Archive for the 'Lost City of Apollo' category
Newgrange through New Eyes
10:36 pm
Just a short time ago, all those of us who love Stonehenge and who are fascinated by the ruins were saddened by the loss of our friend Alex Down. Alex had a passionate enthusiasm for this prehistoric monument and his interest in the men and women who built it, so we shall all miss not only his photographs and illustrations, but also his considered thoughts on all aspects of this Wonder of the World.
Earlier today, however, I was very pleased to receive some original photographs of Newgrange, which were taken by a fine young gentleman named Lewis Williams, aged 9. One or two photos seem to have been taken inside the structure, which I understand is forbidden, but I don’t think any harm’s been done.
Let’s face it – there’s plenty of material here on Eternal Idol which would not have otherwise appeared in the public domain, with more to come, while a lot of it was provided by Alex Down, so it seems to me that young Lewis is merely following some admirable precedents and I’m absolutely certain that Alex would be very impressed indeed, as am I. With this in mind, I’m sure we all wish Lewis the very best in his journey through this life, just as we wish our friend Alex the very best in his journey through the next.
Photographs of Newgrange passage tomb mound by kind permission of Lewis Williams. Photograph of Alex Down at the Bluestonehenge excavation by kind permission of Liann Waring.
It has never been a problem to write for Eternal Idol, aside from finding the time to do so. Time is something that’s been in extremely short supply recently for a number of reasons, but I’m certainly not complaining. I’m extremely grateful to everyone for all the correspondence I receive, with suggestions, new material, new information, new ideas, photographs, diagrams, offers to investigate localities and so forth; as I’ve mentioned numerous times, I have a backlog of posts to complete and publish, while there are ongoing investigations such as that into the Spoils of Annwn, on a separate static page, but there are others still that keep my attention.
In addition to all this, I’ve been working non-stop on two separate projects and I’ll post something up about these as soon as I can. I’m always mindful of the observation “Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them”, so I couldn’t be happier that I have so many things to engage me, but back to the matter of writing. I’m generally satisfied with what I’ve posted here over the years, although I’m painfully aware that some pieces could be a great deal better. Every now and again, however, something comes along that makes me wonder why I bother with the keyboard at all, and one such occasion came about as a result of watching a video sent in by Red Raven, one of Eternal Idol’s many prolific and insightful contributors.
To cut a long and involved story short, the video was made to promote a song called “Roots” by a folk band called Show of Hands. This is turn led me to being contacted by another visitor, Yvonne, who informed me of a play in the West End of London called Jerusalem. She was kind enough to transcribe and send on the text in the programme, and I was so taken aback by what I read that I contacted the author, Paul Kingsnorth.
Paul very kindly allowed me to reproduce his words here, so I would urge you all to visit the various links I’ve supplied for Paul’s site and for the play, while you might also like to see this review in the Guardian, which echoes my thoughts on Paul’s writing. There are many reasons I’ve reproduced Paul’s brilliant essay, one being that I am of course intensely interested in the legends of Jesus visiting Britain, while I’m also fascinated by tales of supernatural creatures emerging from barrows. Paul’s work also reinforces an idea I’ve mentioned here several times before, where I’ve quoted the late Ralph Whitlock, from his wonderful book In Search of Lost Gods:
“Against the backdrop of human settlement in Britain, even the Celts were relative newcomers. As warlike invaders they started to arrive in Britain about the middle of the first millennium BC, but before that the island had an unwritten history of at least two thousand years. The Celts came in no great numbers, imposing themselves as an aristocracy on the older races, and it is unlikely that they initiated a great religious upheaval. Rather, their own beliefs were probably grafted on or merged with those of a much older religion.
Thus, in our search for the old gods, we may well find traces of those who had commanded the worship of men in the days when Stonehenge was young…”
Most of all, however, I’ve reproduced Paul’s words in the hope that anyone reading this will enjoy them one half as much as I did, so without further ado, here is the work in question:
[This article is taken from the programme of the play JERUSALEM and is followed by the words of William Blake's Jerusalem on a separate page]
OAK, ASH AND THORN
Paul Kingsnorth is the author of Real England, The Battle Against the Bland
Before the Normans arrive in 1066, and began to unravel the English sense of self at the tip of a sword, everyone in the country would have known the story of Wayland the Smith. Travelling storytellers – gleemen or scopmen as they were known – would have trawled his tale from village to town to port, embellishing it in the telling but keeping the basic spine of the story intact. The legend told of how Wayland, or Weland, a blacksmith whose works were the wonder of the world, was enslaved and crippled by a greed-blinded king and forced to work for him alone, and how he enacted his revenge in the most terrible way. The story of Wayland spoke to Old English society of themes at once specific and universal: power misused, leaders blinded by cupidity, ordinary men wronged and out for revenge. If we were searching for a foundation myth for the English people, the story of Wayland would be a strong contender.
Who in England knows the legend of Wayland today? The English, notoriously, have a blind spot when it comes to their myths, the legends of their past and their people, their folk tales and their origins. This is not something that could be said of any of the other peoples of the Biritsh Isles. The Scots and the Irish share Cuchulainn and the legends of Finn, and celebrate any number of ancient and modern folk heroes; the Welsh have the Mabinogion and the re-invented Druids, and lay claim (in rivalry with the Cornish) to Arthur and Merlin. Britain’s ethnic minorities bring stories, folk legends, songs and still-living religions from India, Africa, eastern Europe and elsewhere.
But the English are strangely quiet about their deep past; disconnected, embarrassed. It’s a curious thing, for the country is full of living reminders of its mythical history and prehistory, from the green men on the lintels of old churches to maypoles and even Christmas trees. But the English have nothing to rival the Mabinogion. They have no W.B. Yeats or Dylan Thomas, diverting old myths through new channels. What are the foundation myths of the English. Who are their folk heroes? When they look for a mystical past, why do they turn to the Celts? Where did they come from, who built their landscape? Why are the barrows silent and where have the faeries gone?
It’s not as if the stories aren’t there waiting to be found. The old English tales are as deep, as archetypal, as any other myth cycle. As well as Wayland, the Old English pantheon included one-eyed Woden, also known as Grim, god of the slain, who walked the high downs with his familiars – the raven and the wolf – looking down on the world of men. There was great Thunor with his hammer of fire and his sacred groves, and Frig, Woden’s consort, pagan matriarch and goddess of the green. There were Balder and Ing and others long-forgotten, whose swords and carved idols are still dragged up today from riverbeds and bogs. There were orcs and ents, dwarves and elves, demon hounds and giants in the landscapes and mindscapes of England long before they re-emerged in the pages of Tolkien.
These were the gods and the demons of the Old English; dead but not resurrected, unlike their Celtic forbears or Christian conquerors. But the myths of a nation are about more than gods; they are about the folk legends, the small stories, the culture that grows from season and place. In England this gives us, amongst others, the strange mystery of the green man, his foliate head carved on churches, over centuries, a heathen riposte on a Christian building. Who is he? If we once knew we have forgotten, like we have forgotten Jack in the Green and the origins of Robin Hood; like we have forgotten Hereward the Wake and Eadric the Wild and Jack Cade, like we have forgotten the craft of the village witch and the story of the wind smith, the meaning of the white horses and the ballads of the sea.
Times change and the world moves on. Perhaps the English have forgotten because they wanted to forget. Perhaps English is such a self-confident, forward-looking nation that it doesn’t need to bolster its self-image with half=remembered stories from a dead world. But it doesn’t seem that way to me. Rather the opposite: it seems as if, for some reason, the English are afraid of their myths – intimidated by their stories, maybe even by their past. For whatever political, sociological or historical reason – take your pick, according to your inclinations, from a ragbag of defendants that includes the Norman Conquest, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, political correctness or the simple process of historical forgetting – we do not seem inclined to dig into the barrows and unearth the old hoards. Maybe we are afraid of seeing our faces in the reflection.
Over a century ago, in Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rudyard Kipling resurrected Puck, the impish faerie that Shakespeare had himself laid down from the collective memory centuries before. In Kipling’s tale, Puck is the last of the faeries, “the oldest Old Thing in England”, summoned accidentally from his barrow by theatrically-minded children. The first tale he tells them is the tale of Wayland the Smith.
And so the cycle continues. Because though we have forgotten much in England, we don’t have the option of leaving the past behind. No-one ever does. Weirdly, obtusely, at the margins and from the corners of your eyes, the old myths can still be seen. A hundred years on from Kipling, the long barrow on the Ridgeway near White Horse Hill is still known as Wayland’s Smith; the old smith, it is said, will shoe any horse left there overnight if a coin is placed on the stones. The third day of the week is still Woden’s Day, the green men on the cathedral ceilings receive coats of fresh paint, and every May Day, even now, the strange green dance goes on in crevices and byways while most of the nation is driving to the out-of-town retail park.
This is the England of Johnny Byron, a post-modern Puck, a dangerous spirit of the old world and the new, leading the children astray, telling them stories, a story himself. The old gods are still with us, and the myths. Not because we have held onto them, but because they have held onto us. We tried to banish them, like the council tries to banish Johnny from his wood and the developers try to banish the woods themselves. But like Puck, they linger in the barrows long after they were supposed to be gone. “I came into England with Oak, Ash and Thorn” says Puck in Kipling’s tale, “and when Oak, Ash and Thorn are gone I shall go too.” Perhaps when climate change comes to England it will banish the oak and the ash and the thorn, but more likely they will cling on, like Puck and Jonny and Wayland and Grim, like lichen on bark or moss on stone, impossible to shift, so common as to go unnoticed unless we go out and search for them.
At The Mountains of Madness?
1:09 am
In a comment on the “Missing Years of Jesus” post, Thelma wrote about one particular site in Britain and added that in this place “…perhaps there is another sacred landscape to be found?” I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if this turned out to be the case and it may be that instead of being gradually teased out, the whole thing will appear in a flash, as leylines did to Alfred Watkins.
Thelma’s observation about a sacred landscape waiting to be found reminded me of a news item I saw a little while back, and it was something that positively took my breath away. You can read it for yourselves, if you wish, but it concerns the discovery via Google Earth of what appears to be a ‘Lost City’ in the Amazon jungle, close to Brazil’s border with Bolivia.
Of course, I was extremely interested by the whole article, but I was particularly pleased for the ghost of Colonel Percy Fawcett, a man who has been vilified for decades and dismissed as a madman on account of his belief in the existence of a ‘lost city’. Now, to my amazement, it seems as if he’s been vindicated, while in my view, someone whose family motto was “Difficulties Be Damned” and who went on to die in the Amazon jungle in pursuit of his dream deserves every accolade going. My approval may count for little, but as Fawcett is acknowledged as being the inspiration for Indiana Jones and as he’s due to be played in a forthcoming film by Brad Pitt, then I’m sure that this will make him very happy, wherever he may be right now.
As I’ve written a number of times, I can trace my inspiration and enthusiasm for looking into ‘ancient mysteries’ back to a book given to me by my mother when I was a child, a book by C.W Ceram entitled Gods, Graves and Scholars, in which I read the story of Heinrich Schliemann’s discovery of the ‘lost’ or fabled city of Troy.
In brief, at a time when the entire academic establishment was convinced that Homer’s Iliad was a “pretty legend”, Schliemann chose to believe every word of what Homer had written, thereby discovering the lost City of Troy. As anyone who has ever browsed through the various entries on this site will be aware, I’m particularly interested in trying my best to explore whatever the old myths and legends have to tell us about Stonehenge in prehistory and it’s gratifying that I’m not alone in this. Aynslie is similarly interested, while I’m indebted to Professor Melrose for the many things he’s been able to tell me about the meaning and derivation of numerous words related to this study.
Some time back, I corresponded with Dr Angelika Franz of Der Spiegel, after which she wrote and published an account of what I had to say about the “Stonehenge Sentinel“, exactly two years ago today. I was surprised to learn from Dr Franz that Schliemann isn’t held in universally high regard in Germany and there’s no denying that there are good grounds for this. Similarly, Colonel Percy Fawcett doesn’t seem to have endeared himself to sundry establishment figures, and yet I still find myself occasionally baffled by the hostile reactions these people engender in others.
For anyone who isn’t aware of it, in March last year I had a book published, entitled “The Missing Years of Jesus”. It’s an investigation into the legends of Jesus visiting Britain, as suggested in the opening lines of William Blake’s famous poem Jerusalem, and it should be clear to anyone who’s read the book or browsed through this site that there’s no doubt in my mind that Jesus did indeed spend a considerable amount of time in the West of England and in South Wales before returning to his homeland to embark on his famous ministry.
Of course, not everyone agrees with me, but the vast majority of correspondence I’ve received on the subject has been perfectly civil, with the exception of the occasional sarcastic remark, which is to be expected and which I can live with.
By way of sharp contrast, I wrote in great detail a few years ago about my belief that Stonehenge was the circular temple referred to by Pytheas of Massilia and that the nearby Vespasian’s Camp was the ‘City of Apollo‘ that he also described. All the posts are still on this site, if anyone cares to peruse them, while they attracted some attention from the media at the time. What surprised me, though, was the sheer outrage from certain quarters that greeted the posts and the media reports, so there seems to be something about the mere phrase ‘lost city’ that arouses extreme passions in some people today, just as was the case back in the times of Fawcett and Schliemann.
I’ve recently had cause to look into Julian Richards’ “Meet the Ancestors” series and I note that episode 34, in series 6 was entitled “The Lost City of Roman Britain”, so I can’t help but wonder what kind of reception the programme received on account of its obviously highly presumptuous title.
There are other ‘lost cities’ in Britain, most notably Camelot, but there are also lost sunken lands such as Lyonesse and Ys on the coast of Britanny. The enigmatic mediaeval poem The Ruin speaks of a large settlement or city, whose identity is not known to us, while I’m sure there are others still, but they are all surely worth investigating.
As I wrote in a previous post, the existence of Bluestonehenge was predicted back in the 1980s and this astonishing structure came to light last year, as a result of the efforts of the Stonehenge Riverside Project. I could list many other discoveries in the Stonehenge landscape and elsewhere, but it seems to me that the British Isles are an absolute cornucopia or treasure-trove of ancient landscapes, alignments, features and artefacts just awaiting discovery. I understand that Lee Smeaton is making progress as far as his “Kentish Walls” are concerned, while one of the many subjects I’ve been trying to find time to do justice to is the ‘Ghost Avenue’ at Stonehenge, as discovered by Juris Ozols and Alex Down.
With all the means and material available to us, it strikes me it would be madness not to look into these mysteries, so I’ll keep doing so as long as time allows. And it’s extremely gratifying that there are so many others of you ‘out there’ who are just as keen on looking into these matters as I am.
PS: I’ll be away in London on business and pleasure until late Tuesday night, just in case anyone wonders about a lack of response from me.
Celebration of the Lizard
2:16 am
When I first set up Eternal Idol, I intended it to be a repository of original information on Stonehenge; thus it has remained, by and large, despite a few meanderings into broadly related territory, while it’s also survived being shut down in its infancy, it has prospered despite being ransacked in a furtive fashion one night by an embittered ex-associate and it’s been directly responsible for the publication of my book “The Missing Years of Jesus.”
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A Lonely Impulse of Delight
1:20 am
It’s my birthday today (the 26th) so by way of celebration, I’ve put aside a number of otherwise pressing matters I really should be attending to so that I can compose something purely for the pleasure of it. It’s perhaps understandable that I feel in the mood to reflect and cast my eye over “what’s gone before”, but at the same time, I like to think that I can do something to uplift, encourage and possibly enlighten others in the process….we’ll see.
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Wounded Knee and Medicine Men
10:42 pm
About a year ago, I posted up a series of detailed articles dealing with Pytheas of Massilia and his description of a “notable temple, circular in shape” that he’d seen during a visit to Britain in or around 350 BC. I identified Stonehenge as the temple he referred to, while I went on to identify the nearby Vespasian’s Camp as the City of Apollo he’d described.
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In the fourth century BC, Pytheas of Massilia wrote of a notable temple and a city, both sacred to Apollo, that he had seen in Britain. His point of reference for what constituted “a notable temple of Apollo” would have been a stone structure with uprights and lintels somewhere in the Mediterranean, but I believe that we can be far more specific than this.
If we can reasonably single out an individual building that Pytheas was aware of when he saw his famous temple, then we can be more certain still that the structure he described was Stonehenge and that the City of Apollo he mentioned twice was the giant Iron Age earthwork we now know as Vespasian’s Camp. I believe that the magnificent circular building reconstructed in the drawing above figured prominently in the thoughts of Pytheas when he encountered the temple of Apollo in Britain, but to understand why, we have to recreate another voyage undertaken by Pytheas at some point in the fourth century BC.
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Pytheas of Massilia was a Greek mariner who was alive during the fourth century BC. Before he set sail on his famous voyage into the North Atlantic via the Pillars of Hercules, he would first of all have travelled around the Mediterranean region, while his general point of reference for what constituted a temple to one of his gods would have been a stone or marble structure with dressed uprights and lintels, as can be seen from the above photograph of the Parthenon.
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