The Corona Borealis

The Devil..

2011-12-14T13:08:00.002Z

'First-born' Dionysos, fascinated by a mirror.

Well it's a strange old world.

I'd thought for ages that the origin of 'The Devil' was the Scarlet Woman of Babylon (from Revelations). That Ishtar of the morning star had undergone a sex change somehow, and ended up as Lucifer.

Venusian pentagrams and fallen star...into the abyss.

But the rule of 'inversions' is more interesting, the 'Devil' characterised as male and with horns, is probably Dionysos...from the Orphic myth [link].

The Romans had problems with the cult of Dionysos or Bacchus:

Until Paculla changed things, the Bacchanalia had been fairly well managed; a woman's festival and limited to daylight hours. After Paculla, men were involved and it happened at night. The new Bacchanalia spread through Italy, and two years latter, it had to be banned.

Livy tells us:

Paculla Annia, a Campanian, when she was priestess, made a complete change, as though by divine monition, for she was the first to admit men, and she initiated her own sons, Minius Cerinnius and Herennius Cerinnius.

At the same time she made the rite a nocturnal one, and instead of three days in the year celebrated it five times a month. When once the mysteries had assumed this promiscuous character, and men were mingled with women with all the licence of nocturnal orgies, there was no crime, no deed of shame, wanting.

More uncleanness was wrought by men with men than with women. Whoever would not submit to defilement, or shrank from violating others, was sacrificed as a victim. To regard nothing as impious or criminal was the very sum of their religion. The men, as though seized with madness and with frenzied distortions of their bodies, shrieked out prophecies; the matrons, dressed as Bacchae, their hair dishevelled, rushed down to the Tiber with burning torches, plunged them into the water, and drew them out again, the flame undiminished, as they were made of sulphur mixed with lime.

Men were fastened to a machine and hurried off to hidden caves, and they were said to have been rapt away by the gods; these were the men who refused to join their conspiracy or take a part in their crimes or submit to pollution. They formed an immense multitude, almost equal to the population of Rome; amongst them were members of noble families both men and women. It had been made a rule for the last two years that no one more than twenty years old should be initiated; they captured those to be deceived and polluted.

What followed the ban was to all intent and purposes a witch hunt:

Those who had simply been initiated, who, that is, had repeated after the priest the prescribed form of imprecation which pledged them to every form of wickedness and impurity, but had not been either active or passive participants in any of the proceedings to which their oath bound them, were detained in prison.

Those who had polluted themselves by outrage and murder, those who had stained themselves by giving false evidence, forging seals and wills and by other fraudulent practices, were sentenced to death.

The number of those executed exceeded the number of those sentenced to imprisonment; there was an enormous number of men as well as women in both classes.

The women who had been found guilty were handed over to their relatives or guardians to be dealt with privately; if there was no one capable of inflicting punishment, they were executed publicly.

The next task awaiting the consuls was the destruction of all the Bacchanalian shrines, beginning with Rome, and then throughout the length and breadth of Italy; those only excepted where there was an ancient altar or a sacred image.

The senate decreed that for the future there should be no Bacchanalian rites in Rome or in Italy. If any one considered that this form of worship was a necessary obligation and that he could not dispense with it without incurring the guilt of irreligion, he was to make a declaration before the City praetor and the praetor was to consult the senate. If the senate gave permission, not less than one hundred senators being present, he might observe those rites on condition that not more than five persons took part in the service, that they had no common fund, and that there was no priest or conductor of the ceremonies.

Three years earlier, before the Greek 'hedge wizard' had turned the heads of the good Roman folk and made them go bad through the agency of a woman no less, the Roman ceremony 'The Megalasia' had been instituted. The Sibylline books had instructed the Romans to bring 'the foreign Magna Mater' to Rome. Rome was at war with Carthage, and by bringing the Goddess to Rome, She would turn her favour from the foreigners to the Romans.

Then they had trouble with all those blokes dressed like women castrating themselves....

So anyway, I don't know why I came back from the library with Lynn Picknett's 'The Secret History of Lucifer', guess I wanted to be annoyed...by cliched ideas.

Hope I'm wrong.

Journey without Goal.

2011-12-14T13:06:00.001Z

As the book featuresd in Tron 2, I thought I'd re-read and make notes:

It's been a long time since I last read anything by Trungpa; he was the kind of Lama that could be dismissed as 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'. I was glad not to have been a close student of his, he was deadly serious, as mischievous as a sack full of monkeys and practiced what he preached.

I suppose he reminds me of Alistair Crowley, but unlike Crowley he had a popular product. The idea of Eastern spirituality as superior to any other kind is encoded in our culture...

But I am eternally grateful to him for leaving his interpretation of religion in books. Though I like the severe intellectualism of some teachers whose cold, outer-space vision dissolve reality via multiple different versions of 'Truth'. I personally can't take the folksy version of others who promise Dewachen/Heaven for the believers.

The crazy wisdom of Trungpa seemed to me the only honest way to speak of religion. I trusted Trungpa, I still do.

In the film Tron, the journey without a goal expresses Flynn senior's exile and inaction. It also hints at a previous role taken by the actor, Jeff Bridges as 'The Great Lebowski'. Lebowski is the kind of guy who would have read Trungpa!

As to the religious, particually Buddhist, specifically Vajrayana- there isn't very much in Tron Legacy that is particularly Vajrayana...Integrating the psyche (embracing the shadow) is pure Jungian psychology and 'wholness' or 'individuation' isn't what the Vajrayana is about.

The book is based on a series of lectures given by Chogyam Trungpa at the Naropa Institute in the summer of 1974.

I'll go through it chapeter by chapter:

Introduction:
Trungpa begins by stressing lineage, meaning that the foundation and core ideas of the Vajrayana have been passed down from teacher to student for 2,500 years. And that the Vajrayana is based upon Tsultrim (meaning appropriate regulation -doing what is right in a situation rather that what you want to do...) and compassion. The Vajrayana is about 'developing awareness of one's 'indestructable innate awakened state of mind'.

Calling The Lama:
A translation of the kind of prayer known as "Calling The Lama From Afar". It is a prayer of 'sadness and renunciation' but the essence of it is the feeling of devotion, like being a child calling out to a parent in absolute faith that one is loved and will be heard. There are a series of practices called the foundation practices (Nundro) that can take years to complete, and culminate in this prayer. The Nundro is hard work and difficult and makes the prayer meaningful.

The first chapter:
Here Trungpa introduces paradox. On how to live between a sense of continuity and the giving up of reference points. Entering a world that has no beginning or ending, and no continuity. Ambiguity as the starting point.

Second chapter-Vajra nature:

"Working with the energy of Vajrayana is like dealing with a live electric wire.."

Sanity in this case is the effect of experiencing the clarity that develops from basic, sitting, meditation. Clarity is what happens after you have decided to sit down for a set period of time and let thoughts come and go without paying them any attention. It is like the moment a contact lens floats over the iris, fuzz to clear! Unlike the contact lens, it dissolves just as you notice it! The clear light is the light of the mind, basic and pure intelligence unimpeded by lists of things to do or not to do. Trungpa describes it as:

"Things are seen as they are, precisely; but at the same time things are also seeing us precisely. Because we are totally exposed and open and not afraid to be seen, a meeting point occurs. Something makes us realise that we cannot chicken out and say that our life is just a rehearsal. Something makes us realise that it is real...It is a real state of being, a true state of being that is full and complete. That indestructibility and clarity is vajra nature, which is Superior to any other approach to spirituality"

Third chapter -Mandala:

"Our relationship with the world of perception is called the outer mandala; our relationship with the world of the body is called the inner mandala; and our relationship with the world of emotion is called the secret mandala."

A chapter about awareness; of how one feels inside colours the world, or how what happens externally changes how one feels. 'Mandala' is about the way borders are not clear, not defined, not hard or fast or permanent.

Chapter 4 -Nontheistic Energy:
On how to handle duality...and grow up!

Chapter 5 -Transmission:
On how to get real spiritual 'transmission' from a real teacher; on integrity, surrender and cleaning the cup.

Chapter 6 -The Vajra Master:
On why panic is a good thing, on why secrets are a good thing, and why direct apprehension of this world is dangerous.

Chapter 7 -Visualisation:
An explanation of Samaya -sacred bond. And experiencing the difference between ideals and reality via the technique of visualisation, so that ideals are understood to be made of nothing but mind.

Chapter 8 -Body, Speech and Mind:
An introduction to Buddhist logic in which white is black only if black exists, the sun is black because it is bright, daytime is nighttime because it is daytime. You have been warned.

Chapter 9 -The Five Buddha Families:
Or what's your style:
Vajra?
Ratna?
Padma?
Karma?
Buddha?

Chapter 10 -Abhisheka:
On spiritual materialism (why gathering empowerments and going to 'secret' ceremonies will not help you one bit) and empowerment (permissions to practice) how to view such ceremonies.

Chapter 11 -Being and manifesting:
Or how the five styles interrelate with the Dharmakaya, Nirmanakaya and the sambogakaya.

Chapter 12 -The Question of Magic:

On boundaries and thresholds and how this world is magic. Magic is:

"An expression of total nonaggression and an expression of total energy and power at the same time".

Chapter 13 -The Tantric Journey:
On why you will need to become pure before you can go back and play in the dirt. Kriya yoga.

Chapter 14 -Annuttara yoga:
On using inner energy pathways, tza, lhung and tigli.

Chapter 15 -Maha Ati:

You need to read the book yourself...

Hecube.

2011-10-03T15:36:00.002+01:00

I read through the play Hecube by Euripides, a few weeks ago and couldn't see any way that it could be made into a realistic story...the play is an outrageous situation in which outrageous things happen, I think basically to provide a space for philosophy.

I've just re-read and I think that I can almost see a way through.

In many ways, Greek plays are situated in a similar liminal space as science fiction..Even at their time (425 BC) the Trojan war was already ancient history, so far away it was closer to a fantasy than reality.

But I like his style, Euripides I mean. Our modern habit of distinguishing between reality and fantasy, of dismissing fantasy because it isn't realistic leads to a prejudice against the kinds of liminal worlds Euripides and fantasy writers take their audiences to, this is a shame.

So where does Euripides take us to? Basically into an Iron Age culture of war lords and extravagant gestures, of shock and awe and human beings facing death, grief, greed..

There are three parts to the tale.

Part one.
Hecube, now an old woman was, before the Greeks destroyed her city, a Queen. She has seen her husband and two of her sons murdered. Her daughter, Cassandra has been given to the Greek king, Agamemnon. Hecube is now a slave...she is having bad dreams.

Part 2
The Greeks have decided that it is right to offer Hecube's daughter to Achilles. Achilles, hero of Troy was killed. His ghost appeared and asked the army gathered on the beach of Troy, preparing to leave, to take Hecube's daughter and slit her throat so that his burial mound will be drenched in blood. Odysseus argues that the ghost should be honoured and is sent to fetch Polyxena, Hecube's daughter.

Hecube pleads for her daughter's life.
Odysseus explains why her daughter should die.
Polyxena is sad only for her mother, she is willing to die...

A latter report of her death tells how she dies like a hero, goes proudly to her death and therefore honours Achilles.

Part 3
The body of Hecube's other son, a young boy, is found washed up on the beach. He has been murdered by the man to whom he was sent for safety to Polymestor. He was murdered by him because Troy had fallen (so no one would avenge his death) and the boy had gold.

Hecube asks Agamemnon for revenge...and Hecube's revenge is terrible, designed to show that revenge is not justice, and often more wicked than the crime that provoked it.
---
Conclusion.
Euripides wished to contrast the noble death of Polyxena which, Odysseus explains, served to reward men for bravery, for being war heroes, with the fate of Polymestor. A modern day audience could be forgiven for thinking that the play was about the characters and what was happening to them, rather than looking beyond and through the action and into the ideas.

One last detail that is especially hard to make sense of, Polymestor, at the end becomes a seer, foretelling the future. All the audience knows what fate has in store for Agamemnon, Cassandra and Hecube.

Is there something, some kind of balancing act going on?

Polymestor is crawling around the stage at this point, his eyes have been destroyed, his children hacked to bits and he is telling us that all the people on the stage with him, will die. Hecube will fall to her death, a suicide. Agamemnon will be butchered by his wife.

I guess Euripides is pointing out the futility of revenge.

Which is all well and good, but the death of Polyxena is so awful it is difficult to get Euripides meaning which is...the difference between instinctual and civilised behaviour.

Alcestis.

2011-09-16T14:43:00.001+01:00

Enter Apollo: bow slung over his shoulder, a quiver of arrows at his side sits in the garden of the house belonging to his boss.

What does a dysfunctional god look like [bling, carries a weapon], who is Apollo now?

He is a god struck with the thunderbolt, sentenced to live as an unskilled worker as a punishment for his son's behaviour.

His son raised the dead...

Apollo: House of Admetus.
This is where I worked. Thrown out of the gods and into the mire of your world, condemned to unskilled labour. Your world has little time for gods, but it was Zeus who caused my fall. He killed my son, blasting his heart black with 300 kilovolts. My beautiful, clever son! In a fit of rage he accused my boy of using his skills to restore life to the dead, cheating death of his due.

So I killed his fire-makers.

I was sentenced of course, stripped of my powers, thrown out of the party upstairs. I got a job with the guy who lives here, a bit of a wild-man they said, but I found him to be fair. Admetus is a good man. Always treated me well and so when his time came, in that tiny gap just before the ‘accident’ Fate had decreed I used what was left of my god-like powers and got Fate drunk.

If Admeus gets someone to die in his place will you let him off I asked?

The deal was done.

And then Admetus thought it would be easy to get someone to die for him; thought of his dear old ma and pa, thought of a friend who had talked of suicide.

But no one, surprise surprise was willing to die for him.

Except his wife.

She is inside the house right now, propped up on their arms, gasping out her last. For she is going to die; this is the date Fate chose. And I can’t do any more here, I must leave this house, I could never tolerate death.

Ah, too late, he is here already -Death himself, priest of the dead. He has waited patiently for this day and arrives on time.

Enter Death carrying a sword.

Death: Ah Apollo, still hanging around? No where better to go? Still trying to infringe, usurp, and annul the honours due to the powers below? Very clever, you tricked Fate to cancel the death Admetus owed. So I’m here for Alcestis.

What, you come armed; you think you can rescue her!

Did she not willingly agree to give her life to save his?

Apollo: Be calm, I have right and reason on my side!

Death: Right you say, then what are the weapons for

Apollo: I always carry them

Death: And reason? How reasonable is it to exchange one person’s death for another?

Apollo: Admetus is my friend.

Death: So you plan to rob me of Alcestis too?

Apollo: Admetus was not *robbed* from you.
He has found a replacement, his wife whom you have come to fetch.

Death: Whom I will fetch. She will come down with me this evening when the process is
Complete…

Apollo: [anger] Take her then!
Look is there any way I can make you change your mind?

Death: No! This is my work.

Apollo: couldn’t you take someone more ready to die, someone who wants to die, just someone who in passing says, ‘oh god I wish I were dead’ I mean even in jest wouldn’t that be sufficient, I mean isn’t it just numbers like some god- damned equation! Isn’t it just quotas Does it have to be so personal?!

Death: I get your meaning and understand your wish but there is more honour in a death so bravely given.

Apollo: You mean grave goods, her gold and jewels?

Death: Apollo I know you, and you’re so called doctor son, impressed by the glint of gold you’d both sell long life to the rich and happily watch the poor die in rags. You should know me better than to think that I am like you.

Apollo: I know you, hating men, hated by the gods! But before the sun sets you will be sorry that you didn’t listen to me and consider a deal. (Apollo walking off)

Death: (Death to Apollo’s back) There was simply too many words; and words win you nothing. (Death to himself and the audience) Now I go to celebrate the fatal rite, when once this edge (the sword) has severed one lock of hair her soul is sealed to me.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Chorus: [TV crew] has anyone knocked the door, looks like there is no one in, the
whole house is silent, no friends of Admetus of Alcestis around to tell us what is going on. Is Alcestis alive or dead? Poor woman, surely the noblest wife a man ever had. That’s our best angle I think...

Chorus [Papers] Can you pick up any sounds in the house with your equipment of weeping, or that sudden outburst of rage and grief?

Chorus TV: Ignores them, this is bad (emotional response). No one in shot (to justify the statement), but I’ll be glad when it’s all over and done.

The sound recordist, pushes a microphone through the letter box, has earphones and listens.

Chorus papers: It would be silent if she were dead.

Chorus TV when someone has died it is customary to place a bowl of spring-water just before the door. There isn’t one there. Nor is there the lock of hair. Nor is there any sound of weeping. Are you sure it was meant to be today?

Chorus papers: Today what?

Chorus TV the day she was meant to die.

Chorus paper: it doesn’t bear thinking about poor girl and he is much older than her I think. Just shows, mad as a fish, both of them. [To his photographer] make sure that you get photos of that shrine they set up over there, Pagans not quite as news worthy as they used to be, but perhaps we can put some kind of Satanic Cult spin on the story..

A servant comes out of the house.

Chorus paper: Look someone’s coming out of the house, she is in tears! Hey girl, what happened, is she alive or dead!

Servant: [weeping] she can’t hold her head up now, she is fighting for breath.

Chorus paper: Poor man, such a good man too having to watch her go through that. Hope he understands that women like that, noble you might say, are hard to find in this day and age.

Servant: Noble? To believe that she must die for her husbands sake!

Chorus TV: There is no hope that this is all some kind of mistake?

Servant: No, there is no hope.

Chorus TV: Is it true that the family mausoleum has been opened and a coffin has been placed ready?

Servant: Yes, Admetus bought her a beautiful new dress yesterday for her to be buried in.

Chorus paper: She will be famous; this whole death thing will make her famous, you can be sure of that.

Servant: So that’s your angle [half sarcastic] so you want the whole story; you want to know how the noble woman decided to die for her husband and what she did as this day grew ever closer? Well this morning she went out early to the stream and washed herself in the pure water; then she went to her wardrobe and took our the new dress and her finest jewellery. After doing her make-up she went to their shrine and prayed to Hestia.

Chorus paper: Goddess worship hey; did she pray to other gods usually or was this something new?

Servant: [ignoring the paper man] She prayed like this [servant kneels as if she were Alcestis] “Goddess, I’m going below the earth; this is the last time I shall pray to you. Watch over my children. Give my son a loving wife, and my daughter a noble husband. Let them not be cut off in their youth, to die like their mother; give them a good fortune and a long and happy life” she went to all the alters in the house, placing myrtle leaves which she had twisted into garlands, there, and praying. All the time not a single tear, not a sigh, there was nothing in her face, no paleness even; nothing to show what was going to happen to her.

And then she went into her bedroom.

Chorus paper: And just died?

Servant: [angry now] she threw herself onto the bed and wept uncontrollably for a while, I could hear her through the door, and I didn’t know what to do...she began talking to herself “This is the bed where I first gave myself to him; and now I’m going to die for him!

Marriage, till death do us part.

I should hate the vows which brought me here.

But it is I who have killed myself by refusing to break my promise, it’s not anyone’s fault.

And now another woman will take my place here; she may be happier but she won’t be as true or as faithful”

She remained in the room until she couldn’t cry anymore. She came out of the room almost unable to walk, stumbling helplessly. Her children ran to her and she began to weep some more, she began kissing them; she took them in her arms and started saying goodbye to them. They were crying, her friends were crying, she was hugging us all and everyone was heartbroken.

So is that noble enough for you? Listen, if Admetus had died then he would just have died. Instead he will never forget what he has seen today. The memory will torment him for as long as he lives

Chorus TV: It must be truly awful for Admetus.

Servant: Oh yes he is weeping, holding her close to him, begging her not to desert him. It is useless to ask that now [bitter] when she lies in his arms all limp, barely able to breathe.

He sent me out here to see who was outside, oddly enough he is glad of the publicity, seems to think of you as friends of his.

She wants to see the sun, to take her last look; so please don’t make anything harder for her!

Chorus tv: God! Surely we should do something, call an ambulance, is this legal even.

Chorus papers: Perhaps we should just leave.

Chorus TV: too late, people are coming out of the house. They say that marriage holds more joy than pain, but after this how can Admetus bear to carry on?

Alcestis supported by her husband with her 2 children.

Alcestis: [beginning to go into a delirium] Oh beautiful sun, eddies of whirling clouds in the sky..

Admetus: the sun sees that we both suffer and knows that we have done no wrong to deserve this!

Alcestis: [gets down on her knees, begins to lie face down] Oh earth and the walls of my home...

Admetus: Stand up Alcestis, please don’t give in, pray! The gods are powerful, and may be merciful.

Alcestis: I see a boat gliding over the lake. I hear someone calling my name, You hear it Admetus, he is calling me to come more quickly..

Admetus: Please stop...you are breaking my heart, no one is calling you. Oh, what can I do...

Alcestis: I feel a hand gripping my shoulder leading me- Do you see anyone? Let me go (to Admetus who is holding her) let me go down to the house of the dead!

Death frowns at me; his eyes grow dark under the shadow of his wings. [To Admetus) what are you doing? Let me go. I want to follow, but the way is dark, it is fearful -oh it is fearful!

Admetus: We love you Alcestis, we are heartbroken! Your children Alcestis...!

Alcestis (delirium over) Let go now; take away your hand; let me lie here. I haven’t the strength to stand; Death is near, a darkness flows over my eyes like night. Children, my children, you have no mother any more. You will live in the sun’s light. Farewell..

Admetus: Oh god! This is torture worse than my own death. I plead with you Alcestis, how can you bear to leave me, in Gods name how can you bear to leave your children. Courage! Stand up, live! How can I live for you when you are dead? You are my life and death, I love you more than love itself, more than life, more than the blood flowing in my veins; Alcestis I worship you!

Alcestis: Admetus, you can see that I am dying. I must tell you what my wishes are. I have chosen that you should live rather than I because I honour you as a husband. It would have been easy for me to refuse: perhaps if I had become a widow I could have married a rich prince from Thessaly.

Instead I’m dying. I did not want to live parted from you, and my children to be fatherless. Your father and mother are old and would have died honoured by everyone especially if they could have added the glory of saving their only son. If they had not failed you, we should have lived the rest of our lives together. Instead you are going to be alone.

Listen Admetus since life is a more costly gift than any other; I do not ask you for an equal return. What I ask is justified by experience. Do not marry again. You are a man, you love your house and children so keep the house for them, do not marry and have more children to usurp our children’s claim. To children a stepmother comes in like an enemy, like a viper.

Be proud Admetus that you chose a good wife; and you my children, that you had a good mother.

Admetus: I promise Alcestis, never doubt me! You are my wife living or dying, you shall always be my only wife! No woman, no matter how beautiful shall ever call me husband in your place. These children are enough for me; I pray the gods give me joy in them, for my joy in you is lost.

I shall carry my grief for you not one year only, but as long as my life lasts. My father and mother are enemies; I hate them. They say that they love me, and yet they will do nothing! But you bartered your own life for mine, and saved me.

Chorus: We share this tragedy with you. Alcestis is worth all your tears.

Alcestis: Children, you have heard what your father has promised: he will not marry and give you a second mother, but will honour me.

Admetus: I have given my word, and will keep it.

Alcestis: I believe you; and I entrust these children to you.

Admetus: Dear wife. Dear children! I take them from your arms.

Alcestis: Children, I’m leaving you when you need me most...so sorry...

Admetus: What shall I do without you?

Alcestis: Time will soften the pain; and the dead -are nothing!

Admetus: Take me too; in gods name take me with you! Look up! How can you leave your children.....

Silence...

Chorus: She is gone.

A child: What will we do, bring mommy back! Her eyes are shut and her hand is all floppy. Please mommy come back, come back...

Admetus: She can’t hear you, this is too much...

Servant: Admetus, you must bear this sorrow. You are not the first of men, nor the last to lose a wife. Consider: death is a debt that every one of us must pay.

Admetus: I know it. I’ve lived with this day ever since she decided to take my place. The knowledge that this day would come has been torture for me...Now I must set in order her funeral rites. [To the chorus] Stay with me; chant a hymn to the implacable god of death. Let it be known that there is to be no celebration anywhere! I shall never carry to burial another so dear, nor so faithful to me. Her devotion claims every honour I can give; for she alone has given her life for mine.

Servant singing:
Would I had power to go
Down to the river of Night,
To turn again that fatal oar,
And bring you up once more
Away from the gloomy bounds where the waters of weeping flow
Into the day’s light!

For you, beloved Alcestis, you alone,
To ransom from Death’s bond your husband’s life,
Fearlessly you gave your own.

Then lightly fall the earth to fill your grave!
If ever the king take another wife
(This I have sworn)
Mine and your children’s hate and scorn
Shall persecute the man you died to save!

Heracles turns up.

Heracles to chorus: Tell me good people, is Admetus at home?

Chorus change the subject or are awestruck.
What kind of hero is Heracles?

Dialogue all about the perils of his adventure and perils of where he must go.

Admetus returns, head shaven in a sign of mourning, a servant attends him.

Admetus: Heracles! Welcome old friend.

Heracles Admetus! All happiness to you.

Admetus: I wish it could be so, thanks for the thought.

Heracles: Why have you cut your hair; are you mourning the death of someone close?

Admetus: The funeral is today.

Heracles: It’s not one of your children -God forbid!

Admetus: No, no my children are well.

Heracles: Your father, perhaps? He must be a ripe old age now?

Admetus: No, my mother and father are both alive and well.

Heracles: Don’t tell me it is your wife, Alcestis....

Admetus: I don’t know what to say...

Heracles: What do you mean Admetus, you are not making sense.

Admetus: Don’t you know what is fated to happen to her?

Heracles: Yes, and that you are seriously deluding yourself. I know that you felt that you had cheated death and that death would reach out from Hell and drag you down unless someone else promised to take your place. Your beautiful wife Alcestis was as crazy as you and gave her word..to die in your place

Admetus: [beginning to weep] And once she had agreed to that, how can I say that she is alive? She said that she would die, rather than live, (half to himself) she wants to die...

Heracles: For goodness sake man! Don’t start that philosophical nonsense and please wait until she is actually dead before weeping like this!

Admetus: whoever decides to die -is as good as dead, they are no longer are a part of this world; and the dead -are no more.

Heracles: Most of us know the difference between being alive and dead! So come on now, stop this stupidity, someone has died I can see that, but who is it?

Admetus: It is a woman...

Heracles: Related to you?

Admetus: No; she was a close friend of the family

Heracles: And she died here, in your house? It must have been sudden! [Heracles getting ready to leave] Ah well, I wish I’d found you in happier circumstances

Admetus: Heracles, you’re not leaving?

Heracles: I’ll find somewhere else to stay; I can’t stay as a guest here when everyone is so upset.

Admetus: Heracles, no; I will not hear of it. I will be deeply hurt if you leave.

Heracles: No guest is welcome on the day of a funeral; you have enough to do today.

Admetus: The dead -are dead. Now come indoors.

Heracles: It isn’t right...

Admetus: I’ll take you to our guest rooms; they are in another part of the house, away from the funeral.

Heracles: I will always be grateful to you; but let me go; I don’t want to be a nuisance.

Admetus: Old friend, I cannot let you go to someone else’s house. [To the servant] show him the way, tell the cook to provide a good meal. And shut the courtyard doors -our guest must not have his pleasure spoilt by the funeral.

Heracles leaves with the servant

Chorus: Admetus! Are you mad, how can you think of entertaining guests at a time like this!

Admetus: How would it have made me feel better to turn an old friend away? When I have been travelling through his country he has always provided me with food and lodgings, I would have been guilty of being a bad friend if I’d turned him from my door.

Chorus: If he is such a good friend why didn’t you tell him straight that your wife had died? Why hide what has happened?

Admetus: If I had told him anything of the truth he would have refused to enter the house. There are some who would call this denial and blame me for not being brave enough to face the truth of my wife’s death, but I value my friendship with Heracles more than I value what other people may think of me!

Admetus with attendant bearing the body of Alcestis. The friends of Alcestis and servants make up the chorus

Chorus: Admetus, I see your father heading towards us.

Pheres: My poor son, I have come to share your sorrow. The wife you have lost was noble and chaste, you could not have married anyone better; no one could deny it. Suffering is hard; we must learn to bear it. Accept these gifts, and let them be buried with her. It is our duty, your mother and mine, to honour her remains, for she has given her life for you, my son. She would not let me lose you, or see me sink into a miserable and childless old age. She has shed a new dignity upon every living woman by her courageous and noble sacrifice!
Farewell Alcestis! You saved my son, and raised me from the grave. Peace be with you. Listen Admetus: with a woman like that, marriage pays; otherwise it is a bad bargain.

Admetus: I did not invite you to the funeral; you are not here as one of my friends! Nor shall my wife be buried with your gifts -her grave will be honourably furnished without them. When I was ill and dying, that was the time for you to show your sympathy but you kept well away! Then you let Alcestis die! You are old, she was young! And now you come here to howl over her dead body!

You are no true father of mine!

I see you now for what you are -I refuse to be called your son. Surely no one can surpass you in cowardice! At your age, at the very end of your life you had neither the will nor the courage to face death for the sake of your only son, but allowed her -a mother of young children- to die instead. Would your death have been so great a sacrifice? You have only a short time left anyway; you have already enjoyed everything a man needs for happiness: you were a king whilst still a young man, you have a son to succeed you so that your wealth and everything you had worked so hard to achieve would stay within your family and not be lost to strangers.

Tell me, had I dishonoured you so much that you left me to die? I who have always given first duty and reverence to you! I’m telling you, you better waste no more time in begetting some more children to care for you in your old age, to arrange your funeral and to care for your grave: as far as you are concerned I am already dead! I owe my life right now to my wife.

I owe you nothing!

I have heard old men pray for death, abhorring the long slow senile years: hypocrites! Let death come within sight and they refuse to die! Old age is suddenly precious to them!

Chorus: Admetus, please say no more; don’t make today worse than it already is.
Don’t hurt your father.

Pheres: Insolent boy, who do you think that you are talking to? Some wretched slave bought with your own money?
I am a king. My father was king before me; we are of pure blood and breeding, and well you know it! You go too far flinging your hot-headed insults; but you shall not turn your back on me before I’ve answered you!

You are my son: I brought you up to inherit my palace; but I am certainly not bound to die for you. There is no tradition anywhere that demands that fathers die for their sons!

For better or worse your life is your own concern. I have done my duty by you: you have wide possessions; I shall leave you the large estate that I inherited; so what have you to complain of? Have I robbed you? I don’t expect you to die for me, and I’ll not die for you. You enjoy life: do you think that I do not enjoy it? I expect to be dead for a long time, and alive for a short time -yes, short, but still sweet. You took pains enough to save your own skin! You have lived past your time, and as a result you have killed your wife -yes; and then you talk about my cowardice!

You are not fit to call yourself a man; your wife had more balls than you!

On the other hand, you are clever. Well done, I see that you have hit upon a splendid plan. This way you may never have to die at all! Just get another pretty young wife to die for you each time! And should any aged relative of yours decline to step in, abuse him for being a coward!

Now hold your tongue and think this over; if you want to live, so does everybody else. And don’t insult me, your insults will be repaid with interest, and with more home truths!

Chorus: You have both said too much. Pheres, stop!

Admetus: Carry on father. The truth hurts doesn’t it, you know that I’m right in what I’m saying -you should have agreed to die instead of Alcestis!

Pheres: To die for you would be to heap one wrong onto another.

Admetus: But dying is different for an old man. Alcestis and I are both young!

Pheres: A man has but one life to live -his own.

Admetus: then I hope you outlive god himself!

Pheres: what have I done to deserve such a curse?

Admetus: I thought that you were in love with life!

Pheres: I? What of you? Aren't you burying her in your place?

Admetus: Her tomb is a memorial to your cowardice.

Pheres: Oh I killed her, did I? You say that I killed her?

Admetus [with a groan of exasperation] I hope that you may need my help some day!

Pheres: Go on, marry wife after wife, let them all die for you!

Admetus: so they would -more shame on you for refusing!

Pheres: God give me strength!

Admetus: whimpering weakness! Mockery of manhood!

Pheres: Mock me if you will; it is not my old body you’re burying

Admetus: when you die, expect no eulogies over your grave

Pheres: Little do I care, I’ll be dead and gone!

Admetus: Hear that! What sense of honour has an old man?

Pheres: She had honour. What she lacked was sanity -as you discovered

Admetus: Leave me. Let me bury her in peace. Just go….

Pheres: I’ll go and leave the murderer to bury the victim. But beware, you will be brought to justice; if Acastus is the man he used to be he’ll make you suffer for his sister’s death!

Admetus: Get out of my sight; grow old and senile and childless as you deserve, though your son lives! Never come to my house again, or be in the same town! If it is possible to divorce one’s parents I divorce you. I renounce you here and now! I renounce a son’s right to a father’s hearth and home.

Exit Pheres. There is a long silence, during which the waiting coffin is seen at the center of the stage.

Admetus: Now my friends, we have a sad task before us, and must perform it. Let us go to the place of burial.

Chorus:
Farewell Alcestis fearless even to death
High-hearted, first in faithfulness!
Hermes and the dread king
Give you kind welcome to the earthy shades!
If there high place is kept
For noble spirits, may you
Receive full honour, throned besides Persephone!

The Chorus joins the funeral procession and leave the stage. After the stage is empty, shouts and drunken singing is heard coming from inside the house. The servant who was ordered to look after Heracles comes onto the stage.

Servant: I have seen guests in plenty, from all sorts of places come to this house; I’ve served their dinners, I’m put them drunk to bed, but never have I had a worse one than this!

To start off, couldn’t he see that Admetus was really cut up! Admetus told him that the funeral was this afternoon, but in he walks regardless!

Then, we give him his food and do you think he takes into account what’s going on? Does he ever, anything we don’t bring immediately he shouts at us to fetch. He gulps his wine like its water, get’s through two bottles before he begins to warm up! Then he’s off with his ruddy singing, not giving a seconds thought to how we were all feeling. I mean in the kitchen we were all trying hard not to start blubbing for our mistress. But we took care not to let him see the tears in our eyes; Admetus had given us orders about that.

And now, here I am having to look after this guest of his; and Alcestis has gone; and I didn’t follow her coffin, I didn’t get a chance to say farewell.

She was a mother to me and all the servants. A thousand times, when Admetus was in a rage she would calm him down. Now this -guest, who comes bursting in on our trouble, honestly I don’t think I can take anymore!

Heracles [sobering up, still wearing the garland]: Here you! Come here! What’s wrong with your face? What are you all sad-face about, eh? You should be happy, welcoming, pleased to see me. I’m an old friend of your master and you look at me as if it’s my fault that you are a bit upset because your neighbour has died or something.

Come here! You look like a clever man, let me make you a bit more clever! Everybody dies you know, there isn’t a man or woman alive today who can confidently say that he or she will be here tomorrow. Things happen, no one can predict what death will look like for you or me, or when it will be your turn, my turn, to go!

Now I’ve made you more clever! Cheer up, have a drink! Say to yourself, ‘Today my life is my own; tomorrow it belongs to fortune, or Karma or fate or to the bloody trolls!’ and then this life isn’t so bad you know. Get a woman or two to take you to bed, nothing makes life so worth living as having fun…come on Mr Sad-Face, I’m going to make you a new man, I’m going to share my wine with you because you are a man just like me, I can see that there is hope! You and me, we’re just ordinary common, working people not like those poxy philosophers with their solemn faces and knotty eye-brows, do you know what? They aren’t really alive at all. Life to them is one long disaster!

Servant: Look…I know what you are saying. It’s just that today we really do have other things to do.

Heracles: Oh don’t be such a Sad-Face, have a drink with me, lets go down the town and see if we can find something to do to make you happy; I know that a some woman or other has popped her clogs today in your house, but she wasn’t a member of your family was she?

Servant: What? Don’t you know what happened here today?

Heracles: Yes, your master told me about the woman, she was a good friend to the family.

Servant: Oh he goes too, too far sometimes.

Heracles: So you think that I’m out of order for getting drunk at a strangers funeral, is that the problem?

Servant: A stranger! If only it had been a stranger!

Heracles: Is there more to this than I’ve been told, was Admetus trying to keep something from me?

Servant: Please, just leave it…

Heracles: I knew that there was something more…this points to a real tragedy.

Servant: it does, why else would your singing and the way you were obviously enjoying yourself, annoy me so much. It wasn’t right to let you stay here as a guest.

Heracles: But why should my friend treat me like this? Why didn’t he let me know what had really happened; was it his father who died, or his child…and he couldn’t bring himself to speak the awful truth?

Servant: No, Heracles. He has lost his wife, Alcestis.

Heracles: Poor man! To lose Alcestis!

Servant: Yes, and we all feel as if our lives have died with her..

Heracles: I saw his tears and I felt that grief lay deep under the outward signs. He told me it was a stranger’s funeral though; and I believed him. I blundered in, I’ve abused his hospitality. I was feasting and drinking and prancing around with one of those myrtle garlands on my head! And you -when this was all going on- had been ordered to keep quiet about it!

Where is he burying her? Where shall I find them?

Servant: As you leave the city on the main road to Larissa, you will see below you a tomb of polished stone.

Heracles: Come heart and hand, your endless endurance must be put to the test . Time to show what kind of son Alcmene of Tyryns bore to immortal Zeus! The woman is dead and I must rescue her. I owe Admetus that. I will set Alcestis back in her own home again.

The black-robbed king of the Dead will come to drink the blood of the victims offered at her tomb. That’s where I’ll find him; I’ll hide there, watch for him, leap out and lock my arms around his writhing ribs. There’s no power on earth shall wrench him free, til he gives her up to me.

What if I’m too late, or the bait of blood fails to fetch him? Then I’ll go down to the sunless palace of Persephone and her king and ask for her; and by my soul I’ll bring Alcestis up again.

Heracles leaves. Admetus and chorus return.

Admetus: Oh house ravaged and maimed! How can I enter, how can I not hate and dread the emptiness I will find.

Fate has claimed my life though I still live.

Whilst the dead are better off than I. Theirs is the dark home I envy and desire.

Chorus: Admetus go inside, try to sleep, you will get over this.

Admetus: I am alone and desolate

Chorus: true, but what use are all your tears?

Admetus: How can I cease, there is no end to this

Chorus: Drink your full cup of pain. Not in all your years shall you see Alcestis again.

Admetus: You touch my sick mind where the wound is deep. My heart is shattered. I wish that I had never married. I envy those who remain unmarried, childless, invulnerable! How can a man who has wife and children to lose, continue to live when this pain is held, stoppered by fate until fate decides to let the pain flow out?

Chorus: you cannot predict or control fate

Admetus: My fate!

Chrorus: Admetus you must set some limits to your despair! You are not the first whose wife has died.

Admetus I wish that I lay with her in the grave. You should have let me stay with her! No pain will touch her now, her state is happier than mine; she has reached the end of life’s troubles and has gained a glorious name. But me, I’ve gone on too long; trespassed past my time. Too late I know that my life will be a sorry thing. I will lie in an empty bed, the dust will gather in every room, the children will be crying for their mother; and the servants lamenting the beloved mistress that they will not see again! -home will be intolerable.

And in the city there will be weddings and banquets -her friends, young like her! How can I face them. And behind my back people will whisper: ‘There goes the man who did not dare to die, who bought a cowards life with his own wife’s death, who hates his parents for his own failings; is he even a man’

I have nothing to live for.

Chorus: Necessity alone has no alter
No image, no sacrifice…

Look Admetus, Heracles is coming.

Heracles: Admetus, friends should speak openly and honestly together. You were in trouble; and I think I might have been trusted to stand by you, to show myself a friend. You never told me that your wife lay dead in your house; you let me think that it was a stranger’s funeral that you had been called upon to arrange. So there I sat, eating your food, making a fool of myself, behaving like a spoilt kid whilst you and all the house were in deep distress.

I’ve got no desire to make you feel worse so I’ll tell you where I’ve been.

I won this woman as a prize! Isn’t that splendid. It was a wrestling match in some godforsaken dive, you know my love of such uncouth places. Anyway, I’m off on a long trip, can’t keep this woman, though she is very pretty, very well behaved. So can you look after her?

Admetus: Heracles, I’m sorry. I did not mean to make you feel uncomfortable, I had enough sorrow without the added grief of watching you stride away.

As for this woman, I beg you, please do not leave her here with me. My heart is heavy enough already and this is a man’s house now. It’s not easy Heracles. If she stays here two more voices would whisper behind my back one from the city saying: ‘he has betrayed the wife who saved him, getting a girl like that to stay with him’ and one voice from the grave, her voice -I must honour her -I must be very careful what I do.

Heracles: Keep sorrow within bounds. Bear this with patience

Admetus: Pretty easy to say, advice is cheap…

Heracles: If you wept forever what would you gain?

Admetus: I know: but I’m out of my mind with weeping.

Heracles: She was worth your love.

Admetus: I have no wish to live anymore, Heracles

Heracles: the wound is fresh, time will heal the pain.

Admetus: Time. Yes the very same time that brings death to me.

Heracles: You will want to marry. A new wife will heal you.

Admetus: How can you say that to me! No woman ever again will share my bed!

Heracles: What! How do you think that that’s going to help anyone! Do you think it will do Alcestis any good?

Admetus: I must honour her memory.

Heracles: You are right, most right. But you will be called a fool.

Admetus: I swear that you shall never see me marry again! Heaven strike me dead if I betray the dead!

Heracles: I’m glad that your love for your wife is so steadfast -but please old friend, be generous; take this woman into your house

Admetus: No, no! By Zeus your father I entreat you. Do not make me do this!

Heraclese: I tell you it would be a grave error to refuse.

Admetus: but if I consent, it will eat away at my heart.

Heracles: Consent! Be generous, it will bring you luck!

Admetus: you torture me, I wish you had never won her.

Heracles: but since I did…

Admetus: I know that you mean well, but I cannot…she must go elsewhere.

Heracles: Well then I suppose she must go somewhere else, if you say she must, then she must. Are you sure that you mean ‘must’?

Admetus: she must -if- if you will not be angry with me.

Heracles: I have good reasons for begging so hard.

Admetus: OK win then! You always do. But what you are asking me to do is hateful.

Heracles: In time you will thank me; only do what I ask.

Admetus [to servants] we must find a place for her to stay; take her into the house.

Heracles: I will not hand her over to the servants.

Admetus: As you wish, take her inside yourself!

Heracles: No Admetus, it has to be you.

Admetus: I will not touch her -look Heracles -there is the house, there is the door, you want her to stay, you take her inside!

Heracles: Your own right hand! Nothing else will do. Take her by the hand Admetus.

Admetus: You are forcing me? Admetus holds out his hand but turns away. Heracles joins their hands and draws the veil from Alcestis’s face.

Heracles: Now hold her forever! And tell the son of Zeus he is a worthy and generous friend. Turn around! Look at her! Is she something like your wife? Now farewell tears, hello happiness!

Admetus O god, o god what…? What has happened? Is this Alcestis or some way to drive me mad?

Heracles: this is your wife.

Admetus: No, surely some trick, some spirit from the grave. I watched her die. This isn’t possible Heracles.

Heraclese: What? I’m not into all that occult stuff, I don’t know anything about necromancy! She was under death’s authority. It was simple. I fought with death -it was a wrestling match, I told you!

Admetus: but where, where did you find Death?

Heracles: by the tomb. I jumped him, he didn’t know what hit him!

Admetus: Tell me…why is she so silent. She just stands so still, not speaking, is she even breathing?

Heracles: As far as I understand it I think it wears off. But I have to go, oh and Admetus pay your dept to me by showing your guests henceforth a bit of respect. Sorry, I can’t spend any more time here.

Admetus: Stay Heracles, we will have a feast to celebrate…

Heracles: I’ll see you when I get back…

Admetus; Good luck go with you Heracles, and bring you safe home!

Stonehenge and Avebury.

2011-09-16T13:43:00.000+01:00

The attitude to prehistoric monuments has changed considerably during my life time. When I was a child, aged just eight or nine years old, Stonehenge was only just on the map; there was a car park. In the mid 1960’s, there were no guards or wardens of any kind, there was no hint of the troubles in Stonehenge’s, past or yet to come. The site itself was, in my memory, a very big field with large stones, toppled and balancing; the monument itself was lonely, windswept, too silent, and alone on Salisbury plain.

When I visited again, in the early eighties, the stones of Stonehenge were surrounded by little pyramids created to house guards. They were very odd indeed, they looked uncomfortable.

The pyramid ring was defensive, Stonehenge had become a place of battles; it had become the front line where the vaguely extropian, Gnostic attitudes of the Thatcher government was inevitably at war with the pagan, earth centred ethos expressed in the midsummer festivals. Parties and wild celebrations were considered, by the Conservatives to be the old enemy; a return to the degenerate Bacchanalia, a fall from the true, Classical (Greek) past. As in Rome fear activated state violence against debauched citizens. To the senate it was axiomatic that the degenerate Bacchanalia signified a catastrophic end to law and order, and law and order must be strengthened to prevent mindless chaos and destruction.

Ostensibly the war at Stonehenge was portrayed as protection. Those who had recreated the Stonehenge you see now by raising the fallen stones, those who had taken bags full of cremated ash from the ground, were trying to preserve Stonehenge, unlock the hidden code. Today, no archaeologist would be allowed to do such a thing, and no one can recover the quantity of information that has been destroyed literally by the sack load. Those who went to Stonehenge to see the midsummer sun rise and sat on the high triathlons were guilty of using the stones as they appear to be, guilty in effect of taking the stones at face value; to the New Age travellers Stonehenge provided a dramatic mix of theatre and temple, and the people who gathered there were not going to worry about any changes they themselves made (in a universe whose only sure law is that everything changes). Especially when the true infrastructure of our world could be destroyed in a mega tonne flash of Plutonium madness.

The war was and still is, about meaning; a war between Transcendent Gnostics who demand that Stonehenge is treated as an un-deciphered text, and those whose spirituality is more earth bound, imminent, to whom Stonehenge is a connection to our ancestors. The Gnostic view casts Stonehenge as hidden order, an assemblage of transcendent information frozen invisible within the mother of all henges. To be fair, the Conservatives either then or now, would not recognise them selves as Gnostics or extropian. They see themselves as guardians of our heritage; the multi-coloured party of travellers dancing in the ‘garden of the sun’ were, to the Conservatives naive children who would, sooner or latter conspire to drain the nations wealth as they grew older, got ill, reproduced, expected the state to help them out.

Stonehenge today is an even more difficult place to understand. The car park is mostly full. The shop is teeming. But if you can get in touch with one of the Gate keepers’ and get yourself some time within the circle, you will experience the strange deadening of sound and something like claustrophobia. I like Stonehenge more now than I used to, but only because I ditched any idea that I should like it.

Off the military reservation, Avebury is quiet, and used; people live within and around the circles and there are sheep. Avebury is living, or at the very least integrated with the present.

In the 1980s New Age travellers dressed in tie dye, all multicolour, dread locked with ear-lobes full of rings, would beg for money off any straight edge visitor (who didn’t have a small child with him or her). Mike Pitts ran the wonderful museum there, and his partner had created the best vegetarian restaurant in England. At the time of writing, 2011, things have changed. Avebury is being frozen into a museum piece, but I hope it will resist. My impression is National Trust, eighteenth century order: Capability Brown must have planned the grounds, so unusual! A rustic folly, a one off, a never to be repeated riot of stone surrounded by a most impressive haha.

The New Age travellers had started their nomadic trek during the 1970s. People would spend the summer driving in convoys of buses, cars, and vans between festivals and living in their vehicles. It ended in the 1980’s, the 5th or 6th of February 1985 to be precise. In June 1982 approximately 150 vehicles drove to Greenham Common USAF base after the annual Stonehenge Free People's Festival. Greenham Common was ostensibly a part of ‘our’ national defence system. It was the location of American nuclear weapons (Pershing and Cruise, the soldiers would take them out for rides on their trucks). A lot of people resented the paranoia the weapons represented; most people just hoped that the game of mutually assured destruction was working. I had planned to go there, I was sick of being told that I should be afraid. But going was dependant upon failing my radiography exams. I passed, I got a job; which tells you exactly how counter culture I really am!

The traveller convoy set up camp at Greenham and held out until the night of 5-6 February 1985 when police and military, destroyed the protest in the name of freedom?

Back in Avebury 2011, the multicoloured crew of New Age-ers has gone, leaving only a new wave of books in the gift shop to explain dowsing and labyrinths, Wicca and Druidry. Sparkly crystals in silver adorn bracelets and earrings, pendants and wands; un-dyed wool, and Kendal mint cake make the shop (by the post office) a treasure trove. The restaurant is still there, by the mill pond and the medieval barn now selling what I can only describe as synth-cake and tea; the imperative to use products grown with kindness and harvested from the earth with respect, has been repackaged as the cult of Locally Sourced. Yet the cake tasted to me as if it had been created from by products of the petro-chemical industry, some sort of weird made-from packet cake.

So it goes.

Woodhenge.

2010-08-28T23:27:00.000+01:00

Yesterday at 8:30 AM I was walking down a long road. To my right, the ground rises a little and another road follows this incline. I have never walked up that road, it seems to end in sky. I could imagine that the sea is just over the hill, even though I'm in the middle of the country more than one hundred miles from any sea.

As I walked I looked up and saw the moon. The sun was directly behind me and so my shadow pointed straight and true, a dark path towards the moon. The moon hung like a shard of melting ice in the blue sky...I wished then that I'd had my compass with me (my extra special compass that has a mirror and a sight-line and a little hole for accuracy!)

I have been drawing a lot of moon charts recently. Everyone tells me that the moon is difficult because it goes through its year in twenty eight days, and has an eighteen point something year cycle. But if you sit down with a protractor and actually draw where the moon will be (using the azimuth) truly, the moon isn't difficult.

When I drew the sun rise and moon rise points for the autumn equinox, this is the only time of the year when the moon crosses the sun's path; that is to say, the full moon rises further east than the sun rose -though it is only a few degrees. This means that it looks as if the sun and moon rise from the same place; plus it is an uncanny experience to stand directly between the sun and the moon in the sun-light.

Just...you know...everyone gets so hung up on midsummer sunrise over megaliths, but yesterday the image of my shadow pointing to the moon, impressed me. I think that the equinoxes, especially the September equinox are far more interesting for anyone watching the sun and moon, besides which no one interested in the sky would watch only one and not the other (or miss out Orion).

Now why was there this theory that people used to use the moon (original Stonehenge, bank and Aubrey holes) but then, with the Bronze Age and Blue-stones, came a change in focus -towards the sun? The simple answer to that would be to say that there is evidence, but there isn't! Or rather, there is so little firm evidence that I find it impossible to believe.

The moon has had a bad press ever since Jung described it as archetypal female. The fact that the moon is dismissed as difficult, unpredictable and almost childish compared to the watch-like, stead fast and predictable sun reminds me of Sir Arthur Keith's dismissal of the skeleton in the ditch at Woodhenge as foreign (Iron Age).

So anyway, I'm thinking about filming myself walking around Woodhenge, marking the significant finds.

A project blog.

2010-07-15T15:06:00.000+01:00

To make things easier for me really, I've decided to put all the Persephone stuff in one place.

This is the link.

2010-07-13T09:18:00.005+01:00

The bridge between paleolithic-hunter culture and agriculture is the Demeter-Kore myth. The myth becomes highly elaborate {Eleusinian} weaving sex and death together, promising re-birth, wisdom and a personal encounter with the divine.

Plato expresses the distancing from 'God' taking place within that time...by denigrating *the mysteries* as cheap thrills and praising philosophy as the only true and rigorous way to apprehend the truly mysterious -the Divine.

And then where?
Where did Persephone go?

John Dee is as far as I've travelled: The Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus.

But now?

Now we have the Black Madonnas and onwards ever onwards to La Calavera Catrina and Mictecacihuatl.

The Blushing Bride.
By David Harrington.
[LINK]

Are you there my Blushing Bride or have you lost your way? Is that you up ahead? For I do not recognize you amidst such folly. Where was it you stumbled, what caused you to sway? And where are your prophets to rekindle the flame?

The dim glow of your candle can barely be distinguished at the end of the tunnel.

You are like a ship lost at sea alone in the dark, going around in circles always missing the mark.

You were once a pretty young princess adorned with precious stones. Now you just cower in the corner like a sack of broken bones.

Lush palaces and mile long halls once opened wide to greet you. Noble kings and princes bowed their heads to meet you.

For years you endured through an incredible plight. Through tears you stood up and fought for what's right. But look at you now trembling with fear. Have you no heritage, have you forgotten your name? And where are your merits, have they all disappeared?

No fancy facade can disguise your barrenness, no towering spire can overshadow your lowliness. Your walls are shaking, your foundation is cracked: Fragile as an eggshell the blocks were stacked.

With humility you rose, in vanity you'll fall. But what's you going to do when the Master calls?

And where are your apostles, have they all gone to sleep? When the wolf comes a prowling do they scatter like sheep?

Persephone's grave.

2010-06-15T09:44:00.008+01:00

"You see the vastness of that naval army, and the numbers of bronze-clad warriors from Hellas, who can neither make their way to Ilium's towers nor raze the far-famed citadel of Troy, unless I offer you according to the word of Calchas the seer."

Agamemnon to Iphigenia.
Euripides, Iphigenia in Aulis 1260.

A myth lives through us, we shape it to fit our experience, we re-tell it and pass it on.

When Euripides wrote Iphigenia in Aulis the act it was supposed to redeem (the sacrifice of Iphigenia to appease Artemis; to allow the winds to change and the fleet sail towards Troy) was already mythic. No one knew for sure if King Agamemnon had actually had his daughter killed, but it felt possible. In Euripides play the killing was averted (like Abraham and his son) by the fortuitous replacement of the girl with a deer and it is probable that many sacrifices were like that -a story woven to explain how in the past it would have been a human, but due to divine intervention an animal is sacrificed instead..

The past is mythic and thus the more real and the more barbarous, it was the time when the gods walked with humans, a time before we were alone.

Euripides shows what should have happened because the Gods could intervene, in the mythic past.

There are as many theories as there are myths to explain why certain stories and myths continue, whilst others fade away. I'm sticking with my vaguely Jungian notion that the myth almost has a life of its own. It is as if myth expresses something that all people of all times and cultures have in common; the kernel of the myth remains the same whilst the outer form alone, changes.

And so I begin, as begin I must, and in keeping with this tradition. I begin the book of Persephone at a location in time and space, a place now known as Woodhenge and within a time frame known as the Bronze Age.

Persephone 'The lost girl' belongs to all times and to all cultures and so Persephone has many graves both real and fictitious, but the fact remains in all stories she is tricked, or washed away, or dragged into the darkness of the earth.

She is always a sacrifice of some kind.

Woodhenge is a strange monument that tells me more about English culture circa late 20th century, than anything about the Bronze age. It is within a field, you can just about see that it contains a bank and ditch; what you really notice is that Woodhenge is now rings of colour coded concrete posts.

The original Woodhenge is long gone.

Enter the rings of concrete and slightly to one side of what feels like the center, you will find a concrete mound.

This is Persephone's grave.

The site was originally excavated by Mr and Mrs BH Cunnington in 1928. They described it as:

slightly oval with its long axis approximately in line with midsummer sunrise. It consisted of an outer ditch and bank some 76 metres (250 feet) in diameter enclosing several concentric circles of holes which had originally accommodated timber posts.

Two bodies were found, a female child near the centre with its skull split open, and a teenager in one of the ditch sections. The child was interpreted as a dedicatory sacrifice. Unfortunately nothing now remains of her as her body was destroyed in the London Blitz in the Second World War.

The first time I read a description of that finding was in a book by Aubrey Burl who noted the way her body had been placed; how her face been turned to face the midsummer sunrise. He also noted that her skull had been split in such a way that after her death and decay, her skull fell into two halves, indicating a massive axe blow to the head. Aubrey Burl mentioned the story of Iphigenia to bridge the gap between his 20th Century readers and our Bronze age past, and like Iphigenia the story of her death exists in two forms.

The last time I heard an archaeologist explain the find he imagined that the body had been placed there after death; that the child had died in an accident before and that she was laid to rest there, in a place of honour.

There is another aspect to the time I've chosen: 2300BC seems to be a time of disaster http://www.varchive.org/itb/bronzage.htm

All my cards..so far.

2010-06-11T11:43:00.010+01:00

No justice?

2010-06-11T11:09:00.003+01:00

Following on from yesterday...
I sent immediately for another Book of Thoth and then thought, 'why don't I put the Crowley card into the pack to make up the numbers'?

Answer: Basically Crowley represents many things, but Adjustments/Justice isn't one of them.

Then I thought, why don't I print out the tarot cards I've already made? They used to be on a web site somewhere, but I probably deleted them years ago. They must be on a hard drive somewhere -so I'm searching, again real time- but the poor old PC is updating its virus protection, so this could take a long time.

Some still hang on the 'Net.

Meanwhile what does the card mean?
Worse...we watched Batman Begins last night; a film full of pop-tart musings about justice.

I'm too lazy to go get my Crowley pack for the little explanation book it contains, I'll ride the winds of the Internet instead and see what they give me.

The card symbolises the Book of the Law, and is the feminine complement of the Fool:

One must go more deeply into philosophy; the Trump represents The Woman Satisfied. Equilibrium stands apart from any individual prejudices; therefore the title, in France, should rather be Justesse. In this sense, Nature is scrupulously just. It is impossible to drop a pin without exciting a corresponding reaction in every Star. The action has disturbed the balance of the Universe.

She is the ultimate illusion which is manifestation; she is the dance, many-coloured, many-wiled, of Life itself. Constantly whirling, all possibilities are enjoyed, under the phantom show of Space and Time: all things are real, the soul is the surface, precisely because they are instantly compensated by this Adjustment. All things are harmony and beauty; all things are Truth: because they cancel out.

She is the goddess Maat; she bears upon her nemyss the ostrich feathers of the Twofold Truth.

I'm not surprised to see that it is missing from my pack...

Bloody Crowley, always spot on.

Tarot cards.

2010-06-10T08:54:00.006+01:00

Justice holds a dying wasp in one hand and the Crowbar_Of_Freeman in the other.

Behind her fools and madmen fight in slow motion.
She is always there, has always been there, she is just difficult to find!

Justice isn't blind, just busy.

Many years ago I used a pack of Tarot that didn't have any pictures, other than the major cards. I think in some ways the lack of picture made it easier to read them? It allowed me to think something like 5 (means this) wands (means that...)when there are pictures my mind starts to wonder.

...and that's a different skill, one more in keeping with allowing the cards to speak, rather than reading them.

But now I use Crowley's Book of Thoth, a pack that is easier to use than many because Crowley wrote so much; his personality and core belief's shine through the cards. When I use them it is a little like talking to Crowley.

I made about seven cards in all, it is a good way to learn the card. Curiously the card Justice isn't in my Crowley pack -so here is another thing about Crowley's pack, there is sometimes more than one version of some of the cards- Freida Harris was the person Crowley worked with to produce the cards:

This card is Adjustment:

Justice and La Force/strength (moderation is my definition of the lady closing the lion's mouth) often swap places in various packs pack; Rider-Waite-Smith originally switched the position of these two cards in order to make them better fit the astrological correspondences...

But now (and this is real-time) I am seriously confused, I've never seen this card in my pack! I have just looked through all my cards and no 'Justice'?

I'm going to have to put all the cards into order to see if I've lost any -hope not!!!

All the lesser arcana are there...now to check the major...

Oh.

It has gone.

2010-06-06T18:12:00.004+01:00

I was puzzled. What made Guericke use sulphur for his electricity experiment?

The answer: he was trying to replicate the earth by making 'a little earth' a collection of minerals in a ball of sulphur about a foot and a half in diameter -a Globus Mineralis- a terrella.

And when he rubber it it showed him the virtues of the earth; it felt warm and cracked, a feather could be made to hover (like the moon) above it, and when seen in the dark it glowed like powdered sugar...

I was fascinated by this story; if I wanted to make a miniature earth I'd use soil from the garden for surely that is what I'd believe that the earth is made of - in other words, what did people believe about the earth in the 17th century?

Also, why did Guericke place his sulphur ball inside a glass case?

Was it imagined that the volcanic under-earth was sulphur (logical) and that the solid part is a kind of glass, fussed sand?

And if I was to try to do the same as Guericke, what should I use? I have no access to sulphur or people able to put glass around it (or did he melt the sulphur and pour it into a sphere?).

Well, I shall find a glass jar and look at the triboelectric series and see what I can find in the house...

Meanwhile, here is a drawing my son made of Guericke.

New subject.

2010-06-06T17:27:00.000+01:00

I wondered, who decided that the earth was magnetic. Having found the answer I then wondered why.

Why is the earth magnetic?

But Einstein found that question hard to answer at the start of the 20th century, so I wasn't hopeful; though I got answers.

The link between magnetism and electricity made me ask more and thus I came to Goldstein and his 'Canal rays'.

Most mysterious to me is why did one Mr Guericke (in 1663) have a large ball of sulphur encased in a glass sphere and what made him roll it around to create 'portable' electricity?

I was puzzled. What made Guericke use sulphur for his electricity experiment? The answer is he was trying to replicate the earth by making 'a little earth' a collection of minerals in a ball of sulphur about a foot and a half in diameter -a Globus Mineralis- a terrella.

And when he rubber it it showed him the virtues of the earth; it felt warm and cracked, a feather could be made to hover (like the moon) above it, and when seen in the dark it glowed like powdered sugar...

And that was that, as far as he was concerned!

Easter.

2010-04-04T17:33:00.007+01:00

One good thing about the recently released version of Clash of the Titans is that is shows the continuity in religious beliefs, right back from Sumar, through Greek mythology and up to Richard Dawkins.

When I was at school and we were supposed to pray to god, I didn't really get it. Was it some kind of bargain, my prayers would make him like me?

Quite frankly I found it confusing that god was meant to be good.

As the film explains, the gods need us just as much as we need them...but on the other hand, perhaps they need us more. A concept that came straight from Sumar, with the first story of the flood -Atrahasis.

Jesus as half man, half god (depending on your theological standpoint of course) was in Greek terms, a hero.

But as it is Easter, the theme is death and Resurrection.

Before Jesus and the whole death/resurrection thing, a whole slew of nice young and mythical men had to go to the slaughter before him. Damuzi (the shepherd) who failed to show any concern when Inanna finally got off a meat hook in hell, found himself dragged away by Galli -demons- to take her place. The story continues when Geshtinanna- Damuzi's sister- takes his place in hell for half the year (a prequel to the Persephone myth).

Then we have Dionysus (the Orphic version and the first of two Dionysus), son of Persephone and Zeus who is torn to shreds by the Titans and whose flesh (along with that of the Titans and a fair amount of freshly electrocuted mud) is molded into the first humans by Zeus; this, by the way accounts for our nature...

Then there is Adonis -gored to death by a boar, Osiris who was tricked into a coffin by his brother, and finally Attis who, because the cult of Cybele was brought to Rome in 204 B.C, and so was subsumed into the cult of Jesus more than the others?

Pessinus -the temple of Cybele.

The black stone (which represented the holy mother Cybele) was taken from the shrine in Pessinus in Turkey and installed in the temple of Victory on the Palatine Hill.The day on which this event took place, 12 April, was observed afterwards as a festival, the Megalesian.
Megalesiacae spectacula: The Megalesian games were celebrated in Rome from April 4-10 in honor of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, known in Rome as Magna Mater, "the great mother" (in Greek megalê means "great, exalted"). This was a season for general feasting and rejoicing in Rome, a time when wealthy Romans invited their friends for such extravagant banquets that the Senate passed a rule limiting such expenditures in 161 BCE. Thus the time provides a fitting setting for Juvenal's satire about living within his means and inviting his friend to a simple meal that is appropriate to his status. This festival was primarily devoted to dramatic performance (ludi scaenici), but chariot races (ludi circenses) were held in the Circus on the last day. [LINK]

The cult of Cybele and Attis was included in the theology of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus (23 September 63 BC – 19 August AD 14. Though it may have been sometimes wilder and more blood thirsty in the past.

From Frazer's The Golden Bough.

The Pre-Easter festival of Attis began on the 22nd of March. A pine tree was cut down and taken into the temple of Cybele where it was treated as if it were Attis. The tree was carried by a guild of tree-bearers, the trunk was swathed like a corpse with woollen bands and decked with wreathes of violets, for violets were said to have sprung from the blood of Attis. An effigy of a young man was tied to the middle of the stem.

23rd March: the ceremony (from Frazer) was mainly 'the blowing of trumpets'.

24th March: was the day of blood, a day in which the Galli drew blood from their limbs with axes and swords. There was frenzy, dancing, cymbals and flutes. The alter was bespattered with blood, and testicles were severed. The testicles were wrapped up and buried in the earth, or placed in subterranean chambers.

It is possible that the pine tree and its effigy of Attis was buried too.

25th March: the vernal equinox, the Hilaria. A day of general rejoicings and public sacrifices, and no one was allowed to show any symptoms of grief or sorrow.there was a solemn procession, in which the statue of the goddess was carried, and before this statue were carried the most costly specimens of plate and works of art belonging either to wealthy Romans or to the emperors themselves. All kinds of games and amusements were allowed on this day; masquerades were the most prominent among them, and everyone might, in his disguise, imitate whomsoever he liked.

26th March: rest!

27th March: a procession to the brook known as the Almo with the image of the goddess cast in silver, her face jagged black stone. The priests washed the statue and any other sacred objects in the stream...

Here is an updated list of the Attis festival from Wiki

[LINK]

Persephone's abduction.

2010-03-03T20:55:00.009Z

The best known version of the abduction of Persephone comes from Ovid -The Metamorphoses- completed in 8AD. Other versions come from Homer and Hesiod.

There are both simple and complex differences between the three versions involving the location of the abduction and the true nature of the bargain or accident that leads to Persephone's fall from the light.

Necroscape.

2010-03-03T20:11:00.005Z

The language used in books about Tibetan Buddhism are written in pseudo-scientific language. It is a curious phenomenon that I think was started by Herbert V. Guenther I'm probably wrong about that, he could simply have been continuing the tradition).

Perhaps Walter Evans-Wentz started it?
Did Madam Blavatsky write like that?
Anyway!

Peter Bishop finished it:
Tibetan Buddhism..."served as an important metaphysical trope for the construction of an alternative spirituality" because of its more general place in Western culture as part of a "geography of utopia". I liked his description of the Bardo Thodol (first translated by Walter Evans-Wentz) as "The Baedeker guide" to the Bardo, in contemporary language -the Lonely Planet guide to where you go after you die. The Bardo Thodal is one of several 'books of the dead', a kind of Necronomicon offering its possessor, a reassuring certainty.

Death is a big deal in Tibetan Buddhism, I original integrated the almost obsessional compulsion to think about death (an essential part of practice) by seeing it as the force, the voltage required to push me into the present tense (to stop dreaming about the past, or future) or as a way to put annoyances into perspective (such as, why get mad at that person who was such a prat? One day they wil be dying...so be nice!)

Unlike the Necronomicon, the Bardo Thodol guarantee's a safe passage through the experience of death and beyond. Yep, it can be seen as the travel guide for the netherworld...

Like the Necronomicon, the Bardo Thodal has come from the East and is full of, if not of names, then full of words of power, but most significantly (for me, anyway) like the Necromomicon the Bardo Thodol has an imaginary -a virtual- aspect that is far bigger and more powerful and far more interesting than the book itself.

To a large extent the content of the Bardo Thodol is eclipsed by its reputation. Its recent history reflects Western myths distilled from a desire for transcendence, of dreams necessary to balance disappointments. Basically its allure comes from its rich language of symbols, something that has been excised from Protestant (especially Calvinistic) religion.

Though The Bardo Thodol and Tibetan Buddhism appears to offer all that hum-drum Christianity can not: a perfect alternative to a clergy untainted by sex-scandals, and a history bathed in the blood of Holy wars, and the atrocities perpetrated by the Inquisition. It is more interesting to ask why similar stories of less than perfect conduct attached to the history of Tibetan Buddhism, are not believed.

But anyway...I need to come up with some questions that I don't believe will be answered.

The hidden women...

2010-02-08T10:40:00.004Z

It strikes me now -now that I sit here, my pomodoro ticking, resolutely determined to start work on the subject of the karmamudra- that Persephone and any woman who has been a karmamudra (in any religious tradition that demands secrecy) have a lot in common.

Both of us (for I count myself as a karmammudra) were abducted by something, though I hasten to add that at least one mythographer makes a good argument that the Persephone story (with its links to the descent/katabasis theme of Innana's descent to the Underworld) is about an abduction a part of us at least needs to take in the service of our own souls.

A Jungian notion that helps to weave the raw edges of a wound together into a scar that speaks of courage and heroism.

So, where do I begin?
Well there is the pomodoro (a kitchen timer -and the pomodoro technique) and there is a pile of books:

Traveller In Space by June Campbell.
Dreams of Power by Peter Bishop.
Passionate Enlightenment by Miranda Shaw.
Sacred Pleasure by Riane Eisler.

and from these books I hope to find a framework to support my narrative...

Yet the word narrative indicates a story rather than a factual piece of work and story is held to be of less value than hard facts, but nevertheless I do not expect to write the definitive guide to Sacred Sex and how to survive it. I see my role in this as narrator: as a witness and as an insider.

A long time...

2010-02-01T15:47:00.002Z

...since I was last here.

Projects.

The Book of Persephone.

A study of contemporary Karmamudras (the word is more correctly kammamudra, but in English karma makes more sense).

A Red Book.

Clever me (not) when I last reorganised this room, my book full of notes for Persephone was mislaid; surely a good argument for doing everything online. It feels intrusive to ask anyone about such experiences, after all secrecy is absolutely central to the role.

I've never spoken to another karmamudra, and I only half qualify. On the other hand, just talking to myself wouldn't be enough for this project.

And finally the Red Book -a la Jung.

So, that's where I am and what you, dear blog, are for.

I'm slightly peeved that all my notes have gone missing, after all I'd argued for the supremacy of paper over i anything, many times...

Namtar...

2009-11-13T16:33:00.002Z

Well I came across a man who asked me if I wished for a teacher, I answered yes and he told me to study the Sumerian text of Gilgamesh (there are about five texts...) the trouble was, he didn't know as much as me about how to run a modification of UnReal; not that that would have been a problem, except he spoke to me as if I didn't know anything about computer game mods.

I was also beginning to suspect that he didn't know anything about Gilgamesh, other than what the original stories told.

And that, my friend is a lesson. You could say that it was my duty to let the subject go, after all this man without doubt knew more about Sumerian mythology than I.

Actually if it had been any subject other than mythology perhaps I would have continued, but mythology is different, it acts as an interface between the world and one's interpretation of it. The stories ebb and flow, the themes repeat through out time, mythology cannot be pinned down nor fixed and categorized.

Mythology is a common resource and weirdly enough, all interpretations are valid.

2009-08-28T17:48:00.001+01:00

The river is changing, we are leaving Arali.

The Eridanus is the next river, and is famously beautiful...full of sun-gold (amber) and I must leave behind me any right to embody Ereshkigal.

Call the ships to port...

2009-08-23T23:13:00.002+01:00

I did find The Kur, it found me and enmeshed me in a dream. Asleep and in my dreams its tentacles threaded through and through me; like grasping a nettle, confidence was the key.

This mp3 isn't how it was.
This mp3 is kind of the movie...

2009-08-22T18:34:00.005+01:00

There are different kinds of rituals or tantra, but the main difference is how many external props are required. Kriya tantra, as I've said elsewhere -probably here!- is what most people think of as a proper ritual.

In fact the highest tantra is without any kind of ritual at all; one simply is within the mandala of the deity instantly.

The preliminary practices of Nundro create enough mental short-cuts to enable this instant stepping over and into the liminal space.

But actually I'm pretty sure that all it takes is confidence.

That doesn't stop me using props though, I like to use real-world objects as a support, hence this necklace!

The green gems remind me of the emerald pillar filled with flame.

It could just be an excuse of course...to buy myself a present!

So, in the imaginary journey the three nights of the dark moon represented the lowest point, the furthest we could go. Beyond here is the fortress of Ganzer just beyond the two pillars. The boat has not turned back, just slipped away up a side river; I've no idea where we are bound for next.

I think it is time to resort to tourist mode.

For me anyway, the serious part of the journey is over; I came here to find what was left of The Kur, if it was a place, a thing or what...it got into my dreams, it wrapped its inky limbs around and through me, I slipped into and out of it, I'm pretty sure that now I know The Kur.

So I think we may go visit temples!
Any at all and all.

At the moment I'm intrigued by the symbol of the hairy man.

I think Robert Bly made a big mistake right at the beginning of his interpretation of Iron John. When Bly tells us that 'the king gave the queen the key' he fails to listen to the meaning of the words; the king gave the key to the queen - the queen did not ask for it, demand it, or even want it- meaning it is the king himself who locks away the wild man.

Bly blames the mother for making the boy feminine, but in fact it is the father who treats his son with aggression should the boy ever dare act in a wild fashion.

What is the king so scared of?

The connection is hair and wild and beast and scapegoat?

The king may tell tales of when he was wild, but now he is king, wildness resides elsewhere; he has no time to swim in the cool water, no time to run in the forest, no time to care about the animals...unlike the original wild man Enkidu and the original king (Gilgamesh) this king does not have the time to honour his dreams; the king of Bly's story has no time at all, to fight with, to love, or to meet as equal with the wild man.

Whose fault is that?
Is it a bad habit left over from the catastrophe of the industrial revolution and world wars?

In Gilgamesh's time civilisation was creating land out of desert, the role of the woman was to civilise the wild man so that he could meet with and become the friend of Gilgamesh.

In our time the king is hell bent on doing the opposite, civilisation is about destroying in the name of profit.

Now the queen, like the wild man, must be confined by his insane laws.

The cage represents contemporary civilisation...

What happened to this king?
Why does he demand that the queen prevent the wild man escaping?
Good question!

Meanwhile, is there any connection between "barbarism" that is "bearded" and "beast" man? In the bible I seem to remember that the outcast Holy man (Elijah) is hairy, his long hair represented 'the letter of the Lord's word'. Was the hairy Holy man a kind of scapegoat, suffering the ignorance -like Cassandra- of those around him, deaf to his wisdom?

If so then the bible version is curious; it takes the side of Elijah (it shows how right he was and how terrible it is to be chosen by God) yet it accepts that he is an outsider. The people who listen to Elijah are also outsiders, at first.

A society creates outsiders; then punitive laws are required to safeguard the population, no one sees that the process of scapegoating is a ritual that solves nothing.

But it is the connection between beast and hair and scapegoat that fascinates me; for in Bly's Iron John, the wild man is beast-like in appearance alone.

In the story the king can't even speak to the wild man for fear of revealing the underlying similarity and humanity of the beast for then the king must accept his own faults and errors, and learn how to love and how to cry...

2009-08-19T16:50:00.003+01:00

All I get from Hamlet's Mill at the moment is that Pythagoras called the planets, "The dogs of Persephone" and "The seven stars of Ursa guide the planets" so Persephone's dogs are like silly home dogs, not the kind of dogs that guide anything?

I've read Hamlet's Mill from cover to cover once...never again. Today I was just skim reading and missing what I was after. Still, I found something else.

I recommend Hamlet's Mill, I like its central theme very much -of a universe that churns out all, both good and ill, but is dislocated slightly (subluxed) and all mythology ultimately derives from the relationship of stars and planets, knowledge of which is essential for navigation, not only astrology.

But, a new theory for me was coming across the idea that there is a connection between the alignment of Saturn, the Earth, the sun and the moon and earthquakes. This was interesting because The Kur seemed to me to be -amongst several other definitions- a geological experience.

The connection between Kur and Saturn is linguistic, kur and kronos, and possibly not to be trusted...OK but lets continue; with regards the earthquake idea, Saturn in his controller of time role, could be defined as the one who twists the universe, causing the earth to crack.

Anyway, old ideas are encoded in image and narratives and humans can't stand believing that they are living within a meaningless system so there is a persuasive argument that the Wisdom of the Ancients is encoded in myth and buildings. In other words, sacred-geometry.

Astrology was very important in Mesopotamia, so it isn't too surprising to see parallels and continuations; it is surprising that they have endured for so many thousands of years though!

The connection between buildings and astral alignments could be regarded as resonance, the harmony of the spheres brought down to earth by imitating in solid geometry the harmonious motions of the astral spheres, so pathways and angles, symbols such as the cube etc are built, placed together to resonate with higher truth.

More likely though, thinking back to the shrine room at Karma Ling the symbolism exists to remind practitioners of things they have not yet been told (read Phaedo, Socrates explains how learning is a kind of remembering). The Vajrayana is a mystery religion though of course it is not sold as such. A mystery religion promises perception of that which is hidden. There will be purification and preparation for induced moments of perception (the introduction by the lama to the student by a sudden and totally unpredictable method) to the nature of mind.

Only a person properly prepared can experience that sudden moment of revelation in which the hidden universe suddenly stands out clearly to the inner mind.

Regardless of this, buildings were built to encapsulate the truth. Generally this big truth is a story of the descent of the soul through the planetary realms into matter, and of immanence. So references to Enoch and the number nine and Various St John's keep on cropping up.

I kind of wish I believed it, it's a bit like going to a party and remaining sober whilst all around me are drunk with delight because Father Christmas is on his way!

But that's another story.

2009-08-17T19:56:00.006+01:00

MS Paint, there must be web-sites dedicated to MS Paint art?

Where was I?
If I cast my mind backwards, I remember Arali, an ash-like plain containing the un-living un-dead; a region of lost souls, buried dreams and fractured hopes.

Everyone has this place within his or her soul. My experience of it was more of a whip-lash, than an ache, it demanded of me that I take a look at my set of lost dreams and do something about them.

There was a grave in Arali, besides and under the shadow of a tall tree, drawn as if by a child (or someone using MS Paint) in effect the weekend and finally today, were all about opening up that virtual grave.

Today, after fetching my brand new pearly black car from the Volkswagen garage I drove to the place represented by this image. The tree remained, but most of the grass was covered over by a car park. The old hospital had been knocked down and replaced by a new building..I drove into the car park, but there was no need for more.

That imaginary grave symbolised a moment in time when my husband gave up on me. As far as he was concerned (and many of you would agree with him) I'd crossed the line. Actually I don't believe that he was right to feel the way that he did, that if he could have listened and understood why what happened happened, he wouldn't carry on with this cutting off-- that image of the burial of the man who trusted me.

Obviously we have been over what happened then many times, and many times I had believed that it was all OK, but when I imagined myself in Arali I saw that it wasn't so.

In the visualisation the Lord of this place is Nergal, Lord of war and disease. I sent off for some specially blended incense and a necklace (why? information not for this blog) and then returned to the boat. Looking down into the water I see that we float over the ghosts being drawn into the underworld, looking back at the river banks I see that the whole land is ablaze, a conflagration as far as the eye can see...in honour of Nergal.

As I watch the flames, The Kur reaches in and touches me and I cry out with the anguish of loosing him...I am abducted by memories of The Kur, by the rush of air and the sense of space spinning away from me and the sense of crossing over, as I spoke my promise to stay by his side.

In the upper world of reality my husband sees The Kur in me...and doesn't like her at all.

A lot of the time I am perplexed as to why my husband thinks that I wont like him, or what he is thinking. In otherwords I don't understand why he uses my voice to make himself feel bad. The syndrome manifests as wishing to please me, he gets into his head that he must do something or else I wont like him, I'll be angry, I'll be upset....this results in him trying to do this thing regardless of how it feels to either of us.

So it becomes true, I do get angry and I do get upset and text books would say, at this point. that I should remain calm, understanding and rational.

Yet the paradox remains; he thinks that I'm angry because he isn't doing it (what ever it happens to be) right, whilst in truth I'm angry because what he is doing doesn't make any kind of sense and I'm expected to be grateful...

Anger or sadness are absolutely human responses, keeping calm, being understanding would feed the madness; it would confirm that his chosen action was right, and that my obvious lack of response (for the only honest response is to refuse to play and to go and do something different) is a purposeful withholding!

The only alternative explanation -to the correct one- would be that I am hard to please...

But no one is pleased by being gently coerced into a role that doesn't fit. This is the equivalent of an elderly grandmother presenting her twelve year old grandchild with a massive brown cardigan for his birthday...there is nothing wrong with that, but why on earth should the child be overjoyed!

What happens before I get angry is that in his mind I become a she-dragon, she who must be obeyed -except I'm not issuing any commands at all- and the reason why this happens to him is hard to fathom, harder to spot until it has gone too far. Because I'm the she-dragon, he tries and tries and tries to 'do it right' regardless of what I actually want or feel which to be honest is never really going to be about him doing things to a passive me. At some point I give in to a kind of despair at the lack of communication, I know that he thinks that he must keep on trying, I can't say 'Stop' because that would be too confrontational and he actually lies by saying that everything is amazing/wonderful/brilliant particularly that I am amazing/wonderful/brilliant, I'm left feeling, my energy drain away and misirible that I've seen this so many times and tried to change it to a better patten and failed.

So then I'm left with anger or tears...which confirms his script that I can't be pleased by anything he does!

In the myth, Ereshkigal was abducted by The Kur, but contemporary myths will tell you that she wanted to go. Unlike Persephone who is innocently picking flowers, Ereshkigal was already dark and never Innocent, and now, down here on the river of ordeals -the Hubur, Ilurugu- I remember that The Kur placed Ereshkigal on the throne; and I think that She manifests in this upper world of reality through the force of The kur, and for a moment in the visualisation, we three are one and the same.

I know that he sees The Kur in me.

Only it isn't the kur at all...he sees his mother.

Let's get this straight, this isn't the oedipal myth as Freud tells it, this is the same stuff but in the Iron John format as told by Robert Bly; the myth of the male who has to dig deep to find his instinctual wildman. Fathers are out at work, and mothers give their sons their first image of what they (as a grown man) will become, only it isn't good. What the boy hears is the voice of his mother complaining to her son about her husband, his father and during this drip-drip of poison the mother makes the boy take a vow.

The boy takes the vow of his own volition- or so he believes. The vow is to not to be like his dad.

OK, that's the story, I'm bringing it to the visualisation of the river. The theory makes a kind of sense but I have to ask; why am I supposed to be like her in his mind, why is her voice being portrayed as coming from me!

Why must he try to send me to sleep, demand passivity, and should I stay awake and speak, why hear any criticism from me as the same, plaintive voice of his mother?

This strikes me as manifestly unfair I jump to the conclusion that it is punishment; but I also see that there is hidden knowledge written in invisible ink on the same bit of paper as the vow.

The secret is, the invisible information is the key.

She told him, 'I only love nice boys' and he could see through her eyes that his father was a bully, ineffectual and weak with his obsolete paranoia, portraying the world as 'dog eat dog' and his stories of how he had to fight so that 'now you don't need to'; so weak and ineffectual that taking the car to the garage was a trial of manhood too far for him -a failed MOT metaphorically equivalent to only having one testicle- all kinds of things could prove how ineffectual he was in lacking manly skillz.

She wrote the vow and told him to sign it. He didn't know that, he thought that it had all been his idea, he thought that the vow -not to be like my dad- meant that he was now a good boy, a better man.

Something I did made him see me as his mother, what?

I think that he saw that he failed me; when he heard my side of the story but more, I think that I crossed the line, not only in reality, but also in his imagination....he blamed me for trying to 'push him' for trying to take from him what was not given freely and he stopped trusting me and so (me being me and unable to let it lie) I set about dealing with what ever psychological knots I could find...during which I made him see that actually he had failed to keep his sacred vow, that actually he was a lot like his dad.

Ah well, here is Robert Bly.

So, if I made him see himself as his dad, by pointing out that in effect though the words had changed, of course some of his attitudes and basic strategies are the same as his fathers.

Worse follows because I speak in their defence...

He says "How can you possibly love me if I'm like my dad" and I say, "who cares why, I just do!"

I make him break his vow, so he experiences his mothers version of reality warping the truth. The mother voice in him whispers in his ear telling him that it can't be true that I love him; his anxiety increases and then he imagines that I'm thinking her thoughts and actually embody her attitudes.

OK, so that's the theory, now give me the solution to this problem!

2009-08-13T16:20:00.006+01:00

By all accounts The Kur is dead; its body covered in a mountain of stones holding back the waters of the flood. All I know is that here the compass spins around in a dissolute kind of way. North/South/East and West have no meaning on the disc of the black sun of Saturn.

The next location are the pillars that guard The Temple; found on card 2 of the tarot, within the lodges of the Freemasons, as the entrance to the temple of Solomon but originally at the sea palace of King Hiram of Tyre.

King Hiram seems to have made a conscious effort to manipulate the archetype embodied in the Phoenician gods, so that he himself appeared to be a flesh and blood incarnation or extension of them. His throne sat before large windows opening upon the sea and crashing waves. Visitors to his palace may well have thought they'd entered the domain of Poseidon himself.

What I love most in this story is the description of one pillar as made of emerald, possibly green glass containing flame:

Solomon's famous Temple, built by Hiram, is so well-known for its pillars of Jachin and Boaz (representing creative force and destructive force, respectively) that one would assume that it was wholly unique. In fact, it was patterned on three temples that existed on Tyre: one for Baal, one for Asarte, and one for Melqart. All three had the duel pillars of Jachin and Boaz. This lead one author, Gerhard Herm, to conclude that the Jachin/Boaz concept central to the qaballah was of purely Phoenician origin, and had no "connection to any part of Jewish liturgy." Similar pillars were found at the Temple of Baal on Cyprus, and in Samaria, Megiddo, and Hazor. The descriptions of such pillars are invariably identical: Jachin is covered with gold and Boaz is covered with some emerald-colored material. Such descriptions also mention that the emerald pillar "shone brightly at night." This bizarre-seeming observation has lead to the speculation that the emerald pillar may have been constructed out of some kind of green glass tube in which there was a flame.
Reference.

Green glass reminds me of the tektite, moldavite sometimes called an "extraterrestrial gemstone" though there are theories about it being pulled from the moon, my favored theory is that moldavite is glass made from the heat of a meteor impact...which leads on into fire and 'the burning man'. You can translate burning as radical self expression and self-reliance, or look for the older antecedents of this image, back down the years to Hercules.

In contemporary mythology Hercules is Melqert/Nergal. Red (Mars) blind with rage, a Lord of the underworld, consort to Ereshkigal, bringer of plague and pestilence. To put Him on is to get 'The Berserker' (as in Doom3) he burns from the inside out.

Reminding me of Cuchulain (Culian's hound- named thus because he killed the great hound of Culain) who was finally driven mad by visions of flame and murder.

Cuculain was famous for his battle-frenzy:

First he quivered all over, and then his body began to twist backwards. His knees and shins shifted themselves to the back, as did the frontal sinews of his neck, where they protruded out like lumps. One eye receded back into his head, and the other bulged out upon his cheek. His mouth widened until it met his ears, and sparks flew out of it. His heart pounded as loud as a great metal drum, and his locks stood up on end, with a spark of flame at the end of every hair. A great horn jutted out of his forehead, and a vast spurt of black blood jetted up from his skull, where it spread out like a cloud of dark gloom over the battlefield.

Or you can watch Iggy...

Back to Hercules-Melqert-Nergal:

When Nergal disappears by setting with the setting sun, he can be absent for many months because Mars can be travelling at the same speed as the sun and thus slow to get away from its light. However, if he sets with the rising sun, he is absent for just a few days before we begin to see him rising just after sunset.

The connection of Saturn and Mars as represented by the two pillars keeps reoccurring. It is a shame that to travel through the pillars without invitation is, if I read the image correctly, to enter death.

The great city of the underworld is Cuthah which had an earthly counter part called unsurprisingly Cuthah.

The Sumerian name was Gudua 'Entrance to the nether world' it is here that Nergal's temple was to be found (in the real world of what is now Tell Ibrahim (not the one in Egypt, though!).

Gudea your quay is a low quay which bestows water, your interior is artfully built, your mace is a ... mace released from heaven, your platform is a lustrous platform spreading over Mešlam (the name of the temple was Mešlam -Nergal was called Meslamtaea, "the one that rises up from Meslam". Your prince, the mighty god, the sovereign of Mešlam, the fierce god of the underworld, the sovereign of Ud-šuš (Sunset), Nergal, Mešlamta-ea, has erected a house in your precinct, and taken his seat upon your dais.

The two pillars refer to an Egyptian symbol called Djew ('Primordial mountain'). The eastern mountain (not a tower, as in the Crowley card) was called Bakhu, the Western mountain was Manu. The way was guarded by two lions protectors of the the sun as it rose and set each day.

The peaks supported the sky, and the symbol, like the Kur, represented heap, a massive, powerful thing.

The Egyptian necropolis was typically located in the mountainous desert and so the djew was also closely associated with the concepts of the tomb and of the afterlife.

But what is beyond the pillars?
Generally it is 'The threshing floor' related to the word 'Halo'.

But for now, the two pillars and the heat...

2009-08-11T16:55:00.001+01:00

The first part of the journey was to 'find' Enki's temple within myself, and to rest there, asking for His blessing. I feel him to be the original, Green Man, Lord of the 'sweet waters', a Lord of purification also...

I spent perhaps a week there, creating the visualisation.

When I felt sure of creating a connection with Him, I (and my companions) imagined the boat moored at The Quay of The Crescent Moon; a beautiful boat made of reeds and ceder wood.

A boat because the sensation of floating is of leaving solid earth, a metaphor almost for a state of mind.

Our journey began with the full moon (August 5th) and it is difficult to unpack the multiple versions I read of The Kur.

So I trust again to my feelings.

My first impression is that The Kur is the oldest thing in this universe. The Kur is Saturnine', there is much gravity and a dissonance between time and space and my trust in solidity. The ground is heavy and I am overwhelmed by a sense of great age and my own mortality; at this moment I am 'depressed' and at each turn I feel inadequate and weighted down by past mistakes, things un-said, things undone.

But this is a vital -indeed 'full of life'- experience, it isn't dead, it is sharp and tough, not peaceful in any way, I am leaden and pushed down...but sinking is what I need to do.

The Kur is old and is alien, so different to Great Mother Tiamat. I am only at its/his? edges.

But now I must let myself sink deep down into the unknown...

2009-08-10T20:24:00.004+01:00

It is hard to go down, but harder to stay up here on the good ground, breathing the clear air.

But the water is darkening, tainted with oil; the old story of Marduk rending Tiamat apart and fashioning the earth and sky from her body has been repeated again and again.

Now the life-blood of civilisation is distilled from her body. The bodies of myriad sea creatures, once the mind and body of Tiamat, paid for in lies and damnation pulled up from the earth and cooked into crude-oil and cracked into petrol.

Iraq, mother of civilisation has been over run, the sweet waters are lost deep underground, sweet water tainted with salt tears; a misery of shock and awe.

I ride the story-currents into the field of Saturn.

Saturn is time, gravity waves ripple in uncontrolled and un-predictable ways, time is the matrix supporting form and I'm pulled downwards.

Somewhere ahead are the two pillars...

2009-08-10T19:06:00.002+01:00

Cronos and Chronos, one belongs to Hesiod, and one to the Romans.
[LINK]
I'm reminded of Kenneth Graham and the shadow tree.

Not being a Cabbala kind of person, the Klipoth tree didn't make any more or less sense to me..last time I was here.

And Kur becomes care and woe, turns again into spider grandmother's web, ceardroia.

During the Anthesteria -a wine festival and Halloween combined- the cares become Carians or Kares meaning foreigners, personification or mixed up with ancestral spirits. The anthesteria, a flower festival, an unsettling time remembering a matricide (Orestes) a sense of defilement, the silent wine drinking, the masked strangers entering the town and finally the sacred marriage, which took place in the sanctuary within the marshes.

"The woman offers the unspeakable sacrifices for the city; she saw what as a non-Athenian woman she ought not to have seen. A woman such as this entered the room which no other of all the many Athenians enters save only as wife of the 'King'. She administered the oath to the Venerable Ones who attend the sacred acts, she was given to Dionysus as wife, she conducted for the city the ancestral practices towards the gods, many sacred, secret practices."

Saturn is the black sun.
Order-disorder, the deeper rhythm and the spinning castle (caerdroia) of disorientation.

A Saturnine, senex archetype casts its shadow on me, I'm heavy and leaden, weighed down.

2009-08-09T18:32:00.002+01:00

On the subject of my play...one question remains unanswered here.

Did writing an alternative telling of a bad day do me any good?

I wrote the play and then read it within the shrine room. I sent copies to the other's involved, I entered into a very short dialogue with the person who had used the phrase 'Forces of mara' as a description of my pregnancy, in which I said what I needed to say.

Dear D,
Thank you for your reply, you ask me 'was the symbolic gesture helpful'?

A symbolic gesture is used to re-create balance, and balance is preferable to imbalance. The imperative to keep silence was and always will be something I disapprove of.

But I wish to reassure you that you never behaved in an insensitive or unhelpful manner. That may not be absolutely true in Gilgamesh's case, but that's nothing to do with me now. There is no need to apologise for your unawareness. The experience of motherhood may not turn everyone into a realist, but the truth of birth and death highlights the foolishness of abandoning what is, in return for dreams of elsewhere.

It may or may not be true that you once described to Gilgamesh, in an attempt to make him feel better, external realities as 'forces of mara'. I got the impression that you did....unfortunately for him, things such as love and the impulse to take care of ones child are hardwired and are not distractions of the material world acting in opposition to the spiritual.

As to scholarship? The Epic of Gilgamesh is hardly an obscure text, and the concept of the Temple of Inanna as described by Herodotus has become a living myth woven out in brilliant colours within the webs of the Internet. I have a connection, that's all.

I set the context of my play as pre-Pythagorean (pre-Orphic) and Gilgamesh (in the play) has been struck by a new philosophy (Orphic) that promises a way to paradise. The original story of Gilgamesh deals primarily with the impossibility of immortality.

The writers or writer known as Homer, wrote of life and death in the same context as the ancient Sumerian myths (which include The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Descent of Inanna, Atrahasis etc). When Achilles (Homer- The Iliad) chooses fame over long life, and latter (when his shade is summoned from Hades to speak to Odysseus) Achilles is using a pre-Orphic interpretation of the impossibility of a happy existence after death. My character -Shamhat- represented the pre-Orphic tradition.

Sometime around the sixth century BC a concept of a good existence after death, of Elysian fields, of guardian angels meeting one after death -just so long as one had the correct passwords and initiations- entered Greek mythology, and elsewhere. It is easier to label the change as 'Orphic' referring to various texts describing the geography of the other world, and the story of Orpheus; more correctly once could call the new philosophy Pythagorean or Platonic.

Tibetan Buddhism is a mixture of many influences, the Greek and Zoroastrian influences are easiest to see, I also see that the shamanistic elements hover on the verge of decay, but from my point of view a declaration of my rejection of the role this religion demands of women, was a necessity. Ultimately for me, the actual re-balancing had to take place in the shrine room at Karma Ling.

That is done, the silence is fractured, if not broken.

Your part in this was to engage with the different interpretations of realities as you chose.

Now I can never tell if I'm way too much when I write like this, I can't tell how mad I seem, I can't tell how unfeminine and thus unacceptable it is to set my thoughts down. I am always curious why people don't engage with me when I do it though. I am certain that if it were me being accused of anything at all I wouldn't do the 'Don't feed the trolls' thing; I'd either be ashamed and say so, or defend my position. If someone said that they wanted to come round and do a play in my living room (and they could string words together....I'd give it a go!).

Often I think that for an apprehensive person (I am totally apprehensive about everything) I'm really quite brave. I mean sometimes it seems to me that the psychic equivalent of stirring up a hornets nest is one of the better options in this life!

So, did it help?
Yes, it did. I know that when Gilgamesh said, 'Perhaps it was too soon' or some such, I took great joy in telling him the truth (I did a kind of Buddhist one upmanship thing!) that no, it was of course the perfect time for it couldn't have been any other way!

The words also gave me great pain...but that is how it should be, the wound was deep.

In short, all has been said.
I am glad that I did it.

Silance solves nothing.

Python...

2009-08-08T16:47:00.006+01:00

The Kur is sometimes defined by Kramer as the empty space between the earth's crust and the primeval sea.

The question is, how can this space intrude upon the workings of this world, what form can it take and why?

In the story I used to provide a starting point for this journey, Enki sets out upon his boat (beautifully woven reeds and perfumed ceder wood) to 'do battle' with The Kur. This particular story fragment is quoted sometimes as a part of the epic of Gilgamesh but is more often included with a story called, 'The Huluppu tree'.

From Samuel Noah Kramer there is this translation:

"My brother, after in days of yore the fates had been decreed, after abundance had sated the land, after An had carried off heaven, after Enlil had carried off earth, after Ereshkigal had been carried off into the nether world as its prize -- after he had set sail, after he had set sail, after the father had set sail for the nether world, against the king, the small were hurled, against Enki, the large were hurled, its small stones of the hand, its large stones of the dancing reeds, the keel of Enki's boat, overwhelm in battle like an attacking storm, against the king, the water at the head of the boat, devours like a wolf, against Enki, the water at the rear of the boat, strikes down like a lion.

Reference.

The Kur in this case is related to the river, which brings me to the subject of pythons...or rather the serpentine nature of rivers and the connection between Enki and Apollo.

Perhaps it doesn't seem appropriate to mix what is understood from Greek mythology with similar themes found in Sumerian/Akkadian stories? My logic is that as Greek myths, philosophy and mathematics contain much that came originally from Mesopotamia, so too there are common meanings within the symbolism.

In Greek mythology the python, as a serpent is an uncanny creature, it is legless, lives in holes under the ground and sheds its skin -rejuvenates itself- the Greeks made a connection between the snake and the spinal cord, as if there is a continuity between our origin -human as a development of snake. The serpentine spinal cord was perhaps understood by the Greeks as we understand the pentadactyl limb as connecting our evolution from fishy ancestors, or our failure to be snake enough...

The snake is autochthonic, it grows from the soil. Heroes, who are buried in the earth and watch over the land can manifest as snakes.

One connection between Apollo and Enki is oracle, both have cult-sites that are places of oracle. Apollo's oracle was Delphi; in poetry known as 'Pytho'. Its priestess was 'The Pythia'.

The connection between Enki and the house of prophesy is at the end of these lines:

After the water of creation had been decreed,
After the name hegal (abundance), born in heaven,
Like plant and herb had clothed the land,
The lord of the abyss, the king Enki,
Enki, the lord who decrees the fates,
Built his house of silver and lapis lazuli;
Its silver and lapis lazuli, like sparkling light,
The father fashioned fittingly in the abyss.

The (creatures of) bright countenance and wise,

coming forth from the abyss,
Stood all about the lord Nudimmud;
The pure house be built, he adorned it with lapis lazuli,
He ornamented it greatly with gold,
In Eridu he built the house of the water-bank,
Its brickwork, word-uttering, advice-giving,
Its... like an ox roaring,
The house of Enki, the oracles uttering.

Back to Delphi; in the Homeric hymn to Apollo "Who comes from afar" Gaia/Earth or Themis/correctness -in a religious sense- had owned the site where the oracle was to be.

The actual oracle seems to be high up on a mountain, anyone wishing to consult the priestess would first of all come to the sacred Castalian Spring which wells up in a ravine in the Phaedriades mountains. All pilgrims ritually bathed here before entering the sacred precinct. Murderers had to bathe their entire body, while everyone else only had to wash their hair. It once supplied two fountains; both now destroyed.

So, a similarity with the rituals of Mikvah and Wudu...

When Apollo came to claim the site of Delphi, he found it guarded by a huge snake. Apollo kills the she-serpent by shooting arrows into her body. As her massive body decays under the sun she becomes Pythesthai, meaning 'rotted'.

Latter the name of the place, Pytho means place of rotting. The question of stench leads on to an account by Strabo (64 BC-25 AD)who wrote:

They say that the seat of the oracle is a cavern hollowed deep down in the earth, with a rather narrow mouth, from which rises a vapor that produces divine possession. A tripod is set above this cleft, mounting which, the Pythia inhales the vapor and prophesies.

Ethylene and methane are known to rise from geological fault lines beneath Delphi, which would account for the smell and the method of divination.

For a tour! [LINK]

So, the connections between Apollo and Enki are sacred wells, prophesy (wisdom) and finally the serpent. Chronologically it would be so much simpler if The Kur had been The Absu, and Enki's dominion over the Absu being something like the story of Apollo and the rotting snake (who had care of cruel Typhon, 'a plague to men': Pytho+Typhon=Python, that's one theory anyway). But the Absu is 'far water' and his mate is Tiamat (salt sea-mother of us all):

The Enuma Elish begins:

When above the heavens did not yet exist nor the earth below, Apsu the freshwater ocean was there, the first, the begetter, and Tiamat, the saltwater sea, she who bore them all; they were still mixing their waters, and no pasture land had yet been formed, nor even a reed marsh...

There is one version in which Ninurta is persuaded by his personal weapon, Sharur, to go off and kill The Kur.

Ninurta succeds and so finds out that The Kur controls the primordial water. When The Kur has been killed, salt water floods the land or the sweet water fails to irrigate the land...and the solution to this problem is to build a dam over the corpse of The Kur.

Confusingly and not at all to the point, the third killer of The Kur is Inanna who for reasons as logical as that of Sharur no doubt, describes The Kur as some kind of volcano:

"Against the standing place of the gods it has directed its terror, In the sitting place of the Anunnaki it has led forth fearfulness, Its dreadful fear it has hurled upon the land,The 'mountain,' its dreadful rays of fire it has directed against all the lands."

But, if I go back to Apollo, Python, Enki and his journey down the river to The Kur it seems to me that The Kur is to be found in water, fire and stone. The Kur is able to possess non-animate objects, a kind of poltergeist rather than as I would interpret it; geological forces.

The meaning of setting out to kill The Kur is to set ones will against the elements.

So although translations say that Ereshkigal was carried away by The Kur, it isn't reasonable to visualise The Kur as only a river, or a force of nature.

There is a similarity between the stories of Apollo and the Python/ Enki and the river journey, but The Kur seems to be an animate force within the water and the stone. Perhaps as the Python represents older autocthonic forces, so The Kur likewise represents a different form of order.

I am reminded of the dragon-paths in geomancy, the lung-Mei which brings me back to The Black sun...and there I stop!

Idkura.

2009-08-08T16:41:00.003+01:00

2009-08-05T20:57:00.003+01:00

A most gloriously glowing invocation of a setting sun cluttering the sky-line and the open waters ahead with golden sprites. A snowfall of light, and intoxication of colour.

A sensation of all solidity falls away into a dissolution of sound...

For me half of a journey is finding the right music; I think it is the kind of skill other people apply to shopping, or some other ordinary world activity that defeats me!

The SouncClick mp3 and the concept of starting a journey by boat reminds me of
.:. Olias of Sunhillow by Jon Anderson .:.

2009-08-05T15:47:00.002+01:00

We approach the water's edge where the boat is moored a thousand years each step. On the dark waters a promise of flame hidden inside the sun coloured, sun dried reeds.

2009-08-04T11:36:00.004+01:00

Tibetan Buddhism has different kinds of practice which require different levels of retreat. Kriya Tantra is what most people expect: rules about purity, mental and physical conduct, rules about silence and eating. The school or church version of prayer as 'eyes closed, hands together' and exhortations to be peaceful and good for a few minutes lays the foundation for acceptance of this outer conduct as proof of an authentic religious practice.

On the day before I actually decide to step aboard the imaginary boat of my imaginary journey I'm reminded of learning how to 'do' a retreat . The essential point for me as a beginner was to determine my own boundaries and then to keep them. The actual nature of the practice wasn't important, all practices could be used as part of a retreat. So it meant writing a time table, considering what kinds of restrictions could be used and then deciding exactly what I was going to do.

I soon learned that to actually get the amount of time necessary to accomplish a practice, I couldn't be so inflexible. I assume that this is the great teaching of Kriya tantra...to force the student to give up being so rigid!

Nevertheless, when people came to the center for a 'retreat' then we, the ignoble sangha, would revert to what was expected. Here I learnt that at least 90% of being a monk or nun was to fulfill other people's expectations; to keep the door open to the dream that the monastic sangha is a different species, and Nirvana a real possibility.

I also learnt that to practice full time, without withdrawing from the world was mainly a case of deciding to 'step over' and to maintain two realities at once. A conscious choice to reinterpret the whole world as a shrine room.

But a journey belongs to the realm of depth psychology [LINK] . There is no promise of becoming wiser or enlightened, only of fulfilling the the imperative of the Delphic oracle to Know Thyself.

The method is to imagine that you have decided to take a journey; instead of booking time off and leaving the everyday of work and people, cooking, eating... you imagine the events as a continual rolling-by, a fantasy that exists in parallel with everyday experiences.

The sheer ordinariness of this method may not seem special, or clever, or weird enough to be of any value to the soul, unless you have noticed just how special, clever and kaleidoscopically weird so called ordinary life actually is. The result of engaging with mythic elements is an enrichment of the iconic vocabulary of the soul, as fantasy is primarily a language of image, and myth is the language of the soul. Fantasy clothes the myth in meaning.

So...where did I get to?
I was trying to work out the meaning of the Sacred pool within the temple, and I wanted to use it!

Eridu, a town very much like any city anywhere today; a mixture of religions, people, problems; pollution, poverty, great wealth and always everything changing, a sense of optimism and movement. The City temple is dedicated to Enki and I have been living there for perhaps a week, trying to get to know this deity, to feel his presence and to understand where he is to be found in the 21st Century.

Abraham (of Abrahamic -Monotheistic- religions) came from Mesopotamia, either from Edessa or Ur and was 'sent by God' to Canaan. His covenant or contract with God was a promise of world domination in return for circumcision, and worship.

I guess that Abraham perceived God as a synthesis of the Gods he already knew of (who were already long gone from the earth) so Enki with dominion over land and sea, and Enlil who had dominion over air and supported the earth, Nergal with his plague arrows were combined into a sky-dwelling god who rules earth, air and sea, and has a taste for battle. Many bible stories have their antecedents in Sumerian mythology (most famous being Atrahasis)so it is logical to assume that the concept of purification as used in Abrahamic religions provides information about how the ritual bath within the temple of Enki was used?

The female element of the composite God is almost lost from the bible. At best She becomes the Gnostic Sophia or the Shekina (the Divine presence), but the bible clearly relegates The Queen of Heaven to either a sexless virgin Mary or elevates Her to 'The Whore of Babylon'.

The concept of sexuality as a dirty activity is embedded in the English language. I found it very strange indeed to hear that women once expected to be churched after a period of uncleanness following childbirth; I had of course already absorbed unquestioningly the concept that menstruation was so repulsive that it must remain unspoken of!

From Leviticus:

Speak unto the children of Israel, saying: If a woman be delivered, and bear a man-child, then she shall be unclean seven days; as in the days of the impurity of her sickness shall she be unclean. And in the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. And she shall continue in the blood of purification three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification be fulfilled. But if she bear a maid-child, then she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her impurity; and she shall continue in the blood of purification threescore and six days.

In Church of England Christianity, as I said, the Holy water has been shrunk down to a font and used only to baptise babies. I have no idea if women are still churched or not?

The Jewish and Muslim communities provide much more information about purification and the ritual bath (which was indeed a part of a temple dedicated to Enki). Washing is Wudu (Muslim) and the bath is Ghusul. It is essential to have a bath before prayer if any of these apply:

1 Discharge of semen in any circumstances.
2. Sexual intercourse
3. Menses (Hajdh)
3. Blood discharge after childbirth (Nifaas)

The way of washing:

1. Wash hands upto the wrists;
2. Clean the of the private parts also know as Istinja and remove the major Uncleanliness, if any, from the body.
3. Perform Ablution (Wudu).
4. Pour some water and rub the whole body. Pour water again over the whole body, three times. Then rinse the mouth and sniff water into the nostrils.

The water must be:

rain water; spring or well's water; stream, river/sea water; melted snow; hail-water; water in a large pond, or a big tank...
[LINK]

The Jewish ritual is the Mikvah, but added to the Jewish interpretations I read, sex has not been relegated to a discharge or excised from the story. The Mikvah is linked to the sacred marriage (Heiros Gamos). Sexual abstinence is a part of Mikvah:

When the couple gets together again, they appreciate each other even more. And the sacrifice, the performing of the mitzvah, takes their physical relationship to a spiritual level. [LINK]

In keeping with the Absu...

The bottom layer is pure, natural rain water. It is called "live water" and is a symbol of rebirth and the divine flow of creation. On top of the cold rain water is another pool of hot water, where the actual bathing takes place. The two waters are not supposed to mix so the rainwater can maintain its pristine quality. They "touch" in an opening between the two waters, but they don't blend. The bathing water is changed frequently, so it is hygienic. The rain water, which has never been contaminated, remains unaltered and intact.

So, where does this leave me?

I need to enter the Holy water. It is meant to be Absu water...so not salty (even though Muslim ritual allows that). I need a bath after menstruation and I should abstain from sex until after the bath. Right, today is the second day of my period, so I'm in full flow...so how do I add to this the Heros Gamos aspect?

So a woman submerges herself in water, in the source of life.

When she emerges, it's as though she is reborn, and the divine energy of creation can flow again. It's a renewal, a spiritual cleansing.

Hmmm, seems to me that today is totally the wrong day for me to imagine myself getting into such water. Sounds far more correct to get into the water when I return.

Best thing I can do is clean the bathroom and consider my options.

2009-08-01T09:04:00.003+01:00

Last week I started to think about a water palace.

This image of the sea-house came from here: [LINK] the magazine it comes from is full of pretty things that probably wouldn't work for long...but I'm happy to to consume vast quantities of eye-candy.

This last few days the water concept has been refined somewhat, starting with the church font.

Protestant churches in my experience are reminiscent of bus shelters, they are empty, cold, impersonal. They are structures with a function, but my relationship to both the form and function is as a mythographer, never as an insider. The eagle on the lectern seems to me one of the legion's lost eagles dating back to the Roman origin of the church. The eagle -the aetos dios- belongs to Zeus, a messenger bird whose appearance augured victory to Zeus in the war with the Titans. It has no place in contemporary Christian mythology (in which Christ is a Gandhi-like figure, totally uninclined to smite anyone with the might and majesty -the 'death from above- the eagle is supposed to represent).

The font I saw yesterday was in a church whose history reflects the un-Holy (but traditional)mixing of church/state and power; it had once been Catholic, forced to be re-configured to be Protestant and then, when the Catholic mod' was allowed to run once more (once it had been death to celebrate a Catholic mass) it remained illegal to convert the church back to Catholic...

A font is a sad thing compared to the shrines set up around and over the Hagiasma. Here is a description:

According to Callistos's description, the church was of rectangular plan, with entrances at each of the four sides. Part of the church was built underground and two marble stairways, with 25 steps each, led down to the holy spring. The richly decorated church had a gilded ceiling, fine wall paintings and icons. Of the wall paintings, Callistos mentions the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, the Transfiguration, the Crucifixion, and the Appearance of Christ to the Holy Women, the Ascension and Pentecost. He also refers to two icons depicting miracles, probably with scenes from the main subject of the Zoodochos Pege.

A marble fountain, from which water flows, occupies the centre of the icon. Above, the Theotokos is holding Christ who makes the sign of blessing. Two angels hovering over Her head carry a scroll inscribed with the verse:
"Hail! That you bear. Hail! That you are".
Around the fountain the emperor and many ailing people are shown, in a variety of postures, being sprinkled with Holy Water. According to the tradition, a small pond with fish is painted to the side. Actually, it is the fish that have given its present name to the locality, for Balikli in Turkish means "a place with fish".

But things move on..

"Bless your computers with holy water and place a blessed St. Benedict medal on the monitor to call to mind the dangers of the internet. If you use a computer for work, holy water can help to sanctify the tool you use to earn a living [LINK].

I was not, nor will I ever be baptised. But it seems correct to find clear, fresh and more to the point sweet water and be immersed as a symbolic gesture.

...it was anciently believed that springs, wells, streams, rivers and lakes drew their water from and were replenished from a freshwater ocean which lay beneath the earth in the abzu (apsû) or engur... The abzu was the particular realm and home of the wise god Enki (Ea), his wife Damgalnuna (Damkina) and his mother Nammu, and was also inhabited by a number of creatures subordinate to him...The underworld was located even further down, beneath the abzu.
[LINK]

I started to think of swimming in a pool or river; a particularly terrifying thought for all kinds of cultural reasons!

Slightly off the point -I like this re-telling of the story [LINK].

So I looked for locations to swim in: Go to, The Outdoor Swimming Society. But I don't think that that is the answer, what I really want to do is to go somewhere very secluded and quietly and take off all my clothes, get into the water and then straight out! But that wont happen either (every square inch of Britain is covered by cameras or dog-walkers).

So that leaves me with sacred sites, pagan and Christian, though apparently there is a verse in the Koran that says:

"the throne of God was built on water" [LINK]

I thought of Swallowhead spring [LINK], but perhaps it is too feminine...the river Kennet is the river Cunnit (according to Stuckeley).

So far the best idea is to go to Lush, fill the bathroom with candles and get into lots of hot and outrageously perfumed water. It isn't very adventurous, but we still have our kids to consider! Where we go, they go, even a National Trust house with the promise of cake is dismissed as totally boring compared to playing Battlefield online.

The last link is Speedwell cavern [LINK] it may be a very poor experience indeed, but symbolically it fits.

Towards the quay...

2009-07-30T23:03:00.002+01:00

I didn't think that I was taking this journey very seriously but this mp3 convinces me otherwise. Somewhere in there you can hear the water, thick and oily, dark and viscous, for this is the land where people have fought and died for petroleum. If you look into the river you are see kaleidoscopic memories, traces and shards, shattered fragments of 'shock and awe' and hear the echos of death.

There is blood in the water.

Further out under the gathering clouds the water becomes rougher, deeper, colder..the river of ordeals.

The boat stands ready at the quay, it isn't time to embark yet.

2009-07-28T11:38:00.007+01:00

The Amduat followed on from The Egyptian Book of The Dead, and was itself followed by The Book of Gates. The version I used belongs to 'The New Kingdom', somewhere between 1550 and 1070 BC.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is dated 2800 – 2600 BC, and so basically the mythology I'm using for a trip into The Kur is much, much older than that of The Amduat, yet it isn't impossible to imagine that there are similarities in structure between the two journeys, for example the ambiguity between underworld as a chthonic, subterranean place or as located within the sky.

The main difference is that no one has left a definitive description of what The Kur actually is...there are descriptions, but of different things all classed as Kur.

Following Enki's example I'm assuming that The Kur can be entered by boat even though The river of the underworld pulls people from the living realm to the land of the dead, as Gilgamesh crossed over the water's of death, so the boat is a symbol of protection. One name for the river is Id-Kura; Id means River, with Kur, meaning underworld, and ra meaning flood. Another name is Id-lu-rugu, meaning river of ordeals.

It was understood in some myths that the river would lead into a cave and from there the river would lead directly into the underworld.

The Jungian interpretation of the Amduat is that it represents an inner psychic process of transformation and renewal; that the person with courage to embark upon the perilous journey will come conscious of the guiding function of the inner sun god.

I can't say that that was my intention, or the result of my journey; instead I learnt that it was important to use an imaginary version of myself for the journey (exactly the same way I perceive myself in a computer game -there, but not there, vulnerable but ultimately safe) and secondly that by entering this journey realm other classes of beings would see me.

I do not have a better way of putting it, English doesn't have words for this kind of sensation.

Regardless, I do not find classification and taxonomy of flowers or animals of any use in my everyday life, so nor do I care to elaborate upon the nature or otherwise of real and virtual ghosts. The remedy for that particular feeling was to acknowledge, then to put up a barrier between myself and it/them.

In this case the Sumerian term Gidim starts to seem relevant, the Gidim are left-overs, entities trapped between realms and the traditional protection against them was blessed earrings!

For more ghosts: [LINK]

Following Jung I consider that all people have similar pattens of behaviour in the outer world, and likewise within we share a common archetypal structure that regulates behavioural drives. The archetypes are a GUI (like icons on your PC- graphic user interface) they speak in images and provide both direction and meaning. Tarot cards provide a traditional interface -speaking to the user of things within the user's own mind- mythology provides whole strings of meanings to tease out undifferentiated layers of thought and feeling. A good film or book leads half-recognised aspects of oneself into the light and provides new meanings.

But a journey to The Kur is not like the first hour of The Amduat. There is no gate, metaphorical or otherwise, there is no moment of opening for there is nothing to open. Nor has there ever been any kind of invitation to enter (unlike The Amduat that specifically states that the journey may be made by both the living and the dead).

The three of us brave or foolish enough to embark upon this journey are in Enki's temple. The boat trip commences when the moon becomes full 5th August.

Here is a final authoritative description of Enki's temple:
Barbar Temple.

Barbar Temple spring, originally uploaded by rugbybarb.

Two tells near the village of Barbar covered the largest temple yet found in Bahrain and a smaller neighbouring temple. The Barbar Temple is actually three temples, one succeeding the other on the same site.
The two oldest temples are terraced with a central platform above an outer oval platform, an architectural feature comparable with Sumerian temples.
The Barbar Temples, built in the third and second millennia BC, are among the most remarkable architectural survivals of the ancient world and are without parallel in the region. Originally discovered and excavated by the successive Danish Expeditions which explored Bahrain's archaeological sites during the 1950's and 60's, the temple site was re-excavated in 1983 by the Department of Antiquities and Museums.
Temple I The earliest temple was built on a rectangular platform approximately 25m long and 16 to 18m wide. It was originally constructed on a bed of clean sand which appears to have been consolidated by a layer of blue clay. This was covered by a second layer of clean sand. At the foundation of Temple I offerings were deposited in the clay core of the temple terrace. They consisted of dozens of clay goblets found in separate groups, each containing seven beakers which were broken and buried within the foundations of the terrace. Else where copper objects were deposited in small heaps or singly. All these things seem to have been made especially as offering. In the south-westem comer of this early temple steps led down to a square-built well. The central terrace was preserved in its full height,2.0 metres, with the remains of trapezoid shrine in the center and adjoining rooms.
AR the distinctive cult features present in Temple 2 were already established: the subterranean shrine, the temple well and the oval sacrificial court. Unlike the two later temples constructed above it, this first one was built from local Bahraini stone.
Temple 2 is the best preserved of the three Barbar Temples, with retaining walls and terraces stiff in their full height and the cult places intact. In its first stage the oval terrace revetinent was built in local stone, but after an enlargement it was built in limestone which must have been carried by boat from nearby Jidda island where stone was hewn out by hand and carefully dressed into remarkably neat masonry blocks. The skill with which this task was carried out may be clearly seen in the temple walls and especially around the sacred well. The cult ceremonies that took place in the temple are suggested by the sacrificial court, the altars and the shrines. A double circular altar and an offering table stood in the center of the shrine. To the south were three cult stones shaped like the anchors of the merchant ships, although the central one bore a protruding animal head, like the altars depicted on the seals. A temple treasure lay in the stone frame pit in the north-east comer. The central terrace was crowned by a shrine built of cut stone with stone paving; smaller buildings clustered around it covering the rest of the terrace. The wafls were robbed of most of their stones but the ground plan of the shrine and of the neighbouring building can be discerned. There were no buildings on the outer oval terrace but altars and cult symbols were visible. A plinth with recessed stone cylinder lay to the south and a plinth with three pillars was situated near the north-west wall. A double row of plinths for cult objects lined both sides of the stairs from the upper terrace. On each of these plinths were two square holes lined with bitumen and sheet copper nailed to wood. Here may have stood copper mounted poles with the emblems of gods, so often seen on the stamp seals, or, perhaps, wooden statues. From the central terrace a ceremonial stairway led to the subterranean shrine where water cult ceremonies took place. Halfway down the stair was a portal, and from there the stair was roofed. The rich natural spring which filled the pool probably accounts for the siting of the temple at Barbar. Water poured from a perforated stone jar beside a semicircular stone font at the threshold of a dry chamber near the basin. From the comers of the shrine deep stone built channels led the water to the surrounding fields and gardens. This remarkable underground shrine is interpreted as a symbolic abzu the abode of Enki, the god of wisdom and of all freshwater. The abzu was believed to be the abyss or freshwater ocean upon which the whole world rests. Such temple abzus are mentioned in cuneiform texts in Mesopotamia. East of the temple lay an oval sacrificial court connected with a central temple platform by a paved ramp and a staircase. The floor of the court was covered with ashes and the bones of cattle and sheep, presumably sacrificed animals.
Temple III In use until the early centuries of the second millennium, was larger than its predecessors. Two circular offering tables of finely cut stone with a low altar between them still stand in the middle of the courtyard. Note the three standing stone blocks pierced with a round hold. It is thought that these were tethering points for the sacrificial animals. To give you some idea of size, the third temple's terrace was probably about 30 metres square.

2009-07-22T10:15:00.003+01:00

The meaning of being within the temple of Enki is two-fold, it has two aspects: real and virtual.

Psychologically speaking (real) *being in the presence of Enki* is awareness of the flow of 'libido' or 'life-force', one's own sense of inner strength/ control/ power. Enki and his temple represent personal respect of these inner capacities.

Imagining the temple is both real and virtual. In real terms visualising strengthens, possibly by creating more neural connections, thus physically increasing the amount of brain able to evoke the sense of inner trust?!

Putting imaginary offerings on an imaginary shrine and asking an imaginary aspect of oneself for blessing is virtual (choosing to create a state of mind) . The temple is a state of mind in which it can feel as if this is actually happening.

Another 'real' aspect is to look at the connections between the information out there at the moment, and where it fits in now. Oddly I see that there are a whole raft of beliefs about Enki to do with the planet (or not) of Nibiru. I see parallels between the myths of Enki and Egyptian myths, and how the stories have warped and changed into bible stories. A belief in 'The Temple' is central to Jewish 'mythology, understanding this helps one to understand other things and on and on and on....

The virtual aspect is to *journey* in the shamanic sense. Like having the console in a game, you chose to use states of mind (like mapping, you create a mental landscape complete with music, textures and entities) A shamanistic state of mind is analogous to playing a PC game, you chose to let yourself believe.

All that is required to get to the temple is a desire to do so.

The key point is that journeying is opposite (mentally) to meditation. In meditation all images and impressions are regarded as ultimately meaningless. In a journey, all things become the *path* , in other words all things become meaningful (illuminated by the inner sense of being within the temple).

It is a kind of madness (or would be if it went on for years, rather than just for the duration) so boundaries are important. The journey flickers on and off, it isn't all the time -though it runs in the background- so it is sensible to allocate a set time period for each stage.

The shamanistic aspect *at the moment* is to simply step over the limen and to believe in the temple.

2009-07-20T21:28:00.002+01:00

Last Thursday I caught the 8:10 am train to London. In theory I had a reserved seat, in reality the number on my ticket failed to correspond to any numbers I could see in the carriage.

I stood between carriages until Coventry, and then tried to find a seat once more.

Eventually I spotted a tiny seat that managed not to be by a window, and sat down. A large business man flopped down beside me, opened the table up, got out his notebook and then continued to huff and sigh as he manipulated one phone, one Blackberry and his PC to fill in a spread-sheet. I couldn't make out if it was about a bank, or a football team!

Though I did in fact have my Zen stone in my bag, I was convinced that I'd left it at home. There was just my book of Sumerian mythology, keeping my mind out of the horror of business horror.

This track recalls the feeling.

The Kur. An invitation.

2009-07-18T18:40:00.006+01:00

I am still unsure where to start on a topic so big as the history of Persephone. I'm still trying to get an overview before committing myself to any kind of structure; at the moment if there is a structure, I can't see it!

On my journey's through the noosphere I came across someone else fascinated by The Kur, his essay about time, brought one or two new ideas to mind. The Kur was responsible for abducting Ereshkigal, and Ereshkigal is a kind of pre-cursor to Persephone.

So I wrote to him, here is the letter:

Hi, thank you for the extra information. I'm not too keen on getting into details about specifics yet. I'm interested in the nature of the journey before we begin.

I study mythology as if it is a framework, a matrix upon which cultures, towns, families and individuals divide out the types of experiences we are all subject too. I have a pull towards the Jungian stuff, but I remain unconvinced.

Psychology is (at its best and worst) another kind of mythology accidentally and purposefully used to divide up and to explain the ripples (immediate experience) on the surface of 'the great below' (inexplicit feelings gifted to us via our culture and human nature).

Historically the great stories of the past; the tales of Gilgamesh or Troy, live on regardless of the amount of truth or fiction at their heart....for instance the tale of Gilgamesh was probably sold in a truncated form to be bought by story-tellers, who learnt the outline and then added drama (local references and immediate concerns) in the telling.

We take and we spin the story onwards through time, so the squirrel slipper once worn by Cinderella reconfigures via mistranslation into glass. In my re-telling Gilgamesh, in his quest for immortality, could find himself at the shores of Alcor, staring at the ice-tanks of the sleeping dead...and smashing, with a howl of rage, either his dreams or his bank account -Gilgamesh dying of poverty, all his money wasted on a promise of life renewed, his credit card washed out of his hand by a serpentine trickle of fate..

Digging down into the rich earth, following the diverse and diverging roots in the hope of finding a single, glittering gem, symbolising the first, the original...may or may not be possible. It isn't something I do, I'm more interested in how the tree grows and how the branches are used to build fantastic structures, but I acknowledge the importance of those roots and the possibility of finding the gem stone.

But I hear that the boat is packed and ready to sail, I suggest we go forthwith to Kar-Usakar, the quay of the crescent moon, from there journey to the river Ilurugu, (reference Stephanie Dalley -Myths from Mesopotamia) it is the river of ordeals where we risk being attacked by stones and swamped, thereafter we must pass by a gatekeeper, followed by a "man of the river" and a "man of the boat" if we follow Enlil (Kramer).

On the way we will draw maps, and grow old, but the boat awaits, regardless of us or who we are.

I seek the Kur because I'm called by the story of Persephone; Ereshkigal, the queen of the underworld, is said to have been "carried off into the nether world." Afterwards, the water-god Enki "set sail for the nether world," whereupon his boat was attacked by stones and swamped (Kramer) It is possible that Ereshkigal was originally a sky-goddess who was carried off to the underworld somewhat in the
manner of Persephone...but Ereshkigal's story is as close to the origin of the Persephone myth (other than Burkett's behaviorist theories).

Why do you seek the Kur?

This letter is now addressed to anyone else who wishes to journey the river into knowledge of The Kur with me.

We sail, metaphorically speaking, from the Quay Of The Crescent Moon, in Eridu.
The god of this city is Enki (Ea), whose temple was known as E-abzu (house of the cosmic waters) and was located at the edge of a swamp, an abzu.

The Enuma Elish begins:

When above the heavens did not yet exist nor the earth below, Apsu the freshwater ocean was there, the first, the begetter, and Tiamat, the saltwater sea, she who bore them all; they were still mixing their waters, and no pasture land had yet been formed, nor even a reed marsh.

Before we embark, I shall go to visit the temple of Enki [HERE] For the best description of Eridu [HERE].

The method.
To begin the journey imagine it, so far all that is necasary is to be in Eridu and to visit the temple...

2009-06-12T10:27:00.002+01:00

First thing: this has been a lesson in the nature of betrayal, it reminds me why I always try to take care, try to explain, try not to act in ways that are purely selfish unless I have no other choice.

For there are times when one must be selfish, but it seems to me that those times can be made less terrible if there is honesty and a promise to take care of the feelings of the person inevitably hurt.

No one gets through life without being selfish, hopefully we avoid outright betrayal...I'm not sure that I have, but at least I know that I always did my best.

The guy writing to me about his betrayal; well his story is so sad. I at least had someone to love me through it, and the good fortune to meet someone who could put me back together again (restore my status, confirm the inner-sense of who I am).

The guy writing to me ended up in cardiac care getting a heart valve replaced.

Physically, there is a tiny possibility that the pain broke his heart.
But symbolically, there is no denying it, the connection is made.

And so today I post the play to the Step-parents, the one's who took Gilgamesh to the path he now follows, who supported him when I was risking his chance to complete his life's work so to speak.

This is the letter that will be sent to them with the play:

So, why this play?

Because hell isn't 'ordinary life', because the vision of 'real life' getting in the way of Gilgamesh 'transcending' the 'ordinary' didn't fit Gilgamesh's situation with me.

Anyone going along with Gilgamesh's desire to hide from the fact of his own humanity (rather than aspirational sainthood) was doing him a disservice. Lodro Rinchen too, suffered from Gilgamesh's lack of honesty (in so much that he was accused of being the child's father), and that really was a shame.

Now you may or may not feel connected to what happened, I have no idea. The fact is that my son needed a father and I needed support from someone to whom the word love is not a kind of symbol, but is indeed a real thing. My beleif in this is a consequence of my 'emotional intelligence' and years of experience in this world.

You could just say that Simon was ignorant, or you could maintain your belief that 'ordinary' life must be transcended, for the good of all, you could have engaged in dialogue with me and explained your points of view, agreed or disagreed with me.

I interpret your silence as sign that you do not wish to engage with what happened and are content to stay with your misapprehension of that time.

Sending my play to you is a symbolic act, meaning it represents my refusal to be silenced or bound.

2009-06-10T22:42:00.003+01:00

I will read my play in the shrine room of Karma Ling:

41 Carlyle Road
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B16 9BH

This Friday (12th) 7:30 evening.

Is this an invite?
Well perhaps!

2009-05-29T13:44:00.004+01:00

I haven't forgotten about my 'Book of Persephone', but Persephone is a complicated subject, and not easy to categorise or track down, she is after all the missing woman.

She begins as the Sumerian Ereshkigal, sister to the Queen of Heaven and abducted by the Kur. As Queen of the Underworld, Ereshkigal takes care of the ghosts, meters out justice and is confined forever under-ground.

Periodically Ereshkigal appears in stories, either to sentence her sister to death, or to threaten the living with zombie plagues.

The Greek story of Persephone is best known to us via Ovid, a Roman. Persephone becomes a young girl 'abducted for the good of her soul' by her wicked uncle, but a close attention to detail (the histories of place linked to Persephone and the iconography of the pomegranate) reveals the possibility of human sacrifice; it is almost as if the much latter witch hunts, hint of a fear of women and a cultural sickness that demands a ritualised murder.

But in my case, the most explicit absence is within the world of religion. It is as if the mythology of the hunter really is all pervasive ( a theme of paradox, of life experienced only death) became less red in tooth and claw, but never anything other than deeply fearful of women. Fear of sexuality and fear of pleasure, fearful of sin...

But this theme must have its own home, a blog pf its own called Monsters of the id...

2009-05-21T13:18:00.003+01:00

What is to be achieved by saying,

'Your version..it was all wrong, it was mad, it cost you a qualified karmamudra (as if such a notion makes any kind of sense!) it cost you your son, it enabled you to avoid all emotional content: the rich emotions of one's own being, the emotions experienced by others, it left you as meaningless, as empty as space...'

None at all.

What is the purpose of taking him to the charnal ground, to show him the remains of his corpse?

Is truth now some kind of God that requires human sacrifice?
Or is it pure vengeance that motivates me?

None of these things.

Start music

2009-05-21T13:11:00.002+01:00

2009-05-17T19:01:00.003+01:00

No I have not sent the email..
Why?

Because of the Corona Borealis, or rather because I fastened my story onto Lovecraft's Hypnos and did the psychic version of snapping my fingers and saying "Make it so!"

In the story and in reality, my fellow practitioner is ambitious (a failing in the traditional world of magick).

His ambition leads him, led him too far away.

The music for the visualisation is Corona Radiata:

This leaves me with -for I am thinking of turning away, closing down, switching off- no way to shatter the stasis. Instead of seeking to break the silence, I continue to regard him as gone beyond into that pit of icy starlight full of coruscating light that consumes the flesh and then feasts upon the soul...

Reasons: Because I'm seeking the equivalent (by trying to get my play read by those involved) of demanding that a group of Second_Life players play Half_Life; it isn't their choice, they are from what may as well be a different universe.

But continuing the silence feels as wrong.

There must be a part 2 for that unsent letter.

2009-05-14T11:54:00.003+01:00

I don't know what I said in my last post?
I possibly said that I needed to do something with my play.

I thought about writing a letter to one of the people involved:

Hello T, I'm not at all sure about where to begin.

I have written a short play...

...the funny thing is I rather disapproved of the way Hamlet decided to put on a play (within a play within a..) to try to find answers, to dissolve his own, particular, nagging cognitive dissonance. After all, it would have been better for all if he had simply turned his back on the whole sorry affair and gone off to discover a new kind of flower in China, or just gone back to university!

Never the less I do understand his plight (fortunately for me, my life is not a re-write of the Orestes!) I too have suffered from a nagging sense of all not being right and a need to sort things out. The idea that revealing the ideas behind an affair enable a clearer apprehension of 'the truth' may be as doomed as the play, Hamlet makes out or not.

I have absolutely no idea

All I have is a commitment to truth that is as full as wisdom as is the act of gnawing at a bone; for if this life is it, is all, and no more, the finality and depth of reality demands that I take seriously that which I regard as absurd.

For some reason, perhaps for the discipline required, I decided to use the format of a Greek tragedy: the story is 'real time', it requires a simple stage with shrine. The subject is one day (the last day of our relationship) and hamartia.

The play reflects the hidden things, the invisible forces at work. The play takes place on the final day I went to Samye Ling to try to persuade Simon that we needed him more than he needed to do the three year retreat..

I failed that time, 'I' fail in the play, but in the play I express the other side of the spiritual experience, I refer to a pre-Zoroastrian (pre-Orphic even) tradition in which death was a gateway to a life that mirrored this one until one's memory had been forgotten in the upper world; an underworld without redemption.

S is re-named as Gilgamesh (whose horror at the death of Enkidu led him to seek immortality) in this story Gilgamesh has returned from the 'ends of the earth' having failed to stay awake for seven days and nights and failed to keep the plant (stolen by the snake) he turns to the new temple, where the path to redemption is promised to all who shed their attachment to the things of this world.

I am re-named as Shamhat and S's friend V becomes Sappho (who seeks immortality through her work). Shamhat represents that other lineage, the lineage of sex, birth and death, of immortality through taking care of her child and of bowing to the 'truth (represented by the gods)..

You and D both stand in loco parentis to the Buddhist S, both of you knew of what was happening in his life, both of you helped me -thank you- but my version of events was always closed off and hidden away. I have a great need to confront that silence.

How I go about this I don't know.

Ideally I would like the play to be read out loud by all of us: you and D to be the chorus, S to be Gilgamesh, A to be Sappho, G as Namtar and myself as Shamhat and there to be some kind of discussion afterwards, perhaps on the subject of love?

Well for now that is as far as I can see.
Thanks for reading.

2009-04-30T15:22:00.003+01:00

It is a long time since I was last here; must admit I am stuck. I have various scenarios in my mind...but quite frankly it is easier (psychologically speaking) to avoid any trouble or pain, and just sit me down and weave another mp3.

So, what to do?
My target is misogyny -not the outward hatred of women oh no. Misogyny isn't as simple as that; my target is the anti-life aspect misogyny represents. Women represent (all too often) the negative aspects of the creation/destruction nature of this universe, sometimes we accidentally personify it, other times it is value projected upon us.

Either way, it isn't useful or beautiful!

How does misogyny manifest?
In the past as now, women are simply a distraction; children are a drain on precious resources: time, space, freedom, intellect. It may be better 'to marry than to burn', but seeking salvation in the arms of a lover is considered by the misogynists, a waste of precious human existence.

Perhaps misogyny is the wrong word?
Unfortunately I can't think of a better one.

So my play was written with a purpose; I wrote it to say the unsayable. Why is it unsayable...I mean there is nothing unique about my point of view, I'm not alone, and it isn't a crime to put over a different version of the facts?

It just feels rude, that's all. On the other hand that isn't really the problem is it?

The problem is that Gilgamesh makes me feel very stupid when ever I express my feelings and it had to be like that all the way through or else none of it could have happened...if I'd not been provoked by his inability to see things from my point of view I wouldn't have fought so hard; my fighting took the form of words, so many many words.

So what to do?
I could add the names of the people I want to read my words to this page of the blog and wait for a vanity search to bring them to me (too much the spider, I)? That is just about as logical as my first strategy (to write out my play and leave it in a book to be found by anyone).

What I want...I want Gilgamesh, his girlfriend and Tom and Deirdre, myself and my partner to be in a room together; for there to be candles and wine and frankincense simmering over charcoal; and the play to be read out loud.

I will either be mortified by this or vindicated.
I have no idea which way the blade will cut.
I have zero faith in myself, I don't believe anyone can understand the sentiments I express and so perhaps I should ask for help from someone who I believe can write better than I...on the other hand, I'm so determined to speak out using my own words that asking for help wouldn't help me..

You know, I can't bring myself to re-read my words!
But that will pass, it has to.

...in a hand full of dust...

2009-03-30T21:44:00.003+01:00

Fear
Ina
Handfullllll.

I remain with the Wasteland theme, or in a wasteland, or what ever!
It all starts well enough, some cheerful metal type drums...and then the ghosts from the mountain appear,

'They said all would be well'.

Of course, nothing can ever be well ever again.

Horror is my genre, bleak hopeless and ongoing.
It is the land of my birth.

I have severely lost faith in myself.

Oh!
That sounds worse than I mean it to. I mean I'm simply unable to read the words of my play in my head, or contemplate turning it into something- a YouTube- because I'd have to read it out loud...

Yeah, hand me the virtual shot gun and I'm out there, in the Wasteland, consumed with fear, riding waves of paranoia as if it were my beloved horse..

The blood of Shub-Niggurath lingers in the air like a heavy mist. Chunks of putrid flesh lie in piles throughout the subterranean cavern. Exhausted, you stumble along, searching for an exit from this hellhole. You find a blood-spattered slip gate; a strange juxtaposition of ultra-technology and medieval squalor. Hoping for either paradise or oblivion, you step through the slip gate, gambling on its unknown destination. In a flash of light and pain you emerge from the slip gate's quantum vortex in the shiny-clean environment of a modern military base - your home away from home. Leaving bloody footprints in your wake, you step away from the slip gate like a man emerging from a car wreck.

Wearily, you look for some semblance of the life and sanity that you remember from the time before you heard the name "Quake", but find only emptiness. Despite your recent hellish experience, the strange quiet of the military base is more unsettling than comforting. In fact, it's not just shell shock that makes it seem quiet, it's the absolute absence of any life in a place that should be bustling with military activity. Readying your trusty shotgun, you begin a stealthy surveillance. The hum of a nearby computer terminal catches your attention. Peering closely at the glowing screen, you read the final orders from the base commander: "Quake's forces have infiltrated the weapons storage facility and are receiving reinforcements through slip gates located at the research center. All personnel are ordered to proceed with evacuation procedure EVAC-44A." Your heart sinks as you realize that the commander has ordered the base to be sealed to prevent Quake's forces from infiltrating further into our realm. All weapons and vehicles have been removed to reduce any military advantage that could be gained by taking the base. Any means of escaping or defending yourself are gone.

With the loss of hope comes resolution. Gritting your teeth, you decide that you can either cower here, waiting for Quake's forces to arrive, or you can take the battle to them, infiltrate the storage facility and take out as many of the bastards as you can. If you were the cowering type, you wouldn't have survived as long as you have. Who knows, maybe you can find some way of destroying the portal that allows Quake to perpetually send reinforcements. You go to the slip gate that leads to the weapons facility. Monitors show that the site has already been overrun with the twisted soldiers that follow Quake. Hopefully, they won't be expecting the likes of you. Gripping your shotgun with both hands, you leap into the gate?

Valhalla awaits!

I'm no good at real-world stuff!

end track

2009-03-17T12:25:00.003Z

2009-03-04T18:02:00.003Z

I must have done something right because right now there are tears.

When I make an mp3 I don't think, I don't plan, I simply listen. My aim is always to open a crack between this world and the other. The superficial pattens loop and repeat whilst underneath there is the rush of air and the flow of deep water, usually something electrical- a menacing kind of hum. I'm always aware that we live if not inside, then next door to the slaughter house.

It is why my character in the play can chose to go with Namtar. She doesn't fear, but she understands her predicament...

So, this music is I think for the end of the play:

I listened to it just now, as I read the words and it felt as if someone stamped on my heart! So...that means I got it right...it opens the portal to the right place in me. At first it sounds as if everything can be fine, but the cold air sweeps down from the hills, and the abyss is right under my feet.

Visual syntax...

2009-02-26T10:54:00.004Z

"...There is a place there, the Zone, which is and is not, it is reality and, at the same time, it is a place of the soul, of memory. In the film, when you see it, it is a forest, a river. That's all. But the air that circulates, the light, the rhythms, the perspectives, without distorting anything, make you feel it as an "other" place, with various dimensions, always real and, at the same time, different...."
[Tarkovsky]

It pains me, but the god of The Zone is Orpheus...

Orpheus the shaman defied the powers of the Underworld to find his woman Eurydice and return her to life, but when he looked back to see if she was following him out of the realm of the dead, he lost her forever.
From a contemporary web page. [LINK]

I see now that Orpheus is called a shaman, the horns of his lyre representing the portal, and yet no one rides a lyre into the otherworld, it is always a drum. I'm not saying that a lyre wouldn't do...it just wouldn't do for me. It has been said that that shape (the bulls horns, symbol of fertility, the horns of the moon from which dew descends...please note the original moon deity was male, not female and went for a while (Akkadian) by the name of Sin [LINK] )are preserved in the rattle Isis holds: the sistrum.

Orpheus has nothing to do with fertility, or even women. Orpheus is after all a gay icon, so I can't see him as my guide in the underworld.

As the myth of Orpheus explains: music opens the gates to the Underworld. Going back to ancient models, there is ample evidence that music formed a strong part of the shaman's armoury both for combating unwelcome spirits and for creating an opening for sacred dialogue between the visible and invisible worlds. [LINK]

The Zone was beyond the mirror- for Cocteau- for the mirror represents Narcissus, becoming frozen by images, superficial interpretations and one's own response to them. The mirror is a closed loop.

The Zone is beyond the mirror, that moment of crossing over. Cocteau used a Wasteland the bombed ruins of the military academy at Saint-Cyr, to depict Hades. Approximately thirty years before, T S Eliot evoked the dystopia of his (our) time by publishing The Wasteland in 1922, Cocteau used the evidence of dystopia as his film set.

For us, there is urban exploration and The Zone as evoked by Tarkovsky, now centered on Prypiat and Chernobyl (Dungeoness is a close as I'll ever get).

The female version of Orpheus is the siren...who of course, Orpheus outsang in the story of Jason and the Argonauts.

Regard!

2009-02-24T20:18:00.003Z

Did I mention the empty book?
Well I found an empty book in a book shop. It wasn't totally empty, the words on the first page told me that I was the first and that I should use the book for what ever I wanted and then leave the book...somewhere...anywhere for the next person.

And to send an email to some guy called Robin when I'm through.

And so I wrote my play in it.
Robin said

"That is gorgeous to hear. Thank you, here's to our journey..."

As if we are now the book.

The book is still by my bed. I need to go somewhere appropriate to leave it, possibly another Oxfam book shop, possibly the one in Worcester?

We should go to Worcester, it is so old and nothing like here!
Lots of nice places to eat in Worcester..

It took all day to write because a pen is a dreadfully uncomfortable kind of 'capture device' for someone used to a laptop.

My writing is not so tidy, either. On the other hand, physical paper and ink last so much better than transient 1/0 and bit-rotted computer programs. It makes me a little sad to think of how our time is a dark age for future archaeologists. Electrical impulse and discharge/ hardware and software...much safer to record images in silver halides and words in pen and ink. Better still, clay tablets.

I have not given The Master a completed tag yet...

My next project is The Book of Persephone.
I start with Ovid who portrays her as a young girl in that endless field of flowers, the blue sky above, the faintest hint of earth clinging to the stem of the flower she is picking...

The innocent, the beautiful, the unknowing, unawakened Persephone. Those little girls so beloved of the likes of John Ruskin, Alice the beloved of Charles Dodgson. Alice was my first Persephone, I followed her down the rabbit hole genuinely shocked as I fell with her.

I liked Alice. I liked the way that she kept her head in the face of outrageous incongruity.

There is a phrase, 'The Victorian Cult of the Child' the nineteenth-century sentimentalism in which children, especially girls were innocent; an innocent joy is somehow pure and untainted, powerless.. Something of this continues today in the marketing of the cute.

I never played American McGee's Alice.

The Master.

2009-02-10T09:23:00.013Z

The music for the start of the play is here.

The end music is here.

Also you need to know who the cast are:

Gilgamesh- Once a great king who set out on an adventure with his lover. The adventure turned to tragedy when the freind (Enkidu) insulted the Goddess Inanna. Enkidu dies, slowly and painfully and there is nothing Gilgamesh can do. Distraught, Gilgamesh sets out to find the secret of eternal life...and fails. Now, at the time of this play, his mind has turned towards religion; he is set upon seeking the answer for life, for death and as before he cannot accept that there is no escape from death. He is old and young at the same time.

Sappho- The poetess, a feminist, very beautiful and strong, high minded.

The Chorus- perhaps as many as five people, or as few as three, they are people who live at the religious center, the cooks and cleaners, the students, the 'old hands'

Shamhat- aged anywhere between nineteen and thirty-five, she had lived in the temple of Inanna as a Sacred Whore, but had run away and tried to follow the new religion. Now she is trying to get Gilgamesh to return with her, for she is pregnant with his child. The audience is not meant to like her, she should seem scheming, no one should feel pity for her and yet she is the only person there with a grasp on reality.

Namtar- is tall and slim. Has long hair. Either long and white, dressed entierly in black with something a vivid sky blue...or with long black hair, again dressed in black but this time with something scarlet..

The stage is simple in keeping with the rules of tragedy. Three steps, a stone table with a large bowl, ivy has grown over this, the old shrine. To the audiences right there is the entrance to the temple..

THE MASTER.

Platonic philosophy is organised around the hierarchical dualism of the sphere of reason over the sphere of nature, and that it is not only a masculine identity as such which underlies the Platonic conception of reason...but a master identity defined in terms of multiple exclusions, and in terms of domination not only of the feminine, but also of the slave...of the animal and the natural.
Val Plumwood.
-----------------

(Shamhat enters the stage. It is early morning, the sky is still grey. This monologue is running through Shamhat's mind; it is unsaid. "The starlight fell like sparks of ice upon my skin. The ground as if coated in glass. So far, and not supposed to be here.

Forbidden."

She goes towards the new temple at the edge of the stage.

Shoes outside.

Center stage, there is an old shrine once dedicated to the Great Mother now overgrown with weeds and covered in dirt. There are three steps leading up to it. It is a simple table.

then people coming out of the new Gnostic temple. Three of them remain to speak to Shamhat, they are the chorus)

Shamhat:
Asks chorus
Is Gilgamesh here?

Chorus:
I think that he is in the main temple, but he will pass this way soon.
Who are you?

Shamhat:
I am Shamhat

Chorus:
He has a lot to learn before the date, the retreat starts in a week’s time

Gilgamesh:
Hello! I thought that we had already said goodbye.

You must have started your journey very early…

Shamhat:
it hurts-

I left on Friday night, I stayed over at a friend’s house. The last part was very beautiful but it was as if… I had no protection, as if without you I was naked. It was as if, in my imagination the starlight fell like sparks upon my skin. The roads were as if coated in glass. A Hell of ice…such purity. The sky full of shooting stars. The Draconids meteor showers I think...tiny dragons…
(suddenly!)
I feel as if I’m not supposed to be here.

I can't do this…(tries not to sob)

Gilgamesh: (searching for a hanky)
Sappho is coming to see me latter

Shamhat
But it hurts and I don’t think that I can bear it.

Gilgamesh:
Shamhat there is nothing wrong. This feeling of attachment, the hurt you feel- is a part of the journey; I will come back to you. You should trust me.

You know that ultimately you are hurting yourself like this, expecting me to be pleased to see you. We have said our goodbyes; it made me feel as if I’d seen a ghost when I saw you...But tell me Shamhat, why should I not love you more after this?

You are beautiful and precious but the final journey must be made I need to continue.

We should just get on with what we need to do.

I love you you know...But...you also know that I have seen death and must do something.
(Drawing away, speaking as if to himself.)
For six days and nights I wept over him…my dearest friend…I could not give him up for burial until a worm fell from his nose…my friend whom I loved so much, who experienced every hardship with me— lost in the land of ash- lost...at best the land of the dead is a place of gloom and dust.
(speaking once more to Shamhat)
I cannot accept it Shamhat- if death cannot be conquered then I must find other ways to end the suffering of mankind. I must find enlightenment...The mind naturally seeks the good, the light, the noble...the divine. To abandon my search for the light without end would be to accept the mundane and to remain trapped in imperfection… My mind seeks eternity...I need to detach myself from the desires of the flesh. I do not accept the servitude of the soul to the flesh...

And you know this Shamhat you know how I feel because you loved him too

Shamhat
I brought him to you...

Gilgamesh
Grief entered my innermost being when he died

Shamhat
You must strive for immortality because you fear death, in that fear you share the lot of man. You barter your lover and your unborn child to pay for the mysteries and call it self-sacrifice?

Gilgamesh why can you not simply love what you have?

I understand only too well that your resolve to enter the lights without end may as well be a journey into another world; you will return to me changed, and three years is too long, too long. I am made of flesh and blood, and passion is the gift of the Goddess.

I should return to the temple of Inanna I do not believe in the lights without end, nor do I care for immortality

(Goes to walk away…)

Gilgamesh
that would be a waste..

Shamhat
of what, my life?
(She walks off)

Chorus-
No one likes to say goodbye.

Do you know who she is?

Didn’t she used to be a part of that other temple-

What, a qedesha

Shuuush yes she used to be- from the main temple of Inanna at Eturkalamma-
But she saw the light and now seeks the endless light (cross themselves) for herself, that is how she met Gilgamesh.

Oh, I thought that she had been through something? That there had been trouble; someone threatened to either kill her or himself and she had been forced to leave the temple for a while?

Well either way you would think that she’d know better than to come this close to the date...

Perhaps she cannot let go.

Then she will suffer for sure.

Sappho-
(enters the stage)
Hello, can you help me, I’m looking for Gilgamesh

Chorus
another woman looking for him!
(Whispers)- She is the poetess Sappho, from the isle of Lesbos
(All turn to watch as Shamhat returns to steps and begins to cry)

Chorus
(Someone asks)
why Inconsolable

(Shamhat ignores them, turns away and cries all the more. Starts to clear the old alter, get uncover the old and restore it. Burns frankincense, quotes out loud the words by Enheduanna)

Shamhat
"My own trial is not yet over,
but a stranger sentence surrounds me
as though it were my sentence.
To the radiant bed, I did not stretch out my hand.
Nor did I reveal the words of Ningal to that 'someone'
The radiant en-priestess of Inanna am I
My Queen, beloved of An, may your heart be calmed for me."

Chorus
(one speaking to others)
this happens. Often it is mothers who come here to cry, thinking that the three years is too long, too final, fearing the changes that may happen to their precious sons. Wives and girlfriends too come here.

Sappho-
(goes to Shamhat and takes her hand)
Shamhat but you know that he has to do this; it was always his aim to remove the fear of death from all people, to seek answers.

Shamhat
but that isn't the way this world is, you know that Sappho...

Sappho
Yet we agree surely that he has the right to find out for himself and truly if you love him, you will let him go. Having both a lover and one's own space is a treat, you have freedom.. When you first met him you knew it would lead to here and you know better than anyone else here what it is like to be...

Shamhat
used by men?

Sappho
I wasn’t going to say that, just love coupledom isn’t any kind of solution to unhappiness.

The temple of Inanna must have taught you how men are

Shamhat
once he loved you

Sappho
and then our love became something greater. Once he knew that we could never be lovers...it freed up so much more energy. Men are capable of love, they have hearts that may be brimming full of love…but sexuality is framed by a culture passed down from father to son. Males are aggressive and use that aggression on women; they learn how to be possessive, fearful, and uncommunicative. Heterosexual love confines the spirit and men do not learn how to negotiate. Such passion! It is automatic- men treat women as if they are objects; sexuality makes them blind to the person…

Shamhat
You could not respect his maleness; there can be a respect for the needs of others

Sappho
Exactly, we agree!

But male sexuality is too...Shamhat now you have control over your own body

Shamhat
and yet I cry-

Once upon a time pleasure was regarded as a part of life, and once upon a time, life was sacred. Once upon a time a woman's sexuality was understood to be the key to life.

Without sexuality there is no regeneration, no children, no future...I am from the oldest church of all. Our doors are open to anyone young and old, male and female, regardless of how much our visitors understand.

Within the temple, the priestess initiates- through giving pleasure rather than demanding offerings of suffering, and pain, self-sacrifice. There is no rejection of the physical.

In the temple of Inanna or out of it, I am the shrine, all pleasure is both a blessing and an offering, I still see it that way. My body represents the Goddess, the desire to live, love and reproduce.

All sex with me is sacred. An act of reverence, Life and pleasure are sacred.

But you and Gilgamesh and this search for immortality...Sappho, you seek immortality in words, to remain forever known as the ninth muse, the Divine Sappho!

Gilgamesh journeyed to the ends of the earth looking a way out of death. Now he wishes to knock on Heaven's gates and to demand that the gods let him in.

Both of you are feasting on dreams.

And I must seem so out of control, my tears, my body even... compared to all this…calmness, peace, tranquillity.

Tell me Sappho, will you record me in a poem, perhaps I do share something of your vision and would like to be remembered after I‘m gone. Will you record me as Shamhat the splendid who gently led the wild man Enkidu out of ignorance into knowledge, or Shamhat the vile who corrupted the noble savage and led him to his death?

Will you call me Shamhat the Splendid who offered Gilgamesh knowledge of love and immortality through his son, or Shamhat the selfish who stopped the hero Gilgamesh from saving all mankind?

At this moment I am Shamhat the miserable, the whore without a heart of gold. Shamhat the fearful, the ignorant, Shamhat the coward unable to believe in the heroic quest.

Shamhat the snake...
Shamhat the mother.

Sappho
isn't there another way, a way out of this?

Shamhat
this self pity?!

Sappho
stop being so hard on yourself, just relax and let go.

Shamhat-
It is true...when I was beaten and in fear of loosing my life, I gave myself up to despair. I left the temple. I threw away my jewelled belt, my insignia of office, I felt that I could no longer embody the Goddess and do her work, I had become afraid.

But it isn’t so, I still belong to Her.

Sappho
(becoming irritated)
am I meant to understand this?

Shamhat
You are jealous...and yet you have no need to be. He couldn’t have you and so he had me. At first it was habit, I offered myself freely, I promised sex without strings, I didn’t ask for commitment, sex with me was easy. Only I fell in love with the man…not the hero; and I took what you had wanted from him.

I carry his child.

(Sappho did not know this)

I am here because my heart is breaking, but more than that I am here for the sake of our child. I need him to return with us for my child's sake…I need him to trust in love...in life.

His son will be beautiful, brave and clever and it will break my heart to see his father reflected in his eyes and to know that he left us; carelessly as if we don't matter.

I cannot bear to be treated as if none of this has any truth!

How can he think of doing this!

Sappho
(hurt and angry)
it is true, I should call you a snake. You tempted Enkidu back to the city and this led to his death. Now you wish to bring Gilgamesh down to earth, to destroy his ambitions and to tie him to you. It is true that I asked him to help me conceive a child, but I would not have expected him to be at my beck and call afterwards!

I have a partner and I know how to make my own way through this world without a man to 'protect me'. There are nurseries, women have the vote, and we can even get jobs you know. A woman no longer has to rely on a man, Shamhat.

It is an old trick, you are unable to let go of the Patriarchal ways. You dress it up as Goddess worship, but in the temple you were nothing but a whore. Taken there as a young girl, abused and raped. It is despicable that such places exist.

Shamhat
(unable to continue with this debate any longer, and feeling utterly wretched)

I call upon the Great Mother as my witness Sappho. Her pulse is my pulse, Her ways are mine, I gave Gilgamesh my body but it was always you he loved...

But I am done.
This must be over.

Your words bring no joy to my heart and I can see no way to show Gilgamesh that home, food, love, children- the good things, clean clothes…to cherish the little child who holds your hand.

Happiness as well as death is the lot of man. Sappho I thought that it was obvious!

Both of you let fear eclipse joy and shut out this truth. He fears death, and you fear anonymity...can’t both of you simply love life?
(Half to herself)
Loyalty and kindness, acknowledgment of the truth of life and of death...

(Shamhat takes a knife from her bag and cuts her thumb and drips the blood into the earth)

Let the Gates of the Earth open!

Sappho
What are you doing!

Shamhat
Let soft rain comes down from heaven to take my blood- Mother Earth carry my words, take my blood, and carry my words deep down deep down to the sister of my mistress.

Know
Our time is a time of war
Our days are battles
Each hour is a life
Lost to the outer
To those from the outside
They built abattoirs
Food for the children of Tiamat
And the blood of the weakest here
Is libation to Tiamat
Queen of the corpse-eaters
Bringer of pain
To call her
Pour the red water of life
On a stone

(Ereshkigal is regarded in the upper world as a terrible presence, a corpse eater. To Shamhat, Ereshkigal is a sister to Inanna, a figure who dispenses justice and guards the dead in the underworld -a parallel existence with the same kinds of institutions as in the upper world of the living)

Sappho
Stop! Have you gone mad, no one uses the old ways.

Shamhat
I was a priestess of Inanna, I never stopped using the old ways!
Dark Queen Ereshkigal I call on you, have mercy upon your servant..
(Gilgamesh returns at this point -and is shocked!)
Gilgamesh
What you are doing!

Shamhat
Gilgamesh home, food, love, children- the good things, clean clothes, the salt sea, the sweet waters…to cherish the little child who holds your hand. Happiness; as well as death is the lot of man and woman. Will you not change your mind? return home with me, love me and our child...

Or will you throw me away now and watch me break upon this ground; will you remain transfixed by your dreams and let me die?

Gilgamesh
love is not like this Shamhat, you cannot expect me to give into you.

Shamhat
I carry your son in my womb Gilgamesh, your precious child! You are resolved to seek immortality for all mankind whilst ignoring the perils that may await us during those years without you.

Gilgamesh answer me.

Will you return with us, take care of us, trust me when I say that the gods gave us life and death and there is no escape from this?
(Sappho horrified, takes Gilgamesh’s hand)

Gilgamesh
at the moment I saw death, grief entered my innermost being. Shamhat, the love between man and woman is always at the mercy of death.

In ordinary love I find no substitute for the eternal contentment I seek and will gain when I reach the lights without end, I’m sorry Shamhat, you must go now, go home and stop this; you say that you love me and yet you are doing everything in your power to prevent me from finding my heart’s ease, why must you seek to increase the difficulty of my task. I love you, you must trust me, but the downward spiral of pain and suffering you are addicted too, cannot be ended by holding on to me.

You blame me! But all you need is to do is to trust me.
Have faith.

Shamhat
Faith does not put food on tables Gilgamesh, faith does not take care of the labouring woman. Your love so careful, so kind, so meek and gentle, so strong, so deep means nothing if you are not there to catch me if I fall. In what exactly do I put my faith? What kind of a love is it that exists only in the mind, that is satisfied by separation, that rests easy at night knowing that I cannot reach out and touch you? What kind of love is it that drowns out the cries of a new born baby!

Gilgamesh-
Shamhat, you misjudge me; I love you and feel sorry for you...I know that this life is like a dream and an illusion, therefore I don't have any suffering because I don't take anything to be truly existent.

But because of that I feel great compassion for everyone who does cling to things as being truly existent and suffers as a result...

Shamhat-
When I lay in your arms I sought the immortality of the moment, in beauty, in passion, in the lightning flash of conception. But like Enkidu before me, you have sent me deep into the forest and I am lost..

-=FLASH and CO2=-
(Namtar appears Shamhat prostrates before him.)
Stand up priestess of Inanna, You begged mercy from Queen of the dead, Ereshkigal.

I am her visor, Namtar.

What is your request?

Shamhat
Namtar, I wish to know if I may enter the inner courtyard of Ereshkigal to take my place in her temple, to work for her as I once worked for her bright sister …

Namtar
there is no return from Irkalla precious Shamhat, but if you wish to go with me, come as my wife I will give both you and your child protection and your child shall call me father.

Deep in the courtyard of Urugal, you may drink of the fountain.

In the library of Cutha you will finally read all the forbidden lore you sought.
Somewhere hidden in its vast libraries and collections of ancient artifacts may even be the bronze pillar of Enoch on which all the secrets of the world are said to be engraved...The path is, as you know, through death.

Shamhat tears flowing turns to Gilgamesh...The abyss of the underworld is just seven steps away from you and then a descending path which ends at the first of seven gates. All seven gates are guarded and no living person is allowed to pass.

Gilgamesh
if it’s what you want that’s fine…I will always love you.

Shamhat
but you will never speak with me again doesn't that matter, to you. You will not hold your new born son. That doesn't matter to you? I really will be gone, you will never see your child's first smile, his first steps, he will never hear your voice or rest secure in your arms..

Don't you feel anything?

(Gilgamesh- does nothing/ appears to be in a trance...)

Namtar
(to Gilgamesh)
Gilgamesh, to seek wisdom by continuously observing some code, even if only one of honour and decency is an easy way out for anyone. Perhaps the path of dishonour is the way to search out the deeper questions of the worth of life?

You wish to rest in the eternal, to be free from the diktats of Destiny?
The fact remains, after death, you come to us.
(He holds out his hand to Shamhat.
Shamhat takes it. )

Kneel Shamhat; do you take me as your husband?
(Shamhat kneels but glances back to Gilgamesh who is walking away with Sappho, she whispers..)
Shamhat:
love is real it demands action.

Namtar
Lady, I want you to be mine.
Do you consent?

Shamhat
My Lord, I accept both sex and death as gifts of the gods. I am yours. I do not question, the ways of the Underworld are perfect.
(Namtar winds her hair around his hand and pulls her head so that her throat is exposed)

Namtar
I ask you one final time, will you give me your life...

Shamhat
Yes sir. I do not question, the ways of the Underworld are perfect.

Namtar
Then take my hand.
(All goes black….)

(Gilgamesh is with Sappho and the chorus.)

The messenger-
(shocked, shaking, obviously traumatised)
it was so terrible, so horrible, I saw a man as black as gloomy as a storm wade into the river almost dragging a woman. They stood there for a moment in the flowing water and then she knelt before him, the water came up to her chin. I saw him hit her and turn her face towards him as if forcing her to answer his question and then she stood up. She slowly unfastened her clothing and let it drop into the water.

He had a knife it seemed to shimmer with a blue light- I watched as he cut off her underclothes until she stood naked...her clothes floated into the reeds.

There was a boulder- he pulled her over to it and pushed her down so that she lay over it, face downwards. It was rape..obviously she could not struggle...not with that blade in his hand. I didn’t know what to do, I dare not call for help, I couldn't move or speak

...and then as I watched he began to strangle her...I didn't believe what I was seeing, he was still raping her but…he put rope around her throat and he pulled it tighter and tighter- though all the time, she never struggled or tried to fight him

Gilgamesh
She is dead?

Messenger
I don't know, I don't know. One minute they were there, the next gone...I saw a murder...but no corpse, no body, no sigh of any of it. Just gone...I waded out to the rock, the rope and the clothes
(holds up the dripping cloths)

Was it a bad dream, a vision, a ghost...I don’t know, I don't know don't know.

Sappho
(to Gilgamesh)
are you OK? Why did it have to be that way, why did he have to do it that way? Why did she kneel before him, how could she consent to that. What makes women so desperate?

Gilgamesh
she is gone and I must bring an end to death, it is intolerable that people die. The gods are cruel... how they play with us.

Sappho
but she called him and she agreed to go with him, I thought that she loved you?
I thought that you loved her

Gilgamesh-
"Once deep down in my heart I am aware of the certainty of death,
and natural devotion has been born in my being,
at the end of utter weariness there will come renunciation.
May it pour into me the blessing of unshakable joy."

(But Gilgamesh is crying and compulsively shaking his hands.)

2009-02-06T16:33:00.003Z

All the words for the play are in my laptop (and I'm using another computer), but one thing leads to another and it occurs to me that I wish to write 'The book of Persephone'.

The first chapter is about katabasis- it has to be katabasis because that specific word is linked to Jung, and he gives concepts a poetic spin that appeals to me.

But back to the play- tis all written- just needs leaving for a while, so that I forget what I wrote. The theory is that when I re-read it I'll be able to see it more clearly.

In thinking about the differences between Babylonian underworlds and the stories of Inanna/ Ereshkigal/ Damuzi and Geshtinanna I can't help but be struck by the similarities between these descent/ katabasis stories and the myth of Persephone. Once the story moves into Greece it becomes linked to Orphic mystery cults, such as the Eleusian mysteries, in other words the Underworld becomes more spiritual the ghost is no longer dependent upon relatives and worldly wealth, knowledge; the knowledge of secret words and symbols; provides a path out of the drear and into the light...

For me, David Sylvian always was and will be Orpheus. As I've said elsewhere I have problems with the archetype of the beautiful, poetic man; the man who shuns women for the sake of his art. I was in love with him once (not David Sylvian, silly) but a man who made me his muse. The one who proved to me how impossible it is to actually walk into the underworld and to demand that my dead are returned to me- but that's another story.

The final chapters would deal with the nature of the various underworlds:

It seems to me that death rituals- activities centered on the treatment of the corpse- changed slowly, slowly into our own current very mixed up affairs via mystery cults. The Sumerians buried their rich and famous in elaborate graves alongside servants, material good and favorite games.

A film of grave goods from the city of Ur.

The afterlife was a reflection of this one but it mattered that your grave was cared for, it mattered even more than people should morn for you. In Egypt there was something similar going on, but The Book of Gates describes the journey of the sun each night through the underworld- located at the same time beyond the Milky Way- giving the clue that the preservation of mortal remains was essential for spiritual existence.

Contemporary seekers for a life beyond death take refuge in the concept of cryogenic preservation. Meanwhile in the Taoist tradition- which becomes the core of Tantric teachings in Hinduism and Buddhism- there are alchemical traditions relating to either (inner alchemy) the visualisation and transmutation of energy (from external and internal sources) into 'life energy' and outer alchemy, the creation of 'long life' pills usually involving mercury. Sokushinbutsu is a Shingon Buddhist ritual of slowly poisoning oneself with arsenic, exercising to remove all fat, more starvation and finally sitting down to die...to produce a sacred corpse.

The Sumerians don't have a book of gates...as far as I know and yet their is a location for the sun to descend, a tunnel through which the sun must travel each night and in The Epic of Gilgamesh this passageway leads to a land full of trees with leaves of jewels and to the sea at the end of the world.

The sea of deathly water.

2009-02-03T20:34:00.003Z

I wasn't sure about this part; it is true though, the person I call Sappho did ask for a sperm donation (yes, turkey baster or not- either way he was supposed to be just a friend helping her out) so that she could have a child. Also it isn't supposed to matter to me is it, I'm not supposed to judge any one's motivations or have an opinion about their choices, but I was horrified at the idea of someone choosing pregnancy simply because a child would make her feel like a real woman, or whole, or fill a gap!

I told him not to do it; I said that it is impossible not to be connected to a child...it isn't just sperm and egg, it becomes a living, breathing, person with needs.

And after that I conceived his child!
An accident, fate or what ever. I can be righteous about it because I knew what it meant to have a child; I had no illusions about it making me feel anything at all other than very tired. I'd done pregnancy two times before and knew about being a single parent.

So, what did she think of me as I fell apart in that car park at Samye Ling? Actually I think that she was sympathetic...but hadn't a clue why it hurt me so badly.

Anyway, I added this bit about Sappho and in another part I tried to flesh out the underlying philosophy- the undying light- a philosophy that positions this world as somehow less real that the next world (Plato)..

Sappho is hard on Shamhat, people are, in general quite hard on women who play the courtesan. It is an unfair competition, the courtesan puts her relationship with men above her relationship with women, she will listen to bullshit, she will smile, be pleasant, and it is slightly false...and yet something intensely real.

Other women do not like it at all.

Shamhat- You are jealous…and yet you have no need to be. He couldn’t have you and so he had me. At first it was habit, I offered myself freely, I promised sex without strings, I didn’t ask for commitment, sex with me was easy. Only I fell in love with the man…not the hero; and I took what you had wanted from him.

I carry his child.

I am here because my heart is breaking, but more than that I am here for the sake of that child. I need him to return with us for my child’s sake…I need him to trust in love…in life. His son will be beautiful, brave and clever and it will break my heart to see his father reflected in my baby’s eyes and to know that he left us, carelessly as if we don‘t matter. I cannot bear to be treated as if none of this has any truth!

How can he think of doing this!

Sappho- it is true, I should call you a snake. You tempted Enkidu back to the city and this led to his death. Now you wish to bring Gilgamesh down to earth, to destroy his ambitions and to tie him to you. It is true that I asked him to help me conceive a child, but I would not have expected him to be at my beck and call afterwards!

I have a partner and I know how to make my own way through this world without a man to ‘protect me’. There are nurseries, women have the vote, and we can even get jobs you know. A woman no longer has to rely on a man, Shamhat.

It is an old trick, you are unable to let go of the Patriarchal ways. You dress it up as Goddess worship, but in the temple you were nothing but a whore. Taken there as a young girl, abused and raped. It is despicable that such places exist.

More txt.

2009-01-25T18:53:00.004Z

Sappho- (goes to Shamhat and takes her hand) Shamhat but you know that he has to do this, it was always his aim to remove the fear of death from all people, to seek answers.

Shamhat but that isn't the way this world is, you know that Sappho…

Sappho Yet we agree surely that he has the right to find out for himself and truly if you love him, you will let him go.

When you first met him you knew it would lead to here and you know better than anyone else here what it is like to be…

Shamhat (interrupting) used by men?

Sappho- I wasn't going to say that, just love coupledom isn't any kind of solution to unhappiness. The temple of Ishtar must hove taught you how men are.

Shamhat- once he loved you

Sappho and then our love became something greater. Once he knew that we could never be lovers…it freed up so much more energy. Men are capable of love, they have hearts that may be brimming full of love…but sexuality is a learnt activity and men have learnt from their fathers. Possesive love confines the spirit and men are fearful and possessive. Such passion- men treat women as if they are objects, sexuality makes them blind to the person…

Shamhat You could not respect his maleness. There can be a respect for the needs of others

Sappho- exactly. But male sexuality is too …Shamhat now you have control over your own body

Shamhat and yet I cry-

Once upon a time pleasure was regarded as a part of life, and once upon a time, life was sacred. Once upon a time a woman's sexuality was understood to be the key to life-giving,

Without sexuality there is no regeneration, no children, no future...I am from the oldest church of all. Our doors are open to anyone young and old, male and female, regardless of how much our visitors understand.

Within, the priestess initiates- through giving pleasure rather than demanding offerings of suffering, and pain, self-sacrifice.

In the temple of Ishtar or out of it, I am the shrine, all pleasure is both a blessing and an offering. My body represents the Goddess, the desire to live, love and reproduce.

All sex with me is sacred.
An act of reverence, life and pleasure are sacred.

The search for immortality…Sappho,, I do not seek to seize control from the gods or to become a god. Is that how it is?

You and Gilgamesh fear…and so seek a way out of life, and death.

You and Gilgamesh wish to be gods.

And I must seem so out of control, here, compared to all this…calmness, peace, tranquillity.

Tell me Sappho, will you record me in a poem, . Shamhat the splendid whore who gently led the wildman Enkidu. And Shamhat the Splendid whore who selfishly stopped the hero Gilgamesh from saving all mankind from the suffering of death. Shamhat the untrustworthy whore, that miserable one without a heart of gold, not good enough to be able to love, not respectful enough of the heroic quest.

Shamhat the snake…

Sappho isn't there another way, a way out of this

Shamhat this self pity?!

Sappho stop being so hard on yourself, just relax and let go.

Shamhat- when I was beaten and in fear of loosing my life it is true, I gave into despair and left the temple. I threw away my jewelled belt, my insignia of office, I felt that I could no longer embody the Goddess and do her work, I had become afraid.

Sappho am I meant to understand this?

Shamhat You are jealous…and yet you have no need to be. He couldn't have you and so he had me, sex without connection, sex without any responsibility only I fell in love with the man…not the hero; and I conceived his child and I need him to return with us for my child’s sake… to trust in love…in life. His son will be beautiful, brave and clever and it will break my heart to see his father reflected in my baby’s eyes and to know that he left us, carelessly as if we don‘t matter.

How can he think of doing this!

Sappho- it is true, I should call you a snake. You tempted Enkidu back to the city and this led to his death. Now you wish to bring Gilgamesh down to earth, to destroy his ambitions and to tie him to you.

It is an old trick.

2009-01-25T01:03:00.000Z

I've put my mind in neutral this weekend...
Ba ba black sheep.

2009-01-22T13:27:00.002Z

For the cosmos of our waking knowledge, is a hologram within a hologram; we are but a blur of interference patterns enfolded throughout the cosmic hologram. The tangible reality of our everyday lives is really a kind of illusion; the flat and lifeless mechanical world so devoid of transcendence and wonder, is a culturally induced hypnosis. Underlying it is a deeper order of existence, a vast and more primary level of reality that gives birth to all the objects and appearances of our physical world.

Shamhat asks chorus
is gilgamesh here?

Chorus I think that he is in the main temple, but he will pass this way soon. Who are you?

Shamhat I am Shamhat

Chorus He has a lot to learn before the date, the retreat starts in a weeks time

Gilgamesh- ‘surprised’ Hello! I thought that we had already said goodbye. You must have started your journey very early...

Shamhat I left on Friday night, I stayed over at a friends house. The last part was very beautiful but it was as if I had no protection, as if without you I was naked and the starlight fell like sparks upon my skin. The roads were as as if coated in glass. A hell of ice…such purity. The sky full of shooting stars..the Draconids meteor shower I think.…tiny dragons…

I feel as if I’m not supposed to be here.

I can’t do this…(tries not to sob)

Gilgamesh (searching for a hankey) Sappho is coming to see me latter

Shamhat Truly... I don’t think that I can bear it.

Gilgamesh shamhat there is nothing wrong. This feeling of attachment, the hurt you feel- is a part of the journey, I will come back to you. You should trust me, but instead you hurt yourself like this, expecting me to be pleased to see you. We have said our goodbyes, it made me feel as if I’d seen a ghost when I saw you…

we should just get on with what we need to do.

Tell me why should I not love you more after this?
You are beautiful and precious but The final journey must be made I need to continue,

I love you you know…

But I have seen death and must do something.

For six days and nights I wept over him…my dearest friend…I could not give him up for burial until a worm fell from his nose…my friend whom I love so much, who experienced every hardship with me— lost in the land of ash a miserable existence of inactivity, amid gloom and dust.

if death cannot be conquered then I must find other ways to end the suffering of mankind.

And you know this shamhat you know how I feel because you loved him too

Shamhat I brought him to you…

Gilgamesh Grief entered my innermost being when he died

Shamhat- because your resolve to find the lights without end is a journey into another world, because you will return to me changed and three years is too long, too long.

you must strive for immortality because you fear death.

Gilgamesh why can you not simply love what you have

I should return to the temple of Ishtar I do not believe in the lights without end, nor do I care for immortality

Goes to walk away…

Acting is all...

2009-01-21T22:22:00.000Z

Alter.

2009-01-21T11:17:00.007Z

I don't like writing.
I prefer to journey. I need music to ride down to...Only writing my own story is to re-forge a chain of events as seen through a chosen filter. I'm reinterpreting something that was devoid of interpretation, that was chaotic and messy and sad.

It isn't the same as going somewhere that belongs to us all, but it is similar. By that I mean a Shamanic journey is to a land that exists in mind alone, and was created by mind to make sense of meaningless feelings and experiences. Common land of the minds is Hades, or the Egyptian Duat, or even that moment when you are lost in someones eyes and feel the mind within as a kind of landscape..

Journeying my own story is harder. There is a map, and there is a chosen interpretation and there is reality: the discomfort of the chair I use, the slowness of the Internet, hunger, cold, the need for the toilet, need for food, and then there is boredom- though boredom is something else sometimes, not simply a kind of discomfort- there are always other things to do too, things that are much more important than writing.

Bleugh!

So, where does it begin?

The starlight fell like sparks of ice upon my skin. The ground as if coated in
glass. So far, and not supposed to be here. Forbidden.
To the temple. Shoes
outside.
Outside the steps.
The old shrine.
People going in or coming
out

The stage is sparse. At the center is an alter above three steps. To the audiences left is the temple or an indication that a path there leads to the temple.

Homer used the phrase 'Temenos and fragrant alter of the gods' meaning a sacred area containing the cult stone, tree and spring and the bomos, the alter. I have no idea if all sacred areas had to have the stone, the tree, the spring and how this evolves into the design of churches...but back to the bomos, the alter. There are natural alters where the cult stone serves as a place of sacrifice and fire but most are a kind of table built of well fitting stone or brick- decorated with spirals. There is a metal tablet for fire.

Sacrifices to chthonic deities used a different kind of alter- a hole in the ground- called in Greek - a bothros. The ground level hearth, the eschara for fire offerings. Incidentally offerings to subterranean powers are called choai.

So it is that when Shamhat calls upon Ereshlkigal...she would not use the alter, she would use the ground upon which she stands- which is symbolically correct, since Shamhat has turned her back on promises of liberation or heaven..

Basically then, as the alter simply designates that there was an older religion which has been superseded by this new cult of personal liberation, the shrine should be over grown and perhaps covered by insignia of the new religion?

Perhaps, to show that Shamhat bows to something older, more primal, she should clear this alter and make an offering... fill a bowl with water to reflect the star light?

2009-01-20T10:12:00.008Z

On Friday I went to talk to the man upon whom my version of Gilgamesh is based. I spent an awful lot of time explaining background stuff: the story of Gilgamesh, why emanation from a Pure Land (Buddhist beliefs are ultimately of that nature) changes the imaginary set-up of the Underworld.

For this play is about an older version of reality, one closer to the Sumerian view that death cannot be avoided, and that there is no reward in 'Heaven'.

Then I told him that he was, for the sake of this play to be Gilgamesh; which is a fairly flattering. The Gilgamesh of the Epic made a lot of mistakes, but he didn't lack courage or diligence...and then I set about asking him what he remembered of that day.

The hand wringing- though it was a gesture of flicking something away- is what stayed in my mind from his account. The reoccurring motif of adult things happening around him and his total incomprehension of how to respond which in this case led to nothing...save this impotent gesture of despair..

Between times I recounted the tale of his/my son's dinner time question (Tom often asks some strange question midday). Tom hangs out with computer geeks and tis a well known fact that geeks have a fear of disruptive, out of control, ill educated others:

..."Why, when people who wish to adopt children have to fill out forms to prove that they are good parents, don't people have to do something similar before conceiving one of their own?"

After his brother had stopped laughing and spluttering about Nazi ideals and eugenics in general, I said:

"Tom, if there had been such a test, do you think that they would have let me keep you? I'd either have been forced to have an abortion or give you up for
adoption. I earned £60 a week, I was pregnant, I was living in a single room in a
shared house. If I had applied to adopt a child, do you think I'd have been welcomed with open arms?

At that time I was going each day to look after my daughters and busy blocking all my ex-husbands attempts to cut me out of their lives, his account of my irresponsible behaviour (leaving him) would have been enough- even without the lack of money, or a home"

None of that was hidden information, but to Gilgamesh my situation was simply a set of circumstances that I could (as he believed that he would) transcend.

Actually I'm starting to feel angry about that, again. I felt drained and bruised from asking questions.

2009-01-14T11:31:00.003Z

Namtar is a dark man.
The dark man is a favorite subject of romantic fiction. He is the tall, dark, stranger, a hero, an iconic alpha male who kidnaps the heroine and wins her admiration through his forceful action.

Only Namtar has to be, in my version, the ultimate enemy of Feminist idealism. Namtar carries the stuff that men should be ashamed of, if they listen to the feminist woman; he is all the things no one dare say.

I have tried to read romantic fiction, I really have, but the whole alpha male thing leaves me cold. Romantic fiction takes place- as far as I know!- within a very limited framework, representing the stricter borders and boundaries of normal women who enjoy romantic fiction. The conventional dreams of escape, be it translocation to a place of passion full of nice things or the escape from real world consequences (abdication of responsibility) are a kind of escape I cannot trust. These dreams cannot fit me, or feed, me or give me anything other than nightmares!

But that doesn't mean that I'm immune to the common fear and the attraction for the dark man. The dark is in this case, The Underworld. I'm tempted, but it isn't the Freudian Underworld or is it?

I'm not sure yet.

The Freudian Underworld is the id. The ground is strewn with unobtainable desires- murder, rape, torture, theft, abduction, cream-cakes (?). The ground is riven with cracks reaching down into the primal life energy-lava; all around is illuminated with a baleful, red light. Only this isn't true, unless you are a Freudian!

Namtar is death. He is the Queen of the Underworld's right-hand man, he is Ereshkigal's visor. Shamhat summons him to ask for a job. She has been broken by her contact with Gilgamesh, she had believed that her orthodox view, as told to Gilgamesh by Siduri "Why not live your life and enjoy it, go home, fall in love, take a wife, have children, take care of them and love them- because we all die!" was simply the truth. That chasing after the lights without end was pure delusion.

So the Underworld from which Namtar appears is Sumerian, not Freudian or Jungian or Christian or any of the many Buddhist hells. Though I can't help making it seem that Namtar is a kind of reflection- evil to balance good- in fact all he is... is the way it is. There is death, and there is no rebirth or even karma.

It is hard to know what Sumerians actually believed, but any population that buries material goods with the dead may be assumed to believe that the dead have a virtual existence somewhere else, and as long as their body and belongings remain together, the contents of the tomb is something like the code for the virtual life...elsewhere. In the Greek tradition (from Homer) the dead were psyche- a word that is related to breath rather than mind- the dead were insubstantial, unconscious but able to be temporarily revived into consciousness by libations of blood or wine poured out onto their graves. It is likly that the writings of Homer were inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh.

So I shall ask teh intraNets:

Geography of Kur
Urugal: It is here that Ereshkigal's great throne resides as well as the throne of her husband Nergal. That makes this the capital and most important city of the Underworld. It is in fact the only city mentioned being in the underworld. There may be other cities in the underworld, if there are we know nothing about them.

The word Urugal derives from Uru meaning city, and Gal meaning great. Urugal therefore means great city. It is there that most of the dead reside. If one keeps in mind that the dead are expected to continue using the skills that they learned in life, you can imagine how great the city must be.

As the sun dips over the horizon Ninazu, the god of the dawn, travel into the underworld. Presumably Utu, the god of the sun, goes with him. This means that the luminous glow of the sun can be seen coming from Ereshkigal's city. A wonder to behold.

There is a large courtyard beyond Ereshkigal's throne room as a barrier between her inner sanctum and the main city. In order to go from the main city through the court yard, and into Ereshkigal's presence one needs to get the approval of Namtar. This is one of the main services that any of the ministers of the gods provide.

Beyond the city of Urugal are wastelands where the less fortunate among the dead are forced to eat dust. This stark contrast to the great city is what the myths about the underworld are warning us about. Provide for your future and the future of those loved ones that have passed away or you will not have a comfortable eternity to look forward to.

Ganzer: The land of the living and the land of the dead need to be kept apart. There are dead who would return to consume the living, and there are powers that the living could steal from the dead. The fortress guarding the border between the world of the living and the world of the dead is called Ganzer.

The underworld needs a fortress that is strong, because occasionally some of the more powerful gods attempt to break in. Inanna had the strength to rip open the gates, and threatened to do so in one myth. Nergal, being powerful but not as powerful as Inanna, took a small force of demons to force the gates of the underworld.

For most the grave is the gateway that leads to the underworld. It is how the soul gets from the land of the living to the land of the dead. The grave is fitted with offerings for the dead to take with them into the underworld. These offerings would include offerings for the gatekeepers.

Ganzer has seven gates guarded by seven gate keepers. Another version of the fortress has it that there are fourteen gates. The chief of these gate keepers is the minor god Neti in any version. The gates are often described as being bound or locked with a cord.

Id-Kura: The river of the underworld or the man eating river. This is a river that pulls people from the living realm to the land of the dead. The word Id-Kura translates roughly as Id, River, with Kur, meaning underworld, and ra meaning flood.

It plays a strong part in the myth where Enlil is condemned to death and the myth where the child Damu falls into the river. It was understood in these myths that the river would lead into a cave and from there the river would lead directly into the underworld.

Though the river bears some passing similarities to the Greek river Styx, it should be pointed out that we don't actually know that they are in fact connected. We do know that the Greeks borrowed several elements from Sumerian mythology.

Namtar.

2009-01-12T10:27:00.006Z

And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny… is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad...The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, "A New Refutation of Time"

The stage has to be simple.
Steps, an alter. I've no idea what a Sumerian alter was like so I'll stick with the basic, ancient Greek design as described by Walter Burkert; the temple is generic (is that possible, a generic temple?!). The division I make between religions isn't monotheism and polytheism, nor is it between the Gnostic (personal relationship with a deity) or the ordained class of priests for intercession.

The difference is between the Sumerian idea of the underworld- Irkalla as another world and the latter view (Originally Zoroastrian) of the possibility of ascent away from matter and into the spirit.

Though yes- technically Gnosticism is about ascent from the prison of the material world into the infinite and has much in common with Zoroastrian beliefs.

Simplicity on the stage is important.
The words and ideas are, as with Euripides, the point.

When Shamhat wants out she cries to the earth.
The earth sends Namtar 'The decider of fate'. He could be portrayed as the Undertaker.

If it was a musical with a sound track by Trent Reznor, this would be the song.

Namtar in the upper world of order and decorum represents death, oblivion, erasure; he is the essence of fear for those who cannot see his reflection in their own souls.

Namtar leads Shamhat to the other place and I want it to be shocking...His hand wrapped in her hair, she on her knees a knife at her throat. It must appear coercive, a tragedy, the worst possible outcome and yet the audience must be able to understand why Shamhat has chosen this in preference to the order of the upper world.

Her death is not a tragedy, the real tragedy is that Gilgamesh cannot connect to the earth; for his eyes are transfixed upon heaven, constantly searching for a way out to the place of "Lights without beginning".

Feminism (Sappho) and religion (Gilgamesh)do not consider biologically ordained desires as legitimate, 'penetration as a violation of a woman's space' and children as a form of intellectual or spiritual suicide.

Shamhat does not hold such lofty views about life.

Namtar is the original tall, dark, stranger.
TBC..

Erased...

2009-01-11T21:33:00.005Z

There should be some film here of Samye Ling- but to be honest, even though all that Tibetan stuff feels like home, you know I really don't care if I never sit in a Tibetan shrine room ever again.

You can YouTube it if you like...Samye Ling.

Let's continue.

There was ice.
It was cold.
The star light bit into my skin.

I wish I could remember what I was wearing...see, that's how it is! If I look away, or down or away then I wont see this memory. If I can fix upon inconsequential facts.

No, I wish I could remember what I wore and then I'd know why I was cold or perhaps this was that other kind of cold, the cold of despair- under the dim morning sky, the stars flickering out- not that it matters.

None of it matters now.

It was cold, it was dark.
I parked the car, got out and went to the temple door- the sound of Tara puja- so slipped off my shoes, went into the shrine room. Three small prostrations, sit in half lotus and join in, I knew most of it by heart.

Home from home for me.

The day broke grey and I don't remember anything except the sinking feeling when he said that Sappho was visiting him latter on. No food, no drink, just cold with the sensation of shattering glass cutting into my heart with every breath. We walked into what seemed like an endless forest complete with the ginger bread house- a wooden home, small and almost covered with fake flowers, silk flowers in pots, plastic flowers in the garden- home to an old, German lady.

We were invited in for cake and coffee and time moved so slowly, so slowly.

The next part is gone.

amnesia.

Until the memory of being back in the car sinking into complete, abject misery. The car was still parked and I tried to appear normal, but I was slipping further and further out. I probably played the one single Fall tape. I wish I'd had something else, some NIN, something that screamed at me that I was not alone, and at the bottom of this hell is a ladder called anger and that I had every right to use it, to climb out of this into clarity- up, out and away- instead I cried.

Did anyone ask me if I was OK?
No, this is England and grief is a private affair..

Eventually 'Sappho' (this will be her name in the play) came over to hold my hand. A symbol of commiseration I suppose. I felt obliged to stop sobbing quite so much so as to be polite, but to be frank I felt as if someone was pulling my guts out and not inclined to pretend otherwise.

Now the curious thing about this situation is that typically for me I was in a position where absolutely no one around me could see my point of view. From my point of view, or even me considering this story happening to someone else, I'd say that the woman in the car had every reason to feel betrayed. The friend who held my hand was in fact a semi rival, Sappho was, as her name suggests, not inclined towards sexual relations with men, but she had asked Gilgamesh (again, his name in the play) for- in his words- 'a sperm donation'. I had said that I couldn't bear it... I didn't see how he could imagine that what she wished for would be possible, emotionally- that she should think it as nothing to conceive a child from someone that she didn't love, simply for the sake of becoming a mother actually offends me.

So I don't suppose she had much sympathy for me really...carrying the living result of his sperm donation to me.

There is an idea that despair is a way of letting both yourself and the side down. In this place I had no right to believe that my unborn son had any right to have his father with us. The laws of feminism dictate autonomy, the rules of the religious life dictate that family life is at best a waste of time. Gilgamesh was set upon saving the multiverse from the sufferings of samsara, and my unhappiness was therefore a drop in the ocean of sorrow..

After Sappho had gone, I suppose I got out of the car, I suppose I followed where ever. I recall sitting by the river. I recall feeling that most of all that what was happening to me was regarded as something very minor in the grand scale of things and though I know how to dissolve reality into emptiness, though I know all the theories and tricks- there was no space for that now- I could almost do it though, almost push my mind up and out and away from the truth and rest in a kind of woolly oblivion. If I'd had cancer or was mourning the death of someone, this state of mind could have been useful- a lacuna- .Pregnancy isn't that kind of experience though, it's more like waking up to find a time bomb strapped to ones abdomen. Preparations must be made, life must be sorted out. I couldn't ignore it.

In reality I drove back.
I don't remember anything about that either...

A kind of limbo.
A space betwixt earth and sky without any land.

Now I hate the M6. Tebay service station is a pit of ghosts for me, former versions of myself wonder through, eyes red rimmed...hopeless.

Seven months latter, I awoke with amniotic fluid trickling down my leg. I remember ringing the hospital, picking up my bags and driving once more through the dark. I remember the coils of labour, the long walk from darkness into light- a dimming again, the blood-purse of my heart tearing and the imperative to keep on, to keep on living.

I used all my best tricks.
I was an image frozen on the event horizon.
Nothing left.

In real life there was a beyond, a worm hole warped by gravity. Dear reader I TOOK IT and headed out.

In the play I hit the END button during a single day. In real life I endured ten months, perhaps longer, perhaps shorter...

In the play I go from being a sacred whore of Inanna (just about how I saw myself from the age of twelve) to a corpse- with the promise of a husband in the Great Below as I submit to the blade to become a preistess of Ereshkigal- I am erased....

2009-01-08T11:01:00.003Z

I know what it is like to be considered as the bad one, the one whose behaviour was so out of order, who acted irresponsibly. My ex-husband was left with several tales to tell about me that proved how bad I am; paying for a motorbike ride with a fuck in the marital bed sounds suitably terrible even to me...but I was there and so know exactly what was in her mind when she did it. I knew why she had needed that ride, and why such a gift was worth such a payment.

In many ways that motor bike road stands in direct opposition to the memory of the drive over ice to Samye Ling. Of how the evening was bright- the smell of the grass, the sense of being on this earth, the ride back in the dark- of speed, wind, movement and the sense of being taken care of...of how carefully Chris went around corners until he was sure that I understood how to lean. Of the strangeness of being in the picture and the beauty and strangeness of real things- that miraculous, bell-like sound of the beating of swans wings.

So if my ex-husband wished to write about a terrible woman such as me, would I be delighted to have my say; would I jump at the chance to put flesh on her bones, to give her a soul?

Hard to really know...but I think that perhaps I would wish to take care of her- as I say, to give her a soul- otherwise, if she were left to him to write, no one would know that there was more to this story than meets the eye.

And so I wrote to 'Gilgamesh' or rather to the guy whose behaviour is to be attributed to the hero Gilgamesh. Without the real voice, the other side to my authentic account I have only my impressions as bones to carry the body of what I think he meant.

Perhaps he imagines that by not replying to me that I'll give up and go away? As I may have said here or elsewhere this is about justice, I need the people who were involved to see the interplay of the theories held by the main characters and I need it to be a tragedy (for it was most truly a catastrophic error!).

The function of tragedy was held, by Aristotle to be for catharsis.

For me it is all about shattering silence!
People may look into that story and see heroic principals at work, for me it was not that way, for me it was small and painful and stupid. That image needs to be broken, I cannot let it remain.

My task is too big for me and I do not believe for a second that I'll accomplish it. I do not believe that people I consider involved (for maintaining ideals irreconcilable with the plight of a pregnant woman) will feel inclined to help me.

No matter, I'll carry on exactly as I did before and find my own solutions.

2- The Master. Journey's end.

2009-01-07T11:21:00.004Z

The line from my previous post 'I had destroyed the internal logic' stands out for me. Clearly the internal logic of our relationship demanded stasis, demanded silence or else there would be a shatter and dissolve. The brightness and integrity of the flask- its very purpose- maintained by a fragile glass skim-thin skin, a brilliant mirror which I was able to break' with a thoughtless action, or apparent wilful disregard?

The first journey to a bed at a friends house was over, the second part began very early in the morning.

I was driving to Samye Ling to plead -without recourse to any overt emotional display- with the father of my unborn son. I was playing my last card, I trusted in the possibility that Mother Nature would intercede for me, that the wrongness of leaving us would be self-evident. My silent aim was to ask him to give up the orthodox path into wisdom, and to trust in 'the Black School' instead. But I knew that in his eyes I wasn't 'qualified' to be able to tell him that...

The Black School is a concept found in Icelandic myth; it refers to Gnosis and to the idea that if one asks sincerely for revelation, then the world will provide what ever the student needs. Sometimes the teachings arrive by orthodox means, sometimes the lesson is given in a non-orthodox way, fundamental to the Black School is the belief that the student must walk his own path.

The choice my then partner had made required me to trust that he would still love me when he returned from the three year retreat and that he would not accept the underlying message embedded in this- and most religions- that family life with the emotional roller coaster that is child care and sex and multi level human relationship stuff, gets in the way of prayer and religious practice.

I did not trust him, I'd heard too many stories to the contrary of relationships changed towards friendship and celibacy away from passion, but more importantly Mother Nature spoke to me all too clearly:

"A man prepared to leave his woman and baby at the mercy of the future without feeling a need to be there to protect them, does not deserve the honour of being called a father."

As I drove through the darkness, under a sky so clear that I was aware of the immensity of space beyond the thin air, I was vitally aware of the child in my womb. The path seemed perilous, underneath the wheels of the car there was ice. I was overly aware of the futility of my chosen course of action, I was 'Sailing away on the thin ice of a new day' stung by starlight trailing from the tails of many shooting-stars and weighed down by the impossibility of finding the right words; the Cure song Like Cockatoos was in the sound of the car's engine, within the beating of my heart.

There was no way out for us.
Nothing that I could say that could show him how thin the mirror skin of our relationship had become. I needed some gesture, some sign that he understood how close to being broken I was, how close to shattering, and what that could mean for the child I carried...

"Like Cockatoos"
By The Cure:

She walked out of her house
And looked around
At all the gardens that looked
Back at her house
(Like all the faces
That quiz when you smile...)

And he was standing
At the corner
Where the road turned dark
A part of shiny wet
Like blood the rain fell
Black down on the street

And kissed his feet she fell
Her head an inch away from heaven
And her face pressed tight
And all around the night sang out
Like cockatoos

"There are a thousand things" he said
"I'll never say those things to you again"
And turning on his heel
He left a trace of bubbles
Bleeding in his stead

And in her head
A picture of a boy who left her
Lonely in the rain
(And all around the night sang out
like cockatoos)

1-The Master-'This is the winter of your mind'

2009-01-07T10:29:00.007Z

It was a Friday night, or could it have been a Saturday?
It was early October...or was it late September?

Let me start with what I know.
Here was more enforced passivity. I was confined to my room by common sense, an unconscious fear of breaking things, by an outrageous sense that I should be quiet- accepting- passive.

And passivity when feeling myself on the brink of abysmal emptiness drew images I tried not to see or hear that came glittering in fragments and shards; of a thermos flask- a precious object that seemed both expensive and rare- given to me by my mother to clean. I was a child, and I heard her warnings about something I shouldn't do to the flask, I didn't understand and thought it was nothing. Nor could I comprehend the finality; how the second when the bright mirror interior collapsed came with a whiff of death.

I was transfixed by an overwhelming horror- the impossibility- of that irrevocable moment.

My actions had wrought a terrifying transformation, I had somehow destroyed the internal logic of the flask.

The writing was on the wall: doing what I had believed to be so right had proved to be so wrong.

At this moment; this evening, this morning, this evening, this time within my room, the meaning of passivity inverted into action. Keeping still, accepting, doing, are action. The energy expended in withholding movement, to prevent praxis was immense.

So immense that keeping still would shatter me.

So that's how I was...and it must have been evening because I broke the journey in half, to stay at a friends house over night. I arrived at her house around 10pm and left early, perhaps around 4 or 5am? The sense of having to do this possessed me and I wish I'd had the time or space to drive it all into words at the time, but it was too big and too raw...I was already bleeding inside.

There was ice on the roads and the light from the stars seemed to burn my skin.

To keep myself sane I listened to the single Fall tape I had with me, over and over. It was Code: Selfish and the song Return threw sand into my eyes..I tried to ignore.

The epic of Gilgamesh.

2008-12-24T18:13:00.005Z

For quite some time I've wished to write a particular day out in the form of a play...as if written by Euripides. The day really happened, and the consequences were far reaching and I have a great desire to shine a light upon the thoughts and attitudes that led to this particular tragedy.

The confines of a tragedy- for this story is not a happy one- or rather the rules Euripides kept to have been a block alternating with a help in equal measure. For instance, in a Greek tragedy everything happens in one location and during one day. The story focuses upon a hero and how the hero makes a fatal-error out of over confidence, or ignorance, or more usually because a God has some gripe against him. There was no fatal error, but 'the hero' lost a wife and son because of hubris.

hubris referred to actions which, intentionally or not, shamed and humiliated the victim, and frequently the perpetrator as well.

At first I thought that I should be the flawed hero, but latter I came to see that I should be secondary and the recipient of theories intended to help me, but which are actually causing me harm.

The hero is Gilgamesh, that has him as so shocked from his sadness at the death of his friend Enkidu and his failure to win immortality that he entered a religious house and has been studying the spiritual path.

Sappho Sophia is Gilgamesh's muse...

My part in this is portrayed by Shamhat, the priestess of Inanna who was called upon by Gilgamesh to tame the wild man, Enkidu. I had taken refuge in the same spiritual house as Gilgamesh after being beaten by a client. Gilgamesh and Shamhat became secret lovers whilst living in the religious house.

The play takes place at a religious center. Gilgamesh is about to take temporary monastic vows and to enter into a three year long retreat for the good of all beings. I, Shamhat am there because I carry his child in my belly and am pleading for the rule of the Great Mother, that life and death are bigger than us, and that this three year retreat is another attempt at immortality, that the gods do not give immortality to humans. The reality of life in the form of birth, and a child's needs are closer to ultimate truth than any philosophical discourse or experience a person may find in meditation...

Gilgamesh argues the hero's point of view for his desire is heroic after all- enlightenment so that he may save all beings from suffering death- Shamhat appears to be selfish, and representing the worldly values Gilgamesh is rejecting. Sappho reinforces the feminist myths of our time. Her path though life has been will remain the very opposite of Shamhat's, whilst Shamhat has literally embraced shameless sexuality in all and any of its myriad forms, Sappho Sophia has remained aloof. Gilgamesh loved her and imagined that he could win her, but instead she has taught Gilgamesh what could be called courtly love, she has taught him that women and men literally fuck each other up...that sex is something to be transcended.

This of course fits in with the religious life Gilgamesh has chosen.

Intellectually Sappho offered spiritual love whilst physically Shamhat was in his bed. It could be said that shamhat exploited his vulnerabilities- but she did little more than to offer him sex as she had offered sex to any man who entered her former temple (of Inanna) before, she offered it freely as a Holy thing. It wasn't in her to understand how angry Gilgamesh had become at the Goddess and all Her ways, and how she Shamhat could possibly represent anything other than the highest, most sacred path.

Pregnancy changed everything, now it was time for Shamhat to lay all her cards down and to appeal to the human heart within Gilgamesh. To argue for the wisdom of Inanna, how passion is an integral part of life, and that love is all of it and everything...

So I have three points of view to consider and to lay out; a fourth comes latter, when Shamhat is reclaimed by her original temple and called home- at this point Gilgamesh loses a wife and his only son- this moment is the true tragedy. For if Shamhat is right, then he has lost more than he can ever know...

Tam Lin from the Queen of Faeiry's point of view.

2008-11-17T11:15:00.005Z

It was during the week before Halloween I had decided to kill him.

The final insult came in the form of Janet, nothing as simple as infidelity, or lying- he was culpable on both of those charges as indeed there had been others, specifically one Lady Margaret-

No, what made up my mind for me was his down right, blatant and unkind rejection of me.

This time the 'infidelity', the so-called 'Janet' made me feel old and complicated; though she was all the things I appear to be: young, pretty, clever, irreverent-- she was also carrying his child-- a thing that I could never do.

Of course I would not really kill him, well not with my own bare hands, it wouldn't be murder; though death is death and final.

He would be a sacrifice, he would be my perfect offering to the Lord of the infernal realms, the ruler of the abyss, to Lucifer prince of light-- does any of that make it sound any better, more noble? No, but it isn't as if I do this thing lightly! Tam Lin would be my gift to my people and at the same time his death would be my personal sacrifice. His death would hurt me deeply. But he would go to pay that seven yearly tithe to Hell that hangs over me.

This seven year thing is a nuisance, one I had tried to get out of many times, but the only alternative would have been all out war; so I considered the tithe to be rent.

Everyone hates paying rent, don't they.

I and my people live between worlds of a differing nature, as if the world is onion skinned- layer over layer of semi transparent skins- some beings can see this, others cannot. The mortal world suspects the presence of our people, but only Hell knows of the world of fairy directly and requires that I and my people pay its Lord a kind of protection fee.

It pleases the Lord of the infernal realms, perhaps for the sake of bureaucracy, to class the noble race of fairy as a kind of daemon. He likes to think of us as his subjects and of me especially as a kindred spirit. I don't think of myself as demonic, but such things cannot not matter, so long as peace is sustained; and for the sake of peace Hell will be paid.

But now, after Janet, Tam Lin becomes my obvious solution.

Shame, I mused, it had all started so well.

"Your name, fair lady"

were the first words he spoke to me. I was standing over him-- I can see myself through his pale eyes-- a shadowy silhouette against an evening sky, glimmering with a light he cannot see so much as feel. I am more like a static field, a ghost his temporary confusion allows in. He had fallen from his horse and lay half in and half out of his world amongst the roots of an old apple tree. I noticed the startlingly white fragment of bone shining through the skin of his forearm.

'My name? Know me as Tanith'

was my reply. I don't know why I chose the name Tanith, I wasn't in the mood for truth that day.

Tam Lin, so bright and so fair, the beauteous fallen knight, saw me through the pain and haze of concussion; and he gazed with eyes as wide as the sky, into my heart. Tam Lin did not recoil from what he saw there. I expect he was attracted by the crackle of ultra-violet I tend to shimmer with, mortals usually are. It seemed to make his mind hurt and so he turned his attention to what must have appeared as my strange attire-- I am a fairy without wings-- and that day I was covered from my neck down wards in scales of black obsidian, my hair was impressive too-- so long, so black ending as if dipped in fire, my eyes no doubt seemed so cool, so distant. I know that for a fragment of infinity I became the center of his world.

He loved me for that one, single pure moment without question.

I took him then, my Tam Lin, into the hollow hills of fairy where he would eat and drink to his hearts content, not knowing the truth that to consume the merest fragment of food or tiniest sip of drink causes Earth time to speed away. Thus it was the instant Tam Lin ate with us, all who had once known him were as good as dead and buried and nothing. Likewise nothing of Tam Lin was known, save the legend of an earthly knight who had been taken to pick the golden apples of the sun, the silver apples of the moon by the Queen of the faeries.

The moment Tam Lin ate, Carterhaugh, the place of Tam Lin's fall, had long since crumbled away, leaving little except some ivy strewn heaps of stone. Latter on it was to Carterhaugh that Tam Lin returned when summoned to play out his cruel games.

It was to Carterhaugh that Janet came, seeking Tam Lin for a joke, for bravado, or because her life was small and boring. Perhaps she wished to meet this bright young man of whom songs were sung, what do I know?-- only that Janet, like Tam Lin was young and fair, just seventeen.

How was it? If I look deeply I can see the echo, that Janet tied her overly demur-- in her opinion-- long green skirt above her knee to make herself more enticing and to Carterhaugh went she. Janet walked to the ancient well that remained close to the ruins and here red roses grew in profusion. Following the words of warning from the legend Janet plucked a double rose....

And one minute nothing, the next Tam Lin stands there so tall and fair in the soft golden light of sunset. He would say "Why do you pluck that rose, and why do you come here, you know the rose will cost you either your cloak or your maidenhead" And I can imagine Janet, with her good christian education thinking that it was all just a joke.

My cloak or my virginity, what kind of choice is that- a playful apparition, a friendly ghost, he cannot be serious?

But Janet, oh Janet now you know that his seed was as mortal as you, and no joke.

My thoughts return to the past. After I had melded the edges of the shattered bone and sent him spiraling down into sleep I carried Tam Lin to my horse, riding home along the gloomy star strewn way with him lying across my lap. Down to my home of tall towers so old and so final tearing through the scarlet sky. I took Tam Lin to my bed chamber where I removed his muddy clothes, laying him gently between sheets of wolf skin and spider silk. Then I let the armour slide from my skin and naked I lay myself down besides young Tam Lin, my arm around his cool body, feeling the slow beating of his human heart.

The first time Tam Lin rose for me I knelt beside him and bowed down to kiss his thighs. In shock he pushed me away saying,

"Lady what do you do!"

I turned my back towards him and once more knelt, sinking down to place my head between my arms, offering him what all men desire.

Again he surprised me,

"Lady"

said he,

"I do not understand why you act this way...can you not understand that though you are very lovely, I feel shame on your behalf!"

I was baffled, bemused and not a little hurt,

"Why? Don't you wish to use me?" I asked, not sure if I felt sorrow or anger.

"I can't"said he,

"I'm not an animal"

. It was a statement that puzzled me. To my fairy eyes it is obvious that he is just that, a kind of animal, all flesh and blood, all warm and full of feelings. I looked straight at that part of him hanging between his legs and said,

"But you feel desire, I can see that you do!"

He fixed me with a cold stare,

"Yes I do, but you make me feel base. I cannot simply use you to fulfill my urges!"

"But what about my urges"I almost shout,

"what if I really want you to do this?".

"No" said he

"It isn't right"

and that was an end to it.

Latter that evening he spoke,

"Tell me'

asked he,

'Is there any way I may return to my home?'

and I lied.
I said,

'There is no return'.

I did not tell him the truth, he didn't know nor would he know that that until he ate or drank, earth and fairy time were in unity; I was in no mood to play fair. His rejections of my body had hurt me and I am not kind. But once he understood how I had allowed him to lose the path of return, then his sorrow was bitter. I stayed with him as he finished his wine and then called for more and some more until he passed into the oblivion of a drunken sleep. I laid him down once more between the gossamer sheets.

All he once knew in the mortal world was lost to him, he should have been pleased.

Just before dawn I felt his fingers begin to explore and caress my skin. I sighed with longing to encourage his progress, but alas the drink had got the better of him and I felt his fingers slip away as sleep reclaimed him.

In the time we had together I could never call myself Tam Lin's beloved. We slept together, eventually he knew my body, but each time he saw into my heart he was both attracted and appalled at what he saw there. Our world is not the same as the one Tam Lin had fallen from, the mortal world seems strange to us and our world is very strange to them for we do not have the prohibitions of the human world to cause us the suffering humans seem to crave. To humans the world of fairy is a venal place, full of promise; and so like an alcoholic who finds himself alone in a tavern with the keys to the cellar, Tam Lin began to acquaint himself with my people.

I believe that contrary to his own true spirit, Tam Lin took himself to be a cold hearted libertine and maintained a belief that all his actions here were without consequence. I, perhaps to my shame, did nothing to alter that view.

And then there was Janet.

Though years had slipped by when Tam Lin first came into my world, there always remains a connection, a temporary way out to Carterhaugh. The rules of the connections make no logical sense, but work for want of a better term, poetically. So it was that Tam Lin must have consulted with others who made transparent the odd correspondences between worlds. Tam Lin found his way back to Carterhaugh, though I did not know that he also knew of a way to remain in the mortal world. At Carterhaugh my Tam Lin who had spent so many hours entwined with fairy maidens, thought it good fun to sport in the same way with any earthly maiden who came to Carterhaugh, he literally had the best of both worlds.

After Janet, I decided that Tam Lin must die.

It wasn't like putting down a sick dog, or amputating a limb that cannot be healed for fear that it will poison the whole body. I loved him truly, but he brought me no pleasure. The only thing of value he possessed was either his love- which he refused to give to me, or his life-force, which would redeem my world from the threat of war for another seven years. Tam Lin was mine and Tam Lin had refused to please me. To me he was infinitely precious, but I had to acknowledge the truth, Tam Lin was never going to give me that precious part of himself to me, he would never give me all of himself.

Perhaps it was unfortunate that when I finally made up my mind to be done with him I didn't have very long to think about it. The three realms of fairy, human and deamonic slip around and through each other, save at only a very few places and times is there any real connection. Halloween is one of those times. At Halloween the gates swing wide open, and every seven years I cross over and down to the infernal realm to pay that tithe to Hell.

I had told Tam Lin that as the leaves fell from the trees in the world above and the skies turned cold and the sun grows weak and pale, that he, my beloved Tam Lin should ride with me as my equal. I told him that it was a great honour.

As I spoke I saw fear grow in his eyes, perhaps I am a lousy liar, or perhaps my heart gave me away..

I felt some pity, for in truth Tam Lin is not of the same spirits us, he could not submit to my will or see that because I had found him and given him all, that he was in dept to me. It would not have seemed right to him that as he would not pay me back with devotion, then I was justified in offering his soul to Lucifer.

Nor would I be so unkind as to explain these fact of life and death to him.

As the light drained from the land I told Tam Lin to mount the white horse. The failing light seemed to take my blood with it, pulling my spirits downwards. We took the glassy path across the skies and entered the human realm.

As we rode through Carterhaugh, the night now ablaze with star light, and towards the next portal, Janet ran towards Tam Lin and pulled him from his horse. My reactions were predictable, I turned him into a snake, a lion and finally into fire, but Janet held onto him making me feel small and silly...powerless, which is an unusual sensation for me and one I do not take kindly too.

Finally Tam Lin lay naked in her arms, my magic had only been illusions after all-- in the human world all I have is the art of illusion, glamour.

I shouted at Janet, told her that if I'd have had any sense at all I'd have cut Tam Lin's heart away and replaced it with a stone. In payment for all the love he gave me I'd have hung him from the tree so that he could learn the meaning of life and death by following Odin, for nine days I'd have left him there to rot. Perhaps it would have taught him some wisdom. I told her that she was welcome to him... Tam Lin is bereft of wisdom, a foolish stupid mortal and nothing else.

Yet my own heart was breaking at my loss and at the thought of what now must come to pass for it was too late to return and find some other Halloween sacrifice.

And so it is that I go alone to offer myself to Lucifer in Tam Lin's place.

Halloween party.

2008-10-26T22:11:00.001Z

The End, The Beginning’:

If there were not an utter and absolute dark
of silence and sheer oblivion
at the core of everything,
how terrible the sun would be,
how ghastly it would be to strike a match, and make a light.

But the very sun himself is pivoted
upon the core of pure oblivion
so is a candle, even as a match.

And if there were not an absolute, utter forgetting
and a ceasing to know, a perfect ceasing to know
and a silent, sheer cessation of all awareness
how terrible life would be!
how terrible it would be to think and know, to have consciousness!

But dipped, once dipped in dark oblivion
the soul has peace, inward and lovely peace.

DH Lawrence.

I came here to look for a very old web-site, but now the web is so full....and perhaps the web-site is gone, I couldn't find the pages I was looking for.

The reference had been, Halloween part on the moon. A long time ago, I found a short story about a Halloween moon party written by a woman who also created meticulously beautiful and complex web-sites. Her stuff was too complex for me to really care for. They reminded me of embroidery, painstakingly beautiful and complex arrangements of frames; and she had a blog before blogger, a true web-log.

The final entry was from her husband explaining how hard she had found it to live in this world; her eating disorders, her fears, her sense that nothing she did was ever good enough.

After her death, her web pages remained as a testimony to her work. I'm sorry that I hadn't kept any of her images-- or perhaps I did-- but that would have been three computers ago for me and that first computer is no more.

Tam Lin. Part one. Notes.

2008-10-07T20:46:00.008+01:00

"Janet tied her kirtle green above her knee."

I decided to write the story of Tam Lin, answering the question, why would the queen of fairy decide to send Tam Lin to hell-- more accurately, include Tam Lin as part of the seven year tithe to Hell-- if Tam Lin had loved her properly...

Well there could be all sorts of reasons, generally it is taken that the queen had no choice in the matter, that the sacrifice of Tam Lin recalls the story of Damuzi/Attis/Adonis and of how each year the king must be die.

But Tam Lin isn't a king-- or is he honoured as if he were one, whilst in the world of fairy?-- he is an earthly knight. His story reminds me of Tannhauser who found a secret door in the side of a hill that led to the realm of Venus. Within her realm were many free and wanton women and Tannhauser spent seven years in their esteemed company before guilt made him leave and seek forgiveness from the pope.

Here are the key facts, taken from as many versions of Tam Lin as can be found!
Reference.

Warning is given not to enter Caterhaugh for fear of Tam Lin

Tam Lin takes objects of value, including virginity, from maidens

Janet is sewing or decorating, and wishes for flowers

Janet makes defiant statements or a bet about going to Carterhaugh

Janet performs some acts of grooming

Janet specifically wears green to Carterhaugh

Janet leaves flowers at Tam Lin's feet

Tam Lin questions his horse about Janet's presence

Janet returns to Carterhaugh again

Janet finds Tam Lin's horse

Janet plucks roses

Janet plucks unspecified flowers

Tam Lin appears

Tam Lin tells Janet to stop plucking the roses/flowers

Tam Lin questions Janet's presence in the woods without his permission

Janet claims to not need Tam Lin's permission

Janet tells Tam Lin that she owns the woods or is heir to it

Tam Lin takes Janet by the hand

Tam Lin asks no leave of Janet

Janet searches the woods for her departed love

Janet asks Tam Lin his name

Janet is trapped in the woods for some time

Janet returns to or goes to her family

Janet is home for several months

There are young ladies dancing or playing games

Janet neglects her personal appearance and looks ill

Janet looks wan or green

Janet puts on a dress of a specific colour

A bystander comments that Janet is pregnant
k = old knight
g = maid or young girl
s = her sister
m = her mother
b = her brother
f = her father
Janet declares that no man present is the father

Janet praises Tam Lin

Someone asks if Tam Lin is the father

Janet identifies her lover as a faerie

Janet described Tam Lin as a Wee Wee man

A bystander informs Janet of the existence of herbs to induce miscarriage

Janet returns to Carterhaugh

Janet finds Tam Lin's horse

Janet plucks roses

Janet plucks herbs

Tam Lin appears

Tam Lin asks Janet if she intends to harm the baby or warns her against taking herbs

Janet questions Tam Lin about his heritage

Janet indicates she would keep the child if the father was human

Tam Lin says he will make the child his heir

Tam Lin identifies himself as a faerie

Tam Lin identifies himself as a human

Tam Lin gives his human lineage

Tam Lin knew Janet when they were young

Tam Lin was kidnapped as a young child

Tam Lin was specifically given to the faeries by a relative

Tam Lin was captured while resting under and apple tree

Tam Lin was kidnapped as an adult

Tam Lin's capture was preceded by foul weather

Tam Lin fell off of his horse [while hunting]

Tam Lin became drowsy or fell into a sleep when the faeries took him

Tam Lin enjoys living with the faeries

Tam Lin describes some of his life with the faeries

The faeries perform sacrifices to hell The sacrifice is specifically the most recent addition to the troop

Tam Lin fears he may be the next because he is so fair

Tam Lin fears he may be the next because he is a human, making him lower rank than the faeries

Tam Lin is part of a larger sacrificial group

The night or next day on Halloween (Samhain)

The night is on the first of May (Beltaine)

Tam Lin tells Janet how he will be dressed so she may recognize him in the troop.

Janet travels home

Janet travels to a crossroad

Janet brings a special item with her
b = bible
c = cane
h = holy water
Janet hides as the faerie troop approaches

Janet hails or salutes part of the troop

Tam Lin's horse is milk-white

The stars blaze, thunder roars, or other unusual events occur as the troop approaches and/or the struggle begins

The faerie troop cries out that Tam Lin is away

Janet calls out Tam Lin's name

The faerie Queen tries to talk Janet into releasing Tam Lin

Janet throws Tam lin into well water

Janet dips Tam Lin in milk

Janet holds Tam Lin until the morning

Janet puts her mantle around Tam Lin

Janet hides Tam

The Queen praises Tam Lin as her best knight

The Queen wishes she'd torn out Tam Lin's eyes and put in eyes of wood

The Queen wishes she'd turned Tam Lin into a tree

The Queen wishes she'd replaced Tam Lin's heart with a stone

The Queen wishes she'd paid the tithe (seven times) to hell before losing Tam Lin

The Queen expresses fear that she Will be the sacrifice

The Queen praises Janet or wishes her well

The Queen insults Janet

Janet takes Tam Lin home

Janet gives birth to their child the next day