A SHORT HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION OF SAGE

When archeological finds and political upheaval coincide, certain important artifacts have occasionally been known to lose their way amongst the ensuing chaos. Such was the case with the 1914 discovery of sixty-three goat-vellum scrolls in a cave in Northern Turkey. Fifty-five of these scrolls were safely transported to the British Museum in London where they were examined and placed in the Asian archives. However, the remaining eight scrolls disappeared without trace and didn't re-emerge until 1985 when they surfaced at the estate sale of a palm oil importer in Illinois, USA. Although much mystery surrounds the original discovery, it is interesting to note that during WW1 the grandfather of the said importer regularly visited the mountains of Ala-Dagh in Turkey.

Unlike the British Museum scrolls, which were principally trading accounts, the Illinois group turned out to be far older (approx. 600BC) and of a very different nature. Written in a rarely seen text that combined both Cretian and Syrian alphabets, these documents are in the form of an oracle, less complex, but of a similar ilk to the I Ching (the ancient Chinese book of divination).

The Illinois scrolls are laid out symmetrically - four contain a list of questions (99 in total), while the other four respond with an equal number of answers. It was initially assumed that each question had its appropriate answer, but further examination of the accompanying text would clearly suggest that the writer's intent was to awaken the readers' own internal seer. By making each answer fit every question the Sage potentially offers a possible nine thousand, eight hundred and one combined aphorisms.

The exact origins of the Sage will probably never be confirmed. However, given the location of the find, it is more than possible that the author or authors were members of the Knatii, a nomadic group of mystics that inhabited the area during that period.

Given the difficulties of translation, and the often obscure and ambiguous tone of the answers, the scroll's contents weren't released until 1977, when they appeared as an academic paper. This paper entitled The Ala-Dagh Sage, was given to a distinguished audience of linguists at the Salzburg Theosophical Symposium.

In 1999 a new (and more poetic) translation of the Sage was commissioned, and the following electronic version is one of the outcomes of that enterprise. When consulting the Sage it is important to remember that its wisdom is only fully revealed when the questioner accepts the sense within nonsense.

Nick Bantock and Shannon Wray (Co-directors at the Knatii Institute of Oracular Research).