Music before all else,
and for that choose the irregular,
which is vaguer and melts better into the air… – Paul Verlaine
Here is to Friday, and another wonderful day full of beauty in Portland. Walked to the post office, have been working on new web stuff, and generally trying to line up business etc.
I have retreated in a way today to works that I am deeply familiar with. Nothing adventurous, by today’s standards, but deeply so in their own times. Sharing these gifts from the past gives me such pleasure, I hope you do enjoy!
Hope this finds you in beauty, and among those who you love.
Bright Blessings,
Gwyllm
PS: Check out Radio Free EarthRites and the latest edition of The Invisible College!
– Poemes Saturniens
I can guess, behind a whisper,
The subtle rustling of the ancient voices
And, in the musical glimmers,
I can see, O pale love, the future of a sunrise!- Paul Verlaine
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On The Menu:
Dedication To John Michell
Le Sacre Du Printemps
The Quotes
The Myth and Ritual of Attis
2 Views Of Freedom…
Poetry: Paul Verlaine
Art: William Waterhouse
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This Edition of Turfing Is Dedicated To John Michell…
John Michell, author, philosopher, harbinger of Earth knowledge past to the Western Ilses today in the UK….
I first read John Michell’s “New View Over Atlantis” when I was in my early 20′s. His writings introduced me to Sacred Geomancy, and a whole new way of interacting with the world around me. His works made it easier to live in my skin, by introducing me to to the possibility that my ancestors may have actually had a clue about life around them, the earth, the tumbling green world and their place (and therefore my place) within this wonderful scenario.
His writings touched everyone that I knew at that time, really he is one of those great influences that many don’t know about. I was in the process of working on reviews of his latest writings for The Invisible College… and I still will be publishing a review.
Here is to your passing John; thank you for the knowledge and the beautiful take on the ancient landscapes, the concepts of sacred roads and ley lines that eventually took me home to Britain, and a new life.
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Le Sacre Du Printemps
Yes, I know Beltane is almost here… but, I like to give a nod to Mr. Stravinsky every year or so. I love this version! The Joffrey Ballet’s recreation of the 1913 Nijinsky choreography of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre Du Printemps is the best I have ever seen…. enjoy! (once more)
Rite Of Spring Pt. 1
Rite Of Spring Pt. 2
Rite Of Spring Pt. 3
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The Quotes:
Randall Jarrell | “I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can’t read any poetry.”
C. P. Snow | “The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you’ll never find it.”
Mary Chase | “I’ve wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.”
Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata | “Feed a fever, starve a cold. Lightly sup with rickets.”
Booth Tarkington | “There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.”
Ambrose Bierce | “Calamities are of two kinds: misfortunes to ourselves, and good fortune to others.”
Sean O’Casey | “All the world’s a stage and most of us are desperately unrehearsed.”
Sam Levenson | “It was on my fifth birthday that Papa put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Remember, my son, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.’”
George Burns | “The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending, then having the two as close together as possible.”
Albert Guinon | “When everyone is against you, it means that you are absolutely wrong– or absolutely right.”
Mel Brooks | “Humor is just another defense against the universe.”
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From: The Golden Bough
The Myth and Ritual of Attis
– Sir James George Frazer
Attis…
Another of those gods whose supposed death and resurrection struck such deep roots into the faith and ritual of Western Asia is Attis. He was to Phrygia what Adonis was to Syria. Like Adonis, he appears to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and resurrection were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring. The legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike that the ancients themselves sometimes identified them. Attis was said to have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele, the Mother of the Gods, a great Asiatic goddess of fertility, who had her chief home in Phrygia. Some held that Attis was her son. His birth, like that of many other heroes, is said to have been miraculous. His mother, Nana, was a virgin, who conceived by putting a ripe almond or a pomegranate in her bosom. Indeed in the Phrygian cosmogony an almond figured as the father of all things, perhaps because its delicate lilac blossom is one of the first heralds of the spring, appearing on the bare boughs before the leaves have opened. Such tales of virgin mothers are relics of an age of childish ignorance when men had not yet recognized the intercourse of the sexes as the true cause of offspring. Two different accounts of the death of Attis were current. According to the one he was killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other he unmanned himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. The latter is said to have been the local story told by the people of Pessinus, a great seat of the worship of Cybele, and the whole legend of which the story forms a part is stamped with a character of rudeness and savagery that speaks strongly for its antiquity. Both tales might claim the support of custom, or rather both were probably invented to explain certain customs observed by the worshippers. The story of the self-mutilation of Attis is clearly an attempt to account for the self-mutilation of his priests, who regularly castrated themselves on entering the service of the goddess. The story of his death by the boar may have been told to explain why his worshippers, especially the people of Pessinus, abstained from eating swine. In like manner the worshippers of Adonis abstained from pork, because a boar had killed their god. After his death Attis is said to have been changed into a pine-tree.
The worship of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods was adopted by the Romans in 204 B.C. towards the close of their long struggle with Hannibal. For their drooping spirits had been opportunely cheered by a prophecy, alleged to be drawn from that convenient farrago of nonsense, the Sibylline Books, that the foreign invader would be driven from Italy if the great Oriental goddess were brought to Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her sacred city Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone which embodied the mighty divinity was entrusted to them and conveyed to Rome, where it was received with great respect and installed in the temple of Victory on the Palatine Hill. It was the middle of April when the goddess arrived, and she went to work at once. For the harvest that year was such as had not been seen for many a long day, and in the very next year Hannibal and his veterans embarked for Africa. As he looked his last on the coast of Italy, fading behind him in the distance, he could not foresee that Europe, which had repelled the arms, would yet yield to the gods, of the Orient. The vanguard of the conquerors had already encamped in the heart of Italy before the rearguard of the beaten army fell sullenly back from its shores.
We may conjecture, though we are not told, that the Mother of the Gods brought with her the worship of her youthful lover or son to her new home in the West. Certainly the Romans were familiar with the Galli, the emasculated priests of Attis, before the close of the Republic. These unsexed beings, in their Oriental costume, with little images suspended on their breasts, appear to have been a familiar sight in the streets of Rome, which they traversed in procession, carrying the image of the goddess and chanting their hymns to the music of cymbals and tambourines, flutes and horns, while the people, impressed by the fantastic show and moved by the wild strains, flung alms to them in abundance, and buried the image and its bearers under showers of roses. A further step was taken by the Emperor Claudius when he incorporated the Phrygian worship of the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of Attis, in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival of Cybele and Attis is best known to us in the form in which it was celebrated at Rome; but as we are informed that the Roman ceremonies were also Phrygian, we may assume that they differed hardly, if at all, from their Asiatic original. The order of the festival seems to have been as follows.
On the twenty-second day of March, a pine-tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree was entrusted to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed like a corpse with woollen bands and decked with wreaths of violets, for violets were said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as roses and anemones from the blood of Adonis; and the effigy of a young man, doubtless Attis himself, was tied to the middle of the stem. On the second day of the festival, the twenty-third of March, the chief ceremony seems to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third day, the twenty-fourth of March, was known as the Day of Blood: the Archigallus or highpriest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering. Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood. The ghastly rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and may have been intended to strengthen him for the resurrection. The Australian aborigines cut themselves in like manner over the graves of their friends for the purpose, perhaps, of enabling them to be born again. Further, we may conjecture, though we are not expressly told, that it was on the same Day of Blood and for the same purpose that the novices sacrificed their virility. Wrought up to the highest pitch of religious excitement they dashed the severed portions of themselves against the image of the cruel goddess. These broken instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently wrapt up and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to Cybele, where, like the offering of blood, they may have been deemed instrumental in recalling Attis to life and hastening the general resurrection of nature, which was then bursting into leaf and blossom in the vernal sunshine. Some confirmation of this conjecture is furnished by the savage story that the mother of Attis conceived by putting in her bosom a pomegranate sprung from the severed genitals of a man-monster named Agdestis, a sort of double of Attis.
If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom, we can readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine deities required to receive from their male ministers, who personated the divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions: they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy before they could transmit it to the world. Goddesses thus ministered to by eunuch priests were the great Artemis of Ephesus and the great Syrian Astarte of Hierapolis, whose sanctuary, frequented by swarms of pilgrims and enriched by the offerings of Assyria and Babylonia, of
Arabia and Phoenicia, was perhaps in the days of its glory the most popular in the East. Now the unsexed priests of this Syrian goddess resembled those of Cybele so closely that some people took them to be the same. And the mode in which they dedicated themselves to the religious life was similar. The greatest festival of the year at Hierapolis fell at the beginning of spring, when multitudes thronged to the sanctuary from Syria and the regions round about. While the flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life. When the tumult of emotion had subsided, and the man had come to himself again, the irrevocable sacrifice must often have been followed by passionate sorrow and lifelong regret. This revulsion of natural human feeling after the frenzies of a fanatical religion is powerfully depicted by Catullus in a celebrated poem.
The parallel of these Syrian devotees confirms the view that in the similar worship of Cybele the sacrifice of virility took place on the Day of Blood at the vernal rites of the goddess, when the violets, supposed to spring from the red drops of her wounded lover, were in bloom among the pines. Indeed the story that Attis unmanned himself under a pine-tree was clearly devised to explain why his priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree at his festival. At all events, we can hardly doubt that the Day of Blood witnessed the mourning for Attis over an effigy of him which was afterwards buried. The image thus laid in the sepulchre was probably the same which had hung upon the tree. Throughout the period of mourning the worshippers fasted from bread, nominally because Cybele had done so in her grief for the death of Attis, but really perhaps for the same reason which induced the women of Harran to abstain from eating anything ground in a mill while they wept for Tammuz. To partake of bread or flour at such a season might have been deemed a wanton profanation of the bruised and broken body of the god. Or the fast may possibly have been a preparation for a sacramental meal.
But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was turned to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb was opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow, the twenty-fifth day of March, which was reckoned the vernal equinox, the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the celebration took the form of a carnival. It was the Festival of Joy (Hilaria). A universal licence prevailed. Every man might say and do what he pleased. People went about the streets in disguise. No dignity was too high or too sacred for the humblest citizen to assume with impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band of conspirators thought to take advantage of the masquerade by dressing in the uniform of the Imperial Guard, and so, mingling with the crowd of merrymakers, to get within stabbing distance of the emperor. But the plot miscarried. Even the stern Alexander Severus used to relax so far on the joyous day as to admit a pheasant to his frugal board. The next day, the twenty-sixth of March, was given to repose, which must have been much needed after the varied excitements and fatigues of the preceding days. Finally, the Roman festival closed on the twenty-seventh of March with a procession to the brook Almo. The silver image of the goddess, with its face of jagged black stone, sat in a waggon drawn by oxen. Preceded by the nobles walking barefoot, it moved slowly, to the loud music of pipes and tambourines, out by the Porta Capena, and so down to the banks of the Almo, which flows into the Tiber just below the walls of Rome. There the high-priest, robed in purple, washed the waggon, the image, and the other sacred objects in the water of the stream. On returning from their bath, the wain and the oxen were strewn with fresh spring flowers. All was mirth and gaiety. No one thought of the blood that had flowed so lately. Even the eunuch priests forgot their wounds.
Such, then, appears to have been the annual solemnisation of the death and resurrection of Attis in spring. But besides these public rites, his worship is known to have comprised certain secret or mystic ceremonies, which probably aimed at bringing the worshipper, and especially the novice, into closer communication with his god. Our information as to the nature of these mysteries and the date of their celebration is unfortunately very scanty, but they seem to have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood. In the sacrament the novice became a partaker of the mysteries by eating out of a drum and drinking out of a cymbal, two instruments of music which figured prominently in the thrilling orchestra of Attis. The fast which accompanied the mourning for the dead god may perhaps have been designed to prepare the body of the communicant for the reception of the blessed sacrament by purging it of all that could defile by contact the sacred elements. In the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a wooden grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood poured in torrents through the apertures, and was received with devout eagerness by the worshipper on every part of his person and garments, till he emerged from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows as one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the blood of the bull. For some time afterwards the fiction of a new birth was kept up by dieting him on milk like a new-born babe. The regeneration of the worshipper took place at the same time as the regeneration of his god, namely at the vernal equinox. At Rome the new birth and the remission of sins by the shedding of bulls blood appear to have been carried out above all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian goddess on the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the great basilica of St. Peters now stands; for many inscriptions relating to the rites were found when the church was being enlarged in 1608 or 1609. From the Vatican as a centre this barbarous system of superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that provincial sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican. From the same source we learn that the testicles as well as the blood of the bull played an important part in the ceremonies. Probably they were regarded as a powerful charm to promote fertility and hasten the new birth.
Cybele…
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2 Views Of Freedom…
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Paul Verlaine… I can’t tell you how many hours I spent with Verlaine’s poetry. His works have always moved me, and it is like dipping into a cool well when I return again and again to his poesy…
Poetry: Paul Verlaine
The Young Fools (Les Ingénus)
High-heels were struggling with a full-length dress
So that, between the wind and the terrain,
At times a shining stocking would be seen,
And gone too soon. We liked that foolishness.
Also, at times a jealous insect’s dart
Bothered out beauties. Suddenly a white
Nape flashed beneath the branches, and this sight
Was a delicate feast for a young fool’s heart.
Evening fell, equivocal, dissembling,
The women who hung dreaming on our arms
Spoke in low voices, words that had such charms
That ever since our stunned soul has been trembling.
– Translated by Louis Simpson
Les Ingénus
Les hauts talons luttaient avec les longues jupes,
En sorte que, selon le terrain et le vent,
Parfois luisaient des bas de jambes, trop souvent
Interceptés–et nous aimions ce jeu de dupes.
Parfois aussi le dard d’un insecte jaloux
Inquiétait le col des belles sous les branches,
Et c’était des éclairs soudains de nuques blanches,
Et ce régal comblait nos jeunes yeux de fous.
Le soir tombait, un soir équivoque d’automne:
Les belles, se pendant rêveuses à nos bras,
Dirent alors des mots si spécieux, tout bas,
Que notre âme depuis ce temps tremble et s’étonne.
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Before Your Light Quite Fail
Before your light quite fail,
Already paling star,
(The quail
Sings in the thyme afar!)
Turn on the poets eyes
That love makes overrun
(See rise
The lark to meet the sun!)
Your glance, that presently
Must drown in the blue morn;
(What glee
Amid the rustling corn!)
Then flash my message true
Down yonder,far away!
(The dew
Lies sparkling on the hay.)
Across what visions seek
The Dear One slumbering still.
(Quick, quick!
The sun has reached the hill!)
– Translated by Gertrude Hall
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Since Shade Relents
Paul Verlaine
Since shade relents, since tis indeed the day,
Since hope I long had deemed forever flown,
Wings back to me that call on her and pray,
Since so much joy consents to be my own,
The dark designs all I relinquish here,
And all the evil dreams. Ah, done am I
Above all with the narrowed lips, the sneer,
The heartless wit that laughed where one should sigh.
Away, clenched fist and bosoms angry swell,
That knave and fool at every turn abound.
Away, hard unforgivingness! Farewell,
Oblivion in a hated brewage found!
For I mean, now a Being of the Morn
Has shed across my night excelling rays
Of love at once immortal and newborn,
By favor of her smile, her glance, her grace,
I mean by you upheld, O gentle hand,
Wherein mine trembles,led, sweet eyes, by you,
To walk straight, lie the path oer mossy land
Or barren waste that rocks and pebbles strew.
Yes, calm I mean to walk through life, and straight,
Patient of all, unanxious of the goal,
Void of all envy, violence, or hate
It shall be duty done with cheerful soul.
And as I may, to lighten the long way,
Go singing airs ingenuous and brave,
Shell listen to me graciously, I say,
And, verily, no other heaven I crave.
– Translated by Gertrude Hall
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A Une Femme
To you these lines for the consoling grace
Of your great eyes wherein a soft dream shines,
For your pure soul, all-kind!to you these lines
From the black deeps of mine unmatched distress.
‘Tis that the hideous dream that doth oppress
My soul, alas! its sad prey ne’er resigns,
But like a pack of wolves down mad inclines
Goes gathering heat upon my reddened trace!
I suffer, oh, I suffer cruelly!
So that the first man’s cry at Eden lost
Was but an eclogue surely to my cry!
And that the sorrows, Dear, that may have crossed
Your life, are but as swallows light that fly
Dear!in a golden warm September sky.
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