Et in Arcadia Ego - I Tego Arcana Dei

The Shepard's by Poussin

Both Latin phrases contain the same letters. In old Arcadia part of ancient Greece is held sacred by the magi for it is in Arcadia we find the comparison to the Elysian Fields and an afterlife. Arcadia could also be considered comparable to the Western Lands, the Sommerlands of the Gaels. There is the portrait of The Shepard's by Poussin. They stand and point to a grave on which Et in Arcadia Ego is inscribed. The literal word-for-word translation of the phrase is "Even in Arcadia I (am there)," "I" being death, and "Arcadia" being understood as a utopian land. It is usually interpreted as a memento mori. In Greece, during Antiquity, Greeks lived in cities close to the sea, and led an urban life. Only Arcadians, in the middle of Peloponnese, lacked cities, were far from the sea, and led a shepherd life. For urban Greeks, especially during the Hellenistic era, Arcadia symbolized pure, rural, idyllic life, far from the city. Poussin's biographer, André Félibien, interpreted it to mean that "the person buried in this tomb has lived in Arcadia"; in other words, that the person too once enjoyed the pleasures of life on earth. This reading was common in the 18th and 19th century. For example William Hazlitt wrote that Poussin "describes some shepherds wandering out in a morning of the spring, and coming to a tomb with this inscription, 'I also was an Arcadian'. The former interpretation is now generally considered more likely; the ambiguity of the phrase is the subject of a famous essay by the art historian Erwin Panofsky. Either way, the sentiment was meant to set up an ironic contrast between the shadow of death and the usual idle merriment that the nymphs and swains of ancient Arcadia were thought to embody.

While the phrase "et in arcadia ego" is a nominal phrase with no finite verb, it is a well-formed construction because substantive and copular verb omission is perfectly acceptable in Latin. Pseudohistorians unaware of that aspect of Latin grammar have concluded that the sentence is incomplete, missing a verb, and have speculated that it represents some esoteric message concealed in a (possibly anagrammatic) code. In The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Baigent, Leigh, and Lincoln, under the false impression that "et in arcadia ego" was not a proper Latin sentence, proposed that it is an anagram for I! Tego arcana dei, which translates to "Begone! I keep God's secrets", suggesting that the tomb contains the remains of Jesus or another important Biblical figure. They claimed that Poussin was privy to this secret and that he depicted an actual location. The authors did not explain why the tomb depicted in the second version of the painting should contain this secret while the distinctly different one in the first version presumably does not. Ultimately, this view is dismissed by art historians.

In their book The Tomb of God, Richard Andrews and Paul Schellenberger, developing these ideas, have theorised that the Latin sentence misses the word "sum". They argue that the extrapolated phrase et in arcadia ego sum could be an anagram for arcam dei tango iesu, which would mean "I touch the tomb of God — Jesus". Their argument presupposes that:
the Latin phrase is incomplete
the extrapolation as to the missing words is correct
the sentence, once completed, is intended to be an anagram
Andrews and Schellenberger selected the proper anagram out of numerous possibilities.
Andrews and Schellenberger also claim that the tomb portrayed is one at Les Pontils, near Rennes-le-Château. However, Franck Marie in 1978 and Pierre Jarnac in 1985 had already concluded that this tomb was begun in 1903 by the owner of the land, Jean Galibert, who buried his wife and grandmother there in a simple grave. Their bodies were exhumed and reinterred elsewhere after the land was sold to Louis Lawrence, an American from Connecticut who had emigrated to the area. He buried his mother and grandmother in the grave and built the stone sepulchre. Marie and Jarnac had both interviewed Adrien Bourrel, Lawrence's son, who witnessed the construction of the sepulchre in 1933 when a young boy. Pierre Plantard, the creator of the Priory of Sion mythology, tried to argue that the sepulchre at Les Pontils was a "prototype" for Poussin's painting, but it was situated directly opposite a farmhouse (behind the foliage) and was not in the "middle of nowhere" in the French countryside, as is commonly assumed. Plantard also claimed that the phrase "Et In Arcadia Ego" had been the motto on his Family Coat-of-Arms for generations. The sepulchre was demolished in 1988 by the owner with the permission of the local authorities.

I Tego Arcana Dei is the accepted anagram. There are allusions to a larger tale of Iesu having not being crucified, (even if he had existed - and there is no historical or archeological evidence to support he did). Any way he is alleged to of come from a reasonably sized family. His wife being Mary Magdalen who left the holy land carrying the Grail which is her womb and the descendants of the Davidic line. They eventually arrived in Briton and formed a church at Glastonbury - she was said to be accompanied by Joseph of Aremithia - it is also said in addition to carrying the bloodline of the grail she had the bones of the apostle St Andrew who was crucified on an X shaped cross. He is the patron saint of Scotland. The grail bloodline is a confusing mystery which also connects to the Mergovian Emperors of Europe. Many of the noble and Royal houses try to trace their lineage back to this bloodline. In effect the grail came to Scotland and the defendants live today. Both in noble houses and in Royal houses. The Knights Templar know of this mythos which the Church of Rome has tried to hide.


I Tego Arcana Dei

Location:United Kingdom