with Kenneth Grant directly in The Origin Of The Dragon Lords Of The Rings. And that was an excellent starting point. It got me reading the Typhonian Trilogies, at any rate.

I eventually read a roommate's copy of the author Starhawk's book Spiral Dance. The book contained references to the theory that Elves were Old Europe's aboriginal pre-Celtic people, and a "Megalithic Dragon Cult" in Britain. This led me to articles written by historian Andrew Rothovius, which appeared in the 1977 spring and summer issues of the now-defunct New Age Publication East-West Magazine: "The Adams Family and the Grail Tradition: The Untold Story of the Dragon Persecution," (East-West 7, no. 5 (1977): 24-30;) and "The Dragon Tradition in the New World," in East-West 7, no. 8 (1977): 42-54.) Well, not the actual articles themselves: those are proving to be more elusive than I'd first hoped, because apparently those can no longer be found anywhere, even online. But references to them still show up on Witchcraft and New Age websites scattered around the remains of the old Web 1.0 Internet, like a digital breadcrumb trail.

References to those articles can also in several books by the late Traditional Witchcraft author Michael Howard, such as The Children Of Cain and Secret Societies: Their Influence And Power From Antiquity To The Present Day. The book The Pillars Of Tubal Cain, which he co-wrote with Nigel Jackson, is probably the best example of "Dragon Court Gnosis" outside of Nicholas de Vere and Laurence Gardner's writings. The works of the late Andrew D. Chumbley are worth checking out, as well.

At one point early on in From Transylvania To Tunbridge Wells, Nicholas de Vere makes a reference to a text he calls "The Marshmallow Papers" which actually refers to The Pickingill Papers, a series of letters about Traditional Witchcraft sent to Michael Howard by Traditional Witch E.W. Liddell, aka "Lugh." Other writers like Doreen Valiente and Adrian Bott have pointed out specific issues with points made in The Pickingill Papers, but I think it's worth looking at, if a bit dated in its perspective on a lot of things.

I found Paul Huson's book Mastering Witchcraft by accident, but I feel that it fully belongs to the Draconic Grail paradigm along with the other books I just mentioned. I wish I'd found it as a young person. In fact, I wish I'd found it first, before I found Laurence Gardner's Nexus articles. I personally feel that Jack Parson's writings on Witchcraft, Paul Huson's Mastering Witchcraft, and The Pillars Of Tubal Cain by Michael Howard and Nigel Jackson both represent where this particular Grail paradigm could go - and not where it's ended up thus far.

Hank Harrison's book The Cauldron And The Grail was another completely accidental find, at a used bookstore. But like Mastering Witchcraft, it's another book that feels closer to my personal Gnosis at the present time.

I made a blog post on a previous version of this website about how Magick and Magical Thinking are two very different things. The latter trapped me in a hall of mirrors for decades, and the former was what helped me escape. (And here's the thing: you have to learn to tell the difference between the two.) I followed the path right back to where I started: Donald Michael Kraig's book Modern Magick. But I also finally picked up Liber Null/Psychonaut and studied it as well. There's something about the particular Baphometic current explored by the Illuminates Of Thanateros that I like.

The whole reason I'd invested so much in the Dragon Court in the first place is because it seemed to validate my earliest Occult experiences, which I'd started to question. Finding the "Dragon Court" and becoming involved with it would be a way of redeeming the situation from my teens which had turned toxic and fell victim to unstable minds, toxic egos, and drama. But before that ever had a chance to happen, it too fell apart due to unstable minds, toxic egos, and drama. And it kept on doing so the longer I watched.

As for Nicholas de Vere: I guess like Tracy Twyman, I'd wanted to believe a real "Grail King" could actually exist. His claims may have had some historical merit. He may have been the inheritor of a surviving Witch/Faerie tradition. But after the attack on Bill and the dragoncourt.org website, I just couldn't imagine supporting someone who was capable of doing anything like that, or allowing it to be done on their behalf. On a deeper level, it was devastating. it felt like I'd regained something I'd lost, only to lose it again.

"But wait," you interject, "you never knew Nicholas de Vere when he was on the dragoncourt.org forum. You never even spoke to him until 2011. How could this have affected you so much?" And the answer is this: at the time this was all happening, the whole world felt like it was going down a dangerously wrong path, steered by extremist evangelical neoconservative hands towards an Apocalypse. At that point in time, I truly hoped that there was real magic in the world, and that it would save us. And when it happened, I wanted it to be like Jack Parson's poem The Witchcraft. I wanted it to feel like I felt when I found Laurence Gardner's Nexus articles: that this was the Great Big Secret which was finally going to escape containment to break the fascist-minded religious nationalism that was (and still is) threatening to murder the world.

It can, and must be broken. But for that to happen, we have to be the magic we want to see in the world. We have to be The Witchcraft. And what all of this taught me is that we can't wait for a Grail King to save us. We're going to have to do it ourselves.

MAGICK is for ALL. I have written this book to help the Banker, the Pugilist, the Biologist, the Poet, the Navvy, the Grocer, the Factory Girl, the Mathematician, the Stenographer, the Golfer, the Wife, the Consul — and ail the rest — to fulfil themselves perfectly, each in his or her own proper function.

Aleister Crowley, Magick In Theory And Practice.

Years later, in another place, he steps out of the dark and speaks to me. He whispers: "I'll tell you the ultimate secret of magic. Any cunt could do it."

Alan Moore, describing a real-life run-in with the character John Constantine.