Archive for April, 2010
Sir Patrick Moore is without the faintest shadow of a doubt one of the greatest living Englishmen, someone for whom I’ve had the very highest regard and admiration since I was a child, sitting enthralled watching The Sky At Night. There have been several occasions on which I’ve had good cause to mention him on Eternal Idol, so any new announcement this gentleman has to make will always find space here.
With this in mind, you may care to see Sir Patrick for yourself and hear what the great man has to say on this link.
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.
Earlier today (Monday), I was interviewed for an hour or so by Kathleen McGowan and Filip Coppens for their radio show The Spirit Revolution, which is broadcast on BBS Radio. I was asked about the ‘missing years’ of Jesus, primarily for the benefit of an American audience, and I was happy to talk about what I knew.
I’d met Filip before when I appeared on Phil Gardiner’s show on Sky TV last year, but this was the first time I’d spoken to Kathleen. I thought she was very pleasant and very enthusiastic, while it was a real pleasure to reminisce (off air, sadly) about the mendacious David V Barrett, of whom more in another post.
The ‘missing years’ of Jesus constitute a mainstream ancient mystery in which a great many people are interested, as I’m not the only person who’s now looked into this matter in some depth. The associations with William Blake and his enchanting poem Jerusalem are engaging enough in and of themselves, but since the publication of my book, new material continues to come in, so I continue to try to find the time to investigate it properly. The fact that Kathleen and Filip thought that an American audience would want to hear about it is obviously an inspiration as well, so it’s certainly a subject I’ll continue to write about.
Time is a problem and I’m well aware that I’ve not posted anything relating to Stonehenge or Silbury Hill here on Eternal Idol for a while. In a previous post, I referred to two separate projects I’ve been working on, so I’ll try to post a brief update on these as soon as I can, as well as more material on Stonehenge that’s waiting in the archives.
In the meantime, my thanks and best wishes once again to Kathleen, to Filip and to all their listeners in America.
Save Me
11:29 pm
Those of you who read Eternal Idol from outside Britain may not be aware of this, but a General Election is due to be held in a few weeks time. My view on British politics could pretty much be summed up by the following question “Which pack of useless, light-fingered liars is slightly less useless, light-fingered and mendacious than the others?”
As I wrote in a previous post, my time’s currently occupied by working on two major projects that have come up, so it seems a happy coincidence that an election’s been called and an even happier one that an issue’s been raised in which I have a genuine interest.
The rock star Brian May has launched an organisation called “Save Me“, which is based on the simple premise that a great many people here in Britain are against fox-hunting, as demonstrated by endless polls over the years. My view on this vile practise is that if a fox is stealing your poultry or otherwise terrorising your pets or livestock, then by all means shoot it. There is an argument that it’s humane to hunt foxes, or apex predators, with packs of dogs specially bred for stamina instead of speed, and there are also arguments that the cunning old fox actually enjoys this pastime, logic that will doubtless win me over on the day my I.Q sinks to the level of a goldfish.
I rarely look at the statistics for this site, but I’m aware that it gets an enormous amount of traffic and that many of you visit it repeatedly and spend a lot of time here. I could long ago have taken advantage of this by putting up adverts, but I haven’t done so and I have no intention of doing so. My principal interests are Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and the ‘missing years’ of Jesus, and there’s a huge amount of posts, links and informed comments on these subjects here, all of which are free to anyone who wishes to read them. I gather that other sites archive their material and charge for access, but not Eternal Idol.
So, if any one of you reading this has ever spent a pleasurable 15 minutes or so on this site, then I’m very pleased. I can’t twist anyone’s arm and I wouldn’t try to, but if you feel like spending a few seconds signing up to Brian’s “Save Me” site and registering your vote to keep England’s green and pleasant land free of what’s euphemistically termed a “blood sport”, then I’ll be happier still.
My time should be my own again soon and there’s backlog of posts to publish, while two announcements are imminent as well and those of you who visit this site should be the first to hear about them.
Victoria Beckham with foxtail accessory; pure class, makes you proud to be British….
The Stone
3:52 pm
A few months ago, I was honoured and delighted to accept an invitation from Phil Gardiner to star in his forthcoming feature film The Stone. I’ve often pointed that I thoroughly enjoy writing for Eternal Idol and for other projects, but Phil’s invitation made me go positively misty-eyed at the memory of the times I spent working in film, television, music videos and the like, back in the 1990s.
I’ve pored over my collection of photographs to try to illustrate precisely why I enjoyed myself so much in front of the cameras back then, but common decency forbids me from posting up some of the more lurid pictures, although I’m sure they’ll see the light of day at some point. In the meantime, the photograph below was taken when I was touring Austria back in 1991 on a mediaeval jousting tournament, in the company, among others, of Nina Pflegerl, the Lady Marshall, and Sarah, who organised the tour. The work entailed on a touring live performance was literally a world away from being secluded here in my study with my books, pondering ‘ancient mysteries’ such as Stonehenge, Silbury Hill and the seeming enigma of the ‘missing years’ of Jesus, but it was equally exhilarating in its own way.
Be that as it may, I’ve had to speak to Phil to let him know that I can no longer be a part of his project, for the simple reason that there have been some seismic developments ‘behind the scenes’ at Eternal Idol, meaning that I’m committed to working on two other projects that are time-consuming and which also demand every waking hour I can give to work on them. I naturally wish Phil and his team all the very best with The Stone, and I’m certain that my replacement as Professor James Frazer will excel and enjoy himself just as much as I had intended to.
Under the Volcano
3:27 pm
The internet is awash with stories and analyses of the volcanic eruption in Iceland, so this is something you’re welcome to follow up yourselves. However, there’s a particularly interesting piece on the BBC news website that tells of the volcanoes in Iceland and the mythology attached to them, while I was particularly intrigued by the mention of the Angry Sisters, Judas and the Gates of Hell.
The disruption to Europe’s air traffic is apparently worse than it was in the aftermath of 9/11 and it’s caused extreme difficulties for hundreds of thousands of travellers across Europe, including my cousin who was stranded in Milan with her two sons.
There’s another interesting piece on the BBC, musing about the empty skies, so I thought I’d add my own brief thoughts, for what they’re worth. For longer than I’ve been running Eternal Idol, I’ve been trying to put myself in the place of our ancestors who built Stonehenge; along the way, I’ve written extensively about Sky Gods, Sky People and the possibility that the later Romans perceived the ruins on the plain as a Temple to Caelus.
Now, on account of a volcano in Iceland, I’ve briefly experienced the tranquility that’s been denied to us in Europe since men took to the skies in ever-increasing numbers in their flying machines. To be sure, aircraft can be impressive creations and I remember well my time on Salisbury Plain, wandering around the ancient earthworks and hillforts while helicopters from an Apache squadron howled overhead, sometimes hovering directly above me to what was doubtless the great amusement of the pilots. There is a savage beauty in such things, but as I sit here in my garden, languidly typing away in brilliant sunshine, I’ve become magically aware of the piping, warbling, whistling, trilling and fluting of the songbirds, as well as being acutely aware of the hum of bees and the droning of other insects.
I’m a country boy, born and bred, and I spend what free time I have wandering the woods, fields and moors hereabouts. The bickering of a stream and babbling of a brook is never lost on me, nor are the many choruses intoned by the various trees as the winds blow through their differently shaped leaves, but I cannot remember a “sound of silence” such as this.
This particular observation may be at odds with the pastoral beauty of my current surroundings that I’ve tried to convey, but I’m reminded of something I read about the Jack the Ripper murders in 1888, when what was described as a “terrible silence” blanketed the normally bustling East End of London following the slaying of Mary Ann Nichols on the 31st of August of that year. This silence was unnatural, but while the silence I’m enjoying has nothing malevolent to it, it nonetheless has a definite ‘sci-fi’ or even ‘End of Days’ feel to it, so I wonder if I’m the only one to perceive things in such a way?
Finally for now, the BBC piece on the mythology of Iceland’s volcanoes mentioned the Gates of Hell, which in turn reminded me of some of my favourite lines of poetry. In Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil described a visit to the Underworld undertaken by the Trojan prince Aeneas and it includes the warning:
“The Gates of Hell are open, night and day,
Smooth the descent and easy is the way,
But, to return, and view the cheerful skies
In that, the mighty task and labour lies.”
Well, one of the Gates of Hell may have opened in Iceland, but as a direct result, I’ve been blessed with what will surely be the all too-fleeting vision of the “cheerful skies” that our ancestors once gazed upon.
Last summer, I had the honour, the privilege and the pleasure of interviewing Colin Wilson for a documentary being made by my friend Phil Gardiner. Colin Wilson is by any measure the last of the true British ‘greats’ and the simple truth is that I could still be sat there now listening to what he had to say on every subject from Alchemy to Zombies.
Colin Wilson was kind enough to give me signed copies of some of his books that weren’t already in my collection, so I was extremely pleased by this, while he did the same for Frank Somers, leader of the Stonehenge Druids, who accompanied me down to Cornwall that day.
Now I learn from Phil Gardiner that the documentary about Colin Wilson is being edited prior to release, so if you wish, you can now see a brief trailer for Strange Is Normal, which will be distributed by Warner Bros.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I had meant to devote myself to the two projects I mentioned in my previous post (below), but the subjects of the Spoils of Annwn and Caer Sidi have been preying on my mind. In turn, these mediaeval mysteries reminded me of another wonder from those far-off times, so it seemed a good idea to write about it while it came to mind.
Show me more… »
Be bloody, bold and resolute…
2:37 pm
A little while ago, I produced my book on the “missing years” of Jesus, then I undertook presentations, promotions, a book launch, interviews and writing articles for various magazines, all the while continuing to work on producing material for Eternal Idol. I’m certainly not complaining, because it was all a labour of love, but there’s comes a well-defined point when it’s impossible to do everything.
And so it is that I now find myself with two major projects that require my undivided attention. When they approach fruition or when the time is right, I will of course provide all the details here on Eternal Idol and I anticipate that this will take place in few months time, although I’m hoping that my ‘sabbatical’ from writing and publishing original posts on this site will just take a week or two.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to publish contributions and comments as and when time allows. For regular visitors, there are a number of ongoing discussions that are far from concluded, concerning the Romans, the Spoils of Annwn and others. For those of you new to this site, there are something in the region of 300 posts going back 5 years or so in the categories displayed opposite, so there’s no shortage of material to consider. This site deals first and foremost with Stonehenge, but I intend to publish some further detailed material on the subject of “Jesus in Britain” upon my return.
I’ve just been told of a review of a new book on the “missing years” of Jesus in the Daily Mail. The book is written by Dr Adam Bradford, a biblical scholar, who says that “…a mistranslation of the Greek word ‘tekton’ to describe the profession of Joseph, Jesus’s father, is one of many mistakes that have led to a fundamental misunderstanding of Christ’s character.
Dr Bradford claims that while ‘tekton’ is usually said to mean carpenter, it more accurately means master builder or architect.” Amazing, but I seem to remember writing about precisely this matter on page 130 of my own book, which was published a year ago.
The review goes on to explain how Jesus was ‘almost certainly’ enrolled into some top Jewish schools of the time, only to re-emerge 18 years later at the age of 30. Which is where I guess he acquired his ability to sleep through ferocious storms at sea, his revolutionary attitude towards women, his ability to melt unharmed through hostile crowds, his unparalleled ability to banish unclean spirits, his empathy with fishermen, his fondness for high places, his command of Greek, the bearing of a king and so on and so forth.
Sorry about that – as you were…
