Month: March 2007

New Show on the radio… listen while you can, as Internet Radio may soon be a creature of the past. The RIAA is out to strangle the baby in the bathwater so to speak. If their long arm reaches to Europe, we may just be broadcasting from Asia or Africa. These bastards are out to do independent music in by any way possible. Do your bit! Save Internet Radio!

Read more about it here…

Well, that is it for today… Have a good one!

Gwyllm

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On The Menu:

The Links

The Quotes

St Martin’s Eve

Poetry: Jame Stephens

Art: Arthur Rackam ‘Peter Pan In Kensington Gardens’

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The Links:

Big Brother…

POLICE UNLEASH ANTI-DRUGS WEAPON

Bad AI!

Purge on ‘lethal’ laughing gas in clubs and bars

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The Quotes:

“The really frightening thing about middle age is that you know you’ll grow out of it.”

“I take my children everywhere, but they always find their way back home.”

“Nihilism is best done by professionals.”

“It is impossible to travel faster than the speed of light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off.”

“I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!”

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St Martin’s Eve

(told by John Sheehy)

In Iveragh, not very far from the town of Cahirciveen, there lived a farmer named James Shea with his wife and three children, two sons and a daughter. The man was peaceable, honest, and very charitable to the poor, but his wife was hard-hearted, never giving even a drink of milk to a needy person. Her younger son was as bad in every way as herself, and whatever the mother did he always agreed with her and was on her side.

This was before the roads and cars were in the Kerry Mountains. The only way of travelling in those days, when a man didn’t walk, was to ride sitting on a straw saddle, and the only way to take anything to market was on horseback in creels.

It happened, at any rate, that James Shea was going in the beginning of November to Cork with two firkins of butter, and what troubled him most was the fear that he’d not be home on Saint Marlin’s night to do honour to the saint. For never had he let that night pass without drawing blood in honour of the saint. To make sure, he called the elder son and said, “If I am not at the house on Saint Martin’s night, kill the big sheep that is running with the cows.”

Shea went away to Cork with the butter, but could not be home in time. The elder son went out on Saint Martin’s eve, when he saw that his father was not coming, and drove the sheep into the house.

“What are you doing, you fool, with that sheep?” asked the mother.

“Sure, I’m going to kill it. Didn’t you hear my father tell me that there was never a Saint Martin’s night but he drew blood, and do you want to have the house disgraced?”

At this the mother made sport of him and said: “Drive out the sheep and I’ll give you something else to kill by and by.” So the boy let the sheep out, thinking the mother would kill a goose.

He sat down and waited for the mother to give him whatever she had to kill. It wasn’t long till she came in, bringing a big tomcat they had, and the same cat was in the house nine or ten years.

“Here,” said she, “you can kill this beast and draw its blood. We’ll have it cooked when your father comes home.”

The boy was very angry and spoke up to the mother: “Sure the house is disgraced for ever,” said he, “and it will not be easy for you to satisfy my father when he comes.”

He didn’t kill the cat, you may be sure; and neither he nor his sister ate a bite of supper, and they were crying and fretting over the disgrace all the evening.

That very night the house caught fire and burned down, nothing was left but the four walls. The mother and younger son were burned to death, but the elder son and his sister escaped by, some miracle. They went to a neighbour’s house, and were there till the father came on the following evening. When he found the house destroyed and the wife and younger son dead he mourned and lamented. But when the other son told him what the mother did on Saint Martin’s eve, he cried out:

“Ah, it was the wrath of God that fell on my house; if I had stopped at home till after Saint Martin’s night, all would be safe and well with me now.”

James Shea went to the priest on the following morning, and asked would it be good or lucky for him to rebuild the house.

“Indeed,” said the priest, “there is no harm in putting a roof on the walls and repairing them if you will have mass celebrated in the house before you go to live in it. If you do that all will be well with you.”

[Shea spoke to the priest because people are opposed to repairing or rebuilding a burnt house, and especially if any person has been burned in it.]

Well, James Shea put a roof on the house, repaired it, and had mass celebrated inside. That evening as Shea was sitting down to supper what should he see but his wife coming in the door to him. He thought she wasn’t dead at all. “Ah, Mary,” said he, “tis not so bad as they told me. Sure, I thought it is dead you were. Oh, then you are welcome home; come and sit down here; the supper is just ready.”

She didn’t answer a word, but looked him straight in the face and walked on to the room at the other end of the house. He jumped up, thinking it’s sick the woman was, and followed her to the room to help her. He shut the door after him. As he was not coming back for a long time the son thought at last that he’d go and ask the father why he wasn’t eating his supper. When he went into the room he saw no sign of his mother, saw nothing in the place but two legs from the knees down. He screamed out for his sister and she came.

“Oh, merciful God!” screamed the sister.

“Those are my father’s legs!” cried the brother, “and Mary, don’t you know the stockings, sure you knitted them yourself, and don’t I know the brogues very well?”

They called in the neighbours, and, to the terror of them all, they saw nothing but the two legs and feet of James Shea.

There was a wake over the remains that night, and the next day they buried the two legs. Some people advised the boy and girl never to sleep a night in the house, that their mother’s soul was lost, and that was why she came and ate up the father, and she would eat themselves as well.

The two now started to walk the world, not caring much where they were going if only they escaped the mother. They stopped the first night at a farmer’s house not far from Killarney. After supper a bed was made down for them by the fire, in the corner, and they lay there. About the middle of the night a great noise was heard outside, and the woman of the house called to her boy and servants to get up and go to the cow-house to know why the cows were striving to kill one another. Her own son rose first. When he and the two servant boys went out they saw the ghost of a woman, and she in chains. She made at them, and wasn’t long killing the three.

Not seeing the boys come in, the farmer and his wife rose up, sprinkled holy water around the house, blessed themselves and went out, and there they saw the ghost in blue blazes and chains around her. In a coop outside by himself was a March cock.* He flew down from his perch and crowed twelve times. That moment the ghost disappeared.

Now the neighbours were roused, and the news flew around that the three boys were killed. The brother and sister didn’t say a word to any one, but, rising up early, started on their journey, begging God’s protection as they went. They never stopped nor stayed till they came to Rathmore, near Cork, and, going to a farmhouse, the boy asked for lodgings in God’s name.

“I will give you lodgings in His name,” said the farmer’s wife. She brought warm water for the two to wash their hands and feet, for they were tired and dusty. After supper a bed was put down for them, and about the same hour as the night before there was a great noise outside.

“Rise up and go out,” said the farmer’s wife; “some of the cows must be untied.”

“I’ll not go out at this hour of the night, if they are untied itself,” said the man. “I’ll stay where I am, if they kill one another, for it isn’t safe to go out till the cock crows; after cockcrow I’ll go out.”

“That’s true for you,” said the farmer’s wife, “and, upon my word, before coming to bed, I forgot to sprinkle holy water in the room, and to bless myself.”

So taking the bottle hanging near the bed, she sprinkled the water around the room and toward the threshold, and made the sign of the cross. The man didn’t go out until cock-crow. The brother and sister went away early, and travelled all day. Coming evening they met a pleasant-looking man who stood before them in the road.

“You seem to be strangers,” said he; “and where are you going?”

“We are strangers,” said the boy, “and we don’t know where to go.”

“You need go no farther. I know you well, your home is in Iveragh. I am Saint Martin, sent from the Lord to protect you and your sister. You were going to draw the blood of a sheep in my honour, but your mother and brother made sport of you, and your mother wouldn’t let you do what your father told you. You see what has come to them; they are lost for ever, both of them. Your father is saved in heaven, for he was a good man. Your mother will be here soon, and I’ll put her in the way that she’ll never trouble you again.”

Taking a rod from his bosom and dipping it in a vial of holy water he drew a circle around the brother and sister. Soon they heard their mother coming, and then they saw her with chains on her, and the rattling was terrible, and flames were rising from her. She came to where they stood, and said: “Bad luck to you both for being the cause of my misery”

“God forbid that,” said Saint Martin. “It isn’t they are the cause, but yourself, for you were always bad. You would not honour me, and now you must suffer for it.”

He pulled out a book and began to read, and after he read a few minutes he told her to depart and not be seen in Ireland again till the day of judgment. She rose in the air in flames of fire, and with such a noise that you’d think all the thunders of heaven were roaring and all the houses and walls in the kingdom were tumbling to the ground.

The brother and sister went on their knees and thanked Saint Martin. He blessed them and told them to rise, and taking a little table-cloth out of his bosom he said to the brother: “Take this cloth with you and keep it in secret. Let no one know that you have it. If you or your sister are in need go to your room, close the door behind you and bolt it. Spread out the cloth then, and plenty of everything to eat and drink will come to you. Keep the cloth with you always; it belongs to both of you. Now go home and live in the house that your father built, and let the priest come and celebrate Monday mass in it, and live the life that your father lived before you.”

The two came home, and brother and sister lived a good life. They married, and when either was in need that one had the cloth to fall back on, and their grandchildren are living yet in Iveragh. And this is truth, every word of it, and it’s often I heard my poor grandmother tell this story, the Almighty God rest her soul, and she was the woman that wouldn’t tell a lie. She knew James Shea and his wife very well.

*A cock hatched in March from a cock and hen hatched in March.

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The Poetry of Jame Stephens

The Watcher

A rose for a young head,

A ring for a bride,

Joy for the homestead

Clean and wide-

Who’s that waiting

In the rain outside?

A heart for an old friend,

A hand for the new:

Love can to earth lend

Heaven’s hue-

Who’s that standing

In the silver dew?

A smile for the parting,

A tear as they go,

God’s sweethearting

Ends just so-

Who’s that watching

Where the black winds blow?

He who is waiting

In the rain outside,

He who is standing

Where the dew drops wide,

He who is watching

In the wind must ride

(Tho’ the pale hands cling)

With the rose

And the ring

And the bride,

Must ride

With the red of the rose,

And the gold of the ring,

And the lips and the hair of the bride.

—

The Shell

And then I pressed the shell

Close to my ear

And listened well,

And straightway like a bell

Came low and clear

The slow, sad murmur of the distant seas,

Whipped by an icy breeze

Upon a shore

Wind-swept and desolate.

It was a sunless strand that never bore

The footprint of a man,

Nor felt the weight

Since time began

Of any human quality or stir

Save what the dreary winds and waves incur.

And in the hush of waters was the sound

Of pebbles rolling round,

For ever rolling with a hollow sound.

And bubbling sea-weeds as the waters go

Swish to and fro

Their long, cold tentacles of slimy grey.

There was no day,

Nor ever came a night

Setting the stars alight

To wonder at the moon:

Was twilight only and the frightened croon,

Smitten to whimpers, of the dreary wind

And waves that journeyed blind

And then I loosed my ear … O, it was sweet

To hear a cart go jolting down the street.

—

The Goat’s Path

The crooked paths go every way

Upon the hill — they wind about

Through the heather in and out

Of the quiet sunniness.

And there the goats, day after day,

Stray in sunny quietness,

Cropping here and cropping there,

As they pause and turn and pass,

Now a bit of heather spray,

Now a mouthful of the grass.

In the deeper sunniness,

In the place where nothing stirs,

Quietly in quietness,

In the quiet of the furze,

For a time they come and lie

Staring on the roving sky.

If you approach they run away,

They leap and stare, away they bound,

With a sudden angry sound,

To the sunny quietude;

Crouching down where nothing stirs

In the silence of the furze,

Couching down again to brood

In the sunny solitude.

If I were as wise as they

I would stray apart and brood,

I would beat a hidden way

Through he quiet heather spray

To a sunny solitude;

And should you come I’d run away,

I would make an angry sound,

I would stare and turn and bound

To the deeper quietude,

To the place where nothing stirs

In the silence of the furze.

In that airy quietness

I would think as long as they;

Through the quiet sunniness

I would stray away to brood

By a hidden beaten way

In a sunny solitude.

I would think until I found

Something I can never find,

Something lying on the ground,

In the bottom of my mind.

—

What Tomas An Buile Said In a Pub

I saw God. Do you doubt it?

Do you dare to doubt it?

I saw the Almighty Man. His hand

Was resting on a mountain, and

He looked upon the World and all about it:

I saw him plainer than you see me now,

You mustn’t doubt it.

He was not satisfied;

His look was all dissatisfied.

His beard swung on a wind far out of sight

Behind the world’s curve, and there was light

Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed,

“That star went always wrong, and from the start

I was dissatisfied.”

He lifted up His hand

I say He heaved a dreadful hand

Over the spinning Earth. Then I said, “Stay,

You must not strike it, God; I’m in the way;

And I will never move from where I stand.”

He said, “Dear child, I feared that you were dead,”

And stayed His hand.

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James Stephens was born in Dublin in 1882. In his early years he was a solicitor’s clerk, and later Registrar of the National Gallery of Ireland. Amongst his many literary friends was James Joyce, who, partly because they shared a birth year, suggested that Stephens finish Finnegans Wake should Joyce himself fail.

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On The Music Box: Rena Jones-Driftwood

The day is bright, and upon us. Supposedly we are to be clouded in today, but it is incredibly sunny (at this point) for this time of year. I will accept it; it has been raining forever. Our yew tree is releasing clouds of pollen, it covers everything, and especially my eyes, sinuses… truck.. everything.

Heading off to a clients, so must be brief. We have a great article today, kind of topical for this time of year. Some nice poetry as well to make your day. (I hope)

Hope your day is a lovely one…

Gwyllm

On The Menu:

The Links

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

Tree Nymphs and Tree-Hung Shamans

Lament For Tammuz

Poetry: Wu Men… Selections

Paintings… Following A Theme

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The Links:

Tourist vows to film an Australian tiger

Jesus tomb claim denounced

It’s the thinnest material ever and could revolutionise computers and medicine

BNP seeks anti-abortion Catholic votes

The Green Man Festival…

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

by Sir Walter Raleigh

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move

To live with thee and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold

When rivers rage and rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb;

The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields

To wayward winter reckoning yields;

A honey tongue, a heart of gall,

Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten—

In folly ripe, in season rotten.

Thy belt of straw and ivy buds,

Thy coral clasps and amber studs,

All these in me no means can move

To come to thee and be thy love.

But could youth last and love still breed,

Had joys no date nor age no need,

Then these delights my mind might move

To live with thee and be thy love.

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Tree Nymphs and Tree-Hung Shamans

John Lash

PART ONE: The Myth of Adonis

Chapter 17 of John Lash’s recently completed book, Gaia’s Way is entitled “The End of Patriarchy.” It opens like this: Monotheism begins with a god who hates trees.

Ye shall utterly destroy all the places where in the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree. And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their idols with fire; and ye shall hew down the carved images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. – Deuteronomy 12: 2-3

The Demiurge of the Old Testament is jealous, insisting that no other gods be honored before him. This demand of course implies that there are other gods, competing deities. They are Pagan divinities who pervade nature, manifesting in all manner of creatures, in clouds and rivers and trees, even in rocks. Monotheism will tolerate none of these sensuous immanent powers. It makes the Earth void of divinity, its inhabitants subject to an off-planet landlord.

^^^^^

Throughout the book I refer to the Gnostic assertion that redemptive religion is a mental aberration insinuated into the human mind by non-human entities called Archons. Whether or not one accepts this bizarre explanation, common sense alone warns us that a paternal deity who claims to have created the natural world, yet demands to be worshipped by the destruction of nature, may have some serious psychological problems. This is an aberrant god who inspires a twisted faith. We live a natural world that we must deny and destroy in order to show devotion to the god who created it. This is certainly one of the more perverse propositions ever contrived by the human mind.

Experience Destroyed

We may well wonder, How did such an idea ever come to be formulated in the guise of a religious system? Since it is we humans who create religion, and invent our own gods, the monotheistic hatred of trees must have originated in human nature. It must have devolved from some actual experience. Even dementia, the distortion of reality, depends on having a reality to distort. What reality could have been at the source of the hideous distortion of Deuteronomy 12?

It has often been observed that Christianity took some of its rites and images from Pagan religion. The Christian mass, for instance, was taken directly from Mithraic religion. The Vatican itself is erected over a crypt where the rites of Mithras were celebrated. Christmas was originally a feast-day dedicated to the rebirth of the solar god, Mithra, not to mention a host of other Pagan divinities.

Okay, all this is more or less old hat. The cooptation of Pagan religious motifs and rituals by Christianity is well-known, but there is a deeper aspect to the crime of spiritual piracy. It is one thing to pillage rites and symbols which result from genuine religious experience, and quite another thing to undermine the very capacity for such experience. In The Politics of Experience, L. D. Laing warned about this danger: “If our experience is destroyed, our behaviour will be destructive.” Can the destructive behavior demanded by the paternal deity in Deuteronomy 12 be the result of experience having been destroyed? If so, what kind of experience?

A while ago a friend asked me, “Why is the infant Jesus depicted sleeping in a manger?” This question caught my attention, because after a good many years of deep immersion in mythology, I had not asked it myself! The “Christ Child” in the manger is one of the striking details of the New Testament. This endearing image is so deeply associated with the life of Jesus that we never think it could belong to any other story or setting. It seems this way, as do so many features of Christianity, because the cooptation has been done in such a way as to exclude any and all alternatives. The propagation of Christianity has been like a brutal advertising campaign of complete brainwashing that aims to make sure that the targeted consumers do not just reject the competition, but are oblivious to the very existence of any competition.

Birth from a Myrrh Tree

Upon reflection, I realized that the cameo image of baby Jesus in the manger was a cooptation of Tammuz (“true son”), the Sumerian shepherd. As a tender of sheep and goats, Tammuz sometimes slept in the manger where the flock came to eat. This humble image contrasts to his privileged role as a lover of the Goddess, Ishtar.

The Greek equivalent to the Assyro-Babylonian Tammuz was Adonis. Legend says that his mother Myrrha was a tree, i.e., a tree nymph or dryad. One version says that Persephone, the daughter of Demeter (the guardian goddess of the Eleusinian Mysteries) became enamoured of Adonis and took him with her as she migrated through the seasons of the year. In other words, the human Adonis became entirely absorbed in the recycling, regenerating processes of nature, like a tree that changes with the seasons. Adonis’ Sumerian counterpart, Dumuzi (identical with Tammuz, of course), was traditionally born from a tree (Ceramic bowl by Urbino, 16th Century, N. Italy). Even casual observers of nature have noted how the trunks of many trees have open joints that graphically resemble the distended birth orifice. Adonis is extracted from the trunk while his mother, caught in the throes of labor, looks down as if upon a miracle.

All over the ancient Near East the birth of Adonis from a myrrh tree after a ten-month gestation was celebrated on December 25. This is the pre-historical origin of the Christmas tree.

Three details of the Urbino image are striking: First, Myrrha the tree nymph has her arms outspread in a way that immediately suggests the posture of someone crucified on a cross. Second, the scarf wrapped around her recalls the serpent wrapped around the tree in the Garden of Eden. Third, Myrrha wears a pointed cap that almost looks like a thorn, recalling the crown of thorns worn by Jesus on Golgotha. It is as if these details are subliminal clues embedded in the overt mythological imagery. The ceramic bowl pictures (symbolizes, if you prefer) an experience, not the literal counterpart to what it shows. This complex image mirrors to us today something that happened to humanity in the past due to a specific capacity for experience (yet to be determined), a capacity which has since been destroyed. If this mythic image is obscure to us today, it is not because we cannot conceive or imagine what it might mean, but because we can no longer experience in a vivid and direct way what it represents.

In short, the Urbino ceramic does not merely display a mythological event, the birth of a man from a tree-woman; it also reveals the humanly lived counterpart to that event: the experience encoded in the mythic image of a tree-woman giving birth to a man.

Crucifixion Caricature

Now, assuming that the Italian artist who made the Urbino artifact faithfully preserved some details of Pagan mythology about Adonis, and allowing that the legend of Adonis predates Christianity by millennia, we can assert that the image on the ceramic bowl represents a mythical event that came to be caricatured in the crucifixion. By caricatured I mean deliberately and perversely distorted. The specific details that have been coopted are flagrant, as noted above: the woman with arms outspread in joy, the billowing scarf, the pointed hat. Of these details, the first and last are transposed into the conventional scenes of crucifixion. The second detail has been coopted for conventional representations of the Christian scenario of the Fall: the serpentine tempter curled around the Tree of Life.

Consider closely how the caricature perverts the value of the original mythic images. The gesture of Myrrha is an expression of joy: she throws out her arms as if to embrace the newborn child, but also to show her exuberance. The serpent-scarf flutters wildly around her. In Pagan myth and art, the serpent represents the life-force with its sinuous currents full of ecstasy. In Gnostic myth, the serpent in the garden of Eden is the instructor and divine benefactor who confers the cognitive ecstasy of Gnosis on the first parents, Adam and Eve. All this imagery is grotesquely redeployed in the religious imagery where Christ on the cross replaces the serpent on the tree. The difference in the psychological impact of the birth of Adonis compared to the crucifixion is obvious: one, the Pagan image, represents ecstasy and birth from the powers of the earth; the other, the Christian image, represents human death-agony as an otherworldly sacrifice.

The crucifixion image borrows and distorts a preexisting mythic image that arose from a certain experience, but the cooptation denies and reverses the values attached to that experience. In my book, I call this tactic counter-mimicry, after the Greek wordantimimon, used in Gnostic texts to describe Archontic mentality. In other words, counter-mimicry copies an image, but converts it to a set of values contrary to its original meaning. The counter-mimicry of the crucifixion displaced the Pagan religion of ecstacy and regeneration in nature and substituted in its place a cult of death and suffering. It made the redemptive power attributed to Christ’s suffering look more powerful than the regenerative force of nature itself.

Gnostics insisted that this is a deviant and dangerous idea. What do you think?

Phylogenetic Memory

So far, so good. But let’s cut to the chase. What is “the humanly lived experience” represented by the birth of Adonis from a tree-woman? Well, there are two answers to that question. First, the mythic image shown above reflects the Pagan religious experience of ecstatic regeneration through immersion in the forces of nature, as suggested above. Those who identified with Adonis were spiritually and somatically reborn. They participated morally, emotionally and psychologically in the regeneration of nature, as if they were an integral part of the natural world and not separate from it, confined to the human world alone, trapped in single-self identity. This experience was available to every person initiated into the rites of Adonis. The Urbino image represents the first-hand experience of those who underwent those rites.

But this mythic image shows another kind of experience as well, something that transcends the realm of individuality. Because myths refer to the long-term evolution of the human species, not only to the specific experience of an individual member of the species, each mythic image is time-intensive. This means that it displays in a static pictorial form a process that evolved over a long time, extending back into prehistory. Take Orion the Hunter, for example. This is the best-known mythological image found in the skies, where it is pictured as a constellation. The mythic image of Orion does not merely represent one human individual who once went hunting, it represents the experience of the hunt as lived by the entire human species over hundreds of thousands of years. Orion is the time-intensive image of an evolutional process undergone by the entire human species. The image is a mnemonic device for recalling that long-term evolutional process to the conscious mind. You could say that a mythic image is an icon of phylogenetic memory. Click the icon of the myth, behold the image, and it brings up the species memory in the form of a mythic narrative.

Phylogenetic, adjectival form of phylogeny: development of the entirety of a species, by contrast to ontogeny, development of the individual of a species. Phylogenetic refers to the experience shared by a phylum. (Linnaean taxonomy describes each living creature by Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species. Humanity belongs to the Phylum of Chordata, including all vertebrates with a central nervous system along the back. In evolutionary terms, the human species is defined as a creature with a spine, but in moral terms, many members of the species are totally spineless.)

That myth preserves a record of phylogenetic memory, or long-term species memory, has not been widely considered, as far as I know. I have been trying to get this concept into circulation for a good many years. Perhaps you, patient reader, can now understand why I’ve considered this matter to be of such paramount importance. The heuristic value of this idea is immense, and may be crucial to human survival. (heuristic adj 1 allowing people to learn for themselves. 2 denoting problem-solving techniques that proceed by trial and error. The Penguin Concise English Dictionary, 2001.) If you accept the concept of the mythic image as stated here, you can formulate questions that will lead into the true depth of the mythological material. You can ask, What specific phylogenetic memory does this mythic image or story present? The answer is already half-contained in the question. By knowing what you are asking for, you will be able to develop a rich, deeply resourced response. You can ask what a mythic image or narrative reveals about specific experiences in the evolution of our species over the long term.

Which brings us to the second answer about the mythic image of Adonis born from a tree. This image does not represent a one-time literal event, a boy born from a tree-woman in some remote moment of prehistory; but an actual, lived event that transpired over many eons of time. What event was that? It was the birth of male shamans from women who were trees.

Split-brain Technique

Phylogenetic memory encompasses everything that has happened to the human species, including what brought it to its current stage of biological existence as a two-legged self-conscious animal. Whoever can access the long-term memory of the human species can come to know how the human body was formed from germinal events at the molecular level, how we evolved from a kind of primal plasm into a complex multicellular creature, how we acquired our sense-organs, how the brain developed, how sex originated, how we acquired fingernails, how we came to weep when we are sad, and so on. These are biological and evolutional developments, things that happened to us, rather than actions we performed, like hunting. They are developmental events in the life of our species. But phylogenetic memory also comprises other experiences: how fire was discovered, how the woodsaw was invented, how we learned to make bread. I want to emphasize that phylogenetic memory carries a record of discoveries that humans have made and as well biological developments that the human species has undergone. Both categories of events are retained in the human genome where they can be accessed by shamanic techniques of ecstasy, comparable to the Gnosis of the Mysteries.

Now here’s where the going gets tricky… We are entertaining an amazing concept — myth is a record of phylogenetic memory — and, at the same time, we are contemplating some mythological material with that concept in mind, in order to observe how the concept can be applied, how it works in practice. This exercise requires the use of the leftbrain (concept) and rightbrain (myth) simultaneously, but it is not always good technique to engage both sides of the brain at once. For instance, we cannot investigate “the birth of male shamans from women who were trees” and remain engaged with the leftbrain concept of phylogenetic memory. That investigation has to be pursued via a narrative, a story-telling process.

The narrative cannot be developed conceptually, even though we are using a concept to intiate it, i.e., to frame the storytelling process.

Even though the mythological material to be elicited through the narration will show how the concept works, the concept has to set the aside, otherwise it hampers or even cripples the narrative. So, the way to proceed from this point on is to elaborate the narrative purely on its own terms. When the myth has been expanded into a set of graphic and palpable memories of species experience, we can return to the framing concept of phylogenetic memory. In the process of expanding the myth, it helps to keep conceptual and critical thinking in suspension.

Just like we do when we go to the movies.

Lament for Tammuz

“In Eanna, high and low, there is weeping,

Wailing for the house of the lord they raise.

The wailing is for the plants; the first lament is ‘they grow not.’

The wailing is for the barley; the ears grow not.

For the habitations and flocks it is; they produce not.

For the perishing wedded ones, for perishing children it is; the dark-headed people create not.

The wailing is for the great river; it brings the flood no more.

The wailing is for the fields of men; the gunū grows no more.

The wailing is for the fish-ponds; the dasuhur fish spawn not.

The wailing is for the cane-brake; the fallen stalks grow not.

The wailing is for the forests; the tamarisks grow not.

The wailing is for the highlands; the masgam trees grow not.

The wailing is for the garden store-house; honey and wine are produced not.

The wailing is for the meadows; the bounty of the garden, the sihtū plants grow not.

The wailing is for the palace; life unto distant days is not.”

________

Wu Men… Selections

10,000

Ten thousand flowers in spring,

the moon in autumn,

a cool breeze in summer,

snow in winter.

If your mind isn’t clouded

by unnecessary things,

this is the best season of your life.

—

The Great Way

The Great Way has no gate;

there are a thousand paths to it.

If you pass through the barrier,

you walk the universe alone.

—

A Monk Asked

A monk asked Chao-chou Ts’ung shen (777-897) (Joshu), “Has the oak tree Buddha nature?”

Chao-chou said, “Yes, it has.”

The monk said, “When does the oak tree attain Buddhahood?”

Chao-Chou said, “Wait until the great universe collapses.”

The monk said, “When does the universe collapse?”

Chao-chou said, “Wait until the oak tree attains Buddhahood.

—

Moon and clouds are the same

Moon and clouds are the same;

mountain and valley are different.

All are blessed; all are blessed.

Is this one? Is this two?

—

One Instant

One Instant is eternity;

eternity is the now.

When you see through this one instant,

you see through the one who sees.

—

(another translation…)

The Great Way has no gate

The Great Way has no gate,

A thousand roads enter it.

When one passes through this gateless gate,

He freely walks between heaven and earth.

—

Twirling a flower,

The snake shows its tail.

Mahakasyapa breaks into a smile,

And people and devas are confounded.

—

Because it’s so very clear,

It takes so long to realize.

If you just know that flame is fire,

You’ll find that your rice is already cooked.

—

There are two primary collections of koans in Zen/Chan Buddhism: the Blue Cliff Records, and the Wu Men Kuan, also known as the Mumonkan. The Mumonkan, first published in 1228, consists of 48 koans compiled by Wu Men Hui-k’ai with his commentary and poetic verse.

Wu Men (also called Mumon) was a head monk of the Lung-hsiang monastery in China.

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On The Music Box: Axiom Of Choice – Beyond Denial

Rowan and I saw

‘The Faun’s Labyrinth’ on Sunday..or as it is titled here in the US:

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’. Excellent film, and Rowan and I both recommend it. The Spiritual/Shamanic Journey is well layed out, the harrowing of Hell, The Three Task, The Sacrifice…

This will be one of those films that we will purchase the DVD for the home library. The last few years has seen a reasonable amount of films with the ancient tales, myths and dreams deeply embedded in them… The Brothers Grimm (with that bit of joyousness that Terry Gilliam brings to the mix)… V For Vendetta, with its heroes journey and redemption of the world.

The great themes are there if we but look. Films are the modern dream time, with all of the tales laid out within. It could not be any other way, as we come again and again to the deep wells of remembrance and sleep.

Do your self a favour, see this one. The tale is dark, but the rewards are there if you seek them out…

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On The Menu:

Updates & Notes

The Obligatory Links…

Pan & Daphnis…

Those Amazing Quantum Honey Bees

At the Foot of Cold Mountain: The Poetry of Han Shan…

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Updates & Notes:

The second ‘The Invisible College’ PDF Magazine is taking shape. Lots of excitement around here with that project. We are looking for a way to have them physically published in the future…

If you haven’t read it, you can down load it to your left… Tell your friends, and spread the word if you would please!

—

Spring is coming on in earnest here in Portland. It was up to 60f today here. Blue skies, beauty everywhere. We were out in the back yard today, getting it ready for spring (later spring planting) We get freezes up until April 15th, so you have to move with a bit of caution when it comes to the planting side of it all here….

—

Finished ‘Poets on the Peaks’ last night.

A recommended read. It tells the story of Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac’s times as Fire Watchers in the Cascade Wilderness. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

It fills in all kinds of gaps for me regarding the paths the three of them chose with their writings and lives…

It is a must for anyone who finds an affinity with the Beats, and that time of great change and transition. I had a very hard time putting this one down. I read it every night given the chance.. Masterfully done.

You can pick it up through Powells… (Check out the link on our home page…)

Check it out!

—

Have a lovely Monday!

Gwyllm

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The Links:

Towers point to ancient Sun cult

A talk with Daniel Siebert…!

Opus Dei plans its own film

THE CALL OF THE WEIRD

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Pan & Daphnis…

Daphnis was a hero from the island of Sicily. His father was Hermes, god of merchants and thieves, and his mother was a Sicilian nymph who was tricked by Hermes into making love to him. When her time came and Daphnis was born she abandoned him to die in a grove of laurels (whence his name) on the Mountain of Hera, to avenge herself on his father. But Hera saw her and took pity on the beautiful infant. She made sure that he was found by some shepherds, who brought him home and raised him as one of their own. From an early age he was renowned for his beauty, and for his delightful songs about the shepherd’s life. His great pride were his herd of cattle, which were of the same stock as those belonging to Helios, the sun god, and of which he took the greatest care.

Many were those who desired and courted this beautiful boy. He was a beloved of the god Apollo himself, and also of Pan, who taught him to play the panpipes. As he grew older it was his turn to fall in love. One day while tending his herd of magic cattle he caught a glimpse of a lovely nymph, Nomia by name, bathing in the river and fell in love with her. At first she ran off, angry to have been seen by human eyes. He did not give up and kept chasing her. In the end she relented, but warned him that if he ever was unfaithful to her she would strike him blind. He meant to respect her wish, but one day Nomia’s rival, another nymph by the name of Chimaera, plied him with wine and then seduced him. The furious Nomia took away his eyesight in revenge, and Daphnis spent the rest of his short life on earth playing the flute and singing his songs which were now sadder and even more beautiful than before.

Soon afterwards Hermes found out about his son’s misfortune, and came to take him up to Mount Olympos. As he flew off he struck the rock with his foot, causing clear water to gush forth. That spring, close by the town of Syracuse, is said to flow to this day and still carries the name of the blinded youth. There the Sicilian shepherds came ever after to offer sacrifices to their hero.

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Thanks To Dr. Con For This….

Those Amazing Quantum Honey Bees

Ken Korczak:

Warning! What I am writing about today may fry your brain. If you don’t like the thought of your cerebral cortex sizzling like a corndog in a vat of boiling vegetable oil, don’t read this column. In fact, if this column does not fry your brain, then your brain is just unfriable. Is “unfriable” a word? I don’t know, but I digress. Now, on with the brain buzz, and you’ll soon understand what I mean by “buzz.”Imagine having the ability to see, with your naked eye, a quark particle spinning in the weird and shadowy quantum world. Imagine being able to perceive subatomic particles winking in and out of existence. What would it be like if you could easily see electrons shimmering in their orbits around atoms? Furthermore, think about what it would be like if you could exist naturally in a realm of six dimensions, rather than being cramped into the three-dimensional world you live in now. What if you could perform a sensational six-dimensional dance?

Well, that may be what the world of the common honey bee is like. If the theories of mathematician Barbara Shipman are correct, honey bees can not only perceive the energies of the subatomic, quantum world directly, but they also use six-dimensional space to communicate with each other. The fact that Shipman stumbled upon this theory is a classic example of what Louis Pasteur called: “Chance favoring the prepared mind.”Shipman is a mathematician at the University of Rochester, but her father was a bee researcher for the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Shipman would often stop by her father’s office and he would show her the amazing world of honey bees. One aspect of bee behavior which has fascinated and baffled scientists for more than 70 years is the mysterious dance they perform in their hives. The dance — a kind of crazy wing-waggling jitterbug (no pun intended) — communicates to other bees where new sources of yummy flower food can be found. By watching the dance of a scout bee, other bees, called “recruits” get an exact idea of the direction and distance of where new food can be found.Even though bees were not her field of study, Shipman could never get the mystery of bee dances out of her mind. In the meantime, Shipman’s work as a math theorist led her to an area only a select few other mathematicians were working on — something called manifolds. A manifold is a geometric shape described by certain complex math equations. There are an infinite variety of manifold configurations.

They can describe shapes of many dimensions. Shipman was working with a six-dimensional structure called a flag manifold, when suddenly, in one of those eerie moments of scientific coincidence, she realized that the flag manifold very closely resembled the pattern of the honey bee waggle dance.Now, because the flag manifold is a six-dimensional object, it cannot be perceived in our three dimensional world. We can visualize only an approximation of what it looks like by projecting its “shadow” into two dimensional space. The shadow of an ordinary sphere, for example, projects onto two dimensions as a flat circle. And when you project a sixth-dimensional flag manifold onto two dimensions, it matches exactly the patterns dancing bees make. But two-dimensional bee-dance patterns are not enough to explain how bees interpret these patterns to locate distant sources of food. A good explanation may be that the bees actually perceive all six dimensions. In order to do that, the eye or senses of the bee would need to be able to see subatomic activity directly! When a human scientist tries to detect a quark–by bombarding it with another particle in a high-energy accelerator–the flag manifold geometry is lost. If bees are using quarks as a script for their dance, they must be able to observe the quarks in their natural states.At first, scientists speculated that bees were perceiving their flight directions similar to the way birds follow migration routes. It is commonly accepted that birds sense the earth’s magnetic fields because they have a mineral called magnetite in their heads. Magnetite helps birds follow terrestrial magnetic fields like a directional beacon. Even though bees have been found to have tiny amounts of magnetite in their bodies, it does not explain the bee dance and communication process. Also, it is unlikely that the two-dimensional pattern of the bee dance is a perfect shadow for a six-dimensional flag manifold unless there is a connection.

What are the implications of bees being able to directly perceive the quantum, subatomic world? For one thing, it means that we have to reevaluate the fundamental nature of bees. One might speculate that bees have a kind of special cosmic ability to transcend three-dimensional space, operate in a multidimensional universe, and straddle multiple levels of time, space and existence. Bees may be living proof that higher dimensions of reality exist physically, and not just in theory. There also may be doorways for entering into those realities — if you have the right equipment. But the bee evidence has much wider implications for quantum mechanics as a whole, which I won’t get into here.I think this bee phenomenon borders on the miraculous. Imagine these amazing creatures — honey bees — plying the quantum oceans, transcending mundane three-dimensional space as they perform their common labors. A bee is like a tiny winged Prometheus, entering the realm of the gods to bring back a wonderful gift to mankind — the sweetness of honey. Furthermore, I can’t help but speculate that there may be a way to harness the multidimensional ability of bees to expand our own perceptions and abilities. Can we tap into the bee nervous system to help ourselves more directly experience that which can currently only be described with numbers? Can bees in some way enhance the information we collect from gigantic atom smashers? Can bees become the instrumentality that opens a direct portal for us into higher dimensional realms? Can we create bee sensors to make a quantum beam that will shine into the eldritch spaces between atoms, electrons, protons and quarks? It stings the imagination! Or to paraphrase a great poet: “It sings the body electric!” At the very least, it gives my brain a buzz! Yours?

Ken Korczak: www.starcopywriter.com

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At the Foot of Cold Mountain: The Poetry of Han Shan…

Climbing up the Cold Mountain

Clambering up the Cold Mountain path,

The Cold Mountain trail goes on and on:

The long gorge choked with scree and boulders,

The wide creek, the mist-blurred grass.

The moss is slippery, though there’s been no rain

The pine sings, but there’s no wind.

Who can leap the world’s ties

And sit with me among the white clouds?

—

Born Thirty Years Ago

Thirty years ago I was born into the world.

A thousand, ten thousand miles I’ve roamed.

By rivers where the green grass grows thick,

Beyond the border where the red sands fly.

I brewed potions in a vain search for life everlasting,

I read books, I sang songs of history,

And today I’ve come home to Cold Mountain

To pillow my head on the stream and wash my ears.

—

My Dwelling at TianTai

I divined and chose a distant place to dwell-

T’ien-t’ai: what more is there to say?

Monkeys cry where valley mists are cold;

My grass gate blends with the color of the crags.

I pick leaves to thatch a hut among the pines,

Scoop out a pond and lead a runnel from the spring.

By now I am used to doing without the world.

Picking ferns, I pass the years that are left.

—

I recently hiked to a temple in the clouds

and met some Taoist priests.

Their star caps and moon caps askew

they explained they lived in the wild.

I asked them the art of transcendence;

they said it was beyond compare,

and called it the peerless power.

The elixir meanwhile was the secret of the gods

and that they were waiting for a crane at death,

or some said they’d ride off on a fish.

Afterwards I thought this through

and concluded they were all fools.

Look at an arrow shot into the sky-

how quickly it falls back to earth.

Even if they could become immortals,

they would be like cemetery ghosts.

Meanwhile the moon of our mind shines bright.

How can phenomena compare?

As for the key to immortality,

within ourselves is the chief of spirits.

Don’t follow Lords of the Yellow Turban

persisting in idiocy, holding onto doubts.

—

The layered bloom of hills and streams

Kingfisher shades beneath rose-colored clouds

mountain mists soak my cotton bandanna,

dew penetrates my palm-bark coat.

On my feet are traveling shoes,

my hand holds an old vine staff.

Again I gaze beyond the dusty world-

what more could I want in that land of dreams?

—

Since I came to Cold Mountain

how many thousand years have passed?

Accepting my fate I fled to the woods,

to dwell and gaze in freedom.

No one visits the cliffs

forever hidden by clouds.

Soft grass serves as a mattress,

my quilt is the dark blue sky.

A boulder makes a fine pillow;

Heaven and Earth can crumble and change.

—

Friday is here, and I am heading out for some work with Morgan. The new magazine is shaping up and we continue to get feed-back on it. (mostly positive – but some good criticisms as well regarding lay-out etc.) If you have something for the magazine, this would be the time to get it out to me….

Rowan is working away on his part of ‘Guys and Dolls’ at his H.S.. He is choreographing the Cuban fight scene, and is one of the principle dancers. His creativity just keeps ramping up.

Have a good weekend, and enjoy the time with friends and family!

Blessings,

Gwyllm

—

On The Menu:

The Links

Wade Davis on the Ethnosphere

Three Koans

The Poetry of Francois Villon

Francois Villon Biography

Paintings by Edward Burne-Jones

___________

The Links:

Granny finds grenade in groceries

Ancient Prickly Bugs Discovered

Volcano Blows as Space Probe Flies By

Mysterious circles found in Rio Grande

_________________

Wade Davis on the Ethnosphere…

_________________

Three Koans…

A Drop of Water

A Zen master named Gisan asked a young student to bring him a pail of water to cool his bath.

The student brought the water and, after cooling the bath, threw on to the ground the little that was left over.

“You dunce!” the master scolded him. “Why didn’t you give the rest of the water to the plants? What right have you to waste even a drop of water in this temple?”

The young student attained Zen in that instant. He changed his name to Tekisui, which means a drop of water.

—

Your Light May Go Out

A student of Tendai, a philosophical school of Buddhism, came to the Zen abode of Gasan as a pupil. When he was departing a few years later, Gasan warned him: “Studying the truth speculatively is useful as a way of collecting preaching material. But remember that unless you meditate constantly your light of truth may go out.”

—

The Stone Mind

Hogen, a Chinese Zen teacher, lived alone in a small temple in the country. One day four traveling monks appeared and asked if they might make a fire in his yard to warm themselves.

While they were building the fire, Hogen heard them arguing about subjectivity and objectivity. He joined them and said: “There is a big stone. Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?”

One of the monks replied: “From the Buddhist viewpoint everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind.”

“Your head must feel very heavy,” observed Hogen, “if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind.”

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The Poetry of Francois Villon

BALLADE OF THE WOMEN OF PARIS

Whilst it is held they have the chat,

the girls of Florence and of Venice,

enough to have it all off pat,

even the old girls who’re no menace:

though Lombards, Romans, know their tennis;

Genoa girls, Piedmonts among

Savoie lasses – I’ll risk my pennies

Parisian is your only tongue.

They highly prize the skill of chat

in Naples, that’s what people say,

and Germans, Prussian girls don’t bat

an eyelid when they prattle all day:

Egyptian, Greek and all the way

through Hungary even when sung,

by Spanish, Catalan girls at play –

Parisian is your only tongue.

Breton nor Swiss girls hardly know it,

nor do Toulouse nor Gascon fillies,

two Little Bridge fishwives’d blow it

and girls of Lorraine – they’re just sillies

as are the English and, where the will is,

the Calais girls (are all bells rung?).

No! From Valence the Picardies!

Parisian is your only tongue.

ENVOI

Prince, round the necks of Parisian crumpet

the prize for gabbing should be hung;

through some for Italians blow the trumpet,

Parisian is your only tongue

—

BALLADE: MACQUAIRE’S RECIPE

In arsenic that’s sulphurous and hot;

in orpiment, in saltpetre and quicklime;

in boiling lead which kills them on the spot

and, taken from a leper’s limbs, the slime;

in soot and pitch that’s been soaked for some time

and mingled with the piss and shit of Jews;

in scrapings from feet and from inside old shoes;

in viper’s blood and drugs from venom reaped;

in gall that wolves, foxes and badgers lose –

may all these envious tongues be fried and steeped.

In brain of cat which hunts for fish no more,

black, and so old he’s no tooth in his gums;

in spit and slavver of a mastiff hoar,

for what it’s worth, when maddened, up it comes;

in foam from a broken-winded mule which thumbs

have hacked with good sharp blades about;

and water where rats have plunged arse over snout,

frogs, too, and toads and poisonous beasts all heaped,

lizards and snakes and such fine kinds of trout –

may all these envious tongues be fried and steeped.

In sublimate dangerous to touch which passes

into the belly of a living snake;

in dry blood like that which one sees in masses

in barbers’ dishes, when the moon’s full, which take

one a black hue, the other green as a lake;

in cancers and growths and in those steaming vats

in which wet-nurses soak their this-and-thats;

in tiny baths where local whores have dipped

(if you’re now lost, you’ve never used the twats) –

may all these envious tongues be fried and steeped.

Prince, if you’ve neither colander nor sieve,

pass all these dainty morsels – none forgive –

amongst much muck and fetid trusses heaped,

but stir in pigshit first: and, thus captive,

may all these envious tongues be fried and steeped.

—

BALLADE OF GOOD ADVICE

Whether you hawk your pardons round.

whether card-sharp or play at dice,

or forge your own coin, you’ll be found:

you’ll burn like those whom we despise,

those perjured traitors, faithless spies.

Rob, rape or pillage, break all laws,

where does the loot go you so prize?

Straight to the taverns and the whores.

Chant, rant, bash drums and lutes,

act mad and shameless, play the fool;

prance round or shamble, toot the flutes;

be it in town or city, make it the rule

to make ‘em laugh with farce, or cool

with moralities out of doors.

Well as it goes, there’s always some who’ll

straight to the taverns and the whores.

What kind of shit will you not eat?

Sweat with a fork in mead and field,

muck out the stables for a treat

if pen and ink you cannot wield,

you’ll make enough, a niche it’ll yield.

But whether with hemp or lime your chores,

was it for this your pay’s springheeled

straight to the taverns and the whores?

To cap all this then, take your shoes,

your straight-leg jeans, your gear, don’t pause,

take suits, take shirts, all you can lose

straight to the taverns and the whores.

__________

François Villon (ca. 1431 – after 5 January 1463) was a French poet, thief, and vagabond. He is perhaps best known for his Testaments and his Ballade des Pendus, written while in prison. The question “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?”, taken from the Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis and translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti as “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”, is one of the most famous lines of translated secular poetry in the English-speaking world. It is worth noticing that 15th Century French was not pronounced like modern French — for instance, Villon is pronounced as spelled and not as “Viyon”.

Francois Montcorbier (Villon) was born to a poor young couple in Paris. Villon’s father died when the poet was very young and Guillaume de Villon, a well to do chaplain who was a professor of ecclesiastical law at the University of Paris, took Villon in. His academic success allowed Villon to enter the university and obtain both a bachelor (1449) and masters degree (1452), though he seemed to spend more time enjoying the liberal freedoms that students were allowed at the time.

Possibly because of poverty, Villon seemed to be drawn toward the sordid element – thieves, defrocked priests and revolutionary student groups. Villon found them in the seedy taverns where he frequently caroused. He engaged in a short romantic affair with a young lady and later received a humiliating thrashing because of it. Villon became bitter toward the rich and was driven deeper into his involvement with the criminal contingent. In June 1455 Villon fatally wounded a priest who had entered a tavern denying God and began quarreling with Villon and his drinking companions. Villon was banished from Paris for the crime. Villon was allowed to return to Paris in 1456 after being pardoned for the killing on grounds of self defense.

The next year Villon was banished again for stealing from the College of Navarre with his criminal compatriots who had formed Coquille, something akin to a small Mafia. Before fleeing Paris, Villon wrote The Legacy, a tongue in cheek poem bequeathing his real and imaginary wealth to various ‘deserving’ people and institutions. The Coquille conducted a crime spree throughout the north of France, robbing mainly churches and clergy, including Villon’s own wealthy uncle. At the same time, Villon continued writing poetry that became popular among his criminal friends because of its use of their lingo and its attacks on many well known people and institutions. However, the authorities began arresting and hanging many of his gang so, in 1457, Villon sought refuge with the Duke of Orleans, a fellow poet and admirer of Villon’s work. Villon was again sent to prison for theft, but he was quickly pardoned on the occasion of the birth of the Duke’s daughter several months later. From this point, Villon lived a vagabond existence of petty theft while wandering through the pleasant French countryside.

He returned to his benefactor the Duke in 1861. As usual, his freedom did not last long. He was imprisoned for a minor crime and yet again pardoned a few months later when the newly crowned King passed through the town where he was imprisoned. Villon returned to Paris where he was arrested several more times for theft and brawling, but was soon released by virtue of some fortunate circumstance. His luck finally ran out when he was arrested for fighting and sentenced to the gallows. While awaiting the noose, Villon composed a brilliant poem about his own execution and the injustice of man. However, a last minute appeal to Parliament got his sentenced reduced to 10 years banishment from Paris in 1863. He was never heard from again. He was 34 years old. His poetry continued to gain popularity in Paris and throughout France where it went into seven printings.

Between times in prison he produced volumes of what are still considered by many to be the finest French lyric verse ever written. His poem, Le Petit Testament (The Small Testament), known also as Le Lais (The Legacy), was composed about 1455, and Villon’s other long poem, Le Grand Testament (The Large Testament), known also simply as Le Testament, soon followed.

The “Testaments” are mock or imaginary wills in which bequests are made alternately with compassion and with irony. For example, to the Holy Trinity, Villon leaves his soul; to the earth, his body; to a Parisian, Denis, some stolen wine; to a madman, his glasses; to a lover, all the women he wants. At least two of Villon’s shorter poems – Ballad of Hanged Men and I Am Francois, They Have Caught Me – were composed in 1462 while under sentance of death.

Some of Villon’s poetry was translated into English by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and, in the 20th century, Ezra Pound. Francois Villon did not leave a large literary legacy (only about 3300 lines). ..

________________

Tis a hurried day… Talk later,

Gwyllm

—

On the Menu:

The Links

MindStates/Mark Pesce

From Scotland: The Red Etin

The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Art: Gustave Moreau

_____________

The Links:

Stone Age solutions to modern-day depression

A sight as elusive as a Cheshire cat

Huge ‘Ocean’ Discovered Inside Earth

_____________________

Mind States…!

Last Day For The In-Expensive Tickets For Mind States in Costa Rica!

Get Them Today…!

Mark Pesce… on the Eschaton

————————

Mark Pesce… on the Eschaton prt 2

______________

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From Scotland: The Red Etin

THERE were ance twa widows that lived on a small bit o’ ground, which they rented from a farmer. Ane of them had twa sons, and the other had ane; and by-and- by it was time for the wife that had twa sons to send them away to seeke their fortune. So she told her eldest son ae day to take a can and bring her water from the well, that she might bake a cake for him; and however much or however little water he might bring, the cake would be great or sma’ accordingly; and that cake was to be a’ that she could gie him when he went on his travels.

The lad gaed away wi’ the can to the well, and filled it wi’ water, and then came away hame again; but the can being broken the maist part of the water had run out before he got back. So his cake was very sma’; yet sma’ as it was, his mother asked if he was willing to take the half of it with her blessing, telling him that, if he chose rather to have the hale, he would only get it wi’ her curse. The young man, thinking he might hae to travel a far way, and not knowing when or how he might get other provisions, said he would like to hae the hale cake, com of his mother’s malison what like; so she gave him the hale cake, and her malison alang wi’t. Then he took his brither aside, and gave him a knife to keep till he should come back, desiring him to look at it every morning, and as lang as it continued to be clear, then he might be sure that the owner of it was well; but if it grew dim and rusty, then for certain some ill had befallen him.

So the young man set out to seek his fortune. And he gaed a’ that day, and a’ the next day; and on the third day, in the afternoon, he came up to where a shepherd was sitting with a flock o’ sheep. And he gaed up to the shepherd and asked him wha the sheep belanged to; and the man answered:

“The Red Etin of Ireland Ance lived in Bellygan, And stole King Malcolm’s daughter, The King of fair Scotland. He beats her, he binds her, He lays her on a band; And every day he dings her With a bright silver wand Like Julian the Roman He’s one that fears no man. It’s said there’s ane predestinate To be his mortal foe; But that man is yet unborn And lang may it be so.”

The young man then went on his journey; and he had not gone far when he espied an old man with white locks herding a flock of swine; and he gaed up to him and asked whose swine these were, when the man answered:

“The Red Etin of Ireland”– (Repeat the verses above.)

Then the young man gaed on a bit farther, and came to another very old man herding goats; and when he asked whose goats they were, the answer was:

“The Red Etin of Ireland”– (Repeat the verses again.)

This old man also told him to beware of the next beasts that he should meet, for they were of a very different kind from any he had yet seen.

So the young man went on, and by-and-by he saw a multitude of very dreadfu’ beasts, ilk ane o’ them wi’ twa heads, and on every head four horns. And he was sore frightened, and ran away from them as fast as he could; and glad was he when he came to a castle that stood on a hillock, wi’ the door standing wide to the wa’. And he gaed into the castle for shelter, and there he saw an auld wife sitting beside the kitchen fire. He asked the wife if he might stay there for the night, as he was tired wi’ a lang journey; and the wife said he might, but it was not a good place for him to be in, as it belanged to the Red Etin, who was a very terrible beast, wi’ three heads, that spared no living man he could get hold of. The young man would have gone away, but he was afraid of the beasts on the outside of the castle; so he beseeched the old woman to conceal him as well as she could, and not to tell the Etin that he was there. He thought, if he could put over the night, he might get away in the morning without meeting wi’ the beasts, and so escape. But he had not been long in his hidy-hole before the awful Etin came in; and nae sooner was he in than he was heard crying:

“Snouk but and snouk ben, I find the smell of an earthly man; Be he living, or be he dead, His heart this night shall kitchen[1] my bread.

[1] “Kitchen,” that is, “season.”

The monster soon found the poor young man, and pulled him from his hole. And when he had got him out he told him that if he could answer him three questions his life should be spared. The first was: Whether Ireland or Scotland was first inhabited? The second was: Whether man was made for woman, or woman for man? The third was: Whether men or brutes were made first? The lad not being able to answer one of these questions, the Red Etin took a mace and knocked him on the head, and turned him into a pillar of stone.

On the morning after this happened the younger brither took out the knife to look at it, and he was grieved to find it a’ brown wi’ rust. He told his mother that the time was now come for him to go away upon his travels also; so she requested him to take the can to the well for water, that she might bake a cake for him. The can being broken, he brought hame as little water as the other had done, and the cake was as little. She asked whether he would have the hale cake wi’ her malison, or the half wi’ her blessing; and, like his brither, he thought it best to have the hale cake, come o’ the malison what might. So he gaed away; and everything happened to him that had happened to his brother!

The other widow and her son heard of a’ that had happened frae a fairy, and the young man determined that he would also go upon his travels, and see if he could do anything to relieve his twa friends. So his mother gave him a can to go to the well and bring home water, that she might bake him a cake for his journey. And he gaed, and as he was bringing hame the water, a raven owre abune his head cried to him to look, and he would see that the water was running out. And he was a young man of sense, and seeing the water running out, he took some clay and patched up the holes, so that he brought home enough water to bake a large cake. When his mother put it to him to take the half-cake wi’ her blessing, he took it in preference to having the hale wi’ her malison; and yet the half was bigger than what the other lads had got a’thegither.

So he gaed away on his journey; and after he had traveled a far way he met wi’ an auld woman, that asked him if he would give her a bit of his bannock. And he said he would gladly do that, and so he gave her a piece of the bannock; and for that she gied him a magical wand, that she said might yet be of service to him if he took care to use it rightly. Then the auld woman, who was a fairy, told him a great deal that whould happen to him, and what he ought to do in a’ circumstances; and after that she vanished in an instant out o’ his sight. He gaed on a great way farther, and then he came up to the old man herding the sheep; and when he asked whose sheep these were, the answer was:

“The Red Etin of Ireland Ance lived in Bellygan, And stole King Malcolm’s daughter, The King of fair Scotland. He beats her, he binds her, He lays her on a band; And every day he dings her With a bright silver wand. Like Julian the Roman, He’s one that fears no man, But now I fear his end is near, And destiny at hand; And you’re to be, I plainly see, The heir of all his land.”

(Repeat the same inquiries to the man attending the swine and the man attending the goats, with the same answer in each case.)

When he came to the place where the monstrous beasts were standing, he did not stop nor run away, but went boldly through among them. One came up roaring with open mouth to devour him, when he struck it with his wand, and laid it in an instant dead at his feet. He soon came to the Etin’s castle, where he knocked, and was admitted. The auld woman that sat by the fire warned him of the terrible Etin, and what had been the fate of the twa brithers; but he was not to be daunted. The monster soon came in, saying:

“Snouk but and snouk ben, I find the smell of an earthly man; Be he living, or be he dead, His heart shall be kitchen to my bread.”

He quickly espied the young man, and bade him come forth on the floor. And then he put the three questions to him, but the young man had been told everything by the good fairy, so he was able to answer all the questions. When the Etin found this he knew that his power was gone. The young man then took up the axe and hewed off the monster’s three heads. He next asked the old woman to show him where the King’s daughters lay; and the old woman took him upstairs and opened a great many doors, and out of every door came a beautiful lady who had been imprisoned there by the Etin; and ane o’ the ladies was the King’s daughter. She also took him down into a low room, and there stood two stone pillars that he had only to touch wi’ his wand, when his two friends and neighbors started into life. And the hale o’ the prisoners were overjoyed at their deliverance, which they all acknowledged to be owing to the prudent young man. Next day they a’ set out for the King’s Court, and a gallant company they made. And the King married his daughter to the young man that had delivered her, and gave a noble’s daughter to ilk ane o’ the other young men; and so they a’ lived happily a’ the rest o’ their days.

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From Ireland: The Poetry of Medbh McGuckian

Open Rose

The moon is my second face, her long cycle

Still locked away. I feel rain

Like a tried-on dress, I clutch it

Like a book to my body.

His head is there when I work,

It signs my letters with a question-mark;

His hands reach for me like rationed air.

Day by day I let him go

Till I become a woman, or even less,

An incompletely furnished house

That came from a different century

Where I am guest at my own childhood.

I have grown inside words

Into a state of unbornness,

An open rose on all sides

Has spoken as far as it can.

—

Ylang-Ylang

Her skin, though there were areas of death,

Was bright compared with the darkness

Working through it. When she wore black,

That rescued it, those regions were rested

Like a town at lighting up time. In a heart-

Casket flickered her heartless ‘jeune fille’

Perfume; I was compelled by her sunburnt,

Unripe story and her still schoolgirl hand.

My life, sighed the grass-coloured,

Brandy-inspired carafe, is like a rug

That used to be a leopard, beckoning

To something pink. Yes, I replied, I have

A golf-coat almost as characterless,

Where all is leaf. We began moving over one

Each other in the gentlest act of colour,

Not as far as the one-sided shape of red,

But out of that seriousness, out of the stout

Ruled notebook. She would stream in, her

Sculptor’s blouse disturbed so by the violence

Of yellow, I would have to thank the light

For warning me of her approach. Not I,

But the weakened blue of my skirt

Wanted the thrown-together change, from vetiver

To last night’s ylang-ylang, and back again.

—

The Flower Master

Like foxgloves in the school of the grass moon

We come to terms with shade, with the principle

Of enfolding space. Our scissors in brocade,

We learn the coolness of straight edges, how

To stroke gently the necks of daffodils

And make them throw their heads back to the sun.

We slip the thready stems of violets, delay

The loveliness of the hibiscus dawn with quiet ovals,

Spirals of feverfew like water splashing,

The papery legacies of bluebells. We do

Sea-fans with sea-lavendar, moon-arrangements

Roughly for the festival of moon-viewing.

This black container calls for sloes, sweet

Sultan, dainty nipplewort, in honour

Of a special guest, who summoned to the

Tea ceremony, must stoop to our low doorway,

Our fontanelle, the trout’s dimpled feet.

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Medbh McGuckian was born in Belfast on 12 August 1950 and educated at a Dominican convent and Queen’s University, Belfast. She has worked as a teacher and an editor and is a former Writer in Residence at Queen’s University, Belfast (1985-8).

Her first published poems appeared in two pamphlets, Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems and Portrait of Joanna, in 1980, the year in which she received an Eric Gregory Award. In 1981 she co-published Trio Poetry 2 with fellow poets Damian Gorman and Douglas Marshall, and in 1989 she collaborated with Nuala Archer on Two Women, Two Shores. Medbh McGuckian’s first major collection, The Flower Master (1982), which explores post-natal breakdown, was awarded a Rooney prize for Irish Literature, an Ireland Arts Council Award (both 1982) and an Alice Hunt Bartlett Award (1983). She is also the winner of the 1989 Cheltenham Prize for her collection On Ballycastle Beach.

Medbh McGuckian has also edited an anthology, The Big Striped Golfing Umbrella: Poems by Young People from Northern Ireland (1985) for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, written a study of the car in the poetry of Seamus Heaney, entitled Horsepower Pass By! (1999), and has translated into English (with Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin) The Water Horse (1999), a selection of poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. A volume of Selected Poems: 1978-1994 was published in 1997, and her latest collection is The Book of the Angel (2004).

She was awarded the 2002 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Single Poem) for her poem ‘She is in the Past, She Has This Grace’.

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