THE GRAIL CONSPIRACIES, a spiritual thriller, challenges our assumptions about the limits of human possibility. What if the deeper secret hidden behind the Grail accounts is that the grail "vessel" was not just a cup, not a womb and bloodline? What if that deeper secret is the key to an "intuitive prefiguring" of some of the key findings of modern physics? What if the ancients knew, as today's science indicates, that physical reality is not as it seems, and that the human mind plays a central role in unfolding the version of events that we experience? What if they developed those insights into a practical "technology" for tapping dormant powers of the human mind? As St. Augustine put it, "Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature." The story: A strange fax sends Greg Tapscott on one last search for the truth of what happened to his uncle, Paul, an OSS agent missing since World War II. The trail leads him from Washington to the ancient port of the Knights Templar in France, to Oxford, to the Alps, and back to Washington's Union Station on election eve. One source tells him that Paul found what the Nazi Ahnenerbe, or Occult Bureau, had been searching for: the key to tapping "a power within the human mind, or at least within certain trained minds, that can direct and focus energies from another dimension." According to another, he may have come upon "the secret behind the secret" that the Grail-seekers and even the Alchemists were in search of. Now, after six decades of indifference and shifting stories, the CIA is suddenly interested, claiming that Paul Tapscott's name has been coming up with increasing urgency in the intercepted "chatter" of anunlikely terrorist group. That turns out to be Twisted Messiah, a megastar rock group with a worldwide "army" of rootless, angry youth-a group that bills itself as "the world's worst nightmare." THE GRAIL CONSPIRACIES carries us to the intersection of spirituality, science and the unbounded frontiers of human possibility. (The plot of THE GRAIL CONSPIRACIES, a spiritual thriller, references JOINING MIRACLES, a fable by the same author, Michael McGaulley.)