“The search for the Oak Island treasure has been a treasure in itself for me.” ~Petter Amundsen
Petter Amundsen is a church pipe organist by profession, and while he admits that may be a strange profession for someone writing a book on hidden treasure, he remarks that his training as an organist is similar to that of a symbologist, as it includes learning about languages and symbols.
Petter’s initial experience with Shakespeare didn’t impress him, but while he came across a story about a cipher on Shakespeare’s gravestone while investigating the stocks and futures markets, he became so fascinated with this that he dropped his investigation into stocks and futures to pursue the cipher angle. He bought a facsimile of Shakespeare’s original folio of thirty-six plays and when he began looking for cryptic patterns, he found several, not only in the original folio of thirty-six plays but also in the original collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which translated to a celestial map that could correlate with locations on the ground.
Cygnus or The Northern Cross with the star, Deneb.
The pattern he found is a square-and-compass celestial pattern that mimics some aspects of some societies such as those of the Masons, and Petter then mentioned features that locked in a source point on the map, such as the star Deneb. Petter then went on to say that, if the original zero meridian of the day was used, one which ran through west of the Canary Islands rather than the modern-day meridian based on Greenwich, that celestial point corresponds to the coast of modern-day Nova Scotia, on Oak Island itself.
Petter noted that the Rosicrucians probably had a hand in the publication of Shakespeare’s portfolio, and notes that the Rosicrucians created patterns in their own publications of the day and invited people to search for these. So for them to place patterns in Shakespeare’s work wouldn’t be far-fetched. Petter theorizes that Shakespeare wasn’t the author of all of his plays, acting more like a “front man” for the speculated actual three authors of the plays attributed to him, pointing out that the children of the man called William Shakespeare were illiterate - something that would be highly unusual for someone who virtually codified the English language.
The Money Pit in 1931.
Petter gave a brief rundown of the official, historical story behind the supposed discovery of the Oak Island Money Pit, remarking on the various layers that the original diggers had discovered as they went deeper down. He then remarked that the people who got involved with finding the supposed treasure in the Money Pit spent or are spending all of their lives attempting to get it. He notes that there are different theories on the exact location of the Money Pit, and that, around the present site, there have been many cave-ins. Petter speculated that a lot of people had to be involved in creating the Money Pit, including slaves and convicts, likely from Spain, selected specifically for a lack of understanding of English in order to maintain secrecy, and, as mining was done in the area at the time, going deep shouldn’t have been a problem for the available technology.
Petter Amundsen has put an X mark on Oak Island where there could be hidden treasure. It coincides with a point on the Magnetic Resonance Image map of the island revealed on The Curse of Oak Island show on the History Channel, which shows a junction of underground tunnels.
Petter then went into the cross pattern discovered by Fred Nolan, a land surveyor who had the entire island mapped with the help of students during one summer. It was in 1981 when he realized that there were five large boulders, each one weighing at least ten tons. Petter noted how the lengths of the arms were exactly 360 feet distant (with the number 360 being mathematically significant) and that the boulders most likely refer to five of the ten points in the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life, which is a cabalistic symbol - and the Rosicrucians were Christian cabalists. He then went on to say that, when Fred Nolan dug into the ground at the intersection of the paths created by the stones, he found a sandstone block, and Petter himself, during an expedition with Oak Island stakeholders, brothers Rick and Marty Lagina (for the History Channel show, The Curse of Oak Island), found two more stones possibly related to the Sephiroth. Petter hypothesizes that the stones discovered will indicate the X that marks the spot of what he believes is the entrance to the cave complex that holds the treasure.
Petter remarked that the quest for the treasure has been a treasure in itself for him, as he learns something new each time he investigates.
“Emotional truth is the truth that comes from the deepest part of your heart and is spontaneous, and the lines that you write down somehow are universal truth.” ~Lian Gouw
Lian Gouw was born in the Dutch East Indies, and was raised with a Dutch education and cultural values. She grew up during World War II and the Indonesian Revolution, and then emigrated to the United States in the early sixties due in part to the anti-colonial reaction that took place during the Indonesian Revolution.
Lian has always loved to read and write, and as a teenager, she won several essay competitions. She put her writing on hold for several decades, taking it up again when she was in her sixties. She had always wanted to publish a novel, and to prepare herself to fulfil that dream, she took courses on writing. Her efforts paid off when her book, Only a Girl, was published in 2009. The book tells the story of three generations of Chinese-Indonesian women, and tells the story about the intricate dynamics of the family.
Lian notes that, with the present trend of internationalization and integration, family dynamics involving peoples of different cultures tend to get somewhat complicated. Lian also notes that the book has been well-received in the Chinese-Indonesian community and has helped its younger readers understand their parents better, and is presently being used as required reading in several universities. Due to her upbringing, Lian was far more fluent in Dutch and English than she was in Bahasa Indonesia, hence her originally writing out Only a Girl in English, which would later be translated into Indonesian under the title Menantang Phoenix.
Lian mentioned that she encountered the concept of “emotional truth” while studying to be an author and mentions that this is an important element in writing fiction. She then read a passage from her book as an example of this, stating that that was her roots speaking to her, and this is the reason why she doesn’t write lighthearted books.
Lian decided to go into publishing after her first return trip to Indonesia in 2010 since her emigration to the United States. The trip opened her eyes to the dearth of good books in English, and and this was her reason behind her desire to translate Indonesian historical novels into English and release these into the English-speaking market, hence her setting up her publishing house, Dalang Publishing.
Dalang Publishing had originally accepted only previously published works, under the assumption that, because the works had already been previously published, the historical facts in these works would already have been checked and the editing had already been completed. Such an assumption wasn’t always true, so Lian and her editors still needed to check facts and editing, hence Dalang Publishing’s being open to new material. That said, Dalang Publishing books are presently available through such large distributors as Ingram and Baker & Taylor.
Where publishing and marketing is concerned, Lian has found that Americans are curious about her books. Her main challenges are economic and technical in nature, as she lives off social security and isn’t too familiar with the Internet and information technology. Her ultimate goal is to have good Indonesian stories accessible by public libraries and stores, as well as to be of such good quality that they become part of a literature course so that future generations can get in touch with their roots.
With regard to experiences, Lian reflects that she has experienced both compassion and greed, which are the extremes of experiences for her, and with regard to the time in her life that she would like to live in forever, she remarked that she would like to stay where she is in now, as these are her richest years, noting that she had lived long enough to gain insight and experience that is worth sharing. She also notes that she hopes to die with her life’s work not quite finished, because if her life’s work was finished, she said, there is no more reason to live.
