The Book of Persephone.

More Hellfire..

2012-01-23T13:43:00.002Z

Faust.

Faust by Rembrandt, c. 1652.

The fruitful plot of scholarism grac'd,
That shortly he was grac'd with doctor's name,
Excelling all whose sweet delight disputes
In heavenly matters of theology;
Till swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, heavens conspir'd his overthrow;
For, falling to a devilish exercise,
And glutted now with learning's golden gifts,
He surfeits upon cursed necromancy;
Nothing so sweet as magic is to him,
Which he prefers before his chiefest bliss:
And this the man that in his study sits.

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

BY CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
FROM THE QUARTO OF 1604.

What are we to make of Christopher Marlowe's Tragic History of Dr Faust?

Was Faust Marlowe's attempt to clear his name of any association with the occult, or did it do the opposite and get him arrested on charges of heresy?

Witch hunts have long been associated with authoritarian regimes spinning lies to justify the annihilation of 'enemies of the state'. Even in Marlowe's time few were so credulous as to truly believe in Satan as a personal foe; unlike the accusation of heresy or witchcraft- being charged with associating with the devil could mean the destruction of ones reputation and livelihood and eventually torture and execution.

Aldous Huxley wrote The Devils of Loudun in 1952 a historical narrative of supposed demonic possession, religious fanaticism, sexual repression, and mass hysteria which occurred in 17th century France. In it the mechanism of 'Satanic trials' is made clear. Unfortunately the very clarity of Huxley's account can get in the way of seeing how social paranoia arises and how it plays out within our own culture. The burning man isn't always right, the state isn't always wrong...a victim can imagining things...there are ulterior motives.

Faust strikes me as an odd story for Christopher Marlowe to write.

Faust's crime was knowledge, he only wanted to know. Of course when he was offered limitless possibilities he did not ask for knowledge, he wanted Helen of Troy. Given limitless possibility one would expect a man desirous of knowledge to chose to speak to some great figure of the past such as Euclid, or to visit the hanging gardens, or see the pyramids built. Marlowe shows Faust as too ordinary for extraordinary knowledge, knowledge that belonged to god alone.

Faust is a warning and Faust is supposed to be all of us.

The 1620's cover to the play shows a bearded man standing inside a circle of symbols representing the twelve constellations of the zodiac; he holds a book (The Justinian bible) in his left hand, and a stick (for drawing the signs?) in his right..

Outside of the circle and a part of the furniture there is a cross, some kind of circular device with a central cross, something like a small suitcase and a ball hanging from the ceiling.

More importantly Faust is looking directly at a strange figure outside the circle, possibly rising up out of the floor. It has wings, spikes and claws. It is black and probably it has a beard and horns.

Marlowe's Faust is clearly a man who has gone too far. A 'man glutted with learning's golden gifts, he surfeits upon cursed necromancy...'. A man not dissimilar in the popular imagination to John Dee.

And Christopher Marlowe- atheist and Rosicrucian?- was a man writing a play reinforcing the moral panic of his time.

Back to the subject, not why did Marlowe write the play (to save his own skin I guess...) and clearly he was referring to Dee, but why and how does the fictional Faust summon Mephistophales?

First the how to summon demons:

Faustus, begin thine incantations,

And try if devils will obey thy hest,

Seeing thou hast pray'd and sacrific'd to them.

Within this circle is Jehovah's name,

Forward and backward anagrammatiz'd,

Th' abbreviated names of holy saints,

Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,

And characters of signs and erring stars,

By which the spirits are enforc'd to rise:

Then fear not, Faustus, but be resolute,

And try the uttermost magic can perform.

Anagrams of Holy names, symbols and signs of 'erring' stars- planets are wondering stars -these are the things that call forth spirits, and spirits enable magic. The Sigillum Dei Aemeth looks just the thing Doctor Faust would use.

Next an incantation:

Sint mihi dei Acherontis propitii! Valeat numen triplex Jehovoe!
Ignei, aerii, aquatani spiritus, salvete! Orientis princeps
Belzebub, inferni ardentis monarcha, et Demogorgon, propitiamus
vos, ut appareat et surgat Mephistophilis, quod tumeraris:
per Jehovam, Gehennam, et consecratam aquam quam nunc spargo,
signumque crucis quod nunc facio, et per vota nostra, ipse nunc
surgat nobis dicatus Mephistophilis!

Christopher Marlowe,

Faust calls to the god of the river Acheron- which leads on to the river Styx - to be gracious to him and says good bye to god in three, Jehovah (my Latin is not to be trusted, by the way)

Fire, air, spirit of water greetings!

The prince of the East Belzebub, monarch of burning hell, and Demogorgon, let Mephistophilis rise. Why do you delay! By, Jehovah and hell, I scatter consecrated water and by the sign of the cross and by my vows,
rise Mephistophilis !

Marlowe was using his imagination and referring to images and ideas his audience would understand and believe to be real enough. The consecrated water and the sign of the cross provide reassurance to the audience that god still has dominion over the infernal beings.

Why does Faust sign the pact with the devil?

Like Marlowe himself and most of us I guess, we think we can get out of it- what ever it is -if it gets too bad. The pact is a trick, but Faust is confident of his abilities.

Hubris...this is a tragedy after all.

If John Dee was the Faust of Marlowe's play, what ever John Dee may have done, no one ever accused him of performing a Black Mass. Neither Faust or Dee praised the devil, or asked for his blessing. Faust/Dee sought knowledge but it was that desire for knowledge which led Faust into the devil's power, just as Eve had damned all humanity by eating from the tree of knowledge.

Seeking 'god-like' knowledge and earthly power is the same (Marlowe seems to be saying) as praising the devil....

The Black Mass.
The Black Mass seems to be an invention of the Inquisition specifically charged with destroying the Knights Templar and rooting out their heresy. Heresy was, at the beginning the Arian heresy- of failing to agree that God, Jesus and the Holy Ghost were like water, steam and ice- the same thing but different, and taking a more common sense, less mystical view that each of those things are too different to be the same thing.

Heresy was also failing to pay tax, or posing a threat to established order. Or becoming powerful enough to challenge the king.

The demise of the Templars is one of the saddest stories of history. It is hard not to believe that their executions came about as a logical solution to a problem: the Templars were rich, the king needed money so the Inquisition found them guilty of denouncing Christ, worshipping idols- Baphomet composed of stuffed human heads - of spitting on and trampling on the cross, and worshipping the Devil in the form of a black cat. It is more than likely that Baphomet was a mispronunciation of Mohamed, but the more outlandish or plain silly the accusation is, the easier it is to make it stick in the topsy turvy mirror world of satanic panic.

400 years latter the real meaning of the word: Baphomet is confused further by Eliphas Levi taking the goat from Goya's image of a sabbat 1821-1823 and quoting from Herodotus.

Goya paints mothers offering children to a goat...did Goya use the symbol to represent (Moloch- child sacrifice) animal cravings and stupidity?

Goya: Nightmares are creatures of the imagination.

Eliphas Levi describes the goat of the sabbot as The Goat of Mendes in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie1855.

Wallis Budge translated Herodotus:

At several places in the Delta, e.g. Hermopolis, Lycopolis, and Mendes, the god Pan and a goat were worshipped; Strabo, quoting (xvii. 1, 19) Pindar, says that in these places goats had intercourse with women, and Herodotus (ii. 46) instances a case which was said to have taken place in the open day. The Mendisians, according to this last writer, paid reverence to all goats, and more to the males than to the females, and particularly to one he-goat, on the death of which public mourning is observed throughout the whole Mendesian district; they call both Pan and the goat Mendes, and both were worshipped as gods of generation and fecundity. Diodorus (i. 88) compares the cult of the goat of Mendes with that of Priapus, and groups the god with the Pans and the Satyrs. The goat referred to by all these writers is the famous Mendean Ram, or Ram of Mendes, the cult of which was, according to Manetho, established by Kakau, the king of the IInd dynasty.[49]

In 1921 Margaret Murray in The Witch-Cult in Western Europe wrote that the devil was said to appear as "a great Black Goat with a Candle between his Horns".

Back to France and a hundred years after the Templars had been burned at the stake Baron Gilles de Rais, was accused of conducting Black Masses in the cellar of his castle. The accusation claimed that he kidnapped, tortured, and murdered more than 140 children as sacrifices.

Why did he do it?
It was said that he did it in order to gain riches and power.

He was executed in 1440.

Did he do it?
No one knows...but perhaps he didn't?
Three days of torture made him remember...

As to what one should do to perform a Black Mass, this account of The mass of Saint-Secaire (performed to curse someone to death) was written in 1843:

The Mass of Saint Sécaire can only be said in a church where it is forbidden to congregate, because it is half-ruined, or because things were done there which no Christian should do. From these churches, the horned owls, the screech owls and the bats make their paradises. Gypsies lodge there. Under the altar, there are a bevy of singing toads.

The bad priest brings with him his mistress, to serve as his clerk. He must be alone in the church with this sow, and to have enjoyed a good supper. At the first stroke of eleven o'clock, he begins the mass, reading the whole thing backwards from the end, finishing at midnight exactly. The host is black, and has three points. The bad priest does not consecrate wine. He drinks the water of a well into which a child, who died unbaptized, has been thrown. The sign of the cross is always made on the ground, and with the left foot.

Singing toads is a new one...I find myself asking, are the toads essential? What if you don't have any toads, would a recording do?

The most famous description of a witch comes from Lucan in book 6 of his Pharsalia (A.D 61-65). The witch Erictho brings a corpse back to life to tell the future- Necromancy.

As Lucan says, for the witch murder is nothing to fear, it is justified by the rites she performs:

Where lay a corpse upon the naked earth
On ravening birds and beasts of prey the hag
Kept watch, nor marred by knife or hand her spoil,
Till on his victim seized some nightly wolf; (36)
Then dragged the morsel from his thirsty fangs;
Nor fears she murder, if her rites demand
Blood from the living, or some banquet fell
Requires the panting entrail. Pregnant wombs
Yield to her knife the infant to be placed
On flaming altars: and whene'er she needs
660 Some fierce undaunted ghost, he fails not her
Who has all deaths in use. Her hand has chased
From smiling cheeks the rosy bloom of life;
And with sinister hand from dying youth
Has shorn the fatal lock: and holding oft
In foul embraces some departed friend
Severed the head, and through the ghastly lips,
Held by her own apart, some impious tale
Dark with mysterious horror hath conveyed
Down to the Stygian shades.

It has long been known that the fear witchcraft inspires is more dangerous than the reality. The potency of this fear (rather than a desire to deal with any spirit or god) is what draws some groups of people to borrow its symbols and structures. Most often the users do not believe that the symbols have any intrinsic power and conclude that it is legitimate to write of witches sacrificing babies and of singing toads and to make up anything shocking for the purposes of selling their books or papers. Another section likewise know the symbols to be worldly artifacts with no connection to other worlds or beings, but use the fear these images inspire, to empower to their work- I class the Steganographia (written c.1499) by Johannes Trithemius as one of those books. John Dee's work could likewise be cryptography, but the lines between real and unreal blur when looking back 600 years away.

Trithemius wrote of cryptography as a...

"...secular consequent of the ability of a soul specially empowered by God to reach, by magical means, from earth to Heaven"

And when thinking of David Deutsch's work, it is easier to understand Trithemius's comprehension of magic as an extension of research into the unknown...

Cryptography- the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties -was an outcome of Trithemius's work. Dee and Marlowe were both associated with spying, this meant that any one dealing with cryptography risked being outed for witchcraft- and risking the moral panic and outrage of 'the people'.

Therefore the monarchy- an institution engaged in spying -required an alliance with the church as essential for the survival of the monarchy.

It is very tempting to believe that Faust was Marlowe's attempt to distance himself from anything at all that could get him into prison, nevertheless:

A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May 1593. No reason for it was given, though it was thought to be connected to allegations of blasphemy—a manuscript believed to have been written by Marlowe was said to contain "vile heretical conceipts". On 20 May he was brought to the court to attend upon the Privy Council for questioning. There is no record of their having met that day, however, and he was commanded to attend upon them each day thereafter until "licensed to the contrary." Ten days later, he was stabbed to death by Ingram Frizer. Whether the stabbing was connected to his arrest has never been resolved.

If Marlowe had not been stabbed he would have been tortured, I guess the stabbing was his reward for work done.

Marlowe had written and performed the play before his arrest. The texts we have today were changed, and are not exactly as Marlowe wrote the play. But did the writing of Faust actually cause Marlowe's arrest?

One hundred years latter in England officially it was as if witchcraft or the Dionysia (the state would not discriminate between the two) were the same things as being Catholic. In other words, a sign of rebellion and moral decline. The king was Protestant (head of the Church), he felt himself to be under threat from the Catholic supporters of James Stuart...

When George 1 banned Hellfire clubs he banned aristocrats making fun of the Church of England, suspecting them if not of being Catholic supporters, then drunkard louts causing civil disorder. A group known as The Mohock club- basically criminals running a protection racket - as described by Sir Richard Steele in the Spectator 1712 explains the danger:

The particular talents by which these misanthropes are distinguished from one another, consist in the various kinds of barbarities which they execute upon their prisoners. Some are celebrated for a happy dexterity in tipping the lion upon them; which is performed by squeezing the nose flat to the face, and boring out the eyes with their fingers. Others are called the dancing-masters, and teach their scholars to cut capers; by running swords through their legs; a new invention, whether originally French I cannot tell. A third sort are the tumblers, whose office it is to set women on their heads. But these I forbear to mention, because they cannot but be very shocking to the reader as well as the Spectator. In this manner they carry on a war against mankind; and by the standing maxims of their policy, are to enter into no alliances but one, and that is offensive and defensive with all bawdy-houses in general, of which they have declared themselves protectors and guarantees.

By the eighteenth century witchcraft was not a major concern...

The last executions for witchcraft in England had taken place in 1682, when Temperance Lloyd, Mary Trembles, and Susanna Edwards were executed at Exeter. Jane Wenham was among the last subjects of a typical witch trial in England in 1712, but was pardoned after her conviction and set free.

So when people blog about or Tumblr (Tumblrs of Illuminati symbols in pop videos)....assuming that some bimbo pretending to be augmented like Denton (Deus Ex) dancing around gun carrying military figures inevitably dressed in black is actually performing a magic ritual to create a police state...

Caves of Hellfire.

2012-01-21T20:20:00.000Z

I haven't said anything up until now about being abducted, or rather, my experience of what it's like to attend a BDSM workshop before now, perhaps because it seemed so ordinary, not unlike the meditation evenings I used to attend; a room full of people, tea and coffee, food to share.

On the other hand it was unusual to be in a place where it was taken for granted that one person had the right to tie up another and I was indeed tied up: a limb, then a limb or two and finally a whole lot of us were hog-tied in a room that was almost too small and had a carpet that needed a good clean.

We did leave early though, due to fog and ice and the need to get home, did we miss the sacrifice of the goat and the moment when the devil appeared?

I can't tell what I really think!

But mostly people were cracking jokes and generally everyone was really nice and basically it not only felt safe, sane and consensual, it was all of those things.

Disappointingly though, I didn't feel abducted at any time as it was safe and consensual; despite my terror of entering the building- a crumbling industrial building in a crumbling industrial town -I wasn't doing anything against my will.

But perhaps I'm missing the point.

There was a dungeon upstairs, and the room was black and there was a cage and equipment and it got me thinking of how the devilish cave as a place of parties with well-to-do upper class men with too much time and too much money getting their thrills by dressing in monks and ravishing women pretending to be nuns was probably a lot of fun..but probably not my cup of tea.

Two hundred and sixty years ago The Hell Fire Club, with it's motto of 'Do what thou wilt' was in High Wickham; now only the caves remain.

People seem more fascinated by ghosts for reasons that elude me.

It is quite hard to imagine two hundred and sixty years ago, but post Reformation there was a desire to recreate a better church; to go back- if possible -to the original and pure religion taught by Christ. The Puritan version was one way, the re-creation of Druidry was another.

So we get a rebuilding of 'The Temple' around that time: be it the temple of Solomon or of Babylon.

The Hellfire Club (Babylon) was just one of many private clubs whose members enjoyed wine, women and subverting sacred images.

Freemasons in particular are inclined to believe that their institution goes back to Pythagoras, or more reasonably to the Knights Templar (12th century) but there is little evidence for this. I regard Freemasonry, along with Druidry and the Hellfire club as a product of the eighteenth century.

The first Hellfire Club was most likely born from the fear and tension caused by economic disaster- The south Sea Bubble- and given shape by the press.

An antecedent were the Calves-Head clubs, meetings celebrating the beheading of Charles 1. Religious insurrection was linked, as far as the press (and the monarchy) was concerned, with anti-monarchy.

In response to a royal (the king at that time: George, Elector of Hanover- George 1) proclamation on 28th April 1721 stating:

His Majesty have received Information, which gives great Reason to suspect that there have lately been and still are, in and about the Cities of London and Westminster, certain scandalous Clubs or Societies of young Persons who meet together, and in the most impious and blasphemous Manner, insult the most sacred Principles of Holy Religion, affront Almighty God himself, and corrupt the Minds and Morals of one another

Papers circulated:

Identifying participants in the groups that the [Royal] proclamation mentions as ‘Hell-Fire Club men’, the authors explained that a number of London clubs were meeting in support of heterodoxy and atheism. The periodicals accused them of challenging fundamental beliefs, especially the Thirty-Nine Articles. Most importantly, these groups were nurseries for Arianism. In effect, the ‘birth’ of Hell-Fire Clubs was an invention of the press as a way to defame organizations that tended towards latitudinarianism. In the wake of the South Sea Bubble debacle, which Lord describes, the Hell-Fire scare of 1721 also became a way to challenge Whig politicians. Linking the Whigs with nonconformity and atheism was a way to show their threat to the state – a counter-narrative of sorts to a rhetoric linking Tories with Jacobitism.-Reference..

A club had been formed by Philip Wharton, first Duke of Wharton in 1719. About which all we know for sure is that it performed parodies of religious rites for fun and giggles, this became the first Hellfire club.

From Babylon to Solomon, Philip Wharton latter became a Master in the Freemasons in 1722.

The man famous for The Hell Fire Club as portrayed in films and books was Francis Dashwood, 15th Baron le Despencer. He had been too young to have been a member of the very first Hellfire, but was alleged to have been a member of a Hellfire Club that met at the George and Vulture Inn throughout the 1730s.

Hellfire denotes a type of club....

In 1732 Francis Dashwood formed a dining club called the Society of Dilettanti with around 40 members. This was perhaps a precursor for the most famous Hellfire club. Horace Walpole described the selection process for prospective members:

"The nominal qualification [for membership of the society] is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk."

The club funded archaeological expeditions to the lands of the Classics, and had a lasting effect on English architecture and interpretations of myth. It still exist, though the worship of Eros may have faded somewhat, Dionysos is still in favour:

'at the society's formal dinners, held four times a year, the centrepiece of the table is still the mid-18th-century carved chest called the Tomb of Bacchus'.

Sir Francis Dashwood's Hell Fire club began sometime around 1749 at Medmenham Abbey. The members were The Brotherhood of St. Francis of Wycombe (Francis Dashwood, not Assisi) or The Order of Knights of West Wycombe, sometimes they were The Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe or The Monks or Friars of Medmenham. It is said that the club members held mock religious ceremonies and wore extravagant costumes and masks to hide their identities.

Many of the Hell Fire members were wealthy enough to be involved in politics and the membership allegedly included William Hogarth, John Montague the Earl of Sandwich, the Earl of Bute and the Prince of Wales.

Benjamin Franklin, a friend of Francis Dashwood may also have taken part in some of the sessions.

Not surprisingly the club soon attracted rumours about Satanic cults- Black Masses and pornographic activity happening there.

Illuminati myths anyone?

Virtual realms of 'freedom'.
Picture from Q3A.

Putting it mildly, the club had a reputation for drunkenness and debauchery. The words "FAY CE QUE VOUDRAS" (do what you want) had been placed over the Eastern entrance to Medmenham Abbey, this gives us a clue as to what this new temple or abbey was all about.

Rabelais wrote about the Abbey of Theleme in the first book of five The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel; the Abbey of Theleme was a place where people could follow their own inclinations about what time to eat or sleep, to stay or to leave; it was an argument for autonomy and libertarian values.

"Nor can there be any greater dotage in the world than for one to guide and direct his courses by the sound of a bell, and not by his own judgment and discretion". Rabelais.

Photo by Lonpicman.

The first Abbey of Theleme as created by Francis Dashwood may have torpedoed the argument for liberty with the behaviour of its members. John Wilkes- member of Parliament, member of the Hellfire was described as responsible for hastening the demise of the club. A story tells of how he once brought a baboon dressed in a cape and horns into the rituals performed at the club, producing considerable mayhem among the inebriated initiates.

Pretty scary stuff there...mayhem among the inebriated initiates.

John Wilkes described the Hell Fire Club as:

"A set of worthy, jolly fellows, happy disciples of Venus and Bacchus, got together to celebrate women in wine and to give more zest to the festive meeting, they plucked every luxurious idea from the ancients and enriched their own modern pleasures with the tradition of ancient luxury."

So one would need to know what version of Greek they were reading, but it is fairly reasonable to assume that male homosexuality and prostitutes were on the menu.

The second Abbey of Theleme as created by Crowley (1920) was probably a lot less fun.

Ultimately Hellfire clubs once were the private pleasure of the rich. Crowley and the various Lords who went to play in the caverns had money enough, to grant them the freedom to enjoy dark spaces, lots of people, music, and sex.

It helped to have an education augmented by Homer and Hesiod and The Grand Tour to draw upon for these experiences provided a rich set of images and ideals, and they had the money to make their fantasies reality.

Crowley had more than Greek myth, he had texts that had been unavailable to Dashwood, explaining in English, Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. He also had the works of John Dee, Agrippa and Kirchner; these books were available to Dashwood and his friends but why should they bother reading them! Magic is a religious calling, not really about fun or breaking taboos simply for the sake of it...

Much of what is called demonic- especially to those steeped in Christianity - is created directly from myths and fears of Dionysos: the caves, abduction, darkness, spirits....even the goat.

The curious thing is that fear is no longer located in the libertine, and satanic. Feral youth and ranting puritans are considered far more threatening to civilization than the devil.

Nevertheless Hellfire clubs continue, but stripped of any fantasy Greek myth or ritual.

The Hellfire Club meets every week for 'tongue in cheek' fun. If you are not used to dressing up and masks, you will soon get in the habit! We are conveniently located in Sunbury-On-Thames, just 10 miles west of Central London with excellent travel links and secure free parking. The nearest Station is Upper Haliford; just 250m from the Club. We are 10 min from Terminal 4 and the Heathrow Expess (15mins from Central London).

http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/buckinghamshire/occult/the-hellfire-club.html

Wife of God.

2012-01-09T16:02:00.000Z

The descent of the divine.

Karma Kadgyu Refuge Tree.

The idea of power as descending from heaven and being broken apart and then shared out via priests and kings, is often portrayed as a tree

The Tibetan Buddhist image of the Refuge Tree (image) shows the transmission lines of knowledge- knowledge providing the means for spiritual power in this case -and the structures that help preserve it: the monks and saints, the texts and at the base of the tree a ring of fierce Protectors (Mahakala being one) guard the tree.

At the edge of the lake, on the other side from the tree, people bow down, asking for the teachings.

The Assyrian 'tree of life' seems to represent the flow of power too, finally becoming a 'diagrame' of the sephiroths- the dynamic of God and creation.

Mythology when dealing with the subject of the primordial forces forgets all about how the power lines work or are preserved; Assyrian, Hittite and Greek myth describe the descent of power in terms of conflict: The titanic forces of earth and sky- the Great Old Ones -are dismembered, broken apart and buried, some of them still alive deep down in Tartarus. Their power now taken by their children the gods.

The Titans are unknowable, unrecognisable, alien and inhuman.

Their children, the gods such as Zeus and Hades are a little more like 'us' but are still alien in their thinking, unknowable and at times, untrustworthy.

Those original children of the Titanic gods have children, and the story lines become harder to untangle: Persephone, daughter of Zeus and Demeter, gave birth to more gods fathered by her father, Zeus: Zagreus the child with the horns of a bull, and half light, half dark Melinoe. The children of the children of gods, rarely have a cult center and rarely play much of a role in Greek myth.

They are too much like us..

The next step is The Hero, literally a human/god hybrid. Gilgamesh was the first literary hero- the son of Lugalbanda, king of Uruk, and the goddess Ninsun -many more were to follow:

Theseus and Achilles to name just two.

The king too must access divine power and to represent this there is the idea of 'The mandate of Heaven' or of the need to posses 'The tablet of destiny' for without either of these things, a king cannot rule. A king can only rule with the agreement of the gods. The Tablet of Destiny actually gave the rule of the whole universe to who ever possessed it, therefore it, like 'the mandate' it was not a physical object, rather it is a symbol of kingship that is maintained to this day.

Here, on the border between the unknowable gods and the all too human quest for knowledge and power we find the idea of the Heiros Gamos- the Holy wedding between church and state, believed to have been enacted by the king, and a priestess of The Queen of Heaven, Holy Inanna's representative for that night...In Ancient Sumer the temple fulfilled the role of the state whilst the king's primary function was as a war leader. The temple required sacrifices for the gods and distributed 'the sacrifices' as food for the many. The temple gave work to craftsmen, provided exorcists and scribes. The temple was the place rich fathers could send their daughters to live a celibate life, and the place from where Shamhat was fetched (if Herodotus is to be believed about temple prostitutes).

No one seems very clear on the status of prostitution in old Sumer- which isn't surprising, it was a very long time ago! It is true that there is a concept of sacred sexuality preserved in ancient texts (most of it dismissed as 'symbolic') , it is also true that prostitution is an old institution.

Finally and without doubt the temple needed to make money and the kings of Carthage 'married the Goddess' .

I tend to see an obvious way of monetizing the two by the temple offering a heiros gamos to any man wealthy enough to partake of what had once been a king's right.

Meanwhile, to quote from The New International Version of the bible:

Deuteronomy 23:17-1817.No Israelite man or woman is to become a shrine prostitute. 18 You must not bring the earnings of a female prostitute or of a male prostitute[a] into the house of the LORD your God to pay any vow, because the LORD your God detests them both.

But without being able to read the original language- who knows if this is actually what the bible says? The term, shrine prostitute indicates that there were 'sacred prostitutes' and that the new religion (that eventually becomes Christianity) isn't keen...

It is extremely difficult to tell if the whole idea of sacred prostitution is a creation of nineteenth century white men's frustrations which eventually finds its true home in the Wiccan Great Rite?

Ahmose-Nefertari.

Meanwhile faith in the possibility of sexual union with a god present resulting in the fathering of a child created the Egyptian institution of the queen as wife of god, specifically her title became God's Wife of Amun. The role of God's Wife is older than God's Wife of Amun, but it is easier to look at one form of the role, rather than to look at how it changed.

By the time of Ahmose-Nefertari the role of Wife of God had changed; all I can be fairly certain of is that playing the sistrum before the statue of the god was a major role for god's wife- The sistrum induced fertility...in some way- by the time Ahmose-Nefertani married god, it gave her great power in this world.

[LINK]

It is quite easy to see 'the sacred' as a kind of sugar pill, an advertisers' spin, an attempt to sell or hide 'the truth'. The longing for the sacred has an effect, it gets buildings constructed and makes people look for, and experience the spectral light shining in from hidden realms.

But the temples of Sumer were at the heart of civilisation and a balance of power was maintained, or rather the king could be held in check by an institution that depended upon the good will of the people to function correctly.

The Egyptian title, Wife of God, consort to a god shifts love and adoration away from the romantic and centers it on the spiritual; god is something else, not of this world, not even flesh and blood; but can be within flesh and blood...

It is tempting believe that this concept spread into Greece as part of the cult of Dionysos. Dionysos was - the God within - a god of possession and transformation. The sacred wedding of Dionysos took place as a part of the Anthesteria...

Dionysos, Ariadne, Persephone, the cave, the wedding, the wine...no one mentions Hades....because his name means invisible...

Maiden in the tower of 'Great Time'.

2011-12-30T14:22:00.000Z

I'm pretty bad at remembering dates or else I could tell you when I first heard of the Mahakala nun.

I remember that the idea of it, both appalled and attracted me.

The Mahakala nun dedicates herself to the practice of Mahakala- that is the visualisation of the palace and surrounds of Mahakala's realm, imagining the deity, then imagining herself as the deity and then becoming the deity whilst reciting the mantra.

It is a retreat that will last for as long as the nun lives and breathes.

For as long as she lives.

A permanent retreat.

I forget now what the Tibetan word for retreat is, but the word itself implies retreat to mean setting of, and keeping to, boundaries. Some retreats come with ready made rules and regulations- things one can and cannot eat, duration of practice, whether speech is allowed or silence the rule.

The rules of a retreat are comprehensive and proscriptive.

A practitioner can also decide upon the format of his or her own meditation retreat, rules can be borrowed from similar types of retreat. But the duration, whether measured by a clock, sun rise or sun set, days, weeks or number of recitations of a mantra, and the structure of the retreat has to be adhered to.

I don't know how proscriptive a life long Mahakala retreat is.

My first thought when I heard that Samye Ling was looking for a nun to be in permanent retreat was- this isn't right. It is true that there are practitioners who take themselves off to the mountains for years to complete a certain practice, solitary practitioners and couples, but all under instruction from their teachers because they have asked to do it.

In theory there is nothing wrong in dedicating one person to do one practice. It just doesn't fit in with my image of Milarepa or Marpa struggling and begging for permission to be taught certain practices.

Another thing that bothers me, there is usually a beginning, middle and end to a practice, and different practices to be completed; granted if Mahakala is your yidam practice then it is a life long task...but you wouldn't be expected to practice it in a dedicated location.

Samye Ling was looking for someone to fulfill a role, the house was being built.

'Real' practice, for me is closer to this account:
http://ganachakra.com/2011/07/22/chod-inner-trolls-brigdes-and-inner-stagnation/
All apects of the body, heart and mind are involved in practice, all hopes and dreams, meanings and possibilities.

Mahakala.
Image from: http://ganachakra.com/

The Mahakala nun plays a different role to that of an 'ordinary' practitioner; she is fulfilling a role for the temple itself.

As far as I know it is more usual for there to be a group of monks or nuns given the task of invoking Mahakala. There is no need for it to be one person, unless something else if going on here.

The Mahakala nun becomes in effect, a part of the building. Her place of practice is Mahakala's house, and she becomes his conduit or reason to stay.

What keeps on going around in my head is that Mahakala practice can be done by anyone who has had the correct initiations, and there are many people who have permission to practice Mahakala; asking one person to do it for their whole life time looks like creating an 'expert', but it seems closer in my imagination to a more archaic tradition: that of marrying a priestess to a god.

Axial Age.

2011-12-29T19:14:00.000Z

I am puzzled.
Why is there little or no reference in books about the influence of the Assyrians and Persians in Egyptian history?

Granted, the longest period of time Egypt was actually ruled by 'Eastern powers' is equivalent to the time the Romans were in Britain; but we are taught all about the effect the Romans had on British life, even though a lot of it -'they gave us central heating-- is not terribly accurate.

I don't doubt that there is recorded history from Ancient Egypt: Manetho (circa 350 BC) and Herodotus (circa 450 BC) for sure, but by then the Assyrians and Persians had gone.

Why I'm interested in the effect of ideas brought in to Egypt by 'Assyrians and Persians' is that this time period corresponds specifically with that time the Greeks were- according to so many text books -busy 'creating' Western civilisation.

Homer circa 800 BC.
Hesiod circa 600 BC.

The Assyrian king Esarhaddon captured Memphis in 671 BC, leaving Necho 1 as the chief king of twelve rulers. After the Assyrians came the Persians: Cambyses II (525 BC) is the next conqueror, followed by Darius.

Then Alexander the Great conquered Persia in 331 BC.

Trying to decipher the history is complicated by the terms and language historians use: 'Persian,' Phoenician, Babylon, Oriental, Baal, even Assyrian, are terms used interchangeably and in a relative way.

'We three kings from Orient are'

...just about sums it up!

In asking myself why an exchange and influence of ideas between the 'East' and Egypt is disregarded I assumed no one could read cuneiform, and until cuneiform was translated, the Greeks were clearly ahead of their time...basically for thousands of years Mesopotamian mathematics lay in fragments of clay. Until they were read it was reasonable to think that Pythagoras and Euclid had invented geometry!

Babylon was 'found' in the early nineteenth century, Claudius James Rich visited 'Babylon' and wrote: Memoirs on the ruins of Babylon in 1818. It was published in London in 1839- Google books has it as a free download.

The 'Assyrian' language, cuneiform, began to be deciphered in 1857 and approximately one hundred years latter scholars began to publish books about 'Babylonian' mathematics, the sudden increase in Greek knowledge was explained as a result of Alexander the Great's conquest of 'Persia'.

But even today I read modern articles and books insisting upon a kind of cultural purity: books and articles that do not consider the probability that an influx of first Assyrians and then Persians (including rule by a Persian king) could possibly have any effect at all upon an existing culture!

Even though the idea of 'The Axial Age' is easily disproved, there is something about it that appeals to people, even now.

The term: Axial Age came from Karl Jaspers in his book: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (The Origin and Goal of History) written in 1949. The Axial Age, according to Karl Jaspers, is the period between 800 to 200 B.C.E.

"It was the time in which all foundations that underlie current civilization came into being".

The trouble is, writing first appeared in Sumer in 3200 BC, likewise irrigation canals and great cities. In 1952 Samuel Kramer was translating the Code of Ur-Nammu (one of the oldest legal texts in existence dated to 2000 BC).

I suppose cities, writing and law are not fundamental to civilisation....

"…After An and Enlil had turned over the Kingship of Ur to Nanna, at that time did Ur-Nammu, son born of Ninsun, for his beloved mother who bore him, in accordance with his principles of equity and truth... Then did Ur-Nammu the mighty warrior, king of Ur, king of Sumer and Akkad, by the might of Nanna, lord of the city, and in accordance with the true word of Utu, establish equity in the land; he banished malediction, violence and strife, and set the monthly Temple expenses at 90 gur of barley, 30 sheep, and 30 sila of butter. He fashioned the bronze sila-measure, standardized the one-mina weight, and standardized the stone weight of a shekel of silver in relation to one mina... The orphan was not delivered up to the rich man; the widow was not delivered up to the mighty man; the man of one shekel was not delivered up to the man of one mina."

800 BC used to be thought of as the time Homer was writing the Iliad and Odyssey, so I guess that is why that particular date was chosen as a starting point.

Karl Jaspers idea of individual, key axial age thinkers having a profound influence on future philosophies and religions; in other words- one man making a big difference- is a concept that has a lot in common with Helena Blavatsky's idea (circa 1875) that human culture is advanced by Golden Ones, or The Shining Ones (an idea repackaged by Philip Gardener).

As Karl Jaspers risked being sent to a concentration camp for being less than perfectly Aryan, he may have had an inexplicit agenda in believing that 'Aryans' a word derived from Arya (noble, noble ones) and defined by anthropologists of his time as Indo-Iranian, could not have had any connection with the increase in knowledge during the so called Axial Age...

...maybe?

Worse, I've heard it said (the Internet will tell you by whom) in response to this concept of an Axial age that:

"...violence and suffering seem to be a sine qua non of a spiritual quantum leap forward"

Is it true that war, famine and plague are good for people, that suffering teaches people compassion? Or is it as equally reasonable to believe that children who have been brought up with violence accept its inevitability?

For what ever reason Iranian and Assyrian influences on Greek and Egyptian culture (let alone on Tibetan Buddhism- don't get me started!!!) are invisible; they are there though, wrapped up in 'Pythagoras', 'Orpheus' and 'Mithras' and finally in Christianity.

In other words, Iranian (can't keep using the term Persian) and Assyrian ideas became a part of Greek philosophy. There doesn't need to be direct copying or transference of whole concepts and ideas for this to be true.

Ideas don't respect borders or nationalities. Granted. there is more evidence of Hittite (Hesiod's theogeny) and Phoenician (alphabet) influence...than Zoroastrian, but it is demonstrably true that ideas don't stay put.

Herodotus in The Histories gives us some information about the role of the Magi. According to Herodotus, the Magi were the sixth tribe of the Medians (until the unification of the Persian empire under Cyrus the Great, all Iranians were referred to as "Mede" or "Mada" by the peoples of the Ancient World), who appear to have been the priestly caste of the Mesopotamian-influenced branch of Zoroastrianism today known as Zurvanism.

Links:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/herodotus-persians.asp
http://www.avesta.org/mp/zadspram.html#chapter1

Well the Greeks influenced the Iranians, who influenced the Greeks who were influenced by the Egyptians. The Hittites and Phoenicians too. My point is that images and ideas are copied and reinterpreted, trends -such as a rejection of the gods as fallible beings and a desire for redemption -draw in new ideas from other cultures and religions until something new is made.

The new idea feels more truthful to those who desire it to be so.

Orpheus represents a new interpretation of the gods. The god is good, and so the Orphic story of Dionysus (in which man is created from the ashes of Dionysus and Titans) explains our nature- terrible and godlike.

Soul trapped in matter...

The Eleusinian mysteries altered to take care of this thought; initiation promised a better after-life. But the location of the Elysian fields requiring flight, as an ascension of the soul up to heaven was at first an esoteric idea, and probably an imported idea.

More often than not, the location of the promised, blissful next world is simply far away, the Islands of the Blessed, like The Canary isles, somewhere far away over the horizon.

The idea that perhaps the soul is made of a spark of Aethyr, and could ascend above the earth to other planets is an Orphic idea, recalling the Sepheroth of the Cabala, and the Akkadian idea of the stars as domains of the gods..only latter with the cult of Mithras does the Zoroastrian journey to the Isles of the Blessed, the realm of 'The lights without end' finally become a ladder to the stars:

The first step that the soul of man made,

placed him in the good thought paradise;

the second step . . . in the good word paradise;

the third step . . . in the good deed paradise;

the fourth step . . . in the endless lights."

—The Abodes Of The Soul, Zend-Avesta

Ladders- the Seven +1 Gates.

2011-12-27T20:38:00.001Z

THE FIFTH TABLET

From the Enuma Elish.

He (Marduk) made the stations for the great gods;

The stars, their images, as the stars of the Zodiac, he fixed.

He ordained the year and into sections he divided it;

For the twelve months he fixed three stars.

After he had ... the days of the year ... images,

He founded the station of Nibir to determine their bounds;

That none might err or go astray,

He set the station of Bel and Ea along with him.

He opened great gates on both sides,

He made strong the bolt on the left and on the right.

In the midst thereof he fixed the zenith;

The Moon-god he caused to shine forth, the night he entrusted to him.

Sigillum Dei Aemeth- Seal of the truth of God: The sigil predates Dee, having first appeared in a thirteenth century grimoire; it was later described by Athanasius Kircher in his Oedipus aegyptiacus. Used by Dee as a protective device.

From a gold plate found in Thurii, Southern Italy, 4th century BCE.

Pure I come from the pure, Queen of those below the earth,

and Eukles and Eubouleus and the other immortal gods;

For I boast that I am of your blessed race.

But Fate mastered me and the Thunderer, striking with his lightning.

I flew out of the circle of wearying heavy grief;

I came on with swift feet to the desired crown;

I passed beneath the bosom of the Mistress, Queen of the Underworld,

I came out with swift feet from the desired crown.

"Blessed and enviable one, a god you shall be instead of a mortal."

A kid I fell into milk.

The idea of a zombie like existence after death, as described by Homeric texts, has never been popular, even though such a fate was not certain, it is not nice to think of the Sumerian underworld- a domain of ash- for those who do not have a name remembered, or relatives left to tend the grave . The alternative hope, a life after death in a heavenly paradise, or in the company of the gods, or 'enlightenment' is an idea that seems to have taken root in Greek writing, slowly from the sixth century BC onwards.

In 669BC, Assyrians from Mesopotamia conquer Egypt. The Assyrian rule didn't last long; in 525BC, the Persians conquered Egypt and ruled the country until about 404BC, when a revolt earned the country its freedom for about 60 years before Persia attacked again..

The short answer to the question- why? is that Egyptian and 'Persian' beliefs diffused into Greek thought and mythology because of what was happening in Egypt. Of course it is more complex than that, but broadly speaking....The ladder to the stars- the abode of the divine- is an image that has its origin in the Assyrian Tree of Life, and remains today as the Cabala.

The other way to see 'the tree' is to see, instead a fountain:

The clearest evidence for a 'Persian ' influence extending beyond 'Persia' is the Avesta: Khorda Avesta: 10. MIHR YASHT ("Hymn to Mithra"). [LINK]

The Mithraic path to the stars, the seven plus one gates, is explained by Celsus, via Origen (hardly a fan of Celsus), and recorded by A S Geden:

Celsus following Plato affirms that souls proceed to and from the earth by way of the planets...and further being desirous of exhibiting his learning in controversy with us he expounds certain Persian mysteries also, and among them the following: "These doctrines are contained in the traditions of the Persians and in the cult of Mithra which they practise. For the latter gives a kind of representation of the two heavenly spheres, the one fixed and the other assigned to 'the planets, and of the journey of the soul through these. There is an ascending road with seven gates, and an eighth at the summit. The first gate is of lead, the second of tin, the third of bronze, the fourth of iron, the fifth of mixed metal, the sixth of silver, and the seventh of gold. The first is dedicated to Kronus, the lead symbolizing the planet's slow motion. The second to Aphrodite, the resemblance consisting in the bright and malleable nature of the tin. The third, firm and resistant, to Zeus. The fourth to Hermes, in that like the iron Hermes is the tireless and efficient worker and producer of wealth. The fifth to Ares, because of the variable and irregular nature of the alloy. The sixth, of silver, to the Moon; and the seventh, of gold, to the Sun, from a comparison of their colours." Later Celsus investigates the reason for this definite assignment of the stars in whose names the remainder of the physical universe finds symbolical expression, and he expounds further the doctrines of harmony in which the Persian theology is set forth. In addition to these he is so ambitious as to publish a second treatise dealing with the principles of music. In my judgement however, for Celsus to propound his theory in these is absurd; it is like his procedure in the matter of his denunciation of Christians and Jews where he makes irrelevant quotations from Plato, and is so far from being satisfied with these that he drags in the Persian mysteries as he calls them of Mithra also with all their details. For whether these things are true or false in the belief of those who preside over the Mithraic rites of the Persians, why did he choose them for exposition and interpretation rather than any other mysteries? for Greeks have no preference for mysteries of Mithra rather than those of Eleusis or the traditional rites of Hecate which they celebrate in Aegina. And why if he felt it incumbent upon him to set forth foreign mysteries did he not rather prefer the Egyptian, in which many take an interest, or the Cappadocian worship of Artemis in Comana, or the Thracian, or even those of the Romans themselves in which the most high-born senators take part? but if he regarded it as unsuitable to his purpose to adopt anyone of these on the ground that they furnished no support to his denunciation of Jews or Christians, how is it that he did not draw the same conclusion with regard to his exposition of the Mithraic rites? (Geden)

It is tempting to see the Egyptian 'Book of Gates' (specifically the 12 Gates portrayed in the tomb of Thutmose III -1479-1425 BC) as something similar: the 'Boat of Millions' sails the sea of stars, crossing through deserts and across fearful abysses and over round barrow to beat all round barrows- the Hill of Sokar...[LINK].

No ladders in the boat, though!

Winter Solstice- 2011.

2011-12-22T20:10:00.001Z

The moon was truly beautiful, a thin crescent hanging in a sky the colours of Labradorite. The roads were dark and difficult- so many lorries in the early hours of the morning; each one first blinding me with headlights and then throwing muddy water onto the windscreen as we passed.

Eventually we were on the A303, busy even then- so early!
Blue lights indicated police ahead, and road blocks.
Closer to Stonehenge many people, camp fires and people sitting on chairs around their fires. I find it amazing that some people are so well prepared as to actually have chairs..

We avoid the traffic jam, turn right at the island to go towards Devizes. There is a right turn ahead, leading back towards Stonehenge...but again, police, flashing lights and I can't really face the mess and mass or the hassle. Apparantly, the BBC say a 1000 people attended.

So we head for Avebury, and get to be a part of this morning's perfect sunrise.

Avebury solstice winter, 2011. Photo by Dr Kaligari.

Latter we meet Mr and Mrs Sunbeam, truly, truly, lovely people with the most perfect of names for today.

Dionysos.

2011-12-16T12:44:00.001Z

"Now you have died, and now you are born, three times blessed, on this

very day. Say to Persephone that it is Bakchios himself that has

redeemed you."

[LINK]

Tomorrow is looming.
I don't want to go at all.
I feel intimidated.

When I think about it I see a cave hidden inside a warehouse in a dingy Midland's street, filled with implements of torture.

Why should I go.

Why have I done this to myself?

At this moment I am seeing this whole bondage thing as deeply repellent. It is a total inversion of feminism. A ritual of un-becoming, of undoing, of loss of self...of making myself into a thing; empty of myself.

But I am first and foremost uninterested in politics and the objective patten, or what the world says; my subject is subjectivity itself: how I feel and what it means to me. The collective dreams and nightmares of my culture wash around me, images and feelings clash and stop making sense.

I seek only the gold.
The understanding being alive gives.

Dionysos tastes of fear, which is proper. His cult was always associated with the collective mind, the submerging of ones word-making/symbol-using self, into the murky depths of experiential existence. Intellectuals and the rational- things I am not, but my culture expects me to be- always look on Dionysos as a force to be moderated.

I am being immoderate by daring to see and to feel...

The Romans, perhaps because they were such a diverse lot, unsure of their commonality, were fearful of foreign cults, and especially cults begun by foreign women, hence the banning of his cult in 186 B.C.
[LINK]

Their nightmares of what Dionysos means worked through the centuries down to us in the works of the Marquis De Sade and Pauline Réage. In the song, Love will Tear Us Apart, and the old conflation of the meaning of the phrase, 'I die,' with orgasm.

Ultimately Dionysos is spirit, the flow of zoe. His wine loosens the soul. I imagine that suspension is like that too.

Dionysos is Zagreus, the hunter, the one who takes down.

I cannot hold onto this earth or this life.

What to wear?

2011-12-14T14:15:00.001Z

This coming Saturday I'm going to go to a 'Rope' workshop to be tied up, and suspended. I will be dressed in motorbike gear to get there- which isn't as exciting as it sounds, yes...leather trousers- my husband's.

No, to leather jacket...I'd freeze!

This morning I got to grips with what I could wear...because those leather trousers will have to come off, doing the zip up is a bit of a struggle, there is much less give in leather than in denim and there is that padding in the knees.

Motorbike clothing is like wearing your car.

So, the thermal top and leggings are default, I tried a long skirt, but would probably feel embarrassed to wear it. The leggings are Tron, the skirt Victorian. My boots cyberpunk, but I'm going to a place where people probably don't wear much.

Found an old top- as seen in photo- and it worked better than anything else.

I look kind of pantomime boyish.

I can honestly say I have no idea what I'm letting myself in to.

So, how does one go about getting suspended and why? I am doing it because I want to taste that abduction myth for myself, in a safe way.

http://3hadow3un.blogspot.com/2011/11/abduction.html

And there is always a hint of sado-masochism about any ex-Goth. Fundamentally though I have no idea why other people want to be tied up. As a child I climbed rope and did all sorts of hanging off things...but being immobilized is another kettle of fish.

I rarely see myself as powerless, and ultimately that must be what rope up is all about? It must be about trust, abandoning myself to someone else's wishes. And then there is that other aspect; a Dionysian fear and pleasure thing. Like The House of Mysteries...should I be telling you this?

So how does one go about it?
Best to find an expert and ask:
http://www.mrkrigging.com/

There used to be an idea many people had, that I used to hear when I taught meditation; about meditation causing 'things to come up'. Old repressed feelings of resentment and pain, rarely did anyone ever say that nice things 'came up'. I must admit I didn't ever have that experience in meditation: boredom, cramp, more boredom, but no things coming up.

But here in the real world of action, here the things come. I'm now feeling unusually fat, and as old as I am.

This certainly wasn't Persephone's lot.

Bougonia: the bee queen and the dog star.

2011-12-09T14:26:00.001Z

If the labyrinth represents the dance of the bee.

If Ariadne, as mistress of the labyrinth is the bee queen.

If her bull headed son must die...

"Myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance"
Walter Burkert.

"Out of strength comes sweetness".

At the center of the labyrinth there is a star.

It could simply mean god, or be a pretty design, but the bull-headed Minotaur was named Asterion (from Pausanias) or Asterios (from Apollodorus). The connection between the birth of a god and a star over the cave belongs to a tradition much older than Christianity, and possibly goes back to the time when brewing was a new technology.

Two questions arise when I look at that coin, does the star give a clue about the time of year of this event, or was it used here in its more 'Babylonian' form, simply to mean a god?

If the star represents a god, surely the minotaur Asterion was the first born Dionysos.

Both Zeus and Dionysos were born within caves, but only Dionysos has the horns. This version belongs to the 'Orphic' story of the infant mesmerized by his own image in a mirror, and the chalk smeared Titans looming closer and closer..finally tearing the bull boy limb from limb.

Zeus arrives almost too late and blasts the sorry scene of dying child and monstrous Titans with pure flame. Some of the Titans scuttle away, burnt and raw. Others are cremated where they stand, bloody flesh still in their mouths. When it is over, Zeus takes the child's heart and leaves...

Meanwhile something happens to the ash...slowly, slowly, after many days and nights fermenting in the heat, the first humans crawl out of the ash.

Picture by RideFlame.

Carl Kerneyi states that the archaeologist, Spyridon. Marinatos has shown that the orientation of the palaces of Crete, were determined by that other 'Venus'- the dog star; specifically the summer rising of Sirius. If that is so, then there must have been a good reason; the Cretan calendar coming from Egypt is the most likely answer.

This makes me wonder if the modern interpretation of Stonehenge as a midsummer place, derives from evidence such as this?

Almost two thousand years after the building of those Cretan palaces, the Roman, Antoninus Liberalis left out the star when he wrote in his Metamorphoseon Synagoge:

"In Crete, in a cave of bees, there Rhea gave birth to Zeus".

Add another two thousand years and a connection between bees, gods and caves is still reproduced on the tin of sticky goodness known as Golden syrup.

Well there are two explanations, three books...

The lion story comes from the first of the three books- the bible:

Judges 14:5-9 Then Samson went down to Timnah…and behold, a young lion came roaring toward him. And the Spirit of the Lord came upon him mightily, so that he tore him as one tears a kid though he had nothing in his hand… When he returned later to take her, he turned aside to look at the carcass of the lion; and behold, a swarm of bees and honey were in the body of the lion. So he scraped the honey into his hands and went on, eating as he went. When he came to his father and mother, he gave some to them and they ate it; but he did not tell them that he had scraped the honey out of the body of the lion.

This is so close to Euripides Bacchae tearing kids or snakes or ibex, I'm almost beginning to believe Jane Harrison, almost being the operative word. Actually I don't believe that people did run around possessed by gods tearing animals, well, not on a regular basis.

The bible story explains the lion on the tin; except of course it doesn't.

In 1904 Abram Lyle registered the image.
He was a religious man.
Is the strength the tin, or is it the process of acid hydrolysis on what ever it is that makes syrup?

This was only 107 years ago and no one knows the answer....

Carl Kerenyi in his Dionysos- Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life provides the narrative most commonly encountered for the bees and cave, stars and Zeus, Persephone and divine spirits; mainly I suspect, because his explanation makes sense and his book, though densely packed with information and perhaps a little hard going at times is a lot easier to read than the alternative, The Caves of the Sun by Adrian Bailey.

Carl Kerenyi: Dionysos- Archetypal Image of Indestructable Life:
First and foremost as evidence for Kerenyi's theory there are stories told about making honey from bulls.

Virgil, Georgics 4. 281 - 558 (trans. Fairclough) (Roman bucolic C1st B.C.) :"But if anyone's whole stock [of bees] has failed him, and he knows not how to restore the race in a new line, then it is also time to reveal the famed device of the Arcadian master [Aristaeus], and the mode whereby often, in the past, the putrid blood of slain bullocks has engendered bees.
link.

Next comes Cassianus Bassus who lived sometime during C7 AD. His method for making bees is as follows:

A 30 month old bullock should be clubbed to death- so no blood flows.

After all the orifices of its body have been sealed, the cow is placed within a cuboid building aligned to the cardinal points- North, South, East and West- that has a window or door on each of its four walls.

Leave the cow in there for forty days and forty nights..

And voila!
Bougonia- life from bovines- the cow should now be a sack and the bees should be clustered like grapes around the room.

Cassianus Bassus seems to be quoting Virgil:

I will unfold the whole story, tracing it back from its first source. For where the favoured people of Macedonian Canopus [Egypt] dwell by the still waters of the flooded Nile . . . First is chosen a place, small and straitened for this very purpose. This they confine with a narrow roof of tiles and close walls, and towards the four winds add four windows with slanting light. Then a bullock is sought, one just arching his horns on a brow of two summer's growth. Struggle as he will, both his nostrils are stopped up, and the breath of his mouth; then he is beaten to death, and his flesh is pounded to a pulp through the unbroken hide. As thus he lies, they leave him in his prison, and strew beneath his sides broken boughs, thyme, and fresh cassia. This is done when the zephyrs begin to stir the waves, before ever the meadows blush with their fresh hues, before the chattering swallow hangs her nest from the rafters. Meantime the moisture, warming in the softened bones, ferments, and creatures of wondrous wise to view, footless at first, soon with buzzing wings as well, swarm together, and more and more essay the light air, until, like a shower pouring from summer clouds, they burst forth . . .

Which puts one in mind of the Apis bull, which ends its days mummified, and then the Latin name for the honey-bee is Apis Mellifera..all those Apis B-bulls lying quietly in their underground chambers silently recycling souls...

The battering of bulls for honey, it is said, should be done as the Dog star rises heralding midsummer; for the transformation requires both the dangerous heat of the baleful star, and for Zeus to release the Etesian winds.

I can't help but wonder, has anyone tried this?

From honey and sunshine, we get mead:

Pliney: Boil a quantity of water down by one third, so two thirds remain. Add one third of honey. Let it stand in the sun for forty days at the time of the rising of Sirius.

So, the Cretans get the calendar and the mystic mead teachings from the Egyptians and this knowledge produces Dionysus Zagreus.

The knowledge spreads to Greece and creates Bacchus.

Classical Rome liked to portray Bacchus as a chubby cherub as a way of reducing the fear his cults caused. But also because Dionysos, was twice born. He had a safe 'baby' aspect and a more secret, adult and erotic meaning as indicated in The House of Mysteries in Pompeii. There was also a socially dangerous aspect that led to the arrest of hundreds of people, in the 186BC fear of a new Bacchic cult that was increasing general subversion: criminality, drug taking, murder and poisonings and sadomasochistic activities.

It is little wonder that Dionysos ends up portrayed as fat and rather unattractive. He is no kind of threat at all in this form, except if he falls on top of you!.

Cornelius De Vos's (1651) "Triumph of Bacchus."

Adrian Bailey: The Caves of the Sun:
Caves of the Sun is disordered in a way that makes it a fascinating read, but a hard text to really get to grips with. The problem is one of enthusiasm, Adrian Bailey tries to pull in too many sets of similar myths and images to prove his theory; interpreting all and every myth in the light of his one myth

I think he just tries too hard.

He is probably correct in his assumptions about some of it, I think he may well be right about the caves of the sun as indicating a real belief system, but I don't believe that it was ever the only belief system. But his arguments are compelling.

Reading The Caves of the Sun is like learning a new tarot pack.

Prime images:
Decapitated heads buried to create a spring
Midwinter sun entering Newgrange- tombs facing east (not West).
The bull, the lion, the snake and the boar.
The twins.
The lame man-the wounded hero.
The smith forges the new sun.
Cave bear and honey/ sun rebirth from a cave.
Zig-zag horses and meandering bison flowing like water.
First the fire and then the flood.
Golden shoes- following in the footsteps of the sun.
In castration, the 'seed' spills onto the ground and is quickened by fire.
The goddess causes the hero to become lame.
The lion of the goddess brings the bull of the sun, to its knees.
Rain, in boars and the October horse, quenches the sun.
Medusa is the sun of the summer.
The sun changes sex, as it passes through water. Male and then castrated to female.
Day of Blood- March.
The black goddess of the waste land and the golden apple.
The Holy fire breaks out of the cave.

Conclusions:
Hot springs mean that the sun goes underground.
Red oxide/ iron/ blood/ means healing. Blood+clay+sun = life.
The sun goes underground at winter to rejuvenate within the cavern of the seven chambers.
The fire is late summer heat.
The flood is the rain that may extinguish the sun.
7 represents the seven months when the suns influence underground is female.
The twins are the sun (in the sky, not underground) at summer and winter.
'Lameness' is a euphemism for castration.
The dragon-serpent rises when Cancer is in the sky and causes fierce heat and drought.
The hero who will be wounded by the sun, rises in April- month of ripening corn.
The plough drawn by a serpent means that the ground should be ploughed in the season of rain.
The lion bull combat represents the sky in February in 4000 BC when Taurus was setting and Leo in its zenith.
Life pours out from the thighs, from bone marrow of the femurs, synovial fluid of the knees. Both are 'semen'.

The sun 'breaks' out of the ground, hence long barrows...chambers of regeneration.

The taurocotony:
The bull (symbol of the sun) buried in a cave (the underground) creates life (bees). The red bull of the sun began to die in winter, its death would bring the rain, its underground body would bring life out of the ground...

K. B. Stark in 1869 noted that this image of Mithras is "an image of the cosmos"or "great cave" of the sky.

Roger Beck (1984 and 1988) and David Ulansey (1989) agreed with this theory and went on to say that: the bull is the constellation of Taurus, the snake the constellation Hydra, the dog Canis Major or Minor; the crow is Corvus, the goblet is Crater, the lion Leo, and the wheat-blood for the star Spica, the name of which means "spike of wheat" two torch-bearers represent the two equinoxes, and that their crossed legs represent the two intersection points of the zodiac and the celestial equator that define the equinoxes.

Ulansey argues that the tauroctony is an astronomical code symbolizing the precession of the equinoxes: the movement of the cosmic sphere, discovered by the Greek astronomer Hipparchus, which caused the spring equinox to move out of the constellation of Taurus (thus ending the "Age of the Bull"). Adrian Bailey sees it as an image of the solar year; Mithras is the solar lion killing the bull, the bull is also solar- a version of Mithras himself.

Conclusion.
I want to believe Adrian Bailey, mainly I suppose because what he says does not conflict with any other interpretations. Adrian takes myths that are thousands of years apart, when Adrian is talking about 3700 BC (time of long barrows) , this is almost a thousand years before anyone was writing things down (3000 BC). Some of the Greek myths (in the form he quotes them) are, comparatively speaking, fairly recent.

But no matter, his theory is this:
Water is a gift of the sun. Rock and wood, the stones are products of the earth through the power of the underground sun. The cave is the nucleus of life, anything buried inside a cave is worked on by the heat of the sun- in the womb-forge of the Underworld. Standing stones and trilithons are gateways to encourage the sun to enter and to do its work. Building a long barrow is creating a workshop for the sun, the ground close by would benefit. The solar water would flow in the rivers (almost always close to Neolithic structures), the stones and trees become more powerful. All enclosures, Woodhenge, The Sanctuary and Stonehenge in particular become caves of the sun; sources of life...

Which makes me want to visit Stonehenge this midwinter.

Ariadne.

2011-12-08T11:56:00.001Z

"Then it seems like falling into a labyrinth; we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round and we found ourselves back at the beginning, and just as far from that we were seeking at first"
Plato: Euthydemus.

Which ever way you turn, Naxos is the place for the Ariadne and Dionysos story.

According to Diodorus Siculus, Dionysos appeared to Theseus in a dream...

"Theseus, on his voyage back from Krete together with Ariadne, was entertained as a guest by the inhabitants of the island [of Naxos]; and Theseus, seeing in a dream Dionysos threatening him if he would not forsake Ariadne in favour of the god, left her behind him there in his fear and sailed away"....

Theseus awoke griped by terror, and silently got up and left, sailed away. Leaving the sleeping Ariadne abandoned on Venus sands.

"And Dionysos led Ariadne away by night to the mountain which is know as Drios; and first of all the god disappeared, and later Ariadne also was never seen again."

The crown of heaven, the Corona Borealis, was Dionysos's gift to Ariadne.

There is another story...Ariadne was already married to the god, and when she left him to sail the seas back to Athens with Theseus, he had her killed, slain with poisoned arrows.

Homer- The Odyssey.
"Ariadne, that daughter of subtle Minos whom Theseus bore off from Krete (Crete) towards the hill of sacred Athens; yet he had no joy of her, since, before that could be, she was slain by Artemis in the isle of Dia [Naxos] because of the witness of Dionysos.

Venus Sands is a location on the soul.
Love alone provides the copper knife that tears the heart, the body, and bloodlessly cuts the shadow away..

To the mistress of the labyrinth, honey.
The bee dance.

Ladders to heaven..

2011-12-06T14:07:00.001Z

The labyrinth is a path into the Underworld.

Both Ariadne and Persephone have links with Dionysos (Διόνυσος).

Ariadne the Cretan priestess is either married or murdered by Dionysos- depending on whether this is the Naxos myth, or the story told by Homer in the Odyssey.

Both Ariadne and Persephone help others go to the Otherworld.

Ariadne gives Theseus the means to face death and survive, to enter and leave the labyrinth without being destroyed by the bull headed horror hidden within the darkness.

Images of Yama come to mind...

Persephone (the Eleusinian mysteries) does the same for the initiates; as they danced at Eleusis so they will follow Dionysos, his dance leads them onwards to the Elysian feilds.

They do not have to fear death.
--

In British mythology the Otherworld is a mirror world.
Glastonbury as the glass castle should have a labyrinthine path to its summit.

One steps through the mirror worlds by accident. You may turn a corner and suddenly things are different. When you finally get back, a thousand years has passed.

But there isn't really a Persephone or Ariadne to help you. Try as I might, I can't find any convincing similarities between the lady taken by the Kur (Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal) or the Lady of the Mountain (Ninhursag), or the Mother of the Wild things, let alone Persephone in the fragments of British mythology we think we have (since no one seems sure that what we do have is authentic!).

We all have folk tales of princesses requiring the help of a noble knight, thanks to the brothers Grimm and these may, just may recall Dionysos saving his mom! But I see a prosaic stripping off of arcane and esoteric meanings which renders this a world in which woman or treasure are equivalent motivations for entering Roland's dark towers.

But we do have labyrinths in Britain.

The labyrinth goes nowhere, it is Caer Droia, the spining castle:
Caer Sidi- the spin of the multiverse.
It is eternity and rebirth,
a philosophical paradox.

The labyrinth begins with a cross.
When I construct one, the cross comes first, it is the wall between the way in and the way out.

Follow the black lines on the image, not the white.

And the labyrinth is also a meander.

Carl Kerenyi follows the meander back to Militos and so begins the confusion between labyrinths and ladders. He describes an inscription dated to C2 B.C which connects the word labyrinthos to a structure found in two stairwells, one on either side of the entrance to the great hall of the temple of Apollo at Didyma.

Excavations revealed that the ceilings above the staircases were decorated with meander pattens.

The archaeologist Paul Wolters had proved to his own satisfaction at least, that the meander was used as a symbolic representation of the labyrinth as in this image of Dionysos and Ariadne.

Carl Kerenyi notes that the staircases at the temple of Apollo at Didyma were spiral, winding up and down. The stairs assume significance.

No one asks what has Apollo got to do with the Underworld?

Jacob- the Book of Genesis (28:10–19)- had dreamt of a ladder:

And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it!

But going back to the Mesopotamian myths, a ladder or stairs isn't usually the way down into the Underworld.

In the Amana [1400/1500 BC] version of the Nergal and Ereshkigal myth, Namtar has to ascend from the Sumerian Underworld, up to the gods to stand in Erishkigal's stead at the great feast. But the story doesn't give a description of how he makes the journey, no stair or ladder is thought worthy of mention.

In the story, The Descent of Inanna, again no ladder or stairs in either earlier or latter versions. Inanna takes 'The road' the road that leads one way...

When Enkidu goes down into the Underworld, no ladder; he is seized and made to take the road 'where travelling is one way'.

Gilgamesh took the path of the sun to get to the Otherworld.
A tunnel.

Etana must fly up on the back of an eagle.

Finally, a latter version of the Nergal and Ereshkigal story [C7 BC] mentions a long stairway leading from heaven, downwards.

Another ladder reference comes from W.K.C Guthrie, he says there is a vase showing Thracian women murdering Orpheus, and that the women have a ladder and a kid tattoos.

Unfortunately he doesn't say which vase the image is to be found on.
Using Google, I see little goats, but no ladders on Greek vases.

Does the V symbol represent a ladder?
There are Egyptian V shaped amulets representing 'lucky' flies.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/aes/n/necklace_with_fly_amulets.aspx

There is some evidence in this article to show that the little goat tattoo may stand to represent the Goddesses wild things, the undomesticated animals.

K. Jettmar, 'Ethnological Research in Dardistan' 1958 noted that 'prehistoric' (?) stamp seals found in the mountains of Luristan show 'a master of animals', a demon with animal horns. The Haramosh valley is in Northern Pakistan, but judge for yourself how relevant such accounts are when trying to understand images and stories...

And:

The goddess Murkum who was worshipped by all the women of the Haramosh valley. 'She helped in delivery and protected mother and child; yet she was also the chief owner of all ibexes and wild goats denoted by the collective term of mayaro. Therefore she was venerated by hunters, too, who brought her horns'.

Jettmar describes a sanctuary of Murkum, which was still in use, as lying almost three thousand metres above sea-level just in front of the Haramosh; this was 'no accident as the mountain was considered the proper home of the Murkum. On the steep slope there is an altar built of boulders dominated by a cliff as big as a house with a juniper tree growing beside it. Next to it is a spring. Below the altar crude benches of stone were erected for the annual meeting of the women. Nut-trees grow between them. Even they are considered holy and no branches were ever broken off.'

In the rites performed at the annual meeting of the women at the sanctuary, the goddess was to send the sacrifice, a she-ibex. A male priest is said to have participated in the ceremony by performing a dance and by killing the ibex and dividing it up. The ministry of this priest 'is now abolished but women anxious about the welfare of their families still come to the altar table and put leaves of juniper between the boulders.'

The Orphic password- 'A kid I fell into the milk'...

The ladder isn't a labyrinth, you can't dance on it. Aristophanes describes Dionysus leading the dance of the Eleusinian initiates through the Underworld.

The labyrinth is an experience.

And the ladder is almost a meander pattern.
Sometimes that is close enough.

W.K.C Guthrie says that the Egyptians had a ladder symbol, but doesn't explain what he means.

Sir Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge translates something as ladders, many times in The Book of the dead: the papyrus of Ani (in the British Museum)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/egy/ebod/ebod12.htm

And Wiki quotes this:

Hail, daughter of Anubis, above the hatches of heaven,
Comrade of Thoth, above the ladder's rails,
Open Unas's path, let Unas pass!

But, more relevantly ~~Dan~~ Brian Brown in a 1923 book called 'The Wisdom of the Ancient Egyptians' wrote:

The Ladder is a symbol of Horus, and was worn [as an amulet in ancient Egypt] to secure his assistance in overcoming and surmounting difficulties in the material world, as well as to form a connection with the heaven world, or land of light.

Nice idea, fits in with medieval, or Rosicrucian iconography, but it wasn't originally an Egyptian idea, nor do I see Horus.

I have seen Egyptian pictures of ladders, but not as a way to heaven. The ladders have Ashurbanipal's Assyrian army using them to storm the walls!

The C6 AD ladder to the Heavens (left) is clearly influenced by this C7 BC image (right).

Egypt was defeated by the Assyrians in 667 BCE and as a consequence, Assyrian gods were added to the Egyptian Pantheon.

The Assyrians regarded Ashur as their chief god- Ashur was the same as Marduk (again being economical with what I say) and Ashur's symbol is the tree.

A lot of people call it the tree of life,

Originally, in the oldest story the tree could be said to represent kingship: the Huluppu-tree. [LINK]

There is a connection between thrones and what wood they are made of, hinted at in the Nergal myth, and it seems very complicated. But the first throne, according to The Huluppu-tree myth, was made by Gilgamesh for Inanna.

It is probable that the tree and ruler image began because the kings embodies the hero status of Gilgamesh, as latter Carthaginian kings linked themselves to Heracles.

Meanwhile Ashur floats above the tree like the sun. His winged appearance makes people think of Ezekiel and the Merkabah- the fiery chariot.

Somewhere and sometime the realm of the gods stopped being a terrifying place, too cool for humans. The idea of enlightenment, becoming god-like began to be conceived of as possible...

Ashur is sun-like, he is in the place of Shamash- the all seeing eye. As Marduk (Ashur) set the stars in their place, and as each star is a domain of a god, Ashur I guess can be where ever he pleases.

Back on the ground the bird headed being is not Ashur, but nevertheless this image has been misinterpreted as Horus and ladder...

Ultimatly it looks as if the tree becomes the Cabala....a diagram showing the equilibrium of power radiating from god (I think that is what Cabala is...). Would you call it 'a ladder to the stars'...from Egypt and 'the Hermetica' to the Pythagoreans, to Judaism, to the Neoplatonists, finally trickling down to modern Wicca via books on alchemy and astrology.

Babylon was never destroyed....each time a circle is said to have 360 degrees or an hour 60 minutes.

The significance of the Tree is seen in the ancient world among Assyrians and Egyptians. Jews later on inherited the concept of the Tree, apparently from Babylon, slightly modified it and formed Sacred Teachings of Kabbalah, a Jewish mysticism which means, "Ghabel Alahah", in English, "Accept God/Receiving".
http://www.assyriatimes.com/engine/modules/news/article.php?storyid=3426.

But the labyrinth was never really a ladder to the stars, and I can't help but think that the Greeks were barbarians compared to the Assyrians at the time wine and its god Dionysos, came to Athens; those golden tablets and promises of immortality, the so called 'Orphic' teachings were an attempt to understand the esoteric tradition represented by that tree...

Possibly :)

Plato's Spring.

2011-12-05T14:22:00.001Z

Of all the YouTubes or web pages that show Eflatun Pinar, perhaps this one is the closest to what it is actually like today:

The Hittite shrine that surrounds the pool is dated to c.1300 BC, but this place is also known as Plato's Spring (Plato 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC). The legend is that it was here that Plato stopped the flood and caused the waters to run underground.

To see a map, and some photos:
http://www.hittitemonuments.com/

The water is warm and comes up from out of the ground, so the idea of this being the place where the flood ended is hard to understand.

Hittite mythology owed something of its structure and narrative to the myths of Mesopotamia, particularly the latter, Akkadian myths, and the Akkadian myths grew from the stories told by the Sumerians.

If this place is associated with the flood then there are two sets of myth about the control of water: the story of Noah or rather the story of Atrahasis and the gods deciding to kill all mankind.

And the stories of the serpent guardian of the deep, the Kur.

The gods and goddesses carved into the facade at Eflatun Pinar are rising up out of the water. Some of the carvings of the gods and goddesses are perforated, so the water springs out of their bodies. This indicates that the gods have dominion over the water now, because the Kur has been conquered.

A long time before the story of Tiamat and Marduk, the primeval water under the earth contained the great dragon, Kur. In one story it is Enki who goes to fight with the Kur after it steals the goddess, Ereshkigal. The result is that Ereshkigal becomes queen of the Underworld, and Enki becomes 'Lord of the Abyss' and builds his 'Sea palace' at Eridu.

Another story concerns Ninurta, a warrior god, son of Enlil. His weapon, Sharur has 'set its mind against the Kur' and persuades Ninurta to set off to kill the Kur, though it doesn't seem to be particularly troublesome monster.

When the deed is done and the Kur lies dead the primeval waters that the Kur held in check begin to rise. This causes floods and more importantly it means that the flow of water has become disordered, rivers are no longer connected to the deep:

Famine was severe, nothing was produced,
The small rivers were not cleaned, the dirt was not carried off

Ninurta goes back to the body of the Kur and heaps stones over it, building a great wall to hold back the 'mighty waters'. As to the waters that have already flooded the land, Ninurta gathers them and leads them back into the Tigris, just as Plato was supposed to have done.

Because of this the land is super abundant, the fields produce more grain, the vineyards more grapes, everything is heaped up in the granaries and mourning disappears from the land.

The earth goddess Ki falls in love with Ninurta out of gratitude, and he gives her the 'heap' the Hursag and she is now Ninhursag, queen of the 'magic mountain' that causes the gold and silver, the cattle and sheep, the 'four legged creatures' to multiply and to thrive. Finally he blesses the stones who have helped him, and curses those who helped his enemy, the Kur.

Hititte mythology is hard to find, but Google tells me that Ereshkigal, so loved by the Kur that it stole her away is called by the Hittites, Lelwani a goddess of the underworld "the pourer".

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/courses/51/BryceHittiteSociety.pdf

And that's about as far as I'm going with this.
I'm not sure how helpful the myths of the Kur are to an understanding of Plato's Spring, just a little more helpful than trying to associate Plato with it, I guess!

Orpheus...

2011-12-02T22:00:00.001Z

Buddhism, it seems to me, is a very Orphic religion; both are based on the concept of there being a perfect, more real 'Platonic' realm from which this world appears to us because of our 'sin' or 'obscurations' or bad habits of desire...

Both philosophies place an emphasis on an intellectual change as essential for liberation and both systems promise enlightenment after death.

Whilst the Buddhists place the source of our entrapment on ignorance, a state that can be improved upon within one's life time, the Orphics saw themselves as trapped by the nature of their bodies, no one could be free of their Titanic nature.

But as for the Buddhists, with their belief that all living beings have the potential to be a 'god', a Buddha; so the Orphics likewise believed that we are all part god, part Dionysus.

Death alone offered a chance for the Orphics to be free of the Titan within the flesh. But knowledge of what to do in the underworld was essential (rather like the Egyptian 'Book of Gates' there were signs and passwords that had to be recited or else you would be lost with the masses and never get to the Elysian Fields.).

The curious phrase: 'a kid I fell into the milk' is often read on the gold tablets buried with the dead.

There are similar notions in the Vajrayana schools of Buddhism which explain how the moment of death may be used as an opportunity to achieve liberation. But this is physical, rather than metaphorical and is to do with the configuration of energy channels within ones body actually changing in the process of death: of 'winds' and 'drops': dza, lhung and tigle.

The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the visions the consciousness -read soul or psyche- will experience whilst within this bardo- the space between death and re-birth -and tells the practitioner how to 'escape' rebirth by recognising the true nature of the experience as (metaphor of the mirror) a projection.

The Hinayana schools are closer, in this case, to the Orphic religion. Both regard the body as something of an impure hindrance. Desire is the Buddhist 'sin' because it is the cause of all bad behavior, including re-birth. So along with meditation to 'purify' the mind, other practices proscribed for a Hinayana practitioner are centered upon 'transforming desire to wisdom by subduing the body's coarse desires'. Fasting, eating only once a day and eating only what one is given are ways to teach the body that desire is unnecessary to support life and meditation.

A shaved head, robes, celibacy are not so much a rejection of the world, simply a way to ignore it's voice as one ignores the wondering thoughts that cross the mind during meditation.

Understanding the 'emptyness' of desire leads to wisdom and as wisdom is the opposite to ignorance it would be understood by the Orphics as a part of the remedy for the inner Titan. When desire is extinguished for the Buddhists, there is (as for the Orphic) liberation after death.

Original sin, be it a Buddhist concept of ignorance, or a more modern 'green' sense of disgust at the greed of the petrol-heads, bankers and capitalists, is a very Orphic feeling:

The ancient grief of Persephone, according to one arguement, is sorrow for the death of her son Dionysos at the hands of the Titans. Humans pay the punishment because they were formed from the Titan’s ashes and have a Titanic nature. By living an Orphic life and avoiding the bloodshedding which is the legacy of the Titans, humans may pay the penalty and achieve freedom.

In Vajrayana Buddhism purification is achieved through practice: fasting, visulisations of oneself as an emanation of a deity, prayer and discipline- refraining from doing harm where possible, and by complex intellectual arguments that convince one of the non-existence of the self. Ultimately the Buddhist Mahayana and Vajrayana paradigm is that this world is an illusion caused by one's own ignorance and therefore enlightenment for one, becomes in a massively solipsistic way, the enlightenment of all.

The 'original sin' of previous bad karma and desire -which creates bad karma- is analogous to the ash from the Titans, or the 'Original sin' of eating the apple. The Karma Kadgyu also, like the Orphics use the symbol of being dressed in a white cloth (not wool!) as a sign of relisation 'repa clad' but I'd love to know if I'm right to beleive that this along with it being disrespectful to blow out candles (must waft them out with your hand!) and the way that Mahakala looks so much like Zervan...confirms the Zoroastrean roots of both Orphic religion and aspects of Tibetan ritual.

Tibetan Buddhism spins away from the central Orphic purity concept and off into Taoism via alchemy with a sprinkling of Hindu deities and a lot of Bon spirits and symbols.

But, back to the subject.

The Orphic version of the Persephone myth as told by Clement of Alexandria (in which Zeus and Persephone are the parents of Dionysus, and the baby Dionysus is murdered by the Titans) is a strange mixture of themes, the requirement for a gods blood to animate clay comes from an old Mesopotamian myth. Humans were made, so the Mesopotamians beleived, to work for the gods: to grow food for the temple.

I haven't read anywhere yet why the ash of Dionysus and the Titans became human...

Using Tibetan Buddhism as a key to understand Eleusis, is not scientific in any way and I can't really justify anything that I've written, and will write, on this page. But my way of understanding Eleusis is to see it as an empowerment (as Buddhists call them); a ritual that confers on one *just by being there* a link with the deity.

In Tibetan Buddhism an empowerment is permission to practice, in other words, it is a stepping through a wall that exists between the real and the imaginative and into faith. As at Eleusis, what happens in an empowerment is secret, but it too consists of things said, things heard and things seen...

At Eleusis, in the Initiation Hall there are: things done- dromena- which was probably a reenactment of the Persephone myth; there were things shown-deiknumena- the sacred objects displayed (probably by the priest); and finally the things said -legomena- commentaries that accompanied the 'things shown'.

All this was apporheta -unrepeatable; the penalty for divulging them was death.

I have a mental block when it comes to thinking about 'Orphic' versions of the universe. I feel much more at home with the Mesopotamian- Sumerian/ Akkadian- Homeric version: gods up on the mountain somewhere, all they want is the smell of meat and libations of wine, they are egotistical, manic, powerful! The universe was made for no good reason, we live, we die. The best we can hope for is to live a good life here and for people to remember us and tend our graves. There is no redemption, no need for redemption. No sin, no Titanic blood to be free of. The Underworld can be a dusty and miserably place, and the dead seem to fall apart after a while down there unless they are 'fed' by offerings from above, but then again it may be quite pleasant for those whose families remember them.

Cremation is considered a bad idea, the human spirit ascending to the realm of the gods would be out of his depth, like a monkey going to university..

The Orphic universe is a place of emanations and there is nothing simple or prosaic about Orphic ideas.

Take that mirror, the one used to divert the baby Dionysus, to hold his fascination long enough for the Titans to get close enough to reach out and...

The mirror is a Buddhist metaphor for the way this life appears, an illusion, ephemeral, a reflection in the mind. The NeoPlatonist Proclus Lycaeus (C4 A.D) sees in this metaphor of the mirror, the opposition of eternal (god like) truth and ephemeral (real life) birth and decay. For the Buddhists, the capacity of the mind to reflect (conciousness) is in opposition to what it reflects, the everyday, composite stuff of this world. When Dionysus is looking into the mirror the NeoPlatonist sees an image of mankind, the dichotomy between our false mirror-like Titanic nature, and the eternal god we could be.

But the point, for the followers of Orpheus was to live a good life, and to study. The theogony that eventually becomes Neoplatonism is necasarily hard to understand.

Necessary, because it has to be like a Zen koan.

Paradigm shifts are required...enlightenment cannot be easy!

Musaios wrote: 'Everything comes to be out of One and resolved into One'.

In the Buddhist version of this we have the Dharmakaya, Nirmanakaya and Sambogakaya. The Dharmakaya is 'The One' out of which all Buddhas and all phenomenon arise and to which they return after their dissolution. The Nirmanakaya is physical manifestation: the dimension of ceaseless manifestation...and Sambogakaya? 'The luminous form of clear light...' It is the realm of 'the lights without end' ...the formless realm.

See, enlightenment has to be difficult to understand, can't just be Babylonian about being respectfiul of the gods and taking care of your family.

The theogonies of the Orphics are difficult to follow, we have Phanes as the creator and Zeus as his creation, we have worlds and gods swallowed and the first world becomes the Dharmakaya of pure realms of Platonic ideas and the world of Zeus, the Nirmanakaya of emanations, of things, of sense....

Persephone is in here, in this Orphic theogony, but this is enough for now!

Anyone who wishes to get to grips, I'd recommend reading Orpheus and Greek Religion by W.K.C Guthrie.

http://thingsinthree.blogspot.com/p/orphic-persephone.html

600 BCE.

2011-11-26T17:31:00.001Z

The only parts of Draco's code that Solon kept were the laws regarding homicide. The constitution was written as poetry, and as soon as it was introduced, Solon went into self-imposed exile for 10 years so he would not be tempted to take power as a tyrant.

Solon "The lawmaker of Athens" died in 559 BCE and serves as an icon of 'The Archaic Age', the time period during which Greece developed cities, philosophy, theater. The time of Hesiod and of Greek colonies spreading out into unknown territory.

As Draco (of the draconian laws) had preceded Solon, even without Solon's own brand of anti-materialism, Solon would have been hard pressed to have been a less popular ruler than Draco.

Both Plutarch and Herodotus tell us about Solon; his 'cast a cold eye on on life on death' attitude; his insistence that getting married, having children, loving any one person above another were irrational and sure ways to suffering; and about death in a noble cause being better than dying of old age. Solon was a man of his time, Orphic religions, ultimately based on Pythagorean notions of a material universe as a projection from an immaterial (perfect and other) universe began to spread especially around this time, and this 'new' philosophy probably altered the Eleusinian mysteries, changing the focus from one of celebration for the mysteries of harvest, to Eleusis as a promise of redemption.

Women's lives, it is said by many, worsened in the Archaic Age. With city life came Solon's laws for women: marriage was the one and only 'noble' choice for a daughter of 'respectable' family. The home of course was the only proper place for a wife and Solon ruled that a woman could not leave town with more than three garments or carry more than an obol's worth of food and drink, or a basket more than a cubit in size least she got up to no good. If women must travel at night, it was only legal if the woman remained hidden within a carriage which must be proceeded by a torch bearer. No doubt all this was couched in terms of 'it is for your own safety, my dear' nevertheless it is hard to feel grateful for such laws.

City life brings with it a new set of anxiety, one no longer knows one's neighbours and they could be foreigners and practitioners of strange cults. This notion of cults as leading to out of control riots, begins to appear with a distaste for emotional display- emotion as a sign of weakness. Women are considered particularly vulnerable to cults, blaming them for wanting something different after being shut up all day waiting for a husband they never actually saw sober, or who didn't actually like them, was less distasteful than admitting the truth. Lurid tales of what the women followers Dionysus got up to...were axiomatic of the misogyny of that time.

But the fear of emotion and in particular of women as prone to possession by frenzy required law to make it 'safe'. Solon's laws included a stipulation about how much one could cry at a funeral, basically women could fall foul of the law should they cry too much at a funeral, crying for anyone at a funeral unless it be your husband, was suspect- it could be considered as false, an affected lamentation.

Marriage was the best way to 'control' women as the carriers of emotion and chaos. Hesiod advises: "Marry a virgin so you can teach her thrifty ways".

The usual age for marrying was sixteen for a girl and thirty for a man.

But Hesiod was being, I suppose prosaic and sensible, clinging to a farming mentality he would value lots of children to help bring in the harvest, even as city life began to change everything. The demands of the city, it's need for every man to do his military service would mitigate against early marriage for a man.

For women though, marriage was ultimately a kind of 'Descent', a katabasis or at least a shutting away. Persephone's lot was a familiar one to them. Society provided two roles for women, either you were a wife or you made your own way as a whore. Prostitution was seen as a solution to a problem of excess passion Solon, in 594 BCE ordered the building of a state brothel in answer to a plea that men may be allowed to 'indulge' without causing the disruption falling in love with another woman, or harassment by pimps could cause to their family life.

Meanwhile marriage was portrayed by poets such as Simonides and Hipponax as less than satisfactory.

Simonides for instance names ten kinds of women to sum up the whole range of femininity available to men: the pig, the fox, the dog, the one made of mud, one made of sea, the ass, the polecat, the mare, the monkey and the bee (the bee is the only one recommended).

Religion was the traditional means of controlling or regulating 'dangerous' (chaotic ) trends. A view of the past had peasants engaging in their odd rustic customs 'elsewhere' in the countryside, on mountain tops and in caves. Now, in the present time of 600 BCE, those same goat skin clad rustics had wandered into town and put on the clothing of civilised men, but were still celebrating cults of Dionysus and Artemis.

Euripides explains that the gods will have their place in his play the Bacchai, but the mix of new cults with the requirement that people behave in socially acceptable ways begins to feed the energy of anxiety into the art, literature and philosophy of that time in a attempt to make sense.

Orphism starts to appear at this time. On one hand it is a deeply middle class phenomenon- a rejection of this world. Material reality is seen as flawed, better is elsewhere- of there being no chance or hope of finding satisfaction in this earthly life- better is available only after death.

On the other it is an inversion of the cult of Dionysus (to which it belongs). Where the cult of Dionysus demands wine and wildness, Orpheus preaches blood-guilt (his followers were vegetarian) and simplicity, and order as represented by the perfect music he played.

It is possible that the Orphic philosophy may have reflected a 'Metal Age' experience, of toiling underground, the image of the soul lost in the darkness of the earth and desiring release into the light.

Most likley it is related to Zoroatrean ideas of emanation.

One thing remains true, what ever their origin, the city had to find ways to integrate, control and direct these new ideas.

Before the Orphic 'teachings' began to take root, the mysteries at Eleusis had centered on how Demeter through Triptolemos, gave mankind the gift of agriculture. But under Orphic influence, the loss and return of Persephone became the redemption of the individual soul from evil and a promise of immortality.

The true Orphics would probably have looked down on Eleusis as an 'experience' and experience is ephemeral- only an intellectual understanding could free one of the bonds of this earthly life, if Plato is representative of the Orphics...

Abduction.

2011-11-15T18:23:00.001Z

The booking has been made, the cheque posted.

To explore abduction, I'm going to get tied up.
Suspended too.

It is fairly terifying actually, here is the invite:

The rigging team are hosting an all day event, suitable for beginner and accomplished riggers alike. The day will offer learning paths to help you get the most out of the opportunities of the day.

The choice of workshops will allow you to select those that are most relevant and interesting to you as an individual.

The day is split into separate workshops interspersed with practice time; the workshops are hands on and designed to help you to try things out as we go. You can join us for the whole day or just for part of it.

The practice time is fully supported with the rigging team on hand to answer any of your questions and help you along the way.

There is no dress code for the event just wear something you are comfortable in, if you want to dress up that’s fine but if your more comfortable learning in your jeans that’s fine too. If you want to relax and eat lunch at the facility just bring it with you and grab a seat.

Event time:
Saturday 17th December 2011.
10:30 – doors open
11:00 – Workshop 1 -Rope 101
12:00 – practice and play
12:30 – workshop 2 – Rope the next step or Predicament

1.15 – lunch break
2.00- workshop 3 – Erotic rope bondage

2:45 – practice and play
3:30- Workshop 4 -Suspension workshop
4.30 – practice time
5:30 – close

Glastonbury part 1.

2011-10-30T12:20:00.002Z

When thinking about Iron Age locations I think that I'm being a bit dense, really this is a case of I can't see the wood for the trees. Archeology forms a framework for locations, but the more interesting information is to be found in myth.

Archeology calls them hill forts but the hill part of hill fort is much more evocative when it is called Caer, or Dynas or Inis (sometimes spelt Ynys).

It is also possible that echos of Bronze Age ideas can be heard in Iron Age myth. The cauldrons of 'Celtic' myth offer inspiration and rebirth. They remind me of the stone bowls filled with cremations, found in passage graves.

Perhaps the Iron Age cult of the severed head is all that remains of the Bronze Age rite of using preserved bodies...sometimes a single body being in fact a composite of more than one body to make a whole ancestor to be buried in needful places, possibly as protectors [LINK]

It is quite difficult to find a Celtic Persephone myth, the closest I've got is the story of Creiddylad, which brings me back to her father he of the silver hand.

Nodens, or Nudd, or Nuada or even sometimes, Lludd.

His son is Gwyn ap Nudd.

From Wiki:

Gwyn ap Nudd plays a prominent role in the early Arthurian tale Culhwch and Olwen in which he abducts his sister Creiddylad from her betrothed, Gwythyr ap Greidawl.

In retaliation, Gwythyr raised a great host against Gwyn, leading to a vicious battle between the two. Gwyn was victorious and, following the conflict, captured a number of Gwythyr's noblemen including Nwython and his son Cyledr.

Gwyn would later murder Nwython, and force Cyledr to eat his father's heart.

As a result of his torture at Gwyn's hands, Cyledr went mad, earning the epithet Wyllt.

After the intervention of Arthur, Gwyn and Gwythr agreed to fight for Creiddylad every May Day until Judgement Day. The warrior who was victorious on this final day would at last take the maiden.

This fight probably represented the contest between summer and winter and is a variant of the Holly King myth. According to Culhwch and Olwen, Gwyn was "placed over the brood of devils in Annwn, lest they should destroy the present race".

And the theme of the glass castle: Caer Wydyr- a tower surrounded by water; Ynis Witrin, Ynisgutrin, Urbs Vitrea...Glastonbury:

Before the Glass castle
There is the maze of the labyrinth,
The raising of the veils and the closing of shadows..
And the enveloping darkness of the night.

Basically we should have gone on a trip to Glastonbury this week...

Warley Woods- off the Hagley road to Birmingham.

2011-10-26T15:10:00.001+01:00

We went back, to try to find the 'river' of cold air. It was midday (not sunset- as it was when I originally experienced it) and Warley Woods felt like a happy place; lots of people and dogs and push chairs. It was a bright day, autumn trees, the weather almost warm.

After so many years it was hard to remember where the weird cold line had been, that evening we had been looking for a house to buy, to move out of the rented house in Pargeter road Bearwood...

It was sixteen years ago.

We had parked the car and looked around the street and then walked into the woods just to see what was there. It was early evening. The sun was setting. The woods were empty, but that line of cold, the experience of it was odd; I mean really odd.

So yesterday, Tuesday morning we went back to try to work out where the invisible river must have been located.

But first we had to try to work out why we had been there at all!

Eventually the images in my memory started to match up with the land.

The line wasn't where I'd expected it to be; there is a line that runs down through the park land that probably fills up with water when there is heavy rain, there is an occasional pool close to the road apparently. Visually this rain made indentation is the most obvious place for cold air to gather.

But it really wasn't the place, it didn't feel cold.

When I felt the slightest hint of the curious cold sensation I retraced my steps and tried again, then I did it with my eyes shut.

The line is marked on the map as a dark green dotted line.

Imagine yourself on the dotted line looking ahead, just where the slightly more green grass is...that's the Ghost road.

Looking right you would see the tree stump on the other side of the rain ditch.

If you looked to your left...in line with the biggest tree.

Along that line, from the stump to the tree, that is where I thought that I had felt the colder air, but today in bright sun shine and wearing motor bike clothes, I wasn't sure..

Guess we have to go back.
At times like this an accurate thermometer would be very useful.

The day the sun fell...ghost roads of Britain.

2011-10-23T23:58:00.000+01:00

One thing lead to another, as it does.

When writing about Sekhmet I was fascinated by the cloudy yellow scarab at the centre of a piece of jewellery worn by king Tutankhamun; I was fascinated to learn that it is made from vitrified sand.

The temperature at the desert surface was at least 1600 Celsius to melt the sand.

Images flow outwards from the thinking: of science fiction death-rays, Tesla and the Tunguska explosion of 1908, C-beams; images from Halo, recollection of the missile defense shield as imagined by President Reagan.

One thing leads to another and I found myself looking at images of HAARP, the ionospheric heater.

The odd thing about HAARP is, it has been singled out as the ionospheric heater...actually there are at least two more in operation right now. One belongs to 'us' Europeans as EISCAT, with it's ionospheric heater located at Ramfjord, and the other, in Russia is called Sura.

I expect that there are more.
http://thevelvetrocket.com/2009/10/21/the-high-frequency-active-auroral-research-program-h-a-a-r-p-a-research-facility-or-mind-control-program/

So...where does HAARP fit in with ghost roads?
Nowhere really, just thinking about lines of force, how the ionosphere is plasma organised by the lines of magnetism emanating from the earth (thus creating the magnetosphere).

Thinking about how magnetism is an effect of a current of electricity, and electricity is the flow of electrons.

Thinking about the modern myths that derive from knowledge. As far as we know we are on the surface of a spinning ball of rock that has a weird electrical heart, spinning around a ball of plasma (the sun) that is also spinning through space and bathing this planet in waves of more sun-stuff (plasma).

It seems very unlikely that things on this planet are simple or predictable; electricity flows and causes a pulse to dance through everything.

When Alfred Watkins saw lines in the land (1921) he saw them as signs of ancient pathways. Then slowly over the years, Alfred Watkins’s ley lines accumulated other meanings; from UFO navigation 'roads' to geomantic dragon paths, from spirit paths to earth energy and back to spirit paths.

In 1989, Paul Devereux and Nigel Pennick published, Lines in the Landscape, in it Paul Devereux suggested archaic landscape lines were spirit lines rather than "energy lines".

Energy lines are a very modern interpretation of weirdness, originally movement was interpreted as a property associated with life. The wind and water also moved and so possessed something almost life, but not quite. The thorough and empirical description of energy, and the use of mathematics to quantify that movement or to name the kind of movement didn't happen until the invention of steam engines. Electricity and magnetism were also originally (in our culture) linked to anima (the animating force of life). When electricity and especially X ray and radio became a part of our cultures mythic thinking, spirits could be heard in white noise...and x ray proved that something could travel through solid walls.

So it is logical to assume that a concept of spirit lines would predate a concept of energy lines.

Before Arthur Watkins wrote about ley-lines, W Y Evans Wentz in 1911, had recorded a Breton belief in the Ankou, a king of the dead. He recorded that it was believed that the Ankou's subjects have their own particular paths or roads over which they travel in great sacred processions.

'On November eve the living are expected to prepare a feast and entertainment for the dead, of curded-milk, hot pancakes, and cider, served on the family table covered with a fresh white table-cloth. The dead come to enjoy this party with their friends; and as they take their places at the table the chairs are heard to move, and sometimes the plates; and the musicians who help to entertain them think that at times they feel the cold breath of the invisible visitors'.

I think we have two kinds of experiences here, the first is a distant recollection of an ancient tradition, an echo of the original beliefs that had caused the creation of the cursus, and secondly an experience of something real..

Unfortunately no one describes how they know that there are ghost roads, but the experience of weird, and

the understanding of it as pathways remains.

Ghost roads are odd; I cannot begin to answer what they really are. I stepped onto one once and I don't wish to repeat it, but the experience has always puzzled me. It was as if I had walked into a river of invisible cold water.

I didn't feel as if anything in it could see me; I didn't feel any consciousness within it. A strip of land was simply colder when I stepped into the invisible line of cold...and warmer when I had walked through it....

Well it is a long way from HAARP with its energy pathways; a linear array of microwave transmitters to my river of cold air, to the coils of a labyrinth (I still maintain that using a labyrinth makes a dowsable pathway).

I suppose I should try to remember where the 'ghost path' was, and see if it is still there, take a photo or two.

Pomegranate rattle.

And I should buy a pomegranate to see if I can make a rattle.

Meanwhile, this is a pomegranate rattle made from clay, circa 500-400 BC, found in Cyprus.

And in this article about ancient music:

The book of Exodus tells us that Aaron’s garment was decorated with bells. Aaron served as priest at the desert tabernacle during the Exodus wanderings, which are generally placed in the 13th century B.C., 400 years before the date of the oldest known bell. The explanation of this discrepancy is to be found in an error of translation. The Hebrew word which is universally translated as “bells” in the relevant passages from Exodus is pa’ammonim (singular pa’ammon). The hem of Aaron’s robe is decorated with embroidered pomegranates of various colors, alternating, we are told, with “bells”:
Dried pomegranates.
“In its hems made pomegranates of blue, purple and crimson yarns, all around the hem, with bells (pa’ammonim) of gold between them around about: a golden bell and a pomegranate, alternately all around the hem of the robe. Aaron shall wear it while officiating, so that the sound of it is heard when he comes into the sanctuary before the Lord and when he goes out that he may not die”
(Exodus 28:33–35; see also Exodus 39:24–26).b
These “bells” were not true bells but, rather, rattling or jingling devices. Noise-making attachments to garments are known in almost all ancient cultures and served what scholars call an apotropaic function—that is, they gave the wearer magical protection. Note that Aaron’s robe was protected in this way “that he might not die.”
LINK..

Dried poppy heads.

There is always going to be a confusion between pomegranates and poppy heads...they look so similar in pictures or carvings.

Sekhmet- blood mirror.

2011-10-17T13:52:00.000+01:00

Fire lion by ~TomGonets on deviantART

When the Sumerians wrote about the gods deciding to bring about the end of mankind (the story of Atrahasis) they chose the flood.

Water was their lethal element.

When the Egyptians considered their catastrophic past, they chose fire.

The translucent scarab at the center of this beautiful jewelry once owned by Tutankhamen is vitrified glass created when the sun came down to destroy all of mankind.

Certainly some kind of catastrophic heat fused sand in the Libyan desert into glass..

The myth of Sekhmet that explains this event is found in a New Kingdom (1600 and 1100 BC) royal funerary book called the Book of the Heavenly Cow and it names Sekhmet the lioness as the wrathful form of Hathor who is the eye of Re, as the cause of this terrifying event.

The story begins with Re the self-created one.

Re had ruled gods and humans together for millions of years and now he was becoming old. His bones were stiffening into silver, his flesh was becoming gold and his hair hardening into lapis lazuli. His people too- born from his tears- were changing, once loyal and respectful offering praise and prayer, now the people were rebellious and lazy.
Re knew that they were plotting against him.

He was old and tired.

He wanted to return to the primordial waters of Nun.

But before turning away forever, Re sought advice.
The other gods gave him council. Nun saw how angry Re had become and suggested that pain and fear would stop the people treating Re as if he were ineffectual, Nun suggested that Re set the eye free.

In this image, Maat (order and justice) kneels before Hathor and it is easy to confuse her with Isis. She wears the solar disc and cow horns. Hathor of Dendera is both the wife of Horus of Edfu and the great cow of the heavens, who gives birth to the sun.

Once a year, two weeks before the new moon in the third month of summer, the statue of Hathor of Dendera was taken out of the temple for the Festival of the Beautiful Union.

The statue was taken down to the river where another statue of Horus was waiting at the quey. Both statues were presented before Maat (possibly as a third statue) before travelling to the Edfu temple for a marriage ceremony.

After fourteen days there, the statue of Hathor was returned to Dendera.

Sekhmet herself is an old goddess, 'she who scratches', a wild lioness, a 'mistress of life'. Sekhmet can cause and cure disease and her priests are recognised as healers. Amongst the first gods people name are the Lady of the Wild places (giving birth to all wild things) and the Lord of the Sun (all seeing and cause of plagues..).

As Pakhet, the lioness, Hathor embodies both characteristics

But, back to the story:

Re gave the order and his gentle daughter, Hathor transformed herself into the wild lioness, Sekhmet. She descended into the desert where she began her lethal game, soon leaving the sand strewn with the dead and stained red with their blood.

The lioness temporarily too well fed to eat anymore returned to Re proud of herself and her efficiency.

But when Re looked at what she had done he was sickened and filled with guilt. He realized the magnitude of the power he had unleashed, and one look at Sekhmet made it clear to Re, Sekhmet enjoyed the terror and destruction and would not stop

Re sent his fastest messengers to Yeba, to order that red pigment be sent from there to Heliopolis. At Heliopolis the priests ordered the serving maids to grind hundreds of baskets of barley. The red pigment was mixed with the barley and 7,000 jars of blood-red beer were brewed.

Re and the other gods inspected the beer and were pleased.

Early, before Sekhmet had left to begin her killing again, Re went to the killing-fields and emptied the 7,000 jars of blood-red beer over the fields so that they were flooded to a depth of three palms...

As Sekhmet drew close to the land she saw the beautiful red beer and thought that it was blood, as she drew closer she was mesmerized by the sight of another lion -her reflection-coming up to meet her. Sekhmet and the red lion drank deep of the blood until Sekhmet could hardly stand.

Sekhmet returned to Re and he welcomed her back...

That would be the end, except Sekhmet, now happy and satisfied becomes the cow Mehet-Waret and Re can no longer tolerate life amongst people.

Re climbs onto the cow's back and remains in the sky.

Cybele is shown with lions, likewise Durga. The image above is a plate found in Alexandria on Oxus (now Ai Khanum). It depicts a fire alter and in keeping with the Mesopotamian border stone tradition, three symbols in the sky: Venus, the sun and the moon.

In this image, Durga is killing Mahisasur. The picture was taken at Chittaranjan Park, Delhi, Oct 22, 2004 by Mukerjee..

And finally, Inanna.

So why did Venus, Aphrodite lose her lions?
How did she gain the mirror?

This image of Kubaba provides a link.

Kubaba, the only queen in the Sumerian book of kings is portrayed in at least one Sumerian text as Inanna in her form (mentioned in The Epic of Gilgamesh) as inn-keeper at the end of the world.

But here she is shown holding a mirror and a pomegranate.

The picture is a relief of the goddess Kububa, originally located at Herald's wall, Carchemish ; 850-750 BC; Late Hittite style under Aramaean influence. It is now to be found at the museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey. Photograph by JoJan.

She is holding both a a mirror and a pomegranate.

A question I've never found a satisfactory answer to is, why is Persephone linked to pomegranates?

Is it a rattle?
The sound of the sistrum was used to placate the goddess Hathor..
Were pomegranates once dried and turned into rattles?

Just a thought!
I'll have to try it.

Kubaba was the only queen in the Sumerian list of kings.

One last thing.
The mirror symbol represents Venus and copper.

The link between copper and Aphrodite is Cyprus...Cyprus was pretty important from about 3000 BC as the place to find copper.

Kubaba was portrayed as a Hittite Goddess (850-750 BC) who used to be a Sumerian queen (the queen- ca. 2500-2330 BC) who was likened likened to Inanna in her most human form.

Inanna was represented in heaven by the planet Venus...as was Aphrodite the Cyprian.

The Hittites were pretty good with copper...

Just to complete the circle...
A copper mirror.
The face on the handle is Hathor..

It dates to 1976-1794 BC (during the Middle Kingdom and the second classical period of Egyptian history) and was made from a copper alloy and has a handle made out of faience- a glazed material made up of crushed quartz. It is now in the Peterie museum, in london.

One final thing.

If the Sumerian omega symbol was indeed used to represent the womb, or birth-hut, and the Goddess of birth then perhaps the omega becomes Hathor's hair...

Tua Ya Pek.

2011-10-11T12:21:00.000+01:00

After buying the bank of Heaven ghost money..

I started to wonder about the signatures: Yin Low (judge of the Underworld) and Yuk Wong (Jade Emperor) previous post.

At YouTube I found a series of four films showing of a man 'being' a tua ya pek, being possessed by a guardian of the Underworld.

It starts off with Chinese dragon and lion dances.
I think the location is Singapore?

Then the guy who is to be possessed gets dressed and drunk...and is both grave, gentle and impressive as he swaggers around handing out sweets and blessings.

He is also called upon to lacerate his tongue.

The bank notes of Heaven and Hell.

2011-10-09T18:17:00.000+01:00

These bank of heaven notes in the picture above, can be bought from Chinese supermarkets.
They are recognisably money.

Years ago now, I had bought the more arty version, rough bamboo paper with a smear or bold block of silver or gold in its center.

I had no idea what these beautiful bits of paper were for.

A friend of mine recognised them and was shocked....she told me it was money for the ghosts. Well, at that time I was living above a shrine room, I prayed daily (or more) for the living and the dead, nor had I had her upbringing, so I didn't worry too much about the 'bank notes' or the ghosts, rather I was pleased that there was a tradition for anyone, not just 'religious' people, to think well of ghosts and to wish them happiness.

The gold and silver paper is meant to be folded into an ingot:

Another site that shows you in pictures:
http://www.deeindesign.com/blog/2010/02/joss-paper/

When my children had Halloween parties we would always burn 'money for the dead' generally we used the more recognisable bank notes, to make it more meaningful.

I must admit I didn't think too much about the names on the notes.

The last two years, because my children are older (two have left home, two almost old enough to go) we haven't done much for Halloween, which has been rather sad...for me...because I feel that an English Halloween leaves a lot to be desired and would be better if it was more Day of the Dead Mexican style. Just buying a bag full of mini chocolates for the trick or treaters and printing off designs for my kids to use as pumpkin carving templates hasn't been very Halloween-ish, or Halloween enough.

It is a shame that I feel that I should have the excuse of children (oh, you have to make it an occasion for the kids) to hide my need for rituals and to creating sacred space.

But eldest son asked me if he could invite some friends around this year, 'as you like to do Halloween', so I guess I should make some plans.

Today we bought the bank notes. When I got home I noticed that they are Heaven Bank Notes so I wondered if there a difference between heaven and hell notes?

It looks like Heaven notes are offered to the deities of the underworld.

There are two signatures on the notes: Yin Low and Yuk Wong, these two noble entities seem to be in charge of things....

The first, Yin Low is here in the form I know him best as: Yama.

Yama may have begun as a Zoroastrian deity...

But anyway, Hindu and Tibetan, Yama is associated with the bull.

His story is:A holy man was told that if he meditated for the next 50 years, he would achieve enlightenment.

The holy man meditated in a cave for 49 years, 11 months and 29 days, until he was interrupted by two thieves who broke in with a stolen bull.

After beheading the bull in front of the hermit, they ignored his requests to be spared for but a few minutes, and beheaded him as well. In his near-enlightened fury, this holy man became Yama, the god of Death, took the bull's head for his own, and killed the two thieves, drinking their blood from cups made of their skulls.

Still enraged, Yama decided to kill everyone in Tibet. The people of Tibet, fearing for their lives, prayed to the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī.

Now Yama is considered to be a wrathful deity, but oath-bound to be a protector of practitioners.

The second part of the story is:
Yama was depopulating Tibet in his insatiable thirst for victims. Manjushri traveled to the underworld to seek out Yama, who dwells with all his minions in the sealed up iron cities of hell. To tame Yama, Manjushri adopted the same form, adding to it eight other faces and a multiple array of arms, each holding fearful and deadly weapons.

He further sprouted a corresponding number of legs, and surrounded himself with a vast host of terrifying beings. To confront death, he thus manifested the form of death itself, magnified to infinity. Death (Yama) saw himself endlessly mirrored back to himself, infinitely outnumbered by himself. Death was literally scared to death.

Thus the yogi who meditates through the imagery of Yamantaka intends and hopes to develop a sense of identity strong enough to face down death, and the fear that attends upon it. Each head, each limb, each attribute, symbol and ornament of Yamantaka expresses the total mobilization of the faculties of enlightenment needed for this ultimate confrontation.

Both Yama and Yamantaka are represented with bull’s heads, but Yama always has an ornament, shaped like a wheel on his breast, which is his distinctive mark.

The Hindu Yama is the son of the Sun. He is the presiding deity of Naraka and he is also known as Dharma, ultimate reality, or basically god of the way things really are

The Chinese version has Yin Low as judge of the dead, he is a large man with a scowling red face, bulging eyes and a long beard wearing robes and a crown on his head that usually bears the kanji meaning for "king."

Yin Low is both king and judge of the underworld. He is shown with another judge who holds a brush and a book listing every soul and the allotted death date for every life.

There is also Ox-Head and Horse-Face, who are guardians of hell. They bring the newly dead, one by one, before Yin Low for judgement.

The karmic balance of each person facing Yin Low determines where that person goes next, people with enough merit (good karma accumulated by acts of kindness and recitations of mantras as long as 'the merit' has been given away...that is) will be be reborn to have a happy life.

People who have been cruel or who have committed misdeeds will be sentenced to torture and/or miserable future lives.

Yin Low is the absolute king, but the underworld is divided into ten levels or courts each ruled by a Yama King, who specialises in certain crimes.

The spirits of the dead, on being judged by Yin Low, are supposed to either pass through a term of enjoyment in a region midway between the earth and the heaven of the gods, or to undergo their measure of punishment in Naraka, the nether world, situated somewhere in the southern region.

After this time they may return to Earth in new bodies.

So basically the money is offered to him to be kind to one's relatives.
Is that bribery?!

The second name is Yuk Wong, The Jade Emporor.

Heavenly Grandfather...

The bank notes of Heaven or Hell are 'Joss money'. The word Joss probably comes from Portuguese Deus, meaning god. It exists between two realms, the real and the imaginative-virtual. Death is real, the pain of losing someone you love is real, offering ghosts fake money offends the Protestant ethic, but makes sense to the bit of me that knows there is nothing I can really do. A symbolic gesture is better than nothing in my experience.

Many people say that the bank notes can be offered for 'good luck' or to ask for help from Yin Low, more importantly perhaps, it is used to help pay off one's celestial debts.

But the main thing is to offer the money with respect.

It is supposed to be bad to give Hell or Heaven notes to the living, to give someone a Hell note is to wish them dead, apparently.

The notes should be kept out of sight somewhere in the house until needed, (which is probably why they are tucked away in a dark corner of Wing Yip) and when they are burnt, they should be folded. Quite a few web-sites say "folded in a specific way" but I don't know what that is. It is considered bad luck to burn real money, and folding the notes means that the money is clearly Joss money..

A ghost festival be something like this:

1/ Lamps are lit on the alters to attract the ghosts, the alter contains food for the ghost, photographs of loved ones who have died.

2/ The gates of the Underworld open.

3/ Incense, joss money and food are offered.

4/ Paper lanterns are floated down rivers, to help the ghosts find their way back to the Underworld...
---

http://www.anthropology.uci.edu/~wmmaurer/courses/anthro_money_2004/GhostMoney.htm
http://www.taiwanese-secrets.com/ghost-festival.html

Word reminder.

2011-09-30T16:06:00.000+01:00

A Microsoft Word reminder has popped up to say that I should have finished The Bronze Age today. But I've been wondering Robinsonner fashion, trying to think where to go next for The Iron Age....

Well the sun is shining, the sky is so beautiful.
Where to go?

Glastonbury- the glass castle, or the temple of Nodens at Lydney...?

Someone left a comment on one of my Sanctuary blog posts concerning the burial there. My poster said that the pelvis was female, whilst the other bones were male...because it was a composite body, that is to say mummified and stitched together bodies, were preserved in the Bronze Age.

It indicates that the burial at The Sanctuary at least would not have died there. Possibly the same can be said for the little girl at Woodhenge, and the young man in the ditch.

Obviously, what ever was going on here four thousand years ago had nothing at all to do with the abduction aspect of the Persephone myth. Nor would the corpses be entirely within her realm (as queen of the dead).

Preserved bodies exist in both realms at one and the same time. They can be asked to intercede with the underground forces, their preservation is often taken as a sign of special power. The choten (stupa) in Tibetan shrines rooms is empowered by the ashes of a cremated lama (most will be empty) an object the Pythagoreans would recognise, made up of the four elements (rectangle, circle, triangle, oval) topped by aethyr.

A few high lamas are preserved.

The core idea is that a purified individual does not decay, and the physical form resonates with their psychic form- so the conceit is that the lama is too good to rot and that by being in his presence, his goodness shines through to you.

Pythagoras would have understood...In esoteric Buddhism, all material and non-material phenomenon, everything that happens, is an emanation of the Buddha. All you need to do it to change the way you see things...as if what you were seeing was an image on the cave wall, so just turn around and walk into the light!

The Persephone myth does have an Orphic (Pythagorean) interpretation. I don't feel strong enough to bring myself to think about it yet.I find the subject of the quest for eternal life (or enlightenment) trying.

But the people who originally dug up the bodies in rings and barrows in Britain, had been brought up with Greek myth. This didn't get in the way of their research or evidence, it just informed the way the findings were described.

Aubrey Burl simply reported what Maud Cunnington had said about the child at Woodhenge.
Ronald Hutton repeats it.

In this way Stonehenge may have been reinterpreted as a midsummer site, when really it was made to function properly during the midwinter.

Does it matter?

Iron Age, where next?

2011-09-28T15:53:00.000+01:00

When trying to work out where next to go, I find myself frustrated by the lack of information. Or am I just frustrated by the mundanity of it?

The Iron Age isn't as dramatic as the Neolithic or Bronze Age. Maud Cunnington and her medical expert Sir Arthur considered the Iron age people to be foreign, not indigenous Brits. I suppose this prejudice was found elsewhere in Britain, too.

Perhaps the Iron Age feels too recent, not far enough away to grab the imagination of archaeologists. Or the success of new farming techniques led to too many people, settlements just turned into villages and towns, and they are still here, under our feet.

Nevertheless, the only things people associate with the Iron Age are hill forts and 'enclosures' listed as cattle pens- function unknown.

Druids and Celts.

There are no spectacular Iron Age structures left, equivalents of Silbury or Stonehenge, in our landscape, just 'hill forts' hills with ditches ringing the summit such as Hereford Beacon, where it is said, king Caratacus was defeated by the Romans.

There are deserted villages such as Chysauster.

There may be a fogous and post holes marking out rectangular grain stores and there are reconstructions of Iron Age settlements to be found such as Castell Henllys.

The Iron Age is understandable, rural, European African- our Iron Age could be a scene from an old BBC documentary showing life in an African village: round huts and people wearing home-spun, farmers and weavers, a black-smith and story-teller.

Just change the weather.

Neolithic and Bronze Age burial mounds promised rich grave goods and hints of elaborate burial rites. Archaeologists inspired by Lord Carnarvon's spectacular finds hoped to find something like an Egyptian royal burial in rural England.

Sutton Hoo is as good as it ever gets.

When no amazing artifacts or anything much was found in the burial mounds the focus was turned back towards meanings: the symbolism of alignments and beakers, of standing stones and their connection to the stars...

Iron Age artifacts are never so obviously symbolic as the Bronze Age finds of burials with cattle bones, chalk axes and beakers, alignments to sun and moon, solar spirals and sacred offerings.

What happened, why did it end?

No sure answers to that!
There is only when...

The grand, ceremonial phase of the Bronze Age seemed to end between 1500 BC and 1200 BC. After about 1500 BC there is no evidence that ceremonial sites were built anywhere in the British isles and by 1200 BC virtually all the ceremonial sites had been abandoned.

Some work was done to Stonehenge around 1350 BC to extend the North East avenue, but that was abandoned unfinished.

Burials gave way to cremation, and the burial of urns (Urnfield Culture) often a cluster of about thirty or so, with one marked out by goods or other special treatment.

The years between 1100 to 600 BC seems to be a period devoid of any monuments, burials or ceremonial structures.

People put their energies into creating farm land, building stone walls rather than barrows and henges..and no one died (!)

But in Ireland some traditions continued: Tara, it is said, was used until Christianity rendered it's ceremonies and rituals meaningless...

Religion, the old religion, died in Britain sometime between 1400 BC and 600 BC..?

Do I assume continuity in belief, or is it more like the 'Roman' burials that copied the barrows, close to The Sanctuary? A continuity in the aura, or atmosphere of the place, rather than a continuity in an oral tradition explaining the origins of the sites?

The Iron Age went on for quite a long time...It went on for much longer in Ireland.

But just one location isn't enough to prove anything much, and there is some evidence to suggest that Iron Age people often took stones from henges to make forges, smashing cremation urns and believing Neolithic axes to be thunder-bolts.

All I can say is, if that's the case then the thread of continuity is very thin indeed.

Though the French sites show a continuity in food offerings, pigs for the living, cattle for the dead.

Close by, we have Wychbury Hill. Down the motorway there is the Romano-British Lydney Park in Glocestershire. A temple dedicated to the one handed god...

The Cuckoo Stone close to Woodhenge had been 'adopted' by the 'Romano-British' and three cremation urns were placed in its shadow.

But none of these places inspire me.

So where is Persephone in this chapter of the story?

Often it is the bogs and rivers that accept sacrifice; the watery, slippery, transient..ever changing.

Or was sacrifice punishment?

The bogs are neither solid or liquid, they are liminal, betwixt and between the worlds. There are signs of punishment, a woman found in the bog, her hair shaved, or crudely cut. Again I ask myself, as with the boy in the ditch at Woodhenge, did physical disability or oddness mark you out for sacrifice, as already half-way out of this world and belonging to the other world of the un-made becoming?

Strabo describes disemboweling as a way to for tell the future...by observing the convulsing of the limbs. Some bog burials had been disemboweled..

Or were these well fed, well looked after people hostages from a rival tribe, sacrificed for the effect it had, to shock and to awe?

Male and female both, no one sex singled out as an offering.

If the deity is female, then perhaps she is more like Grendel's mother...

Of all the film versions of Beowulf, the Icelandic is my favorite.

The way to the Underworld..blood of the lamb.

2011-09-16T16:21:00.000+01:00

... it is the offering pit that I dislike the most.

Hard times create hard hearts.

I don't mean the pit inside rectangular buildings (see previous post) to contain the slaughtered cattle. I'm thinking of the shafts...with the (in one case at least) four meter pole erected on the shaft floor and the remains of flesh around it.

I'm not saying that the Wilsford shaft is like that; it was created in happier times and dug out with antler picks in 1700 BC by people now called by contemporary archaeologists, Deveral-Rimbury. It is six feet wide and reached a hundred feet into the earth. Then the pit reached water, so could not be dug any deeper.

I know what you are thinking...but it was never used as a well, the presence of water may instead have made it a more suitable receptacle for sacrifices.

At the bottom of the Wilsford shaft there were bone pins and amber beads, pots and an ox skull -indicating to me anyway- that this shaft was used as a communication with the Underworld. Right at the bottom, propped against the side of the shaft archaeologists found an oak post.

Offering pits seem to have been dug in the Neolithic too, but as the Bronze Age transformed itself into the Iron Age the contents of the pits become more sinister...

By the time we get to the Iron Age the pits are being offered human flesh:

A late Iron age shaft in Holzhausen in Baviaria with a post at the bottom was presumably used for impaling a human victim; the pole when analysed had traces of human flesh and blood. In East Yorkshire, at Garton Slack a young man and a woman of about thirty were found huddled together in a shaft, a wooden stake between them pinning their arms together; the woman was apparently pregnant, since a fetal skeleton was found beneath her pelvis. Presumably the two adults were ritually killed for punitive purposes. There have also been several instances of foundation burials, often of children, which may or may not have been sacrifices (Green 1992, 183-84).

Holzhausen is a Late Iron Age "ditch-and-berm" constructions known as a Viereckschanzen. It isn't a common term in the UK, such a site would probably be labelled on a map as a Pre-Roman sacred site, or a Romano-Celtic temple. Both Gourney-sur-Aronde and Ribemont-sur-Ancre are Viereckschanzen, but true examples are hard to find in Britain.

But, back to the pits and their meaning; above and below, heaven and earth form the universe.

In Greek myth and ritual the Chthonic and Olympian belong together. It is fascinating to consider that the Greek gods seem to have mortal counterparts who they will kill: Artemis demands the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Apollo kills Hyakinthos.

Sacrificial pits in ancient Greek times were the Bothros or Megaron, the Megaron in particular is linked to Demeter and Kore, during the Thesmophoria festival women were said to throw piglets into the 'chasms of Demeter and Kore' recreating the scene of Kore's abduction -when the ground opened to allow Hades through and the pig-Herder lost his pigs.

But said by whom is another matter.

Rome had at least two lapis manalis (stone covering a pit allowing access to the souls of deceased loved ones): one named by Festus the ostium Orci (the gate of Orcus- a god of the underworld, punisher of broken oaths, portrayed in paintings in Etruscan tombs as a hairy, bearded giant. The name probably comes from Greek: Horkos described by Hesiod in his Theogeny, a child of the Erinyes who personifies the curse that will be inflicted on any person who swears a false oath) and another lapis used to call down rain...

More commonly a lapis manalis was dug as part of the foundations of a new town as a way to offer the 'lords of the soil' libation. It is possible that the gladiatorial games were a continuation or a civilising of this concept of offering blood to ghosts.

The closest thing I've experienced to any of this was the recent outbreak of foot and mouth in sheep and cattle which resulted in an economic and political decision, rather than a scientific one, to kill possibly as many as 10 million animals at a cost to the British tax payer of £20 billion...[LINK]

The whole thing was unbelievable really, a ritual purification of our food because the government must be seen to be doing something. Sensible solutions such as vaccination are out because vaccination would produce antibodies in animals, and the test for the disease is the presence of antibodies...there isn't a system set up that allows vaccination certification to prove 'purity'.

And virus' mutate rapidly, it is hard to create an antibody for all types- but not impossible.

Taking care of sick animals only happens if the causative agent is a bacteria in which case liberal doses of antibiotics are administered, taking care doesn't happen in industrial style farming.

We no longer have any culturally acceptable need of making offerings to the ghosts underground, yet this mass killing echos rituals of the past in a truly disturbing way.

Iron.

2011-09-10T18:19:00.000+01:00

I blame Aubrey Burl for my dislike of the Iron Age; his books give an impression of the Iron Age as a harder, more feudal time than the preceding Bronze Age.

Unfortunately archaeological findings do nothing to change my mind.

The (war temple?) sanctuary of Ribemont-sur-Ancre, dating from 300 BC contained many iron weapons: swords, scabbards, spears, shields mixed together with human bones: legs, arms, pelvises, hands, feet, etc belonging to about 1,000 men aged between 15 and 40 years old.

Around the outer walls eighty headless bodies of males had been displayed along with their weapons.

There were no skulls, these may have been given to the near by river, Samara..

A more recent excavation seems to reveal that the dead were treated in different ways there, some -the enemy? were used as building material, or hung on the walls.

About twenty individuals had been buried in one enclosure, whilst another grave held the remains of several dozen more.

Were these the protectors, the sleeping warriors, 'sleeping' like Arthur and his knights, waiting until England needs them?

I don't know if they kept their heads or not, I can't find many details about these sites at all.

There was also a crematoria made of human bones on the site; was this honorific treatment for those burnt, were bodies were given honour or dishonour in destruction by fire? To be a part of the crematoria was that a good or bad burial, I wish I knew.

A similar site, Gournay-sur-Aronde has a similar Iron Age construction; it contained many, many bones and iron military artifacts but here, skulls were hung up with the armour.

As at Ribemont, the dead had been young men...possibly the conquered enemy.
Or were they the sons and fathers of the area?

The presence or absence of skulls is interesting.
Strabo -63 BC – ca. AD 24- a Greek historian, geographer and philosopher recorded:

"again, in addition to their witlessness, there is also that custom, barbarous and exotic, which attends most of the northern tribes — I mean the fact that when they depart from the battle they hang the heads of their enemies from the necks of their horses, and, when they have brought them home, nail the spectacle to the entrances of their homes. At any rate, Poseidonius says that he himself saw this spectacle in many places, and that, although at first he loathed it, afterwards, through his familiarity with it, he could bear it calmly. The heads of enemies of high repute, however, they used to embalm in cedar-oil and exhibit to strangers, and they would not deign to give them back even for a ransom of an equal weight of gold."

At Gourney-sur-Aronde there were two kinds of animal sacrifices: pigs and lambs -for the living. The pigs and lambs were slaughtered and eaten within the enclosure, but cattle were offered to the 'Lords of the Soil' the cthonic deities.

Bulls were killed and their bodies left to rot in a pit.

Celtic myth may not be the most authentic source, but certain themes in the tales seem verified by archaeological findings; the bog sacrifices especially.

The triple death inflicted on the people offered to the bog is strangulation, stabbing and being hit over the head to cause three deaths, one for each sacred realm of heaven, earth and hel.Rasputin likewise dies a triple death- poisoned, shot and finally drowning in the Neva river. It is also said that he suffered a fourth death, that of being stabbed and the severing of his penis. A final scene shows us Rasputin's body being taken to cremation in the woods. As his body was being burned, Rasputin appeared to sit up in the fire. His attempts to move and get up thoroughly horrified bystanders...apparently one should cut the tendons of a corpse before cremation to prevent this.

Not that that has anything to do with the Iron Age, but goes to show the anxiety around murder, and the feeling that killing someone before his time has come, is heavy duty.

Iron came to Britain sometime around 750 BC and wasn't the single cause of the changes that were soon to take place. Bronze, glittering like gold in the sun, had given status to the warriors whose barrows cluster around Stonehenge. Elaborate trade routes followed rivers and crossed seas to Europe exchanging copper for tin and bringing in amber from the Baltic.

But something happened to change everything, the weather, wars and upheavals in distant lands, and it took another two hundred years before society reconfigured itself, assimilated change and found a new way to live.

Sometime between 800 BC to 750 the Bronze Age in Britain came to an end; people buried hoards of bronze artifacts -no one knows why- I guess that burying it was a way to hide the family riches until better times, and that the symbolic value of the bronze was now either useless or a liability. If it was a liability, then bronze had not lost its symbolic value at all; indeed it had become too precious. Perhaps it is more correct to say that The Bronze Age came to an end when the symbolic value of an item became less than its practical use, and bronze became useless.

At the moment the value of gold and silver is still climbing as people lose faith in money (a purely symbolic item) and buy gold, believing that gold will always be valuable. What is happening now in the world economy may be a crisis, but it is nothing like as catastrophic as what happened in the late Bronze Age.

One of the earliest iron artifact in Britain so far, belonged to 750 BC and was a small sickle made in exactly the same shape and design as its bronze counterpart indicating that craftsmen had not yet worked extensively with iron and learnt how to exploit it.

The art of smelting iron is dated to around 1200 BC in the Mediterranean...some evidence points to the Hittites as the first Iron Age people, smelting iron as early as 1500 BC.

.

Though their iron production was not large scale, Egyptian frescoes and Hittite art show Hittite warriors wearing bronze helmets and sometimes bronze scale armor, though I'm not sure how anyone can tell that unless the frescoes are in colour?

When the Hittites conquered Mesopotamia they adopted many aspects of Akkadian culture including the gods. Following on from the Hittites, Hesiod's Theogeny draws directly from the Hittite version of the Akkadian Enuma Elish.

How much mythology migrated with the secrets of iron smelting it is very difficult to know. Norse mythology in particular contains mythic elements from Greek myth that in turn echoes Marduck's battle with Tiamat via the Hittite version: Tarhunt's battle with Illuyanka.

The Akkadian queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal becomes the Hittite Goddess Lelwani.

I wish that I knew how much myth diffused into Britain along with the knowledge of Iron...

The Iron Age hill forts appear in Britain between 550 and 500 BC as a new social order is established. They have been interpreted as castles, or market places, or stores for near by villages. The Iron Age seems to be almost a new Neolithic -as farming became the new technology of that time, so once again farming became the central preoccupation of people helped by a whole host of efficient farming techniques resulting from the use of iron ploughs and sickles.

Stonehenge: end of August, 2011.

2011-08-26T16:25:00.003+01:00

A few days ago my husband and I went to Stonehenge...

Notes from Stonehenge as I sit on the grass.

The ground feels as if it is full of thousands of powerful roots. The ground is warm, lithe, alive.

So many people here, a constant flow from all over the world. They mostly stand and stare, the audio guide like a mobile phone fixed to their ear..

Above me a grey sky, it is quite cold.

The starlings are massing for their exodus, they gather here, many sitting on the horizontal lintels of Stonehenge, feeling winter's approach.

Sound of a motorbike, a plane, the rise and fall of sound; so many people talking. The wind rushing through the grass behind me.

To my right rain clouds gather on the horizon -I pull my hat down to cover my ears.

The ground is a disc, Stonehenge the mandala.

A few moments ago three policemen came to stand, looking over from across the road and through the fence...Two Chinooks rose from the trees to our left and flew almost skimming the ground. Stonehenge and Wessex retains its ancestral warrior land; war never goes away.

Close to the stones two English Heritage officials stood blowing bubbles, a secular ritual; heart warming and safe, absolutely non-offencive.

To my right a couple just like us, clutching their M+S bag, sitting, having eaten; he is describing Stonehenge to her, now talking about Woodhenge.

We sit on my black, army poncho strewn with bread crumbs, a half empty pot of olives. I'm beginning to long for coffee as another plane skims the clouds over head.

People stand in groups or meander widdershins; laden with bags and cameras. Above our heads black flies circle as the cloud breaks and I feel sunlight warm my back. People sit, a few lie down.

The 303 is a river of cars, before me and to my left I see perhaps six round barrows -over to my right and in the distance more barrows. I wonder how far it is to the cursus separating the land of the dead (where we sit) from the land of the living. There are people pushing others in wheelchairs and pushchairs.

I suddenly imagine Stonehenge as Lourdes.

A Japanese couple take photographs, he is trying to get an image of her feet. Most people are dressed for summer and are I imagine cold. I'm in leather, with and insulated coat; I'm still cold.

A swoop of starlings, the sound of a lorry on the 303 river...time for us to circumnavigate...

Today made me see Stonehenge in a totally different way. Use alters a location -not only the tangible, visible aspects, but the atmosphere and how the very ground itself feels. The never ending flow of visitors and their expectations of Stonehenge as a midsummer magnificence reflects back.

Someone else's film of the solstice night:

I like this version of Stonehenge very much, it is so different from standing inside the ring of stones after the visitors have left.

Here is the other entrance:

If ever I start to feel grumpy about people mistreating sacred sites, I simply think of the Christians and how their major festivals have been turned into shopping sprees and chocolate fests; how so many people have been murdered in the name of Christ and that basically Pagan is so open and all encompassing and so old, it makes me smile!

Bryn Celli Ddu.

2011-08-16T21:57:00.006+01:00

I don't remember going inside the dark, but I know what is in there.

The more I wonder around ex-sacred places, relics of a previous age, repositories of forgotten theories and fractured understandings the more I believe that the right thing to do is to use these places and restore meanings, resacralise. Authenticity is secondary.

In this film I'm doing the good old compass thing, more to prove to myself really that North East is that significant.

I do not do anything to restore the numinosity of this place in this film; but the black cloak and incense, the Dorje Pagmo red hair (but not the pig!) are mine. It wouldn't be too large a step for me to cross over.

If Woodhenge and The Sanctuary may represent the lost girl and the place of her abduction by the Netherworld, Bryn Celli Ddu is like crossing through the seven gates of Irkalla and standing next to Ereshkigal herself.

Over the mountains...

2011-08-15T21:52:00.000+01:00

Riding to Anglesea to visit Bryn Celli Ddu.

Take me back! Set controls for the Iron Age.

2011-08-07T19:18:00.001+01:00

I am no fan of the fifteenth, or fourteenth, or even the first century AD. I got caught up in the story of John Dee and his obsidian mirror and the language known as Enochian because of the subject of magic; very often the places linked to Persephone have also been linked to oracles: Nekromanteion. Oracles, the act of divining the future is still, even today considered a risky business if you ask hard-core Christians. God in the post-reformation version of Christianity, is not to be questioned or bargained with. Angels no longer speak to man (though that seems to be breaking down again, I have seen two, newly opened shops recently dedicated to angels).

If anything speaks, via the Ouija board or the Tarot, it will lead me astray, or so I was told -by a vicar. Ah..how right he was!

The fear of witchcraft seems to me to be more a barometer of cultural anxiety, than a measure of knowledge or intelligence. But generally the concept of witchcraft as a threat to civilised and ordered society goes back most clearly to the Romans. Both the Nekromanteion of Acheron and the sanctuary of Baia, near Naples were destroyed by the Romans as part of a law enforcing the prevention of necromancy.

Almost always at oracles we have a shrine to Apollo, and a cave leading to underground tunnels belonging to the Sybil; or we have a 'Sanctuary of Hades' and a 'Palace of Persephone'.

I find it curious that the dead were expected to know anything at all after drinking from the waters of Lethe, but Homer and latter Virgil both describe the approved method of reanimating the spirits to tell of what fate has in store for them.

Perhaps it is because fate (in Sumerian myth, Namtar) is a talkative chap and so the dead would hear whose time was up? In Greek thought, Death was the invitation rather than the process. Fate was the cause for the soul to leave the body, and Fate decided when one's time was up. This meant that Death could be delayed or tricked, but Fate always had your number.

Apollo is linked to divination: at Delphi, at Clarus, at Didyma and more. Apollo sees all because (as it tells us so often in Mesopotamian poems and myth) the sun sees all. At night the sun goes into the Underworld. Apollo Aplu Enlil (Akkadian: son of Enlil) becomes Ne-uru-gal (lord of the great city) where his consort is the queen of the great land...Well, in Akkadian myth..

Mesopotamian myth informs Greek myth and even the concept at the heart of Enochian magick has its roots in the Enuma Elish via The Key of Solomon' (a 14th or 15th century Italian work?). The parallels are too great to dismiss, I think. There may be no similarity between a Mesopotamian ritual to be performed at the time of the moon's eclipse and the way a contemporary astrologer describes the effect of the moon turning red on our lives, but new books are still being written that clearly use concepts -astrology- derived from the first civilisations. I am amazed at how stable belief systems are. The narratives explaining the core information changes considerably, but the core remains...it may be more like a cargo cult version, but a cargo cult version of something that was in itself as equally full of misunderstandings, can't be a bad thing can it?

A church has so more in common with Neolithic long barrow than with the Greek, Orphic modification of the cult of Dionysus that Christianity so obviously is.

Really I doubt myself!

I see continuity, I may be wrong, but surely the fact speak for themselves?

It is unfortunate that if the Phoenicians really did carve axes on a stone at Stonehenge, that they did not teach people how to write on something that would last for the requisite thousands of years between then and now! We have what the Romans say, we have snippets from Greek speaking travellers and second-hand accounts from ancient historians who have read books that were lost centuries ago....

Ah well...I'll just have to go see what I can find!

Tertius.

2011-08-06T20:08:00.002+01:00

I was in the chained library of Hereford cathedral a few days ago. The display in the glass cabinets was of bibles, the guide was quite enthusiastic about the King James bible circa 1611 -many people are- the language is praised and it has an aura of authority as it was translated by forty odd scholars from Latin, Greek and Hebrew..

I can't take the history away from the text, though.

At the moment the Reformation (something we were taught at school as have being a great movement towards rational, common sense and a freeing of the people from the tyranny of the church) seems to me to have been a hideous affair.

Far from freeing people from tyranny, the reformation swept away harmless methods of dealing with anxiety (Holy water, relics, liturgy) and replaced it with self criticism and the criticism of others.

It is said that the Catholic faith is experience centered whilst the reformation faiths are objective.

The cool, third-person view of tragedy and triumph as immaterial (at best) as one's own fault (in the case of tragedy) or as a temptation (in the case of triumph) demanded by the reformation church, is a bit too much to ask for from everyone if you ask me. It is downright in-humane to demand that everyone remain cool, and objective; and to see everything as a fair and measured effect of god's plan regardless either of common sense or ones own feelings.

So for me, the King James bible represented something of the madness of King James (King of Scotland) who in 1597 wrote: "Daemonologie, In Forme of a Dialogie, Diuided into three Bookes".

The opening lines of which are:

"The fearefull aboundinge at this time in this countrie, of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the Witches or enchaunters, hath moved me (beloved reader) to dispatch in post, this following treatise of mine... to resolve the doubting... both that such assaults of Satan are most certainly practised, and that the instrument thereof merits most severely to be punished."

James became king of England (and Ireland) in 1603. A year latter (March 19th 1604) Parliament passed a tougher, stronger Witchcraft Act (not repealed until 1736) which would give rise to people like Mathew Hopkins and the incineration of perhaps as many as 40000 people between 1600 and 1680 in England.

In 1604 John Dee, now living once more in England, was an old man aged seventy seven. On the 5th June that year, Dee begged to be placed on trial so that he may clear his name of conjuring 'divils'. Three days latter he wrote again (the poem at the start of this blog) once more asking the king to have his name cleared publicly; a brave move.

The king simply ignored him.

So, the last of his three diarys is Tertius which I think formed the basis for the work known as The Heptarchia. My notes are very sparse, very poor...because they provide nothing but an outline.

Really, if you want to know what John Dee wrote, you must get as close to the original text as possible.

My notes are patently useless:

Tertius.
1582
28th April.

The third diary begins with Edward Kelly describing the angel Micheal. John Dee says that the angel replied to 'my diverse complaints and requests' by saying through Kelly: 'The Lord shall consider you in the world and in the world to come' (and there appeared in the scry stone a chair all on fire (rather a common image, it seems to me).

John Dee is confused by this, for the angel is talking as if Dee and Kelly are equal. Dee asks: 'You mean us (Dee and Kelly) must be joined and as one mind, as if we were one man?' The angel tells Dee that this is so...

Next the angel admonishes Dee for not being quick enough in buying the goods (?) 'Take heed of punishment for your slackness' is what the angel actually says.

The goods are the lamine, and a ring. The lamine is a triangular breast plate inscribed with symbols, it was to be worn hidden under a scarf and its function was to protect Dee from malevolent influences. The other item was a ring, marked with the inscription PELE 'without this ring you shall do nothing!' The sigil of Dei Ameth, Seal of the truth of God, a total of seven tablets in all are to be fashioned.

Next comes a vision of angels and fire, maidens and balls, tablets and numbers, an instrument of conciliation.

April 29, 8:30 pm.

Micheal and Uriel:
Micheal says: 'et posuit illos in ministerium ejus quid desideratis?' which I assume is a question about where to place the tablets and objects?

Dee replies: 'wisdom and knowledge is necessary for us in the service of God's power and His glory' and the angel replies (my translation!) 'know God from his creations'...

The vision is of seven women.
This work is of wisdom says Micheal.

After Kelly and Dee have placed the seven tablets in place (the ring and breast-plate have not been made) Uriel tells them that there are forty-nine angels in charge of the earth, and of course by knowing their names and by correct invocations, these angels will aid you. The angel gives the forty-nine names (all beginning with B)

The angel Micheal asks Dee: 'What else, what else?'

And Dee replies: 'to make progress, and to increase power, to honor and to glory in God's truth'.

Next come visions of birds..

The text concludes with Dee asking about the lamine and the ring, saying that Kelly cannot engrave the objects. The angels tell them that a good man may be found to do the work, and when the objects are made, they will know how to use them.

The session finished at 4:30 AM.

Before Tertius...

2011-07-30T20:39:00.000+01:00

Carthage, probably between 400-200 BCE, and this stone.

This stele comes from the Tophet in Carthage (today Tunisia) Such grave markers were set up over burial urns for small children and animals which had been sacrificed to the goddess Tanit and her consort Baal Hammon.

Canaanite symbolism: sun,crescent moon and triangle; the goddess below. It is at The British Museum.

First thing, it looks like a boundary stone to me because it was usual for Mesopotamian boundary stones to be decorated with a symbol representing the sun, the moon and Venus. The sun symbol -which looks like a section through an orange- and the moon, are easy to see.

The Goddess Tanit is represented by the triangle, and upright arms figure. Her original name had been Inanna (Via Akadian: Ishtar, to Astarte, to eventually Tanit). But by now she had become a Goddess in her own right, the stories concerning her had changed though remaining recognisable.

At a guess, the rectangle represents dominion over the land; a symbol meaning *all*, but that's a really weak guess and based entirely on intuition.

It was the Omega and the arrow symbol that really caught my eye.

At first I thought that the Omega on the top of the arrows, again from Akadian look a little like the symbol used to represent the birthing hut -and so represented rebirth. Whilst the arrows may represent Meslemtea/ Nergal the consort of the Goddess of the underworld (Nergal had seven plague demons which, by the time of The Iliad, had become the plague arrows of Apollo).

The whole thing (in relation to the Tophet...) made me see a symbol as representing death as a pathway into a new life. If the Carthaginians did indeed sacrifice their own children in times of dire need, the arrow + Omega may make the poor parents feel a little better...

Hermes carries a similar symbol, the kerykeion, it is a heralds staff, which he carries in his left hand. This symbol is also known as the caduceus. The Iliad describes Hermes as using it to open and close the eyes of mortals, he makes us sleep and thus brings us to the borders of death.

Hermes as guider of souls, thus it is linked to death and the journey through the underworld.

Hermes, is a god of boundaries. The name for a boundary stone: a herm could be the origin of his name, and the sacred boundary-marker or road-altar, has been dedicated to Hermes since ancient times.

But a herm is also an upright stone surrounded at its base by a heap of smaller stones; not so different from Hursag meaning hill, and Ninhursag the queen of the stony ground (the Lady who gives birth to all the wild things) .

Her omega symbol is known to appear on some Mesopotamian boundary stones. The image here comes from a truly beautiful Kudurra, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudurru for more information and full sized image.

The snake symbol in connection with the caduceus is all Greek. Serpents appear on Kassite (Mesopotamian) boundary stones, but mainly seem to represent the Kur, for they are at the bottom end of the stone, underground.

More as a force that will carry one away, than as a guardian.

Ideas spread, meet and create new symbols.Hermes and Ninhursag both have a heap of stones connection.
And so Ninhursag's omega becomes Hermes' snakes?

This Greek early 5th century B.C, upper part of caduceus (carried by Hermes) shows the snakes perfectly.

This one can be seen at the Dallas museum.

But what do the snakes mean?

There is a link in Greek mythological thinking, between the snake and the uncanny and fearful. The snake signifies death and life (not necessarily re-birth).

The daughters of Cecrops are killed when they open a kiste given to them by Athena. They see the snake child (Ericthonius) within and panic, falling to their deaths over the north face of the Acropolis.

The serpentine appearance of the spinal cord led to a semi-rational belief that this part of the dead could be transformed into a living snake (see Burkert, Greek Religion; page 195) .

The death-snake was a convenient and almost omnipresent motif in Greek, Bronze Age vessels according to Burkert. But its meaning is not explained, as Burkert points out, most of what we know about Greek funerary rites come from plays, from theater scenes, and it was taken for granted that people knew what was customary and so there was no need to write out specific meanings in detail.

Perhaps it was observed that after funeral libations had been made; the wine spilt and offerings left at the grave, a snake may come to lick at the left-overs and then vanish as quickly as it had come...

Hermes too has a connection to death and the Underworld, he was the god who led the soul to the river that separated life from death. In the play Alcestis (by Euripides) Death tells us that is his role simply to cut a piece of hair from the person destined to die.

Death is a servant of fate and Death carries a sword for this task. Then it is Hermes who leads the soul over the boundary between life and death. A role latter taken by Dionysos as a more Orphic version of the Mysteries becomes current.

It makes sense to interpret the river motif as the sensation of dying, of being carried away by the woeful river or the river of ordeals: Idkurra, (in Sumerian myth). This contrasts with the calm and terrible image of the boatman in Greek myth...

So back to snakes- not forgetting that The Kur was sometimes portrayed as serpentine and able to control the flow of water.

The motif of serpents around a staff brings to mind Ningishzida.

Ningishzida is called (in this copy and paste of Google) "messenger" of the "Earth Mother".

It is the oldest image of snakes coiling around an axial pole and it is tempting to project meanings backward (Hermes is messenger to the gods, he has a stick with two snakes, so any other Babylonian deity with serpents around a pole must be a messenger!) rather than to look at myths from that specific time period.

This image of the double serpent is said to represent Ningishazida. It came from the royal libation cup of King Gudea of Lagash (Sumer), 2000 BC. The temple of Ningishzida was located at Lagash. And the cup came with an inscription; it was meant as a long life gift. Thousands of years latter people put two and two together and see the double serpent as a symbol of healing, or rejuvenation.

Granted...that is what it meant in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The main story concerning Ningishzida (whose name, translated by Thorkild Jacobsen is Lord of the Good Tree) was to accomplish the death of the daylight.

In the Adapa myth he is one of two guardians, guarding the gates of Heaven.

He, like his fellow gatekeeper Dumuzi were originally mortal, but by facing the ordeal of the underworld, both would attain a godly status. He reminds me a little of Zalmoxis, a Thracian deity described by Herodotus.

Most people, or Google anyway- but not me -prefer to place Ningishzida guarding the gates of the underworld.

If the snakes are not about rejuvenation, how about Ningishazida's snakes as lightning?

Lord of the Good tree,
Lord of the lightning struck tree?

Adad, or the Canaanite Hadad are regarded as the lightning gods and it is possible that Ningishazida's serpents are closer to the Kur, dangerous primordial forces.

Lightning begins to fit...

But that Central image of a pole, serpents and perhaps the world tree is hard to read.

All I can think of is Norse myth...

The ash Yggdrasil..

Bears more than man can know.

A hart nibbles at its side

Whilst Nithog devours from below..

Meanwhile on earth, a pair of bronze serpents flanked each of the four doorways of the temple of E.sagila ( a temple dedicated to Marduk), the serpents could represent trophies and relics of the primeval battle between Marduk and Tiamat because the shrine Esagil and the city Babylon were situated at the middle of the world created from the corpse of Tiamat, a serpentine dragon, by Marduk.Again the dominion over primordial forces...

Moving on a thousand years, the coin in this picture was minted on Skiathos in the 4th century BC. On one side there was a picture of the god Hermes, and on the other his staff of snakes.

Now I see where the alchemical symbol for Mercury comes from!

The link between the caduceus and doctors.
The god of healing is Asclepius, latter famed and then punished by Zeus, for restoring life to the almost dead.

As someone once said,

'the staff of Hermes would be better placed on a hearse than on a doctors car.'

The only connection between Hermes and the original good doctor comes from Pausanias, in his
Description of Greece:

[2.26.6] There is also another tradition concerning him (Asclepius). Coronis, they say, when with child with Asclepius (fathered by Apollo) had intercourse with Ischys, son of Elatus. She was killed by Artemis to punish her for the insult done to Apollo, but when the pyre was already lighted Hermes is said to have snatched the child from the flames.

The serpent is a reminder that Asclepius himself escaped death. Hermes rescued the god of healing from his mother's womb as she lay on the funeral pyre, because it was his role to lead the soul. Hermes chose not to lead her away...

Asclepius has the stick, he has the snake; but he has only one snake not two.

The idea of the serpent as a symbol for rejuvenation is found in The Epic of Gilgamesh, but the symbol doesn't seem to be used in art that way then or now (except for in medicine). Lucius Annaeus Cornutus, a Stoic philosopher, 60 AD described the serpent as a symbol for Asclepius and medicine in general because the serpent sheds its skin

"those who avail themselves of medical science undergo a process similar to the serpent in that they, as it were, grow young again after illnesses and slough off old age; also because the serpent is a sign of attention, much of which is required in medical treatments. The staff also seems to be a symbol of some similar thing."

Oddly enough, Asclepius was killed with a thunderbolt launched by Zeus. Asclepius had taken to preventing any death at all....the natural order was under threat.

And there I stop.
Time to return to John Dee, and the last of his three diaries (well the last of what I've been able to find of his diaries.).

Secondus.

2011-07-25T13:18:00.000+01:00

I began to read the second of John Dee's diarys Secondus. By midway through, and half way into the book on Dee by Charlotte Fell-Smith I had made up my mind. I know what I think about John Dee and Enochian. I do not have any certainty, but I have come to the conclusion that Enochian is a game within a game.

Nevertheless it is one of the most fascinating stories I have ever read. A contemporary version would be Brian Cox staring into the read-outs from the Large Hadron collider and working together with someone who could see more in the numbers and fuzzy fields of static, than he.

Together they see that the messages add up into systems describing forces creating this universe, and provide clues on how to shift and change those forces to create new systems.

So there you go: Enochian for beginners!

Notes on Secondus:
Begins with a prayer and then conversation with the arch-angel Micheal. Though it seems that Dee and the angel speak directly, the communication is via the man charged with the duty to be John Dee's scryer.

The angel tells Dee that what will be spoken of here and now, should never be revealed to anyone, ever...

The angel tells both John and his scyer that they are blessed and asks Dee what he wishes for. John Dee asks for 'Correct/right wisdom and intellegence'.

The top quarter of the next page is lost....

When the text begins again, the angel is instructing Dee on how to use something, the angel tells Dee to: 'Divide this outer circle into 40 equal parts: whose greatest numbers are four: and then every of them into ten...

The angel Semile appears and asks Dee what he wishes to know concerning the tables.

There then occurs many angels issuing from one angel; the angel that 'contains' all the other angels inveriable has a single letter on his chest. There is much falling down of angels, recitations of prayer, rainbows and flames.

One after another, visions of angels appear. Each angel acts out a charade of symbolic gestures such as: Then stepped out one in bloody clothing, all his body full of serpents heads and a b on his forehead and the number 10 over it.

He went away.

After the scrying session was over, Mr Talbot (another name for Edward Kelley?) had supper and then went upstairs to pray. A little latter, Talbot knocks on John Dee's door and tells John that Uriel had appeared to him and told him that there is a mistake in the seal (or tables). John Dee gives Mr Talbot the seal, and a little latter Talbot returns with the corrections made. John Dee cannot believe that he made any mistake when he made the original seal, indeed he gives me the impression that he believes the angel Micheal to have been at fault, rather than himself. Whereupon Dee and Talbot decide to ask Micheal.

The angel duly appeared to Mr Talbot and told them that the error had been with the scryer, Mr Talbot, that he had omitted to pass on the information correctly. latter, Uriel had told him of his mistake.

The visions begin again, Micheal tells them that the original form of the world, before it vanished away was as concentric circles.

The angel begins to explain in more detail now, the use of the seal. There are seven Principal names: names of angels and these names, broken apart and in combination give us the Enochian calls. Some names are significant in themselves. No letters but double number are the name of god. Confusingly the angels explains that when there are two Aa together, the first in not to be placed within the name, but rather 'left with his inward power'.

John Dee asks the angel about Hebrew, 'I have read in Cabala that the Name of God has forty-two letters....and ends, 'I am not good in the Hebrew tongue, but you know my meaning.

Micheal, via Talbot does not say much on the subject.

Tuesday, 20th March 1582.
The conversation begins again: 'Are you Uriel'? And Uriel apologises, saying that they cannot be contacted right now, please try again at the twelfth hour.

At the twelfth hour, Mr Talbot was busy in other affairs until latter in the afternoon. At 2 o'clock Mr Talbot found Micheal and Uriel, but Micheal went out and then returned carrying on his right shoulder seven baskets of gold. Micheal tells Dee to shut the door of the study and then the vision continues...

Micheal asks Dee 'what would you have'?

and Dee replies: 'sapientiam'

Wisdom.

The angel asks Dee to read the seven names the angels gave him previously. The angel corrects any errors and then shows him a great number of sigils.

More visions about how to arrange the sigils, names and numbers.

Dee struggles to understand...

Finally the account of that day's work ends with the angel telling Dee that Edward Talbot must go for the books; meaning books belonging to Lord Monteagle, Lord of Lancaster.

There after, all in the diary is about how to use Enochian, or rather how to compose...

Primus.

2011-07-16T21:21:00.000+01:00

Primus is the first of three notebooks written by John Dee and it tells of the beginnings of John Dee's six year adventure, following the angels. The Latin is difficult, it is probably better to look for several translations before attempting to work out what the account actually says. I have read through and got the gist of the thing, so to speak, but don't take my account as accurate.

Also I stopped making notes after Uriel made his appearance. Uriel showed John an image of a chair, he told John of a demon or two that was going to cause trouble to his family, the angel dealt with the malevolent entities, Uriel instructed John on how to create the Sigillium Dei and how to use it. But I restricted myself to the initial scrying session mainly because I was fascinated by what it told me about John Dee.

Here is my account of how John Dee began to talk with angels.

The notebook known as Primus begins thus:
"A faithful declaration to Almighty God for the perpetual memory of the events, written in the year 1582".

It starts with heartfelt prayer; a request by John Dee for wisdom, goodness and power to be bestowed upon him for the honour and glory of all people.

Dee explains that in all the books he has so far read and in all the conversations with all the wise people he could find, he had not yet discovered true wisdom. But he has read in god's books and records how Enoch spoke with god, and that Moses too was given that favour. An almost peeved sounding John Dee goes on to list Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joshua, Gedeon, Esdras, Daniel and Tobias as all given instructions by the angels, and that secrets were handed out by angels.

Next, Dee mentions the 'Shew-stone' which 'the high priests used. Again, rather peeved, John Dee says that god did not refuse to instruct his prophets when they were asked for instructions even by the common people, even for things of a decidedly worldly (aeconomicall -economical) nature. For instance when Samuel asked Saul where he could find his father's lost asses, Saul was able to help. This was a completely mundane use of magic.

Dee continues, in a somewhat perplexed manor to try to persuade god that he is in fact more worthy than many, to receive such revelations.

Next Dee mentions a man called Barnabas Saul (not by name at first) and how he trusts that Saul was sent by god to help him in his work. But he finds a great difference between the way Saul appeared to be in everyday life, compared with Saul as seer.

Dee reproved Saul for his bad behaviours and it sounds as if Saul was none too pleased at that.

Dee persuaded him to behave better by explaining that the angels will not talk through Saul unless he gave up his 'naughtyness', unless he improved he would be 'barred from the mysteries'.

Time to get to work:
1581 December 22.
Dee, after fervent prayer to god asks Saul to use the 'great crystalline globe'.

It sounds as if Dee asked Saul if he could see the angel Aneal there. Why Aneal I have to ask? Saul said that he could see one that answered to that name, but there was also another one there, very beautiful: dressed in yellow that glittered like gold; star beams radiating from its head and fair eyes. The angel wrote on the stone in Hebrew letters of transparent gold. Saul could not read them, so Dee wrote 'after his voice'.

In the crystal was seen a bright star that seemed to rise up and down beside the angel and there was a white dog with a long head; and many other visions appeared as the angel faded whilst the star and dog persisted.

Next there is another angel in the vision. Dee asks 'in the name of god, who are you?

The angle answers 'all power is upon me' meaning I suppose that 'all power is mine'.

Dee asks 'What?' and the angel replies 'bona et mala' which means 'good and bad' but then malevolent is more like it.

More letters appear in the stone.

The next question Dee asks surprised me- 'about the hidden treasure'? and the angel replies (literally): 'have no passion: for these are trifles' . There are by the angels left hand a great pile of dead men's skulls.

The angel asks Dee: 'when is your power'? and Dee replies 'Why ask me about my power'?

The angel continues...and it looks to me as if it says, 'Why? It signifies nothing to me'.

Dee places his crystal ball on top of a frame, and the dialogue is very hard to translate (my version is no doubt wrong! but it looks as if the dialogue is: Dee says to the angel, 'Is someone good assigned to this mirror'

The angel replies 'certainly' and Dee asks 'who'?

The angel writes a name in Hebrew

Dee replies (and I can't untangle this: 'good that not he angel, about from upon to write fit mind?' I assume that Dee is asking if the angel is good...? and the angel replies, 'Maxime' meaning 'to the highest degree'.

Dee goes on, 'what does this signify?'

The angel says, 'Another angel with a different charactor'

Dee asks again, 'why show me now?' and the angel says: 'For a great cause.'

The angel has told Dee that another angel is to come, a bigger and better angel. for this to happen, Dee must prepare with prayer and fasting. Dee is told that the next angel will appear after New years day, but not on the Saboath. The angel instructs Dee to get up as soon as he wakes and to fast and pray, both kneeling and sitting.

The stone is to be placed in sunlight.

Dee concludes his narrative by saying that the angel was ruler (prepositus) of the circle of Venus and chief Governor of this period (of time?)

The date this account was written was 1582, November 20th, a year after the event.

The next entry is made concerning one Mr Edward Talbot who turns up at Mortlake in 1882, a Saturday at 10 AM. John Dee tells Mr Talbot that he needs someone who can help him communicate with angels, and goes to fetch the stone in its frame (given to him by a friend). Dee said that he had been reliably informed that it could be used to contact some good angels to appear in the stone.

Dee asked Talbot to call the angels Anchor, Anachor and Anilos.

Mr Talbot got down on his knees at Dee's desk with the stone placed before him, and started to pray and entreat the angels to come. Dee went to his Oratory and prayed to god for the angels to be sent.

After fifteen minutes Talbot saw one angel and Dee welcomed the angel and asked its name. In his account, Dee says that the angel spoke clearly (to the hearing of Talbot) and said that its name was Uriel...

Uriel tells him that he will give him the instructions on how to read the Tablets of Sogya. Dee exclaims that he has been told that he will live for only two years longer, should he read the tablets, but Uriel tells him that instead he will live one 'hundered and odd' years.

Uriel tells Dee that he must ask for the angel Michael and create the Sigillum Dei which is already shown in a book in Dee's library...

What am I to conclude from this? It seems that there are a sufficiency of people willing to scy for John Dee and it seems that John Dee cannot see anything in the crystal or stone himself, nor actually hear what the angels say. Dee is concerned that evil rather than good angels may start speaking to him and I suppose talking about 'hidden treasure' was a test.

The Book of Enoch was rediscovered in Ethiopia around about 1773, so John Dee did not read that version but he must have read a version.

The next question is: does the bible mention Enoch?
According to Google- Genesis 5:24 And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God tooke him. But John Dee knew that god spoke to Enoch.

Hebrews 11:5 (1611 King James Bible)
By faith Enoch was translated, that he should not see death, and was not found, because God had translated him: For before his translation he had this testimonie, that he pleased God.

Jude 1:14 (1611 King James Bible)
And Enoch also, the seuenth from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord commeth with ten thousands of his Saints, to execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

So, if The Book of Enoch was not a part of the King James bible, was it a part of a previous version of the bible or is it a part of Jewish Torah? Otherwise how did John Dee know that Enoch had talked with god if all the bible says about Enoch is that he was raptured?

I can't be the only person asking this.

Solution (I think) Book of Jubilees.

OK, next question: Uriel said that John Dee had a book in his collection that showed the Sigillium Dei.

What was that book?

Trithemius's The Steganographia, probably!

Where did Trithemius get his lists and names, astral connections and starry charts from? Ramon Lull is one name, Solomon (Key of Solomon) the Lemegeton is most likely the book that inspired Trithemius...

Well this takes me back to the Babylonians; true it is a long way between 1800 BC and the sixteenth century. But I'm not so interested in filling out the missing links, others have already done this I'm sure.

I like to see the different spins added to the original themes. The fundamental notions link back to the first cities, and still so much a part of 'our' culture.

Steganographia...

2011-07-15T15:44:00.001+01:00

Steganography is the art of concealing messages; often by presenting the message obscured by something extraneous to the *real* message, and yet the obscuration is in itself an innocuous message, a mask hiding the messages true intent.

The mind loves this kind of thing and the love of it fuels conspiracy theories and fears of Satanic cults. Orders to terrorists hidden in jpgs of cats, message that may only be consciously heard when a record is played backwards. But Johannes Trithemius seems to have been such a trickster that his books (especially the third in the series on this subject) worked in the opposite direction. Instead of concealing instructions on how to access and use the aethyric realms teeming with angels and demons, Johannes Trithemius put the angels and demons on the outside and concealed within a few innocuous messages such as:

*"The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" in Latin.
*"The bearer of this letter is a rogue and a thief. Guard yourself against him. He wants to do something to you."

Johannes Trithemius wrote three books 1499 that were published in 1508. The first two were ostensibly spells, until someone realised that the mysterious name that heads each section simply indicated which decipherment key to employ.

Meanwhile the third book was regarded until 1998 (Dr.. Reeds) as a *real* book on how to practice magic by communicating with astral forces. In fact lots people still regard Trithemius's book as all about magic...Magic, a word related to Magi, meaning 'Persians* who knew all about astrology...The third book reveals a complicated system of astrological magic that uses numerology, incantations and esoteric alphabets to interface with astral intelligences. Trithemius describes how images of cosmic forces can be etched into wax to capture and communicate with these otherworldly beings; the aim being the acquisition of knowledge.

I was wrong in thinking that John Dee must have read The Book of Enoch. It was the Steganographia that inspired him, and in 1581 John Dee had realised that the only way he could learn the other stuff, was to beg the angels for enlightenment..Book three explained the method.

But I'm left with a problem, I can understand why John Dee took the perilous leap into the dark; I don't understand Johannes Trithemius though, he seemed to be playing with people's beliefs and expectations at some risk to himself of course. The only answer I find most satisfying is that Johannes Trithemius must have been (in the modern sense) a troll!

As a boy in the twenty first century Johannes Trithemius would have a six character long, online, screen name, and be king of hackers. As a thirty seven year old he would write a book that convinced people for at least five hundred years to come, that he had found the way to communicate with the dead and the future unborn via an ultimate computer program; but in truth (when deciphered ) the book would provide nothing more than a handful of bad World of War craft haikus.

I may well be wrong, at the moment I'm judging the Steganographia as a work of intellectual superiority, a grand joke that only 'insiders' would understand. I simply can't tell what he was up to.

One name that comes back, as I try to see where The Book of Enoch fits in with anything (!), is Athanasius Kircher: the guy who was lowered into Vesuvius to see the inner workings of the earth and who wrote a strangely compelling, but erroneous book on Egyptian mythology The Oedipus Aegyptiacus.

Of the three: Trithemius, Dee and Kircher, I cannot say which one was more misleading, unable to distinguish within their own minds between what they wanted to see and what they saw...an art continued by Stukeley.

They remind me that there are two ways to apprehend reality: first, to stay aloof and to dissect appearances, or secondly to enter into the illusion and believe. The third way is a combination, to experience and to question at the same time.

I know that this going off the subject massively, but perhaps it is in this third place that I'd put Philip K Dick.

I'm not in the least bit interested in the 'original language' be it Hebrew (Stukeley's time) or Sanskrit (1900's to at least the 1970's). Call it Adamic (the language Adam spoke) communicated with god, or Enochian. But the Black Iron Prison concept, and VALIS as the organisational, force seems to bring the concepts struggled for by Dee and Trithemius back into the 20th century. The myth of information being all....and knowledge as power.

The Persephone myth is so much easier!

Black mirror..

2011-07-12T18:35:00.002+01:00

The subject of The Book of Enoch, keeps returning to me, hence the title: black mirror. I've given in, I'm following the links and realising yet again that empirical information is blurred by time and by language even.

Basically my desire for straight answers isn't making me a happy bunny.

John Dee's black mirror is on display in the British museum, I have a photo somewhere, but it is rather blurred, possibly that is the way it always looks..anyway, this particular obsidian mirror was brought to Britain from 'The New World' some time after Cortés brought plague and misery to the people of that land, between 1527 and 1530.

If John Dee had known more would he have dared look into it?

Yes, pushing the boundaries of knowledge was for him worth everything.

John Dee's obsidian mirror was, according to Sir Horace Walpole 'The Black Stone into which Dr Dee used to call his spirits'.

But what did Dr Dee learn from the angels?
And why make the Calls?

My usable copy of John Dee's Enochian magic is the tarot pack designed by Alister Crowley. Fascinating how the original is like pure code, whilst the Crowley edition is a GUI (graphic user interface).

But back to the original, the metaphysical owner of the obsidian mirror is Smoking Mirror, Tezcatlipoca. I would classify him (from a safe distance) as the Lord of rulers, a black-sun, Vril-drenched edition of Apollo, and Apollo is a god of divination because the sun sees all...So John Dee got that bit right.

But how did John Dee's book of Enochian magic become a part of the twentieth century? Alister Crowley published in a 1912 edition of The Equinox, a description of Enochian magic. There was also, a Golden Dawn Enochian Magic.

How these two versions differ I've yet to find out.

The online version of The Book of Enoch (1917) starts with this introduction:

The Book of Enoch, written during the second century B.C.E., is one of the most important non-canonical apocryphal works, and probably had a huge influence on early Christian, particularly Gnostic, beliefs. Filled with hallucinatory visions of heaven and hell, angels and devils, Enoch introduced concepts such as fallen angels, the appearance of a Messiah, Resurrection, a Final Judgement, and a Heavenly Kingdom on Earth. Interspersed with this material are quasi-scientific digressions on calendrical systems, geography, cosmology, astronomy, and meteorology.

So, let's start at the beginning; Enoch was the prophet of Genesis. Enoch's eyes are opened by god and he is able to see and hear the angels.

The angels show him the end of the world.

In chapter VI the angels tell Enoch how they lusted after the daughter's of men, and went down to Mt Hermon- Gilgamesh passes near Mount Hermon in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where it was called Saria by Sumerians, "Saria and Lebanon tremble at the felling of the cedars". In Deuteronomy it is Mt Sion, and for the Canaanites it was Mount Ba'al-Hermon.

and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it. And these are the names of their leaders: Sêmîazâz, their leader, Arâkîba, Râmêêl, Kôkabîêl, Tâmîêl, Râmîêl, Dânêl, Êzêqêêl, Barâqîjâl, Asâêl, Armârôs, Batârêl, Anânêl, Zaqîêl, Samsâpêêl, Satarêl, Tûrêl, Jômjâêl, Sariêl.

The result is a race of monsters, and misery and bloodshed. But the angels also taught mankind metalwork, astrology, magic (in Sumerian terms, the angels gave mankind the Me; in Dawkin's language: memes). These angels are known as The Watchers (confusing because in The Book of Daniel, the Watchers are the obedient angels).

The souls of the dead arise to heaven where the good angels hear reports of what is happening on earth.

And then Michael, Uriel, Raphael, and Gabriel looked down from heaven and saw much blood being shed upon the earth, and all lawlessness being wrought upon the earth

The good angels seem more angry that men now have 'The Holy Me' than about the problems on earth to be honest.

God sends Uriel to tell Noah to prepare for the flood and sends the other angels to heal the corruption of earth, and to seal the Watchers under the earth (like Zeus throwing the Titans down into Tartarus). The good angels are also to kill the half-human, half-angel offspring and then to restore the ground by planting olive trees and vines and fruit trees.

In Chapter XII The Watchers call Enoch, and Enoch having a massive attack of deja vu tells the angels what is going to happen -how there will be war between angels and how the renegade angels are to be sealed under the earth and their children, murdered:

Then I went and spoke to them all together, and they were all afraid, and fear and trembling seized them. And they besought me to draw up a petition for them that they might find forgiveness, and to read their petition in the presence of the Lord of heaven. For from thenceforward they could not speak (with Him) nor lift up their eyes to heaven for shame of their sins for which they had been condemned. Then I wrote out their petition, and the prayer in regard to their spirits and their deeds individually and in regard to their requests that they should have forgiveness and length of days. And I went off and sat down at the waters of Dan, in the land of Dan, to the south of the west of Hermon: I read their petition till I fell asleep.

Enoch has a dream

I saw visions of chastisement, ⌈and a voice came bidding (me)⌉ I to tell it to the sons of heaven, and reprimand them. And when I awaked, I came unto them, and they were all sitting gathered together, weeping in ’Abelsjâîl, which is between Lebanon and Sênêsêr, with their faces covered. And I recounted before them all the visions which I had seen in sleep, and I began to speak the words of righteousness, and to reprimand the Watchers.

Chapter XIV Enoch goes in to see god. I think the text says that the Watchers are to be as demons and evil spirits on the earth, deprived of their physical form...the text then goes on to be a travel journal describing many portals for winds and stars and different kinds of hells for different kinds of beings.

There is also mention of a beautiful tree

And the seventh mountain was in the midst of these, and it excelled them in height, resembling the seat of a throne: and fragrant trees encircled the throne. And amongst them was a tree such as I had never yet smelt, neither was any amongst them nor were others like it: it had a fragrance beyond all fragrance, and its leaves and blooms and wood wither not for ever: and its fruit ⌈⌈is beautiful, and its fruit⌉⌉ resembles the dates of a palm

which reminds me of the 'beautiful tree' in the Tibetan map of the universe, and the 'Wishing trees', the Kiskanu tree -in the temple of Enki in Eridu there was 'planted upon Absu' a Holy tree, the kiskanu [Garden of the gods (Sumerian paradise)] Enoch travels further into a forest of beautiful trees and the text rambles and repeats itself, its tenses are mixed up, it needs to be read very slowly and carefully.

John Dee's notebooks were preserved through the centuries and found their way to Elias Ashmole, the first (documented) Freeman. Elias tried to create some kind of magical system from them.

The diaries are now in the British Museum.

Alister Crowley was the first to publish notes on Enochian magic in the Eqinox (1912). A Golden Dawn version was published in 1937/40 and again in 1969.

"You must use a four square table, two cubits square,whereon must be set the Sigillum Dei, which is already per-fected in a book of thine: Blessed be God in all his mysteries and Holy in all his work.

This Seal must not be looked upon-without great reverence and devotion. This Seal is to be made of perfect wax:

I mean wax that is purified; we have no respect of colors.

This Seal must be nine inches in diameter, the roundness must be twenty-seven inches or somewhere more; the thickness of it must be an inch and half a quarter, and the figure of a cross must be on the back side of it."

The work began on March 8, 1581. Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley worked together, Edward Kelley looked into the obsidian mirror and Dr Dee recorded what Edward Kelley saw. The information was decoded using a large tablet of 49 one-inch squares which constituted the four Watchtower Tablets and the Tablet of Union.

The forty-eight Enochian Calls were also worked out using the same method.

The language was called Enochian because the dictating angel, Ave, was said to have originally given the tablets to Enoch. This is puzzling, did John Dee have the Tablet of Union before commencing his work with Kelley, or was the tablet the first thing the angels gave to them?

I remember hearing that John Dee had a book called something like 'Steneographia' which I guess was about codes? Enochian is puzzling, nevertheless.

The Golden Dawn took Dee's work and heavily modified it into a workable system of magic. It included ceremonial ritual, skrying and astral projection. It also included a four-handed chess game with divination as a subsystem. The basis for the Golden Dawn's Enochian system were the Four Great Watchtowers which were subdivided into the Four Elemental Tablets' and a smaller one called the Tablet of Union which is associated with the fifth element, Spirit.

And that is just about as far as I can go with this for now!

Ashkelon.

2011-07-07T15:27:00.001+01:00

I thought I'd got this whole thing worked out. I even thought that I was just about ready to give the bible a read (as it the easiest to find Bronze Age text)

Then I realized that I hadn't a clue about who the Philistines were.

OK, well for me history starts with the Sumerians "The black-headed people", their culture became via a close cultural symbiosis with their neighbours, Akkadian (2800 BC is the oldest, Akkadian text).

At the beginning of the second millennium BC, West Semitic people created kingdoms including and around the city of Mari. They 'take over' but still use Akkadian for writing. They compose the Enûma Eliš, they have the king Hammurabi -and plenty more!

The Akkadian word for them is Amurru, via the Old Testament we call them Amorites.

At the same time, related tribes invaded what is now Palestine. Amorites who stayed up in the hills stayed as 'Amorites' whilst those who lived closer to the sea were called Canaanites from Akkadian Kinahhu (meaning: purple dye).

The North coast Canaanites were called Phoenicians by the Greeks and their cities were Tyre, Sidon and Byblos. They had many colonies, including Cyprus.

All of these are Ugarit culture...I think.

The Romans called the Phoenicians at Carthage Poeni. So any thing Ugarit found in Italy, Sicily or North Africa, gets labelled, Punic.

From the east of the Canaanites (or Phoenicians, or Kinahhu which ever name you fancy) territory there is another set of tribes known as Aramaeans, probably semi-nomadic pastoralists from northern Syria and northern Mesopotamia and around for a long time before 1200 BC. Naram-Sin of Akkad mentioned Aram as a place name, and a people or place of Aram was mentioned by in texts found in Mari written 1900 BC, and Ugarit in about 1300 BC.

From 1000 BC, Damascus was their central city and their language became the language of the Jews, of government and, for want of a better word, eclipsed Akkadian. The Aramaic religion was considered to be 'heavily Hellenised' how or why, is another question.

But who are the Philistines?

Ashkelon was once:

...one of the five cities of the Philistines (Josh. 13:3; 1 Sam. 6:17). It stood on the shore of the Mediterranean, 12 miles north of Gaza. It is mentioned on an inscription at Karnak in Egypt as having been taken by king Rameses II., the oppressor of the Hebrews. In the time of the judges (Judg. 1:18) it fell into the possession of the tribe of Judah; but it was soon after retaken by the Philistines (2 Sam. 1:20), who were not finally dispossessed till the time of Alexander the Great. Samson went down to this place from Timnath, and slew thirty men and took their spoil. The prophets foretold its destruction (Jer. 25:20; 47:5, 7). It became a noted place in the Middle Ages, having been the scene of many a bloody battle between the Saracens and the Crusaders. It was beseiged and taken by Richard the Lion-hearted, and "within its walls and towers now standing he held his court." Among the Tell Amarna tablets are found letters or official despatches from Yadaya, "captain of horse and dust of the king's feet," to the "great king" of Egypt, dated from Ascalon. It is now called 'Askalan. [LINK]

The Philistines had five cities. Still don't know who they were, but at least there is a location. Ashkelon was called Hieropolis or Bambyce. Herodotus describes a temple there, the oldest temple, he says, to Aphrodite (Atargatis) in the world. Another such temple 'is to be found in Cyprus'. The god Hadad (Akkadian Adad) all fury, thunder and wind was Atargatis's consort. As the people there seem to be speaking Phoenician he was Baal (the Lord) and she, Belit (Lady). The term Belit is used sometimes in English translations of Mesopotamian myth, but I've never seen the heavily loaded word Baal.

Lucian (whose book I've yet to find) and who died in AD 180 described the temple of Atargatis. Fortunately, other people have copied and pasted so I can add to the copy and paste fest:

It was richly decorated, with a golden ceiling and doors, and inside it, the statue of Atargatis was also made of gold and displayed with Hadad's. While He was enthroned on two bulls, She sat on two lions (like Astarte), holding in one hand a scepter, in the other a distaff; around Her waist was a girdle that Lucian identifies with the cestus of Aphrodite, the magic belt that made Her irresistible when worn. Her crown was in the form of a tower (the mural crown, signifying possession or rule over a city) and rays were depicted behind Her head. This statue was covered with gems and jewels from all over, and in Her crown was a great red jewel that lit up the room. Lucian also says that no matter where you were in the room the statue's eyes always looked directly at you.

So much of this is confusing; I haven't got the picture yet.

But it is quite clear that the Queen of Heaven, is erased in an effort to create a new religion based on a distant sky-god, and, to achieve this everything possible is done to appear not-Canaanite, or un-Phoenician. The rite of seething a calf in its mother's milk becomes never mix meat with dairy, and no one (except Robert Popper, and exponents of Death Metal) can use the word, Baal. The Phoenicians are accused of terrible things and...and...so who was Tanit?

Tanit was the Queen of Heaven in Carthage, and her consort was Melqart. I went along with the idea that Melqart was a form of Meslemtea (or Nergal, as he is known to his friends) but I no longer see the connection as strongly.

Melqart translates as 'King of the town'...so basically, the king is 'he who marries Tanit' I think. The other name: Baal-Hamon means 'Lord of many'. The stone that the drawing is copied from, is actually a burial marker, set up over the cremated remains of children and small animals.

Tanit is represented by the triangle, and upright arms figure. The icons at the top make this look like a boundary stone (following the Akkadian tradition of sun, star and Venus at the top of boundary markers).

The Omegas on the top of the arrows, again from Akkadian look a little like the symbol used to represent the birthing hut and the arrows may represent Meslemtea (plague arrows, rather like Apollo). So perhaps I'm wrong and Melqart does have war god, cthonic connections?

The square is new to me though, I've no idea about what it could mean.

It is interesting that 'Venus' has become a dot, and that the moon has been placed with the triangle to make another figure.

Some people see the Tanit symbol as a boat carrying the sun over a pyramid, a 'cardines mundi' (hinges of the world) hmm. Possibly only people who think Egyptian mythology is the bees knees? I see what they mean, but there isn't a boat of millions, a solar barge in Mesopotamian myth. The moon may ride on a boat, the gods may ride on boats, but there is no Otherworld connection, unlike the 'Book of Gates' Amduaat in Thutmoses III's tomb.

The Akkadians seemed to regard cremation as taking the spirit of the dead person directly to the gods in the rising smoke. This was not a good thing. Humans are like apes compared to gods, the gods would not be pleased to see you. Sacrifices on the other hand, and now I look at the marker I see an almost chilling representation of ascension and then descent via the birth hut symbol to the ground, sacrifices would be reborn...again, no hint of rebirth myth in Akkadian. I don't know about Carthage, but that's what the pictures seem to say.

The photo of the stone is here: [LINK].

The little dark house...

2011-07-03T21:53:00.004+01:00

Bryn Celli Ddu is old, older than it looks. The post holes at Bryn Celli Ddu were dated from remains of pine charcoal as belonging to 4000 BC. So Bryn Celli Ddu was in use before the Neolithic period. Wooden posts (or stones) placed in line seem to be a Mesolithic feature.

But 4000 BC is usually considered to be the beginning of the Neolithic, a time of cattle, bread, barley and stew...farming and settlements.

The post holes are located some five yards beyond the entrance, and archaeologist Julian Thomas (1991) made the logical connection between them and the 'A' holes at Stonehenge:

"It seems likely that (they) record a series of observations upon the rising of some heavenly body in order to ascertain its standstill position."

Considering the moon, Clive Ruggles wrote:

"The only possibility is the northern minor limit of the moon, and while the adjacent posts are ranged on the correct side to record the position, say, of the midwinter full moonrise in years before and after the minor standstill, many other interpretations of these posts are doubtless possible."

Posts are difficult, one would like to know how tall they were and to know what else was contemporary with them. I'm reminded of the Mesolithic post holes covered over by Stonehenge car park.

During the Neolithic, a stone circle and henge were added; at the time when the ring of Stenness, and Maes Howe, and Newgrange (Meas Howe aligned to the midwinter setting sun, Newgrange aligned to rising sun of midwinter) were being constructed (around 3,000 B.C.) a henge was built, consisting of a circular array of 14 standing stones, surrounded by a ditch about 30 metres in diameter and 5 metres broad. There may have been a causeway across the henge to where the burial chamber now stands. The 1928 excavation revealed a pit at the centre of the henge in which a fire had been set. This had been covered over with a stone slab and a human ear-bone was found.

The passage tomb, something similar to the one you see today (it has been heavily reconstructed) contained a pillar and a bowl. Sometime around 1865, Capt. F.D Lukis entered the tomb and investigated the pillar within the chamber, ashes and burnt human bones were found at its base. On one side away from the main entrance, a shallow clay bowl was found. It contained an ox skeleton, its head turned so that it would face straight into the entrance of the chamber passage.

There was evidence of fires, of hearths either side of the entrance, and broken white quartz was found all over the site, particularly at the entrance. Between and in front of the hearths was a small mound that contained a cremation of an adult male, his ashes were mixed to some extent with stones which may have lined his grave. He was buried without any beaker, or any artifacts. It as been suggested that by W.J. Hemp at least, that he may have been placed there when the grave was finally sealed.

The bowls interest me, both Knowth and Dowth, contained bowls. Dowth has a midwinter sunset alignment, Knowth an equinox alignment (like the Hougue Bie 3500 B.C. in Jersey).

Bryn Celli Ddu also has a carved stone:

So a midsummer alignment is odd...

Lets turn the diagram around:

The entrance is north-east (as usual).
What are the differences and similarities between the sun's positions at midsummer, and midwinter?

Midsummer sunrise: 21 Jun 2011 4:55 am. Azimuth 49° degrees.
Midsummer sunset: 21:33 pm. Azimuth 311° degrees.

Midwinter sunrise: 21 December 2011. 08:16 am. Azimuth 128° degrees.
Midwinter sunset: 16:06 pm. Azimuth 232° degrees.

This means that the midwinter sun sets directly opposite to its sunrise.
The midsummer sun rise is in the north-east.
But there is no midwinter sun set or sun rise is within the north-east.

For the equinox:
Spring -21 Mar 2011.
Sunrise at 06:14 am. Azimuth 89°.
Sunset 18:27 pm. Azimuth 272°.

Autumn -22 September 2011.
Sunrise at 06:58 am. Azimuth 88°
Sunset at 19:12 pm. Azimuth 271°

So the equinox sun (which rises and sets in more or less the same place twice a year) may well shine into the tomb. I personally find the equinox time more interesting as far as sun and moon are concerned, especially the equinox full moon. The equinox full moon is always in the east, this year, the September full moon and sunrise are both in the north east, at practically the same azimuth -so, is it true to say, as a rule of thumb when the full moon rises in the same place as the sun, that marks the Autumn equinox?

And then there is Venus...with its eight year cycle.
When Venus is a morning star it rises in the east.

Using the chart for this year's autumn equinox, at the time of sunrise -about 7 am, I see that Venus morning star, is located at an azimuth of −83.325° (!). The chart says:

Azimuth in the above table follows the astronomical convention: zero degrees is South with positive angles toward the West and negative angles toward the East.

So that means an azimuth (when north =0) must be 97° degrees. One hour before, Venus is in the north east at 85° degrees. Each transition from an evening, to a morning star takes nine months, but it isn't very easy to find out where Venus actually is! Other than to say that Venus is in the same place once every eight years, possibly there are four out of eight years when Venus may shine through a light box.... and the chart I'm using doesn't make much sense to me.

As ever, the only way to really know is to be there and see.

And then there is the Venus transit, this takes place next year in June and wont happen again 121.5 years have passed, definitely a last chance to see.

But finally, regards the idea that a child conceived or born (I'm not sure which?) under the light of the morning star (or better still, of Venus and Mercury) will be super bright -like the star- comes I think from a mistaken understanding of how the Akkadians understood the connection between kingship and Venus. A king had to be the beloved of Ishtar to reign; everyone has a personal god, but kingship was more than the fate of an individual, it was the fate of the city. Hence the hieros gamos, the sacred wedding between the king and the goddess's representative, be it symbolic (a statue) or with a priestess. The rite continued in Carthage, where the king became Melqart and married Tanit. The idea of the fortunate star is played out in the story of the three kings following a star...

In Akkadian understanding, it is quite possible that the god may leave you bereft and at the mercy of ill winds and demons. A god is responsible for all good things that happen to one, for your good reputation, and personal power and health. But I don't see any record of the stars in the sky affecting which god chooses you, or the positions of the stars changing your intelligence or personality.

As I said before, the stars show the god's will. Celestial events can be predicted, sacrifices made, crisis averted. But the notion of celestial events affecting personality or what happened to an individual, via gravity of flux, didn't seem to be there...

I may well be very wrong about that, but astrology as we know it, seems to be born of a scientific age.

Bryn Celli Ddu.

2011-06-28T12:44:00.002+01:00

Thanks to Hobgoblin for reminding me a location tattooed on my soul.

Venus has more than one meaning, more than a star, more than Lucifer; meanings common to all and meanings that are deeply personal..

In my view, the true function, both now and in the past of Bryn Celli Ddu and all the 'old' places is as repositories, sacred libraries. For the Neolithic and Bronze Age sites belong to a time when narratives were allowed to contain gods, demons and the deeply irrational, they provide space for our minds to enter the sacred and to remember, for we have no where else to catch such old dreams....

When I think of location as a place one visits and then moves on from, I think of the Taoist or Buddhist maxim, that one cannot step into the same river twice...I think of linear time (Djed) and it reminds me of the life as journey narrative.

And when I think of life as journey I hear this parental voice saying, 'don't dwell on things so much dear!' as if I should be moving on, making progress, getting somewhere.

Another way to think of time is (Neheh) circular time; all locations coexist, one can step into the same river twice, and be washed away to drown many times.

When I think of Bryn Celli Ddu it is with mixed feelings. I should go back, actually I want to go back, after all I owe the Dark places my life. But it still makes me taste metal when I think of it.

Call it post traumatic stress?

Bryn Celli Ddu, the Dark house opened for me the first of the seven gates of Irkalla. My soul stepped over the threshold, whilst 'I' remained by the first gate, as the faithful scribe; this was one of the most important lessons of my life, perhaps it is something dear old Granddaddy Jung gave me? there must be some part of oneself ' outside' of the catabasis experience, to record and to seek help, armed with knowledge and able to call on the gods.

I don't remember going inside the dark, but I know what is in there.

I can taste the car fumes, I can feel the disorientation and I fear the distant cries.

In the upper world, as my life was falling apart, Bryn Celli Ddu represented my death by suicide.

Surrounded by utter chaos, I sat down in the house of ash and wrote a poem called Bryn Celli Ddu, visualising the dark pillar, daring to look over the lip of the bowl, into the darkness. I wrote as a way to come to terms; the pain I was experiencing was too much. I couldn't function. I couldn't get out to save myself without casting my pain, like a net of poisoned threads, onto my children, my husband.

Yet the decision was made.
I chose death.

Obviously I'm still here....

Saved by sex as raw as the thousand volts that shock the quivering heart back to life, and by a dream. Sorry, I should say it was Prozac and CBT, but it wasn't..nor will it ever be, I don't work that way.

Concerning Venus, at first the Inanna myth did not fit. I had not chosen to listen to the Great Below, I had not chosen to enter the Dark house. In the dream it was the enemy, 'The Dark Sister' who merged into me and offered me her strength.

Latter in talking to someone who had been compelled to make a film of the Descent myth, I began to see in the original story some deep truths that had applied to my own life. I still cannot think of a better description of the agony of bone-shattering depression than the meat-hook.

Finally, for me the Descent of Inanna concerns partnership and marriage in particular, it contains a warning and some advice...

But back to the upper world of connections, is Bryn Celli Ddu aligned on Venus? For me it was enough that the pillar and the bowl represented my true Mother (the earth) and her bowl contained 'the perilous vision', be that a reflection of my self, or the ash of my own cremated remains.

I didn't connect the place with Inanna (all love and war and passion), but the Descent myth helped me to make sense of the dream I needed to dream before I could save myself. The name Bryn Celli Ddu means something like little hill in the valley-dark, but in my mind it was the Dark house. Visiting it provided the grit to create the pearl, or rather helped me to make sense...The ability to create a narrative is innate, but the stories we are given sometimes need a physical place, a stone, some ground. Bryn Celli Ddu provided that for me.

Five point stars...

2011-06-26T20:54:00.000+01:00

The Sumerians, and the Akkadians didn't use five point stars very often..

And Venus/Ishtar or Inanna is not represented by a five point star, ever..there, I've said it!

No really, this whole thing about the Babylonians designating Ishtar with a five point star looks like total rubbish to me. I can't remember a single occasion when I have seen a five point star in a Mesopotamian image.

The basic star symbol represents the title Dingir -meaning god, especially in the first millennium BC

There is an archaic word that people say means corner (ub) and was drawn as a five point star, they say...

But actually it is more like a box with triangles added. It is hard to translate it, because I know so little. But it seems to mean something like the four quarters, meaning the area, or (in this case) the area of the world.

The next 'word' is translated as: (Old Babylonian) villages, settlements; the inhabited world; totality, world

So, no.
I don't see any connection between the 'Babylonians' and the five point Venus star.

The Egyptians, on the other hand, frequently used a five point star symbol as this image from the tomb of Tuthmosis III (1425 BC) shows. It is possible that the five point star (within a circle) means the Duat (the night-time Netherworld through which the sun rides the solar ship...).

Stars may also represent gods, and that's sort of an end to it.

Except perhaps there is a Venus alignment for some prehistoric monuments, but I don't think I'm going any further with this subject.

Venus.

2011-06-25T20:40:00.003+01:00

Everyone knows that the planet Venus has the pentagram as its symbol right. But why? and how long has there been a connection between the star shape and the prettiest star?

Anything I write from this point on will reveal how bad I am at mathematics, nevertheless, I want to work this thing out.

So: Venus goes 13 times around the sun for every 8 orbits of Earth. This must mean that Venus is in the same place in the sky (same date, same time) once every eight years I think...

Venus is linked to the Fibonacci series via the ratio of Earth's 13 to the 8 of Venus. The Fibonacci series describes the ratio that creates spiral sea-shells, or the pattern of seeds in a sunflower.

The Fibonacci numbers are: 0.1.1.2.3, 5, 8, 13, 21. So one could predict (but in my case can't see it!) that Venus would make some kind of pretty patten, or at least a regular pattern when observed. So it is that people say, Venus traces an almost perfect geometrical shape.

But not from where I'm standing.

Newton, on the other hand...but he was very good at maths!

Four thousand years ago, the view from space (let alone the sure and certain knowledge that we were atop a ball of rock rotating around a star) wasn't available. The most logical way to solve this mystery of Venus as linked to a pentangle star-shape is to remain earth bound and look at sky maps showing the stars above me for the same day and time and location for eight years recording where Venus is, and then draw a line between them and see if it makes a star!

I have just done that, and convinced myself that I get a kind of warped five point star shape.

The Mesopotamian tablets that describes the movements of stars, sun and moon are known as The Enuma Anu Enlil. Tablet 63 is the Venus tablet of Ammisaduqa, (1750 BC) mostly it describes Venus's position and provides something along the lines of 'red sky at night, shepherd's delight' information: 'Venus enters the sun, or Venus enters the furrow and the wind blows'. There is some discussion about the colour of clouds seen around Venus, but mostly we are in Old Moore's Almanac territory:

"The gods of the land will decide the case of the land for evil. Enlil will hang the plow of the land on a peg...."

The Enuma Elish which may have been written around the same time or after The Enuma Anu Enlil describes Marduk creating the heavens and the earth from the body of Tiamat with the stars as the domains of the gods, and setting out the order of their movements. Any disorder such as an eclipse (even though it was predictable) was considered to be unfortunate. The gods would purposely cause plagues and war, the signs in the sky meant that appeasement of the particular god whose star was signalling the warning, was possible and disaster could be averted.

We are no better off, from the Internet it appears to me that people are not too sure whether or not to believe that Venus has an effect on the economy, or a child born when Mercury and Venus are in the sky may be the Messiah, or if Saturn in conjunction with Mars causes earthquakes.

In Mesopotamia, 1100 BC, people had a theory that explained causation of dire events, and explained why the celestial event didn't always correlate with the predicted event.

We live in a time when the Popparian dictum of being able to falsify, but never to prove a theory, is supposed to reign. Each of us is supposed to enjoy science, enjoy uncertainty and to prefer boldly facing the unknown...But we are not very different from the people of Mesopotamia.

But, more often than not Ishtar/Inanna is shown holding the rings in her hands -metal(?) loop symbol of a ring-headed doorpost. Sometimes she is shown with a star, but usually and eight point star (as in the eight years of it's rotation?) and not a pentagram.

So I don't see any strong connection with the deamonically satanic pentagram and Venus as Inanna.

Whilst there is certainly a connection between Inanna and the planet Venus; the Sumerian stories Inana and Shu-kale-tuda: translation and The Descent can both be interpreted as linking her with the visible movement of the planet.

And prehistoric, Neolithic connections with the planet?
I've only heard it said of Newgrange.

Hakpen...

2011-06-24T14:28:00.005+01:00

It bothers me, this name Hakpen, this idea of a serpent path from the trinity of Avebury to the Sanctuary. It bothers me that I haven't read Stukeley's book, but there isn't much I can do about that.

The reason why Stukeley put a serpent with the Holy Trinity of Avebury isn't so hard to understand, just I was being a bit thick!

Now I don't really know why Stukeley did anything, or thought anything that he did. But I am assuming that the Freemason's G we see today, has always stood for Gnosis meaning wisdom, knowledge: God, Geometry and The Great Work.

Gnosticism in short describes spirit confined by matter; and a god that is mad, bad and dangerous to know. But knowledge, gnosis, is redemption.

I keep forgetting that Shamhat stands in the place of the snake, because there isn't a serpent in the garden of Eden moment in the Sumerian story that becomes Adam and Eve and The Fall. In the Sumerian story, Shamhat the prostitute is the temptation that brings knowledge, in other words she is the 'serpent' . And the knowledge she gives to Enkidu is how to be human. She gives him a bath, and beer, cooked food and company. Before Shamhat, Enkidu was at one with nature, running free with the animals and eating grass.

It is likely that the bible sees the whole thing from Enkidu's point of view; before Shamhat he was happy being an animal. After Shamhat, running around, having adventures with the renegade king Gilgamesh, got him killed.

So I suppose, 'eating the apple' was a mistake, sort of..

Well anyway, in the Gnostic version the serpent is Christ and the redemptive knowledge symbolised by that apple is the Morpheus moment of the blue (or was it the red?) pill. And Shamhat becomes Mary Magdalene and onwards, onwards, Gnostic stuff, erm... the Shekhina.

Was Trinity the Shekina?
Oh for goodness sake!

But I'm going too far and too fast again, missing out the Orphic stuff -I want it on record, I have never bonded with the Orphic stuff, it annoys me, I try not to think about it! It is Gnosticism, in other words, Plato. And Plato annoys me (sorry, that's just how it gets you sometimes!).

The point?
So yeah, Stukeley was a Freemason, he wanted to see in the landscape signs of ancient wisdom, he saw a sinuous path starting at Beckhampton, connecting Avebury to the Sanctuary.

From Stukeley's point of view, the wisdom hidden by the ancients in this case looked like a snake. Obviously it is the serpent that brings knowledge to man. And what is that knowledge? Well first we see our predicament (always living at the edge of death) secondly we wake up to our 'true' nature. And our True Nature is? As in the Orphic myth: half god and half monster; in Gnosticism we are Divine spirit shackled to this world by chains of ignorance; this world with its physical, institutional and psychological limitations -in modern parlance, Gnosticism is libertarian.

It's kind of OK, but kind of not.

So that's that, why (according to me), why Stukeley called the rings of standing stones, The Serpent's Head.

And it mattered so much to him that he made up a story about pseudo-Hebrew words being used by the locals to authenticate his vision.

Stukley's vision grew, like the Lambton Worm, into Lhung-Mai (dragon paths) and other wonderful theories that embellish this world with meaning and I wish that I hadn't got the sort of mind I have (like I really do wish I'd stick to the point!) but I can't help but think something like: serpent and knowledge and Lucifer the fallen angel of knowledge and Venus the pentangle star...isn't Venus pretty bright and a bit weird? linked to Lucifer by a sex change? -Inanna/Ishtar via The Whore of Babylon to Lucifer? (I mean I know nothing about stars or planets but...) but doesn't Venus fall out of the sky at Michaelmas (equinox?) wouldn't Venus be something you would notice if you could see the sky without street lamps getting in the way, and you were into that kind of thing?

So, ah I get it the Sanctuary is a Temple to Lucifer!!!!
I jest.

Seriously, has anyone thought about Venus and stone circles? Ha, bet the Masons have, bet Dan Brown has too! but does it matter to my story?

A connection between Venus and the descent into the Underworld is 'The Descent of Inanna'.

The descent of Inanna is the cause for vegetation to die, but Inanna is not an Underworld deity, so I suppose that thinking of Inanna as 'The Shekina' or calling her Lucifer are too far off the point for now.

See, I sympathise with Stukeley, he is a bit like my shadow. Stukeley saw what he wanted to see (don't we all) he then went on shamelessly to lie about it...or did he really believe what he thought? Am I so good at seeing my own self-deceptions that I can criticise Stukeley?

I can't know.

So much of this story is going to end in I can't know...

02 July 2011.
Notes from William Stukeley: science, religion, and archaeology in eighteenth-century By David Boyd Haycock.

In the second century AD Tacitus wrote that "The Egyptians" in their animal pictures were the first to represent thought by symbols: these the earliest documents of human history, are visible today, impressed upon stone

Plotinus, a Romano-Greek philosopher (AD 205-269/70) who developed the Neoplotonic interpretation of Egyptian hieroglyphs in the eighth treatise of his fifth Ennead, 'On the Intelligible Beauty'. There he wrote that the 'wise men of Egypt...either by scientific or innate knowledge' drew images in their temples that 'every image is a kind of knowledge and wisdom and is a subject of statements, all together in one, and not a discourse of elaboration'.

Plotinus concluded that this type of beauty 'exists before research and before reasoning'.

In the late fifteenth century Marsilio Ficino translated Plotinus's Enneads, and from then on Egyptian Hieroglyphs were interpreted as a divinely-inspired form of symbolic writing.

William Warburton would attack this idea that Egyptian hieroglyphs were mystical symbols concealing dogmas in his book, Divine Legation of moses, seeing them instead as a purely practical method of recording historical events, laws and history.

Stukeley disagreed strongly with him, they had, "very many and warm disputes...In short we never could agree in our notions about them, about the hieroglyphs, the mysteries or of antiquities in general"

Stukeley did not believe that the Egyptians worshiped the statues of the gods placed within the temples, rather, the statues were symbolic devices which would draw down the influence, or blessings. His interpretation came from his reading of Kircher, who in Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652-1654) examined the works of Plato and the Neoplatonists: Plotinus and Iamblichus. It was Kircher who identified the hieroglyph of the globe, serpent and wings as a form of the divine trinity.

Stukeley wrote: "All writers Jewish and Christian with one mouth assert'. The snake's practice of shedding its skin "and returning to youth again" was "A fit emblem of [Christ's] resurrection from the dead, and of returning to an immortal life". The circle "in hieroglyphs means, divine" and was a clear symbol for god who, as described by Hermes Trismagistos, was "without beginning and ending, whose center is everywhere and circumference no where". The wings, the final part of the trinity were not physically represented in Avebury because of the difficulty of illustrating them using stone. But they would have represented the Holy spirit "the moving and penetrative person of power of the deity"

Why North-East?

2011-06-23T11:17:00.004+01:00

This has two answers, or at least two places to start to answer..

First, there is the real experience.
Second, there is the virtual, the ideas that people use.

Finally, there is the truth...and that's kind of hard to find!

So, let's start with the real, it is true that Stonehenge and Woodhenge have a north east entrance, and that the east side of the Sanctuary is the area that had the most 'use'. The summer solstice sun rises in the NE. The moon, too, rises in the East, and sometimes the north east.

Being more specific now; thinking of Woodhenge and the Sanctuary and looking at charts that show information on the rise and setting of the sun and moon. But without being there to check it out myself...

The midwinter full moon gets the closest to the North of all the moons.

North East on a compass is 45 degrees.
Midsummer sun rise is at 49 degrees.
The most NE moon rises this year is 51 degrees.
The solstices and equinoxes happen during the period between the 18th and the 23rd of the months: solstices -December and June, equinoxes occur in March and September.

In January, February and March full moons rise towards the East and cross the Northern sky to set increasingly in the North West. The New moons go the other way, rising at first in the South East and progressing with each new moon rise, towards the East, and set in the South West. The March full moon and new moon rise in the East -between an azimuth of 83 and 86 degrees- with only a few degrees of difference between them. If you want to know when it is March, wait for the full and new moons to rise from the same place.

In April, May and June the full moons have swapped places with the new moons. The full moons rise in the South East and set in the South West. The new moons rise in the North-East and set in the North-West.

In July, August and September the new moons still rise in the North East but are now moving towards the East and setting in the North West. The full moons are moving from South East towards true East, with the most easterly full moon almost at true East. The September full moon does an odd thing, it crosses the path of the sun into the West; I mean it crosses the 270 degree line just a fraction. This is the only time in the year when the moon does this.

For October, November and December the full moon is back in the North East and heading North to hang like the Queen of Ghosts at the entrance to Stonehenge -Aubrey Burl considered the moon to have been the more important celestial 'marker'for the Neolithic people- and the new moons are turning away from the East, heading West.

So that's it, all the information I have regarding north-east. William Stuckeley, on the other hand:

was one of the first learned gentlemen to be attracted to speculative freemasonry, newly fashionable after the appointment of the first noble Grand Master. His Diary and Commonplace Book of June 6, 1721 says "I was made a Freemason at the Salutation Tav., Tavistock Street, with Mr. Collins, Capt. Rowe, who made the famous diving Engine." The same entry says he was the first person for many years who had been so made in London; there was great difficulty in finding sufficient members to perform the Ceremony; and immediately thereafter "Freemasonry took a run and ran itself out of breath through the folly of its members." His diary and papers are among the earliest sources on the subject of the new Grand Lodge.[Quote from Wiki]

This guy can tell you about the Freemason symbol of circles better than I:

The only thing that surprised me, after trying to get to grips with the Freemasons use of symbols, yesterday, is how similar their use of symbolism is to the lexicon of symbols I learnt when studying Tibetan Buddhism. Both 'schools' use a Platonic description of the universe, both use Pythagorean forms and symbols, both have the concept of unity -bringing mind, body, spirit and universe-into harmony (I recommend Trungpa's book on Mandala for anyone seriously interested). The crucial difference is that Tibetan Buddhism is the 'introvert' form; individual enlightenment for the sake of all beings. The Freemason version isn't extrovert as such, but it is far more 'real world' and practical. 'We' (I suppose I still regard myself as a member of the Karma Kadgyu?) have the concept of everything as real and unreal at the same time, Freemasons are perhaps more sane? Perhaps it is because the focus of Buddhism is on death whilst the Freemasons is on life? Anyway, in Tibetan Buddhism, colours are very significant and the 'rules' on which colour fits with which (basically reflex colours go together, with orange or purple as a middle colour. The beautiful colours of the shrine room and of thankas correspond on an exoteric level to an equivalent of 'planatary' influences, in this case to places on the body, to deities, to states of mind. At the esoteric level the colours are the colours one sees as the elements of the body dissolve one into another during death -during the mind's experience of the bardo.

Basically, the Masonic lodge looked odd to me, because it was so post-reformation church like! All white walls and old wood. I wondered where that part of the teachings went? But 'my culture's' fear of bright colour is a whole book's worth, by itself.

So, Stukeley was a Freemason, he thought that the Druids were proto-Christians. Stukeley did not, like Aubrey Burl, speculate on tribal people gathering together to enjoy feasting, dealing with the dead, and being rooted to the here and now by practical concerns such as: getting enough to eat, making sense of the world, and accommodating anxieties, disease, change...to which end, trading information and (at the very least) better pottery, would require festivals and organisation.

Religion seems separate, cold and distant -mathematical- when God is in his heaven, when one uses a Platonic version of reality.

When the gods represent the forces within the world, religion is within everything one does.

If I was pushed into saying where the Freemasons got their ideas from, my guess would be: translations of Vetruvious, Pico della Mirandola and the other one..Ficino (this is Frances Yate's territory). The main evidence for this must come from catalogues of books available in Elizabethan England. One such is John Dee's inventory of his library. There are two copies of his lists both dated September the 6th, 1583.

Dee was a man now famous for his taste for 'forbidden knowledge' as his catalogue shows, he expended considerable effort in amassing the most fascinating books of his time. The catalogue lists over four thousand books and manuscripts. Dee had read De Occulta philosphy of Henry Cornealius Agrippa, a book that places mathematics as the key to magic. Agrippa's book is the logical outcome of a movement loosely called Renaissance Neoplatonism, and of course Dee's library contained the major works of Ficino (including Ficino's translations of Plato) and Pico della Mirandola; he also had copies of Vetruvious, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Ovid, Lucan...

The next link between the Renaissance and Stukeley's time: Inigo Jones (July 15, 1573 – June 21, 1652). A man, in his own words, much influenced by Palladio and Vetruvious. Inigo Jones dismissed the idea that the Druids had built temples, he argued that the classical writers said the Druids worshiped in sacred groves and woods, and that there was no evidence of Druids as architects, nor did he believe the Druids to have 'science' and so could not have been architects. Jones uses Geoffrey of Monmouth as his main source for the original use of Stonehenge, and sees hexagons, equilateral triangles and circles within Stonehenge all pointing to an alter stone and proving Stonehenge to be of Roman origin. After all, it conformed to Virtuvain rules and must (as it wasn't a theater) be a temple.

Inigo Jones decided that Stonehenge was dedicated to the god of the heavens Coelus.

...was not the Temple at Hierusalem adorned with the figures of the Cherubim, that thereby the Nations of the Earth might know it was the Habitation of the living God? and why not in a like manner this Temple composed of astrological figures, that, after ages might comprehend it was anciently consecrated to Coelus, or Coelum heaven?

The god Coelus had been described by Pierio Valeriano in his guide to hieroglyphs, Hieroglyphica (first published in 1556, and again in 1602).

Inigo Jones saw, in Stonehenge a Roman theater turned into a Romano-British temple, complete with astrological significance, dedicated to heaven upon Salisbury's starry plain.

I recall reading somewhere that Stukeley linked the Sanctuary with Egyptian gods, too. But these names (as with Coelus) were unfamiliar to me. Again, referring to books that Stukeley would have had available to him I get the name Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century German Jesuit scholar and the most famous "decipherer" of hieroglyphs of his day (most of his assumptions and "translations" have since been disproved as nonsensical.) Kircher (and this is impressive) was actually lowered into Vesuvius so that he may study the interior of the earth... But his Egyptian mythology, really is only of use in helping to understand what Stukeley was trying to say.

Quite frankly I've had enough of Stukeley, I never had any love of geometry, I have never wanted to see the building of The New Temple, I don't care much for concepts of a New World Order. I don't want the world to be a better place, I don't think it is broken! I know too many stories about the end of the world, and it makes me laugh when people try to see Pythagorean rules embedded within Woodhenge by drawing triangles all over the place.

But I am supremely ignorant.

The Day before Midsummer..and Hebrew.

2011-06-21T10:09:00.002+01:00

From the 18th (Friday) to the 21st (tomorrow) the sun stands still.

I am at a cross roads, tricking myself that life is sometimes simple, knowing that it never is; trying to apply logic and failing. I am convincing myself that there is just too much information (that I'd never collect enough and that I don't even have the brain to use it) and feeling bad for not even trying.

Basically it is easier to sit, and be a Robinsoner, than to try and resolve the pull to get up and go!

If I think about this logically I know that the Persephone myth has nothing to do with Midsummer. The deities dragged unwilling to The Great Below are vegetation; they go in autumn, they go in the spring, they go when they are harvested.

Except...the midsummer offering is made to ensure that the wheat will thrive. Midsummer is the tipping point, the time between ripening and being ripe enough to harvest.

Oh poo!

And my Bronze Age 'chapter' has a midsummer connection. In the public imagination (and the public of my time are most decidedly a part of the picture) at midsummer the megaliths and stone circles open. Maud Cunnington described the burial site of the child at Woodhenge as being aligned (Woodhenge itself is aligned...) on the midsummer sunrise. I don't recall any such concept being applied to The Sanctuary, but midsummer is the time when people visit and use the prehistoric sites, and I wont be there.

The only way I could tell if Woodhenge was a midsummer place would be to be there tomorrow morning, likewise the Sanctuary. Knowing that I can't be in both places at once, and that cloud will probably hide the sun, doesn't make any difference to how I feel.

Even though logic isn't my strength, I return to logic. My skill has always been an ability to find texts, to sift information; to make connections. There must be a lot of computer wrangling to get through, loads of Livy and Strabo and dear old Diodorus and of course the reason I started to write this -Stukeley. Besides which, Tesco is delivering the shopping tomorrow afternoon, petrol costs too much; if I went there wouldn't be anywhere to park my car.

The Bronze Age burials within the concentric stone and wood circles of Woodhenge and the Sanctuary are sad places; stories I cannot finish. But the contemporary beliefs (including the seventeenth century) are within my reach, so let's begin.

The Sanctuary, Hakpen -the snake's head.

You see on the left of the image, a barrow (that may or may not be Roman). The road runs between the barrow on one side, and the entrance to the Sanctuary on the other. Avebury and West Kennet, and Silbury are behind me.

The first concrete rectangle (painted blue on top) directly in front of me, as I took this photo, has a buried stone in front of it. This marks the place of burial.

Why did Stukeley call this site, the serpent's head, and in particular believe there to be a Hebrew connection with a British, prehistoric site?

In short, if Stukeley took his bible seriously then the easiest answer is, all our ancestors spoke Hebrew because we are all descended from the only family to have survived the flood.

The bible cites the tower of Babel as the reason for different languages. If the Tower of Babel happened after the flood, then one may assume that the people god 'loved' kept their Hebrew?

The bible provides the foundation for the belief in Hebrew as 'God's' language.

In 1723 Henry Rowlands published: Mona Antiqua Restaurata: An Archaeological Discourse on the Antiquities, Natural and Historical, of the Isle of Anglesey, the Antient Seat of the British Druids. Rowlands used Greek and Roman classics, plus brand new material provided by archeology and philology. Rowlands liberally applied Hebrew translations to Welsh prehistoic monuments because a French scholar, Samuel Bochart (1599-1667) had stated that the word Britain "is a corruption of the Hebrew words Barat Anach," meaning islands of tin. He went further, and stated that there exists close phonetic associations between Hebrew and Welsh.

Therefore Stukeley had good reason to believe that British words had a Hebrew origin, and in his mind it was obvious that people who spoke languages closest to Hebrew, were closer to the original religion. It made sense to him to consider that the patriarchal religion of the Old Testament was the original religion of mankind, and that this 'pure' religion had degenerated into idol-worship as (Canaanite religion) emerged.

William Stukeley was born in 1687, though there was colonisation of America by British settlers at that time, and some information coming back about indigenous hunter-gatherer communitees, it never crossed William Stukeleys mind that the British were anything but people of the book. The Romans had left written reports describing Druids, and Stuckeley dismissed the negative, stressed the positive and decided that Avebury ( in Stukeley's account of Avebury- 1740) was proof that the Druids were proto-Christians.

The proof was in the lay-out -three circles, one large containing two small, 'God in three persons' .

And you are right, it isn't as simple as I'm making it out to be...What has the Serpent's head (Stukeley's name for the Sanctuary) got to do with the Holy Trinity?

Having decided that the Sanctuary was linked by a serpentine path to Avebury, Stukeley came up with a Hebrew (in the loosest sense) name for the place: Hakpen.

For the record, this name seems to me to be a totally spurious word. No one before Stukeley is recorded as calling the site anything much, only Mill field (from the ancient word mill, a 'machine' used to grind grain, and field.)

Hargrave Jennings (1817-1890): a British Freemason, Rosicrucian, author on occultism and esotericism, and amateur student of comparative religion, seems to be quoting from Stukeley. In his book: Ophiolatreia: An Account of the Rites and Mysteries Connected with the Origin, Rise, and Development of Serpent Worship(1889)wrote:

Perhaps the most remarkable of all British relics of this worship are to be found on the hills overlooking the village of Abury, in the county of Wiltshire. There, twenty-six miles from the celebrated ruins of Stonehenge, are to be found the remains of a great Serpentine Temple---one of the most imposing, as it certinaly is one of the most interesting, monuments of the British Islands. It was first accurately described by Dr. Stukeley in 1793 in his celebrated work entitled Abury, a Temple of the British Druids. It was afterwards carefully examined by Sir R. C. Hoare and an account published in his elaborate work Ancient Wiltshire. Dr. Stukeley was the first to detect the design of the structure and his conclusions have been sustained by the observations of every antiquary who has succeeded him.

The temple of Abury consisted originally of a grand circumvallation of earth 1,400 feet in diameter, enclosing an area of upwards of twenty-two acres. It has an inner ditch and the height of the embankment, measuring from the bottom of the ditch, is seventeen feet. It is quite regular, though not an exact circle in form, and has four entrances at equal distances apart, though nearly at right angles to each other. Within this grand circle were originally two double or concentric circles composed of massive upright stones: a row of large stones, one hundred in number, was placed upon the inner brow of the ditch. Extending upon either hand from this grand central structure were parallel lines of huge upright stones, constituting, upon each side, avenues upwards of a mile in length. These formed the body of the serpent. Each avenue consisted of two hundred stones. The head of the serpent was represented by an oval structure consisting of two concentric lines of upright stones; the outer line containing forty, the inner eighteen stones. This head rests upon an eminence known as Overton, or Hakpen Hill, from which is commanded a view of the entire structure, winding back for more than two miles to the point of the tail, towards Bekhampton.

"To our name of Hakpen, alludes ochim, called 'doleful creatures' in our translation." Isa (13 v. 21), speaking of the desolation of Babylon, says: Wild beasts of the desert shall lie there, and their houses shall be full of ochim, and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there." St. Jerome translates it "serpents." The Arabians call a serpent Haie, and wood-serpents Hageshin; and thence our Hakpen; Pen is "head" in British.

Hargrave Jennings goes on (chapter 2) to relate prehistoric cup and ring carvings, with Hindu practices:

No one who compares the stone Yonis of Benares, sent herewith, with the engravings on the first page of the work on the Rock Markings of Northumberland and Argyleshire, published privately by the Duke of Northumberland, will deny that there is an extraordinary resemblance between the conventional symbol of Siva worship of to-day and the ancient markings on the rocks, menhirs, and cromlechs of Northumberland, of Scotland, of Brittany, of Scandinavia, and other parts of Europe.

It is fascinating that Hargrave Jennings is looking East for meanings in British prehistory, away from the Bible. It reminds me that in the 1970s, people were finding Sanskrit origins for words, everywhere. I'm sure I remember being told that Welsh was actually the closest language to Sanskrit in existence (!).

Well I have to stop, I'm running out of time today. This story continues with the connections between Stuckeley and Sir Isaak Newton.

The fact that Stukeley became a Freemason (June 6, 1721).

How the Reformation described the word of god as now 'open-source', free for all men to read within the book of nature ( the natural world) and the book of God, (Scripture)

Finally how the Neoplatonic conception of reality describes a kind of *fall* which makes physics -for Newton- and in proto-archeology for Stukeley, a recovery of a better, a higher truth, rather than a discovery....

Ceres, Liber and Liberia.

2011-06-19T20:10:00.000+01:00

The photograph is of Stewart Perowne. I bought his: Roman Mythology from an Oxfam bookshop.

I see that you can buy it from Amazon for just 1p.

Stewart Perowne found a city, the Greek colony of Aziris; unlike Heinrich Schliemann or Arthur Evans, Aziris does not have any myth (as far as I know) associated with it. So there are no major reconstructions, or fantastic re-imaginings, as with Troy or Knossos to remember him by.

Nor are there any photos of him in Google search, so here is the photo taken by Walter Bird, printed at the back of the book.

I see that Walter Bird was:

... always a great fighter for adequate photographers’ fees and Copyright Law.

I'd never heard of Aziris. But Herodotus (4.150–151) wrote an account of how the inhabitants of Thera, suffering because of a terrible famine, were advised by the Delphic Oracle to send a colony to Libya under the leadership of Battus.

Aziris is now Wadi el Chalig.

Concerning Persephone in Rome; according to tradition there was a famine in Rome in 496 B.C. The dictator L. Postumius, consulted the Sibylline books. As a result a temple was built on the slope of the Aventine hill, near the west end of the circus Maximusto, to honour Demeter, Dionysus, and Kore. It was dedicated in 493 B.C. by the consul Sp. Cassius (Dionys. VI.17, 94) to Ceres, Liber, and Libera, with whom the Greek deities were identified.

But of course, it can't be that simple. Arnobius dates the introduction of Ceres' Greek cult to 'just before' the arrival of Magna Mater in 204 BC...

But I must admit reading Arnobius is hard work, also he was hardly a sympathetic reporter or even a witness to the events he describes. The only reason I bother with him at all in this case, is that he mentions Brimo and Persephone (in his rant!).

Once upon a time, they say, Diespiter (Jupiter), burning after his mother Ceres with evil passions and forbidden desires, for she is said by the natives of that district to be Jupiter's mother, and yet not daring to seek by open force that for which he had conceived a shameless longing, hits upon a clever trick by which to rob of her chastity his mother, who feared nothing of the sort.

Instead of a god, he becomes a bull; and concealing his purpose and daring under the appearance of a beast lying in wait, he rushes madly with sudden violence upon her, thoughtless and unwitting, obtains his incestuous desires; and the fraud being disclosed by his lust, flies off known and discovered.

His mother burns, foams, gasps, boils with fury and indignation; and being unable to repress the storm and tempest of her wrath, received the name Brimo thereafter from her ever-raging passion: nor has she any other wish than to punish as she may her son's audacity.

Jupiter is troubled enough, being overwhelmed with fear, and cannot find means to soothe the rage of his violated mother . He pours forth prayers, and makes supplication; her ears are closed by grief. The whole order of the gods is sent to seek his pardon ; no one has weight enough to win a hearing. At last, the son seeking how to make satisfaction, devises this means: Arietem nobilem bene grandibus cum testiculis deligit, exsecat hos ipse et lanato exuit ex folliculi tegmine . Approaching his mother sadly and with downcast looks, and as if by his own decision he had condemned himself, he casts and throws these into her bosom. When she saw what his pledge was, she is somewhat softened, and allows herself to be recalled to the care of the offspring which she had conceived.

After the tenth month she bears a daughter, of beautiful form, whom later ages have called now Libera, now Proserpine; whom when Jupiter Verveceus saw to be strong, plump, and blooming, forgetting what evils and what wickedness, and how great recklessness, he had a little before fallen into, he returns to his former practices; and because it seemed too wicked that a father openly be joined as in marriage with his daughter, he passes into the terrible form of a dragon: he winds his huge coils round the terrified maiden, and under a fierce appearance sports and caresses her in softest embraces. She, too, is in consequence filled with the seed of the most powerful Jupiter, but not as her mother was , for she bore a daughter like herself; but from the maiden was born something like a bull, to testify to her seduction by Jupiter. If any one asks who narrates this, then we shall quote the well-known senarian verse of a Tarentine poet which antiquity sings, saying: "The bull begot a dragon, and the dragon a bull." Lastly, the sacred rites themselves, and the ceremony of initiation even, named Sebadia, might attest the truth; for in them a golden snake is let down into the bosom of the initiated, and taken away again from the lower parts.

It is with some relief that I return to Mr Perowne, but not yet...that word Sebadia needs more attention. I ask Wiki and get:

Greek writers, like Strabo in the first century CE, linked Sabazios with Zagreus, among Phrygian ministers and attendants of the sacred rites of Rhea and Dionysos.

Strabo's Sicilian contemporary, Diodorus Siculus, conflated Sabazios with the secret 'second' Dionysus, born of Zeus and Persephone, a connection that is not borne out by surviving inscriptions, which are entirely to Zeus Sabazios.

The Christian Clement of Alexandria had been informed that the secret mysteries of Sabazius, as practiced among the Romans, involved a serpent, a chthonic creature unconnected with the mounted skygod of Phrygia:"‘God in the bosom’ is a countersign of the mysteries of Sabazius to the adepts. Clement reports:
"This is a snake, passed through the bosom of the initiates".
Much later, the Byzantine Greek encyclopedia, Sudas (10th century?), flatly states
"Sabazios... is the same as Dionysos. He acquired this form of address from the rite pertaining to him; for the barbarians call the bacchic cry 'sabazein'. Hence some of the Greeks too follow suit and call the cry 'sabasmos'; thereby Dionysos [becomes] Sabazios. They also used to call 'saboi' those places that had been dedicated to him and his Bacchantes... Demosthenes [in the speech] 'On Behalf of Ktesiphon' [mentions them]. Some say that Saboi is the term for those who are dedicated to Sabazios, that is to Dionysos, just as those [dedicated] to Bakkhos [are] Bakkhoi. They say that Sabazios and Dionysos are the same. Thus some also say that the Greeks call the Bakkhoi Saboi."
In Roman sites, though an inscription built into the wall of the abbey church of San Venanzio at Ceperana suggested to a Renaissance humanist it had been built upon the foundations of a temple to Jupiter Sabazius, according to modern scholars not a single temple consecrated to Sabazius, the rider god of the open air, has been located, small votive hands, typically made of copper or bronze, are often associated with the cult of Sabazios. Many of these hands have a small perforation at the base which suggests they may have been attached to wooden poles and carried in processions. The symbolism of these objects is not well known.

Finally, (blessed simplicity at last)Stewart Perowne has this to say:

"The introduction of this triad is of prime importance, because it introduces Rome to Eleusis, the setting of the most famous of all Greek mysteries, into which emperors would be proud to be initiated."

Yet again I am reminded that the past is often portrayed as a glittering dream palace of fascinating cults. I have no doubt at all that most of the time life was pretty dull and rather stressful!

In two thousand years time, if any contemporary media survives along side the plastic bags and car tyres and the odd, solitary, road-side shoe, people will use fragments of script from East-Enders, snippets of speech from The Archers and a crumbling page from The Daily Mail to reconstruct our lives...

The roles assigned to deities of the Underworld.

2011-06-19T15:43:00.001+01:00

The two main roles given to underworld deities are:

Guardian/ judge of the dead.

Persephone,
Hades,
Ereshkigal,
Hel.

Personification of life force.

Kore,
Dumuzi,
Adonis,
Geshtinanna.

The third role in the Persephone story is not an underworld deity, it is best described as

Wild Woman / Wild Man:

Inanna.
Ninhursag/ Nintur.
Demeter.

The duality of the roles taken by Underworld deities is represented in the doubling of the name, Persephone (which no one seems able to translate) and Kore meaning young girl; Persephone representing the Queen of the dead, a figure rather like the Viking Hel, and Kore representing the force of nature, the green shoots springing from the earth.

In other stories the sexes are reversed: Hades or Nergal replace Persephone as ruler of the Underworld, whilst Dumuzi or Adonis take Kore's place, hunted and chased down into the dark earth.

In Sumerian stories, Ereshkigal is queen of the dead, whilst Geshtinanna (Lady of the grape-vine) and Dumuzi (almost John Barleycorn; Damu -the power in the sap in trees and plants) both take the role of Kore. When Dumuzi of the grain disappears underground in the spring, or early summer, his sister, the wine goddess, searches for him. Finally, in autumn she descends into the earth and takes his place allowing him to return.

A third goddess, Inanna plays a role not too dissimilar to that of Demeter.

In Greek mythology; in the older Homeric works of The Iliad and The Odyssey, Persephone is a dread Queen of the dead, very similar to Ereshkigal. Yet in the latter Homeric hymn to Demeter, Persephone is portrayed as less powerful, personified now as the abducted child.

The power to make things grow in Hesiod's version, is given to her upper-world mother, Demeter.

In Hesiod's theogeny, Persephone is simply the stolen girl, given by her father to her uncle..and now powerless, robbed of her role as life-force, and subject to Zeus's whim. Zeus is the real power in this story, likewise Demeter must plead with him for her daughter's return.

Rather confusingly the Romans combined the two names and two roles into one: Proserpina from "proserpere", "to shoot forth" and simplified the Greek story.

But if I go back to the oldest stories I know of, Ninhursag 'The Lady of Birth' [Nin -Lady. Hur-sag -hill-country; mountainous region ('holes, valleys' + 'points, peaks') is Kore as Wild Woman. Thorkild Jacobsen in The Treasures Of Darkness describes her as mother of summer and winter (when Enlil in the form of a great bull copulates with the 'foothills' [the hursag]).

In another story her husband is Shulpae, king of the wild beasts of the desert. She loses her children to the hunters and farmers when they are killed, captured or tamed; yet domestic animals may die if they wonder into her territory.

When the storytellers told of Inanna's descent to 'The Great Below' and her sister Ereshkigal, queen of the dead, something of Ninhursag's connection with hills and mountains was given to Ereshkigal. The story describes Ereshkigal crying out as if giving birth, as if restoring life to the dead?

But reincarnation wasn't a part of Sumerian belief, as far as I know.

Ereshkigal [e-ri-iš -Queen, Lady. ki-gal -Great Earth (as opposed to an-gal great heaven] described as taken by the Kur [Kur -mountain] to become Queen of the Underworld, taking care of the dead and administering justice. Ereshkigal seems to be the major, permanent power of the under ground, representing its capacity to hold and re-home the dead. In the latter story "Nergal and Ereshkigal" (approximately 1500 BC) the focus of the tale is power, who actually rules the Underworld: Ereshkigal or the god of war, Nergal.

The Lady of the Foothills is also The Lady of the Birth Hut; the term 'birth hut' seems to have been used in Sumerian to mean, amongst other things, the womb. Her emblem is an elongated Omega symbol.

The interesting part of all this for me is to note how power shifts in the myths to represent what feels right (reflects society) and addresses anxieties within that society.

The Seven Hills.

2011-06-15T13:50:00.001+01:00

Last time I was in Avebury I couldn't leave the shop without buying Avebury -the biography of a landscape by Joshua Pollard and Andrew Reynolds. I knew that Joshua Pollard and Mike Pitts had excavated The Sanctuary in 1999 and so I was looking forwards to reading something about the place from someone who had actually dug into it.

So, date: The site has been in use since the Neolithic, but the 'integrety of the plan of the monument strongly suggests the posts belong to a single-phase construction, though perhaps with the stone setting coming a little latter' (Pollard 1992). Finds within the post holes: chiseled arrow heads, sherds of Grooved ware give a date of approximately 2500 BC.

Function? But trying to work out what actually happened there is a challenge. The objects found in the post holes were recorded by the Cunningtons: the large stones were erected with offerings of Grooved ware bowls and unused arrowheads. Niedermendig lava (elsewhere described as being from a grinding stone, a quern) was placed in one hole.

Lava from the Niedermendig–Andernach–Eifel region of the Rhineland widely used in making querns and grinding stones from the later Neolithic onwards. The quality of the stone is such that it was traded widely in northern Europe.

Querns made of this stone were traded in Saxon times, used in the Roman period for the same purpose; a rough stone - millstone grit. The lava was placed in C7. and a horse metacarpal, in E2.

As to finds not buried with the posts or stones, the Eastern side of The Sanctuary is the area with most deposits. The entrance area, 'kept clean'.

A large quantity of debris from the work of shaping the stones accumulated around the posts and stones of ring C in the SE quarter, and a human mandible was found here.

The stone C12 that marks the position of the girl buried is in the NE, more East quarter than North side of the circle.

If you were standing, looking towards the center of the circles, back to the single, out lying stone, you would be facing NE.

All so far so good. Nothing new, just finer detail.
What is with the North East though?

What did surprise me was this statement (page 176):

"Rather more spectacular are the unusual Roman barrow burials on Overton Hill excavated in 1962 opposite the Sanctuary...The Overton Hill cemetery had long been thought to be typical of the Early Bronze Age...characterised by barrows arranged in lines. The 1962 excavations, however, showed that three of the mounds were in fact of the Roman period, they are known by archaeologists as West Overton G6, G6a and G7 from south to north; the 'G' prefix refers to the near exhaustive listing of Wiltshire barrows by the Rev. Goddard and, later, Leslie Grinsell."

The reason why this surprises me (other than obviously I thought that the barrows were all Bronze Age) is that in the 20th and 21st century people have their ashes cast into the sea and rivers (fired into space), scattered onto football grounds, or heated and compressed in to diamonds, or pressed into vinyl. We don't generally use other people's sacred sites, we find places that are sacred to us.

There is an area around the crematorium which is I guess, general 'sacred ground' (no rules about kind of religion, or denomination) but 'we' don't generally use 'native' sites, or copy 'native' practices.

'We' don't expect other people to want to copy 'us' either. The crematorium likewise is primarily utilitarian, it fulfills the law, rather than dictates of a religion.

If it wasn't too confusing to let people scatter their loved one's ashes in Stonehenge, and illegal to build a 'Tower of Silance' in parkland or garden, if one could employ Chodpas (and import the vultures) would 'we'?

Perhaps it was a rare occurrence in Roman times. But some of the Romans at least, who found themselves in sunny Albion, in their construction of barrows made a positive choice. It wasn't 'make-do' or the 'only' possible solution.

Where there are temples to Apollo there you will also find the Queen of the Underworld.

2011-06-14T16:16:00.002+01:00

In Ovid's metamorphoses the Cumaean Sibyl tells Aeneas that Phoebus Apollo had offered her anything she wished, if she just agreed to sleep with him.

Sibyl, being a clever girl, takes a handful of dust and asks for as many years life as there are particles of dust in her hands. Apollo, being even brighter tries to warn her of her mistake...

The 'Grotta della Sibilla' is described in a chivalric romance written in 1391 (a book called- Guerino il Meschino). In 1420 Antoine de La Sale inspired by the legend decided to find the grotto. He travelled from Norcia, and climbed up to the site of the cave at a place known as Montemonarco. As he travels, Antoine describes the scenery and the plants, the herbs people use in cooking, and the chatter of local folk, he writes a travel journal. He asks people about other travellers and is told that necromancers make pilgrimage to the Sibyl's lake in the crater on one peak, and to the Sibyl's cave on the other to dedicate their grimoires, and to talk with the Sibyl, the villagers warn him that all travellers to the cave or the crater must first seek permission from the villagers before attempting the visit, because pagan necromancers have done much damage by summoning storms and damaging harvests when practicing their dark arts.

Any one not seeking permission may be regarded as a pagan necromancer. Quite recently (La Sale reports) a bad priest and his companion had been torn to pieces and thrown into the lake, so it pays to be careful.

La Sale continued his journey, he describes a perilous, narrow path that induced vertigo, leading on to a summit so high that one could see the sea on both sides of Italy from its heights. There La Sale found the entrance to the Sibyl's cave shaped like 'a pointed sheild'. La Sale crawled through on all fours into a small square chamber lit by a hole above, with seats carved into the rock on all sides.

Here his courage failed him and La Sale did not go any further. He had been told that the corridor ran deep into the mountain, it ended at a set of doors made of polished metal which opened onto the inner labyrinth.

The next set of doors were made of crystal, they opened into a region made terrifying by a great wind 'very horrid and marvellous' which howled up from the infernal regions.

The brave traveller would then find a narrow bridge to cross over the torrential cascade of water falling through the hole in the world, and at the end of the bridge, two dragons and the names of all those brave souls who had ventured thus far and never returned, carved into the rock.

In 1550 the poet Leandro Alberti mentioned that he had heard the story of the Sibyl's grotto from women when he was a child, around the same time the Inquisition obtained a confession of witchcraft from Zuan della Piantte, who described a journey to the Sibyl's cave where he renounced his faith and met 'Donna Venus'...

According to Marina Warner, Pope Pius II (October 18, 1405 – August 14, 1464) had identified the Sibyl with the goddess of love, Venus. And the Sibyl's cave had becomes in legend the entrance to a underworld realm of sensual delights: beautiful young men and woman in exquisite clothes, eating and drinking and dancing; speaking every language known to man with ease. The only problem with this perfect place is that every Friday at midnight, all the beautiful people turn into snakes -a realm of the devil! a Gnostic allegory, all that seems so sweet is poison.

Wagner, when writing Tannhauser, called the place Venusburg.

So what happened to the grotto?

In 1497 Rome was threatening excommunication to anyone who dared visit the area, and in the early seventeenth century, due to the growing number of pilgrims arriving, the authorities posted sentries to prevent entry to the grotto.

Sad to tell, but a 1898 mountaineering journal reported that the grotto had been dynamited 'to prevent wizards from escaping'.

But that's not quite where it ends. All the pages on this subject seem to be in Italian, but anyway the story of the grotto continues: In 1946 - The poet and writer Tullio Colsalvatico begins his exploration -with explosives! He is stopped.

At the same time, the geologist Lippi Boncampi prepares the first official report on the underground cave of the Sibyl including topographies, sections and plans.

In 2000 there was an attempt at exploration, but not much happened [LINK].

Lady Death.

2011-06-14T13:51:00.001+01:00

Santa Muerte is understood by many to be 'a strange mixture of religion and crime', a Virgin Mary who smokes, who loves prostitutes and murderers.

Her worship takes place at a shrine, as a penitent you may crawl to her, as a visitor you must cross yourself to show respect. There is no sense of incongruity in the hearts of the worshipers. Gestures and words supposed to be offered to Jesus are probably from religions much older than Christianity. The gestures feel right, they continue.

The woman who created the shrine had been worshiping Santa Muerte for many years before finally creating the shrine. People come to make offerings to a goddess who, just as a Sumerian Goddess, will not promise you anything, but will, if she feels inclined, watch over you, take care of you, create miracles for you.

The religion of Santa Muerte is older, and in many ways more grown up than anything offered by the church. The people worshiping Santa Muerte have faith in her because she represents a truth -we all die.

The Priests say, 'the people are confused, Jesus alone promises life eternal' but the church misses the inconvenient record of history, and the inconvenient fact that heaven has already closed its gates to so many: those of the wrong religion, wrong sexuality, to the criminals and the insane; to anyone already outside the beauty and order of heaven.

Santa Muerte, like Ereshkigal before her, offers nothing except cognition. It feels better to know her, to be friends with her, rather than to turn away.

In Britain, sometimes you may find a shrine, but they are not so vibrant and 'living' as the one to Santa Muerte. I particularly like the image of her (a shrine in Iglesia de la Piedad, Tepito) dressed in black, a wide brimmed hat and a cigarette hanging loosely at the corner of her mouth, uninclined to discus the philosophical aspects of suicide. There are shrines dedicated to The Virgin Mary. The Chalice well at Glastonbury (Glastonbury itself) is a shrine too. There are remains of Romano-British shrines. People visit Stonehenge as if it is a shrine, and likewise the various circles and standing stones.

But there is nothing there except what you bring to it, the reconstruction and the bronze plaque; unless you listen, and I don't even know what it is I'm hearing.

The whole procession thing -with floats and statues- got cut off from religion and became the Lord Mayer's show. Street theater may at times capture something, transport people to the space between the mundane and the sacred.

But the stories have become confused, the mythology is yet to be written.

But death, well Terry Pratchett has become the keeper of a sort of shrine to DEATH by personifying death in his Disc World books, as a figure not so different to Santa Muerte -an entity that isn't loving or malicious, just is...

In our, very Plato-esque culture we we are forced to be rational. Death cannot have his or her shrine, instead Terry Pratchett has become death's scribe, forced to be rational.

To speak as Death's friend, for Death has no priest.

The Narcissus and the Pomegranate. An Archaeology of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter -by Ann Suter.

2011-06-12T22:21:00.002+01:00

When I first came across references to this book, my first reaction was to go to Amazon and buy!

The book is a comprehensive exploration of the earliest Persephone story: The Hymn to Demeter by Homer. In theory the Homeric hymn is the oldest and closest record of the original myths celebrated at Eleusis.

But the book costs: £71.73 (reduced from £75.50). All I can say is, thank you Francis Trigge, Rector of Welbourne in Lincolnshire for setting up the first public library in England, so that the poor may read the precious texts previously restricted to members of prestigious institutions and the rich.

My first impression of the book (and I haven't read it all the way through yet, so I don't have any strong conclusions) is that Ann Suter's careful sifting and winnowing of the facts, helps me to clarify my own thought about some of the things that have irritated me, thus far. Namely the habit of using Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical reading of myth to gain an understanding of the underlying forces that created the myth, and secondly, the habit of lazily creating synthesis from similar but different versions of the same myth, in effect creating new myth. I'm not against it...really (only a little bit) but the concept of the Hymn to Demeter being all about:

"a middle-aged woman's reactions to her adolescent daughter's increasing sexuality and independence"

is just the kind of statement I often come across in relation to the Persephone myth. And it kind of bugs me because though it may well be a universal truth (I am middle aged, I have two daughters) it is too simple to be satisfying.

Whilst Ann Suter's conclusion that:

"The Hymn incorporates the kourotrophos myth ('the rearing of boys' the story of the child Demophoon, whom Demeter places in the fire each night) into the hieros gamos myth and turns the later into an abduction myth, using the Hesiodic story of Hades' "snatching" of Persephone. ... Eventually, the story of the Hymn -- the abduction, the search and mourning, and the reunion of mother and daughter -- became the canonical version of the myth"

Is far more interesting, and is something I have never thought of before, though it seems an odd theory somehow...doesn't add up.

Ann points out that the Persephone spoken of in The Iliad and The Odyssey differs from the one in The Hymn to Demeter: Neither in the Iliad, or The Odyssey is there any mention of Demeter and Persephone, nor is Persephone's abduction by Hades mentioned.

Persephone is referred to as 'dread', 'pure' and 'noble'.

Persephone has the power to accomplish curse:

"His mother, grieving for the death of her brother, prayed the gods, and beat the earth with her hands, calling upon Hades and on awful Proserpine; she went down upon her knees and her bosom was wet with tears as she prayed that they would kill her son- and Erinys that walks in darkness and knows no ruth heard her from Erebus."(Iliad book 9)

Persephone is described as having power to raise the souls of the dead and restore or withhold their wits:

"You must go to the house of Hades and of dread Proserpine to consult the ghost of the blind Theban prophet Teiresias whose reason is still unshaken. To him alone has Proserpine left his understanding even in death, but the other ghosts flit about aimlessly."(The Odyssey book 10)

Once in The Odyssey she is referred to as Zeus's daughter, but there is never any mention of her mother, or of her spring time return. Never is she called Kore.

Hesiod writing the Theogeny some two hundred years after Homer, hardly mentions Persephone at all. He calls her 'dread' Persephone and 'The white-armed daughter of Zeus and Demeter abducted by Hades with the consent of Zeus'.

So the Hymn to Demeter actually has more in common with the Hesiodic tradition, than the Homeric.

I'm not sure if anyone believes in dear old Homer (as a wise old man with exceptionally bad eyes) any more? I can't believe in him any more than I can believe in Greek myths as the creation of The Greeks alone.

But the Homeric hymns are regarded as the canonical version updating old myths to reflect a new hierarchy, dressed up as a struggle for power between the Earth goddesses and the sky god Zeus. Previous to Demeter and Kore being seen as mother and daughter, Persephone was a goddess in her own right, the linguistic and archaeological data suggest they were worshipped as a pair for the first time no earlier than the Dark Age 1200 BC–800 BC.

To be continued.