Daniel’s Blog

Today, in the Christian calendar, it is John the Baptist day. Every Christian will known the story of John’s birth, John’s baptisms and John’s death as explained in the canonical bible. We celebrate this day as a remembrance of the wonderful life of John the Baptist.

However!!! Little does the average Christian know (and those of other spiritual paths) that John the Baptist is not just a Christian Character!

John the Baptist appears in Mandaeanism, Islam and Bahaism.

In Mandaeanism, John the Baptist is a key figure in scripture. His Mandaean name is Yahya/Yahia. Mandaeanism has quite different theology to Judeo-Christianity, but it does actually detail the baptism of Jesus. Here is one of the fantastic quotes from Mandaean Scripture:

“Bring fire and burn me; bring sword and hew me in pieces.” But the priests in Jerusalem answered to Yahy?: “Fire does not burn thee, O Yahy?, for Life’s Name has been uttered o’er thee. A sword does not hew thee in pieces, O Yahy?, for Life’s Son rests here upon thee.” -

Mandaean John the Baptiser
John the Baptist can be found in Islam too. His Islamic name is also Yahya. Here is one quote from the Koran:

“O Yahya! take hold of the Book with strength, and We granted him wisdom while yet a child” -

The Koran
And also (but not finally) he is mentioned in the Baha’i faith. John is one of the prophets, and is mentioned here:

“As to the list of the prophets with whom Bahá’u'lláh identified Himself in the passage found on pages 26 and 27 of ‘The Dispensation of Bahá’u'lláh’, their names are as follows: Abraham, Moses, Joseph, John the Baptist, Jesus, Imam Husayn, on whom Bahá’u'lláh has conferred an exceptionally exalted station, (and) the Bab.” -

Lights of Guidance
There are also various other spiritual reference to John the Baptist in various Gnostic and Apocryphal-Christian writings.
But it doesn’t stop there… if you dig deep enough you’ll find references to John the Baptist in writings about Anthroposophy, Theosophy and even Freemasonry. But maybe that’s a topic for another time.

So I hope you all have a joyous John the Baptist Day! Christian, Mandaean, Muslim, Baha’i, Gnostic, Anthroposophic, Masonic and otherwise!

ok, so the next book by Dan Brown is titled “The Lost Symbol” (even though it had the code-name through writing of “The Solomon Key”), and will be released in September 2009.

All of the Dan Brown fans seem to be excited to get their hands on it. But many Freemasons are worried…. the reason… because The Lost Symbol is rumoured to be about Freemasonry (but as of yet we don’t have full evidence of this). Dan Brown is very well known to make very tenuous links between things, and merge fiction with non-fiction… so as a warning, please don’t believe everything that he says, and remember that he is a fiction writer.

However, there is some clever marketing going on at the Random House which involves the new “The Lost Symbol Website“, as well as a @lostsymbolbook twitter feed.

The twitter feed of which has the first post of:

Codes of ethics? T 10 C; 6 P O T SOD; 12 S O T Z

Which I know what it means

Yep, thats right… I’ve published my own poetry book.

It is a very high quality print which contains 25 of my poems spanning the years 2002 to 2009. My poetry, if you don’t already know, is very Spiritually, Philosophically and Society orientated.

You can buy it from lulu here: https://www.lulu.com/content/7291647 (See the Light and See the Dark by Daniel Lewis)

Here is the description: “A collection of poetry written by Daniel Lewis between 2002 and 2009. His poetry is inspired by life, and more specifically spirituality, philosophy and society. This very high quality book will compliment any household. It is a must have!”

Hi all,

One of my last blog posts was about trying to find a job here in/around Bristol. Well the good news is that I’ve found something to do

From today (Wednesday 10th June 2009), I have a two week contract at nameless. A lovely web design/development agency in the heart of Bristol. They really are a lovely company, who know practically everything about nice user interfaces coupled with strict observance of web standards. It’s going to be good to work as a Content Analyst (a task which is usually assigned to Information Architects) for them for two weeks - particularly as I know some of their staff quite well.

But that’s only a temporary thing. After the two weeks with nameless, I shall be going into permanent full-time work at another web agency in Bristol called Sift Media, which is a publishing company specialising in professional (B2B) online communities (those in Accounting may know of AccountingWEB, those into Knowledge Management may know of KnowledgeBoard…. both of these are projects by Sift Media). I shall be working in the technical team at Sift Media as a Web Developer and probably will offer my various other skills (such as Technical Writing, Knowledge Engineering, Semantic Web etc) when they are needed. Sift Media is part of a larger organisation called The Sift Group, which is a more general web organisation providing the Collaboration and Social Networking platform called Sift Unity.

I’m very excited at being able to work for both nameless and Sift Media, as both are incredibly professionally and socially reputable organisations.

This is the next part of my journey!

Thank you to all of those who have helped me in my job search, and to those who have sent me their best wishes. I really appreciate it.

Cheers,

Daniel