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You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
This is a sample post created to test the basic formatting features of the WordPress CMS.
You can use bold text, italic text, and combine both styles.
This content is only for demonstration purposes. Feel free to edit or delete it.
***
… “You know, I’m not sure syncretism is quite the right word,” says Wen, eyeing the icon of Gilgamesh with some trepidation. We are in the British Museum doing ‘research’ as Wen likes to call it. ‘Pick up your staff and pen,’ she said, ‘we have work to do.’ Which means in Wen-Speak, among other things, more churches…
“Your doubts are probably well founded. Mr Graves called it ‘iconotropy’ – turning religious iconography to new religious purpose.”
“Oh, him again. No one knows who Robert Graves is.”
“Well, they should! Anyway, in ‘King Jesus’ he has a Priestess of Astarte and Joshua-ben-Miriam go through a whole series of cave-bound images with each of them giving a different yet perfectly valid interpretation of the self-same icon.”
“Cave-bound?”
“Inscribed in a cave.”
“It hardly seems possible.”
“Religious interpretation, I should have said.”
“It still hardly seems possible.”
“Why isn’t anything, anything else?”
“You’re being obscure again,” says Wen.
“It’s what we bring to the table!”
“Hmmm… That’s a good thought… Okay then, is Gilgamesh meant to be a giant?”
“In the story he is two-thirds divine, one third-man.”
“Which doesn’t actually answer my question.”
“I don’t know, is he meant to be a giant?”
“Ah, I see… Well, if that is a mature lion, then he is very definitely a giant.”
“The Hebrew storytellers saw fit to make the lion a cub.”
“With the express aim of de-gigantic-ising him I expect.”
“Is that a word?”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
“So, why would they down-size him?”
“Because the strength of their hero didn’t come from his size. It came from God.”
“The Spirit of the Lord.”
“The Spirit of the Lord, that’s right.”
“But if Gilgamesh is two-thirds divine, doesn’t his strength come from ‘God’ too?”
“Gilgamesh has a divine mother, Ninsun, and a father who was born human but later became divine.”
“Ninsun, is a name to conjure with,” murmurs Wen and then, “this becoming divine business is interesting.”
“And the crux of their reasoning for a change. The Hebrews did not go in for that kind of truck with the Gods. Their God was transcendent. Only his feminine aspect was immanent and because of that she was not regarded as a Goddess. She was known as the Shekinah but even this, later became all but forgotten. At least officially.”
“That is not the jaw-bone of an ass is it?”
“I very much doubt it.”
“Do we have any idea what it actually is?”
“Nope. None whatsoever, but I expect it will reveal its identity at some point during the proceedings.”
“Research!” proclaims Wen, triumphantly.
“If you insist,” but this is a form of research too. The Greeks called it dialectic… three, six, nine… lots of maybe’s, lots of supposes…”
“So, why should transcendence be considered the ‘be all and end all’?”
“I don’t know, why should transcendence be considered the ‘be all and end all’?”
“Well, it has to do with the outer, and hierarchy, and objectivity.”
“None of which are intrinsically unsound concepts.”
“Until they are regarded as ends in themselves and not as integral parts of process and cycle… I like his hair.”
“Not so sure about the chain-mail beard though.”
“Did Samson have a beard?”
“I expect so, although I suspect the ban on the razor only extended to his head.”
“Oh really, and why would one suspect that?”
“I’m not totally sure, but I think it has something to do with the sun, and its rays of light.”
“If most of the Hebrew males wore long hair and beards anyway, why was there a need for the razor ban?” pondered Wen.
“Ah, is that the sound of trumpets scaling the ramparts of heaven?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“A question of questions, young Wendolina, the answer to which may serve as a stunning proof of our original assertion.”
“Your original assertion, which was posed as a question anyway. And I’m older than you are.”
“Yes, yes, dearest Wendlebury. There was a need for the razor ban, in order to achieve assimilation. The original model for Samson wasn’t Gilgamesh at all, it was his ‘alter-ego’, the wild-man, Enkidu, who in the words of birds-feet etched into tablets of baked-clay over four thousand years ago, possessed long hair like a woman and an excessively hairy body.”
“In that case the ‘jaw-bone’ may well be a form of boomerang…” muses Wen, and then, “Birds’ feet?”
“Cuneiform.”
“If I wasn’t so confused, I’d be tempted to jump up and down,” says Wen.
“Two-thirds animal, one-third man.”
“Ah,” says Wen, the light of comprehension settling down to roost in her visage, “I knew the British Museum would be a good idea.”
“Rule Britannia!”
“Are we allowed to be rational for a moment?”
“We would not expect you to be anything else.”
“If we consider Enkidu who is two-thirds animal, one-third man, together with Gilgamesh, who is two-thirds divine, one-third man, and treat them as one whole man, we get a ruler who is one-third animal, one-third divine, and one third man.”
“The idea was to create harmony out of an imbalance. On his own Gilgamesh mistook arrogance for strength and had become a tyrant and tormentor of his people.”
“But the constructor of this tale would have to be a psychologist of far greater acumen than Carl Gustav Jung to have come up with that device.”
“But it gets better. The harmony doesn’t last for long. The human part of Gilgamesh corrupts the animal part of Enkidu and as a result, together, they visit an ecological disaster upon their civilisation.”
“This story is how old?”
“About four thousand years.”
“It’s not only high genius, it’s also pertinent.”
“Genius is always pertinent.”
“Do we know who the author is?”
“Do we ever know who the author is?”
“Do we know who the author is purported to be?”
“Gilgamesh existed as the legendary protagonist in a number of Sumerian poems long before ‘his story’ was turned into an ‘epic poem’.”
“So, who turned it into an epic poem?”
“The compiler of the first ‘epic’ now referred to as the Old Babylonian Version is unknown.”
“And the later version?”
“Five hundred years after the Old Babylonian version had been circulated a ‘scholar-priest’ called Sin-leqi-unninni revised and elaborated it.”
“Another name to conjure with. Do we know what it means?”
“Something along the lines of, ‘The Moon accepts the Prayer’.”
“Nice!”
“Sin-leqi-unninni’s epic is now regarded as the Standard Version.”
“And in some quarters, at least, he is regarded as a genius with greater psychological acumen than Carl Gustav Jung.”
“Well, he was a priest.”
***
***
The phenomenon of twins has always carried with it an aura of mystery.
We use the terms identical and non identical to describe its biological manifestation, yet identity itself is, to us, no less mysterious.
The earliest spiritual writings and teaching insist that this phenomena lies at the very heart of the human enigma.
Would it, then, be worthwhile to consider what the ancients have left us to ponder in this regard?
For those who dare to awaken to being…
LIZARD-MEN – Now available in Amazon Paperback
*
Would you walk the corridor of dreams
Into the dark and unknown inner places
Where silent voices whisper your desires
From unkissed lips upon amorphous faces
*
Dare you cross the Temple chequerboard
Where black and white in alternating tread
Reflect the hope and terror of the night
To face imagination’s deeper dread
*
*
Could you face each inner world you find
Knowing that they are a true reflection
That shows the turmoil of the conscious mind
Destroying your illusion of perfection
*
Can you face the demons hidden there
Where every rock and tree and fragrant flower
May hold the cryptic kernel of your fears
Reverberating with emotive power
*
*
Look deep into the mirror of your dreams
To see reflected ancient joys and sorrow
Begin to read the soul and journeys there
Face today and walk towards tomorrow
Image – Sue Vincent
*
The device of riddling is common to most traditional cultures.
Maidens set riddles for their suitors:
‘What is sweeter than mead…?’
‘What is whiter than snow…?’
‘What is lighter than a spark…?’
*
Antagonists use riddles to settle their disputes:
‘Forty white horses on a red hill first they gnash then they champ then they stand still…?’
‘What is blacker than the raven…?’
‘What is swifter than the wind…?’
*
Divinities play hide and seek with their devotees within the miasmic form of riddles:
‘What dances on the surface of the water…?’
‘What good did Man find on earth that God did not…?’
‘What is sharper than the sword…?’
*
A riddle is one thing, or a collection of things, described as another thing, or a different
collection of things.
It is an extended metaphor without its point of reference.
To solve a riddle is to gain clarity and rid oneself of confusion.
‘Thunder before lightning… Lightning before cloud… Land parching rain… Give me a name.’
*
Solving a riddle allows one to recognise one thing in another and so transcend one or more of
the polarities or categories that apparently govern the perceived world through language and
thought.
A riddle then simultaneously highlights the rigidities of language and its potential
flexibilities.
“A shepherd stands in a field with twenty sheep, how many feet?”
*
Riddles act like little bundles of experience to be untied by the still uninitiated.
The riddler knows something that you do not yet know…
Riddles straddle two or more different frames of reference.
Landscape features are given human attributes and provide ample food for the riddler.
‘I run never walk… My mouth never talks… My head never weeps… In my bed, I never sleep.’
*
The answers are rarely if ever immediately obvious…
Their solution requires contemplation.
Just like crossword clue solutions they are though obvious once you know them.
Unlike crossword clue solutions, there is more often than not a very practical purpose to their solution.
*
If a landscape can have human features then,
why can’t a human have landscape features?
***
Cover Photo – Sue Vincent
***
The Old Stone Monuments that yet hold sway in the remote places of the globe have both folk-lore and mythology associated with them.
In the case of myth the worlds that are purportedly described were current thousands of years after the construction of the monuments and the archaeology does not match the realms so described.
But, still, the associations persist…
Have we become so blinkered in our modern sensibilities we can no longer recognise that which lies before our eyes for what it is?
There is probably only one way to answer this question.
Year of the Pig details a journey around some of the sacred sites of Ireland in search of the deeper truths that still exist in these Blessed Isles…
Now available in Paperback
“Holy air encased in stone” … that is how Sir John Betjeman described the crypt at Repton, and it was this that we had come to see… we hoped. On a previous visit, the crypt had been locked. This time, as we descended the worn stone steps that lead beneath the nave, we were really hoping the door would yield.
Early in the eighth century, the crypt was built to a mausoleum for the relics of the royal house of Mercia. It is one of the most intact survivals from the Anglo-Saxon era, preserved perhaps as it was closed and forgotten, remaining lost until it was rediscovered by a workman excavating a grave space in the nave in 1779. He fell through its roof and found himself in a wholly unexpected and sacred space.
It is believed that the crypt was first constructed as a baptistry, during the reign of King Æthelbald who reigned from 716 to 757. The Repton Stone, found near the church but now in a museum, is believed to show the king, and is thus the earliest full-scale depiction of a British monarch.
The crypt is sunk into the earth and built over a spring which drains to the east. You have to wonder how long that spring had been a place of veneration… perhaps predating Christianity in the area by a very long time.
King Æthelbald was possibly the first to be interred there when it became a place of burial, followed by King Wiglaf in 840 and Wiglaf’s grandson Wystan, who was murdered in 849. Records say that a great light shot up to heaven when Wystan died and many miracles were attributed to his relics.
Repton became a place of pilgrimage until the saints remains were moved to escape the Great Heathen Army of Viking invaders in 873. The army overwintered in Repton and a vast mound has been excavated there containing the bones of around hundreds of them, disarticulated and neatly stacked.
The volume of pilgrims was so great that rough-hewn passages had to be cut through the fabric of the church and stone to enable a ‘one way system’ to manage the number of people visiting the relics of the kings.
The church today reflects the whole of English history from that time onward… the scars and damage of the Reformation, the rebuilding and changes in fashion, the burials of medieval knights and Tudor dignitaries… it is all there to read in the glass, wood and stone of a little parish church.
The door yielded reluctantly to our touch and we stepped back in time to breathe the ‘holy air encased in stone’. There are no relics remaining of those long-dead kings, only the niches were their bones were laid to rest. They were never buried here; the bodies were first interred then the bones, once the flesh was gone and the bones were clean, were recovered and placed in the crypt.
The columns that have supported the vault for one and a half thousand years are decorated with ascending spirals, a symbol that links back to the very earliest rock carvings… and the silence is complete. Each breath resonates in a very strange way, making you very conscious of your life in this house of the dead. Conscious too of your presence within a greater human story.
The art of Thierry Arnault. Paris c1981
There are few photographs of my years in Paris. The camera I had back then was minimal, film expensive to process and anyway, postcards did a far better job that I could ever do. It doesn’t matter. Back then it was all about art. Not mine, of course… It would be twenty years before I picked up brush and courage and laid them on a canvas. No, it was all about the Place du Tertre.
I haven’t been back for a very long time… over a quarter of a century has passed and I cannot say how much has changed there, and how much remains the same. But there are things that remain fresh in our memories; bright and sparkling.
For me, Paris was a time of intense emotion, friendships so deep they stripped away illusion and, until the last couple of years, the happiest I have ever been. Some things we don’t forget; times, places, memories that stay in that special corner in our hearts where treasures are kept.
And there was Paris 1981.
And of course, I still have the Diaries.
I had been to Paris once, years before, and fallen in love with the place. Of all the fabulous buildings and museums two places had stuck in my mind and felt, in some indescribable way, like home. One was the Rue Mouffetard, a little backstreet off the tourist track, just behind the Pantheon, where I had wandered very early one morning. The narrow street seemed timeless; archetypically Parisian. The aroma of fresh bread and coffee hung in the morning and a tramp slept beneath the pages of Le Monde in a doorway, clutching the green glass of an empty wine bottle to his chest.
The other was the Place du Tertre, the artist’s square in Montmartre and a painted canvas on a rickety easel. The picture showed another bearded tramp wearing a cap pulled low against the night; just the grizzled face illuminated in the darkness by the match he was holding to half a cigarette.
So when I was lucky enough to go back to work there, Montmartre was the first place I headed for, walking right across Paris as if I knew the way in search of a memory.
I found the square and somehow, incredibly, soon found myself amongst friends; mainly amongst the resident artists who stayed there all year round and took their art seriously. Others came and went chasing the concentration of summer tourists and francs. Those I came to know had made it their home. I modelled for them and fed them when they were broke, and when they sold a painting, we partied. They were some of the best friends you could wish for and we took care of each other.
The bar on the corner of the square, Au Clairon des Chasseurs, was our meeting place. I could arrive for coffee on a Saturday morning and still be there in the wee small hours of Sunday. Just talking. My friends would come in, one after another to warm their hands and as one left another would arrive. Back then, everyone went to Montmartre. I met actors, writers, diplomats and aristocracy. I knew the tramps and the prostitutes who worked there. For all the surface commercialism the tourists saw, there was still a true Bohemian life under the surface and they invited me in. Everyone, it seemed, found their way there. Mini, Tahar and Thierry the waiters joined the conversations as we discussed and debated just about every subject under the sun and then went further, delving into the mysteries of the inner universe. All nations, all languages, all faiths and perspectives met there and the only rivalries I ever saw were in jest.
It was an education sans pareil. From a mousey little creature with neither confidence nor any great opinion of her worth I slowly opened up to life and laughter and began to see that perhaps I might have some kind of value after all. You could not hide in Montmartre. It demanded that you be real… warts and all.
The first Christmas in Paris stands out for many reasons. I had been ‘adopted’ and nicknamed ‘la Tomate’ for my penchant for wearing bright red, or they called me ‘Yorkshire’ in heavily accented tones. I really felt I had come home.
My closest friend was Tom Coffield, a brilliant Glaswegian artist. He was a small, wiry Scot with a deep love of Burns and a gift for holding up the mirror of the soul. We had met after I had been sitting on the kerb talking philosophy with Big Boris. He handed me a portrait he had sketched, but I wasn’t buying. “An I’m no’ sellin’!” said Tom as he joined me on the kerb. We must have talked for six hours straight.
Sketch by Thomas Coffield, Paris 1981
We became firm friends. He was my conscience, mirror and confidante, and he was my teacher in the fine art of living. He tore strips off me when one of the artists developed an unrequited passion and taught me a new slant on responsibility. And he taught me to laugh for no reason except joy. He stripped away every illusion I could hide behind and made me see myself as real. We spent most of the summer talking, yet the dour Scot was a few years older than I and I was never quite sure what he thought of me. Except the courage. He told me I had courage. I’d never considered that before and it was a new slant on the way I saw myself.
He promised me a proper portrait, but it never did materialise. Each time he tried to paint me he saw something new, and knowing me so well he tried to capture it all. But that Christmas he gave me something better. He gave me a memory.
It was snowing and Paris is magical in the moonlight. We bumped into Thierry Arnault at dinner chez Denise on the Rue Lepic. Tom insisted that Thierry show me his studio and his work, in a tiny garret next door. Thierry, however, seemed more interested in introducing me to his cats, Snoopy and Pigalle. Mini at the Clairon had presented me with a bottle of Chateauneuf for Christmas and it accompanied us all to Montparnasse where the layers of this Bohemian world came together to party.
It was, according to my diary, a wonderful evening. I must have written the entry as soon as I got home. There was dancing and song. “I have no idea what possessed me to join Vince in ‘Ilkley Moor bah’t ‘at’ to drown out Tom’s Gaelic. I may be obliged to plead the fifth… not amendment, but Chateauneuf.” “They decided to rename me ‘La Princesse’ with great ceremony and so much laughter!”
Tom kissed me a Merry Christmas. I was leaving next day for England. He told me to come back soon as I was loved by many and would be missed. It was the first time in my life that I felt I really mattered in the world. One is born into a family, but those who find and cherish us for who we are, they are very special. My diary records, “ …and that was a good day. So many friends I have made! I am a lucky woman.”
Tom also gave me a Christmas gift that night. It hangs on my wall today close to that very first sketch he made the day we met. The pen and ink drawing shows the Clairon and all my friends. Tom is the small guy with the beret on the left talking to Monsieur Steve and old Marcel who loved the light in my hair… I am listening to Big Boris somewhere below his beard. Sam Yeo, Mini, Thierry, the dogs and the ‘no credit’ sign…. Even the pigeons on the glass roof. The tall figure of Alain, with his fiery eyes…but that is another story. Once upon a time, I knew them all.
It still stands… I am a lucky woman.
Au Clairon des Chasseurs, Paris. Thomas Coffield 1981
I love the old stories, the legends and lays of ancient times when the world, from our vantage point, seemed both a more innocent and more magical place, where the impossible walked hand in hand with the improbable and where worlds seemed interwoven through the warp and weft of reality.
The tales tell of monsters and battles, quests and fair maidens, intrigue and magic. At least on one level. It is possible to hear in them still the crackle of the fire and the cadence of the bard holding spellbound an audience. Yet to listen to these stories in the silence of the heart is to realise how much they hold. In storytelling there is a perfect way to commit history to memory, to teach of new advances and preserve old lore, to guide the heart and mind through the hidden valleys of wisdom and show not only a way to live but a reason for life and the winding pathways we traverse.
The stories were simply stories… tales to while away the evenings round the hearth or fill the mead hall with sound. They were entertainment in much the same way as our society sits on its sofa watching fantasy and documentary on TV. We choose whether to be amused or informed. So did our forefathers, but perhaps it was the level of attention and engagement that changed not the tale.
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Sue Vincent's Daily Echo 