ELPHINofANGLELAND

Lately in Green Cider Groves

2008-07-31T10:27:00.000-07:00

Lately in green cider groves
I find myself enquiring:
What secret makes Dame Apple blush
To see Sir Sun a-shining?

Did Lady Apple and Sir Sun
In early hour of dawn
Dance in joyous nakedness
Upon the dewy lawn?

For if I know enough of life
To read a lady’s cheek
I know that fair and rosy glow
Of some love-game must speak.

Though it’s not in ancient myths,
Least, none that I have heard,
That ruddy hue speaks far more true
Than any written word.

And yet I cast no judgment for,
Who’s not, in early hour
Felt the full and fiery force
Of Love’s almighty power?

PHOTOS

2008-07-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

What this is, right, is, just a few photos (CLICK ON THE PHOTOS TO ENLARGE THEM) I took this evening after I got back from work. After I got back from work, had an outdoors swim, and went for a ramble. Down I went from Westmeston Place over the field with clover where the horses usually are, through the gate to the field with the long grass where the grasshoppers currently are, through the gate into the woodland in the in-between-place, past that and onto the greenway, the stoney track arched over with trees where many a creeper entwines its husky striated vineaous sap-hose, the track i.e. that took me on to the place with pond in the wood, where I went left, and on, and left and up to what is called Plumpton College Vineyard, at the very foot of very Ditchling Beacon its very self. DId you know that the geological formation that makes the South Downs carries on down ito Champagne in French-land? So this in Ditcling was where it was, was where I took these photos. How very Mediterannios it does indeed look, as if a Poussin or a Cezzane painted it, and indeed after this, after a Meditarranios type repast, I ventured to Barcenna, a bar in Burgess hill, and sat outside following a Pernod with an Absynthe, how very aniseedy of me. And how workinglass, sat there outside such a place on a summer's eve. But you pay good money to fly off to the Greek islands to sit outside working class bars, so I see it as that I got a good deal. I was sitting there wi-fying on my lap top, and I got a strange comment from a working class chap: "Working on the weekend? You must be keen!" The strange thing about that comment is that this is a Tuesday, not the weekend, from where I'm sitting. Hang on, no a Monday, but still, you know? Hmm, none so queer as. For another walk that goes past here, check http://www.sussex-southdowns-guide.com/sussex-walks.html.
For more on Sussex wine including the one from this vineyard:
http://www.sussex-southdowns-guide.com/sussex-wine.html
Tour of the winecountry is it? Here? In Sussex?
But anyhow, the photos:-
(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

NEWS

2008-06-18T14:17:00.000-07:00

Noted recently in the news, human DNA inserted into cow cells to make wierd cow-human embryos. So, they went ahead and made the Minotaur, despite the warning from ancient myth. Minos had to lock the monster away in the great prison but it still brought his downfall.

Noted recently in the news, robotic arms for chimps which they controlled with just they're brains. Check out the Irish myth of Nuada who had a replacement arm made for hm by the smith Dian Cecht...but it lead to a war. Bet you somewhere someone's already building a robo-soldier to go and do the fighting.

Noted also in the news - big cat has been seen prowling in a wood near Brighton - just like Dermot saw. (See DITCHFEST! blog post)

Appendix: Calculation of Pyramid-Related Positions

2008-06-17T03:38:00.000-07:00

“Right then,” I said. “So the area of a square is just the side length squared, unsurprisingly enough. So side 2 gives area 2 x 2 = 4. So if the outer square had a side 2, then the inner one, if it had an area half that of the outer one, would have an area of 2, i.e. half of 4. So its side length squared would equal 2, in other words it would have a side length of the square root of 2, which is [tap, tap, tap] around 1.414.
“So we want to check if the diagram shows two such squares?” said Santina. “Where the lengths are in the ration of 2 : 1.414, yes?”
‘That’s it. So, what is the size of the smaller square? What we have is a half the diagonal of the smaller square, that is to say from the centre to the corner, being equal to the radius of the circle, do you agree?”
They looked at the diagram again, saw how the radius of the circle was indeed half the diagonal of the smaller square, and then agreed.
“And you agree that the radius of the circle is also half of the side of the larger square?”
Again, after looking at the diagram for a moment, and as you can see for yourself, they agreed that yes, the radius of the circle was indeed equal to half the side of the larger square.
“So we can work out the relative sizes of the two squares. Half the diagonal of the smaller square is half the side length of the larger square. So before we imagined that the larger had the side length of 2, so that the smaller would have the side length of 1.414. So if this circle radius is half the length of the large square, and the larger square is side 2, then this radius length will have the unit value of 1. With me so far.”
They nodded.
“Right so the full diameter of the circle is 2, and the area of the larger square is 4. What then is the side of the smaller square?”
“Um…” said Laura.
“Well,” I said, putting on a somewhat teacherly tone, “what do we know about it?”
“We know that half of its diagonal is 1 unit long,” said Santina.
“Right, so how can we work out the length of the side?”
They weren’t too sure.
“We can use Pythagoras’ theorem for right angle triangles,” I said. “So if half the diagonal is 1, then the full diagonal is 2. So we have a right angle triangle with two sides of the length of the side of the smaller square, and the hypotenuse – the longest side of the diagonal – is length 2. Clear?”

“Perfectly.”
“Good. But let’s half the size of that so we can work with our unit length, and then we can double it up again later. So, call half the side of the smaller square s, and then we know by Pythagoras’ theorem for right angle triangles that s squared plus s squared is equal to the square of 1. 1 squared is just 1 x 1 = 1. So 2 x s squared = 1.
Divide both sides of the equation by two, and then we have s squared = ½.
So s = the square root of 0.5, which is [tap, tap, tap, tap] 0.7071.
But remember we halved the size of the triangle, so let’s double it up again. s is half of the side of the square, so the side is that times 2, and 0.7071 x 2 is 1.414. Good. This is what we were looking for. To find the area of this smaller square, we square its side length, and squaring 1.414, as we have already seen in reverse, gives the value of 2. So the area of the inner circle is 2, and the area of the outer circle is 2 x 2 = 4, so, yes, the inner one does have an area that is half of the outer one, and our original theory was surely correct.”

Laura said “And what was that theory again, just to remind me?”
Santina said “I said that I was sure that the 50th course, referred to in the clue, was the height on which the King’s Chamber within the pyramid was placed. And then Luca said that in plan view the area above the height of the King’s Chamber and that below are equal. And along with the clue was a diagram, which Luca has now shown by maths to be a diagrammatic statement of the same thing.”

“Cool!” said Laura. “I got all that. I’m not sure I could repeat it all back to you, but I got it. Which I’m quite surprised about as I was never much of a master at maths at school.”
“The link between the mind and motivation is amazing,” said Santina. “It’s surprising what can be achieved when you are genuinely interested in something.”
“Only one thing left to do then,” I said, “We have to find the latitude of the top and bottom of the 2 by 1 rectangle of southern Britain, and then check that the Long Man – which must be the giant with the poles in the poem – is at this height up the pyramid plan.”
“Let’s do that then,” said Laura.

This I did, as I will detail a little further down, and it turned out to be true to a very precise degree – as precise as it is possible to be, as I then informed the other two. So we had made definite progress, and basically solved this current clue, but as for what this was all about in more general terms, well it all still seemed quite obscure to us, but little did we didn’t realize then how the next stages of unraveling would both explain and confirm the pattern.

Said Laura “But what about these official’s poles that he has in his hands? And what is this business of He-who-is-in-his-Ka?”

Laura’s question was not something we were able to answer at that time, and it wasn’t essential to finding the next clue, but at a later time we did find the solution to this, as you shall see.

Unbeknown to me at this time, Jenny had now arrived in Canterbury and was at this moment making her sweet way towards the Cross Keys Inn, occasionally trying her mobile to see if I had yet switched on my phone. We, however, proceded to check out, pick up our packs and walk off down the street. That I didn’t see her as we passed, which we must surely have done, can be put down to the fact that I had no reason to believe that she would be in the area. That she did not see me must have had some more elaborate reason – perhaps she stopped for a brief while to look into a shop window. Anyway, the upshot was that we passed by, traveling in opposite directions. She, upon arriving at the inn, learnt after some initial inquiries that we had checked out and left with our packs. We, arriving at the station, learnt that the train was cancelled and another not due for an hour. She, upon hearing the sad news of our departure, ordered herself a g’n’t from the bar and sat down to consider her options. We sat on our packs on the platform mulling over the next part of the clue about the giant.

“Luca,” said Santina, “you never did explain how you found that the Long Man is at the latitude of the King’s Chamber.”

“OK, so to show that the Long Man is at the height of the King’s Chamber up the pyramid plan, we find out the latitude of the point where the 2 by 1 diagonal reaches the sea in the far west of Cornwall, to give us the base latitude, 50’07’’. Next we do the same for the location where it meets the sea in the far east at Lowestoft, giving us the top of the rectangle, at 52’29’’. We convert these to decimal figures: 50.117 and 52.483, and then we find the difference, to give us the height of the rectangle in degrees of longitude. (The distance of a degree of latitude stays more or less the same as you get further North or South, unlike degrees of longitude.)”

“Sorry about this,” said Laura, “but what exactly is longitude and latitude?”
I said “Latitude rings go around the world parallel to each other, and measure how far north or south you are, and longitudes run perpendicular to these, to measure how far east or west you are.”
“Thanks.”
“So this gives us the height of the 2 by 1 rectangle: 2.367 degrees of longitude. The ratio of the sides of the outer and inner squares in the diagram is 1.414 / 2, which is 0.707. This measures off 1.673 degrees down the rectangle, which finds the latitude of 52.483 – 1.673 = 50.81.

Converting back to degrees and minutes this gives 50’49’’ degrees. And the latitude of Wilmington, according to the index of places in the Times Atlas of the World, is precisely this: 50’49’’, that height up the pyramid where the area of the faces above and below is equal.”
“I believe you on the maths,” said Laura, “but I don’t quite see how just by applying the same ratio you get the…oh hang on, yes, no it’s ok. I can see it now. The ratio of the height up a triangle at a place on its hypotenuse, or whatever you call it, is the same as the ratio of the horizontal distance along the…thingy.”

LUCA: Exactly.

Jenny sat for some time trying to reach me on the mobile and then phoned the boss who concurred with her feeling that it was time to give up and head for home. What else was there to do?

We boarded the train and sat waiting for it to depart. Shortly before it did so a somewhat dejected features photographer for the quarterly journal Wessex and Weald boarded a few carriages behind us, and plonked herself down in a seat.

Some twenty or so minutes into the journey I felt the call of nature, and doddered in lurching zigzags down the train towards its front, but reached a dead end before I reached a toilet. So I then zigzagged back in the other direction until I did find a toilet. I pressed a button the size of a puma’s paw and the door slid slowly open like something off Star Trek. In I went, pressed another large button to close the door, and in some haste lowered those parts of my clothing that would have hindered my purposes while sitting at stool. Looking up to the wall it then came to my attention that there were in fact two of these large buttons, one marked DOOR and the other LOCK. I realized that simply pressing DOOR to close it was not enough, even though I could think of no earthly reason why anyone would want to close the toilet door from the inside and not also lock it. I, personally, decided I would rather not be disturbed, so without further ado, I stood up, shuffled a couple of paces forward, and pressed the LOCK button. To my very great surprise, the result of this action was that the door began to open. With one hand I attempted to halt its relentless motion, (but I may as well have tried to stop the march of time and the tides themselves), as with equal ineffectiveness my other hand groped at the undergarments around my ankles in an attempt to lift them. And still the door kept opening.

Suddenly there in the open doorway was Jenny Love-Interest.

LUCA: Jenny!

JENNY: Luca!

LUCA: This is a turn-up, and no mistake!

JENNY: That’s no turnip!

Shielding my modesty with my hands, I stood up and attempted to explain.

LUCA: Hi, this was just…I didn’t mean to…I tried to lock it but the stupid button…been to Canterbury…looking for the pyramid and stuff…how have you been?

Jenny just smiled, pressed the outside button to close the door, and said, quietly and calmly: “I’ll speak to you when you’re finished.”

LUCA: Oh yes, good idea…speak in a mo.

In somewhat more refined circumstances, Jenny and I spent the rest of the return journey discussing excitedly the possibility of the trip to the sunny south to do the feature for the journal. I became entirely convinced of her happiness at the thought of spending this time in my company, which was a very pleasant affirmation of my hopes. I also attempted as best I could to explain the situation regarding the story about the inventor – that there was no such inventor nor invention and that I was in fact involved in research with a couple of colleagues – to whom I introduced her - research into a subject which at this stage it would be difficult to explain to the boss.

LUCA: So if you could, please, tell him that you didn’t manage to find me – I’m gonna a need a bit more time off work.

JENNY: No problem.

[And that was one of the good bits! But we’ll need to fast forward in my “novel” to the next bit of maths.]

“That’s not all,” Santina continued. “We did a bit of research. In Gods and Graven Images : The Chalk Hill Figures of Britain, by Paul Newman, is a great confirmation. Seen in the low winter sunshine of January ’69, Newman tells us, (and again in July ‘76 after a period of draught) was a 150 foot dog placed on the North side of the giant, that is to say to his right, or our left, as we look at him. In other words there was a dog placed just where Orion’s hunting dog, the constellation Canis Major, is located in the sky, to the left of Orion as we look at him (his right side as he faces us).”
“Crickey!”
“And get this,” Santina went on, “Rodney Castleden, whose work on the subject is referred to in Gods and Graven Images points out that in Petit Sainte Grail (c.1200) Peredur, the hero of the story, is sent to a mound beneath which is carved a figure of a man. And at Cerne Abbas we have a giant on the hillside, and above him on the summit of the hill is an ancient mound.”
“Lawks! Do you think the mound contains the Holy Grail?”

“It’s possible,” said Santina, “in the sense of something that represents it; represents the blood of the gods. But quite apart form anything else Castleden’s reference invalidates the oft’ repeated maxim that there are no references to the Cerne Abbas Giant from more than about 300 years ago. Added to that, an early account mentioned in John North’s book Stonehenge speaks of a cult of a god called Helith at Cerne Abbas, also at a much earlier time, which has been taken as meaning ‘man’ or ‘hero’.”
“…and the location is definitely correct?”
“Spot on,” I said. “Remember the latitude of Wilmington?”
“It’s on the tip of my tongue.”
“50’49’’. The latitude of Cerne Abbas – 50’49’’. Exactly the same. And we’ve verified the longitude co-ordinate as well. You can look at my working if you like:-

In an appendix in the back of Gilbert and Bauval’s Orion Mystery is a diagram showing measurements and a line extended from the Orion shaft so that it touches the tip of the top of the Queen’s Chamber at the exact central axis of the Pyramid at 53 royal cubits from the base, while the full height is 280. So the fraction of the full height is 53/280. Now we can work out how far this point is below the floor of the King’s Chamber. No figure is given for this in the Orion Mystery diagram, but we can work it out since we have calculated the latter as a fraction of 0.683/2.367 of the full height. In royal cubits this would be 80.79. So the distance between the tip of the roof of the Queens Chamber and this horizontal is 80.79-53, which is 27.79. Since the Orion Shaft is angled at 45 degrees, we can see that the distance horizontally from the vertical axis of the intersection point of the shaft and the King’s Chamber horizontal is the same as the vertical distance down to the top of the Queens Chamber. In a decimal longitude measurement this is 27.794/220x3.74=0.4725. The longitude of the central vertical in decimals is 1.99’W, and 0.4725’ west of here is 2.4625’. Converting to degrees and minutes this is 2’28’W. The Times Atlas gives the longitude of Cerne Abbas as 2’29W. Once again it is a mere 0’01’ away. The combination of such a close match both for the latitude and the longitude figures are pretty impressive, considering that not just any site is suitable for a large chalk hill figure.

“Splendid!” said Laura. “I can’t wait to go there!”
“And there is the name as well,” said Santina. “‘Cerne’ is very similar to ‘Herne’ as in Herne the Hunter, a hunter of the English oak forests who had two hunting dogs and would appear at night. In other words Herne was Orion, and again the two words are sonically very similar. ‘Herne’ / ‘Orion’.”
“So the line of the fiftieth course is actually the line of latitude that joins the two Albions,” said Laura, “the ancient chalk giants of the southern British downlands. I’m blown away, to be honest. Well I must say this is all really highly intriguing.”
“I know,” I said, “fascinating isn’t it? I’m rather concerned it may prove a distraction from less important things.”
“Don’t be daft! That reminds me: do you like my highlights?”
“Lovely.”
“It’s better shorter too,” added Santina.

TWO POEMS

2008-06-17T03:29:00.000-07:00

The Voyage of Bran

Up from the western cape they came
Bran’s heroic crew
For every fathom sailed North
They Eastward sailed two

Ever watchful of the Bear
To keep the bearing true
For every port-ward furlong ploughed
They forward furrowed two

At length they came to Burrowbridge
Site of the famous mound
To which they tethered up their ship
And time for rest was found

The distance up ahead of them
And that which lay behind
Stood in golden ratio
Pleasing to the mind

Onward then they sailed again
And every measure North
As before was half as many
As furlongs furrowed forth

Amid the mists of Avalon
They drove the sacred barque
Towards the place where Arthur sleeps
Entombed in a golden ark

Rising high the noble isle
Of Glastonbury fair
Within its heart a grotto hides
Which nymphs have made their lair

In this place two crystal founts
Flow up to meet the air
And sanctify the apple groves
Of Glastonbury fair

Here the Hill of Faeries
The line it does divide
So the whole is thrice the large
When by itself multiplied

And so the ship was brought ashore
And Bran’s heroic crew
Stood and gazed and wondered at
The fruitful mystic view

In bliss they stayed upon the isle
A full six days and nights
And then renewed their course
The centre in their sights

For the town Divizes named
Divides the trail in half
The distance lying up ahead
Equals that to aft

Sail on, sail on, heroic crew
Across the verdant sea
Each year these fields are marked with art
Devised from geometry.

On the fourth of seven rings
That gird the hemisphere around
Beside the spring of Kennet stands
Silb’ry’s Mother Mound

They brought the ship to rest upon
The summit of this hill
And by this act a destiny
Bran’s heroes did fulfill.

They slept the night but come the day
Away they sailed again
Until they came upon the place
The Thames conjuncts the Thame

Here again the distance left
By ratio of gold
Compared with that behind them
A wonder to behold!

The larger to the sum
Equals the smaller to the large
Here in Thameside Dorchester
Where they parked their barge

And then they sailed straight and true
To Whiteleaf’s cross of chalk
Which lies beside the sacred path
The Chilterns’ Ridgeway walk.

Here upon her eagle wings
Soars Isis as a kite
Circling round with poignant power
And distance piercing sight

On towards the Eastern point
Sailed Bran’s heroic crew
And every league they measured North
They East-ward measured two.

Phoenix Fire

The plans of Khufu’s chambers hide
Amid our British greenery.
The form is printed far and wide
Where slopes of gold on either side
Run down to meet the sea.
The Mansion of Osiris stands
Upon the Balance-of-the-Lands.
The Earthly and the Oceanic Powers
Are measured in the scales equally.
The Mansion stands amid the Field of Flowers
Enduring like the stars, eternally.

The Triangle Egyptian boasts
Harmonious geometry
Which spans the land from coast to coast
Invoking Beauty by the most
Aesthetic alchemy.
And I would like to build again
Not with stones but with my pen
That pyramid, from fragrant words of rhyme
By the poet’s deft technology
To stand in the collective human mind
Enduring like the stars, eternally.

In times of quiet contemplation
Neither pen nor book in hand
I like to let my meditation
Fly to sites around the nation
Beautifully planned
As a man in drugged inertia
Feeds his gaze on rugs of Persia
Peacefully observing the design
While phoenix-fire flickers in the hearth
So I let the eye within my mind
Journey out along some ancient path.

Come inside, drop gard’ning things
Unfurl the feathers of your mind
When teatime’s four o’clock bell rings
Sit you down and spread your wings
With your course aligned
So southward distance equals seven
And eastward equals half eleven:
Khufu’s Angle, ‘cross the Southern Weald
To meet the Ouse at ancient Lewes town
Osiris’ road traverses many a field
Leading onward over vale and down.

How the Antidelphoid Got His Name

2008-06-07T12:32:00.001-07:00

Quitting my room, and hoofing it over the fence, I struck out meadowards from the old, rustic hacienda, and there upon the path I met that fine fellow Aristrocrates.
“Shall we wander down to the pool?” I posed, and so we crossed the meadow where four horse-folk were tending to the gastro-business of munching such tender field-fare as clover leaves and grasses. And let me say they looked well on it, athletic and sheen-fleeced. We sat a while near the pool, and after a time I asked Aristocrates to clarify for me what he was thinking.
“I’m studying,” he said.
“But I see no book,” I replied.
“I’ve just learned that Mr Bumblebee takes on average four counts to drink nectar from each buttercup, and though the stem bends under his weight, it does not break. That said, sometimes a petal or two falls off.”
“Yes,” I said, “a loosely attached thing, a buttercup petal.”
“Just now as the petal dropped he took a tumble. Mr Bumble took a tumble.”
“The petal itself was his platform.”
“Yes.”

Just then some unseen waterfowl-fellow akin to coots warbled ecstatic aquatic equistoquackic, rippling sonorous through the Ether of evening. Several creatures derive pleasure from warbling.

We turned our attention to the pool. A large gray carp was involved in a slow, gentle thrashing amid pondweeds.

“Fish,” said Aristocrates, “are an order of being that breathe in water but would drown in air, while we are of an order descended from fellows who long ago left the Primordial Waters and learned how to breathe in air, and now we would drown under water. There is also an order of beings whose descendants returned to the water, but who still breathe air. These are the Delphinoids.”

Aristrocrates looked contemplative and I looked with new wonder at the carp.

“I suppose,” continued Aristocrates, “that when the Delphinoid Folk have learned to breathe in water again, it will be the completion of some Great Cycle.”
“Shall they then be called fish?” I asked.
“By that very name?”
“I mean, should they be considered to be of the same order as fish, whatever name for that order is then in common or official use?”
“If they relearn the same method of water-breathing then they would have much in common with the fish. Yet some other name is necessary, because to eat a fish is natural for us, but to eat a delphinoid or its descendant would be the foulest of crimes against the order of nature.”

Bird chirps multitudinously formed a fruity canopy of dew drops in the air. Fruit dew, juice drops.

“May we perhaps call those fellows the Delphinofish Folk?” I asked.
“We may indeed,” agreed Aristocrates.
“Or just the Delphish,” I further suggested.
“Better still,” said my wise friend.
“And may we call that horse-fellow over there a Lithe-Cow-Small-Udder-No-Horns?”
“I think perhaps not, in that particular case, as for one thing he is without question a male-fellow, not an uddered one.”
“Oh good heavens yes!” I remarked. “Little doubt about that. In fact, looking at the fellow, we might even call him…”
“I think,” interrupted Aristocrates suddenly, “Horse-Fellow will suffice.”
“Oh yes! So it will.”
“We might limit our naming to things and fellows that don’t already have names, don’t you think, Quentin?”
I looked around for this Quentin fellow whom my colleague had addressed. Suddenly a patch of ground near where we were sitting moved. Something below was pushing its way up, mole, rabbit, or badger.
“Quentin?” I inquired, nodding at the soil movement. Aristocrates shook his head.
“Who then is this Quentin?”
“Yourself.”
“I? But that is not my name, Aristocrates.”
“Precisely my point.”
“Aha, a point well illustrated.”

We looked out across the meadow’s great crowd of yellow buttercups.

“Will you help me then, Aristocrates, to think of some things without names that we can name?”

He thought for a while.

“Well…we have not yet spoken of an order of being who might at some point live in air, as we, but do its breathing by diving into water, just as the delphinoids live in water but come up to air for their breath.”
“And what name would you give those?” I asked.
“Quentinoids.”
“Whyforth?”
“Because you rejected the name Quentin just now, so it is a name without a thing, and so is well coupled to a thing without a name.”
“But Aristocrates, there are fellows named Quentin.”
“I suppose so. But not Quentinoids.”
“Well, that’s true, but since you wouldn’t allow Lithe-Cow-Small-Udder-No-Horns, then there too is a name without a thing.”
“But that name would be more appropriate to something like a cow but more lithe.”
“Indeed, and a fish is more lithe than a cow, is it not?”
“True, but it’s not much like a cow, and what of the small udder and the no horns?”
“Few fish have horns to speak of,” I said.
“And udders?”
“No udders at all, as far as I am aware.”
“But a lack of udders is a very different thing to a small udder,” said Aristocrates.

In the West the Olympian cumulonimbaean echelons of the sky-realms glowed cream gold like the spirit of genius that illuminates the cerabra-dome of a mind in a genius state.

“Well,” said Aristocrates, “shall we agree to call them Lithe-Cow-No-Horn-Quentinoids?”
“Well, we could at least then be certain that the name was unique,” I replied.
“Or,” he suggested, “we might just call them the Antidelphoids, for while the Delphoids surface to fill their lungs with air, these fellows would dive down from air for water-breath.”
“I like that too,” I said.
“Which is it to be then?” asked my friend.
“Antidelphoids,” I said. “I like its succinctness.”
“Very well then.”

And that is the story of how the Antidelphoid got his name.

Kundalini Scene : The Art of Rapture

2008-04-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

SNAKE MAGIC

Kundalini, Sacred Time, and the Art of Rapture

The benefits of risen kundalini are enormous. The rising serpent fire activates the centers of the body, bringing renewal and aliveness, and this is the key to actualizing the kind of dreams we have for, to give an example, an idyllic holiday. Kundalini activates the body-mind system, including the senses. Food will actually taste better. And like sap siphoned up through a plant by capillary action, a feedback loop of sustained kundalini can be generated. For example, a delicious meal can cause increased passion for living, in other words a rising of kundalini - life force - which can actually make the food taste better, and the increased interest in life can further enhance the motivation to make more delicious meals, and so on.

A Passion for Life

Then we say this person has a passion for cooking. An artist may similarly develop a passion for the colours of nature, the flowers, the field of golden corn, dappled sunlight playing upon a wall. Is it worth being interested in the world? Is there any point in getting curious about the patterns on an insect’s back, the smell of wild thyme, the taste of fresh sea bass, or the velvet colours of the rose? More than that, it is our cosmic vocation as humans.

The benefits are also apparent even on more obviously practical levels. If you want to make the most of some time off, for example, you will want raised kundalini. Travellers’ cheques? Tick. Passport? Tick. Suntan lotion? Tick. Methods for raising kundalini?

Because of the way kundalini enlivens the senses, knowing how to raise it is very a valuable tool for enjoying life more. And because kundalini is passion for life, things that inspire curiosity can be useful for this. Can taking a fascinating book with you on holiday make the cuisine you will sample there taste better? Absolutely! Even more so if it makes you more curious about your environment at the time. And will the food make the book more interesting? If the food is delicious it’s all part of keeping the sustained kundalini flow, and so yes, and you are mastering the Art of Living. There are Muses of cookery who will guide you to the herbs you are best working with in any given period! There is body wisdom, intuition that you can follow regarding such things.

The Art of Appreciation

When you are interested in life, you have more life force. That’s self-evident. Kundalini rises. Life has been invested with many Mysteries, because the art of discovery is a great way to raise kundalini. And when kundalini rises, creativity is enhanced, and the chakra centers are activated, including the Eye of the Mind, called the Third Eye. This allows you to see the Beauty of Culture, because collective repositories of passionate human perceptions exist as morphic fields perceivable by the Mind’s Eye. So if your kundalini has risen up to this level, that is called the 6th Chakra, harmonious ancient architecture will be seen with its halo of exquisite beauty, through resonance across time. So again, if you are going site-seeing check you have the guidebook, the map, and so on, but also get the kundalini up to the Third Eye.

Snake Medicine and Getting in the Groove

At this level too it is a two-way process – just as your Sight will be activated, so too are there are sacred geometric patterns of time and space that are the triggers of kundalini. The teachers of this, kundalini rising, are the serpents, which makes intuitive sense since kundalini itself is the serpent fire, coiled at the base of the system while dormant, then rising in serpentine fashion like a snake climbing a tree. At one of the more simple levels, the rattle-snake teaches how use of rattles, shakers, tambourines, sistrums can be used to enter a trance in which the kundalini serpent is somewhat set free from its cave. So we start to feel more groovey. But there is far more to it, and there are keys in the serpentine patterns and numerology.

Can it really be true that contemplation of something so seemingly dry as geometry and calendrical numerology is able to bring about the opposite of dryness – the flowing of the sap that invigorates the system and makes life interesting? Give the following a go:-

Fascinating Wheels and Shimmering Scales

The Maya discovered that a delicious, juiced up feeling can be invoked by basing art, temple architecture and sacred time on the patterns and numbers of the rattle snake Crotalus Durissus Durissus, and so they became quite, quite addicted to this. Just contemplating the Mayan Mysteries in a place beyond stress can open the doorway to beautiful culture and invigorated senses, and interest in life. The snake has a geometric pattern on its hide, based on a diamond which is actually a square rotated through 45 degrees, and with a cross coming through this, marking the diagonals of the larger un-rotated square which encompasses the first. It is the abbreviated form of the pattern known to some as Plato’s Canted Squares – a repeating pattern of alternated rotated and un-rotated squares of decreasing size set one within another, and it creates an image of a perspective 3D view of a diamond tunnel.

The basic square on the snake’s skin is generally of side thirteen scales, with the sides cut by the diagonals in the middle of the side, i.e. the seventh square. The snake grows two new fangs every twenty days, and sheds its skin once every solar year. The calendar that embodies this is not the famous Long Count with its much talked of end date, but rather the Calendar Round.

This is the basic calendar of Sacred Time. Contemplate how it is made from two interlocking “wheels”, one of thirteen days and the other of twenty days. These two wheels come into phase after a period of 260 days, and this and the solar year of 365 days come into phase every 52 years, which is half of 104 years. 104 years plugs into the Venus calendar, which is also made up of thirteens. The basic Venus cycle is, elegantly enough, very close to eight solar years, which is thirteen Venus years, and thirteen of these eight solar-year periods is 104 years. Since eight solar years is also thirteen Venus years, this 104-year period is also 13 x 13 Venus years, the square of thirteen, which brings us back to that square of thirteen on the snake’s hide. Why half of this – the 52 solar years – rather than the full 104? This part of the chain of ideas actually makes the whole more elegant, rather than less so, because the halving of the square (in this case the 13 x 13) is precisely what is achieved by Plato’s Canted Squares as is explained by Socrates to a young boy in the dialogue written by Plato called Meno. The 13 x 13 gives the 169 scales / Venus years; halved, this gives us 84.5 Venus years, which is the 52 solar years that is the phase cycle of the solar year and the 260 sacred year of the Maya. And incidentally the relative diagonal lengths of the inner and outer squares (below) give the ratio of the orbit distances of Earth and Venus from the Sun!

Inner square = half area of outer (tilted) square

Check you got that, contemplate it, then see if an olive tastes better! Actually, it might not taste too different; the juicing up of your system will probably occur once you take the Canamayte pattern on board and start to use it creatively, whether for doodles, mosaics, weaving patterns, tiled floors, architectural design or other types of decoration. As the Maya discovered, it is adoption of the pattern in craft that invokes the juicy sense of Sacred Time. You can further enhance the resonance by shamanistic contemplation and communing with the rattlesnake teachers, and the morhpic fields that have been established by the culture of the Maya, their pyramids, relief sculpture, and artwork. Then taste that olive.

some key links at this stage:
to find today's date in Tzolkin (260 day) and Haab (solar 365 day):
http://www.diagnosis2012.co.uk/mlink.htm

and to make sense of the names that gives you:
http://www.michielb.nl/maya/calendar.html

Viperscience (Kathleen Rogers & Jose Diaz-Bolio):
http://www.kathleenrogers.co.uk/2006/08/viperscience_1.htm

The Gifts of Eve : Entry to the Garden

One of the fascinating things about the Garden of Eden story is that it is perfectly incorrect, exactly opposite of the truth. Eve, (Hebrew snake goddess Hevia, who is Venus) and the serpent himself, and those delicious apples, the fruit of Venus, are the sacred teachers for ENTRY TO not EXIT FROM the Garden of Eden, and Eve does Adam a great favor.

The Living Library

As well as being coded with numeric codes for kundalini release, this Mayan Mystery also teaches us about the encoding of the natural world with information, as an allegory for the fact that Gaia’s biosphere constitutes a “living library”. I mentioned above that contemplating the patterns on a insect’s back, smelling the fragrance of wild thyme, going into rapture over fresh sea bass, or vibing-out on the velvet colours of the rose are actually examples of cosmically worthwhile activities, inherently interesting. Human culture has been invested with Mysteries so that we have things to be curious about, but we may also note that material channeled from Pleiadian sources (in Barbara Marciniak’s Plieadian Keys to the Living Library) tells us that we are the library cards of Gaia’s Living Library and that as we appreciate these things multidimensional beings are able to access cosmic information that has been encoded and stored here. The rattlesnake mystery of the Maya is just an allegory for this, because this cosmic information is not something we will understand ourselves intellectually; it is accessed through us. But knowing this does allow us to realize how worthwhile it is on many levels beyond the personal and the mundane to be passionately interested in, appreciative of and rapturous about the world around us.

Phasing Out the Long Count, Chiming in the Calendar Round

Karma cannot remain in a state of stagnancy once kundalini rises. This is where stories come from about how kundalini rising can be uncomfortable. But the spasmodic release of deeply felt repressed emotion (the basis of karma) is well within our capability, so this is nothing to worry about.

If you want life to be more interesting, you can start with an intention. You put out the request to the Universal Mind for this, and then you play the Great Game, which is going out into life and finding what you’ve asked for. Ask your Higher Self to get involved, and any other multidimensionals of the Love-Light.

And as karma burns away, interest in End Time based calendars fades, to be replaced by a love of the delectable cycles of Sacred Time, just as the hype of 2012 will be followed by 2013 – which will focus our minds on the two numbers, 20 and 13, that form the elementary wheels of this Mayan Calendar Round. The Venus transit of June 2012 also gives us the perfect opportunity for the recalibration of the Calendar Round attuned to the Venus cycle.

As we approach 2012 there will no doubt be many with pound signs flashing before their eyes who will arise and peddle sensational ideas about the end of the Long Count by means of fear-based selling. It’s all nonsense. Don’t buy into it. Just choose to see it as an opportunity to process and release any lingering End Time repressions, those neurological blocks Barbara Hand-Clow calls catastrophobia. As you do this you will be overjoyed to notice your optimistic New Ager self being reborn, but not the type of New Ager who looks forward with insane, unbalanced hyper-optimism to an End Date as some kind of instantaneous entrance into the New Age. That is just the other side of the coin of catastrophobia karma. Karma is charged energy. The opposite of a charge is an anti-charge, but the release of karma is the collision of particle and antiparticle, creating light, which is uncharged. Winter Solstice 2012 will be a day like any other, a day like today or tomorrow, but today and tomorrow can be fantastic if you are living in Sacred Time and Sacred Space juiced up by the fire-sap of raised kundalini and passionately into life, allowing karma to be released. Why wait?

MIRACLE SLIMMING CURE FOUND UP SKIRT OF CELEBRITY-ISLAMIC-FUNDAMENTALIST-SEX-SCANDAL ROYAL MAY BE THREAT TO YOUR BABY AND ENVIRONMENT, SAYS THINK-TANK

2008-02-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

In the absense of quality writing, concern-based journalism sells newspapers. The trouble is, the more people are made to feel that there is something they should be worried about, the more they feel guilty about enjoying pleasures like art, creativity, culture. But here is the real cause for concern, because when culture is lost, barabarism steps in to take over. A fear-based media will create a violent society in a downward spiral of culture-loss. We should not be complacent about having culture. Dark Ages have, in the past, replaced High Cultures. Since 9/11, many people have been living as if in a Dark Culture already. But the quality is still all around.

Ancient Mysteries take a back seat when you feel under threat from immanent bombings. Statisticaly, however, the chances of being killed by an act of terrorism in, say, the UK, are very small indeed - not worth worrying about. Forget about it. Enjoy culture with a feeling not of guilt, but of doing something worthwhile. The less guilt you feel, the more worthile it is. Curiosity about the sources of our culture matters. Really matters.

Do something important. Take a break from the mass media for a week or too, and get stuck into some quality investigations of the Ancient Mysteries.

Thoughts Occuring While Sitting in the Bull, Ditchling, 11-01-08.

2008-01-11T15:14:00.001-08:00

Thoughts Occuring While Sitting in the Bull, Ditchling, 11-01-08.

Partaking of the Form of Chair,
Yon' chair is a revelation!
- A thought that suits a poem more
Than idle conversation.

Barber's Adagio for Strings comes on
Evoking Akhenaten's city -
Some emotional parallel I've drawn:
The tragedy, the pity.

Whatever. I cast my mind back to
The ecstatic rustic fire
In Avalon's mantic cider groves
I ascend, higher and higher.

Anakreontics Cicada Poem My Versh

2008-01-11T15:09:00.000-08:00

In the course writing something the other day I wanted to quote a poem that was formerly
attributed to Anakreon, but which is actually of unknown authorship. I decided to do my own rhyming version.

Cicada, royally blest you are
Perched in yonder tree
You sip some dew and know you own
Everything you see
Harmless to the farmer's fields
Summer's prophetic voice
Beloved insect of mankind
The Muses' bard of choice
Apollo also holds you dear
Your clear song came from him
Wise un-aging Earth-born child
Play on, your divine din.

A STRANGE CONSEQUENCE OF BEING EAVESDROPPED

2008-01-11T05:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday evening I was in a pub in Lewes chatting with m'good friend Alex about this and that. I explained how and why I don't really buy the idea that myths are predominantly organic things that, through very gradual evolution, come to mirror the subconcious, but hold rather that they may just as easily in many instances be born fully fledged through oracular or Muse-evoking creative procedures, and then be conserved for various reasons such as an aristocratic family's claims to hero/demi-god ancestry, and that such changes that occur often happen consciously through the craft of the poet, the dramatist, the story-teller, frequently with an audience effect in mind. So the dragon that guards the Fleece is in my opinion more likely to have been inserted to provide thrill as it is to have evolved organically into the story as a mirror of the Shadow archetype in the collective subconcsious. Alex relayed some interesting mythology he had learnt from his anthropological fieldwork with the Nishi people of North-East India, and some curious similarities with Egyptian myth then came to light. I then saw a biro on the floor and picked it up: "That means one of us is going to want to write something down."
And so our discussion continued. After a while a middle-aged man with dark black hair and a mediterranean look who had been hovering for a few moments nearby suddenly came over and introduced himself. He appologized for having eavesdropped, and told us that he had been wanting for some time to organise late night group intellectual discussions, after a Spanish tradition which I forget the name of. Something like tertulia, or something like that. We offered him a seat, and so he entered into the conversation, which continued with new enthusiasm. "We should exchange emails," we soon decided, and the biro I'd found on the floor found the use to which it had been destined.
After a while Dominic's nephew appeared, Merlin by name, and he turned out to be just as erudite, and again the conversation grew in pace and passion. I outlined my Titian Bacchus and Ariadne constellation-map theory to Dominic, the elder man, while the other two were at the bar, and he held my gaze and told me he thought I'd come up with a very important addition to the history of art. I don't recall everything that we talked about but something that stuck in my mind was when I suggested Dominic might enjoy Virgil's Georgics, to which he replied that he had been put off them because he was made to copy them out while at Eton as a punishment for being bad at Latin. He also told me his family had been given an ancient Egyptian calcite bowl by Howard Carter, the fellow who famously opened the tomb of Tutankhamun.
"Come round some time. Handle it."
"Please!" was my head-nodding reply, as I recalled how while in Greece I had similarly been invited to handle an ancient Greek vase by a rich Greek lawyer, and had done so.
After some time Alex had to get back home, but the remaining three of us continued until last orders, and then we removed to a bar in Lewes called the Rainbow. It was full and big and noisy as if it was a Friday, rather than a Thursday, and after a while I realised that karaoke was the main event. Dominic calmy informed me that he was going to go and sing a song. And so he did. At which point I realised he was wearing a pair of green wellies, trousers tucked inside them, dried chalky Downs mud all over his trousers and jacket, so he made quite an unusual figure as he belted out Brown Eyed Girl.
I observed to Dominic that several of the young ladies in the bar had a Spanish look about them, and he then proceeded to speak to most of them, in Spanish. He was fluent since he was himself half Spanish.
For the second time in the evening last orders were called and we spilled out onto the pavement. More conversations with Spanish ladies followed, into which Dominic kindly drew me, telling them in such Spanish as I could understand due to the few words common to English that I had "an enormous intellect". Possibly it was not the size of my intellect they were interested in. Dominic lead our conversation towards the topic of introversion and extroversion, and he, Merlin and I all emphatically agreed that we were extroverts who usually seem to be introverts simply because what is going on in our minds is not usually what people want to talk about. Dominic then said that he felt that English culture imposes an introversion which the English attempt to break out of through alchohol which results in yobbishness. I don't know if he had read Watching the English, the book I have had cause to mention often in my own eavesdropping adventures, but the same theory is propounded there, and it does make a lot of sense.
Then one by one people drifted off until there were only Dominic, Merlin, myself and three youths of a slightly chavacious orientation who seemed to illustrate perfectly the kind of aggressive alchohol-facilitated extroversion Dominic had just been describing. They began to take issue with Dominic's green wellies.
"It's because I'm posh," he informed them. "Haven't you heard of the green welly parade? I've been on the farm."
Dominic was not particularly intimidated by these three fellows, and so answered all their jibes with responses, but he, Merlin and I soon decided to leave. As we got into my car - I having offered them a lift home - one of the three yobs picked up a cardboard box and threw it at my car. I was actually rather glad they had chosen so soft a missile, but never the less was irked that they had performed so disrespectful and uncalled-for an act. I found myself reversing the car to where it had formerly been parked, and opening the door to get out and ask this fellow what the blazes he meant by it.
"Just drive off!" advised Dominic wisely. But I didn't find myself able to do that. I got out of the car and walked up to the three gentlemen, squaring up to them, and enquiring of the one in question as to why he had thrown a box at my car. He didn't have a ready answer, but the chap to his right advised me to leave, while the one to his left told me that in his belief my car was "a piece of shit", from which I presume I was supposed to surmise that it deserved to have a box thrown at it.
"It gets me from A to B," I said, turning to him. It came out almost in a friendly, chatty sort of way, and perhaps it was for this reason that it silenced him, as if by confusion as much as anything else.
I repeated the question to the guy who had thrown the box, and they in unison repeated their suggestion that it would be advisable for me to leave. Going through the alternatives in my head, which either involved injury to them (they were after all of relatively slight build compared to myself) or else injury to myself, had they resorted to foul play of some kind, I saw potential complications, so with a final "I'm not impressed," I turned and walked back to my car. As I did so a pencil fell out of my jacket pocket. The guy who had given his opion of my car picked it up and shouted "you dropped your pencil" and threw it in my direction. "Keep it," I said in reply, after all I was already up one biro. This was a surreal ending to our little chat, because it could again have been easily heard as a friendly exchange of chit chat:
"You dropped your pencil."
"No no, really, I insist, you keep it."
I presume one of them was destined to need to write something down.
"Christ," I thought as I drove off, "what in the name of Dionysos did I think I was playing at there?"
Arriving back in Westmeston I started to fix up some tapenade and marinaded wild mushrooms on toast with herbs and extra olive oil, when Vincent, my landlady's partner, appeared in the kitchen.
"Someone's up before me," he said. In confusion I looked at the clock on the wall, and his eyes followed me, prompting him to then add, "My goodness, is it...is it really only ten past one?"
Squaring up to groups of youths is one thing, but this was just too wierd, so I finished my toast and went upstairs and read the Georgics to calm myself down.

Lewes Guitar Festival videos and pics

2007-09-09T03:33:00.000-07:00

location of the music: The gardens of the Grange, Lewes. beautiful. old. sunny. Tower of Lewes castle just visible on horizon.

What was their name again? Note solar pannels used to drive the speaker system

VIDEO:

Video above is of some kind of Brazilian music. Since base and rythym were not really picked up by my phone, the people appear to be dancing to rythms beams directly into their minds.

MASTERPIECES FROM THE CLASSROOM

2007-09-09T02:44:00.000-07:00

The Artist at Work, Aix-en-Provence 1898

At the Market, St Remy, 1886

Dressing Gown, Paris, 1882

Cuppalot Holds Forth

2007-09-09T02:36:00.000-07:00

Myrtale: Empathagenia dear, do try to keep still while Pater Cuppalot is delivering one of his opium-fuelled monologues.
Empathagenia: But M'ma! Why won't he look for a perspective that embraces both the Platonic and the Aristotelian! It does irk me so!

The child in a dress pictured here above is not, in fact, the daughter, Empathogenia, but the son, Pathologicus. Empathogenia is the child dressed as a boy, standing with her hand on the lap of her mother, Myrtale. Her father Cuppalot stands arm on the mantlepiece sporting a fine smoking jacket. Proffessor Hatpins (left) and Thomas de Puggalot (right) make up his standing audience. In the background Hawaki Leafstrain prevents Henry F Tosser from gaining backdoor entry.

(Drawing, presumably by Hogarth, which hung in the White Horse pub, Ditchling. Sorry it's askew. Had a devil of a job taking the photo without light reflecting on it. Also some difficulty in explaining to barlady why I was standing on a chair taking the picture.)

The Song of Dijong

A muse of absurditoire charmant beswozzled my mind and utterethed the whimsical song of Dijon, of the massive harp, which pleases me most fully: I do not spend this hot August morning in busy Brighton But in leafy Ditchling, below the Downs Just as, upon the tip of Tehuti, Auset, leaving beaufully multi-stored Memphis, entrusted the young Heru to the countryfolk of Chemmis village Where Perseus too has his temple Perseus, who similarly found haven on sandy Seriphos, safe from the jealous wrath of Acrisius, floated there from the mouth of the Inachus, his ancestor, the River God who fathered Isis' priests. So do I entrust myself to this ancient Sussex village. And eat your heart out Seriphos, for this is Ditchling, And three turtles are in the village pool. So hot it is this morning that not even they choose to bask on the rocks that range around the water's edge, But float in the cool green Sun-water like islands in the sea. So eat your heart out Seriphos, for these very rocks, these megaliths from some ancient circle, they were petrified when Medusa, the Gorgon, cast here her glance. And mark you, O Seriphos, Surely it was here, in Ditchling, that Perseus came with the sickle, god-given; the three turtles, older still, remember it well. Only the heron, the Heron of Ditchling Pool, is older even than they. Today perhaps flying out somewhere on wide slow-beating wings, or wading silently deep there in the shady private foliage on the far side of the pool - this morning the heron has not been seen. In former times the Soul of the Ditchling Heron resided in a great king, his seat here in Ditchling, while the Beacon stood as Acropolis. The turtles, then too in human form, are his three daughters. The ducks an archestra of comedians, While at other times it was the doves who enchanted the palace with song. The moorehens paced from room to room carrying scrolls in hand and discussing or meditating upon high matters of state, While the coots their brothers padded through herb and vegetable gardens, for they were the king's own farmers. There was in Ditchling in those days a great harpest who played in the palace. His name was Dijon. He loved courgettes and soft, white pillows. He slept in a cave inside Ditchling Beacon. Beneath the Acropolis, with his enormous golden harp by his side. His tall boots were made from India Rubber - the first of their kind. He fell in love with one of the king's one-day-to-be-turtle-daughters, and wrote music for her of such beauty that the gods allowed him to live to the age of 373 so long as he promised to play the song every morning. As his 373rd birthday approached the people of Ditchling were sad that they were about to lose their harpest and not hear any longer his woundrous song, and feeling compassion for them he taught it to the local birds who repeat it once a year at dawn for seven days in May. Dijon then betook himself to his cave, with his harp, and fell asleep, but it is said that he will wake and play again when a cow and a goat are seen to walk along Ditchling highstreet of their own free will. The two animals must then be served golden ale from bronze or pewter dishes. Then Dijon will awake.

DITCHFEST!

2007-09-09T01:58:00.000-07:00

Picture Above : Second from left = Dermot

Note homemade geodetic dome

T Shirts and everything! Note grass on roof.

'Twas on the morning of I don't quite remember when, Summer 2007, and Dermot of next door came over and told me today was Ditchfest. "It's invitation only, but I'm inviting you."

So I went along with himself and family. We carried hampers of picnic stuffs out across the fields from Westmeston to Ditchling. About a hundred yards into the journey there is a pond fed by a little spring at the foot of the Downs, near a stable. Here the path crosses over into a meadow adjecent to a field of llamas. I have seen stirrings in that pool, under the proliferation of pondweed, of unknown provenance. As we approached the bridge over the river Rosa told me how Dermot had seen a black panther at this spot. At the moment I sought to verify this with the man himself, Dermot was otherwise engaged due to his just having seen a large grass snake by the bridge. Then he confirmed that yes, he had seen a panther there, it had been down in the stream, had snarled at him and departed, and yes it had been on the way TO the pub rather than the way back (in which case a possible alternative hypothesis might be formulated, perhaps involving strong organic vintage cider.) Dermot, I must point out, is a very down to Earth fellow, practical, anything but attention-seeking, which makes this panther story all the more peculiar. Rosa then recalled how one of my landlady's daughters had recently seen a wallaby in nearby Hassocks - a sighting confirmed later by the fact of their having been an escaped wallaby in the viscinity at the time.

So crossing over that bridge felt like one of those limminal margin moments, and I stuck close behind the others and began looking around me for strange creatures - panthers, snakes, wallabies, llamas.

We crossed another bridge over a little stream which marked our entry into the outskirts of Ditchling Village and before long Ditchfest was upon us. It is a full on music festival in a back garden, with a stage, mixing equipment, PA system, all the works.

The house was built by Dermot about ten years ago. There must have been at least thirty different bands, all local, except Detroit Dave, who just happened to be in the area, stunning us all with his proffesional guitar playing. There was Latin Jazz, Indie Rock, Prog Rock, Brit Pop, Folk, Protest Songs, Parisian Tango, you name it. One of my favorite acts was Spalian Acecraft. "We do gigs in Brighton and stuff," announced the lead singer.

All the children already knew the chorus of "He's Got an Orange for a Head", you can hear it at their myspace page.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=152770969

THE TORCH OF OLYMPIA Chapter 4 : REVELATION OF THE SECRET OF THE GREAT MYSTERIES OF ELEUSIS

2007-08-05T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Argonaut Mystery :
Aeschylus' Chain and The Eleusis Triumph

Spring 2000 and I've been teaching in the port of Volos on the east coast of Greece for a couple of months. But right now it's the weekend and I have visitors from England. My parents, to be exact.

The previous night had been a somewhat wild one. I finished teaching around ninish and the Aged Ps had only just arrived in a car hired down in Athens. We'd gone straight to a taverna just off the seafront and followed several carafs of wine with the contents of a mysterious plastic bottle. Having been told that we couldn't have ouzo because of something to do with licenses, my father had asked the waiter if we could have some of whatever it was that was being plied to the Greeks on the next table out of this plastic bottle.

I was soon flying. My parents got into a conversation with these Greeks neighbours. Their daughter was coming to England to study. Arrangements were made to meet them the following evening.

Then the dancing started. Blindingly, amazingly fast bouzouki playing and foot-blurring Greek circle dancing, with three figures visible amongst the throng who seemed to be dancing out an unorthodox pattern: my father, my mother and myself.

I did my best, but in situations like this when you don't even know what it is that you are supposed to be doing your best at, it didn't count for much.

My parents went off to their hotel room overlooking the bay and I meandered back towards my apartment. On the way I heard a familiar sound drifting out of another taverna...more bouzouki music! I was quite the expert now, so in I went. More octopus. More ouzo. Every bit the integrated traveller. Dionysian. Bon viveur. Greeker than the Greeks. And with this little cephalopodic dessert course now consumed, I stood up, patted my stomach in satisfaction, thought better of more dancing, went back out into the night air to resume my journey, and promptly threw up.

Ah yes, the octopus.

I don't remember much after that but I woke up in my own bed.

With a headache...

...SENT UP FROM THE NETHER DEPTHS OF HADES ITSELF!

If I understand correctly, ouzo, or rather the local Volos version - tsiporo - is made by fermenting the left over sticks and stuff after the soft, luschious parts have been used to make wine. A terrible idea. All sorts of impurities.

But here I am the next morning awaiting the arrival or the Ps in the hire car. We are due to take a drive up and over Pilion, the great double-peaked mountain that looms over Volos. Up there is where Chiron the centaur has that wild school whose rollcall of illustrious past students includes Jason and Achilles. I look up at the mountain. Something is different. White bits. Oh my god, it's snowed! My parents have come down to the Sunny South to put the English winter behind them, and I offer snow, by Dionysos!

The top parts of the mountain are red-gold, the Sun's beams striking that higher place already, then the gold snakes its way groundward as the Sun comes up.

Soon enough the parents arrived, and didn't the whole city know about it.

Toot toot!

By some freak of engineering each time the car was steered to the left the horn sounded. I climbed in and we headed off, waking up the locals wherever we went. We passed a couple of early risers, old ladies waiting patiently at the side of the road. We hallooed them with more jubillant toot-toots. What jolly types we must have seemed!

Of the journey up Pilion I shrink from speaking in any detail. Suffice it to say that ouzo hangovers and precipitous winding mountain passes don't mix. We stopped at the top when we came upon hoards of people skiing, then wound down the north side to a beach.

Later that evening back in Volos we met the Greek family as arranged, plus the daughter and a grandmother who was not able to remember for more than a minute that we were not native Greek speakers. They then took us to an intruiging site - a large candle-filled cave out of town in use as a church. I wondered what it had been used as in pre-Christian times.

The following morning, my constitution back to normal, we undertook another adventure, this time heading to the quayside and embarking eastward in a big yellow motorized catamaran, just as Jason and crew had embarked eastward from this same harbour in the Argo on their quest for the Golden Fleece all those years ago.

It was good to have my stomach back in order. I never drank ouzo again. Apart from those few times in Larissa with fellow English teachers (waking up in an apartment sandwidged between two Greek churches both in the habit of scaring the b'Jesus out of the faithfull first thing on Sunday morning with mechanized tuneless untuned bell chimes. Not particulalry heavenly.)

Oh yes and the time when my sister came to stay in Volos in the Summer, with a lawyer friend of hers.
"We'll stay out for another drink if you buy the next round," my sister had said to me.
"I'll get the next round if the next bar we go into gives it to us for free," I said, and we went straight into another bar, and saw a line of drinks on the counter.
"Help yourself," said the girl behind the bar, "They're free. We're closing up."

So we shrugged off our disbelief and helped ourselves, got to know the manager, then found ourselves been whisked off in his four-wheel drive to a night club around the bay. According to my sister my catchphrase from this point on was the cringeworthy "I think I'm in there," even with reference to a young Greek girl who was standing right next to her boyfriend.

Such tales of ouzo induced woe leads us appropriately enough into a darker side of the Dionysian Mysteries, the tragic theatre. I've said that before we get to the dawn we will first have to look at the darkness, and this is more the case for the first part of this section than it was in the last, as we investigate the weighty drama of the Agamemnon saga, but the hour of illumination is close at hand.

Mysteries Thinly Veiled : Aechylus' Agamemnon

The obvious predecessors of the novels in the Greek world were the plays of the Greek stage. Written on scrolls as books the plays continued to be read, and, we can assume, it was then only a small step before alterations were made to make them more suitable for the reading experience.

That the serious plays of the Dionysian Theatre of Athens evolved out of the Dionysian religion is no secret, and with this in mind it becomes less of a surprise to realise that the novels, too, were based on the Mysteries.

Those plays that bear the closest resemblance to the novels are the ones with happy resolutions such as certain of Euripdes' works, like Alkestis and more notably Ion, named after a child who, like Chariclea in the Ethiopian Story novel, worked in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, was lost-and-found, and narrowly evaded being killed by his own mother prior to recognition.

But even the dark and heavy Orestes trilogy by Aeschylus ultimately ends with a solution and optimism for the future. It is the first part of the trilogy which concerns us here, and words like "lighted-hearted" don't immediately spring to mind.

The history of the theatre starts with a type of Greek song called the dithyrhamb. A sacrifice accompanied the singing of the dithyrhamb, and the songs themselves were about the birth of Dionysos. We might recall that in Egypt a song was song by the lector priest to accompany a dance in honour of the bull-god at the time of the bull sacrifice. The same paradoxical ambiguities surround the dithyrhamb. The purpose of the sacrifice of the goat to Dionysos is clear - the blood of the animal soaked into the soil and fertilized it. Greek sentimentality created certain complexities around this rite. They wanted to be able to feel that the slaughter was just.

In fact, if we are to assume that the dithyrhamb actually evolved out of the hymn to the bull god sung in Egypt - and the bull did precede the goat as the Dionysian animal in Greece, as Kerenyi outlines in Dionysos : Archetypal Image of Industructible Life - if we make this assumption, then we can clearly see the Greek mindset of the later age expressing itself in the altered approach, more sentimental, and, as a result, more intellectual, and also looser and more creative.

The wine did its work so that the dithyrhamb became impovisational, with all the creativity that entailed. But the Ma'at which the Egyptians had accepted in the order of nature was not enough, and the Greeks attempted to make use of an intellectualisation in order to feel that the killing of the goat was morally justified. This intellectualization was based on the fact that if goats manage to get into a vineyard they will set about eating the vines. So the sacrifice was viewed as a punishment for this crime against Dionysos, and the evolution of that motif is seen in the dramatic punishment of flawed protagonists in the plays that grew out the dithyrhamb.

The goat was, in fact, quite innocent of this supposed crime, and intellectual justifications of that nature are not healthy. The higher quality of tragedy is simply Dignity - respect for the animals who help us in various ways, such as the provision of meat. Dances for the soul of a slaughtered animal are to be found in old shamanic cultures around the world.

Nevertheless, it was from this complexity that theatre was born, which in turn lead to the novels, and so a lot of creativity has come out of it, and it did allow the likes of Aeschylus to present ideas of morality to the Athenian audience.

In some cases the connection to the bull-sacrifice was particuarly explicit, as we shall see next.

Aechylus wrote somewhere between seventy and ninety plays, only seven of which have survived. A story tells how he was told in a dream by the gods to start writing these plays. His craft was then well-honed. It was fifteen years after he started writing before he carried away the winner's wreath from the Theatre of Dionysos.

What is particularly interesting with regard to our current investigation is that Aeschylus was taken to court accused of revealing the secrets of the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis in one of his plays. A story relates that he was acting in the play himself when initiates among the audience began to suspect the disclosure, and that the playwright had to seek sactuary by running to the altar of Dionysos when they stormed the stage.

We have not said a great deal so far in this book about the Mysteries of Eleusis, but perhaps it is time we did so, for these were by far the most renowned, majestic and monumental of the Greek initiation ceremonies. They took place every year in autumn for over a thousand years, and were spread out over a number of days. The city of Eleusis is located a lengthy walk north-west of Athens, and this walk was undertaken by the thousands of initiates each year as a great procession at the start of the initiation. Textual evidence from the ancient world attests to there having been something really rather awe-inspiring about these Mysteries, which were concerned with, on one level, grain and the agriculture goddesses Demeter and her daughter Persephone, and on some other but related level with eternal life, as with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

Nothing was thought to compare with the Mysteries of Eleusis. Even wars were stopped temporarily to allow people to attend. (A modern equivalent could be be a day without cars in Athens and the suburbs to allow Greeks to walk this old route in peace and consider their heritage, the Greek Dreamtime. I visited the ruins on the site in September of 2001 on a pleasant sunny autumn day and found that it retained an air of invigoration.)

A democratic spirit predominated, for anyone, male or female, could become initiated, as long as they had enough Greek to understand what was said.

Certain secret things went on, were said and observed which left people feeling happy, and it was forbidden for anyone to reveal them to the uninitiated. But Aeschylus, himself a native of the city of Eleusis, had done just this, it was claimed, in one of his plays. He was, however, found not guilty by the court partly, it is thought, because he had served valiantly as a soldier, and ostensibly because he claimed not to have been an initiate at Eleusis.

Exactly which play contained the disclosure is not included in the anecdote that has come down to us. With only about a tenth of his plays having survived, we might need the will of the gods on our side for the play in question to be one of them. As far as I can see, however, his Agamemnon is that very play.

In the opening scene a kind of prologue is uttered by a watchman outside the palace of Argos. This prologue makes reference to certain things that will be spoken of that will be understood only by those in the know.

"A great ox has laid his weight across my tongue. But if stones could speak, these stone walls would have a tale to tell. Myself, I can speak to those who already know; if another asks me, I forget."

As if this reference to information only for the initiated wasn't enough, while it is being spoken events are going on in the play that are very reminiscent of certain things we do know went on in the Great Mysteries of Eleusis. The watchman finally sees, after years of waiting, a distant beacon fire that signals the end of the Trojan War, and, he hopes, the return of his king, Agamemnon. The watchman hails this beacon as the "kindler of dark, O daylight birth of dawn."
He then asks that word of this signal be carried to Agamemnon's queen inside the palace, so that she may

"Rise like dawn, and lift in answer strong,
To this glad lamp her womens' triumph song"

to quote from Gilbert Murray's excellent rhyming translation. The watchman speaks then of a celebration dance and says that he himself "will tread the dance before all others."

The watchman then completes the prologue with the reference to secret things that I mentioned before (within the story line applicable to Clytemnestra's affair with Aigisthus), and then the triumph cry is heard in the palace. The handmaidens and attendants then appear on stage bearing torches and incense is kindled on altars. Then the day begins to dawn.

It may well have been at this point that the initiates in the audience of the Theatre of Dionysos below the Acropolis in Athens stormed onto the stage and Aeschylus, playing the watchman, sped off to the altar of Dionysos for safety, because all of this is reminiscent of the Eleusis ceremony. Most obviously, dances at night by dancers holding torches were one of the aspects of the Mysteries that could not be kept secret from passers by. We also know that at the climax of the Mysteries, with the initiates all standing inside the vast darkened initiation hall, a light shone in through a small hole in the roof shortly before dawn, and a great fire was lit as a triumph cry went up in honour of the birth of Iachos the Torch-Bearer and child-self of Dionysos, self-begotten son of the Maiden who had been impregnated in the Underworld. In the Homeric hymn to Demeter, in whose honour the Mysteries were performed, we read how the goddess, who had been sorrowing and aging while looking for her lost daughter, was suddenly rejuvenated as a "light like lightening" shone into her house along with the fragrance of incense. This would appear to refer to the manifestation of Persephone that occured in the Mysteries when a great fire surged up.

This is enough to rouse considerable curiosity. Let's read on and see what else the play has to tell us.

Agamemnon returns from Troy along with the Trojan priestess Cassandra. Clytemnestra, his wife, slays them both in vengeance for Agamemnon having murdered their daughter Iphigenia as a sacrifice. Of course there was the other version where the daughter was saved by Achilles who then married her and fathered the line that lead to another hero who would help stop a sacrifice of a daughter by her own father - Theagenes of The Ethiopian Story. But Aeschylus worked in his trilogy with the version that would allow a trail of dramatic retributions to be worked out on the stage like the slaughter of the goat that attacks the vines, and in terms of dramatic intensity not even Shakespeare comes close.

Even in his own time Aechylus was considered a little obscure - Dionysos himself (in The Frogs of Aristophanes) confesses to having stayed up all night wondering what a horse-cockeral might be, and it is partly in these peculiarites of dialogue that Aeschylus was able to make what must surely have been deliberate references to a Thesmophorian style bull-sacrifice, and, perhaps, the related Eleusis Mysteries.

Agamemnon has gone inside the palace, Cassandra the Trojan prophetess stands outside uttering her predictions about the events shortly to occur. Realizing that her schemes of murderous revenge may be rumbled if the prophetess continues, Clytemnestra complains that there is no time to stand around listening to such crazed utterances because there is a celebratory sacrifice to be carried out:

"How long must I stand dallying at the gate?
Even now the beasts to Hestia consecrate
Wait by the midmost fire, since there is wrought
This high fulfillment for which no man thought."

(Murray)

The "beasts" who are to be sacrificed are Agamemnon and Cassandra herself; this is what Clytemnestra wants to get done sooner rather than later.

But Cassandra continues to describe her visions and as they become clearer she cries:

"Ah, look! Look! Keep his mate from the Wild Bull!
A tangle of raiment, see;
A black horn, and a blow, and he falleth full,
In the marble amid the water. I councel ye."

Here, then, Agamemnon is the wild bull, and the bull's mate, who must be kept from him, is his wife, the queen, Clytemnestra. Aeschylus repeats this same apparent allegory of animal sacrifice several times in the play. When Cassanda, still seeing visions, speaks of

"death drifting from the doors, and blood like rain!"

the leader of the elders of the palace tries to reassure her:

" 'Tis but the beasts at the altar slain."

Cassandra sees that she herself will die, but walks on into the palace, at which point the leader asks:

"Knowing they doom, why walkest thou with clear eyes,
Like some god-blinded beast, to sacrifice?"

After the act in question has been carried out in the play, (an act which is imagined to have occured off set), Clytemnestra appears at the doors of the palace holding an axe, the instrument that was used in the sacrifice of bulls at Delphi in the classical period as it had been in Minoan Crete long before. That it was the Double Axe or labyrs may be infered from a reference to it later in the play as "double bladed iron".

It is unusual for a poet to make use of the same allegorical image in such a repeated way. Normally poets use an array of images to fill out the picture from various angles. That Aeschylus should allude to the sacrifice of a bull who is the mate of the queen, and that this queen should reign at Argos, to which were brought the Thesmophoria from Egypt, according to myth, namely the bull sacrifice rite from the harvest festival of Min Bull-of-his-Mother - this all suggests that perhaps it is not a poetic allegory at all, or rather the allegorical process is the other way round - bestial in actuality and human poetically, dramatically, an audience-thrilling personification. Not that bull-sacrifice was the secret of the Eleusis Mysteries of course; no, it was something more inspiring and out of the ordinary. We shall come to it presently.

Another interesting reference in the play is where the mourners sing:-

"Ah, sorrow, sorrow! My king, my king!
How shall I weep, what shall I say?
Caught in the web of this spider thing,
In foul death gasping thy life way!
Woe's me, woe's me, for this slavish lying,
The doom of craft and the loney dying,
The iron two-edged and the hands that slay."

In Minoan Crete wild bulls were captured by means of a net, allowing them to be brought back alive so that they could, for example, for sacrificed during a rite. This would appear to be behind the reference to the "web of this spider thing". The live capture may also have been the original way that the Perseus bull-throwing integrated with myth.

But this bull-sacrifice was not the big secret of the Greater Mysteries, I don't believe. It is time now to look into that mysterious light that shines into the dark.

The Golden Fleece

A striking similarity between the Eleusis Mysteries and the Egyptin Festival of Min is that at the end of the former the hierophant wordless held aloft an ear of corn to the assembled crowd, while in the depictions of the Egyptian festival we see the pharaoh cutting a sheaf of corn with a sickle.

There is in fact a reference to harvest in The Agamenon. Clytemnestra says, to disuade Aigisthus from continuing the spree to the defiant elders:

"Let us work no evil more
Surely the reaping of the past is a full harvest."

What might a light shining in through the roof of a dark hall have to do with harvest? The answer might lie in the Mesopotamian flood story, the story of Atrahasis. Like Noah he builds an ark as the waters rise, but this ark is not a floating boat but a rectangular chamber that remains watet-tight during the flood, underwater. When the waters finally recede he is able to open a door in the roof, and light shines in. Tears of joy stream down Atrahasis' cheeks that the flood is finally over. Atrahasis looks out and sees fourteen mountain tops.

Might this story have come originally from Egypt where a great flood was an annual occurance, and one tied in intrinsically to the harvest cycle? Depictions of the Festival of Min show four birds being released to the corners of Egypt to announce a triumph. Noah released a dove which conveyed the message of a mountain top having risen above the waters of the flood. In Egypt the Primordial Mound, Ta Tenen, "Risen Land" was a potent symbol of the beginning of the recession of the water that would allow them to sow the seed in the fertile silt that had been left behind. Here was a sight all Egypt waited to see, and of course it would occur upstream days before it occured downstream, as that is the nature of rivers. Carrier pigeons may indeed have been used to convey this message north from Thebes to the Delta where the news of the continuing cycle was eagerly awaited.

Messages and mountaintops - doesn't this bring us back to The Agamemnon and that chain of beacons so central to the start of the play? But neither in Argos nor in Eleusis was an annual flood a part of the harvest cycle. What message did they wait to receive from the East? The Eleusis Mysteries were concerned with the return of the Maid from the Underworld, and they were held in the autumn when Virgo, the Maiden, ends her period of absence from the sky (daylight had outshone her stars), by first rising just before the Sun, then earlier each day through Autumn and Winter until She is rising as an evening constellation again by Springtime. It is conceivable that the sight awaited was the rise of Arcturus, the star that sits on the lap of Bootes, just as the infant Dionysos, named Iachos, was depicted sitting on the lap of his adult self, and born from the thy of Zeus while his mother (Persephone, the Maid, in the Orphic version) was burned up by the light of Zeus having asked to see him in his full glory. Could this be the rise of Arcturus shortly before the Sun rises to obliterate the light of Virgo? The star could be seen as a distant beacon, the torch of Iachos, the Torch-Bearer whose statue was carried from Athens to Eleusis at the start of the Mysteries. It all makes extremely good sense.

But what of the light that shone into the initiation hall shortly before dawn? Conceptually, such a beam could be seen as the agent by which Dionysos seeds himself from the future in the womb of night. But how do you get a beam of daylight to shine into the hall before dawn?

Noah built his Ark and from it let a dove fly forth to find land. Jason sailed in the Argo with his crew, and sent forth a dove so as to pass through the clashing rocks. Tears streamed down Atrahasis' face when the light shone in through the opening in the roof of his rectangular ark. This too is very strongly reminiscent of a scene in the Argonautica, the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece as told by Apollonios Rhodios.

Jason had obtained the fleece and he and his crew were nearly home. But then "night suddenly fell, a terror they call the Shrowd of Darkness...too thick for starlight or moonbeams to pierce, it came as a black void out of heaven or...from the nether depths..."

Then Jason stretches out his hands and invokes Apollo, Son of Leto, "while down his cheeks agonized tears ran", reminding us of Atrahasis. Then, paraphrased:

"Son of Leto, you heard him quickly and descended lightly from heaven to the Melantian rocks, that lie there out in the deep. You sprang on one of their twin peaks brandishing in your right hand your golden bow, which gave off a dazzling light all around."

A small island was then revealed by this light to the Argonauts, which they sailed to and cast anchor and went ashore. Shortly after this day dawned. They built a shrine there for Apollo and invoked him as Phoibus the Radiant "because of the far-beamed radiance", and they named the island "Revelation". They had no wine to pour libation, and were forced to pour water, at which point the handmaidens that had come with them back from Colchis, where they had obtained the Golden Fleece, were unable to hold back their laughter at this sight, since they were used to the most sumptuous libations being poured.
"The heroes returned the laughter with indecent language, flinging insults, exchanging mockery, all in fun."

Which brings us back to Eleusis, for the Mocking Jests are another of the features of the Mysteries that we know about. As of course is the light that shines into the hall shortly before dawn. Just as the dawn comes up shortly after the message has sped to Argos in The Agamemnon, and shortly after Apollo has revealed to the heroes the island.

We may now ask ourselves how a beam of light could spring off a double peak and reveal an island by means of 'far-beamed radiance' shooting through the darkness. Sunlight obviously hits mountaintops before the sunrise occurs at ground level, but what about this beam of light? How were the Greeks placed in terms of mirrors? Well, the Pharos light-house made use of them to send light far out to sea, and Archimedes devised a weapon that focused beams of sunlight from mirros onto approaching enemy ships so as to burn them. There are a few mountain peaks around the Eleusis site. Should we be wondering whether it was all done with mirrors?

Rams fleeces were apparently draped over the initiates at Eleusis at some point in the proceedings. It seems that the Quest for the Golden Fleece may be of particular relevance here.

Jason's city was ancient Iolchis. This is where the Argo was built, and it was where the crew set off from on the start of their eastward adventure in search of the Fleece, and to which they returned. This city, now called Volos, is where I lived during 2000. This was before I had read Apollonios Rhodios' version of the Argonaut story, featuring Apollo's beam springing off the mountain peak, but the theory I have just outlined formed in my mind at that time, while I had been pondering the Golden Fleece myth, the Eleusis Mysteries and the Aechylus beacon chain. Wonderfully, the moment when the idea came to me could hardly have been more elegant.

Sitting in the classroom while my students worked on a task, I looked up out of the window at the twin peaks of Mount Pilion. Suddenly I saw a bright flash of light at the very top of one of the peaks. A ski resort is located up there and the Sun must have been reflecting off a window or a metalic surface, the ray happening to shine in my direction, and planting in my mind the seed of the theory here outlined.

So you can imagine how delighted I was when, a couple of years later, I read Apollonios' version of the Jason story and read, in the last part of the book, the incident where Apollo's beam reflects off the mountain peak in a moment of revelation.

In Egypt in Cleopatra's time the beacon chain system was used to commicate with the distant mines out in the desert, while in the day time a system of mirrors was used to communicate over the hundreds miles using flashes of sunlight. Such systems are not mere flights of fancy, but entirely workable. Not that a whole chain of mountain tops would be necessary. The light of the rising Sun could be reflected down from a high mountain to ground level where it was not yet dawn.

A more elaborate and impressive version would do what Archimedes' ship-busting weapon did - the ray would ignite a fire. This fire would then be one ignited by the light of a future day. It would be a sacred fire.

"Kindler of dark, O daylight birth of dawn."

Such were the words with which the Watchman greeted the mountaintop blaze ignited by the message arriving from the East in The Agamemnon.

A suggested scenario, the most likely from the evidence in The Agamemnon and The Argonautika:

Sunlight is mirrored from one of the mountaintops near the Eleusis site, focussed from several large mirrors into a very bright beam and aimed through the roof of the initiation hall shortly before dawn. This light, perhaps via a lens burner, ignites the sacred fire in the Holy of Holies and the triumph cry is raised. The sacred fire is then passed around from torch to torch and the initiates perform the traditional dances, rather like the passing of the sacred fire from candle to candle in the Greek Easter ceremony.

The scenario is feasible, yet it also explains the sense of wonder and awe that the initiates felt about the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis.

The Golden Fleece fits snugly into this context. A symbol of Sun, it is stolen from the East and raced back to the West in the ship named Argo, which means "Swift". The Argo has to outrace the fleet of the king of Colchis, who is closely identified with the Sun, Helios.

For example, Book III, 1225:

"He [the king] put on golden, four crested helmet equal in brilliance to the dazzling haloed luminescence of the Sun when he first climbs up out of the ocean."

This king is in fact a son of Helios, and rides in a chariot "drawn by the horses that Helios gave him." The Greeks imagined that Helios, the Sun, rode in a chariot across the sky.

So there is great significance in the way that the Argonauts manage to outrace this king on their way back to Greece in the west. This sigfnificance is made all the more powerful by the fact that the Golden Fleece itself in Apollonios' epic poem is said to shine as if catching the first rays of the Sun. Paraphrased:-

"At that early hour when huntsmen scrape sleep off their eyes Jason and Medea stepped out of their vessel and went ashore into a grassy meadow called the Ram's Rest. They followed a pathway to the sacred grove where the Fleece was spread out over a great oak tree just like clouds that flush ruddy gold as they catch the first rays of the rising Sun."

This beautiful symbolism of sunrise lies at the core both of the Golden Fleece myth and the epic version of it woven by Apollonios. From this golden wool the entire tale was spun. It is as if Jason is the archetypal artist, the one who captures the light of beauty.

Perhaps a rich romantic with a sense of fun will take this torch and run with it, duplicating in our own time this feat of outracing the day's fire with a beam of sunlight that ignites a fire before sunrise. I like to imagine this will be the way that the Olympic Torch is lit for the London Games in 2012.

The scenario we have looked at also reminds us of the words of J.G. Fitzgerald in The Golden Bough: ‘…in the land of Bisaltae, a Thracian tribe, there was a great and fair sanctuary of Dionysos, where at his festival a bright light shone forth at night as a token of the abundant harvest vouchsafed by the deity’, and bear in mind that the Thracian priests, according to historian Karl Kerenyi, are thought to be precursors of the priests at Eleusis. Notice that this light shone at night (in an age before electric lighting), and ensured an abundant harvest.

There also appears to be fairly explicit reference to this extraordinary hidden high mystery tradition of the Greeks, a mystery dramatizing the triumph over the illusion of the solar death, in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex:

…Life on life goes down,
You can watch them go
Like seabirds winging west, outracing the day’s fire
Down the horizon, irresistibly
Streaking on to the shores of Evening.

"Outracing the day's fire" is our theme here, so let's read on. A few lines on we hear:

Artemis, Huntress,
Torches flaring over the eastern ridges
Ride Death down in pain!

…Dionysos…Come with the lightning
Come with torches blazing, eyes ablaze with glory!
Burn that god of death…

Here we have explicit references to torches on mountains in the East. We also find more words that fit the scenario in this section of the play:

I call Apollo, Archer astride the thunderheads of heaven -
O triple shield against death, shine before me now.

And:

You who twirl the lightning, Zeus, Father,
Thunder death to nothing!

So this light from the East is associated with putting an end to death.

And there also seems to be a reference to these goings on right in the most obvious place to look, the story of Demeter and Persephone. When Demeter was in sorrow after her daughter had been taken down into the Underworld, 'when it was dark, the goddess (Demeter) lighted two torches at the flaming summit of Mount Aetna, and continued her search. She wandered up and down for nine days and nine nights. On the tenth night when it was nearly morning, she met Hecate, who was carrying a light in her hand, as if she, too, were looking for something. Hecate told Ceres how she had heard Prosepine (Persephone) scream, and had heard the sound of wheels, but had seen nothing. Then she went with the goddess to ask Helios, the sun-god, whether he had not seen what happened that day, for the sun-god travels around the whole world, and must see everything. Ceres found Helios sitting in his Chariot, ready to drive his horses across the sky. He held the fiery creatures in a moment, while he told Ceres that Pluto, the king of the Underworld, had stolen her daughter and carried her away to live with him in his dark palace.' (From Favorite Greek Myths by L.S.Hyde.)

Ceres is the Roman name for Demeter, while Proseperne is Kore, or Persephone, and Pluto is the Underworld Lord. Mount Aetna, be a vulcano and due West of Eleusis, was seen as an entrace to the Underworld, in the direction of which the constellations of the Zodiac, including Virgo, were see to set, so this was mythologically seen as a place where the Maiden went down into the Earth.

Here, in the story that we know most closely relates to Eleusis, we have a) torches being lit upon mountain tops, b) a reference to the way in which the Sun travels all around the world, and c) a visit to the place where Helios stables his horses, at a time d) that is shortly before dawn.

THE TORCH OF OLYMPIA Chapter One: EASTERN SPICE

2007-07-09T08:35:00.000-07:00

THE TORCH OF OLYMPIA Chapter One: EASTERN SPICE

"The problem with writing about Ancient Greece," said George, "is that it's all been written about before."
"Actually," I replied, "I'm not sure about that."
It was about five in the morning and it had been a somewhat decadent night, largely due to the extravagant generosity of persons whose aquaintance I had made only that evening, the most generous being a shadowy fellow originally from Cyprus who I shall refer to simply as The Greek.
"Yes, I suppose you can introduce Ancient Greece to a new audience," said George, discussing my interests as if talking about a business, which was understandable since he had, just prior to this, been giving me the low down on his own next business venture.
I did my best to focus a slightly addled mind, and then maintained my position:
"Actually I don't feel like that's what I'm doing. It's a bit more than that."
George gave the appearence of being a fairly normal ex-public school boy of oriental extraction, and that is what I would have taken him for had I not been told earlier in the evening by an old friend that he was 'practically a billionaire' due to links with the royal family of the Asian country from which he hailed.
It was here in the kitchen of a comfortable three-story house in the centre of Brighton that he had just decribed to me the ins and outs of his proposed business venture, which was something to do with programming and the Internet, and I can tell you that the description involved frequent use of the word 'outsourcing'. Beyond that I cannot tell you anything, not because I'm bound by a code of secrecy, but because it was somewhat beyond my field.
"What sort of thing do you write about?" he'd then asked me.
"Ancient culture, that sort of thing."
"Asian cultures?" he'd asked to check he had heard correctly, which of course he hadn't.
I corrected him: "Greece, Egypt, that sort of thing."
"The trouble with writing about Ancient Greece," he said, and that brings you up to speed, as that's where this book started.
As if on cue, The Greek appeared, bearing gifts.
A little later I was half-seated, half-sprawled on the kitchen floor - a floor worthy of some note since it had a peculiar fissure in it, a tear in the material revealing a dark, mysterious space underneath. Seated just across from me was a young woman whose name I forget, who had studied Fine Art or Art History or something, in Florence, of all places. Again the conversation lead naturally to my own interests, and I was just beginning to tell her about the Bull-Leaper theory - which you shall hear about shortly - when a reveller called us down to the basement to play a computer tennis game that involved swinging some sort of electronic racket.
"I can't really see the point," I complained.
The Greek, slumped in a big beanbag and observing the proceedings with a wary eye, agreed with me:"Why don't you just go down to St Anne's Well Gardens and have a real game of tennis?"
It must have been getting on for eightish by the time I finally got round to leaving.
"Yeah, I'm starting to feel a bit tired myself," said the Greek.
My gaze swung to the well-off Asian guy: "We must do this again," he said.
As I made my way home I thought over what George had said. As I see it, each age has its own blindspots, as if from its location on the landscape of time certain things cannot be seen, hiding behind hills and mountains in the middle ground. The ages in which Greek culture was assimilated in Western Europe were not ages free from certain kinds of blindspot and blinkered perspective, and we are now ascending to a place where other wonders come into view. At the most practical level, we have recently seen how academic views of ancient history can be radically shifted by new science, as for example where DNA evidence shows that the Celtic peoples did not come to the British Isles from southern Germany in the Iron Age, as has been claimed by scholars for a century, but from the Iberian penisula in the Neolithic and before.
And it's not just that, as experience has taught archaeology, any low hill may turn out to contain the treasures of a lost culture, a Minoan palace or a Troy. The interpretive side of archaeology may also strike gold from time to time, as for example when Egyptian hieroglyphs were finally decifered and the doors of vast treasure houses of ancient thought were finally flung open to those curious to know on what shoulders our civilsation stands.
Blindspots may be healed as we take the time to extract ourselves from the limmited views of the age from which we ourselves are emmerging, and the resultant new perspectives on the past are frequently exciting.
It would have been highly impressive, I fancy, if I had come out with the above on the spur of the moment as I stood there in the kitchen talking to George at five in the morning.
One by one the computer tennis players might have ascended the stairs from the cave like the initiate in Plato's simile, seating themselves at my feat to feast their ears on my stirring rhetoric and their mouths on pieces of toast:-
"...as when the doors of vast treasure houses of ancient thought were finally flung open to those curious to know on what shoulders our civilsation stands. May we find the keys to more such treasure houses?"
Such would be my question as, trailing my toga on the floor while pacing dramatically around the kitchen - hopefully avoiding the hole in the floor - I then proceeded to answer my own rhetorical question:-
"Yes we may, as I shall now reveal to you!"
Rapturous applause would have followed, and cheers muffled by mouthfulls of toast, as I put the kettle on and then took them through the theories and discoveries from which this book is constructed.
So put that kettle on and settle in for the duration.
You yourselves are, I trust, an intelligent, prudent, well-rested and sober audience, and therefore demand no doubt a fuller explanation of this business of the blinkered views of certain ages. And to furnish you with such an account, I shall in fact take you back to another meeting with interesting gentlemen from the exotic East.

Spoons

"I can't be doing with your spoons."
The immaculately dressed Indian gentleman picked up the massive T-bone steak with his fingers and lifted it to his mouth. The Nishi tribe of North-East India do not hold the cow sacred in the same way as the vegetarian Hindus.
Robinson was busy chatting to the other Nishi gentleman about his business interests Southern India; Allie and Vikki were at the other end of the table debating whether or not to get ice-cream; Robinson and Allie's young daughter Ophelia was somewhere under a table engrossed in play, leaving Henry and I taking in the spectacle of a well dressed man setting about getting outside of a steak in the most time-honoured and hands-on manner.
All in all our party dominated the bar of the Star Inn, Alfriston, as a festive fire roared in the hearth and a red-faced barman looked on in mild bewliderment.
"I can't be doing with your spoons."
I loved the juxtaposition of an easy command of English idiom - "I can't be doing with..." and, at the same time, a shelving of our traditional eating implements even to the point of a carefree disregard for exactly which implement it was that was being shelved, the spoon not being the usual tool taken up when a Britisher is faced with a well-done steak. The use of the hands, though not the norm in Alfriston et environs, is an accepted manner in some parts and has been since campfires began, and so seeing it did not fill me with any of the sick, lurching feeling I get if I see someone from my own nation holding a knife as though it were a pen. It's just not good form! A knife is a knife and a pen is a pen. Do you mean to write an epistle in tomato ketchup? Can we not save the creativity for the conversation, the cuisine, the flirtation, without squandering it on the cuttlery?
(You understand that I don't speak directly to a 'you' meaning you, the audience, in the above, but to the fellow I spied profaning his supper with a needless revolt against the collectively agreed form in the Half Moon, Plumpton last Saturday evening.)
How had our party come to be seated in the Star in Alfriston? Earlier that day, as I had been leaving work, I had picked up a voicemail from Henry which informed me that the two Nishi gentlemen were due to meet him soon, one of them being the Minister for Culture, or some such, from that region of India.
"I've promised to show them some of the local Sussex countryside," Henry had said in his message, "have you got any ideas?"
I phoned back to suggest they took a drive down to Cuckmere Haven, the idyllic eastuary of the Cuckmere between Seaford and the Seven Sisters. Henry then furnished me with some more of the particulars. It was in fact I, I now learnt, who was to be the chauffeur - Henry didn't have access to a car that evening.
"Just give me a moment to have a little clear out," I had said, an image forming in my memory of the extensive midden heaps that would have to be cleared from both passenger side and rear sections alike. Afterall, one feels something of an effort should be made when receiving a Minster of Culture into one's country. Were his department agriculture, defence or trade and industry he would have been of hardy disposition, and would have been made to like it or lump it, but a man of culture is more refined and sensitive.
I should explain that Henry spent quite a bit of time living with the Nishi people - two day's from the nearest road - to fulfil the field-work part of his anthropology PhD. This is why the two gentlemen had looked him up when they landed in town.
When I picked up Henry and the two visitors from Henry's place in Lewes I was gifted with a rather fine bright navy blue Nishi shirt. Too small for myself, but it was intended for my wife, as soon as I found one. This was to become a theme in fact, and I was assured that if I returned with them to India a wife could be found. This didn't really fit with my plans and I declined the offer despite the fact that Henry got right behind the notion and was all for me booking a plane ticket there and then.
Anyway, off we'd headed to the seaside in my palm-green Clio Versailles. Out on foot by the river, miles from any significant settlement, the face of an ex-colleague loomed up out of the mist. She must have wondered what Henry and I were doing accompanying a couple of briefcase-carrying businessmen in smart suits down towards the shore. Perhaps she surmised that we were due to receive goods by boat from the poppy fields of the East under cover of darkness.
We continued our stroll.
"Mittun! English mittun," cried Henry, pointing at some cows by the path and seeing with Nishi eyes for a moment with admirable intent, but not a bit of it, for our guests perceptions had taken up residence in the landscapes of Thomas Hardy's novels. Lights glimmered through the gathering gloom of dusk in the windows of a small cluster of cottages up on the clifftop, and to the visitors these were straight out of a Hardy story, as was the Star Inn, Alfriston, once we arrived.
Alfriston met with their approval, but we were told: "You can keep your London." The reason for their visit to England was in fact to attend a tourism trade fair in London, and this was also the reason for their smart attire, but they were now glad to escape.
But what about this Hardy business? The English take on the novel was spread to the corners of the Empire because the two things coincided in time, and it can also be said, with some truth, that to a degree the same arrogance inspired both movements. We were the new Romans, or according to the British-Israel movement the new chosen people, the rest of the world would read our literature - the most developped - and they would eat their meat with knives held in the propper manner.
As it happens I had an Indian lecturer of English Literature at University, and I say with some warmth that - certainly if one takes audibility into account - his lectures seemed to me to be utterly, utterly dire. He generally introduced Hardy, even if the book being discussed had no direct link to the writer, and when he introduced Hardy he also chanted the formula of Hardy's plots: "One damn thing after another." This was trotted out in one damn lecture after another, and truly not one ounce of enthusiasm for the Wessex writer's novels was instilled in me by this lecturer.
There arer some fine, upstanding people I know who speak with fondness or respect for Hardy's novels, but seeing good in that type of plot must surely be down to a charitable generosity beyond my comprehension. These are generally the same queer folk who think highly of Shakespeare. My grandmother was one of them. My friend Henry is another. I feel a mixture of curiosity and exhasperation about their perverse charitability, wanting simultaneously to to fathom the bizare mystery of their pity-full devotion and to wake them from their macabre dream with a slap around the face with an uncooked turbot.
"Apparently you can tell the moment when Hardy falls in love with his own character, Tess, in the middle of the book, and then he felt great pain about what had to happen to her, for the sake of the plot," Henry informed Robinson and I while we were picking up a Thai take-away from Lewes recently. That's the point where I glaze over. Why did the plot have to go that way? What rule book says it had to?
The rule-book is called Presctiptive Realism and it came to be regarded as the only 'serious' type of literature in 19th century England. Its basic idea was that the novel should represent 'real' life only, whatever that may be. The absurdity of this limmitation is starting to seem self-evident in our age, but until quite recently it was seen as the English 'contribution', as a step forward, progess, a development making all things that came before somewhat obsolete. Now we can see that forbidding the fantastic from literature is like forcing ballet dancers to keep both feet on the ground at the same time; it ignores the greater potentials and essential nature of the medium. How could we have missed that for so long? What created the blindspot? The notion of Empire is based on a belief in cultural superiority. Threaten that and you shake the very foundations. Surely this is why it is still considered practically sacriligous to admit to not enjoying the works of that playwright whose popularity was rescued from obscurity just at the time we were building our own empire and needed a Homer to be our our 'bard', as the Romans had needed Virgil.
The danger is that Prescriptive Realism has been so thoroughly accepted that it has become a kind of invisible standard by which to judge works of literature. "I don't believe in fairy tales," Robinson will tell me, but why does belief have to come into it?
All great steps forward begin with imaginative contemplation. Literature can be an excercise for this most powerful of tools.
Myself, I had the good fortune not to study English Literature at A-Level, and once I had started at University I knew my own mind well enough to see that the lecturers didn't know their arses from their elbows. Besides which, I'm not a fan of modern architecture. How one could be expected to apply oneself to scholarly pursuits in boxes raised in a modernist mode I simply cannot imagine. So the nincompoops of University washed by me largely unnoticed as I began my own researches in accordance with my fascination.
It should be pointed out here that it's not Realism that I'm questioning, but Prescriptive Realism. You can't have a novel without realism, and I'm all for it. In the field of fine art, Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne is a work of aweinspiring realism, but the subject is mythological. Greek sculpture was similarly exceptional because of its realism, though it depicted gods, nymphs, satyrs and centaurs. The ancient novels were much the same.

We British certainly didn't invent what we call the novel. There are sophisticated examples from the Ancient Greeks and Romans, as has been well noted by scholars such as Margaret Anne Doody in her recent The True Story of the Ancient Novel. And now what I intend to show in this book is that there are amazing ways which have not previously been recognized in which the writers of the ancient novels were capable of an outstandingly brilliant marriage of the universal and the particular, the Mysteries and the mundane world, the sacred and the secular. That these ancient novels related to the ancient Mystery traditions has been suggested before, by the likes of Carl Kerenyi, but now it is possible to present proofs that are as elegant as they are exciting. This is how how I shall show that Ancient Greece has not all been written about before.
The novels may not have been written during the Golden Age of 5th century BC Athens, but that does not mean that they are not a product of it in a different way. The novel, because it has so much space for full descriptions of things, has the ability to contain the other arts within it, hinting at them or using allegories from them, as with the theatre, or simply describing them as in a description of a building, a temple, a sculpture and so on. It is fitting then that the novel should come along after the other arts are fully formed.
The Allegory of the Chariot
From what we know about the way crafts were learnt in Ancient Greece we can hazard a pretty good guess that novelists received and later handed on some kind of formal training. The command of plot and the existance of strong parralels between the novels that have come down to us support this supposition. In Ancient Greece all forms of art and craft were felt to have some touch of the divine. Dionysos revelled in poetry, dance and song; Apollo loved harmonious music, was a leader of the Muses and an expert on the lyre, an instrument invented by Hermes, as the Panpipes were invented by Pan; one form Athena took was as a goddess of skillful craft; the smiths had their patron in Hephaestus; statues in the temples were felt to be places the gods could take up residence. So in a world where crafts were handed down, often from parent to child, even in fields like stagecraft, it was natural for each craft to develop its own Mysteries. In the ancient world the word Mystery was used for a private, cult initiation based on a movement through formal patterns. Each of the arts and crafts had its own sacred form-ality, whether it was the verse structure of poetry, the different shapes of urns intended for particular purposes, the proportions and underlying geometry of architecture, or the plot structure of a play.
We can see from various statements in the works of Plato that this sacred formality, grounded in the mystic philosophy whose aim was to achieve sight, understanding and appreciation of the Realm of Forms, of universal, intelligible, eternal Ideas, extended up to, or perhaps we should say cascaded down from even those Mysteries that were less applied, more abstract in nature, more purely religious. In other words, we gather from Plato's various hints that something similar to Socrates' philosophy of Forms was taught by certain priests and priestesses.
It is not clear how much of this philosophy reached Socrates - the Socrates whose image is painted in Plato's books - via direct contact with the officials of such over-arching Mysteries, and how much came to him through the teachings of the craft of stonemasonry that his father must have begun to hand down to him before he decided to go off and live the life of a free-wheeling philosopher. Socrates himself, in the Symposium, says that he learnt this philosophy of the Realm of Ideas from an Arkadian priestess called Diotyma, which might seem to answer our question. Yet the young Socrates cannot have failed to notice commonalities between the philosophy and his family's craft, since formal canons of proportion underpinned by sacred geometry were the blueprints of the works of the sculptors. Either way, and no matter how Plato moaned about the non-philosophers who were blind to the subtle light of the Realm of Ideas that is perceivable to the mind's eye, the fact is that the Socrates of the dialogues voices a philosophy which is an abstracted expression of what had long been applied in the various arts and crafts of the ancient Greek world, just as it had previously in Egypt for well over two millenia.
So much for the sculptors, but what about the novelists? From the evidence it looks as though novelists appeared on the scene a little later than the 'Golden Age' of Socrates and co. Therefore we will need some further evidence before we can be conclusive about a connection between the novels and the Mysteries.
Both Plato's school, the Academy, and the Mysteries continued for many centuries, making a connection entirely feasible. Doody presents a strong piece of evidence when she notes that at the time many of the novels that have come down to us complete were being written it had become common for philisophers to interpret existing works of literature along allegorical lines. Is it not likely then that the same would have been done in reverse, asks Doody: would it not have been natural to adopt this approach in the writing of new literature, if such was what was hoped for in the old? The Neoplatonist Porphyry recorded an intelligent interpretation of a part of Homer's Odyssey in an essay called The Cave of the Nymphs, based on Plato's Simile of the Cave and the Mystery initiations of the Persians.
Yet it is possible to go considerably further than this. It was not just the philosphers that were making references to these matters, but also the novelists themselves, within the novels, certainly in the case of The Ethiopian Story by Heliodorus. In this novel we see an Egyptian priest called Calasiris relating to the Athenian Cnemon a bold speculation about hidden meanings in Homer, to which Cnemon replies "You have admitted me here to a Mystery, most reverend sir." Take note: we have a novelist - a creator of literature - depicting the presence of an encoding of a Mystery within literature. Is this not to be taken as a hint that this is in fact exactly what Heliodorus himself was doing in his story? And indeed he was, in pretty explicit ways, for a section of the book refers in only the most thinly veiled ways to another famous Platonic simile.
The two lovers in The Ethiopian Story meet during a ceremony at Delphi held at the time of the Pythian Games, and the text says that "at the moment of meeting the young pair looked and loved, as though the soul of each, at first encounter, recognized its fellow and leapt towards that which deserved to belong to it." J.R.Morgan's notes to Sir Walter Lamb's translation, published by Everyman, point out that this is reminiscent of the idea that romantic desire was a memory of beauty seen by the Soul before birth in Plato's Phaedrus. Morgan then adds that "this whole scene is full of Platonic connotations." Though Morgan doesn't tell us what they are, they are easy enough to find.
Calasiris describes riders on horses taking part in the procession at Delphi, where the "gallant steeds...chafed at the bit...spitting on it and foaming amain; and yet they suffered themselves to be guided by the rider's intent." Plato used the horses pulling a chariot as symbols of erotic desire, showing how if driven well - in other words with an honourable goodness of heart - they could pull the chariot up into the skies to the very gateway of the Realm of Forms. Diotyma describes the process that is initiated with the perception of beauty in the other, and which then expands into a perception of Beauty in general. In other words erotic desire could be the start of an initation through Beauty into a recovered apprehension and appreciation of the trancendant Realm of Ideas. This is the initiation process that Socrates says was described to him by the Arkadian priestess. Plato relates how the twelve gods - the signs of the Zodiac - travel this ascending path in the sky from the east towards their highest point, the place where they 'culminate', namely where their path - the ecliptic - reaches the meridian due South. This point, in Plato's system, is associated with the portal to the Realm of Universal Ideas, and the initiate, the philosopher, travels in the train of the gods towards this place.
Extending the allegory of the driver of the chariot, Plato's dialogue turns its attention to the chariot races of the Olympic Games, and says that the real wreath of success is awarded on an inner level to those who can successfully steer these horses of erotic desire along this path of initiation. This too is refered to directly in the narrative of Heliodorus' Ethiopian Story: "On the following day the Pythian (Delphic) Games were to come to their end, but those of the young couple were coming to their height. The god of love, I imagine," says Calasiris, "was acting as their marshal and umpire, and was determined to prove, through the particular case of these two athletes, paired off by him, that his own kind of contest is the greatest of all."
Delphi is well worth a visit even now, but in the age of Classical Greece it was wonderful indeed. I've been there myself a few times, and the time I recall with the greatest affection was a weekend stay while I was living in Volos on the East Coast. I stayed in a campsite a little walk along the valley from Delphi, at the time of the March equinox before the Summer season had got underway. I wanted to collect some water from the sacred spring, and it didn't seem appropriate to store it in a plastic bottle, so I bought a bottle of wine. Actually it was an especially large bottle, perhaps double the standard volume. Having done so I had to dispose of the wine inside to make room for the water. This took me more than a whole day, and it resulted in my strolling down a little way from Athena's circular tholos temple into the cover of an olive grove on the mountainside. Here I thought I'd have a bit of a lie down, maybe sleep off a little of the wine, so I lay myself down on the ground in the dappled shade of the olive trees and settled into a somewhat hazy state. After a time I was surprised by the sound of hooves drumming on the ground, and opened my eyes to see a group of sheep running through the grove and heading straight towards me. There wasn't time to run out of the way, so I just kept my fingers crossed and none of them actually trod on me as they came leaping past. It had all seemed very dreamlike, and a kind of satisfied glow came over me as I thought to myself, Byron-like, how wonderfully Greek it all suddenly was.
Nor was the wine finished. In fact as I walked back to the campsite in the darkness later in the evening I was still under Dionysos' influence. More sheep-related excitement followed. I heard some strange calls and was aware of a commotion, and straining my eyes in the darkness I worked out what was going on. Some local shepherds were driving their sheep back into the fold. I happened to be wearing a fluffy white fleece at the time, and one of the shepherds came careering up to me uttering his bizare calls until he got close enough to realise I wasn't a member of his herd. "How wonderfully Greek!" I thought to myself.
I was the only person staying in a tent at the campsite, and that night I found out why. A storm blew up, with great winds whistling along the valley, and I spent a slightly peculiar period of hung-over confusion as I sobered up and wondered what I was doing there in a little tent on a mountainside in a wild gale.
Calisiris the Egyptian priest in The Ethiopian Story has this to say about Delphi. "The city impressed me in general as an abode for the higher powers, but especially from the nature of its site...the natural acropolis of Mount Parnassus, impending aloft, closely enfolds the city within its flanks." He goes on to say that he was "highly pleased with the city's public walks and squares and fountains, and with the Castalian spring itself," from which he besprinkled himself.

So Heliodorus' certainly based the story on this Platonic description of erotic initiation, and the good drivers of the powerful horses are in fact symbols of the whole story of the pure and true romantic love of the two protagonists. This is an area upon which Prescriptive Realism can make no comment, because a person has a choice in any moment to become more honorouble and good of heart, so that there is no particular depiction of the quality of a relationship that can be considered the most 'realistic'. The ultimate aim of the arts is Beauty. In fact all the surviving Ancient Greek novels are centred on this same theme of ideal romantic love.
Doody points out that escape from a cave is also a recurring motif in the novels, and she suggests that this again may have been representative of the ascent from the cave in the Platonic simile. Porphyry in The Cave of the Nymphs pointed out that caves were used as places of initiation and also refered to constellations being assigned to parts of the cave. He also spoke of the South Gate of the cave pointing off towards the Sun's position where the ecliptic crosses the meridian at noon, portraying this as the ascent to the Realm of Universal Ideas. Plato's Simile of the Cave in The Republic also has animal shapes cast onto the walls of the cave and those in the cave receive their initiation when they see the Universal in these figures and in other shapes. When we add to this Plato's linking elsewhere of the constellation patterns - the animals of the sky - to the Realm of Forms we begin to get a picture of an initiation involving images of these animals painted on cave walls. As we shall see later, such traditions stretch back to very, very early times here in Europe, and their survival over such enormous tracts of history may be seen as a validation of their efficaciousness. Afterall, the constellation figures are in pragmatic terms eternal, being extremely old and unchanging, and they are universal in that one still seems the same pattern in the sky when travelling to other nations, and we have given them a kind of intelligibility in seeing them as join-the-dots animal figures with associated mythological stories. Being ancient, universal and intelligible these patterns fit the description of a Form, so might they not facilitate a connective mental morphic resonance across time to those ancient generations of star-gazers and story tellers? This resonance with perceptions beyond our own particular way of seeing leads to expanded sight, making these forms seem very numinous and trancendental, and through this they can trigger perception on a more universal level, just as Socrates says is the purpose of the initiation. This collective perceptual repository is called the Dreamtime, since initiation into collective ancestral resonance through contact with ancient rock art is a feature of the Australian indigenous culture. Exposure to these Forms is the essence of all Mystery initiation.
So much for the background. The purpose of this book now is to uncover these keys to the Arcadian Dreamtime. We shall start by looking at how the Ethiopian Story encodes constellation imagery.

The Perseus Mystery
The philospher Aristotle, who studied under Plato at the Academy, wrote about the art of plot in his Poetics. He recommended that a story should have a key idea and that all parts of the story should in some way work towards the demonstration of this idea, just as all the limbs of a body have a function to fulfil within an organism as a whole. The Ethiopian Story achieves this admirably. The core idea is simply that human sacrifice is wrong and unnecesary and that the gods themselves do not desire to be sacrficed to in that way. Aristotle also recommended the plot type that involves the recognition trope, the lost-and-found child story, for the pleasing relief that it facilitates. Heliodorus' brilliant idea based on this formal plot was this: the gods do not desire human sacrifice, so what if there was a people in some distant land who still practiced the barbarous rite, and how about if the god to whom it was offered was looking for a way to communicate to them the fact that he did not want it, and would a wonderful way for that to be communicated be if the person about to be sacrficed was suddenly to be recognized at the last moment at the lost child of the person about to offer the sacrifice? From this central moment of genius he then began to weave the story together, using as his core matter the story of Andromeda, the princess rescued by Perseus from sacrifice to at the hands of her own father, the Ethiopian King. He added to the simple story by making the princess a lost-and-found child, and then had a priest interpret the extraordinary events as a situation orchestrated by the god in question - the Sun - to show that such an act was not desired by him. Then Heliodorus set about working out what such an orchestration might be, and this proved fairly easy since Apollo, the god of prophesy and patron of Delphi was also a Sun god. It is easy enough for the god behind the oracular proclamations of Delphi to orchestrate events, and sure enough it is such an oracle which brings about the princesses return to Ethiopia.
In such a non-linear manner did this master of plot build up the story, with the result that the reader only comprehends all of this at the very end of the book. Had Aristotle lived on to read the novel he would surely have been as well pleased with it as would Plato and Socrates.
The indentification of the female protagonist Chariclea with Andromeda is strong in the book, and that of her lover Theagenes with Achilles is equally strong. Here we see more of this business of all the parts having a function to play in accordance with the one central idea, because Achilles, a millenia before the time in which The Ethiopian Story is set, protected Iphegeneia from sacrifice at the hands of her own father. A version of the story held that Iphegeneia and Achilles then had a son, Neoptolemus, and in Heliodorus' story it is this Neoptolemus to whom the ceremony at Delphi is dedicated and from whom Theagenes is descended, just as Chariclea has Andromeda as her ancestor.
But just as, by making Theagenes a latter day Achilles, Chariclea in turn becomes linked to Iphegenia as well as Andromeda, so too does Theagenes play the role of Perseus as her heroic consort. It is this more covert association that becomes the key to unlocking the big Mystery of The Ethiopian Story.
[then into Perseus bull-leap as in blog posting]

DIONYSIAN LITURGY

2007-06-29T01:01:00.000-07:00

Liturgy of A New Dionysian Harvest Festival

We place no power outside ourselves, recognise no priestly authority, and do not offer praise in the hope of special favour, but we dance now in ideas and simple ceremony through steps that activate age-old resonances, in awakening and invoking you.

We invoke you as the Dance-Weaving One

We understand that in this resonance resides a living genius, and also understand that in some sense this is a part of our collective, multidimensional consciousness. We invoke you as a genius which brings pleasure, and are happy if through us such pleasure may spread into the world.

We invoke you as god of the Comedy, of laughter and wine.

And so, to dance in resonant ancient steps, we have set up this idol as of old, to the same specifications, the mask upon the pillar, the double garment, and with the eye that is mind we see back to that time when this idol was raised with great ceremony.

We invoke you as Dendrites, He-Who-Is-In-The-Tree.

Through this image we remember you as Osiris who grew up into a tree which was then made into a pillar, and recall how Isis by her magic awoke your essence within this pillar.

We invoke you as the Pillar, and He-Who-Entwines-Around-the-Pillar

And so we shall pour libation to you, saying as in very ancient times, that we return to you what was pressed from you, the Life energies of Sun and Moon that are called the Eyes of Horus which had infused the grapes from which this wine has been made. We shall return to you the Eye of Horus.

We invoke you as the Sun-in-the-Grapes

We invoke your energy in the pillar, and the first object we bring before you, before this idol, is a basket which contains a representation of a vinestock. It represents the first vinestock that was brought to these shores and planted in these soils. At Harvest the vine is cut down to this core part, and in Winter you dwell within the Underworld while the vine seems to sleep. There you were initiated into the mysteries of Rhea, Mother Earth, so that when you returned to the surface you were stronger and more fruitful than before. In Spring the horned vinestock wakes and sprouts green tendrils like serpents as the sap rises.

We invoke you as the Horned-Child with serpents for hair

Riding on a goat you found safety, and then received protection from Rhea. It is said that the vinestock was carried to new lands in a basket on the head of the goddess, and so we now carry this basket and place it before you.

We invoke you as Liknites, the Child-in-the-Basket

We close our eyes for a moment and image ourselves in the Underworld receiving the Mysteries from Rhea, Mother Earth, entwining around us protectively as a healing serpent. [PAUSE]
And now we open our eyes as if reborn as initiates.
Risen from the Underworld you are the Initiated Dionysos, and you grow strong through the Summer, riding high in the evening skies as the wine-bringer constellation Ikarios, the constellation also called the Herdsman. Ikarios ascended into the stars while a vine grew up from his tomb.

We invoke you in the form of your human stand-in, Ikarios, who took you into his house and first received from you the gift of wine.

As this constellation, Dionysos, you ascend, riding in your chariot pulled by the magnificent team, Leo and Leo Minor, while behind you follow the revelling throng, the Bearers of the Serpents, called Maenads, and your Sagitarian mentor, the half-man, half-horse Silenus, on his mule, and the goatish satyr of Capricorn. You lead this triumphant party from the East, happy with your successes!

We invoke you as He-Who-Leads-the-Throng

Now we recall that your birth was two-fold. While she was in the Underworld your mother, Semele-Persephone, became pregnant with you, and when you were born you were protected from the light of Zeus by a covering of ivy which he, your father, placed around you.

We invoke you as the Ivy Apollo

From Persephone, of the green plants, you were born as Iakchos, who is in the fresh, new fruit juice, the gleukos. And so we now carry the branches hung with grapes and other first fruits of the season and place them before you. And we now drink fruit juice that is sacred to you. We pour first the grape juice, and we feel thankful for the gifts of rejuvenation in this elixir, for the powerful antioxidants - polyphenols - and for the rejuvenating resveratrol. We drink also pomegranate juice, remembering how this plant was said to have grown up from where drops of your blood hit the ground. Such gleukos is fermented and sewn into the wine skin to be matured. Zeus sewed you when you were premature into his thy to complete the gestation.

As this time of year is upon us, we invoke you as the sewn-in god.

The matured wine may be opened at any time of year, and such an occasion is your second birth. And as we open the wine and celebrate simultaneously this second birth we shout, as they did of old at this moment of the first opening of the matured wine: "Son of Semele, Iakchos, Bestower of Wealth!"

Son of Semele, Iakchos, Bestower of Wealth!

Hence you are are the Twice-Born.

We cast the sight of the eye that is mind back to this moment in the Temple of Dionysos in the Swamps of Athens, the Lenaia, when the birth was announced, and when the wine was ladelled out of wine-mixing jars set upon tables placed before the idol, just as has been arranged here. We ladel this out for ourselves, and also into a kantharos that we have reserved for you Dionysos, which we place before you on the table.
And now comes the next part of the initation, the kraterzein, the original Eucharist. For we shall drink this sacred blood-of-the-vine, recalling how as the Sun rises with Sirius in late Summer the grapes undergo the mysterious transubstantiation from green to red, transformed to ichor, the blood-of-the-gods. May our minds become pregnant with pleasure-bringing genius and may we birth this into the world through our creativity.
May the Dionysian Pagan codes be activated to beneficial effect in the Age of the Cup Bearer!
And so as promised we now pour libation to you, saying as in very ancient times, that we return to you what was pressed from you. We return to you the Eye of Horus.

We invoke you as the Sun-in-the-Grapes
May the Dionysian find its place in our world
May the genius in the plants awake
Wassail!

MORPHIC RESONANCE

2007-06-20T06:13:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting on the balcony outside the Atlas Lounge in Brighton looking down Norfolk Terrace towards a light pastel-purple sea. A soft spectrum rises up through rose-pink and light grey-gold up into a lavender-blue evening sky, this glowing flush of colour wreathing as a halo the skyline of cream Regency architecture, now lit orange-gold on the western faces. A seagull answers a call in its bones by choosing a chimney pot as a perch, and stands statue-still like the benu bird, while large flocks of starlings take their cues and make their wheeling way on mass to roosting places on the piers. I muse upon how this location-specific behaviour must in some sense be learnt, but wonder how much is passed on directly, and how much is due to a species resonance - behavioural patterns imprinted into a morphogenic field? What, I think to myself, are we to make of butterflies on long migratory routes which choose the same particular trees to stop in on the way that their parents did, even though this new generation has never been anywhere near these trees before? I wonder too if we should be thinking of the blue tits who more rapidly learnt how to open milk bottle tops even though the time elapsed during which milk was not delivered was longer than the lifespan of that bird. Would Brighton's starlings after a similar gap in time without piers return in the same way to replacements without any direct tuition?

People, too, flock to Brighton. Are they also dancing through the patterns of those sea-seekers who came before filling up the carriages of steam-trains with hats, brolleys and large moustaches? Can these fields be perceived consciously too, appreciated? Can we, with the eye that is mind, read the myths of places, rising out of the particular and the transient into a resonance more collective and enduring, simultaneously grounding ourselves into a deeper, richer strata of human perception?

Is this why pilramage routes - holy journeys along ancient paths past sacred sites - form so ubiquitous a part of world-wide tradition? The Greater Greek Mysteries opened with a lengthy procession along a sacred way from Athens to Eleusis past various sites associated with the myth of Demeter and Persephone - this was a key part of the initiation of candidates. The initiation into the Australian Dreamtime sight by walking the old Songlines - again past sites connected since time immemorial with particular stories - is remarkably similar, a similarity so striking that it speaks of some real transpersonal, collective phenomenon of resonance at the core of these traditions. Further support of more empiracle nature is available.

Although the idea of morphic fields was popularized by Rupert Sheldrake, it was around for some time before Sheldrake’s first book on the subject, A New Science of Life, was published. Sheldrake himself has an impressive background in science. A holder of a PhD in biochemistry, he has been a director of studies in biochemistry and cell biology at Cambridge University, a research fellow of the Royal Society, and a Knox fellow at Harvard University.

Something that initially fascinated Sheldrake was morphogenesis - how biological structures grow into their particular forms. Certain mysterious phenomena drew his attention. If a sea urchin is cut up into parts at an early stage, each part will still give rise to a perfectly formed sea urchin. Yet more surprising results can be found in experiments that I find difficult to approve of ethically, but have a massive bearing on the morphogenesis question. Muscles, removed from lab mice, put through a mincer and then replaced in their original sites, have regained their previous usefulness. An entire sponge can be broken into its constituent cells, and put through a sieve, and these can then come together and reform into a single sponge organism. How do the cells know where they are in the whole? Newts that have had the lenses surgically removed from their eyes have been able to regenerate them and see again.

The theory of Formative Causation states that, as a general principle of nature, once a pattern has manifest, it becomes easier to manifest again. It proposes therefore that the fields responsible for organizing morphogenesis are non-physical, in the sense that they transcend space and endure unendingly over time.

An area where we see related phenomena is where details of form or behavior leap between the branches of the evolutionary tree. In fact, flight is an example, having evolved separately in insects, birds, mammals and even reptiles, such as the flying lizard, which literally leaps between branches while gliding on wings that have evolved into its form. But there are more specific examples.

The inside front cover of the March 1994 issue of BioScience showed five butterflies, each of which were paired with a virtually identical butterfly in terms of shape, design and colours. But in fact the two butterflies in each pair were different species, and yet there is no obvious evolutionary advantage to mimicry in these instances. (Miller, Julie Ann; BioScience, inside front cover, March 1994.) Another example of this kind of ‘convergent evolution’ is the similarity of the North American Meadowlarks and the African Yellow-throated Longclaw, birds which are again virtually identical but actually different species.

Another mystery that does not find a suitable answer in DNA programming is the way that the offspring of various animals make huge journeys that their ancestors have made but which they have never made before, using landmarks that they have never seen before. There is that example a type of butterfly that does this, the swarm choosing particular trees to group in year after year even though each time the swarm is made up entirely of individuals who have never made the journey before. Likewise when a colony of blind termites work together to build a mound including complex internal architecture, Sheldrake suggests that perhaps field effects are at work.

According to the theory, the morphic field of the organism contains a blueprint, and the morphogenesis is shaped and directed by this pattern. The theory further states that repetition of a pattern will strengthen its morphic field, making it easier for that pattern to be repeated again. This is shown by another type of experiment entirely.

A series of experiments carried out by W. McDougall at Harvard University in 1920 produced some surprising results. Laboratory rats were placed in a chamber with two exits, one brightly lit which would give a non-fatal electric shock. The other exit was unlit, and was the way out. As successive generations of rats were put in the chamber, increasing numbers chose the correct exit in their first test. McDougal’s experiments went on for fifteen years. While the first generation had to take on average two hundred goes before they learned which way to go, the last generation, fifteen years later, took on average only twenty goes. At this stage the conclusion was that the ability was passed on genetically. However, this conclusion was to change.
Similar experiments in the Universities of Edinburgh and Melbourne were carried out, and they showed that laboratory rats all over the world had become better at knowing which exit to take. These experiments were carried out because, naturally, scientists wanted to see if McDougal’s results were repeatable. It was found that they were - again the rats of later batches learned with increasing ease - but something else also became apparent. The increased ability to learn did not require a direct family relation. All the rats were learning more quickly, even if taken from stock that had never been involved in the experiment. The ability had leapt across the family tree by resonance rather than genetic inheritance.

There are other cases of behavioral patterns passing between members of the same species without physical contact. A famous example is not a scientific experiment but a relevant observation none the less, namely that of the blue tits pecking their way into milk bottles, with the skill spreading with great speed across Europe. Milk was not delivered during WWII, for a period longer than the life span of blue tits. But once it was delivered again the pattern quickly arose again and spread even more quickly than the first time.
Another example is described in Sheldrake’s book (The Presence of the Past 1988). In 1923, Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov trained mice to run to a feeding place when an electric bell was rung. The first generation required an average of 300 trials to learn, the second 100, the third 30, and the fourth 10. Pavlov was then surprised when a new group of mice from a different unrelated stock seemed to have a head start. Sheldrake, however, is not surprised. "Subsequent mice would be influenced by morphic resonance from those in the first experiment," he says.

What we are most interested in here is the affect of morphic resonance on human thoughts, as demonstrated by experiments showing that it becomes easier to learn what other people have already learned. One of the simplest examples is that of crosswords, which according to Sheldrake’s theory should become easier and easier as more people solve them. Sheldrake tells us that an experiment to test this was carried out on students in Nottingham, with positive results.

Another experiment carried out to test the effects of morphic resonance on human learning was carried out by Dr. Arden Mahlberg of Madison, Wisconsin. It involved the participants learning two codes, one that was the real morse code, and one that was a similar code with the dots and dashes given to the letters of the alphabet in a different way. The subjects learned the real morse code more easily.

A well-known example of something similar quoted by Sheldrake is where Western children were given three Japanese Hai Kus to learn, one that was traditional, one that was newly invented, and one that was nonsense. The traditional one was learnt quicker and more easily than the other two. Here we begin to see how his theories must be considered by anthropology when examining cultural continuity.

But perhaps the most relevant example to our theme here is the experiment carried out using picture puzzles. These were apparently jumbled selections of black blobs which, upon closer inspection, have images concealed in them. These are rather like ink blot tests except that there is a genuine non-random picture deliberately hidden amongst the blobs. On 31st August 1983 such a pictorial puzzle was given to a group of volunteers and then the puzzle and its answer were displayed on national television. Later, a different group of volunteers, who had not seen the TV show nor the original test subjects, turned out to have a 76% higher success rate at solving the puzzle. This is an extremely significant result. It was not a factor of chance or more intelligent participants, because the groups involved were large, involving several thousand people from different parts of the world.

A similar experiment was done in 1984 again on British television. Again, in Western Europe, there were significant results. What Sheldrake found puzzling was that in North America people did not find it easier to pick out the picture whose fields had been imprinted by the eight million British viewers. In South Africa the results were more like those in Western Europe, except that the sample size was not particularly large, which makes those particular results less significant as a matter of course. This is interesting because the people in North America and in Western Europe should be of similar genetic stock. It suggests that other factorts - culture? location? national identity? - have more of an effect than racial background. In other words someone of, say, Indian stock who has been born and brought up in England with English friends and surrounded by English culture, and who, perhaps most importantly, considers themselves English, quite possibly has more of a resonant connection with the collective English field, than with that of India. Interest in their ancestral heritage could trigger a different resonance.

Some effect is definitely present. And the question here is, if an image flashed up briefly on television can develop a higher morphic field potential, what happens to an image that is contemplated at great length generation after generation after generation? The constellation figures are not dissimilar to these picture puzzles. A selection of stars, mainly the brightest ones, are joined together like join the dots patterns, and conceived of as animal shapes. The hypothesis suggested here is that the constellation figures must be very richly imprinted, and that this could explain the immense antiquity of many of the figures. Subsequent generations find it easier to see them in this way. Not that the tradition is not also passed on directly, but this is facilitated by the high morphic field potential. People sense this resonance, which accounts for the success of the tradition. The further suggestion is that this ancestral imprint, being a connection across time, is very nourishing, that in fact the richness of the imprint manifests in our perceptions as beauty, as a sense of the numinous, of other ages being present now, a trancesion of the chaos of transience. It becomes clearer why assuming the static, traditional poses of yoga can be such an effective form of meditation.

This then would seem to be why Mysteries based on an ekphrasis of works of art that are themselves based on mythologised maps of the constellations were used for a shammanic initiation into what we can call the ancestral Dreamtime, whatever word they may have used to denote this. For if morphic resonance is a real phenomenon, as the weight of evidence discussed here suggests, then the Dreamtime has objective transpersonal existence. In other words, we don’t need to look to the nature of humans or to some direct contact to account for the fact that both the Australian Aborigines and the proto-Indo-European Magdalenians used art to access a Dreamtime - the fact is that these Dreamtimes actually exist, and they perceived them, they became aware of the resonance. Accepting this is an enormous relief, for everything falls so easily into place.

Sheldrake has a chapter The Fields of Human Societies and Cultures in which he writes:

‘Such fields structure human language, thought, customs, culture, and society and they organize the interrelations of the component parts. They are stabilized by self-resonance from a society’s own past and by morphic resonance from similar societies.’

He follows this chapter with Myths, Rituals and the Influence of Tradition. Here he writes that the theory of Formative Causation ‘offers a potentially more fruitful approach to the understanding of cultural inheritance, and the evolution of cultural habits…the interpretation of [myths, rituals, traditions and initiations] does not so much contradict conventional structural interpretations as go beyond them. It could even be regarded as a kind of evolutionary structuralism.’

Sheldrake himself comments on the Australian Aboriginal mythology. He goes over the nature of the mythologies of the Northern Aranda peoples of Central Australia, where by all occupations originated with the totemic ancestors. So the sons of the gurra are always engaged on the same quest as their father, the ancestor of hunting and eating bandicoots. Another ancestor set in motion the art of gathering wild plums, another is the ancestor of spearing fish. He quotes Levi-Strauss commenting on the way that the people play out patterns set in place by these Dreamtime ancestors, and then he writes: ‘This sounds very like a description of morphic resonance, through which patterns of activity are repeated again and again, stabilized by this resonance from all similar past patterns, right back to the time each morphic field first came into being.’

There has been a tendency to assume that the Australian Aborigines have maintained their culture for a very long time because it didn’t occur to them to try anything else. But this ignores the fact that they actually have a philosophy that tells them about the benefits of continuity. To enter into perception of the Australian Aboriginal Dreaming is to come in contact with the accumulation of over 40,000 years of ancestral perception, resonant with the permanent forms of the landscape. It is to discover something unspeakably rich, something that elevates the totemite out of mundane everyday time. It removes all existential angst about the apparent transience of things, because it literally transcends space and time to join the individual to the ancestors.
But do they really have a philosophy underpinning this? The answer appears to be a definite yes. This can be seen from an understanding of the aboriginal word kurunba. James Cowan, quoted by Devereux in Symbolic Landscapes, explains that ‘Kurunba…is a metaphysical expression denoting the presence of a cultural layer within the landform itself that has been inspired by mythological contact with the Dreaming…in other words, the landform has become iconic in essence, fulfilling a role of containment, not only of physical attributes…of meta-physical significations. It is this quality that gives a landmark its inherent Form over and above that of its mere physical presence.’

What is more, totemic places where the aborigines have for millennia conducted ceremonies are known by them as ‘increase centres’. This is a scientific term. The places are used for a two-fold purpose. Here, because of the tradition, it is easy for the people to enter the Dreamtime. But they also conduct the ceremonies here with the aim of invigorating the totem ancestor of that place. (Devereux, Symbolic Landscapes, p.10). Thus the kurunba, the morphic field, is increased as more and more people visit the site and see it in this way, and perform the same ceremonies. Kurunba is thus like wine from a magical chalice that becomes fuller the more we drink from it. The name ‘increase centre’ is thus in accordance with morphic field theory.

Sheldrake himself comments on something similar. ‘Why is the effectiveness of rituals so universally believed to depend on their close similarity to the way they have been done before? Why should this similarity of ritual forms in the present to those of the past be regarded as essential to establishing a connection with the ancestors?’ The idea of morphic resonance suggests a natural answer. Through morphic resonance, sacred ceremony, from the great procession along the sacred way to Eleusis to the Aborginal songlines to eating your soup with a rounded spoon dipped far edge-first and moving away from you - really can bring the past into the present. An apology for formality.
Though not mentioned by Sheldrake, the ancient Vedic text from India known as the Rig Veda makes a particularly explicit reference to this:

‘The Brhati metre resonated in the voice of Brhaspati [etc] That was the model for the human sages, our fathers, when the primeval sacrifice was born. With the eye that is mind, in thought I see those who were the first to offer this sacrifice. The ritual repetitions harmonized with the chants and with the metres, the seven divine sages harmonized with the original models. When the wise men looked back along the path of those who went before, they took up the reins like charioteers.’

In fact Morphic Fields exist in Hindu thought under the name of Akasha, the element of the Universe that records all things eternally, and one with an open third eye can read the Akashic Records.

Now we can see why entrance into the Dreamtime is dependant upon walking particular Songlines, paths that have been walked for generations, and singing the same songs at particular places, and maintaining the same traditions about what simulacra are to be seen in the landscape, and what stories are associated with them.

The theory of Morphic Resonance also has its counterpart in the ancient traditions of the Mediterranean Old World. In the Hermetica, Hermes tells us:

‘Every living thing has its own unique Form…. This Form is appropriate to its species, yet each is individual. The human race, for example, shares a common universal Form by which we know that a man is a man….Nature has an assistant called Memory, which ensures that Nature creates individual forms that are copies of the primal universal Forms.’

Hermes associates these Universal Forms with the fixed constellations of the Zodiac. The concept of Forms, also called Ideas, is found in the philosophical interpretation made by Plato upon the teachings of Socrates. He talked of another realm, beyond the physical, where these blueprints exist objectively as collective, universal ideas, in the Universal Mind of which we are a part. He too, in Timaeus, made the same connection between the Forms and the constellations of the Zodiac. The association seems to derive from the universality and stability of the constellations as seen from different places on the Earth. When we look up at, say, Taurus, we are looking at basically the same star pattern our ancestors looked at 18,000 years ago. This is why the mythologized star-patterns are keys to connection with our ancestors.

Rupert Sheldrake believes that it is not just behavioral patterns that work in this way, but also the forms of biological organisms. For him the DNA is a key with which to access the blueprint of a biological form, and that blueprint is held in morphic, or in this case more specifically morphogenic fields. They are responsible, he says, for morphogenesis - the process by which cells grow into an organism of a particular shape.

The comparison with the words from the Hermetica is pretty much exact. There we find that Nature uses Memory to ensure that creatures grow in accordance with the Universal Form of their species, which exists objectively in the Realm of Ideas. Now we consider that the morphogenesis of form is made possible by blueprints held in non-physical morphic fields. It’s clearly the same thing. The only difference is that in the new conception there is greater emphasis on the way that these forms can themselves evolve.

There are many other examples we could give of support for the theory, but my favorite involves the marsupial mammals of Australia. From a common mammalian ancestor, Old World and Australian mammals went off in different directions. And yet in many cases they took the same directions, but on different branches of the evolutionary tree. There are marsupial wolves, marsupial flying squirrels, marsupial cats, even marsupial anteaters! What on Earth is going on here? If approached without the morphic resonance argument, the idea that morphogenetic fields that are a collection of environmental forces alone could produce similar forms has to be stretched beyond the limits of common sense. Why would this lead to the familiar stabilized types: species? What set of environmental factors could independently produce wolves and cats amongst the placental and marsupial mammals as the result of random mutations? In his book The Presence of the Past, highly qualified biologist Sheldrake includes pictures of various marsupial and placental twins, reproduced here. We see the flying squirrels, the jerboas, the moles and the wolves. Another seemingly bizarre fact is that porcupines have evolved both in the Old World and in South America. Sheldrake asks: ‘What are…the ‘principles’ of porcupines?’ The porcupine idea is a neat one, the design is good, but how could it arise and survive twice independently by a random mutation? Those who cling to the sinking ship of Old Darwinism try to claim that the independent parallel evolution of these creatures in Australia and elsewhere is the result simply of similar environmental factors. But that is a weak contention. There are chimpanzees on the North and South sides of the Congo that are, despite being the same creature, carnivorous hunting pack animals on one side of the river, and peaceful vegetarians on the other. The form of an animal and the niche which it occupies are not so tied together as the environmental factor camp would like. We are to imagine that the marsupial anteater evolved simply because their was niche to fill and that was the only way to fill it. However, camels were introduced by humans into Australia, and they have gone wild, and are doing nicely. If the niche was there, if the environmental factors were right, how come indigenous camels didn’t evolve to make the most of it? A niche is not necessarily always snapped up in the way the environmental factor camp imply, and nor is there only one way to snap it up. An elephant has evolved a long trunk and a giraffe a long neck, and both of them use these to reach leaves high up in trees. Another creature might have evolved a long neck, but it wouldn’t necessarily be a giraffe. The sloath, the gorilla and the koala also eat leaves from high up in trees by climbing up to get them, but even they are species strongly distinct from each other. The koala is more like a bear in form, yet the grizzly bear hunts and fishes, which koalas don’t do. Alligators and herons and king fishers also fish, yet even the heron and king fisher, despite both being birds, do it in different ways. The king fisher does it more like a pelican, but looks very different. Similar creatures of the same type live in very different environments. The panda lives in a very different environment from the polar bear. Seals share the diet and environment of polar bears, but don’t look anything like them. So why should differentiated recognizable species have evolved amongst the marsupials in parallel with their placental twins? Wolves and wild cats live similar lives in similar environments hunting similar prey. So why didn’t something evolve in Australia that was a bit catlike and a bit doglike, whilst in fact being neither, rather than what has actually evolved, which is something that is so obviously similar to the wolf in particular and cats in particular? Why do particular species blueprints dominate the evolutionary process?

The point I am making is that there is more than one way to skin a kangaroo, and so the argument that the marsupial wolves, anteaters, jerboas, moles and so on have evolved simply because of similar environmental factors just doesn’t add up.

Sheldrake acknowledges these examples of convergent evolution as ‘spectacular’. The parallel, resonant marsupial-placental twinning is stunning, and it raises some intriguing questions. If wolves, jerboas, flying squirrels, moles, anteaters and so on can evolve separately on isolated continents.

And if these animal Forms are so strong, this is a further recommendation that they be used as the subjects of artists, as they were for everyone from the Old European Cave Artists to the Minoans, from the Egyptians to oils of Stubbs.

A channeled text, The Plieadian Agenda : A New Cosmology for the Age of Light, by Barbara Hand-Clow, makes a connection between Morphic Fields, Platontic philosophy and Ancient Greek and Egyptian Culture, and the portrayal of animals in art.

‘It is easier to see the light geometry of inanimate objects than it is to see the morphogenetic fields that cause lifeforms, such as your cat, because lifeforms are always moving. Subtle fields are easier to see by glimpsing them with peripheral vision when they are stationary.’

(This, incidentally, is also why I prefer to do yoga of the static kind, holding poses for some time rather than moving dynamically through them.)

So the constellation images have this double benefit, being based both on patterns that have been wondered at down through the generations, and also upon the Forms of animals, themselves potent repositories of morphic fields. This information from The Plieadian Agenda is a wondeful alternative to the depressing "Theory of Art" at the end of Plato's Republic. Some of the ideas expressed in The Republic are supported by Hand-Clow’s ‘channeled opus’, such as conceiving of a city as a horizontal wheel divided into twelve sectors assigned to the signs of the Zodiac, but at the end of Plato's book Socrates, as if becoming confused by weariness at the end of a very long discussion, overstretches the ‘simile’ of the Cave, or takes the simile too literally. Starting with the idea that the things in the world are copies of universal Forms, and expressing this through the idea that the things we perceive with our physical senses are like reflections or shadows of the true essence of those things, and then working along the lines of the simile in which the things in the world are the shadow images cast upon the wall of the Cave, he comes up with the barmy notion that since art consists of the imitations of things, it is therefore nothing more than copies of copies, and concludes that it must therefore be further into the world of shadows and less in touch with the realm of true Ideas. But one can see immediately that he was merely overstretching a particular analogy, and it is an almost diametrically opposite idea expressed in The Pleiadian Agenda that makes more sense in the light of thousands of years of culture: the stationary statue of the cat in fact makes the fields of the trancendant Form easier, not harder, to see, thus vivifying the field for those cats resident in an around the temple of Bastet.

We might take a further look at some of this wisdom from The Pleiadian Agenda.

‘Many artists can see such fields…[and]…they [i.e. the fields] are actually the source of beauty in matter. Beauty and desire are what cause things to come into existence in the first place, and an artist can make this visible.’ It continues: ‘When an artist strives for true beauty, these fields can actually be felt and heard.’

The last sentence is strikingly evocative of the famous Beethoven quote: "from the heart may it go to the heart," and Beethoven's work is mentioned several times in Hand-Clow's channeled work. This is a very relevant updating to the ‘Hermetic-Platonic’ philosophy, because it validates the Romantic approach, what we might term the Beethoven or the Van Gogh side of things: the passion of the artist is perceivable in the art, can be resonated with, something which some of the heavily formalized Egyptian art may, for all its ‘Hermetic-Platonism’, lack. Or take Constable’s Hay Wain as an example. As a child I spent many an evening gazing at that work, as I also did with Van Gogh’s paintings while a teenager, finding them magically beautiful. In that painting Constable was painting a scene that was very dear to his heart because it was the one seen from his beloved home. This love was ‘imprinted’ into the idea of the painting, and we can understand therefore why it has become the nation’s favorite painting. This latter statistic also results, of course, in another very rich layer of fields imprinted with passions and values this time from the audience. Romanticism believed in the unique ‘folk’ genius of each particular culture, or nation, and encouraged artists to work within a local vernacular. We can now see that this makes sense, because realistically speaking, as with Constable very often the heart is where the home is, and so we have shared values and feelings for places with those with whom we share the inhabitation of those places. I call this the Hera Principle or the Ceridwen Principle, for Hera represents the balance to Zeus's love of the exotic, an opposition to his expansionist zeal.

Another book might be written to encourage the return of such passion in art; this book is focussed on the hermetic technologies of enhanced resonance. The two can go hand in hand, and in fact support each other. ‘Indeed it is one of the paradoxes of art that structure, form and convention liberate the artist, whereas openness and complete freedom can be seen as a kind of tyranny.’ So wrote Stephen Fry in The Ode Less Travelled. And truth be told, Constable made very intentional use of the Golden Section in many of his paintings - there was more to them than Romantic sentiment alone.

Of course the presence of such Value Fields imprinted into a work then has obvious benefits, for as Satya herself says in The Pleiadian Agenda: ‘I, Satya, want as many of you as possible to remember how to appreciate beauty and harmony because we know that cultures that value these things are able consciously to reduce the destructive tendencies among their citizens.’

As we resonate with the stored value fields, an entrainment of our personal fields occurs causing us to value the world around us more. Sacred sites are very useful in this sense, and we can understand why beautiful, sacred buildings are such a vital part of the Greek culture model. Says Satya: ‘Ancient objects, such as the Sphinx or the Parthenon, are especially wonderful places to see these fields because they have remained in 3D for so long by means of the intense feelings of humans.’ The Parthenon is also deeply geometric, of course, and the Golden Section is often called Phi simply because these are the first three letters of this particular temple's architect. More so even than constellation patterns, sacred geometric Forms are universal, intelligible and eternal - they are the most fully mentally resonant 2D and 3D patterns that there are. Thus they strongly amplify the value fields of an ancient treasure.

So the values that we have felt for such things are like a bank account that we can draw upon, and some of our words are encoded with this wisdom. We speak of property ‘appreciating’ and of stored money ‘gaining interest’. If you appreciate something, you charge up its value fields, and the same applies if you are interested in something. (What have the curiosities of the many millions of readers of The Da Vinci Code done for the fields of the Louvre Pyramids and the Paris and Rosslyn ‘roselines’?)

This chapter argues for the existence of such fields, and by nature agruments tend to be intellectual, but let us recall that perception of the fields includes other faculties of mind. A leopard stalks in the dappled shade at the margin of the forest and the glade; so do we apprehend Beauty. Since morphic fields are fields, rather than solid logic, we need to observe them indirectly, like the way scientists know that light particles have behaved like waves by seeing the interferance patterns produced on a screen. They do this because as soon as one observes light directly, it ceases to behave like a wave, a behaves like a particle! The 6D light fields are, I would suggest, best seen when we enter into the state in which we stalk the margin between disclosure and concealment, like the leopards sacred to Dionysos.

Although Plato's Socrates occasionally makes mention of the need to strengthen the perceptive abilities of the eye of the mind, for the most part the Forms are described in Plato’s work as things to be found through philosophy. But these instructions from The Pleiadian Agenda - ways to see these fields almost like auras around things - are refreshing and exiting. We hear how the ‘vehicle’, Barbara Hand-Clow herself, was one night gazing out from her hotel room across to the Athenian Acropolis and ‘the white marble perfection glowing in the night sky was the essence of true beauty…lines of blue white light began shooting off all the angles and curves of the structure, as if the Northern Lights were forming in the night sky behind the Parthenon.’

Far from viewing art as one step removed from these fields, The Plieadian Agenda tells us how beautiful art activates our perception of this dimension of reality, and how ‘great art causes your heart to expand.’ It does not have a kind word to say about modern art, but favors a return to the ideals of past cultures, as with the City States of the Athenian League who, ‘finally exhausted after interminable struggles…attained a culture devoted totally to artistic beauty, personal freedom and intrinsic harmony.’ (Pleiadian Agenda, p.172) The book adds ‘your planet requires a very powerful dose of beauty quickly.’

This last point - namely that beautiful art, even though it is copies of things and not the things themselves, can assist us in expanding our experience the so-called six-dimensional reality - links to another shift in emphasis. In the various works of Plato we are told about the path of the philosopher moving from the world of illusion into the intelligible realm, moving along the Line out of the Cave towards the Sun, representing the Good. The implication is a movement out of the 3D world of physicality. But no, says The Pleiadian Agenda, that is not our goal here on Earth. What we are to increase is our multidimensionality, staying grounded and functional in 3D with our sense of self in tact, and actually perceiving the infusions of other dimensions by using the world around us as if looking through lenses. As far as 6D is concerned this is largely about seeing the universal within the particular, and this was there in the Platonic and Hermetic philosophies, but what there was not was the teaching that in fact we are better able to become multidimensional humans by staying grounded in 3D as our kind of home base, while in waking consciousness. Around this stable base is the canopy of our feeling body, and by achieving in our feelings a state of balanced polarity rather than polarized duality, (which can start by stopping watching team sports) in other words achieving the calm that comes through letting feelings flow and enlightening our belief systems, with this state achieved the feeling body, our 4D canopy, becomes a sensitive membrane able to receive the subtle light of higher dimensions. Conceiving of a town or city as a wheel of twelve will, we are told, greatly assist us in achieving such a state of balanced resonant polarity.

That’s fine when we are at home, but what about when we move around? Additionally, The Plieadian Agenda draws attention to a 6D aspect to possessions of personal value, such as the power objects in a shaman’s pouch. These are of course portable, and a small sacred circle to the four directions can be made anywhere, a little medicine wheel that can also be useful in achieving that balanced, enlightened state of calm emotional fluidity that allows us to go more multidimensional.

It is worth hanging on to valued objects when moving from place to place. I have had a framed print of Constable’s Hay Wain up in my living space for the last few years because I know that I find it easy to resonate with the accumulated value fields of that work and the idea of England as a beautiful idyll. For the same reason I recommend holding onto your teddy bear - it is a dear totem animal - Arcas - which records value fields of the child self who found appreciation of beauty natural and easy because 6D was valid for it, since it had not yet been persuaded to think in purely materialistic 3D terms about the space around it.

The above part of this chapter should give pretty rounded understanding of Morphic Resonance. I think you can appreciate why I saved the theory for so late in the book. Firstly, I consider it better to come at it from the experiental point of view - to explore the Mysteries in such a way that the Morphif Fields are felt. Then the theory may be approached with less danger of conscruing it in the wrong direction by misdirected logic. The other reason is simply that the material in this chapter just didn't seem to me to be appropriate for the opening parts of a book - first impressions count, as they say, and to be honest I didn't want to put people off.

Apart from the Theseus prophesy, which seems to include even more multimensionality, any one of the Mysteries in this book could function as case studies for the theory outlined in this chapter. As it happens there is still an intriguing Mystery left over which may serve as the example as well as any other. Follow the link as we look now at the ASLAN Mountain of Provence, that great Keeper of the Arcadian Dreamtime.

ASLAN

2007-06-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

Paul Devereux has noted on several occasions in various books, such as The Sacred Place, Symbolic Landscapes and Living Ancient Wisdom that in countless ancient cultures on every continent landscape features that have recognisable, intelligble profiles have been, since the earliest times, valued as repositories for the 'imprint of the ancestors'. By morphic resonance, the eye of the mind resonates by similarity of pattern with the minds of those who have walked that same mental path, so to speak, and the result is a richer perception and a feeling of lifting out of linear time into a more trancendental realm, what is called - in connection with the original Australian culture - the Dreamtime.

Devereux himself does not refer directly to the work of Rupert Sheldrake, but it is clear that the two bodies of work are mutualy supporting. Sheldrake himself extends his own experimentally based theory of morphic resonance into the realm of human culture in his book The Presence of the Past, and takes the Australian culture as an example. He talks too about cultures in general and about the way that sacred ceremonies always seem to have an emphasis on repeating certain cultic actions in the same way that they have been done before. He suggests that this is because by walking through these actions the resonance with the ancestors is established.

So I was amazed when, while reading a translation of the Hindu texts known as the Rig Veda, I discovered that not only did the Hindus have a word for "the archetypal patterns of behaviour established druing the fist sacrifice to serve as a model" - dharmas - but I also came across the following description of this same process.

An account is given of the creation from the body of a giant, like the Norse myth of the creation of the world from the body of the giant Ymir. A hymn then describes rituals that date right back to the earliest times and resonate with the act of creation. 'The Man' of the translation is Manu, brother of the twins Yama and Yami, cognate with other twins such as Greek Gemini, Norse Ymir, Persian Yema, etc.

The Man stretches the warp and draws the weft; the Man has spread it out upon the dome of the sky...What was the original model, and what was the copy, and what the connection between them?...What was the metre, what was the invocation, and the chant...?

Having made reference to a model and its copy, just like the Platonic version of the Creation, the hymn then gives an account of the names of the metres and the gods who first uttered them. Then it continues:

That was the model for the human sages, our fathers, when the primal sacrifice was born. With the eye that is mind, in thought I see those who were the first to offer this sacrifice. The ritual repetitions harmonized with the chants and with the metres; the seven divine sages harmonized with the original models. When the wise men looked back along the path of those who went before, they took up the reins like charioteers.

Wow. With the eye that is mind, in thought I see those who were the first... etc. There's a handy little mantra to repeat when you want to tune into the ancestral imprint of something, such as the moutain profile I now wish to discuss.

Sainte-Victoire, Totem of Provence

A magnificent mountain stands strong in Provence, the massif called Montagne Sainte-Victoire. It lies in part of those warmer southern regions of Europe that provided havens for the ancestors of modern native Europeans during the Ice Age, a landscape that escaped the scouring of the glaciers even during the last glacial maximum. This mountain is famous worldwide because painters in more recent times have developed passionate artistic devotions to it. Perhaps the most profuse examples of such passionate painterly pilgrims are Cézanne and Granet, but there have been many others.

The form of the massif is complex and very different shapes are seen when looking from different angles. The one that is of particular interest to us at this point is that which is seen when we are to the West of the mountain, looking East. I brought this to public attention when I published an article on the ‘Aslan Mountain’ in Atlantis Rising magazine.

Shown here above is an image of this view in a photograph taken by myself on a September evening from the spot on the Colline des Lauves where Cézanne liked to set up his easel. I have indicated on the image how this forms the profile of a mighty feline on the Eastern Horizon.

So we have found an unusual, very prominent, intelligible animal shape writ large on the horizon, like the mighty benevolent lion Aslan. Aix is, as we have decoded it, in the Leo sector of the Great Zodiac of France, clearly the best place for this awesome simulacra.

But there are more mysteries surrounding this great mountain. A truly intriguing question hangs over another feature of the Sainte-Victoire simulacra.

Mysteriously, the region corresponding to the lion’s face of Sainte-Victoire in Provence seems to have been artificially enhanced to give it a leonine countenance, as seen in the close-ups below. An archeologist with knowledge of rock working who was also a capable rock climber might be able to shed light on the question of whether this image of a countenance is just an astounding coincidence, or whether, as seems more likely, it is the result of human action. The question of dating would then be a whole other issue.

THE FOUR FACES OF KHUFU

2007-06-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

Four Golden Rectangles, with diagonals.
Cut along diagonals, stick together adjacent against adjacent, to make four faces

Stick four faces together, add a suitable covering, et voila! The Great Pyramid.

GEOMETRIC THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

The reason why the Great Pyramid is such a harmonious form is more readily apparent when considering the faces than the cross section, for these are derived directly from the Golden Rectangle.

Cut this rectangle into two along the diagonal, creating two right-angle triangles. Put these two together again with the medium-lengthed sides touching. And there it is. You have one of the faces.

Repeat this another three times, then put the four faces together, the long sides on the ground forming a square and the other sides touching, and you have the 3D form of the Great Pyramid.

Obviously, from a practical point of view, if you actually tried to do the above you'd be attempting to stick edges against edges, which is fiddly. You would of course be able to find other easy ways to achieve the same mathematical result but which involve leaving folded flaps useful for sticking.

RECOGNITIION

2007-06-15T01:03:00.000-07:00

A new poem to add to the GWRI GOLDEN HAIR story, at the moment of euphoric recognition (Anagnorisis)

ANAGNORISIS

THE SPOILS OF CAER ARIANRHOD

Deep down, deep down, deep below

The salty waves a treasure trove

Amid a grove where seaweed swirls

Holds trinkets, jewels, rings and pearls.

And one who dives down through this ocean

Through their old repressed emotion

With these gifts may then adorn

Their hair and limbs and rise reborn.

And so their life's past drama's changed

What once was lost becomes regained

In beggar's clothes he was disguised

Now robed and crowned he's recognised.

With gold and ruby rings adorned

See stable boy to king transformed.

It's no false claim, you'll be surprised

When golden tokens recognized

Give proof of love gone back in time

The story's course to realign.

As light that, from a black hole freed,

Would journey back, the past to seed,

From a bag that can't be filled

This future-seeded light is spilled.

Rhianon's bag must clinch the case:

Gwri Golden Hair brings Grace.

Constellation Confirmation : THE GIRAFFE OF THE SKY

2007-06-12T01:03:00.000-07:00

The Bull-Leap and Giraffe Star-Map in the Ethiopian Story

In the sky, the constellations that are immediately above and to the right of Perseus are Kamelopardis - the Giraffe constellation, Andromeda - the princess who is Perseus' lover, and the constellation of Andromeda's father Cepheus, king of Ethiopia, and stars representing the throne of Andromeda's mother, Casseiopeia, the Queen of Ethiopia. Beneath Perseus is Taurus - the Bull, and to the right of Taurus and Andromeda is Pegasus, the white, flying horse of Perseus.

The Ethiopean Story, an ancient novel by Heliodorus, also centres around an Ethiopian princess and her lover, and the final climax of the story also centres around her mother and father, with her lover riding on a white horse and leaping over the horns of a bull. Indeed, this princess is explicitly associated with Andromeda in the story. So when her lover, Theagenes, (and by this logic therefore the Perseus figure) performs a bull-leap during this final climax of the story, we obtain as sure a proof as we could possibly need that the theory that the bull-leaper in the Knossos fresco - though predating Heliodorus by one and a half millenia - is indeed the Perseus contellation. The further conclusion is that the Knossos fresco is a depiction of the myth from which Heliodorus' novel was derived.

Chariclea = Andromeda Figure

Chariclea to the king and queen of Ethiopia: "I am your country woman, a native of this land...I am also of royal birth..." Again Hydapses spurned her words as stuff and nonsense. "Enough now father," she said, "of vilifying your daughter."

...She drew forth the swathe that was exposed with her...unfolded it and handed it to Persinna [the Queen]. At her first glance the Queen stood dumbfounded and stunned, and for a long time she kept gazing on the script in the swathe and on the girl....Hydapses took it in his hands and invited the Gymnosophists to stand by and read it with him. As he made out the words he was himself filled with wonder.

"...Persinna here achkowledges that she contracted certain shapes or impressions of likeness from looking on the figure of Andromeda during her union with you. If you still required some further assurance, the original is there before us. Look carefully, and see if Andromeda is not unmistakably manifest [in Chariclea] as in the girl in the picture."

The servants were ordered to take down the picture, and they brought it and set it up beside Chariclea. The result was a great burst of applause and clamour from the onlookers, as they...were struck with an amazemement mixed with high delight at the exactness of the resemblance; so true it was that Hydapses himself could no longer be in any doubt, but stood for a long time lost in both joy and wonder...Persinna could no longer contain herself. She leapt up off her throne, ran up to the girl and embraced her.

Appearence of Kamelopardalis Causing a Sacred Bull to Break Free

[Animals were being given as gifts to the king, Chariclea's father, and these included a very strange creature.] Its stature was like that of a camel...while its hide was coloured like that of a leopard....its shoulder parts, front legs and breast rose up to a height out of all proportion to its other parts. Its neck was slender and protruded a great way from the main bulk of its body....Its head, shaped like that of a camel, was nearly twice the size of that of a Libyan ostrich....The appearence of this animal astounded the whole multitude, and its form then suggested its name...'Kamelopardalis' (Camel-Leopard, Ancient Greek word for 'giraffe'.)...

At the Altar of the Moon stood a pair of bulls, and at that of the Sun stood a team of four white horses....One of the bulls - which alone, its seems, had caught sight of the wild beast - and two of the horses sped away in headlong flight.

Theagenes, Lover of Chariclea, Peforms Bull-Leap showing that Perseus Constellation = Bull-Leaper

Theagenes (lover of Chariclea), either impelled by the manly spirit that was born in him, or acting on the instigation of some god,...seized hold of one of the horses that had not bolted, vaulted onto its back, grasped the hair on its neck and used its mane as a bridle. Stirring on his mount with his heel...he speedily caught up with the bull . Chariclea at this sight was seized with trembling and palpitation....He let his horse run on free while he leapt off it and onto the bull's neck. He then laid his face down between its horns and, encircling them with his arms as with a coronal, locked his fingrs together over the bull's forehead. The rest of his body was slung over the beasts shoulder, and thus suspended from it he was born along, only slightly tossed by the bounding of the bull. But when he felt it beginning to gasp beneath its burden and its muscles to relax their extreme tension, at the moment when it came round to the point where Hydaspes [the king of Ethiopia] sat in state, he swung himself over to the front, thrust his feet against its legs, and so by knocking repeatedly against its hoofs he artfully hampered its progress. Finding itself impeded in its onward course, and overborne by the young man's strength, it gave way at the knees and suddenly lurched headlong; then tumbling over onto its shoulders it rolled over on its back.

GIRAFFE FACTS:

They can apparently go longer without water than a camel. They get a lot of moisture from the leaves, and can drink as much as 12 gallons at a time.

They have a way of moving where they move both legs on one side at a time, and this is correctly described by Heliodorus in the same novel, Ethiopean Story. I have decided that I rather like giraffes.

In my earlier post I speculated as to whether the two giraffes in the proto-dynastic rock art with a bull and a Sun-boat might be Gemini, since the Twins are immediately to the left of Taurus. But so is Kamelopardalis, the Giraffe, which is diretly above Gemini, and so I now make this adjustment to the speculation, and if this is correct then it suggets that the constellation is a very old one.

The Universal and the Novel

I continue to be impressed by the beauty of of ancient forms - such as the constellation figures and their relative positions and movements across the sky - as the unchanging blueprint of myths. Then these myths in turn were exapanded and given more detailed particulars in the early novels. So the novels (certainly three of the four Greek novels: Ethiopian Story, Daphnis and Chloe, The Ass) have a blueprint in the Unchanging Realm, they have a Platonic Form.

How peculiar...novels with a Platonic aspect? Aren't novels supposed to be about change, about particulars, about the temporary and thus, by extension, the incarnate and bodily? Well, that is what they have become, certainly in the case of the British 'realism' of the 19th century and the like. That aspect of change - such as the sexes being equal and slavery, sacficice, tyranny etc being unjust being implicit in the stories - that aspect was there right from the start in the early Greek novels, but those novels also had this aspect of the Universal, the Eternal, a Platonic Form, which for me makes them far more beautiful. Times change, different things become relevant, and so novels written now are best to acknowledge what is now relevent, and this expresses itself best in the new costumes that are draped over the Platonic Forms, but the greatest beauty is to be found in the conservation of those Platonic Forms. There need be no duality, but certainly the emphasis now must be on recovering the Platonic aspect, because this is what has not been considered in literature for the last few centuries. It is clear that novel writing was no different from the other arts in Ancient Greece, in that is considered the Platonic Aspect, some blueprint centered in the unchanging realm....not forgetting of course that the flesh is also good. We certainly wouldn't want a return to the dimensional hierachies of Christianity that grew out of Neoplatonism.

PAINTING: THE VENUS OF BRUNSWICK SQUARE

2007-06-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

ALSO CALLED: KHUFU'S HORIZON 1 : BRANWEN WAKES

(Click on picture for a FULL ENLARGEMENT)

POEMS ACCOMPANYING THE PAINTING
(as in previous post ISLAND-HOPPER : GEODESY)

The Venus of Brunswick Square : A Saphic Ode

Leave Crete, Surf-Born, for Brunswick’s glade
Where sea-breeze whispers in the tops
Of thick-grown firs that cast their shade
Under the copse

Around the green the terrace lies
Where frontages, curved round in bays,
Make lookout posts for seaward eyes
To cast their gaze

The column curves catch varied light,
With spiral capitals of cream,
And finely frame a bounteous sight
Where wavelets gleam.

Corinthian pilasters hold
Their load upon acanthus leaves
Still spiraled, as their curves unfold
Under the eaves

Aphrodite, come, we pray
And grace this finely crafted cove
And softly smile upon our play
In surf-flecked Hove.

Aphrodite Brightonica : An Invocation

As water runs down temple steps of marble, one by one
So let our recounting mark the reasons once again
That hallow out this place so as to make a goddess’ home
Calling and enticing Her step forth from the foam

Solar Amun has the centre of the mighty square
From eastmost point to westmost, and from north to south as far
Hermes has the inner ring, and builds His city where
His distance fords the River Thames, old Oxford’s in his care

Gaia, most voluptuous, just meets the outer square
It’s Venus who divides the Land and Sea in balanced share
She places by her slimmest part within the outer square
A square of half the area, which meets the southern shore

At Brighton, where the surf rolls up between the land and sea
Just as in Her ancient myth the surf gave birth to She
Who fills our hearts with Romance, beautifying all we see
Such elegance befits You; this city is for Thee

A Choral Ode to the Balance of Land and Sea

Strophe : Odyssey, The Ode to the Sea

Come Epic Muse down to me, and now sing a fine Ode to the Sea
Singing “O, to the Sea”, sing an ode, To the Sea sing the story in me
On the Roads of the Sea his crew rowed, as Dawn’s petals fell on the dark Sea,
Like a Rose from the salt-waves She rose, Epic Muse sing the story in me.

Antestrophe : Ge-Odyssey, The Ode to the Land

But no Sight can be found as he sails, homeward bound, as the comforting mounds
Of the Hills of his home where he’d roam, in the fields with his favorite hounds
Singing “O, to the land” always standing, its ground as the winds whirl around
Standing Strong and secure, firm and sure, the great rocks of the shore standing sound.

Epode : The Balance of Land and Sea

With her Compasses Queen Aphrodite, a synthesis brilliantly found
For by Halving the Square she has measured, the balance of land and sea
So the Two Realms at Brighton agree, to the ruling of Zeus they are bound
With BritAnnia and Neptune in balance, he’s finished his Odyssey.

Venus of Hove

If in many-pebbled Hove,
You slip into a dream
In which you see Her stepping out
Where morning waters gleam

Or if among old Brighton’s lanes
You catch a waft of rose
Drifting on the evening air
Then you might suppose

You see the Queen of Beauty
And appreciate Her beams
That glow amid the flowers andIlluminate your dreams.

Palmeira Poem II

Let this poem recall my joy
Of the immensely beautiful immensity
Of Homeric technicolour cloudscapes
Ranged distantly above the sea
Sun-tinted in time-faded creams
And hanging in static pose
Like prancing Olympian figures
On a high pedimental frieze
Dry-footedly above the horizon
Of the yacht-traversed immensity
Of the abundantly immense and immensely
Abundant blue-gray sea
Far off amid the western haze
There lies, they say, an Isle of White
Behind me Palmeira’s pediments shine
And celebrate sunlight.

Palmeira Poem III

Let these few lines recall(My joy of) the immensely longstanding solar passion for coniferousness(As there has long been in the case of) soaring dinosauriac velvet green-scapes
Vaulting haunts of pelicanariac fish-feedersMyrrh-shady alligator-limbed perch-branches of white-feathered squawkers
(And as there also is in the case of this Palmeiran pine.)

The Albion Line

The gods hang out in architraves
Where Evening throws red gold
As Luna creeps into the parts
Where shadows feel the cold
Revelers lean from windows
All along the Western Road
And throw rose petals in the footsteps
Where the giant strode
His image in a wheeled boat
Will ride again tonight
Lit up by burning torches as they
Cast their flick’ring light.

THE INCONTINENTIAD (of the Emerald Poets)

2007-06-06T05:47:00.000-07:00

Incontinentiad, although chronologically the second, forms the first part of the Cuppalot Chronicles Trilogy. Like Island-Hopper, it has Cuppalot as the narrative voice in the main part, but Hatpins is the protagonist in this plot, in which the prophesies of ages are fullfilled...

The Incontinentiad
(of the Emerald Poets)

Professor Hatpins had it all. A big comfy jumper. A bike that worked. Even his own apple press.

He also had a cottage with a real fire, a marriage to the lovely Heather of Bromwich, and an annual grant to finance his research. Yes, there was no doubt that things had been going swimmingly for Hatpins. So, notwithstanding the fact that it was always a wrench to drag himself from the comforts of the marital bed, it was generally with a spring in his step that he wandered along the riverside path in the mornings through Marlow town from his home to his office at the university.

Today was no exception. To lesson the trauma of parting for the day, Hatpins and Heather were exchanging text messages expressing their longing for the moment that afternoon they would again be in each other's arms. The professor was partly occupied by this as he ambled beside the Thames, and was partly involved in appreciating the beauy all around him. A line ran through his head that seemed to him to be the beginning of a poem, since it happened to rhyme:

I'm rather keen
Upon this scene.

He was setting his mind to how he might continue this poem when another text came through from Heather. It was of an intimate nature, making certain promises, and bringing a smile to Hatpins' face. He replied in kind, and then turned his thoughts back to his little poem.

I’m rather keen
Upon this scene
This riverside
This valley wide
Is rich with gold
Of stories told
I’m rather keen
Upon this scene

Yes, that would do nicely. Now, another verse. He had by now come to the slipway by the river that lies on the opposite bank from the Compleat Angler hotel, and has the roaring weir off to the left and the famous Marlow Suspension Bridge off to the right. Here he sat himself down and began to ponder a follow-up verse. Then another text arrived:-

"Hatpins, I need to see you now. As a matter of urgency."

He read the text absent-mindedly, his thoughts now wrapped up in his poem, and then pressed reply and sent a text saying: "Hatpins can hardly wait either, love bunny!" and pressed send.

Now back to the poem. A second verse appeared:-

I have been seen
To lift a skein
I am that keen
Upon this scene
A toast I say
To the glorious day
To the cream gold ray
On this waterway

Yes, that would do just fine. The professor now felt that he was on something of a roll - had not Shelley himself composed under these same yew trees? - and it wasn't long before he had a third verse.

I’m rather keen
Upon this scene
This River Queen
This creamy sheen
Rose-mist shrouds
In wispy clouds
The old wild wood
Where Badger stood

What Hatpins' didn't realize was that the last text he had received - "Hatpins, I need to see you now. As a matter of urgency" - and to which he had hastily replied, had not in fact come from his lovely wife, Heather of Bromwich, but from his head of department Cardinal Forthright, professor of Philanthopology at Marlow University, the message's tone being one of gravity rather than flirtatiousness. So rather than speeding along to Cardinal Forthright's office to see what the problem was, Hatpin's remained seated by the river composing a fourth verse:-

This riverside
This valley wide
Is rich with gold
Of stories told
The rising smoke
The sturdy oak
I love this scene
Where late I’ve been.

Only then, in relaxed fashion did he up and wend his way to the university, deciding as he wandered along that he would call his poem Wide Valley Scene : Contemplations Arising Upon Wandering Beside the Thames in Marleaux in the Morning.

The reason for the head of department's text to Hatpins was as follows. Though Hatpins’ funding had been flowing in quietly but surely via the Department of Philanthropology at the University of Marlow for some years now, in fact every one in the department had long assumed that someone else was keeping an eye on the professor’s work. But this morning an academic journal had fallen open on Cardinal Forthright's desk, revealing one of Hatpins' recent articles. The essay was entitled: Dionysos and the Dinosaurs = ‘DNA Source’ I & II. In this piece Hatpins had related how the Orphic philosophers had believed that Dionysos flows in the human blood due to the fact that when Zeus blasted the Titans for making a meal of Dionysos, and then made the first humans from the ashes of this fire, the ashes of the dismembered Dionysos who had formed their meal were also present in the mixture. For Professor Hatpins, who had been working on such theories in isolation for some time, the Titans were really the dinosaurs, who he now thought of, by virtue on nonlinear etymology, as 'DNAsource' One, while Dionysos, or 'DNAsource' Two, was an infusion of a non-reptilian blueprint into the DNA matrix. So it was, according to Hatpins, that the human blood contained the blood of the gods, not just the draconic genes but also the stellar influence, the blood of Dionysos, for which reason he held out hope thatg humanity might one day be able to overcome the dragon Competition and make stellar consciousness the norm. For Hatpins Zeus blasting the Titans actually stood for an asteroid impact which brought about the demise of the Titans, the Dinosaurs, according to Hatpins, and he also suggested that perhaps hardy bacteria had arrived upon this or a similar asteroid, explaining the mythic notion of Zeus creating from the resulting mixture.

Forthright’s brow furrowed in confusion as he read through the piece. DNA had not been discovered, let alone named, when the dinosaurs became known to science, still less when the Dionysos cult had emerged, in fact the English language itself had not existed at the time of the latter. How then could the etymological connections Hatpins was suggesting be possible? Forthright searched hurriedly through some other journals until he found another piece by Professor Hatpins and in this one it was stated as a fact that the Odyssey of Homer had been so named because it was an Ode-to-the-Sea, the old brine-encrusted sea poem of the Greeks.

It had been at this point that Forthright had sent the text message to Hatpins telling him he needed to see him urgently. And it was Hatpins' most unexpected reply - "Hatpins can hardly wait either, love bunny!" - that now had Forthright deeply concerned for his colleaugue's mental health.

“Now look here Hatpins”, said Forthright, with a note of gravity, when his colleague finally showed up at work, "I am not, and greatly doubt that I shall ever be your love bunny."
"Um..." said Hatpins, as he gradually realized what had happened, but before he could explain, Forthright continued:-
“But what concerns me even more is all this about Homer naming things in English, and Orphic philosophers theorizing about dinosaurs and DNA…”
“Ah well now,” Hatpins interjected at this point, “I must say that I haven’t made any such claims. My reasoning is not so peculiar once you realize how information can travel on beams of higher-dimensional light back into the consciousnesses of the ancients, and that gifted intuitives such as bards, oracles and mystic philosophers are able to sense the information via their feelings. They referred to these beams of higher-dimensional light as the rays of Apollo, god of prophesy, and they are the cause of non-linear etymologies.”
“Maybe so, Hatpins, but where are your references?”
“I believe I referenced Barbara Ricicle.”
“Yes, but as far as I’m concerned such bold claims require strong proofs. Would you be able to provide a proof that such prophetic processes occur?”
“I am confident that I would be able to do so, yes.”
“Very well then, I shall give you four weeks. Should you find at least two, and preferably three such a proofs then I will willingly triple your pay and you may set up your own sub-department of Non-Linear Etymology. But should a proof be lacking then I will have no choice but to reduce your funding merely to an hourly rate for lecturing and tutoring on more conventional subjects.”

This, then, was the challenge that now faced Professor Hatpins: to prove that old stories may be pregnant with information sourced in times long after the stories were themselves conceived. Was his salary to be reduced in the way Forthright had suggested, Heather and he might have to sell the cottage and find alternative accomodation, maybe even somewhere without a real fire, and the very idea tore at his heart. Yes, he could probably keep the jumper, and the bike, maybe even the applepress, but thought of a winter without those cosy evenings curled up with Heather in front of the fire - well, it didn't bare thinking about. And so he simply didn't think about it.

But what he didn't do, and here he showed great wisdom, was repress the associated feelings. He knew that in all likelihood the events which seemed to be working against him here were in some way manifestations of existing repressions, and that true success depended on an effective surfacing and release. Now I could pretend, for the purposes of dramatisation, that he acted out these feelings like some florrid character in an an old tragedy, but in fact he did not choose that path. If anyone had been watching him as he walked home that evening they would have seen him sit down at his favourite spot by the wier, and close his eyes. And if this observer had listened very, very closely they may have heard a whisper on his lips "Ok, let's feel this," and then they would have seen nothing perceptible in his expression until about two mintutes and thirty seconds later, when for a duration of about three seconds his body spasmed and he shook his head like a wild stallion. Then eyes opening, taking stock of his location in the here and now, an inbreath, then getting up and walking home with the expression of someone who intends to be succesful.

And so it was that, after contemplating the matter for some time, the amiable professor approached his dear friend Captain Cuppalot and explained the situation, and the Captain offered his services should they be required. In fact over the next couple of days Cuppalot occupied his mind in thinking of ways to help his dear friend, and hit upon the notion that the two of them, along with their friends Hawaki Leafstrain and Thomas de Puggalot, would publish a book of their poetry. That way, even if Hatpins lost his funding, perhaps he would be able to keep his cottage. His idea was that the collection be called Most Thankly Mr Posh, but it has not been recorded why he hit upon this particular name.

Inpsired and motivated by this idea, he wrote a poem about it, and set it to music:-

How would it be were we,
The Evergreen Poets Three (Plus One)
To take our verbal daisy chain
And season it with rain
And Sun?
(We'd have some fun.)

Then tie it up with ribbons and bows
And dandy it up with drapes and throws
And stitch the pages into a book
And give it a most dainty look

Emroidered with tendril decoration
And lavender sprayed perfumeration
And bearing an overarching name
That's simple but quite insane:

Most Thankly Mr posh.

Cuppalot then called on his friend and fellow Emerald Poet Thomas de Puggalot to see if he had any poems that could go into the collection.

Mmm? - said de Puggalot.

I was saying, have you been writing? Do you have any poems for this book I've just described to you, you know, to help Hatpins out and so forth?

Oh…in a manner of speaking. I haven’t actually been writing, in the literal sense. But I have been having some…ideas…

Yes? And could I hear some of these?

Ah…well…now…I was thinking about…about the softness, the gentleness, the feminine, the sway of things, the way things sway, as a gentle wind of life blows through all things…isn’t it nice sometimes, to take time, no rush you see, really, no rush. Just a gentle sway…

That’s it?

That’s it.

I see.

But you might try Quentin of Medmenham - said de Puggalot - I believe he has an idea for a novel.

Cuppalot went to Medmenham, as suggested, and found that Quentin's idea was for a book very much along the lines of Watership Down, but with badgers.

Quentin described how for him the pathos of Watership Down had always been undermined by the fact that the characters were rabbits, and consequently had very large ears and enormous, clown-like feet. How much more noble would such a story be, were the noble badger to replace the rabbit? Cuppalot thanked Quentin for his suggestions, and for the use of his hubbly bubbly, but decided badger the idea was not right for the Emerald Poets, and bade his friend farewell.

Next Cuppalot went to Hatpins himself and shared his idea of a book of poetry. Hatpins showed some enthusiasm, and then read him his recently composed poem Wide Valley Scene : Contemplations Arising Upon Wandering Beside the Thames in Marleaux in the Morning.

"What do you think?" asked Hatpins.
"I like it, Hatpins, I like it a lot. It's just, well, I'm not sure it's going to set the world on fire."
"Well I had no intention of setting the world on fire, Cuppalot, it's just a glad little poem about enjoying living by the Thames."

It wasn't long before they had come to accept that their kind poetry was not likely to result in a book that would shoot up the best-seller list. Luckily, Hatpins had come up with an idea of his own that would make such contingencies unnecessary, by addressing Forthright's challenge directly.

“I am correct in supposing, am I not,” he asked, that you are aware of a past life as Daidalia, who sailed from Knossos with a contingent of Minoans to settle in Delphi, the greatest of the oracle centers of the Greek world?”
“You are indeed correct,” Cuppalot confirmed.
“And it is also true, is it not,” Hatpins continued, “that as Daidalia you went on to assume for some time the role of a prophetess at this oracle site.”
“That is correct, yes.”
“Excellent. My request then is a simple one. Might I ask you to invoke your connection to Daidalia while she is performing this role, and that you beam to her certain ideas which she may then be able to encode in some lasting form that we may be able to recover and decode and then cite as proof of this process, showing Cardinal Forthright that information can indeed code ancient stories from the present?”
“I should consider that a very worthwhile project,” said Cuppalot.

The next stage was to decide what ideas to beam back into the past. Hatpins explained that really it would have to be information that was available to us in our own time but which could not be available to Daidalia in any other form, and for this reason Hatpins thought it best if we chose some modern scientific theory which could not possibly have been arrived at through the science of Daidalia’s own society. After casting around for such a theory for a time, Hatpins hit upon a brilliantly elegant scheme: we would send to Daidalia the theoretical notion that if some form of light could escape from a black hole it could actually come out into the past, in other words an idea which was closely connected conceptually to the very process we were interested in proving! No-one of Daidalia’s time could have had the slightest inkling even of what a black hole is, let alone of the theory of relativity upon which the notion is based, so if this idea could be sufficiently well encoded in the ancient tale we would have our proof.

“Run it by me again,” said Captain Cuppalot, as the two sat, later that afternoon, fine-tuning the plan.
“Listen carefully. A black hole, such as is believed to be located at the centre of our spiraling galaxy, is somewhat like a prison from which even light, of the ordinary kind, cannot escape, so strong is the gravitational pull. According to the equations of relativity time slows down, relatively speaking, in an increased gravitational pull, and the gravity of a black hole is so strong that could light find a way to escape it could actually come out into the past. The black hole can also be thought of as being like a great hungry monster that engulfs everything it comes in contact with. For a long time it was assumed that nothing could possibly escape, that the black hole remained continent, but then it was stated that some forms of radiation were emitted, but it was not thought that they could contain any information about the inside of the black hole. But then, in the June of 2004, the month that saw Venus transit the Sun in the constellation of Taurus the Bull, scientists started saying that inside the black hole were things called Superstrings that were tangled but not destroyed, and that perhaps some of the emissions might contain some information about these Superstrings.”
“I don’t really get this business of the Superstrings,” said Cuppalot.
“That’s not a problem,” said Hatpins. “You don’t need to understand the concepts, you just need to transmit them to Daidalia, at the same time impulsing her to formulate the information in a way that may survive until our times. If she is a priestess of Delphi this shouldn’t be too difficult. Her words will be considered precious by all Greece.”

And so Cuppalot invoked Daidalia and beamed to her as best he could the strange ideas that Hatpins had described to him, something about an engulfing monster - did he say a bull? - in a spiraling prison from which it was for a long time said that no-one could escape, but how this could be achieved by some sort of amazing string, once it had been detangled and unraveled. Cuppalot also transmitted to Daidalia that it was important that the story be passed down without being changed until such time as science had developed its muscles, so to speak, sufficiently to be able to recognize the symbols of information, tokens of a future science. He transmitted to her the idea that if this information could be effectively recovered and decoded in this future age from which it had come, it would indeed be a most happy occasion!

Now it so happened that their friend Hawaki Leafstrain also had a past life connection which would hopefully provide them with the second proof that Cardinal Forthright had said would be necessary for completeion of the challenge, namely as a Celtic bard. So, to increase the chances of success, Hatpins carried out the same procedure with Hawaki.

And so, four weeks later Hatpins and Cuppalot sat before Cardinal Forthright in his office, relating to him their adventures. It was Cuppalot who was elected to tell the bulk of the story:-

“Well, once we had posted the core ideas into the past there seemed only one thing to do - to go on the quest to find the deposited tokens. It was decided that Hawaki would stay in Britain and search for the tokens within the Matter of Britain, while Hatpins and Heather together with I and my wife Myrtale, would make the journey to the mainland, the great Eurasian Continent. There was little doubt where would be the best place to start the search - an initial consultation with the priests and perhaps even the current prophetess of Delphi seemed most sensible, since this was where the seeds had been sewn.

And so we traveled to Gaul in our yacht, the HMHM Henry-Moorehen-Ry-Mooring, and upon landfall I was inspired to write a little verse:-

Cuppalot on Continent Part I

Here Am I on Continent
Awake with the Dream
Cuppalot incontinent
Gushing forth my stream.

In order to travel in style we decided to journey to Delphi via Apollo’s Wondrous Way, steering the Henry-Moorehen-Ry-Mooring overland on a constant bearing of 30 degrees south of East down along the rhumb line that runs from St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, past Mont Saint-Michelle off the north coast of Gaul, through the city of Bourges in Gaul’s heart, along the Riviera of the east coast of Italy, through Corfu and straight to Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi. Apollo’s Way continues to Athens and then to the Kykladian island of Delos, birthplace of the god, but we stopped at Delphi to speak to its priests and priestesses, who sadly have for some centuries not enjoyed the same position at the forefront of the Greek world as once they did.

We spoke to a lady called Maria, explaining what it was we were looking for. Her eaction was extraordinary. For what must've been a full three minutes she stared at us in open-mouthed wonder, while we smiled politely back at her wondering if she was still in possession of her senses. Then suddenly she yelled ‘Theseus!’ and leapt up like a lusty dolphin shooting out of the sea, and started dancing the Greek circle dance, calling us to join her, which we did as best we could while she laughed almost hysterically.

Then she lead us to the Thesea, the area of Delphi which has since ancient times been sacred to a legendary Athenian king who she said went by the name of Theseus. Here at last she began to explain her elation: she knew exactly the story we were looking for - it was a myth about this Athenian King, Theseus, and every one of the ideas Cuppalot had transmitted back to Daidalia had been received and successfully set down in permanent form. We asked her to relate to us the details, but she said that the discovery was so great that it deserved a suitably magnificent telling, and told us that we were to meet her in two days’ time in the Dolphin Temple in Athens.

And so we continued along Apollo’s Wondrous Way to violet-crowned Athens. While admiring the Parthenon Cuppalot experienced an epiphany of Athena as white marble shone like the Moon, revealing intimately the cherishing touch of centuries. Maria took us to the Temple of Athena the Craftswoman and Hephaestus the Craftsman, which had formerly been called the Theseum, sacred to Theseus, then it was time to go the Dolphin Temple.

Maria had really pulled out all the stops. The temple had been hung with fine drapes, and was lit by lamps burning olive oil, while pine-resin incense burned on the altar, wine was poured from large vessels in the antique style, and a harpist plucked gently while waiting to accompany Maria’s telling of the myth. The priestess herself, Maria, looked positively regal when she entered the temple, wearing a blue velvet robe fastened with a beautiful gold broach in the shape of a sprig of olive bent round in a circle, and fine gold earrings in the shape of dolphins, with a laurel wreath upon her head. Her eyes glittered like those of a goddess as she began her tale.

She related in full the story of the Athenian hero who had entered the spiraling prison called the Labyrinth, the cyclopean-walled house of the flesh-eating bull-headed monster, the Minotaur. Prior to this it had been said that it was impossible to escape from this meandering prison, but Theseus was able to show that in fact it was possible, and the feat was achieved by use of a thread which he had been given by a Minoan princess, which he unraveled as he went and then used to find his way back out of the dark stronghold. Maria also told how one of her Delphic predecessors, Plutarch, himself a high priest of Apollo at the oracle centre, had recorded a version of the tale of Theseus in which the young prince had escaped from Crete along with a daughter of King Minos called Aigle, which means ‘Light’. She told too how those seeing the approach of the returning ship back on mainland Greece saw a black sail, which they read as a signal that the escape had not been successful, when in fact it had. Further to this the beginning of her tale contained the fact that Theseus’ father Aigeus the king of Athens had, when wondering how he might have a child, visited the Delphic oracle and been given, by way of answer, a sewn up wine sack and told not to open it until he got back to Athens. After the birth of his child Aigeus had placed certain tokens under a rock - a sword and a pair of sandals, and had told the mother of his child, Aethra, not to tell his son who he was until he was strong enough to lift the rock and recover the tokens. Then he should be sent to meet Aigeus in Athens.
The child was named Theseus after these deposited tokens, and Plutarch’s version noted that the name could be read as a pun coming not only from the Greek for the placing of these tokens but also for the word for ‘acknowledge’, referring to the recognition of the hero by his father once he had arrived in Athens, for this was the happiest moment there had ever been in the city, according to the story. His father had not known who the young man was until he had drawn his sword to cut some meat, the sword that he had found under the rock. Aegius immediately recognized the token by the emblem carved onto it, and in this moment Theseus was recognized and acknowledged as the true heir to the throne of Athens.

And so we too had found our tokens, those that Daidalia had placed in the ancient story. Maria hardly needed to explain to us that the hungry flesh-eating monster was the black hole, how the thread by which the escape was achieved was the tangled superstring inside the black hole, how the black sail was the blackness of the black hole which sucks in light by the strength of its gravitational field but how Aigle, meaning light, with whom Theseus escaped is the higher-dimensional light that can and does escape this gravitational field, the reason that the black sail is not a true signal. It was also clear that the recovering of the tokens under the rock was an encoded symbol of the recovery of the information from the future, and that not opening the bag from the oracle until the right time symbolized Daidalia’s story being passed on unchanged until the time of decoding, and that Theseus developing his strength until he was strong enough to lift the rock and recover the tokens symbolized science developing to a stage of sophistication whereby this decoding became possible, in other words that the story could not possibly be decoded until science had developed to this stage, which was why Hatpins had chosen these notions in the first place.

Now it was easy to understand why Maria had been so amazed when we had explained to her the details of our quest. Now it was we who felt that sense of amazement, with a thrill of wonder screaming through us more intensely than anything any of us had ever experienced before.

But I have skipped ahead and not really told you anything of the wonderful rendition of the story that was given by Maria. I have not mentioned for example her quotation of Bakchilides, adapted into English, which outlined the events surrounding Theseus’ arrival in Crete:-

The blue-prowed ship cut through the salty waves
Off the shores of great Minoan Crete
It carried Theseus, that brave hero
And fourteen young Ionian maids and youths.
It sped on winds sent by grey-eyed Athene
Filling its bright sails from the North
But when the arrows of desire struck Minos
Reaching out he touched one of the maids
Who screamed out in alarm for Theseus
Who seeing this with anger boldly spoke:
“O son of peerless Zeus the course you steer
Is carrying you towards a harmful deed
You may have been conceived by mighty Zeus
But I sprang forth from great Poseidon’s seed
Who lay with Aethra when the violet-wreathed
Nereads gave her a veil of gold.
Therefore, warlord of the Knossians
Cease from acts that would bring many tears
O I shall fight you, and the gods will judge.”
So he spoke, and sailors stood spellbound
To hear such bold defiance from this man
But Minos started raging deep inside
Forming in his mind a cunning plan.
“Father Zeus,” he cried, “Now hear my words
Listen to your son by Phoenix’ daughter
Send a peal of thunder as a sign
So all will know that I am of your line.”
Zeus answered his prayer and sent a flash
Of searing lightning down across the sky
And all aboard the ship were filled with awe
To see such confirmation of his birth.
Then “Theseus”, called Minos, “if you’re born
To Aethra as a son of he who stirs
The seas, leap now into those depths
Posiedon’s chambers lying far below
And bring back up this shining golden ring.”
Thus spoke the king and Theseus showed no fear
But from the solid wooden deck he sprang
Into the swirling forests of the sea.
The dolphins, those lithe roamers of the sea
Bore the hero swiftly through the fronds
To the palace of his horseman sire
And into the great regal hall of gods
There he gazed in wonder at those nymphs
Who, shining gold, performed a happy dance
And there he saw the ox-eyed goddess queen
Who was his father’s true majestic wife
She wrapped him in the finest purple robe
And placed a flowery wreath upon his head.
Then, unwet, he rose up from the sea
With gifts of gods bright-gleaming on his limbs
A miracle by which Minos was stunned
As the sweet-voiced nymphs began to sing
To celebrate the finding of the ring.

Though my crew and I had no need of an explanation, Maria described for the others present - who included members of the Athenian city council and the Greek ministry of culture - the symbolism of the tale, the way that it was encoded with information from the current time. As a result of this, following this evening, the stupefied ministers officially and publicly sanctioned and endorsed the Delphic oracle as of old, even themselves visiting Delphi for advice. This resulted in the oracle orchestrating the complete rebuilding of the sacred culture of Greece, albeit with a new emphasis. In times past the great myths had been valued for reasons many of which were particular to those times, and now here was a new reason to value them more than ever before, which revealed their numinous beauty again, for, as the aesthetic philosopher Gerald of Hove understood, this is what true beauty is, an activated and resonant field of value, a healing balm for towns, cities and nations. Funnily enough even these governmental going-on have precedent in the old tale, for it was said that after he became king of Athens Theseus instituted many enlightened reforms.

We ourselves decided to spend a little more time in the Greek world, by way of a celebratory holiday, planning to continue south-east into the Aegean. But first we wanted to spend some more time in Athens for our own pleasure. We had temporarily forgotten that it was not one but at least two proofs that you yourself, Cardinal Forthright, had asked for, so delighted were we to have found the tokens hidden in the Theseus story.

That evening the ladies, Heather and Myrtale, had found somewhere to discuss a novel they were planning to co-write,and myself and Hatpins, that erudite son of Apollo, took a stroll around those ancient streets. Cosmopolitan hubub snaked through ancient Plaka, Bouzouki and the clink of dishes. We found a delightful little taverna and there enjoyed a traditional meal.

“Top up your retsina, professor?” I said.
“Most kind, Captain Cuppalot, thou far-galloping spawn of Bacchus.”
“So Hatpins, Greece...any thoughts?”
“Well, my dear Cuppalot, if I may take up a theme of non-linear etymology, I have learned that the Greek for 'oil' is a word which is pronounced 'larthi'. This is of course where we get the English word 'lather'. Now, what we call 'Greece' is not what the natives call their homeland. They call her Ellada, pronounced 'E-lather'. In other words the Greek for Greece is almost the Greek word for oil, which is effectively another word for 'grease'.”
“Most efharisto, kirie Hatpinos, you have proved yourself once again a true son of Apollo, rising up with gifts "bright-gleaming on your limbs", but the next question surely is why? What could be the reason for this oily etymology?”
“Well, where does the word 'oil' come from?”
“From the word 'olive'?”
“Kala! It is 'elias' in Greek. Olive oil has been produced in Greece since very ancient times. Huge and beautiful earthenware containers were built to store it even in the hey day of Knossos and in the time of Jason, before the Greeks set sail for Troy. They ate it on food, they burnt it in torches, they rubbed it on their bodies for that 'Greek god' look, they put a layer on top of wine to prevent it oxidizing during storage, (in fact they still do that), it is also used to make soap, and so, for want of a less clichéd expression, the list goes on.
Since we are in Athena’s city, I might mention that Athena is the goddess of olive trees, and She is thoroughly Greek, hers is not one of the immigrant cults. One of Her epithets is Promachus, which means that She is a protectress. The Ancients believed that She helped to protect their land from invasion. And, interestingly, olive leaf extract is a very powerful microbe-remover, and so Athena's olive tree really does protect the body against invasion.”
"Ah yes, I have heard as much said of the olive leaf. What of the other gods and goddesses, do their sacred plants have similar relvance to their particular qualities?"
"Yes, there are observations that we can make along those lines. The god Pan is a lusty old fellow, one who despite his advancing years has not lost his potency. For a man to stand proud in later years it is necessary for cholesteral levels to be kept down, to maintain healthy blood flow. The goat is obviously the animal of Pan, and goat's yoghurt, more than cow's, is useful for lowering cholesterol. Then there are the pines themselves, the trees sacred to Pan. Apparently pycnogenol, extracted from the bark of the European coastal pine, works together with the amino acid arginine to maintain a man's sexual function, so he may continue to stand proud like the pine trunks themselves. Arginine is found in high levels in whey, obtained from milk, whether cow's, sheep's or goat's, and also in oats, explaining their associations with potency. Garlic too has an affinity with Pan, for he is that lusty god who in myth always seems to desire rather than to be desired, and this is the paradox of garlic. It is wonderful for the heart and for the circulation, and its high level of antioxidants will also help keep an man active, but its odor is not reckoned to be the most attractive. Some solution to this is required if Pan is not to remain the unpartnered god."
"You interest me my freind with such talk. But tell me, know ye of any other non-linear etymological interests such as with grease and lather, oil and olive?"
"Well, I have been recently struck with another thought regarding the Ode-to-the-Sea. Within our model we have the light escaping the prison of the black hole as the symbol of information seeding the past, yes? And we have a hungry, devouring monster in that prison, engulfing all around it yes? So the English name 'Ode to the Sea' went into the dark prison of the engulfing monster and then managed to escape, coming out in the past and there proclaiming itself as "Odyssey", yes? Do you not see in this the tale of Odysseus and his men escaping from the cave of the man-eating Cyclops, Polyphemos? And was it not in fact through a play on words that they tricked the monster into rolling away the stone from the entrance?"
"Ah yes," said Cuppalot,"Odysseus told him his name was No One, so that when they blinded the one-eyed monster with the olive-wood spear and the neighboring Cyclopses, hearing his roars of pain, came to ask what the matter was, and who was harming him, Polyphemons said that No One was harming him, and so they went away again. So skill had triumphed over brutishness, am I correct?"
"You are, yes, but there is a third level to the pun in the original Greek, because the word for No One sounds the same as the word for skill or cunning, Metis, so truly yes, Metis triumphed over brutishness as you say."
"Gosh that's frightfully clever isn't it?"
"Quite so my dear Cuppalot, and what did Odysseus do once he had escaped with his men under the bellies of the rams?"
"Why, he turned around and proclaimed his real name, Odysseus, so the brute might know who it was that had escaped his canabalistic plan. This, I am suggesting, represents the name 'Odyssey', Ode-to-the-Sea, going into the past, so that in some small way there is a part of Greek mythology that is for ever England."
“Well I should hope so. But tell me, are such links peculiar to the Anglo-Hellenic connection?"
"Why no, I have found Egyptian examples too. You will find in the health stories a plant-sourced amino acid sold under the name of 5-HTP, short for 5-Hydroxytryptophan. It is similar to tryptophan, the amino acid found in proterin, in in high levels in, for example, milk, but this 5-hydroxy form of the chemical apparently enters the brain more readily. It is a precusor to the chemical associated with satisfaction, serotonin, and also to the chemical associated with relaxed sleepiness, melatonin. This may be considered in light of the ancient Egyptian word for satisfaction, which the spelled with the equivalents of our letters, H, T and P. Egyptologists insert vowels for ease of pronunciation in the spoken form, and so you will find the word given as hetep and as hotep. The Egyptian goddess of joy and satisfaction is Hathor, who in her bovine form was depicted in the paradisal papyrus marshes known as the Field of Satisfation. She was of course a goddess of milk, shown suckling the pharaoh."
"Indeed truly most thankly prof Hatpins, for another most etymological interest," said Hatpins. "Most certainly so yes. Octopus?”
“Where?” said Hatpins in alarm, his gaze darting around him in search of errant cephalopods.
“Most silly kirie Hatpins! I was merely making a culinary suggestion!”
The professor blushed.

After embarking from Piraeus, the port of Athens, we headed out in the Aegean for some island-hopping, and here we lazed on various Kykladian islands and swam in their warm seas, sailing from one to t’other on the Henry-Moorehen-Ry-Mooring.

I myself, Cuppalot, was on a number of occasions inspired to poetry, and I shall include a couple of short examples here:-

Incontinentiad

Here I am on balcony
Listening to birds,
Reading books on falconry
And playing games with words.

'Here I am on continent
Awake within my dream
Here I am incontinent,
Spilling forth my stream'

Here I am on campsite
Watching sprinkler squirts
Here I am in wardrobe, fest-
tooned with silken shirts
Yonder is the cuttlefishFiring inky squirts
Here I am in jellyfish
Amid translucent skirts.

My infant splendor’s mine
My heart's not broken
The beauty-seeing child within
Has now been woken

My infant splendor’s mine
I feel protected
The child inside Pandora's box
Is resurrected

Fructose Renewal II

I stumble into orange groves and pilfer for the express purpose of obtaining fluid How much am I sweating? One orange full? Two? What? I listen to the wind in the trees, what is it saying? One? Two? The song bird, what does he tell me? One orange? Two? Three even? How much? I hear the cicada, Cicada, how much am I sweating? One? Two? More? Mud frogs and Unglish mango out in the mad day fun One mango? Two? What? How men men go? Mud frogs and Unglish mango out in the mad day fun

It was while we were hopping around the Kyklades that my crew and I had various discussions about the Mayan calendar, initiated by Hatpins outlining a thesis he had been working on for some time. We first noted an elegance of idea in the way in which in Southern Greece Apollo’s Wondrous Way actually aligns upon Winter Solstice Sunrise, and the Sun at the winter solstices in our own period was aligned with the region of the Black Hole of Galactic Centre, how this would also be true at Winter Solstice of 2012, the date which is the end of the Long Count calendar of the Maya people of Central America, the beginning of a new age of the Sun. We talked too of how the Maya name periods of time after the last day of the period, as if the beginning of the period had been seeded from the end of the period, just as the Theseus information had come from our own time - the end of the Mayan Long Count - and gone back to the ancient days to form the core of the story.

And as we idled in the shade of the vines in the warm Aegean afternoons, serenaded by the hissing cacophony of the insects in the foliage, we talked too of how the Maya divide such periods of time into thirteens, and from here we began to talk of their other calendar, which does not finish in 2012 but continues its sacred cycles, namely the Mayan Calendar Round, as it is called. At the simplest level this calendar is made up of two interlocking wheels of 13 and 20 days, leading to a sacred year of 260 days, and between lunches of fresh-caught fish and love-making at siesta time with our respective spouses, the four of us wondered that this numerology of 13s and 20s was derived from a Central American rattlesnake, Crotallus Durissus Durissus, the 13 coming from the pattern of scales on its skin, and with two new fangs being grown every 20 days, thus accounting also for the twenty-day period.

Between snorkel dives and walks across hills fragrant with wild thyme, we noted the connection of this Calendar Round, and of thirteens, to Venus, and to sacred time that is seeded from the future. And while enjoying dark wine on the deck of our slowly lolling yacht, we let our minds play upon the fascinating patterns, for in more or less exactly the same time it takes the Earth to travel around the Sun eight times - eight solar years in other words - Venus orbits the Sun thirteen times. Thus we have the sacred eight year period divded into thirteen.

The connection to future seeding comes from the geometry of circles, as we noted between yoga poses and cups of myrtle tea. A single circle is balanced around its own centre. Place another circle of the same radius upon the circumference of the first, and the centre of balance has shifted from the original centre of the first circle to the point midway between them. Add a third circle again of the same radius with its centre upon one of the two intersection points of the first two circles, and again the centre of balance will shift - the second movement. After seven circles have been drawn in this elementary way the centre has shifted six times, and now a hexagonal pattern has been created that is once again balanced around the original centre point of the first circle, since there are now six circles equally spaced around that first circle. The seventh movement is a return to the start position, and it may be imagined that this is when the first circle is drawn, from the future, as it were. As we enjoyed black oily olives and meditated upon ants walking in the sunbathed dust of ancient paths, or upon lizards scrambling over warm dry rocks, we recalled that this is why Chapter 24 of the I Ching says “All movement is accomplished in six stages, and the seventh brings return.” The first circle is created from the intersections of the circles which were themselves its creations, like a snake biting its tail, with the original seed having come from the future, as with the Theseus story. This too is the reason why certain creation myths, myths of Genesis, have seven days, the day of rest being equivalent to the return home to the original balance point. Myrtale massaged palm oil into my shoulders as I listened to Hatpins, cocktail glass in hand, explain how our own western week is based on this cycle of seven days, but the week of the Maya people is of thirteen days because it is after drawing a further six circles between and outside these, in other words with their centers on the newly created intersection points, that a pattern is created that once again has its centre of balance at the original centre of the first circle. The same pattern can also be linked to the thirteen Venus years, each of these years equating to one of the circles. Through this geometry the 8 solar year period becomes sacred time, in the sense of the end being the beginning.

Relaxing indeed were the hours we spent drawing these patterns with pencil and compasses as the evaporating seawater of our last dip left its salt on our now tanned shoulders.

And it was with the aftertaste of barbequed kalimari still pleasing out palettes that we meditated too upon the way that the larger cycles of the Calendar Round and the pattern on the hide of the great rattle snake of the Maya link again to Venus. I assure you that our concentration was repaid, with interest, as we listened to Hatpins explaining these things. The solar year and the sacred year of 260 days come into phase once every 52 solar years, a sacred period for the Maya, and half of 104 solar years, the period of 13 Venus cycles each of 8 solar years and 13 Venus years. So from the elementary cycle of 13 days combined with the factor of 20 days, we move easily up to a period of 13 x 13 Venus years, while the pattern of scales on the skin of the rattlesnake is also a square of side 13. These numerological patterns were like rich wine for the mind; there seemed some mystical significance, some trigger for kundalini in the contemplation of them. We contemplated the possibility that Winter Solstice 2012 is of purely symbolic rather than astrological importance, and that this date ceases to be significant for anyone who has learnt that the future seeds the past; for those people it is time to embrace the Venus Calendar as sacred time in practise, a harmonious, hermetic, holomorphic, six-dimensional time field.

It did not seem strange to us to be so involved with Mayan cycles while in the Greek setting, but we felt that perhaps there was some mystery in the fact that it didn’t seem strange, and sure enough we soon found our thoughts turning to connections between the Venus cycle and the Theseus story. According to the old story after escaping from the Labyrinth Theseus sailed with his crew to the island of Delos, and there they donated a statue of Aphrodite, that is to say Venus, to the temple complex, and danced a dance which was the first performance of the Labyrinth dance, a Greek circle dance no less. We thought of how the Greek circle dance, like the basic maypole dance, involves regular periodic retrograde steps as it goes round, just as Venus goes retrograde periodically, seeming to reverse her course in the sky, five times in every cycle of eight solar years. We also recalled how Maria had related that in the Athenian version of the Theseus story it was Aphrodite, in other words the planet Venus, who guided Theseus through the Labyrinth. Really we could not deny the sense in which the Labyrinth Dance and the Venus Cycle are one and the same. After all it was Homer who wrote in his Odyssey that it was a dancing ground that Daidalus, elsewhere the designer of the Labyrinth, had built for Ariadne of the lovely locks.

That was when we realised that Theseus instituting the Labyrinth Dance on Delos once he had escaped the Labyrinth in the old story is yet another Token Deposited and could actually symbolise the global institution of a Venus Calendar on the 6th June 2012, the day of the Venus transit.

While on Naxos I myself, Cuppalot, half in sleep under a colonnaded vine canopy in the warm afternoon, had a dream in which I was visited by a youthful god, Dionysos, stood sweetly recognizable amid the haze of my dream vision. He told me it was time for us to return home, and of the most elegant route that we might take. A course running parallel to Apollo’s Wondrous Way, the route by which we had come to Greece, but further north, running through the old site of the ancient city of Troy rather than through Athens, at that same constant bearing, namely in this direction 30 degrees north of west, would take us to the great city of Brighton-by-the-River, otherwise known as Llan Danu, often rendered as ‘London’. Yes, for when Geoffrey of Monmouth spoke of the tribe of the Trinovantes, saying their name derived from the fact that London was built as New Troy by the Trojan Brutus, he may not have been recording linear history, but rather bardic intuitions about the location of London upon the line of The Wondrous Way of Trojan Apollo. So it was that we steered our craft in the wake of Brutus’ ship up to the British capital. And it was now that we recalled that one proof alone would not meet the specifications of the challenge that had been set by yourself, Cardinal Forthright. Our hopes lay in our friend Hawaki, and a phone conversation revealed to us that he believed himself to have discovered tokens himself, and he said that he would explain the details to us once we met him back in Britannia.

During the journey we recalled how it was in June 2004, that month of a Venus transit, that scientists had started to speak of how superstrings inside the black hole might not be destroyed, the discoveries that made the encoding possible, noting the elegance of the fact that this too links to the cycles of Venus, since the sacred Venus cycle of 8 solar years is the period that would occur between that and the next Venus transit of the Sun, in June 2012. Just as one may derive pleasure from the excertions of physical athelticism, so too did we benefit from the mental excertions required in concentrating upon these matters. We recalled that 2004 had also been the summer in which the Olympics had returned to Greece, and that the Olympic period of four years also harmonized with the Venus cycle, being half the 8-year period. And in fact the Pythian Games were originally held every eight years in honour of Apollo at the site of Delphi. It also occurred to us that the Olympics of the summer of 2012 were to be held in New Troy, Llan Danu, London, upon the course of the Wondrous Way of Trojan Apollo. These facts cheered us to the possibility that leaving the idyllic Aegean did not have to be an exile from paradise, but rather that even London could be Arcadia, the Olympian precinct standing by the wide-flowing Thames as its original stands beside the Alpheus, the great river of Arcadia.”

Following this path of the Wondrous Way of Trojan Apollo brought us back to Britannia, the Great Undulating Green, at the site of Hythe in Kent, and we then continued along the bearing to Ashoford, Maidstone, and then to Greenwich in London. Here Heather and Myrtale disembarked and hired another craft in which to sail up the Thames to Marlow. Myrtale was to stay with Heather for a few days so they could work on their novel, while we gentlemen in the HMHM Henry-Morehen-Ry-Mooring travelled on at this 30 degree bearing from the Greenwich observatory which took the crew exactly to the great domed temple built by Sir Christopher Wren by the Thames, and then on through Regent's Park, then out of London and through Pinner Wood, Rickmansworth, through Chesham Bois and the delightful sacred valley of Pednor, then on through Bucks and Oxfordshire, on to Worcester, into Wales, meeting again the Great Wobbly Blue at the edge of the Great Undulating Green at Harlech, which was where we were scheduled to meet Hawaki who was staying there in his holiday cottage."

At this point Cuppalot's tale was interupted by Cardinal Forthright, who could remain continent no longer, and so rushed off to the toilet. Cuppalot was pleased of the break because it gave his voice a rest. When the Cardinal returned Cuppalot went on to describe how once they had made their way to Hawaki's cottage, they found their friend waiting with a freshly brewed pot of tea. When they first arrived at Hawaki's cottage he had just finished composing some Haikus. He exaplined that he had been out that morning strolling through the countryside and had come to a pool where, to his delight, he had seen a heron. Hatpins and Cuppalot begged him share the Haikus, and this he did, to the music of the lyre, improvising a little melody on the spot.

Heron Haiku 1, from the series, 7 Haikus for the Heron.

Slow stalks the stork-bird
On stalks that step in pond silt
He has forever.

Heron Haiku 2

Beauty emanates
Wind tussles feathers softly
The peaceful Heron.

Heron Haiku 3

Who writes the haiku
Is it me or is it you,
Mysterious heron?

Heron Haiku 4

Perched on bamboo stalks
Carefully lifting one leg slow
My friend the Heron.

Heron Haiku 5

Mindful fisherman
You hold the fish with chopsticks
Gliding boat on legs

Heron Haiku 6

The pond is your soup
Filled with fish and vegetables
Wait patient grab fast.

Heron Haiku 7

Old man of the pool
Spirit haunting this reed place
Magic surrounds you.

This introductory entertainment now completed, Hawaki, over cups of green tea with mint, told his friends of his visit to Southwest Cymru where he had met with some of the natives who had shared with him one of the treasures of ancient Cymrian mythology, the story of Pwyll and Rhianon. He summarized the story as follows:-

"Prince Pwyll first saw Princess Rhianon when she was riding on a white horse, and though she appeared to be riding slowly it was impossible to catch up with her, even on the fastest of horses. This symbolizes the way that mass increases as velocity increases, relatively speaking, according to the the equations of Relativity, and the result is that approaching the speed of light the mass becomes so enormous that further acceleration is impossible." Hawaki paused for a moment to drag in more of the clear tea, and to examine his friend's faces for signs of comprehension or otherwise, and then continued his monologue.
"Photons, light particles, themselves have no mass, and so can travel at the speed of light, so- named for this reason, of course. So it was thought that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, until a theory called Bell's Theorem was experimentally proven, showing instantaneous, in other words faster than light connections between previously linked photons. In some sense they are communicating 5th dimensionally, which is to say over and above the limmits of space-time. And sure enough, in the same way, though he couldn't catch up with Rhiannon on his horse, when Pwyll called out to her to stop and wait for him, she did so."

"Well," said Cuppalot, "that sounds pretty good. Now who's for a stroll?"
"Cuppalot," said Hawaki, calmly and deliberately, "you misunderstand me if you take that for the whole story. That was was simply the overture. Rememer we are not looking for a token symbolizing instantaneous 5th dimensional oneness, but one representing information actually going into the past, and thus changing it."
"Oh," said Cuppalot. "Forgive me, Hawaki, old chap, pray, continue, continue - we're all ears aren't we Hatpins?"
Hatpins nodded.
"In the story, Rhianon was already promised to another man, but one she did not love."
"Drama," said Cuppalot.
"Precisely," said Hawaki. "Now when Rhianon chose Pwyll over this other, who was called Gwawl, which means 'Light' in the Cymric tongue, Gwawl plotted a way to get Rhianon back, but it was not through love. He arrived at the court disguised as a beggar and asked for a favor, at which point Pwyll promised, rather rashly, that he wold grant anything in his power for the beggar. Gwawl simply asked for Rhianon's hand in marriage. Pwyll, in horror, was forced by his code of honesty to fulfil the promise, and grant this boon."
"Oh gracious me!" said Hatpins. "How terrible! I'd rather I had never heard that story Hawaki, no offence and all that. Now, what about that stroll before the weather changes?"
"Patience, professor," said Hawaki. "All was not lost for the two lovers. It so happend that Rhianon had a magic bag with the property that no matter how much was placed inside it, it would never fill. So, Pwyll now disguised himself as a beggar and went to the court asking simply that his bag be filled with meat. Gwawl saw no reason to refuse, but as more and more meat was put in the bag it did not fill up. Gwawl expressed surprise, and then Pwyll told him that the bag would only be filled if someone would climb inside and stamp down on the meat. He then described a condition, the person who did this would have to be a man who possessed lands and riches or it wouldn't work, such being the nature of the magic, and since no one else in the room fitted the description, Gwawl himself got into the bag. At that point Pwyll tied up the top of the bag over his head and told Gwawl who he was, telling him also that there was a condition for his release. He would have to let go of Rhianon and allow her to marry Pwyll. This Gwawl then agreed to do."
"Why, thank heaven's for that!" cried Hatpins.
"Professor Hatpins," said Hawaki, "please do not forget that this is just a story.""Oh yes of course. Silly me."
"The point here is that Gwawl means light, and he was tied up in a bag that could not be filled, and release from the bag allowed for a past mistake to be erased. Light escaping from the black hole changes the past, and thus also the present and the future. This, my friends, is, I believe, the information that I sent back to my past life as a Druidic bard."

"Now", continued Hawaki, "Wouldn't it be grand if the finding of the tokens aspect of all this were to be self-referentially encoded into the story as in the Theseus myth? Theseus was brought up away from Athens, not knowing about his true ancestry as the heir to the Athenian throne; recognition of the tokens placed under the rock allowing him to be recognized. The lost-and-found child motif then works as a symbol of the period of time that lapses before the future-sourced information arrives back at that place in time in which it can be recognized. In the Cymric tale, Pwyll and Rhianon, reunited after the releasing of Light from the bag, went on to have a child and this child disappeared for many years, only later being returned and recognized as the lost son of Pwyll and Rhianon, this being the moment that Rhianon was released from all her worries.

And so, like the prince finding his way through the tangled briar towards Sleeping Beauty, Hawaki began to untangle the threads of this British tale. He had one more thing to add.
"The tale of this lost-and-found child ends happily, with his ascension to the throne result in good and prosperous rule, and so the tale ends happily, again like the Theseus story, although unlike many of the other Greek stories that seem to rest upon the mistaken belief that pathos is beautiful. It is Success that is beautiful. Several of the Celtic tales have this optimistic quality where mistakes can be rectified, faults can be fixed, lessons can be learnt. One might even suggest that in this respect this strand of Celtic tales surpasses the Greek."

Both Captain Cuppalot and Professor Hatpins seemed lost in thought as the three gentlemen strolled through a nearby wood a few minutes later. Eventually Cuppalot could remain continent no more, and said:-
"Surpasses the Greek, you say?"
"Indeed."
"Extraordinary."
"You will forgive our surprise," said Hatpins,"only we've just got back from Greece ourselves, as you know, and were rather taken with the place...and now here you are saying...well...what you're saying...and so forth...and, well..."
"It's a personal opinion, I suppose," said Hawaki, with a hint of doubt in his voice.
"Quite," said Cuppalot, and for the moment that was the end of it.

That evening, while the men were off in Harlech, the ladies, Heather and Myrtale, went to a pub in Medmenham near Marlow, and there discussed the plot of the romantic novel they were planning to write. A gentleman who had overheard them came over said politely that he thought he might be able to make some suggestions that would enrich their book. They asked him how, and he proceeded to suggest that their novel could be made a little more "badger", using the word as an adjective. They then pressed him for specifics, at which point he said plainly that they might make the characters, leading man, leading woman and all, badgers. Somewhat taken aback, and thinking he may have misunderstood the nature of their book, they clarified for him that it was a romantic story intended for adults and meant to be taken seriously.
"In that case," said the man, "the badger is definitely your best bet. Forget all about the comical rabbit; place your trust in the noble, pied bear of the night, the regal subterranean panda of the British Greenwood." He then revealed to them that he had modelled his own underground house on the badger's set. This triggered a memory for Heather, who then asked him:-
"You're not by any chance Quentin of Medmenham, are you, a friend of Professor Hatpins?"
"The very same," said the man.
At this time over in Harlech in Cymru the three Emeralds also found themselves a pub and similalry deep in conversation. It was Hatpins who was particularly on fire with ideas as he began to describe some thoughts that had occured to him about the Wondrous Way of Trojan Appolo. He mentioned first that the people of Cymru of centuries past are known to have built turf mazes and to have called them Troy Towns, the citadel of Troy having been for some reason conflated with the Cretan Labyrinth of Knossos. He cross-referenced this with the Greek story which said that prior to the Paris incident, Theseus had in fact carried off Helen, some versions saying she was entrusted into his protection. He knew also that Hellen, spelt with a double rather than a singal 'l', means 'bright', and so he began to see an equivalence between the escape of Theseus from the Labyrinth with Aigle and the rescuing of Helen from within the citadel of Troy, with the recue of Helen from Troy, also called Illium, also being, of course, the underlying motivation for the events described by Homer in his famous epic the Illiad. Further to this Hatpins recalled another Greek story which seemed to lend weight to this idea of a Trojan labyrinth since it spoke of a vast migration of Minoans from Crete to Troy, to a region below a high mountain which they named Ida to recall Zeus's Cretan home. Apollo had given them an oracle telling them where to build their settlement: it was to be where "they were attacked by Earth-born invaders under cover of darkness." These invaders in fact came in the form of a hoard of field mice who came at night and nibbled at the edible parts of the Cretan's gear. The Cretan leader Scamander recognised this as the sign, and so here they settled and built a temple to Sminthian Apollo, sminthos being the Cretan word for mouse.

At this point Hawaki interrupted Hatpins, reminding his two friends that in fact a similar plague of mice formed the chief motif of the next part of the saga of the royal Welsh after the passing on of Pwyll, where Manawydan catches one of these mice and thus obtains the release of Pryderi and Rhianon.

Back in th epub near the Thames, Myrtale was busy explaining to Quentin of Medmenham that the characterisation for the novel she was planning to write with Heather of Bromwich was pretty much sorted out, that it was really just an underlying plot that was lacking, and that for this reason, though they were grateful for his suggestion, it might be best if they didn't go with the badger idea.
"That is a shame," said Quentin, "for the idea excitries me. In fact I would even have been willing to pay a considerable advance for the writing of such a book."
There was short pause.
"Would that be badgers living in a human world, as with, say, the animal characters of Wind in the Willows," asked Heather, or would they be more badgery badgers in a badgery environment?"
"They'd be more badger," said Quentin, thus reinforcing his own version of the adverb of badgeriness, and continued: "Something like Watrership Down...but with badgers, of course, rather than rabbits."
"Oh I see," said Heather, as if this made all the difference. "Now that sounds more interesting."
"Um...," said Myrtale, in whose eyes the pound signs were not flashing quite so boldly, "that would make almost all of our existing material impossible to use. We'd have to start from scratch and base the story on the kind of issues badgers have to contend with."
Heather looked momentarily flumoxed but then had to admit that this was true. Then she had an idea.
"What about somewhere half-way between human and badger, something like, shall we say, the Hundred Acre Wood home to the animal chums of Whinnie the Pooh?"
The two women looked eagerly and expectantly towards Quentin, who pouted and furrowed his brow as if deep in thought. The pout gradually broadened into a smile, the brow lifted, and a far away look came into his eyes.
"Yes," he said. "That would be....superb...."
Then he stood up, grabbed his cane, nodded briefly at the two ladies, placed his boater on his head, and walked out of the pub without another word.

Over in Harlech Cuppalot had now joined the conversation, his suggestion being that a temple of Sminthean Apollo be built in Cymru upon the line of the Wondrous Way of Trojan Apollo, the line of constant bearing from Troy to New Troy, and he further suggested that from this point on the line be named the Wondrous Way of Sminthean Apollo. Hatpins and Hawaki liked this idea, and Hawaki suggested that the pediments of the British Temple of Sminthean Apollo be decorated with scenes from the saga of Pwyll and his family.

"And who will build the verbal temple that this story so worthily deserves?" asked Hatpins. "Who but we oursleves?"
"It is all very well to formulate such a bold ambition," said Cuppalot, "but what experience do with have with story-writing? We may be poets, we may have dabbled in song a little, and Hawaki in painting, but what experience do with have with writing fiction?"
Hatpins had to accept that Cuppalot had a point.

So while Heather and Myrtale felt more than confident with their story-telling abilities but lacked an underlying plot, their husbands along with Hawaki had a plot but were more than a little unsure of their abilities in the fiction-writing field.

But of course the Emerald's primary aim had been to find the tokens, and they now had that second part of the proof that they felt would surely satisfy Forthright, in the story of Pwyll and the magic bag which trapped and then released light, but the journey was not over. An extended conversation via an electronic medium was undertaken the following day with Thomas de Puggalot, who was staying in his own holiday cottage near the magnificent Neolithic temple of New Grange.in the Boyne Valley, across the sea in Ireland. They explained to him about the nature of their adventure and the discoveries they had made, and it became apparent to all concerned that continuing along the line of Sminthean Apollo across the Sea of Manu would take them to this same region, the Boyne Valley. And so this was the voyage that was now undertaken in the Henry Moorehen-Ry-Mooring, and they arranged also to meet up with the ladies Heather and Myrtale in a couple of days in this Irish location. During the journey Hawaki began to speak more of the essence of a certain strand of the Celtic myths, again mentioning ways that they might surpass the Greek, and this had again caused some raised eyebrows.

Knocking on de Puggalot's door produced no obvious effect, so the three poked round the back and there found the distinguished gentlemen doing something with bits of cane and lengths of twine. He was in fact making a frame in the shape of the Great Pyramid of Khufu which he intended to use as a kind of trellis for his grapevine to climb up around. Seeing the trio he offered them seats around the garden table and, as is the custom, plied them with tea. Since the three arrivals were all still thinking about this business of surpassing the Greek, it was not surprising that the conversation soon turned in this direction. de Puggalot himself turned out to have some powerful thoughts on the matter and it soon became clear that his ideas had strong affinities with those of Hawaki. The story of Paris of Troy and Helen of Sparta formed the core of his thesis.

First he had made it clear that by Trojan he partly meant Celt, saying they could make of this what they liked, but that it could be taken metaphorically, given colour by the old story of the arrival in Britain of Trojan Brutus, after which the nation is supposed to be named. Or, he said, they could take it somewhat more literally based on the fact that the Trojans were surely a Hittite people, since that was the civilization of Anatolia, location of Troy, in the period of the Trojan War, while the Hittites are believed by some to be that Indo-European culture whose elite went West to Britain and Ireland and East into India, accounting for the many extraordinary similarities of ancient language, custom, myth and law of those two far distant places.

And having now established his broader sense of Trojan, de Puggalot also shifted time periods, saying that we were to contemplate the notion that the Trojan War was in fact the French Revolution, or rather the end of the Rennaissance that was part and parcel of the change in ideology that was occuring as the French deposed their aristocrats. Paris Prince of Troy, he said, represented the Phillhellenic French aristocracy, as indeed he does in Offenbach's satyrical opera, La Belle Helene. More broadly he represents the way that once the Renaissance had diffused to Northwest Europe the artists had an affair with Hellenic culture that lead many of them to disregard the local Celtic mythology that could have served them even better. This, he said, was the Judgement of Paris, the cause of the Trojan War. Hatpins felt a shiver as he realized that Paris must be another example of a name that seeded the past, being both the name of the French capital and the Trojan prince in the old Greek story. However, the professor managed to remain continent about this fact because he wanted to allow de Puggalot the floor until he had outlined his thesis. In fact it was Cuppalot who spilled forth what was on his mind, pointing out a certain irony in the way that de Puggalot was using a Greek story, the Fall of Troy, to make this very point about the need for a return to the non-Greek stories. de Puggalot responded to this by first thanking the Captain and then stating emphatically that he did not envisage and would not countenance an exclusion of Greek mythic matter, and that this was not about reacting too far in the other direction, and went on to say that the important thing was simply that the Celtic stories be given a space to shine, and that they be polished by the skill of philosopher-artists until they did so.

For De Puggalot's central point was that Helen, who represents Hellenic mythology, had seemed more beautiful to Paris than the local mythology not because of her core nature, but because the Greeks had so consumately bedecked her with the gifts of Charis, the Grace who bestows beauty. He talked of how such excellence in the arts rarely arrives from nowhere, but usually has some model, and the Greeks had Egypt not far away. With such a culture to inspire them, the Greeks perfected the technology of beautification.

de Puggalot stopped for a moment to watch a sparrow that had landed on the terrace not far off and was hopping from spot to spot, and then he turned back to his guests and asked them if Hellenic culture would seem so beautiful had not the stories been told with skill and care, had not the poets taken up the themes, and sung them in traditional well balanced prosodic forms, with imagination and humanity, expanded them for the stage with dance and drama. Hatpins said at this point that he had once heard the Odyssey squashed into two hours, with the poetry taken out, and just the bare bones of the plot dumbed down for a young audience, and how he had gone down with influenza for the rest of the week out of shock at how weak the story appeared when told without the beautifying effects of poetic description, a jumble of man-eating giants and other strange monsters set along a course of bloody revenge.

By now even Cuppalot was nodding in agreement with de Puggalot as he began to see the point that was being made. If Homer had chosen one of the Celtic myths it would be that which would now shine with the glory of three millenia of rose-fingered dawns. This had nothing to do with patriotism. It is simply that culture needs aspects of diversity and becomes rich when there is ancestral continuity and a beautiful sense of place.

de Puggalot also reminded the others that, though no examples had survived, it was known that the Greeks had been excellent painters. He spoke of the awarding of honours in the Greek world to the most skilled painters, sculptors and musicians. He spoke also of the use of harmonious geometry, of wondrous realism, of canons of proportion, symmetry, poise, balance. He spoke with passion of the temple architecture as an amplification of mythic beauty, of the sacred geometry, the vernacular styles and regional orders, of temple location with attention to views, to the directions, to the movements of the Sun and the constellations so imporant in the myths, and indeed to the myths of place that are redolent of the ancestral Dreamtime, of the incense and song that filled these exquisite marble edifaces, as his audience of three listened in wide eyed rapture. He spoke too of the Greek devotion to the healthy body, of the naked body of the athlete as a model for the sculptors and of the harmonious porportion of healthy muscle, of the simple elegance of draped fabric which adorned these godlike bodies. He talked a little too, quoting Gerald of Hove, of the philosphies of the Pythagoreans, of Plato and Socrates, of the intuitive understanding of the way that geometry in its definable, universal intelligibilty generates strong trancendant, collective morphic fields which are seen by the minds' eye as the essence of Beauty. So it is, he said, that the ancient buildings have appreciated in value because they have been appreciated, accumulating interest because they are interesting, becoming repositories for the passions of those people who have cherished them over the centuries. He spoke too of the schools for artisans where they learned the skills and the mysteries of their craft.

de Puggalot then called their attention to the myth of the birth of Helen of Sparta. Zeus had taken the form of a swan and then mated with her mother, Leda, who had then laid two swan's eggs. Each egg produced twins, and one of the children to spring forth from this swan coupling was Helen. So Helen was a swan child, a cygnet, and she grew into a swan maiden, with, metaphorically speaking, beautiful, irridescant pearly white plumage. But it had not always been so of course, as the story of the Ugly Duckling records. Paris the Trojan disregarded the local Trojan Swan Maiden because she was still grey of plumage, still awaiting the gifts of the Graces, gifts which could only come from the artists. Rather than carrying off Greek Helen, the higher purpose of the Trojan realization of the beauty of Greek culture was the copying of the technology of beautification as the Greeks had done when they encountered Egypt. Blinded by the beauty of the gifts of Charis, the Trojans thought it was the stories themselves in their essence that were the cause of the beauty.

"The Trojan Cygnet," said de Puggalot drammatically, "still awaits those who will transform her plumage from the grey of dishwater to the white of pearl."

de Puggalot even went so far as to tell the three the identity of a Trojan Helen.
"She is called Caer," he said, "which means Droplet."

"Of course!" said Hawaki, who had read the Celtic myths broadly in his search for the deposited tokens. "Another tale which avoids the pathetic ending, and instead, in true Celtic style, ends happily. Had Shakespeare treated that one...well, then we'd see how beautiful British culture could be!"
"Exactly!" said de Puggalot, and for a moment it looked as though the two men might embrace.

Cuppalot and Hatpins were deeply curious, and asked if the other two might share with them some of the details of the story. Hatpins then did so, telling them how a prince called Angus had dreamt of a beautiful swan maiden, fallen deeply in love with the dream vision, and then sought her in the waking world. This Angus it is who is called the Ever Young and above whom four birds hover whose song has the power to make people fall in love, like the arrows of Greek Eros; he it is who had nurtured the beautiful Ethne with the milk of a sacred cow from a golden cup, the only food she would take; the same Angus is he who had recognised the psyche of Etain when in the form of a butterfly and built for her a bower of nectar-rich flowers to sustain her until her Soul found another human incarnation. Now it was Angus himself who was deeply in love, and with the swan maiden he had met in his dreams.
And Angus said to himself, if we may borrow from Yeats, that though he might wander through many hilly lands,
He would find out where she had gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands
And walk among long dappled grass
And pluck 'till time and times are done
The silver apples of the Moon
The Golden Apples of the Sun.

Eventually he found her, but she had changed fully into a swan as part of an annual festival along with a host of other swan nymphs. To borrow, with some adjustment, from Yeats again:-

The trees were in their autumn beauty
The woodland paths were dry
Under the October twlight
The water mirrored a still sky
Upon the brimming water
Upon the stones
Were three times fifty swans.

The nineteenth autumn had come upon him
Since he'd first made his count
He'd seen before he had well finished
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great rings
Upon their clamourous wings.

Angus would be able to marry her if he first was able to recognise her amongst all the other swans, which he managed when he saw the gold chain around her neck, the chain being a token of her identity, a sign. Then he would have to agree to be changed himself into a swan, which he did, and the two then flew off together to Angus' home, the magnifent ancient temple called New Grange near the Boyne River in Ireland.

Of course the Emmmerald Poets and Co. were all entirely aware now that the Wondrous Way of Sminthean Apollo leads up to this region of the Boyne Valley, making the site most elegant as a home of a Trojan Helen, Helen herself being a swan maiden being born from the swan's egg after Zeus had coupled with Leda in the from of this bird. None were now in any doubt that Caer was indeed the Cygnet of the Gaelic Celts, who only needed her poems, operas and ballets, paintings, sculptures, decorated vases, shrines, temples, and incense offerings, geometry, balance and proportion, all carried out with care, skill, passion and devotion to beauty and then appreciated by a wide audience.

Hatpins wondered if this story might be cited as a third part of the proof, for he was aware that the Swan Constellation contains what is considered by scientists to be the location of the most likely black hole candidate. Because a Celtic swan maiden would be sought in the future, the ancient bards were prophetically inspired to put one into the storehouse of myth, a seed from the future that could be sprouted at a later time.
Cuppalot then asked if there was any proof of the existance of this story in Ireland at a time before they would have heard of Greek Helen, and Hawaki had to admit that there was not. But then Hatpins realised that there was more to it.
"Did not Barbara Ricicle, chanelling Argolid" said Hatpins, "predict that the war in Olympus, the argument between the three goddesses involved in the Judjment of Paris that manifested as the Trojan War, did she not predict that this war would be bypassed by the recovery of the Cygnet of the clan of the daughter Atlas, surely Electra who mothered the Trojan breed ?"
He refered of course to a real book, the Signet of Atlantis, which had been in existance for many years, since long before they began their search for these Tokens from the Future, and so they satisfied themselves that there was at least this certain sense in which the Swan Maiden had come from the future, having escaped, of course, from the labyrinth of the Trojan Citadel.

Then Cuppalot had a moment of reservation.
"Um, I hate to spoil the fun, but Caer is, if I understand you, a Gaelic maid from Ireland. Is it any better for us Brits to have an affair with Gaelic Caer than it was with Hellenic Helen?"

There was a pause, and then de Puggalot said:-
"If we are looking for a British Swan Maiden we may consider Branwen, the sister of Bran who the old story in the Mabinogion explicitly calls the the most beautiful woman in the world, the same definition that is given for Helen.. Recall that Branwen was a princess who was made to work in a kitchen washing dishes, and imagine the dull dishwater-coloured rags she must have been dressed in, like the Ugly Duckling, and then consider that her name, Branwen, actually means White Breast, suggesting the pearl-white plumage of the swan.

Branwen was, in the story, rescued from Ireland. In British mythology Llyr's children are Bran, Branwen and Manawyddan. The Irish have this same sea god, Lir, and agree about his son being Manawyddan, who they call Manannan. The Irish also have a story about the Children of Lir, the central feature of which is their transformation into swans. So in the Irish the Children of Lir are Swans, and in the British they are Bran, Branwen and Manawydan, so in "rescuing", in inverted commas, Branwen from Ireland, what we are doing is recalling her nature as a swan maiden, fitting with her British name, White Breast, recalling that in Cymric prose the swan's breast was used as a simile for the fairness of a maiden, as in the wonderful desciption of Olwen, also in the Mabinogion.

She certainly had strong associations with birds for it was a starling who informed Bran of her mistreatment and in addition the birds were said to have been silent in the marshes on the day she died, and like Helen she was rescued from abroad by a fleet of ships that were launched on her behalf. There are some complications, however, for the story has hints of the pathos that is generally particular to the Greek tales, and we must consider how far we might allow ourselves to remove those aspects, which is not an easy question, for one enters dangerous territory when one considers tinkering with the gifts of the Muses."
de Puggalot paused here, leaving his listners hungry for solutions to these complications.
"Do you have an thoughts on how to overcome these hurdles?" asked Hawaki.
"I do. Grail scholars seem to be in agreement that the Bran of the old tale in the Mabinogion is one and the same as Brons, the Fisher King who's healing is the core motif of the later Grail legend, the story of Peredur. Now, Peredur is said to be a nephew of this Fisher King, which suggests that Peredur is one and the same as Pryderi, which has been suggested anyway on account of the similarity of name. Pryderi, remember, was the son of Pwyll and Rhianon, who we spoke of earlier. But Rhianon seems to have been blessed with goddess-like longeivity, and after Pwyll had passed on she remarried, her new husband being Manawyddan, the brother of Bran and Branwen. This makes Pyrderi the step-nephew of Bran, just as Peredur is the nephew of the Fisher King, Brons, so we may consider them one and the same. If this is so, then when the version of the tale of Bran and Branwen in the Mabinogian says that Bran died, it must lie, for the sake of pathos, perhaps under the influence of the classical poets such as Virgil and Theokritus. If Bran is the king who is healed by Pryderi, then he must only have been wounded at that earlier time. And since the Mabinogian says that Branwen died of grief because of the death of her brother, Bran, then this also cannot be true, for he did not die. Branwen, as the most beautiful woman in the world, represents, as we have already said, the potential beauty of British mythology told, sung, painted, skulpted and acted well. The potential for beauty did not die, so Branwen did not die, she only sleeps, and in our western tradition the story of Beauty who sleeps but who may yet be woken is well known, we call it Sleeping Beauty. When Britannia finds her Homer, the poet in question may take the great epic of which the stories of the Mabinogion are a part, from Pwyll at the start right through to Pryderi, and he may combine them in this way, where Bran does not die but is wounded; Pryderi and Peredeur are one and the same; Bran is the Wounded King who is healed, thus regenerating the wasteland, and Branwen too did not die but only sleeps, and is finally awoken by a gentle prince after the manner of the story of Sleeping Beauty. It may be appropriate here to quote a couple of verses by Morris," said de Puggalot.

"The fateful slumber floats and flows
About the tangle of the rose;
But lo! the fated hand and heart
To rend the slumberous curse apart!

Here lies the hoarded love, the key
To all the treasure that shall be;
Come fated hand the gift to take,
And smite this sleeping world awake.

We might also abridge Tennyson, who penned some delightful verses on the same theme.

All round a hedge upshoots, and shows
At distance like a little wood;
Thorns, ivies, woodbine, mistletoes,
And grapes with bunches red as blood;
All creeping plants, a wall of green
Close matted, bur and brake and briar,
And glimpsing over these just seen,
High up, the topmost palace spire.

She sleeps : her breathings are not heard
In palace chambers far apart,
The fragrant tresses are not stirr'd
That lie upon her charmed heart.
She sleeps: on either hand upswells
The gold-fringed pillow lightly prest :
She sleeps, nor dreams, but ever dwells
A perfect form in perfect rest.

He comes, scarce knowing what he seeks :
He breaks the hedge : he enters there :
The colour flies into his cheeks :
He trusts to light on something fair ;
More close and close his footsteps wind :
The Magic Music in his heart
Beats quick and quicker 'till he find
The quiet chamber far apart.

A touch, a kiss ! The charm was snapt,
There rose a noise of striking clocks,
And feet that ran and doors that clapt,
And barking dogs, and crowing cocks ;
A fuller light illumined all
A breeze through all the garden swept,
A sudden hubbub shook the hall,
And sixty feet the fountain leapt.

And then at last the king awoke,
And in his chair himself uprear'd,
And yawn'd, and rubbed his face, and spoke,
'By holy rood, a royal beard !
How say you? We have slept, my lords.
My beard has grown into my lap.'
The barons swore, with many words,
'Twas but an after dinner nap."

"Thankyou de Puaggalot," said Hawaki, and the words came from his heart.
"Swan!" said Cuppalot, suddenly.
"Not for me," said Hatpins, "I ate well at lunch."
"No, no," said Cuppalot, pointing. "There, a swan!"
Turning to look behind him Hatpins beheld a fullgrown swan standing beside de Puggalot's pond.

They still had some time left before they were to attend the scheduled meeting with Cardinal Forthright, and so they were able to spend a few days relaxing beside the Boyne, accompanied now by Heather and Myrtale. They strolled around the ancient sites, enjoyed the beauty of the countryside and drank in the local culture. They went horseriding, canoed on the river, and became aware for the fist time of the symmetry of lack as regarded their respective writing projects, Heather and Myrtale wanting a plot for their work, the Emmarld Poets in need of the novelistic story-tellers art for theirs.

While they were staying in this area Cuppalot had an experience he described as Attaining Avalon, the paradisal isle of apple orchards, while drinking cider enriched with St John's Wort and 5-HTP under leafy fruitful boughs in a country garden. He saw the green of the plants intensify to an otherworldly emerald, while great bliss came over him, and he saw the archetypal characters of faery tale streaming before his eyes. He maintained enough focus to be able to write some lines of poetry while within the experience:

How could I explain my joy
That shudders down through levels five?
It's rich and resonant and fine
And makes me feel alive.

He said the experience was akin to the epiphany of Dionysos he had experienced on Naxos, but with the land of faery orchards replacing the southern vineyards with their satyrs and wood nymphs, and with a greater intensity of emerald infusing everything.

Then it was time to head for home, which took them back across the sea of Manu where they reached the Llyn peninsula between the ears of the great tusked boar that is made by the outline of Southern Britain, it snout being Pembrokeshire, its tusk being the Gower Penisula, its jowel the Vale of Glamorgan, its forleg Devon and Cornwall, its rump East Anglia and its two ears Anglesea and the Llyn Peninsula. It was of course in between the ears of the great wild boar that the brave heroes found the magic comb in the story of the quest for Olwen. Realising this caused them consdirable delight, as they realised Olwen must be another name for the potential of British culture to be beautiful, another name for Branwen, which would also give them the name of the prince who wakes her, Culhwch. Olwen is described as of incomparable beauty in the Mabinogion, which specifically describes her as having a bosom 'more snowy than the breast of the white swan'. Her name, Olwen, means White Path, for it was said that little white flowers grew up wherever she trod, forming a white path behind her. Since the Woundrous Way of Sminthean Apollo passes between the ears of the Great Wild Boar of Britain, it therefore seemed appropriate to see this as linked with the White Path of Olwen, to imagine her passing along it rather as a swan glides over a still lake in the misty morning.

The crew allowed themselves another night in Harlech, and here Hawaki entertained them all with the story of Bran son of Febal, the Irish version of the voyage of Bran, then the next day it was time to continue along the line in the direction of London, for the day after that they were due to meet with Forthright.

These then were the events that Cuppalot, who had been elected to talk on Hatpins’ behalf, related to Cardinal Forthright in the cardinal's office at the end of the allotted four-week period, and as he reached the conclusion of his great monologue now it was the Cardinal's turn to “do a Maria”, that is to say to stare in wide-mouthed amazement. So pleased was he with the story, and so complete was his acknowledgement of Hatpins’ original theory, that he not only raised the professors’ funding and gave him his own department of Non-Linear Etymology, but he also spoke with London’s Olympic committee so that they were made aware of the elegant connection of the Games with the sacred cycles of Venus.

Forthright in turn invited Hatpins to spak to the Olympic Comittee. The four poets agreed that Hatpins should speak of the importance of the Cultural Olympiad which runs parallel to the Athletic one, and primarily of how it was time for artists to wake the Sleeping Beauties of the British Isles, to love these beauties even while they still await artisitc beautification, just as Geraint, in that story in the Mabinogion, loved Enid, whose father, an earl, had been ousted from his earldom so that his family were forced to endure patiently in a ruined castle wearing ragged, fading garments. Geraint saw her beauty despite the drab attire, and restored her fortunes. The Emerald Poets thought it would be appropriate were Hatpins to quote Tennyson, who wrote five-footedly of Geraint's first sight of this castle:-

Then rode Geraint into the castle court,
His charger trampling many a prickly star
Of sprouted thistle on the broken stones.
He looked and saw that all was ruinous.
Here stood a shattered archway plumed with fern;
And here had fall'n a great part of a tower,
Whole like a crag that tumbles from the cliff,
And like a crag was gay with wilding flowers.

Geraint succeeded in winning back the earldom for the family, and he did so in a tournament where the winners were given the chance to call their true loves the fairest of all, and it was for Enid that Geraint competed. Geraint and Enid were then to be wed, and Enid would be introduced to Arthur's court, but still she lacked suitable apparrel. Thinking of the coming wedding, in Tennyson's words:-

At this she cast her eyes upon her dress,
And thought it never yet had looked so mean,
For as a leaf in mid-November is
To what it was in mid-October, seem'd
The dress that now she looked on to the dress
She look'd on ere the coming of Geraint.

However, help was at hand, and as Tennyson tells us, her mother now came to her with a fine dress and said:-

So cloth yourself in this that better fits
Our mended fortune and a Prince's bride:
For tho' ye won the prize of fairest fair,
And tho' I heard him call you fairest fair,
Let never maiden think, however fair,
She is not fairer in new clothes than old.

The task of British artists wishing to help in the healing of the land, Hatpins was to tell the committee, was to cloth British myth in just such a manner as Enid was clothed after her potential had been recognised by Geraint. Beautiful ancient tales of the Clan of Danu and its branch the family of Lir, Mananaan and the rest, optimistic, obscure, mysterious, tales of success, for Success is that most beautiful maiden of all who now at last shall be most finely attired.

This all seemed suitable for mentioning to the committee, and yet after the conversation Hatpins had a lingering sense that something was missing, that they had overlooked something of great importance.

Cuppalot himself was filled with enthusiasm fof the notion of a rebirth of a cultural calendar timed with the sacred 8-year period, as with the original Pythian Games of Delphi, and it occured to him that there might be a space for a figure equivalent to Pindar, someone to sing odes to the great artists who achieved excellence in these Games. His plan was to work his way into the business through the back door, and his first break came with a job reading the traffic reports on a regional radio station. He was perhaps a little premature however in his adoption of a Pindaric style.

Where shall I now aim my golden arrows of up-to-the-minute traffic fact? At Aldershot, rich in connifers. Just as one need not scan the sky for a brighter star once the Sun has risen, so too does Aldershot outshine other places in the friendliness of her hairdressers. Expect delays on the A34 due to roadworks.

These uterances were none the less taken in good spirit by the listeners, and on some days he was even read alowed to report on other stories:

Here ye! Here ye! The great god Pan is married at last! Pan, who savors yoghurt of the goat, Pan, who adores the pines, Pan who loves garlic, has married the nymph Menthia, She-of-the-Mint, who loves gardens lush with pennyroyal and lemon verbena. A venue has been set on Mount Pilion and a whole host of immortals are expected to attend what is quite simply the event of the season.

On the first Tuesday of July 2007 - a date which, counting backwards from the Venus transit of 2012 lies around 8 Venus years back, or 5 of the 13 Venus years between the 2004 and the 2012 transits, with 5, 8 and 13 being Fibonacci numbers, this also puts the period around the minro Golden Section of the distance between the two dates - anyway, on this afternoon there was a convergence upon Cuppalot and Myrtale's cottage at the head of the Pednor Valley, near Chesham. Myrtale and Heather were already present, relaxing in the garden, Hatpins was making his way by bike form Marlow, and Cuppalot was making his way back up the Chess valley after a constitutional stroll.

Neither, it must be said, wasd in any great hurry. It was wonderful to back in Britain at the height of summer, and everything seemed so very green by comparison with the sparser, drier flora of the Greek islands.

Before long Cuppalot came to a gushing waterfall. His heart jumped when suddenly a trout was seen, attempting to leap up over the cascading wall of water. At this point the Captain was inpspired to poetry:-

The fishfull, fishfull river,
It is well-stocked
Any more trout fishes
And it would be blocked

As he walked on along the path beside the little river he saw rabbits scurrying off into hiding, and squirrels too darted off upon his approach, as did even minnows, for at one point the water-some river was over its lips and channeled over the path. Cuppalot was again inspired to poetry:

The fishfull, fishfull path
It is well stocked
Any more wee minnow-fish
And they'd get into your socks

By now any apprehension Cuppalot may have had about returning to Britain after the delights of the Aegean were completely forgotten about. He was in his element.
Soon he came to a road, and here saw traffic at a halt waiting for two swans taking a promenade down the middle of the road. This gave him his third verse:-

The swanful swanful road
they are most regal
whiter then a chaffinch
much bigger than a seagull

Then after walking a little further he was at a field of horses, which included a lusty stallion and several mares. Cuppalot stayed for a while to appreciate their healthy horsey beauty, and in fact he was there to see the stallion take a mare from his harem as a mate. The two horse lovers did in fact wait 'till the cricket game in the next field had finished before they got down to it. But as soon as the last bat had been batted, they got to it.
Very cheval-rous of them to wait, thought Cuppalot, and then composed some more lines:

The sperm-full sperm-full horse
He is well hung
Chocka with male hormones
And rather highly-strung.

But happy to bide time
Until the cricket's winner
Has wandered from the pitch
Before he'll stick it in her.

He is a British stud
He knows what is respected
Like waiting till the game is done
Before he gets erected

Such simple etiquette
Makes Britain what she be
Like looking for a decent bush
When you need a pee

Yes, love of his own country had now seeped into his veins once again.

Hatpins was not far behind, and about a quater of an hour later he too passed through this same field. He saw there a jet black stallion, and mares who had foaled only that spring, their younglings staying close by their mothers, who would sometimes take them for little runs.
There were two older foals - Lampus and Phaeophon by his naming (the colts that pull the chariot of Dawn) - who would race side by side in an ovaloid cursus, up convex flank of hill and down into the valley, where only their nodding heads were visible above the waving grasses as they galloped along, so that from Hatpins' perspective there was the semblance of them swimming, as horses swim, with only heads above water nodding. Sea horses. Thoughts of Poseidon came to mind, the sea god whose gift according to the Greeks was the horse. Hatpins on this morning named one of the mares, a light beige gal with a look of extreme sentience, Rhianon, after the Cymric horse goddess. At water-drinking time one of the mares broke away from the group and went to the trough before the stallion had given the word, so he was a little fractious, and he came across the grassfields at high gallop, the Sun behind, in his mane, and the others all followed, and then he whinnied and Rhianon ran away doing back kicks - like in a Rhodeo or some such, and soon there was much commotion with horses galloping amidshipsallover but always satelliting around some moving middle point, the eye of the storm, so that they circled over the field very much as a whirlwind does. Hatpins' heart fluttered with all the whinnying and jumping as he was at fairly close quarters and the fence seemed so easily jumpable.

While Hatpins was in the horses' field, Cuppalot had continued his walk into a wood and down into a vale, and his experiences here promted him to gush forth some lines of free verse:-

Falcon Poem

The Falcons’ screech haunts my memory
Three in number they were
Hanging over the wood

I stood in the valley
Seven horses to the left of the way
Eight brown bullocks to the right

The wood clad the ridge
Like the mane of the horse
Seven in number were the horses

Three in number
The falcons over the wood
Watching all

Falcon screech
Piercing the walls
Of my thankful heart

Plunging in pitch
Diving like a falcon
Opening a doorway

Spirit of the falcon
Permeating the valley through sound
Like a god.

The reason for the convergence of these two poetic ramblers upon Pednor was a dinner party, of which we may hear from an article written by Cuppalot who had, through his new found popularity, easily been able to cruise into journalism:-

Cullineriad

The evening of July 5th 2007 saw, as if the days have eyes, the commencement of the first Amersham Tandooriad, the Coriandimpic Games. Preparations had been underway since the morning,

as meat was placed in marinades,
and maidens put their hair in braids.
(Cup. Incont. XVII)

The two principle opponents in the Games were the dilletantes Quentin of Marlow and Thomas de Puggalot.

Before the commencement, the participants shared chai tea out on the lawn in the early evening Sun, while de Puggalot read aloud about the cheeky childhood pranks of Krishna and the cowgirls. The Games were opened with a co-operative effort, a Sag Panir made by de Puggalot, with a massala paste provided by Quentin. The result was orgasmatronic, and the very gods were pleased, as the wood flutes of Asian Gold FM trilled their ecstatic melodies out upon the evening air.

The barbeque by this time was going, and de Puggalot offered up lilac branches at the shrine of Aphrodite, infusing their gentle aroma into his first main course piece: tandoori style organic chicken thighs. It had all the delicious burnt bits one hopes for in fine tandoori chicken, and the very gods were pleased.

While Quentin's tandoori lamb was cooking, the de Puggalot camp suffered a set back as their champion took the unusual move of serving up vegetable curry on the kitchen floor. He swept it up into a pile and announced: ‘Right, tuck in!’ Interviewed about this later on he confessed that the dish had been very hot and slipped from his fingers as he extracted it from the oven.

Quentin's tandoori lamb was delicious, causing taste raptures, and the very gods were pleased. For a moment it looked as if he might win the wreath (and an actual wreath of laurel leaves had been made to place on the head of the winner). But de Puggalot still had his own tandoori style lamb escallops to come, and at this point, sensing that the prize might slip from his fingers, Quentin proffered the olive brand, although this time it was metaphorical, and it was agreed that they would share the prize, and both be winners. This proved to be a shrewd plan when Quentin himself tasted the escallops and admitted that they might well have clinched the wreath for de Puggalot, especially in the light of the deliciousness of the quick substitute Garam Massalla stir-fried vegetable curry de Puggalot had knocked up to replace the one that he had served up on the kitchen floor, for which there had been no takers.

And so it was that we took turns wearing the rather fetching laurel wreath, and as the last sips of spicy chai tea were slurped down, the embers still glowing in the outdoor oven, all felt well fed, and the very gods were pleased.

The next competition will be open to all comers, and like the Greek Olympics, competitors will be required to take part quite, quite naked, save only when cooking dishes that have a tendency to spit hot fat.

That follwing night, back in Marlow, Hatpins read the story of Geraint and Enid from the Mabinogion to his wife, Heather of Bromwich, and as he reached the end and told of the mysterous episode of the Hedge of Mist, it seemed to resonate with that thing which he felt was missing from his earlier discussions with the Emerald Poets about the Cultural Olympiad.

The Hedge of Mists is a somewhat obscure appendix to the tale of Enid and Geraint, in which a stranger tells them of a tall hedge made of mist behind which enchanted Games are held. Geraint goes through the hedge of mist and the game commences, which in essence is just a dual with another knight, and when Geraint has got the upper hand his opponent says he will grant him any wish. Geraint says "I wish only that these Games cease, and that the hedge of mist and the magic and enchantment disappear."

"If I am honest," said Hatpins, "that describes my own feelings perfectly."
"What do you mean?" asked Heather.
"I feel, deep within me, that art comes from the heart, that it has nothing to do with competition. This business of Cultural Olympics seems to me like folly. The Greeks supposedly competed in honour of the gods, a strange idea, but even the gods, being immortal, must surely have become sick with boredom by such so-called entertainments now that millenia have past. It is surely true creativity that is the most fragrant offering we can place on the shrines of the Olympians."
"I agree completely," said Heather, looking upon her husband with admiring eyes. "Artisitc creativity bubbles up as a passion of enthusiasm, a love of art for its own sake. To reduce the matter to some illusion of winners and losers would be to take a backward step, in my opinion. Exceedingly childish."
"But isn't the idea supposed to be to do with catharsis, let it out on the sportsfield instead of the battlefield, and so forth?" said Hatpins.
"Times move on, lessons move on, if you keep teaching students the beginner lessons you will cripple their growth," said Heather. "The Greek city states emmerging from the Bronze Age were plagued by competitivenss no different really to tribal warfare, and by comparison the panhellenism ushured in by the Games was a step forward. But in my opinion," she continued, "those same games with their us and thems, their dualities, perpetuate a small-mindedness, a backward consciousness as a result of which the creative spirit inside just gets bored."
"By Dionysos, you're right!" said Hatpins, and then added, his brow furrowing: "But what on Earth can I tell the committee?"
"Why does this have to be a calendar of competitions?" asked Heather. "Why not just make it a calendar of cultural festivals, an opportunity for the artistic accademies to show their works to the public? Exhibitions, displays, performances. Let the people chose what they like by what they go to see, but that doesn't make it about winners and losers."
Hatpins had little choice but to give Heather a big hug and a kiss, for she had helped him solve his great dilema. Cultural festivals! Of course!

And so when the time came Hatpins presented his ideas at the meeting of the committee held in the Queen's House in Greenwich, and they were quick to spot the potential popularity of such a Venus-cycle calendar of culutral festivals.

Of course, the international Athletics competition would still take place, the momentum of the thing being too great to put a stop to it, but the plan was to hold a parralel Cultural Olympiad of festivals of a more localised nature, the reason being that culture must maintain regional distinctions if homogeny is to be avoided.

The Cultural Festivals would be open to artists and artesans resident in Britain and lands immediatley adjecent, from Ireland and Northern Spain round to Scandinavia, regardless of race, the one rule being that the subjects of their works would have to come mainly from local British and Breton, Gallician, Gaulish and Gaelic and also English, and the related Norse folklore and mythology. Entrants who passed the first stages would be given training in the accademies in the skills and Platonic mysteries of their art, learning all about moprhic resonance, proportion and the philosophies of harmony as well as the nitty gritty of their chosen handicraft. And in this way the likes of Caer and Branwen, Olwen and Enid, would grow into their wonderful graceful plumage and the culture of Northwest Europe would became attuned to healing trancendental beauty and the sacred cycles of Venus.

Yes there would still be a place for the athletes as always, but with a renewed emphasis - the primary goal would be the healthy body, the body beautiful, with a view to their attaining the honour of being models for the painters and sculptors.

These then were to be the two main rules: subjects must be taken from local mythology, and entrants must be students of the Classical aesthetic academies. Of course it doesn't pay to be too heavy-handed about these things, and there were some other categories, such as the Satire of an Elizabethan play, which was generally taken to mean Shakespeare, and a mini category for work on a non-mythological theme, and even one for works non-members of the Academies. And nor would this new impetus mean for a moment saying good bye to Hellenic culture, for the students of the academies were to be given a thorough grounding in that field and were expected to go on the grand tour on Continent, to appreciate the beauty of Helen in order to know what might be achieved for Caer and for Branwen.

In the festivals there could be sculptors, architects, painters, poets, musicians, dancers, athletes of body beautiful, story tellers, potters, dramatists, and all manner of other artists. The Great Greenwich Cultural Olympics were to be held in June 2012 and then at eight year intervals from this date, to be recalibrated at the end of this eight year period to maintain attunement to Venus and her five retrograde movements. There would also be other smaller fesitvals drawing from regional catchment areas around the country held at dates arrived at using a newely drawn up Venus calendar.

And the minutes of the meeting record that it was this calendrical system that was the main topic of dicussion. The scheme decided upon was as follows. The calendar would place great significance on the traditional week of 7 days, and upon a month of exactly 4 of these weeks, namely 28 days, which is a good approximation of the time taken for the Moon to return to the same place in the Zodiac. 13 of these months is 364 days, a good approximation of the solar year of 365 days. But there is more. 8 of these 28-day months is a very good approximation of the Venus Year, the time it takes for Venus to orbit the Sun once. 8 and 13 are numbers in the Fibonacci sequence, the next number being 21, and 21 of these 28-day months is a good approximation for the period between retrograde movements of Venus. After every 13 Venus years this calendar was to be recalibrated to keep exactly accuracte as regards the movements of Venus. It was this calendar which, it was decided, would give the timings of the various Olympian sub-festivals. Large festivals would be held every 21 months, thus timed with Venus synods, smaller ones every 8 months thus attuned to Venus years, Athletic training cycles and also training in artistic accademies being arranged also in terms of these 28-day, four week months.

And so the seasons turned round, and along came an interesting date in the Venus Calendar, for it so happens that Valentines Day 2008, counting back from the Venus transit of 2012, lies a regular number of Venus years distant, seven to be exact. The Emeralds and their fellows began to plan another Cullinariad for this evening, one on a suitably Venusian theme. The planning period is recorded in Captain Cuppalot diaries as follows:-

The fair was to be Fruits de Mer,Oceanic cornocopia, Seafood, Shelfish. Ingredientgs would include such things as fresh oysters, scallops, muscles, clams, cockles, kalamari, pollyps, kelps, lobster, crab, prawns. The style was not stipulated; it could be Thai, French, Spanish, Greek, British or some other.

The winner would be presented with a ceremonial conch, a trident and a robe died with the finest Phoenician purple from the Murex and Purpura shells, and crowned with a wreath of seaweed.

When arrangments were being made Hatpins did say unto Cuppalot, "let us truly mash it up as gentlemen do. "

"Wholeheartedly, and are others of our party also of like mind?" quoth Cuppalot.

"Aye," said Hatpins, "I have already bequested my wifeling on the subject, and she agrees it is most auspicious."

"Well tell her also when you see her next that I have infused blue lotus in organic muscadine ready for our meeting."

"Great news, my friend, may smiles of lotus moonshine grace every face."

"Yea, and that was well phrased. You appear to be entertaining the Muses, who do seem to me to be endowing you with the gift of polysignifaesthetica, and I enfloreate your laureate for it, most undubitousfully of it, logically cardboard."

"Polysignifaesthetica? Why, that is a shed load of polysyllabelles, my friend, a shed load of bellysyllapheez."

"Again I detect the hand of the Muses in your words."

"Aye, for my guts are garters for the muses of my bowels, and I speak with the fine flowing music of yesteryear."

"Verily, your guts are garters for the music of your bowels,
And I enfloreate you laureate for the rubric of your vowels."

"Anon, anon, fine sir - the Sun has caught my glance and drawn tears for the slow passing of unsentinelled gatehousing for dear Syllabelles. She lies sleeping in the house of damned Logicus!"

"Nay 'tis not Logicus who hath her chained, but that hag Mundanity. Be sometime unexpectedly logical in the sallying forth as order peeks from amid the hierovineous thorncrepper scragglebellishment, for strange logic is the foot butler of disconformal syllabetic unusualities."

To which quoth Hatpins: "Are you bullshitting me man?"

"No, no, but let us not dwell on the matter, but rather look ahead to the coming Cullinariad."

"Very well, but be aware, I plan to cook fish and shellfish lasagne, and to destroy you with flavour."

"So say thou now, but I fully expect my hot spicy steamed Thai style scallops will knock out all comers in a triumphant charge of taste bud victory."

"Time will tell."

"Indeed, but may I suggest that you pray to the gods that watch over the wide Earth and hope that one will have mercy upon you, for it would seem from the omens that they have already chosen the head upon which the wreath shall settle. But do not despair, for I give you this prophecy: whomsoever shall not take the wreath, shall yet produce fine cookery, and the very gods themselves do not look without some favor upon fish and shellfish lasagna. yea, tho' another may take the wreath, there shall be fashioned for you a sash, and none shall say which token - the crown of leaves or the sash - carries the greater honor."

"For the gods, and for our tastebuds, let the recipe planning commence!"

In such manner did the two heroes cajole each other, each causing the other to rise to new peaks of cookery enthusiasm. First a taunt would come from Hatpins of the golden locks, and then mighty Cuppalot would raise his verbal shield of shining bronze, and counter with some cunning reply that would fly with wings of fire and glance off the battle armor of his noble opponent. And all the while each knew that in so much as they caused the other to produce a finer dish, it was their own taste buds that would rejoice! In such a manner did the goddess Irony overcome the dragon Competition, establishing peace between the two sides, and the very gods rejoiced!

When the day itself came around, Hatpins took a stroll around sunset, and found himself in a field that had not, last time he had been there, been home to horses, but now was. And he was moved to poetry by the beauty of the sight.

Cheval

There across the meadow’s one
Autumn-hued like evening Sun
Burning there in musky shade
There’s many more across the glade

Another with a chestnut hide
There in winter the wood is spied
A fiery ‘ney’ from snarling colt
And through the gate the horses bolt

What was once a patch of grass
Now becomes a stallion’s pass
There’s something new about this scene
Now that horses here have been

Careful where you tread - look ‘round
For something steaming on the ground
There’s something new about this scene
Now that horses here have been.

He then proceeded back to the cottage to help Heather perpare for the arrival of their guests, Cuppalot and Myrtale. And then dinner was served, course after course of it, flavorsome, delicious, exquisite, and every morcel infused with the Apphrodisiac powers of Venus.

And pleasant indeed was the snuggling before the fire later that evening for Hatpins and Heather as they polished off the last of the lotus wine and then proceeded to the bed chamber to conduct the rite of Aphrodite, their lying-down dance lasting long into the night until Hatpins could remain continent no longer, and the very gods rejoiced.

It remains only to tell you in broad terms of how our friends were kept busy in the years running up to the Olympic Transit.

Cuppalot continued for a short time with his journalism, but when he started using his column in a weekly paper to espouse the philosphy that mental morphic fields create tendencies which manifest as happenings and situations he was taken aside and quietly reminded that it is in the best interest of the newspapers to keep such knowledge secret, since 95% of journalism relies precisely upon generating feelings of public concern about things being in a mess. The editor pointed out that if the public realised that the endless ranting on about such messes in the media in fact creates more of it, they would very rapidly stop buying the papers. Cuppalot responded that perhaps it was time for the papers to find a different kind of inspiration, and at that point he was asked to leave. But no matter, for by now there were far more important matters to attend to.

Someone was required to oversee the setting up of the various aesthetic academies, and it was Adrian of Shoreham who played this role with alpomb. Heather and Hatpins, Myrtale and Cuppalot, Hawaki and de Puggalot all joined academies relevant to crafts they wanted to express the newly untangled Peredur myth through, for as a group they had chosen the Peredur story as the matter to be beautified by the kiss of the Muses and the perfumes of the Graces. The core of such matter is story, and so the group first untangled the briar of tales until a basic plot that they were happy with was clear, and then Myrtale and Heather produced a prose narrative. They also produced, in consulation with Quentin of Medmenham, a shorter, simpler version in which the characters were badgers, for an audience that could include children but would be enjoyed by people of all ages. The reason for this is that children have a superb ability to infuse magic into stories, and this was considered most desirable.

After the core utterances of story comes the patterning of the poets, and Cuppalot, Hatpins, De Puggalot and Hawaki all produced metered verses of rhyme as well as some blank verse based on parts of the core story. The natural development of poetry is song, and with song comes dance, and through dance song is lead on towards drama. Cuppalot and Myrtale worked on a spoken theatrical version, a play, and Hatpins and Heather developped this into a version with music and dance, an operatic ballet. Theatre requires scenery, and Hawaki worked on a series of large oils depicting key motifs from the story in a style that combined the classical and the impressionistic. Hawaki worked with a group of sculptors to produce statues of the main figures and Cuppalot worked with some goldsmiths to make an awesome gold cauldron decorated with scenes from the story in a style that combined the Celtic and the classical. Its elegant shape was derived from sacred geometry and again combined the form of the Bronze Age cauldron with that of the classical wine-mixing jar. The jar was to be displayed in the British Temple of Sminthean Apollo, the design of which architectural ediface was to be overseen by Hatpins, and which was to function as a lecture hall for a school of aesthetic philosophy, as well as a sacred art gallery, theatre, recital hall, and gymnasium.

With such pleasant and worthy endeavours were the Emeralds occupied in preparation for the institution of the festival calendar.

Here Ends the Book that is Called Incontinentiad.