Author: Gwyllm

On The Music Box: Steve Roach, Strata…

Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling the potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

– Allan Watts

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First off, a big hello to our friend Vera down in California, and to Nestor just around the corner. Thanks for reaching out to me on Monday. You both were there just in time!

I also want to thank all who have written lately excited about what has shown up on Turfing.

Hot Days in Portland, some 95f Monday in some areas. I was going for a run and thought better of it. I worked for 6 hours on The Invisible College only to find I had blown the whole thing. I tend to over complicate things, like repeatedly. Back to the drawing board!

Todays’ entry is somewhat influenced by “Memoirs of a Geisha”, which we watched over the last couple of days. Wonderful film. Seeing the film reminded me of my early love for Koans, so the poetry wanders in that general direction.

I must wander off now, it is late nearing Midnight.

Bright Blessings…

Gwyllm

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On The Grill:

The Links

The Article: THE BOREAL CROWN and THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION

The Poetry: Daoist & Zen… from back when…

The Art: for some of the illustrations: The Floating World…

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The Links:

The Boys in Blue are protecting you!

Images of the unexpected…

DWARF DRACULA KNEE-HIGH ANKLE BITER TERRORIZING SEATTLE!

White Line Fever???

Dr. Toon: Dis-band-ed

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THE BOREAL CROWN and THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION

by Anonymous

In 1808 the illuminated theorist and “Utopian Socialist” Charles Fourier launched the first fullyrealized and consciously revolutionary attack on CIVILIZATION by publishing his Theory of the Four Movements in France. No one noticed — any more than anyone noticed the books of William Blake, the only thinker of the era comparable to Fourier. In this brief text we cannot attempt a full report of Fourier´s brilliant utopian system of society, which he called HARMONY. But we could at least recall his programme involved the reorganization of human life into large groups, called Phalanxes, arranged in “Series” according to “Attraction” — that is, according to shared “Passions”. For Fourier, Passion was the sole possible organizing principe for utopian life. In brief: if everyone were free always to do exactly what they desire, all reason for social discord would vanish. Scarcity of any good — material, spiritual, erotic — can only be artificially imposed on society by CIVILIZATON, For Nature is naturally “generous”. Marriage, poverty, work, morality, loneliness, alienation, violence, boredom — these civilized miseries constitute the perverse results of a system which benefits a few at the expense of the health of Earth herself.

Fourier believed not only that humans are the desiring subjects of a desirable object (i.e., Terrestial Harmony), but also that the Earth and all other celestial bodies (planets, stars, etc.) are also living, sentient, desiring beings. The “force of attraction” that holds the universe(s) together can only be described as Passion, Erotic desire organizes not only the microcosm of human society but also the macrocosm (e.g., our solar system) in mandala of Harmony — the “Lineaments of gratified desire” as Blake would say.

Thus everything, quite literally everything, is moved solely by erotic attraction. In Harmony we shall work only at that which satisfies a Passion — and we shall be free to choose “Attractive Labor” — and since humans are inherently oassionate beings, Harmonian economics will replace the illusion of scarcity with the reality of super-abundance. Everyone will be “rich. Everyone will eat like a 18th century french gourmet (but the food will be healthy because it will be prepared according to the Harmonian science of Gastrosophy) — and everyone will enjoy at least “utopian minimum” of erotic pleasure. This immense intensification of animal/animate life will soon produce beneficial mutations even of the human body: — we shall need only a few hours of sleep per night, we shall grow taller and more beautiful, and within a few generations we shall each have a tail with an extra “hand” at the tip, and an extra eye in the palm of the hand . Moreover the climate will change and the seas will turn something like lemonade. Most of these changes will occur not through evolution and its endless eons, but almost immediatly, spontaneously, virtually overnight — as soon as we abandon CIVILIZATION and institute HARMONY in its stead.

One reason why these changes will occur so rapidly can be explained by the fact that Civilization has literally knocked Earth out of its true position in the cosmos. normally, since stars and planets are sexual beings, they enjoy sexual intercourse. Their sex organs — so to speak — consist of great cosmic rays (which Fourier calls “aromal rays”); celestial bodies project these rays at one another and thereby experiencethe bliss of fertilizing potency of erotic contact. In former times Earth also possessed an aromal ray and enjoyed its benefits — which manifested in the peace and plenty, gender harmony and sexual freedom of the hunting/gathering (or gardening) economy of the Old Stone Age. But Civilization disrupted the aromal ray. Earth lost its orgasmic potential. As Wilhelm Reich would put it, Earth was cut off from the cosmic source of orgone energy; Civilization equals sexual repression and erotic scarcity.

Now clearly, if human society were to overcome the malign local effect of civilization and institute the Harmonial Era, our planet would at once recover its cosmic sexuality and its aromal ray. Immediatly Earth would bathed again the perfume or illumination or jizm of the stars. Revivifying effects would begin to appear almost at once, and the initial eforts of the first Harmonians would be rewarded a thousand-fold through the vast new reservoirs or cosmic energy now available via Earth aromal ray.

in Theory of the Four Movements Fourier also revealed that Earth´s aromal ray — or rather its shattered fragments and dispersed remnants — can still be seen in the polar aurorae. the Northern and the Southern Lights (Aurora Borealis and Australis) resemble torn curtains of light. No Wonder! At one time they constituted coherent rays of brilliant color abd scebt which penetrated the yoni of the aether like an infinite lingam, and served as the pathway and vaginal gate for the infusion of subtle illumination-juices from everywhere in the multiverse. [ Incidentelly, this theory could be used to suggest that UFO´s are not extraterrestrial but consist in fact of local manifestations of “deadly orgone”, just as Reich feared]

Now it has occured to us that if the downfall of Civilization and the establishment of Harmony would result in the restauration of the “Boreal Crown” (as Fourier called it) to full coherence, then perhaps the opposite might also prove true. THE RESTAURATION OF THE BOREAL CROWN MIGHT RESULT IN THE DOWNFALL OF CIVILIZATION AND THE TRIUMPH OF HARMONY.

We believe it´s worth trying . But the big question facing us is — obviously — how? How does one go about repairing the Aurora Borealis?! If we knew the answer to the question we´d simply go and do it. The purpose of this text is to share our findings so far and to propose a framework for future research and action. We are convinced that this project will necesserly involve a certain amount of coordinated action by a great many people. We envision participation at many levels. Moreover, wehave no intention of acting as the center of this participation. We prefer to remain anonymous, and it is possible that our specific actions will be carried out more-or-less clandestinely. We will publish no address; so if you want to share ideas with us please send texts to the publication in which this communique appears – or else find out who we are by word of mouth and contact us directly.

So far, we have arrived at the following understanding. The popular aurorae are connected in some way with the with the magnetic poles rather than the geographic poles. The North Magnetic Pole is currently the more accessible of the two, since it is currently moving very slowly across northern Canada. As of this writing it is near Barthurst Island. The latitude of peak auroral activity is actually described by an oval ring whos center is a few degrees off the magnetic pole inthe direction of midnight. [See maps -Ed.]. The lights glow most intensely during magnetic storms, caused by an increase in the solar wind interacting with Earth´smagnetic field. At such times the auroral oval grows both southwards and toward the pole. The greatest auroral activity occurs at the peaks of the eleven-year sun-spot cycle, one of which, unfortunately, has just passed in the last year or two. It should be possible, nonetheless, to determine certain times and spacesat which our chance of acting on the Boreal Crown would be optimal. For example, if we determined that our action should take place at the magnetic place, we would calculate a time when weather conditions and geomagnetic activity would coincide to offer a maximal “window of opportunity”. If we decided that our actions should occur within the auroral oval, then a different set of space/time parameters would come into play.

Besides the questions of time and place we also face the question of effective action. At present we believe that we should consider the probable necessity of installing one or more “aromal devices” at one or more key points connected with the auroral/magnetic activity. These aromal devicesshould be concidered “machines” for the repair and restoration of the Boreal Crown. At present we remain uncertain aboutthe design of such devices; but we intend to uild at least one, and to install it at the chosen time and place. We hope that other groups and individuals will work on their own theories and also produce their own devices. Then, when a time and place have been determined, we will make this information publicly known. We will proceed to carry out an expedition, let´s say, to the Magnetic North Pole, timed to arrive at a certain day or period of days. We hope that others will launch their own simultaneous expeditions and that we will all rendezvous at the appointed moment and location. There and then we will carry out all our planned installation, actions, rituals, etc., together, inthe context of FESTIVAL.

Obviously a certain element of psychic technology enters into this project — and it is precisly on this psychic and “astral” level that many wish to participate in the action. Energy can be added to the activities of the Arctic expeditions (and to the acual installations or aromal devices) by the though projections and sympathetic actions of supporters and well-wishers all over the globe. We consider the possibility of a GENERAL STRIKE on the day of the festival, as the vital component of the operation. Everyone who cannot be with us at the installation of the site can carry out some symbolic and/or material action against Civilization, against Work, against oppression, boredom and alienation. This might consist of nothing more than wearing a symbol of the Festival (button, badge, flower, color, scent, etc.). Some participiants might simply wish to take a day off work and loll around, thinking about the Northern Lights. Group might want to organize actuall strikes or demonstrations against miseries of Civilization, and in favor for Attractive Labor or the Utopian Minimum. Artists and creative groups might errect sympathetic installations or perform supportive rituals, whereever they might happan to be at the appointed hour.

Our project at present calls for the further refinement of all these ideas, and for their widesat possible dissemination. These tasks are perhaps best carried out by many groups and individuáls simultaneously and more-or-less anonymously, so that the best ideas and images will have a chance to circulate by word of mouth and by various informal networks. In this way they will have a chance to take a life on their own and to circulate under their own power, so to speak, in anatural, organic manner. In order to succeed this Festival and General Strike needs to belong to everyone and anyone. Already this text is the product of a group — a group that believes that its ideas will sink or soar solely according to the degree of Attraction they radiate. The one central idea of the idea is the restorationof the Boreal Crown to its primordial coherence as Earth´s aromal ray; around this center the event must come into being spontaneously, like the mandala of a snowflake, like atrue holiday, like an uprising. The evnt therefore, must create itself.

We might, however, speculate in more detail about our vision of the aromal device or machine for repairing Aurora. Certain themes have already been touched on, and we expcet the full structure of the device to precipitate and crystallize around this or other related themes: Magnetism, the Sun, the Earth´s magnetotail, magnets (the first compass was amagnetized needle floated in water), “animal magnetism”, sexual attraction, sexual fluids, aromas, perfumes, colors, lights, the North, the Arctic, hunting, gardening, the Old Age, night, stars, te North Star, the Moon (measurement of time), clocks, gold, crystal, ice, rays, coherent light, curtains and ribbons of light, heraldic emblems (symbols of the events) such as flowers, colors, geometric shapes, hieroglyphs, banners, music, dance, ritual, arctic shamanism, the Millennium, the end of Civilization, restoration of Harmony, peace, brilliance, delicious food and drink, transformation, the esoteric, the clandestine, the hidden, mutation, orgy, the erotic manias, performance, opera, alchemy, the mythology and the folkloire of the Northern Lights, mental energy, the visualization of coherent light as aroma, energy from the stars, orgone, blue, mirrors, maps, invocations…….

Imagine a “machine” with such “moving parts”, miniaturized to the size of a small box, taken to the North Pole, installed — and activated. Imagine it as a focus for the concentrated desire of a world sickened by Civilization — work, oppression — a vast desire channeled into one image: the Boreal Crown in full glory — and one goal: the downfall of Civilization. In combination: a Festival of Light.

– Anonymous

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Poetry: Daoist & Zen… from back when…

Returning to form today. Some of my earliest poetic readings were Japanese Koans, via Mr. Suzuki’s most excellent book: “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. I haunted the local Japanese import store when I was a young one. It was as close as I could get to the culture at that point.

The pieces I have selected today are some of my old favourites, from the Zen and Daoist Traditions. I hope you enjoy.

Gwyllm

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Bitter rain soaks the pile of kindling twigs.

The night so cold and still the lamp flame hardly moves.

Clouds condense and drench our stone walled hut.

Broken rushes clog the reed gate’s way.

The stream gurgles, a torrent in its bed.

That’s all we hear. Only rarely, comes a human voice…

But oh, how priceless is this peace of mind that fills us

As we sit on our heels and put on another Chan monk’s robe!

– Bitter Rain by Master Hsu Yun

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There is a reality even prior to heaven and earth;

Indeed, it has no form, much less a name;

Eyes fail to see it;

It has no voice for ears to detect;

To call it Mind or Buddha violates its nature,

For it then becomes like a visionary flower in the air;

It is not Mind, nor Buddha;

Absolutely quiet, and yet illuminating in a mysterious way,

It allows itself to be perceived only by the clear-eyed.

– Daio Kokushi, 1232 – 1308, On Zen

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In the awakened eye

Mountains and rivers

Completely disappear.

The eye of delusion

Gazes upon

Deep fog and clouds.

Alone in my zazen

I forget the days

As they pass.

The wisteria has grown

Thick over the eaves

Of my hut.

– Muso (1275-1351)

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Asking without knowing.

Answering, still not understanding.

The moon is cold, the wind is high–

On the ancient cliff, frigid juniper.

How delightful: on the road,

He met a man who had attained the Path.

And didn’t use speech or silence to reply.

His hand grasps the white jade whip.

And smashes the black dragon’s pearl.

If he hadn’t smashed it,

He would have increased its flaws.

– Hsueh-tou (980-1052), Roaring Stream

(Stéphane Mallarmé painted by Manet)

This edition of Turfing is dedicated to my friend Morgan, whose revo/evolutionary spirit has deeply moved me over the years. He works incessantly with social/politcal/art issues, touching many lives. He always brings a fresh viewpoint, rooted well in historic and often humourous precedents. To know him is to love him!

As you can tell, Turfing has a new look. I am cracking the PHP code slowly but surely. Necessity is the Mother, I must tell you.

More later, working on The Invisible College and falling behind.

Hot today here in Portland. 90′s plus predicted.

Blessings,

Gwyllm

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On The Menu….

The Links

The Article: Power and Revolution: The Anarchist Century

Poetry: Stéphane Mallarmé

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The Links:

‘Brazilian Stonehenge’ discovered

Born Into Cellblocks

Massive Attack – Special Cases

The musical Mr. Hatch…

Everything, is under Control

Wanted: a warning to last 10,000 years…

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Power and Revolution: The Anarchist Century

by Andrej Grubacic

{This paper is a revised version of the essay co-writen with David Graeber: Anarchism or the Revolutionary Movement for the 21st Century. It is revised and will be revised further for the presentation for the June 1 – 7 2006 Z Sessions on Vision and Strategy, held in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. }

(Jonathan Talbot, “Large Anarchist Patrin,” )

It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It’s becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twenty first century, will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism.

Everywhere from Serbia to Argentina, from Seattle to Bombay, anarchist ideas and principles are generating new radical dreams and visions. Often their exponents do not call themselves “anarchists”. There are a host of other names: autonomism, anti-authoritarianism, horizontality, Zapatismo, direct democracy… Still, everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power and then begin imposing one’s vision at the point of a gun. Above all, anarchism, as an ethics of practice-the idea of building a new society “within the shell of the old”-has become the basic inspiration of the “movement of movements”, which has from the start been less about seizing state power than about exposing, de-legitimizing and dismantling mechanisms of rule while winning ever-larger spaces of autonomy and participatory management within it.

There are some obvious reasons for the appeal of anarchist ideas at the beginning of the 21st century: most obviously, the failures and catastrophes resulting from so many efforts to overcome capitalism by seizing control of the apparatus of government in the 20th. Increasing numbers of revolutionaries have begun to recognize that “the revolution” is not going to come as some great apocalyptic moment, the storming of some global equivalent of the Winter Palace, but a very long process that has been going on for most of human history (even if it has like most things come to accelerate of late) full of strategies of flight and evasion as much as dramatic confrontations, and which will never-indeed, most anarchists feel, should never-come to a definitive conclusion.

It’s a little disconcerting, but it offers one enormous consolation: we do not have to wait until “after the revolution” to begin to get a glimpse of what genuine freedom might be like. Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are not as rare as you think. For an anarchist, in fact, to try to create non-alienated experiences, true democracy, is an ethical imperative; only by making one’s form of organization in the present at least a rough approximation of how a free society would actually operate, how everyone, someday, should be able to live, can one guarantee that we will not cascade back into disaster. Grim joyless revolutionaries who sacrifice all pleasure to the cause can only produce grim joyless societies.

These changes have been difficult to document because so far anarchist ideas have received almost no attention in the academy. There are still thousands of academic Marxists, but almost no academic anarchists. This lag is somewhat difficult to interpret. In part, no doubt, it’s because Marxism has always had a certain affinity with the academy which anarchism obviously lacked: Marxism was, after all, the only great social movement that was invented by a Ph.D. Most accounts of the history of anarchism assume it was basically similar to Marxism: anarchism is presented as the brainchild of certain 19th century thinkers (Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin…) that then went on to inspire working-class organizations, became enmeshed in political struggles, divided into sects…

Anarchism, in the standard accounts, usually comes out as Marxism’s poorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed but making up for brains, perhaps, with passion and sincerity. Really the analogy is strained. The “founders” of anarchism did not think of themselves as having invented anything particularly new. The saw its basic principles-mutual aid, voluntary association, egalitarian decision-making-as as old as humanity. The same goes for the rejection of the state and of all forms of structural violence, inequality, or domination (anarchism literally means “without rulers”)-even the assumption that all these forms are somehow related and reinforce each other. None of it was seen as some startling new doctrine, but a longstanding tendency in the history human thought, and one that cannot be encompassed by any general theory of ideology.

On one level it is a kind of faith: a belief that most forms of irresponsibility that seem to make power necessary are in fact the effects of power itself. In practice though it is a constant questioning, an effort to identify every compulsory or hierarchical relation in human life, and challenge them to justify themselves, and if they cannot-which usually turns out to be the case-an effort to limit their power and thus widen the scope of human liberty. Just as a Sufi might say that Sufism is the core of truth behind all religions, an anarchist might argue that anarchism is the urge for freedom behind all political ideologies.

Schools of Marxism always have founders. Just as Marxism sprang from the mind of Marx, so we have Leninists, Maoists,, Althusserians… (Note how the list starts with heads of state and grades almost seamlessly into French professors – who, in turn, can spawn their own sects: Lacanians, Foucauldians….)

Schools of anarchism, in contrast, almost invariably emerge from some kind of organizational principle or form of practice: Anarcho-Syndicalists and Anarcho-Communists, Insurrectionists and Platformists, Cooperativists, Councilists, Individualists, and so on.

Anarchists are distinguished by what they do, and how they organize themselves to go about doing it. And indeed this has always been what anarchists have spent most of their time thinking and arguing about. They have never been much interested in the kinds of broad strategic or philosophical questions that preoccupy Marxists such as Are the peasants a potentially revolutionary class? (anarchists consider this something for peasants to decide) or what is the nature of the commodity form? Rather, they tend to argue about what is the truly democratic way to go about a meeting, at what point organization stops empowering people and starts squelching individual freedom. Is “leadership” necessarily a bad thing? Or, alternately, about the ethics of opposing power: What is direct action? Should one condemn someone who assassinates a head of state? When is it okay to throw a brick?

Marxism, then, has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice. As a result, where Marxism has produced brilliant theories of praxis, it’s mostly been anarchists who have been working on the praxis itself.

At the moment, there’s something of a rupture between generations of anarchism: I would like to express my affinity with what might be loosely referred to as the “small-a anarchists”, who are, by now, by far the majority. But it is sometimes hard to tell, since so many of them do not trumpet their affinities very loudly. There are many. in fact, who take anarchist principles of anti-sectarianism and open-endedness so seriously that they refuse to refer to themselves as ‘anarchists’ for that very reason .

But the three essentials that run throughout all manifestations of anarchist movement are definitely there – anti-statism, anti-capitalism and prefigurative politics (i.e. modes of organization that consciously resemble the world you want to create. Or, as an anarchist historian of the revolution in Spain has formulated “an effort to think of not only the ideas but the facts of the future itself”. This is present in anything from jamming collectives and on to Indy media, all of which can be called anarchist in the newer sense.

The new anarchists are much more interested in developing new forms of practice than arguing about the finer points of ideology. The most dramatic among these have been the development of new forms of decision-making process, the beginnings, at least, of an alternate culture of democracy. The famous North American spokescouncils, where thousands of activists coordinate large-scale events by consensus, with no formal leadership structure, are only the most spectacular.

Actually, even calling these forms “new” is a little bit deceptive. One of the main inspirations for the new generation of anarchists are the Zapatista autonomous municipalities of Chiapas, based in Tzeltal or Tojolobal-speaking communities who have been using consensus process for thousands of years-only now adopted by revolutionaries to ensure that women and younger people have an equal voice. In North America, “consensus process” emerged more than anything else from the feminist movement in the ’70s, as part of a broad backlash against the macho style of leadership typical of the ’60s New Left. The idea of consensus itself was borrowed from the Quakers, who again, claim to have been inspired by the Six Nations and other Native American practices.

Consensus is often misunderstood. One often hears critics claim it would cause stifling conformity but almost never by anyone who has actually observed consensus in action, at least, as guided by trained, experienced facilitators (some recent experiments in Europe, where there is little tradition of such things, have been somewhat crude). In fact, the operating assumption is that no one could really convert another completely to their point of view, or probably should. Instead, the point of consensus process is to allow a group to decide on a common course of action. Instead of voting proposals up and down, proposals are worked and reworked, scotched or reinvented, there is a process of compromise and synthesis, until one ends up with something everyone can live with. When it comes to the final stage, actually “finding consensus”, there are two levels of possible objection: one can “stand aside”, which is to say “I don’t like this and won’t participate but I wouldn’t stop anyone else from doing it”, or “block”, which has the effect of a veto. One can only block if one feels a proposal is in violation of the fundamental principles or reasons for being of a group. One might say that the function which in the US constitution is relegated to the courts, of striking down legislative decisions that violate constitutional principles, is here relegated with anyone with the courage to actually stand up against the combined will of the group (though of course there are also ways of challenging unprincipled blocks).

One could go on at length about the elaborate and surprisingly sophisticated methods that have been developed to ensure all this works; of forms of modified consensus required for very large groups; of the way consensus itself reinforces the principle of decentralization by ensuring one doesn’t really want to bring proposals before very large groups unless one has to, of means of ensuring gender equity and resolving conflict… The point is this is a form of direct democracy which is very different than the kind we usually associate with the term-or, for that matter, with the kind of majority-vote system usually employed by anarchists in the past. With increasing contact between different movements internationally, the inclusion of indigenous groups and movements from Africa, Asia, and Oceania with radically different traditions, we are seeing the beginnings of a new global reconception of what “democracy” or “revolution” should even mean, one as far as possible from the neoliberal parlaimentarianism currently promoted by the existing powers of the world.

Again, it is difficult to follow this new spirit of synthesis by reading most existing anarchist literature, because those who spend most of their energy on questions of theory, rather than emerging forms of practice, are the most likely to maintain the old sectarian dichotomizing logic. Modern anarchism is imbued with countless contradictions. While small-a anarchists are slowly incorporating ideas and practices learned from indigenous allies into their modes of organizing or alternative communities, the main trace in the written literature has been the emergence of a sect of Primitivists, a notoriously contentious crew who call for the complete abolition of industrial civilization, and, in some cases, even agriculture. Still, it is only a matter of time before this older, either/or logic begins to give way to something more resembling the practice of consensus-based groups.

What would this new synthesis look like? Some of the outlines can already be discerned within the movement. It will insist on constantly expanding the focus of anti-authoritarianism, moving away from class reductionism by trying to grasp the “totality of domination”, that is, to highlight not only the state but also gender relations, and not only the economy but also cultural relations and ecology, sexuality, and freedom in every form it can be sought, and each not only through the sole prism of authority relations, but also informed by richer and more diverse concepts.

This approach does not call for an endless expansion of material production, or hold that technologies are neutral, but it also doesn’t decry technology per se. Instead, it becomes familiar with and employs diverse types of technology as appropriate. It not only doesn’t decry institutions per se, or political forms per se, it tries to conceive new institutions and new political forms for activism and for a new society, including new ways of meeting, new ways of decision making, new ways of coordinating, along the same lines as it already has with revitalized affinity groups and spokes structures. And it not only doesn’t decry reforms per se, but struggles to define and win non-reformist reforms, attentive to people’s immediate needs and bettering their lives in the here-and-now at the same time as moving toward further gains, and eventually, wholesale transformation. It rejects the very opposition between reformism and revolution.

(Yves Tanguy)

And of course theory will have to catch up with practice. The problem at the moment is that anarchists who want to get past old-fashioned, vanguardist habits-the Marxist sectarian hangover that still haunts so much of the radical intellectual world-are not quite sure what their role is supposed to be. Anarchism needs to become reflexive. But how? On one level the answer seems obvious. One should not lecture, not dictate, not even necessarily think of oneself as a teacher, but must listen, explore and discover. To tease out and make explicit the tacit logic already underlying new forms of radical practice. To put oneself at the service of activists by providing information, or exposing the interests of the dominant elite carefully hidden behind supposedly objective, authoritative discourses, rather than trying to impose a new version of the same thing. How to move from ethnography to utopian visions-ideally, as many utopian visions as possible? It is hardly a coincidence that some of the greatest recruiters for anarchism in countries like the United States have been feminist science fiction writers like Starhawk or Ursula K. LeGuin.

One way this is beginning to happen is as anarchists begin to recuperate the experience of other social movements with a more developed body of theory, ideas that come from circles close to, indeed inspired by anarchism. Let’s take for example the idea of participatory economy, which represents an anarchist economist vision par excellence and which supplements and rectifies anarchist economic tradition. Parecon theorists argue for the existence of not just two, but three major classes in advanced capitalism: not only a proletariat and bourgeoisie but a “coordinator class” whose role is to manage and control the labor of the working class. This is the class that includes the management hierarchy and the professional consultants and advisors central to their system of control – as lawyers, key engineers and accountants, and so on. They maintain their class position because of their relative monopolization over knowledge, skills, and connections. As a result, economists and others working in this tradition have been trying to create models of an economy which would systematically eliminate divisions between physical and intellectual labor. Now that anarchism has so clearly become the center of revolutionary creativity, proponents of such models have increasingly been, if not rallying to the flag, exactly, then at least, emphasizing the degree to which their ideas are compatible with an anarchist vision.

This doesn’t mean anarchists have to be against theory. It might not need High Theory, in the sense familiar today. Certainly it will not need one single, Anarchist High Theory. That would be completely inimical to its spirit. Much better, I think, something more in the spirit of anarchist decision-making processes: applied to theory, this would mean accepting the need for a diversity of high theoretical perspectives, united only by certain shared commitments and understandings. Rather than based on the need to prove others’ fundamental assumptions wrong, it seeks to find particular projects on which they reinforce each other. Just because theories are incommensurable in certain respects does not mean they cannot exist or even reinforce each other, any more than the fact that individuals have unique and incommensurable views of the world means they cannot become friends, or lovers, or work on common projects. Even more than High Theory, what anarchism needs is what might be called low theory: a way of grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project.

Similar things are starting to happen with the development of anarchist political visions. Now, this is an area where classical anarchism already had a leg up over classical Marxism, which never developed a theory of political organization at all. Different schools of anarchism have often advocated very specific forms of social organization, albeit often markedly at variance with one another. Still, anarchism as a whole has tended to advance what liberals like to call ‘negative freedoms,’ ‘freedoms from,’ rather than substantive ‘freedoms to.’ Often it has celebrated this very commitment as evidence of anarchism’s pluralism, ideological tolerance, or creativity. But as a result, there has been a reluctance to go beyond developing small-scale forms of organization, and a faith that larger, more complicated structures can be improvised later in the same spirit.

There have been exceptions, such as the North American Social Ecologists’s “libertarian municipalism”. There’s a lively debate developing, for instance, on how to balance principles of worker’s control-emphasized by the Parecon folk-and direct democracy, emphasized by the Social Ecologists.

Still, there are a lot of details still to be filled in: what are the anarchist’s full sets of positive institutional alternatives to contemporary legislatures, courts, police, and diverse executive agencies? Obviously there could never be an anarchist party line on this, the general feeling among the small-a anarchists at least is that we’ll need many concrete visions and many utopian dialogues. Still, between actual social experiments within expanding self-managing, ungoverned communities in places like Eastern Europe or Latin America, and of the efforts of new anarchists all over the globe, the work is beginning. It is clearly a long-term process. But then, the anarchist century has only just begun.

___________

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Poetry: Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)

SEA-WIND

The flesh is sad, alas! and all the books are read.

Flight, only flight! I feel that birds are wild to tread

The floor of unknown foam, and to attain the skies!

Nought, neither ancient gardens mirrored in the eyes,

Shall hold this heart that bathes in waters its delight,

O nights! nor yet my waking lamp, whose lonely light

Shadows the vacant paper, whiteness profits best,

Nor the young wife who rocks her baby on her breast.

I will depart! O steamer, swaying rope and spar,

Lift anchor for exotic lands that lie afar!

A weariness, outworn by cruel hopes, still clings

To the last farewell handkerchief’s last beckonings!

And are not these, the masts inviting storms, not these

That an awakening wind bends over wrecking seas,

Lost, not a sail, a sail, a flowering isle, ere long?

But, O my heart, hear thou, hear thou, the sailors’ song!

————

Anxiety

Her pure nails sprung up exalting their onyx,

Anxiety, this midnight, bearing light, sustains,

In twilight many dreams burnt up by the Phoenix

Whose scattered ashes no sepulchral urn contains

Atop the sideboards, in the empty room: no ptyx,

That voided toy of vibrant nonsense, left inside,

(Because the Master went to draw the tears from Styx

With that exclusive object wherein Naught takes pride.)

In vacant north seen through the casement frames, a gold

May agonize at times, within the setting, to behold

Fire-breathing unicorns arrayed against a nix,

She, lifeless naked mirror image, repetition

Whom in the twinkling framed forgetting, is to fix

Through sparkling timed in septet, composition.

————

Apparition

La lune s’attristait. Des séraphins en pleurs

Rêvant, l’archet aux doigts, dans le calme des fleurs

Vaporeuses, tiraient de mourantes violes

De blancs sanglots glissant sur l’azur des corolles.

—C’était le jour béni de ton premier baiser.

Ma songerie aimant à me martyriser

s’enivrait savamment du parfum de tristesse

Que même sans regret et sans déboire laisse

La cueillaison d’un Rêve au coeur qui l’a cueilli.

J’errais donc, l’oeil rivé sur le pavé vieilli

Quand avec du soleil aux cheveux, dans la rue

Et dans le soir, tu m’es en riant apparue

Et j’ai cru voir la fée au chapeau de clarté

Qui jadis sur mes beaux sommeils d’enfant gâté

Passait, laissant toujours de ses mains mal fermées

Neiger de blancs bouquets d’étoiles parfumées.

————-

The Faun

Those nymphs, I want to perpetuate them.

So bright,

Their light rosy flesh, that it hovers in the air

Drowsy with tangled slumbers.

Did I love a dream?

My doubt, hoard of ancient night, is crowned

In many a subtle branch, which, remaining the true

Woods themselves, proves, alas! that alone I offered

Myself as a triumph the perfect sin of roses.

Let us reflect …

or whether the women you describe

Represent a desire of your fabulous senses!

Faun, the illusion flows from the cold blue eyes

Of the most chaste like a spring of tears:

But the other, all sighs, do you say she contrasts

Like the warm day’s breeze in your fleece?

But no! through the still and weary rapture

Stifling the cool morning with heat should it struggle,

No water murmurs unless poured by my flute

On the thicket sprinkled with melody; and the

Only wind, quick to escape the twin pipes before

Scattering the sound in an arid rain, is,

On the smooth untroubled surface of the horizon,

The visible and serene artificial breath

Of inspiration returning to the sky.

————-

ONE TOSS OF THE DICE

NEVER

NOT EVEN WHEN CAST IN ETERNAL

CIRCUMSTANCES

FROM THE DEPTHS OF A SHIPWRECK

WHETHER

the

Abyss

whitened

becalmed

furious

under an inclination

glides desperately

with wing

its own

in advance refallen with a difficulty in setting up flight

and covering the outpourings

cutting utterly the leaps

very interiorly resumes

the shade buried in the deep by that alternative sail

as to adapt

to its wingspan

its gaping depth as the hull

of a vessel

tilted to one or the other side

THE MASTERoutside old calculations

where the maneuver with age forgotten

arisen

inferringlong ago he grasped the helm

of that conflagration at his feet

of the unanimous horizon

there is preparing

stirring and mixing

in the fist that might clutch it

as one menaces a destiny and the winds

the unique Number which cannot be another

Spirit

to hurl it

in the tempest

refolding the division and passing proud

hesitates

a corpse by the arm set apart from the secret it keeps

rather

than to play

like a hoary maniac

the game

in the name of waves

one invades the chief

flows like a submissive beard

shipwreck that direct from man

sans ship

no matter

where vain

ancestrally to not open the hand

clenched

beyond the useless head

legacy in the disappearance

to someone

ambiguous

the last immemorial demon

having

from null regions

induced

the old man towards this supreme conjunction with probability

he

his puerile shade

caressed and polished and rendered and laved

made supple by the wave and abstracted

from the hard bones lost between the planks

born

of a gambol

the sea with the grandfather tempting or the grandfather against the sea

an idle chance

Betrothal

whose

veil of illusion gushed their phobia

like the phantom of a gesture

will totter

will fall

madnessWILL ABOLISH

AS IF

an insinuation simple

in silence rolled with irony

or

the mystery

precipitated

howled

in some nearby whirlpool of hilarity or horror

flutters around the gulf

without strewing it

nor fleeing

and cradles the virgin index

AS IF

plume solitary distraught

save that encounters or skims it a midnight cap

and immobilizes

in velvet crumpled by a guffaw somber

that rigid whiteness

derisory

in opposition to the sky

too much

for not marking

exiguously

whosoever

bitter prince of the reef

puts it on like the heroic

irresistible but contained

by his little reason virile

in lightning

concerned

expiatory and pubescent

mutelaughter

that

IF

The lucid and seigniorial aigrette of vertigo

with invisible brow

scintillates

then shadows

a stature dainty tenebrous erect

in its siren torsion

time

to slap

with impatient scales ultimate bifurcated

a rock

false manor

right away

evaporated in mists

that imposed

a limit on infinity

IT WAS

stellar issueNUMBER

EXISTED HE

otherwise than scattered hallucination of agony

COMMENCED HE AND CEASED HE

upwelling but denied and closed when apparent

at last

by some profusion widespread in rarity

CIPHERED HE

evidence of the sum if only one

ILLUMINATED HE

IT WOULD BE

worse

no

more nor less

indifferently but as much CHANCE

Falls

the plume

rhythmic suspense of the sinister

to bury itself

in original foams

not long ago whence sprang up its delirium to a peak

withered

by the identical neutrality of the gulf

NOTHING

of the memorable crisis

when might

the event have been accomplished in view of every result null

human

WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE

an ordinary elevation pours absence

BUT THE PLACE

inferior lapping whatsoever as if to disperse the act void

abruptly which if not

by its falsehood

might have founded

perdition

in those regions

of the wave

in which all reality dissolves

EXCEPT

at the altitude

PERHAPS

as far as a place fuses with beyond

apart from the interest

as to it signaled

in general

according to such obliquity by such declivity

of fires

toward

this must be

the Septentrion also North

A CONSTELLATION

cold from forgetting and desuetude

not so much

that it does not enumerate

on some surface vacant and superior

the successive clash

sidereally

of a total count in formation

watching

doubting

rolling

shining and meditating

before stopping

at some last point that consecrates it

Every Thought sends forth one Toss of the Dice

______________

Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris in 1842. He taught English in from 1864 in Tournon, Besançon, Avignon and Paris until his retirement in 1893. Malarmé began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Charles Baudelaire. His first poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s. Mallarmé’s most well known poems are L’Aprés Midi D’un Faun (The Afternoon of a Faun) (1865), which inspired Debussy’s tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by Manet. Among his other works are Hérodiade (1896) and Toast Funèbre (A Funeral Toast), which was written in memory of the author Théopile Gautier. Mallarmé’s later works include the experimental poem Un Coup de Dés (1914), published posthumously.

From the 1880s Mallarmé was the center of a group of french writers in Paris, including André Gide and Paul Valéry, to whom he communicated his ideas on poetry and art. According to his theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lies the essence of perfect forms and it is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarmé’s poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. Each poem is build around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists on subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. Mallarmé’s vers libre and word music shaped the 1890s Decadent movement.

For the rest of his life Mallarmé devoted himself to putting his literary theories into practice and writing his Grand Oeuvre (Great Work). Mallarmé died in Paris on September 9, 1898 without completing this work. (From Ubuweb)

A short entry for Sunday.

Hoping that this finds you at peace with yourself, and the world.

Take a couple of minutes today, sit outside and breath ever so deep of the gathering day.

Put your hands in the earth, and fill its living presence.

Listen to the wind, to the birds, to children playing near by if you are so lucky.

Live a prayer, live this moment.

Talk Tomorrow,

Gwyllm

On the Menu:

The Links

Decline and fall of the Roman myth

Poetry n’ Prose: Earth Prayers

___________________

The Links

Marimba Ponies!

Study links guns and hormones in men

A party full of desperate people?

For Your Listening Pleasure!

_____________________

Decline and fall of the Roman myth

We were ‘barbarians’, but early British civilisation outshone the Roman version, says ex-Python Terry Jones. We just lost the propaganda war

Nobody ever called themselves barbarians. It’s not that sort of word. It’s a word used about other people. It was used by the ancient Greeks to describe non-Greek people whose language they could not understand and who therefore seemed to babble unintelligibly: “ba ba ba”. The Romans adopted the Greek word and used it to label (and usually libel) the peoples who surrounded their own world.

The Roman interpretation became the only one that counted, and the peoples whom they called Barbarians became for ever branded — be they Spaniards, Britons, Gauls, Germans, Scythians, Persians or Syrians. And, of course, “barbarian” has become a byword for the very opposite of everything that we consider civilised.

The Romans kept the Barbarians at bay for as long as they could, but finally they were engulfed and the savage hordes overran the empire, destroying the cultural achievements of centuries. The light of reason and civilisation was almost snuffed out by the Barbarians, who annihilated everything that the Romans had put in place, sacking Rome itself and consigning Europe to the Dark Ages. The Barbarians brought only chaos and ignorance, until the renaissance rekindled the fires of Roman learning and art.

It is a familiar story, and it’s codswallop.

The unique feature of Rome was not its arts or its science or its philosophical culture, not its attachment to law. The unique feature of Rome was that it had the world’s first professional army. Normal societies consisted of farmers, hunters, craftsmen and traders. When they needed to fight they relied not on training or on standardised weapons, but on psyching themselves up to acts of individual heroism.

Seen through the eyes of people who possessed trained soldiers to fight for them, they were easily portrayed as simple savages. But that was far from the truth.

The fact that we still think of the Celts, the Huns, the Vandals, the Goths and so on as “barbarians” means that we have all fallen hook, line and sinker for Roman propaganda. We actually owe far more to the so-called “barbarians” than we do to the men in togas.

In the past 30 years, however, the story has begun to change. Archeological discoveries have shed new light on the ancient texts that have survived and this has led to new interpretations of the past. In Roman eyes the Celts may have lacked battle strategy, but their arms and equipment were in no way inferior to the Roman army’s. In fact the Celts had better helmets and better shields.

When the Romans got to Britain they found another technological advance: chariots. It may seem odd to those of us brought up on Ben Hur that the Romans should have been surprised by chariots on the battlefield, but that was the case.

The Romans had chariots, but the Britons made significant design improvements and, as Julius Caesar noted, had thoroughly mastered the art of using them. So how come the Romans built roads and the Celts did not? The answer is simple. The Celts did build roads. The “Romans-were-greatest” version of history made the earlier roads invisible until recently. One of the best preserved iron age roads is at Corlea in Ireland, but it was not until the 1980s that people realised how old it is. It was known locally as “the Danes’ road” and generally assumed to be of the Viking period or later. It was not until the timbers were submitted for tree-ring dating that the truth emerged: they were cut in 148BC.

However, the really startling thing is that wooden roads built the same way and at the same time have been found across Europe, as far away as northern Germany. The Celts, it seems, were sophisticated road builders and the construction of these wooden roads was no mean feat of engineering.

Oak planks were laid on birch runners and they were built broad enough for two carts to pass each other. What’s more, Celtic road building is not necessarily predated by that of the Romans. The first important Roman road was the Appian Way, built in 312BC, but the so-called “Upton Track” in south Wales, a wooden road laid across the mudflats along the Severn estuary, dates back to the 5th century BC.

It is only now that historians are beginning to reassess the sophistication of Celtic science and engineering. From early times the Celts were the iron masters of Europe. A Celtic smith was regarded as a magician, a man who could take a lump of rock and transform it into a magical new substance — a cunningly worked steel blade sharp enough to cut through bronze or ordinary iron.

The Celts’ mastery of metal technology also enabled them to develop sophisticated arable farms. We know they had iron ploughshares in Britain from about the 4th century BC because in a shrine at Frilford on the River Ock, near Abingdon in Oxfordshire — a site that was occupied from about 350BC — an iron ploughshare was found under one of the central pillars where it had been buried, perhaps as a votive offering. It is a fair guess that the temple was one of the first buildings to be erected there and that the iron ploughshare was offered at the time that its foundations were laid.

The Celts’ use of metal even allowed them to invent a harvesting machine. Historians did not believe that it could be true until bas-relief sculptures were discovered that apparently show just such a contraption. It was a sort of comb on wheels that beat off the ears of corn and deposited them in a container rather like the grass box of a lawnmower. A replica was built and tested in the 1980s.

It has been easy to underestimate Celtic technological achievements because so much has vanished or been misunderstood. Of course, it was thoughtless of the Celts not to leave us anything much in the way of written records — they should have known that the lack of books putting forward their own propaganda would weight the evidence firmly in favour of the Romans.

Western society’s enthusiasm since the renaissance for all things Roman has persuaded us to see much of the past through Roman eyes, even when contrary evidence stares us in the face. Once we turn the picture upside-down and look at history from a non-Roman point of view, things start to look very, very different.

(From Terry Jones’ Barbarians by Terry Jones and Alan Ereira to be published by BBC Books on May 18 at £18.99. The book is available for £17.09 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585. Terry Jones’ Barbarians begins on BBC2 on Friday May 26)

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Meanwhile, back at Caer Llwydd’s Back Forty…

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Dance to Heal the Earth

by Dee Smith

Whenever you dance, wherever you dance, dance to heal the earth!

Dancing is power. Dancing is prayer. Some say that all is dance. Maybe. Now there’s a big dance coming, a dance to heal the earth. If you’re reading this, you’re probably part of it. You take part whenever you do whatever you do to help heal the earth. When you recycle. When you choose to show love, to fight for justice, to bring healing, to bring out what is good in others. When you avoid cruelty and dishonesty and waste. When you are outraged. When you speak out. When you give. When you consider the generations to come. When you protest to the oppressors and encourage those who feel the cutting edge of injustice. And, of course, when you dance. There is a tree that all the prophets see, and whenever you let your love show, you make the flowers grow.

Soon this dance will be done in a big way, in the old way, on sacred ground. All living things will take part. If you want to, you can take part. No one is twisting your arm. You can stop any time you need to, and start up again whenever you’re ready. If you’ve read this far, you probably know what I’m talking about. You’ve probably been doing it in one way or another for a good while. Soon will be the time to make no bones about it! Cut loose!

Anytime you dance, anywhere, whether at a party or in church, dance to heal the earth! Let your feet beat a healing rhythm into the earth. Let your feet beat a strengthening rhythm for those who struggle the hardest. Let your feet beat a life-giving rhythm for all peoples, regardless of race or national boundary, regardless of whether we’re human or whether we’re the trees, the air, the fish, the birds, the buffalo, the bear, the crow. We come out of hiding, we come back from the dead, and we dance, and our dance is a prayer, and our songs and our rhythms and our breath give life.

Is the music they’re playing some mindless jingle? Never mind, as long as it’s not bad music, and you can dance to the beat! Make your own words, and make the words a prayer. A prayer for the end of exploitation, a prayer for the end of lies, a prayer for healing, for justice, for life. Remember your prayer-song, feed it and let it get strong and pass it along. Dance and pray, whenever you dance, dance to heal the earth.

Have you seen anything? Wear it out! Make it so that all can see what you see! Take a white T-shirt and mark it with your dreams. Is there anything you’d like to tell the world? Take your shirt and mark it with your song! This is the way it has been done, so you can do it too. Use any color except black (there are reasons for that that will become clearer later), and you’ll probably find that a loose, pure cotton T is most comfortable for dancing in. Cos this is an actual dance, you dance hard, you sing and breathe hard and sweat. Wear it when you plan to go out dancing, to dance to heal the earth.

Some people do this dance while fasting, and dance for several days straight. But even a few minutes of dancing helps, and joins with all the other dancing going on, everywhere on Earth. Not everyone can fast these days. Besides, you never know when you’re gonna dance, and you have to eat sometimes! But if you plan to dance, hold off eating till later, or just have a little. It’s easier to dance if you don’t have a hotdog weighing you down.

Some people say, do not do sacred things where people are drinking and partying. But all the universe is a sacred place. It really doesn’t matter what others are doing, you can make a place sacred wherever you are, with your intention and your prayers. Some people use smoke to make a place sacred; a cigarette or incense stick will do fine. You can dance to heal the earth anywhere, even a party or a bar! The earth is everywhere, so you can dance anywhere to heal her. Only one thing. Please hold off drinking or using any other intoxicants till you’re done. It works better that way.

The Lie has gone far enough. It spreads and makes everyone sick. Now is the time for this dance to begin. It, too, will spread, and it will bring healing to all. In the beginning, they say, God put a rainbow in the sky, to let us know that Spirit never forgets. Now is the time for us to put a rainbow across the earth, to let God know that we, too, remember.

Dance to heal the earth. Not just when you’re dancing, but always. Live the dance, whenever you move, in all you do, dance to heal the earth.

————–

“The Earth Prayer”

Black Elk Oglala Sioux, Medicine Man

“Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold

me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice.

You lived first, and you are older than all need,

older than all prayer. All things belong to you

– the two-legged, the four-legged, the wings

of the air, and all green things that live.

You have set the powers of the four quarters of the earth to cross each other. You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties, and where they cross, the place is holy. Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things.

Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice.

At the center of the sacred hoop

You have said that I should make the tree to bloom.

With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather,

With running eyes I must say

The tree has never bloomed

Here I stand, and the tree is withered.

Again, I recall the great vision you gave me.

It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives.

Nourish it then

That it may leaf

And bloom

And fill with singing birds!

Hear me, that the people may once again

Find the good road

And the shielding tree.”

————–

I Live My Life

Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening rings

which spread over earth and sky.

I may not ever complete the last one,

but that is what I will try.

I circle around God’s primordial tower,

and I circle ten thousand years long;

And I still don’t know if I’m a falcon,

a storm, or an unfinished song.

—————

Kiss The Earth

Thich Nhat Hanh

Walk and touch peace every moment.

Walk and touch happiness every moment.

Each step brings a fresh breeze.

Each step makes a flower bloom.

Kiss the Earth with your feet.

Bring the Earth your love and happiness.

The Earth will be safe

when we feel safe in ourselves.

Had to take a friend to the Chiropractors this morning, so this is all a bit rushed. Gardening Madness, it has us all going at full tilt.

The days are ever so beautiful. The fullness of life is all around. Mary’s Robin has shown up again, hanging out with her as she gardens.

On the Grill:

The Links

The Merry Nisse

Gaelic Poetry: Two poems from modern times and one from the 1400′s

Enjoy, and have a good weekend!

Gwyllm

————-

The Links:

Neolithic man ‘had violent history’

The RFID Hacking Underground

Daydreams are different in autistic minds

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The Merry Nisse by Brad Steiger

The night that I encountered “him” proved to be a life-altering event. The presence of this entity provided me with my personal proof of the reality of other dimensions of being, and set me on the quest that has dominated my life path. That night, when I was a child of nearly five, I saw what is commonly referred to as an elf, a brownie-or, in the Scandinavian culture that is my heritage, a nisse. There are probably no cultures that do not have their own version of this often ancestral household spirit. Traditionally, Scandinavian families left a small portion of food out at night for the nisse to enjoy. I remember discussing the nisse with a friend in the Mesquaki (Fox) tribe, who said that they never forgot to leave an offering of food for their household spirit’s evening nourishment.

Tricky Guardians

In the Scandinavian tradition, the nisse look after hearth and home, a kind of guardian entity-but one with an attitude. Nisse can be extremely volatile if provoked, and they are very often mischievous little tricksters. I have spoken to many folks who remember as children having their hair pulled, their toys hidden, their cat’s tail pulled by the nisse. Although few of my friends admit to having seen nisse, a good many have strongly sensed their presence.

On that long-ago evening when I caught a nisse watching my parents, I believe that I suprised him as much as he did me, but he quickly regained his composure and gave me a strange kind of smile that was as benevolent as it was puckish. At the same time, I sensed that it was a conspiratorial kind of smile, as if we would forever share a secret that was profound in its simplicity. I don’t remember what happened after that, because his eyes suddenly became very compelling and seemed to grow larger and larger. And the next thing I knew, it was morning.

When I reported my experience to my parents, they were far more indulgent than one might suppose. According to my Danish mother’s family tradition, we were in the lineage of Hans Christian Andersen and such encounters with the wee ones were not unexpected. Grandma Dena often spoke of the “pantry elf,” another name for the nisse, and Grandma Anna reported seeing the entities as little bits of sparkling light.

As I have recounted my experience over the years, many listeners have expressed their opinions that I may actually have met an extraterrestrial alien-a “Grey”-or a ghost; but I suspect that I came face to face with a nisse. And although I have never seen such a creature again, I have never lacked for evidence of their presence in my home. And I must give full credit to my initial encounter with the being for my desire to learn more about the human psyche and our niche in the universe, and for my various psychic safaris to investigate a wide range of unexplained phenomena-from poltergeistic disturbances and haunted houses, to UFO manifestations and woodland monsters. Because of my childhood meeting with a nisse, I learned at an early age that our species is part of a larger community of intelligences, a far more complex hierarchy of powers and principalities-both seen and unseen, physical and nonphysical-than most of us are bold enough to believe.

Finer Points of Creature Lore

We must at this point make the distinction between nisse and trolls. Although a few years back some enterprising Danes made a fortune cleaning up the image of trolls and selling them to an unsuspecting public as cute little creatures with big bug-eyes, dolphin grins, and bushy red hair, real trolls are nasty buggers who can assume gigantic proportions and wreak havoc whenever they choose.

To be even more precise, they are fiendish giants, very often associated with hostile, darkside sorcerers. I have heard many an ill-informed salesperson refer to the benignly grinning troll dolls as Scandinavian elves or nisse. To be fair, however, among more contemporary and less traditional Danes there did develop a tendency to confuse the identity of the huldrefolk (elves often involved in changeling tales) with trolls, and to envision them as brownie-like beings. Though it is difficult to imagine how any entities involved in baby-napping could ever be considered cute and adorable.

Tiny Demons

I must admit, there have been times when I certainly didn’t consider our nisse as charming and adorable, either. Once when I was a teenager, the nisse decided to terrorize me when I was home alone on the farm. It began with doors opening and closing of their own volition, terrible poundings on walls and windows, and the palpable sense of a menacing presence. Interestingly, our dog, Queen, a collie/wolf mix who took no nonsense from anyone or anything, also sensed-or may even have seen-the wild and crazy nisse. Her hair bristled, she bared her teeth, and she directed her warning growls at an unseen troublemaker. It was incredible to watch her attention being directed and redirected at various places in the house as the invisible entity moved from place to place, thudding walls and scattering books and papers. Queen and I finally retreated upstairs, determined to make a brave last stand against our assailant. I will never forget kneeling with my .22 rifle, my faithful dog snarling at my side, awaiting the creature as it noisily ascended the stairs, step by step.

Thankfully, before I could shoot any holes in the walls, there was a peculiar “whoosh” of air around us, a tiny sound of tinkling laughter, and the spooky game was over. Queen shook her head and whined in puzzlement, and I felt an overwhelming sense of relief that there really was no monster in the house about to rend us limb from limb. It had all been a merry prank played on me by the nisse. As I considered the impetus for such an eerie demonstration, I recalled reading an issue of the great old pulp magazine Weird Tales, and my father remonstrating that such stories could pop back into my memory at the most inopportune times to frighten me. Of course I had scoffed at such an ill-founded paternal warning and laughed that a robust 15-year-old such as myself could not be easily frightened by anything.

Almost as I had spoken those words, I sensed an unseen presence accepting the challenge.

Peaceful Coexistence

As I became an experienced investigator of psychical manifestations, I eventually encountered the gamut of eerie displays-spectral appearances, ghostly voices, and a seemingly inexhaustible range of poltergeist demonstrations. For the past many years, the activity of our household nisse are benignly mischievous. Most often, a book or file that I have had in plain sight on my desk will suddenly not be there when I reach for it. After a brief search to prove what I already know-that I have not misplaced the objects-I will say aloud, “All right, guys. Bring it back right now!” I might wait a couple of minutes before I leave the room to get a drink of water or to check on my wife Sherry, and when I return, the missing book or file has been returned to the center of my desk.

Sherry, who also enjoys Swedish heritage among her United Nations ancestry of French, Italian, Irish, and Chippewa, soon caught on to the games that nisse play. I will often hear her shouting out from her upstairs office, “Nisse! That’s enough. Leave me alone now! Bring back my papers!”

In our household, we enjoy a very peaceful coexistence with the nisse. Some are obviously always concerned with our health and happiness and serve as guardians of our home. Others, well, they are a bit more fun-loving and will always delight in temporarily hiding objects that we had moments ago been using. Such behavior, though, is really not all that obnoxious. Annoying sometimes, yes, but, after all, the nisse keep our house from ever becoming the least bit boring!

Brad Steiger is a well-known author who has written on all aspects of the strange and unknown.

_____________

Gaelic Poetry

The Old Live On…

Maire Mhac an tSaoi

They liked a high forehead on a woman –

The fashion for fringes on females was not prized –

And the broad separation of the eyes,

And the charming gap between the very white front teeth:

The canon of beauty laid down before the coming of Christ…

And I thought I would jot down their tidings,

For, when our generation is no more,

Who will taste the gentleness of their conventions?

I happened to be teaching school at that time in the West,

And there on the bench [sat] a child like a lily,

A conflict of roses on her cheeks

And her head of hair golden-yellow,

Her eyes blue and slow-moving,

Her brows precisely drawn,

And her small fresh mouth like raspberries in June.

She registered eleven years

And there wasn’t a spark of sense in her head,

Nor was she at all worried by that,

It was enough to be there and be thus.

The word for ‘muse’ cropped up during teaching;

‘That is a word you won’t know,’ the mistress declared to them.

The little hand shot up:

‘I know it…’

I unleashed the teacher’s heavy irony at her:

‘Tell it then to the class, Teresa, from the store of your knowledge.’

Bold and confident in her loveliness, she shot back the answer:

‘A woman with no clothes on!’…

Eoghan Rua laughed.

———-

Listen, People of this House…

Iseabail ni mheic Cailien

Listen, people of this house,

to the tale of the powerful penis

which has made my heart greedy.

I will write some of the tale.

Although many beautiful tree-like penises

have been in the time before,

this man of the religious order

has a penis so big and rigid.

The penis of my household priest,

although it is so long and firm,

the thickness of his manhood

has not been heard of for a long time.

That thick drill of his,

and it is no word of a, lie

never has its thickness been heard of

or a larger penis. Listen.

————-

A Child Born In Prison

Godfraidh Fionn O’Dalaigh (circa 1400)

A pregnant woman (sorrow’s sign)

once there was, in painful prison.

The God of Elements let her bear

in prison there a little child.

The little boy, when he was born,

grew up like any other child

(plain as we could see him there)

for a space of years, in prison.

That the woman was a prisoner

did not lower the baby’s spirits.

She minded him, though in prison,

like one without punishment or pain.

Nothing of the light of day

(O misery!) could they see

but the bright ridge of a field

through a hole someone had made.

Yet the loss was not the same

for the son as for the mother:

her fair face failed in form

while the baby gained in health.

The child, raised where he was,

grew better by his bondage,

not knowing in his fresh frail limbs

but prison was ground of Paradise.

He made little playful runs

while her spirits only deepened.

(Mark well, lest you regret,

these deeds of son and mother.)

He said one day, beholding

a tear on her lovely face:

‘I see the signs of sadness;

now let me hear the cause.’

‘No wonder that I mourn,

my foolish child,’ said she.

‘This cramped place is not our lot,

and suffering pain in prison.’

‘Is there another place’, he said,

‘lovelier than ours?

Is there a brighter light than this

that your grief grows so heavy?’

‘For I believe,’ the young child said,

‘mother, although you mourn,

we have our share of light.

Don’t waste your thoughts in sorrow.’

‘I do not wonder at what you say,

young son,’ the girl replied.

‘You think this is a hopeful place

because you have seen no other.

‘If you knew what I have seen

before this dismal place

you would be downcast also

in your nursery here, my soul.’

‘Since it is you know best, lady,’

the little child replied,

‘hide from me no longer

what more it was you had.’

‘A great outer world in glory

formerly was mine.

After that, beloved boy,

my fate is a darkened house.’

At home in all his hardships,

not knowing a happier state,

fresh-cheeked and bright, he did not grudge

the cold and desolate prison.

And so is the moral given:

the couple there in prison

are the people of this world,

imprisoned life their span.

Compared with joy in the Son of God

in His everlasting realm

an earthly mansion is only grief,

prisoners all the living.

When a belief is widely held in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we call it a superstition. By that criterion, the most egrerious superstition of modern times, perhaps of all time, is the “scientific” belief in the non-existence of psi.

Thomas Etter

———–

Irish Blessings:

May the blessings of light be upon you,

Light without and light within,

And in all your comings and goings,

May you ever have a kindly greeting

From them you meet along the road.

May you work like you don’t need the money,

Love like you’ve never been hurt, and

Dance like no one is watching.

Dance as though no one is watching you,

Love as though you have never loved before,

Sing as though no one can hear you,

Live as though heaven is on earth.

Garden Times…

Worked up the ladder today, trimming off the dead branches on the Ancient Cheery Tree in our back yard (left over from the old insane asylum from the 19th century from the river up to Mt. Tabor) Branches were rotten, widowmakers if I ever saw them…

Trimmed the neighbors tree as well, in all the years we have been here, she just lets them go. Nice neighbor, bad pruning habits. It cost us quite a bit of growing space (due to the shade factor) in the yard. We grow moss the best, followed close behind by the dandelions.

We went to the nursery today, picking up veggies, herbs and poppies. I love poppies, but they are always being wacked by the pod thieves! Argh. Bad habits abound. I love the nursery. I discovered a new tobacco plant from Brazil. Mary nixed me getting it, sez it will mess with the tomatoes. I am looking for Tobacco Rustica to grow next year. Love the smell! The whole gardening meme is a lovely one. Ahhhh. Loam!

We are getting the garden prepared for summer events. Dale and Laura Pendell will be in Portland on the 1st of June, for a reading at Powells… My Father is visiting… Summer Salons and various gatherings are being planned. The Solstice of course, and PARTIES!

More tomorrow, of course.

Gwyllm

—-

on the Grill

The Links

Articles:

The Next Green Revolution

Universe ‘child of previous one’

Poetry: Jesse Lee Kercheval

_____

The Links

Evolution of Dance

1945 war debt to US ‘almost paid’ (expect a different relationship after that!)

Mapping a path for the 3D Web

What Price Freedom?

_______

The Next Green Revolution

How technology is leading environmentalism out of the anti-business, anti-consumer wilderness.

By Alex Nikolai Steffen

For decades, environmentalists have warned of a coming climate crisis. Their alarms went unheeded, and last year we reaped an early harvest: a singularly ferocious hurricane season, record snowfall in New England, the worst-ever wildfires in Alaska, arctic glaciers at their lowest ebb in millennia, catastrophic drought in Brazil, devastating floods in India – portents of global warming’s destructive potential.

Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction. Asking people in the world’s wealthiest, most advanced societies to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance is naive at best.

With climate change hard upon us, a new green movement is taking shape, one that embraces environmentalism’s concerns but rejects its worn-out answers. Technology can be a font of endlessly creative solutions. Business can be a vehicle for change. Prosperity can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific exploration, innovative design, and cultural evolution are the most powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can propel the world into a bright green future.

Americans trash the planet not because we’re evil, but because the industrial systems we’ve devised leave no other choice. Our ranch houses and high-rises, factories and farms, freeways and power plants were conceived before we had a clue how the planet works. They’re primitive inventions designed by people who didn’t fully grasp the consequences of their actions.

Consider the unmitigated ecological disaster that is the automobile. Every time you turn on the ignition, you’re enmeshed in a system whose known outcomes include a polluted atmosphere, oil-slicked seas, and desert wars. As comprehension of the stakes has grown, though, a market has emerged for a more sensible alternative. Today you can drive a Toyota Prius that burns far less gasoline than a conventional car. Tomorrow we might see vehicles that consume no fossil fuels and emit no greenhouse gases. Combine cars like that with smarter urban growth and we’re well on our way to sustainable transportation.

You don’t change the world by hiding in the woods, wearing a hair shirt, or buying indulgences in the form of save the earth bumper stickers. You do it by articulating a vision for the future and pursuing it with all the ingenuity humanity can muster. Indeed, being green at the start of the 21st century requires a wholehearted commitment to upgrading civilization. Four key principles can guide the way:

Renewable energy is plentiful energy. Burning fossil fuels is a filthy habit, and the supply won’t last forever. Fortunately, a growing number of renewable alternatives promise clean, inexhaustible power: wind turbines, solar arrays, wave-power flotillas, small hydroelectric generators, geothermal systems, even bioengineered algae that turn waste into hydrogen. The challenge is to scale up these technologies to deliver power in industrial quantities – exactly the kind of challenge brilliant businesspeople love.

Efficiency creates value. The number one US industrial product is waste. Waste is worse than stupid; it’s costly, which is why we’re seeing businesspeople in every sector getting a jump on the competition by consuming less water, power, and materials. What’s true for industry is true at home, too: Think well-insulated houses full of natural light, cars that sip instead of guzzle, appliances that pay for themselves in energy savings.

Cities beat suburbs. Manhattanites use less energy than most people in North America. Sprawl eats land and snarls traffic. Building homes close together is a more efficient use of space and infrastructure. It also encourages walking, promotes public transit, and fosters community.

Quality is wealth. More is not better. Better is better. You don’t need a bigger house; you need a different floor plan. You don’t need more stuff; you need stuff you’ll actually use. Ecofriendly designs and nontoxic materials already exist, and there’s plenty of room for innovation. You may pay more for things like long-lasting, energy-efficient LED lightbulbs, but they’ll save real money over the long term.

Redesigning civilization along these lines would bring a quality of life few of us can imagine. That’s because a fully functioning ecology is tantamount to tangible wealth. Clean air and water, a diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the human race survives – and may even extend our stay on Earth.

It may seem impossibly far away, but on days when the smog blows off, you can already see it: a society built on radically green design, sustainable energy, and closed-loop cities; a civilization afloat on a cloud of efficient, nontoxic, recyclable technology. That’s a future we can live with.

________

Universe ‘child of previous one’

By Sarah Cruddas

A joint UK-US team has put forward an alternative theory of cosmic evolution.

It proposes that the Universe undergoes cycles of “Big Bangs” and “Big Crunches”, meaning our Universe is merely a “child of the previous one”.

It challenges the conventional view of the cosmos, which observations show to be 12-14 billion years old.

The new ideas, reported in the journal Science, may explain why the expansion of the Universe is accelerating, the researchers say.

“At present the conventional view is that all of space, time, matter and energy began at a single point, which then expanded and cooled, leaving the Universe as it is today,” said Professor Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, New Jersey.

“However, this new theory suggests that there’s a continuous cycle of universes, with each a repeat of the last, but not an exact replica.

“It can be thought of as a child of the previous universe.”

Cosmological constant

The new idea builds on previous work by the same team, and is set to challenge the current model.

The cosmological constant represented an inherent pressure or force associated with free space, which would be resisting the gravity-drive contraction.

The concept was later abandoned when observations showed the Universe to be expanding – causing Einstein to label the cosmological constant as “the greatest blunder of my career”.

In 1998, a form of the constant was re-habilitated when it was found that the Universe’s expansion was actually speeding up.

Unanswered questions

Although the re-introduction of the constant enabled calculations to match theory, it also raised the question that there was something in physics that was “missing”.

Professor Neil Turok, of Cambridge University, told the BBC News website: “When the value of the cosmological constant was calculated, it was found to be much smaller than expected.

“The explanation as to why this constant is so small has become one of the biggest problems in physics.

“At present, the only explanation for this is that things just have to be that way.” This theory leaves many questions unanswered, but now Professors Steinhardt and Turok have developed a new theory to explain why the cosmological constant is so small.

They suggest that time actually began before the Big Bang, meaning there was a pre-existing universe.

This would also mean that the current Universe is much older than presently accepted.

Dark matter

“At present there may be an alternative ‘dark matter’ universe that exists at the same time as ours, but we could never reach it,” explained Professor Turok.

“The best way to think of this is to think of a pane of double glazing with a fly on it. The fly is unable to cross over from one side to another, just like we are unable to get from one universe to another.

“These two universes are drawn together by the force of gravity and will eventually collide.

“This means that things that are happening now will help to create another universe in the future.”

_______

Poetry: Jesse Lee Kercheval

Gav’rinis

5000 years ago & already religion over

turns religion—

fells a 16 ton menhir

carved with deer a running hare

& hauls it to the shore

onto a barge for the trip

to this shale island

lost among a sea of islands

buries the pictographs inside a fresh dug dolman

covers them

with pounded earth

because like Islam 3000 years later

this new faith does not show

its God in pictures

but rather in abstraction

in sweeping curves &

circles inside circles—

God with her daughters

resting in her—

They had come so far—these first human farmers

Plants grew & cows gave birth

when & where they ordered

Everything was possible—everything was new

So the menhir from the old believers

hunters/ gatherers was buried—

then time covered the new religion to

these people

their boats

as time will cover ours—

now we walk to board our boat

& find the tide

dropped

20 feet

leaving our poor boat stranded

in a bay of sticky mud

the earth sleeps

the sea never

so I’m left with time to wonder

why sit in the dark

etching circles into limestone

with nothing

but a sharp quartz pebble?

Why make the ordered marks

already fading on this page?

because you do not draw

a human head

to show the face

of God

—————

Children of Paradise

Paris is an egg. It is the egg.

Wide or narrow, it is a ribbon

of pastry, of moonlight, of butter.

Paris is the light

gliding over our eyelids,

sneaking in even when we try

not to see. We know ourselves

through Paris & in this

Paris is as private

as blood & as public

as humiliation in high school. I broke a molar

on a piece of popcorn

watching Les Enfants du Paradis

in Paris, watching that luminous cloud Arletty

playing the heroine Garance.

Like the flower, she says

after giving her name. What flower? the audience

always murmurs. Me too—

& that’s what I love—

the not knowing.

Just as no one in the Paris of the film

can truly know Garance.

But what with the cracked tooth,

watching this film about Paris

in Paris turned out

not to be the rush of paradise

I expected, but instead,

along with Baptise the mime,

I was in agony. Baptise

from his unconsummated love

for Garance. Me from my molar,

from the pain crashing through my nerves,

& for a moment I thought

ammonia & chlorine bleach

had come accidentally together

filling the whole theater

because I was crying,

because I couldn’t breathe.

Then Paris

took me out of myself & into the souls

of the stars, filled me with great pity,

with a sense infinite space as poignant actuality,

as the light from the projector

shone over the heads of the audience.

But there is more, much more

to Paris than that. In Paris, life

runs away, is a runaway

at play & passion is everywhere.

Paris dangles all possibilities before us,

clanging as loud as bells. The mind sees

as through a glass–Heaven.

The heart sees–as through a moving curtain—

worlds beyond the bones

of everyday.

———–

Isle de Brehat

In this garden enclosed

by a stone wall

on this stone island

where the stone houses

have stone roofs—

my son twists

on a wooden swing

In between cold

rock shore & cold rock

shore, this garden

bleeds w/ roses

the bruised kiss of fuschia

Beyond the wall, in

the low & marshy land

sheep crop the sweet

salt grass

This could be

my stone house—Kercheval

in the land where

ker means home,

It could be my

parents in the cemetery close

inside the church

yard walls—my father

grandfather

lost at sea

lost to war

their faces still young

in the enameled

photographs that grace

the cemetery walls

or hang in honor

in the Chapel of the Rescuers—

resting place for those

who died

searching for

neighbors/other islanders

lost in the slate grey sea.

Who have I saved

lately?—a Breton

300 years gone

from this stone land—

long ago set sail across

the wide and

salty sea?

No one, I admit

at least not

lately

&

catch my son

in my arms, hoping

love—mine or God’s—

will be enough save him

First him, then

my husband

& then

me

——–

Xylophones

I deliver my daughter to kindermusic.

The teacher has her theories:

how the body, so young,

already knows music.

Week One: the class—

two boys, four girls—

dances with ribbons

imagining themselves notes.

Week Two: they draw music,

slash, dashes, waves, wolves

across butcher paper

unrolled on the floor.

Week Three: they clap, they stomp

making their bodies mallets,

beating the floor,

the air, their drum.

At the end of each class

they get stamps—butterflies,

tigers, smiley faces

on the back of their hands.

Week Four: Finally they are given

their special kindermusik

xylophones, white plastic

with red metal keys,

are taught how to hold

the wooden mallets

how to hit each note

just so. No more improvisation,

no more roaring and dancing.

Ding, all together, ding.

At last, they’re making music.

Their teacher smiles and smiles.

________

Jesse Lee Kercheval was born in France and raised in Florida. She is the author of six books, including the poetry collection Dog Angel, the novel The Museum of Happiness, and the writing text Building Fiction. She is the Sally Mead Hands Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, where she directs both the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. She lives in Madison with her husband and two children.

____________

Summer is coming on strong. A green world here in the NorthWest. Beautiful weather, finally. (ah, the rain is beautiful as well!)

I started running and working out again. Some how, I have convinced Sophie the wonder dog to run with me in the morning. She is good for the first half, then I have to kinda coax (read drag her along) to get her back home. She really is a good sport. (Come on Sophie!)

I have found that running on my own is boring. I keep on getting the same replies to my questions. The discussions are all one sided. Sophie helps with this. She participates in conversations by being a most active listener. She also needs attending to from my side. Encouragement, praise and concern for her well being.

Some interesting finds. The meme of how the US has dealt with its native dwellers, The root of the Pharmacratic Inquisition laid out in a timeline… Poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins…

So far, so good. Off running in a few minutes so I will wind this up…

A Blessing on your day!

Gwyllm

——

On The Menu:

The Links

On Native Grounds

The Roots of the Pharmacratic Inquisition, The First 300 Years of Christian suppression of Pagan Beliefs: “COVERING THE EARTH WITH DARKNESS”

The Poetry: Gerard Manley Hopkins

The Artist: Evelyn De Morgan

Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919) was an English Pre-Raphaelite painter. She was born Evelyn Pickering on 30 August 1855. Her parents were of upper middle class. Her father was Percival Pickering QC, the Recorder of Pontefract. Her mother was Anna Maria Wilhelmina Spencer Stanhope, the sister of the artist John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and a descendant of Coke of Norfolk who was an Earl of Leicester.

Evelyn was homeschooled and started drawing lessons when she was 15. On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, Evelyn recorded in her diary, “Art is eternal, but life is short…” “I will make up for it now, I have not a moment to lose.” She went on to persuade her parents to let her go to art school. At first they discouraged it, but in 1873 she was enrolled at the Slade School of Art. Her uncle, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, was a great influence to her works. Evelyn often visited him in Florence where he lived. This also enabled her to study the great artists of the Renaissance; she was particularly fond of the works of Botticelli. This influenced her to move away from the classical subjects favoured by the Slade school and to make her own style. In 1887, she married the ceramicist William De Morgan. They lived together in London until he died in 1917. She died two years later on 2 May 1919 in London and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, Surrey. (Wikipedia)

_____________

The Links:

Halo 3 E3 Trailer

Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show

German ‘Robin Hoods’ give poor a taste of the high life

Thought Crime: Man who painted marijuana images on house may avoid jail

Alcohol is deadlier than ecstasy, says Government’s drugs adviser

_____________

On Native Grounds

According to the official mythology, the American Revolution was a struggle between plain, homespun-clad patriots and arrogant redcoats determined to keep them under the heel of George III. The reality was, of course, more complicated. There were well-to-do whites who supported independence and a surprising number of lower-class ones who did not. There were free blacks who fought in the Continental Army and slaves who were royalist nearly to the man (or woman), running away to British lines at the first opportunity. There were also the Indians, some of whom supported the Patriot cause but most of whom sided with the British in the belief that they were the only force capable of restraining the tidal wave of settlers engulfing Indian land.

Alan Taylor’s The Divided Ground is a comprehensive account of this last group from the Revolutionary period to the first years of the nineteenth century in what is now western New York, Pennsylvania and Ontario. The story is an unremittingly dreary one. During the war, the Indians were a valuable commodity, thanks to their superb fighting skills. Their faces painted red, blue and black, their heads completely shaven except for a central ridge of hair known as a scalp lock, they would creep silently through the forest only to erupt in terrifying screams at the moment of attack. British commanders considered 300 Indian warriors “in the Woods” to be worth 1,000 ordinary soldiers, which is why both sides bid so vigorously for their services.

Once the fighting was over, however, their presence became suddenly inconvenient for British colonial officers in Canada and American politicians alike. The Indians were frightening, and they were an impediment to economic progress. “I am confident that sooner or later…no men will be suffered to live by hunting on lands capable of improvement, and which would support more people under a state of cultivation,” a US general named Benjamin Lincoln remarked after visiting New York’s western frontier in 1792. The insufferable hunters in question were of course the Indians, who Lincoln said would “dwindle and moulder away…until the whole race shall become extinct” unless they changed their ways.

General Lincoln’s prediction proved all too accurate: The Indians did not change and so fell by the wayside. But this, too, is part of the official mythology, which holds that the demise of Indian society was the product of a cultural clash that nobody could prevent and, consequently, was nobody’s fault. But The Divided Ground takes apart this myth, showing in relentless detail how official bad faith and ill will helped undermine the Indians’ position and speed their demise. “It seems natural to Whites,” one Indian leader observed, “to look on lands in the possession of Indians with an aching heart, and never to rest ’till they have planned them out of them.” This was true of British officials in what was then known as Upper Canada, but even more so of New York Governor George Clinton and his cronies in Albany, who at one point pressured the Oneida Indians to part with more than 500 square miles of land that, over the next two years, they succeeded in reselling at a 1,000 percent markup. Land was the Oneidas’ one bankable asset, yet Taylor shows how by 1802 state politicians had managed to relieve them of two-thirds of their holdings from just seven years earlier, a massive expropriation–there is no other word for it–that sent them into a tailspin. The Oneidas tried to control their fate by leasing their land rather than selling it outright or by demanding a fair-market price. But they found themselves blocked or outmaneuvered at every turn. Like the rest of the Iroquois tribes, they didn’t just fall off a cliff–they were pushed.

Still, Lincoln’s point is not easily dismissed. There was simply no way the Indians could continue in their old ways without courting disaster. As Taylor shows, they were victims of what was most fundamentally a revolution in land-use policies. Where the Indians used the forest to hunt, fish and engage in small-scale tillage, the settlers laid siege to it, chopping down the trees and shooting the deer to make room for livestock, crops, towns and mills. However much latter-day Greens may romanticize the Indian way of life, there is no doubt as to which was the more productive. It took a lot of land to support a small number of Indians but comparatively little land to produce a swarm of whites. The invaders cut roads, dug canals and transformed the countryside to the point where Indians were soon reduced to harmless curiosities to be gaped at by tourists on their way to the Niagara Falls some 200 miles to the west. They were rendered literally homeless. By 1810 whites outnumbered Oneidas in their own territory by 60 to 1.

Differing land-use policies both reflected and reinforced differing political practices that were no less crippling. The Yankees flooding into the Mohawk Valley during this period were descendants of English Puritans who, a century or two earlier, had all but invented the concept of the modern businessman. They adhered to a written culture of deeds, treaties and contracts, one in which time was money and the purpose of a meeting was not to engage in empty palaver but to get to the point in as short order as possible. That of the Indian was the opposite: an oral culture based on eloquence, consensus and the constant reaffirmation of common values. Where one was restless and dynamic, the other was traditional. Where one group had leaders empowered to represent the larger community, the other was leery of the very idea of leadership and representation. Instead of deferring to the majority, dissidents in an Indian community always had the option of heading off into the forest vastness and forming another band of their own. Rather than confronting their opponents, they simply melted away. This made for a more harmonious communal existence, particularly in contrast to the settlers, who were always competing and arguing among themselves. But it also meant that there was no “there” there from a Euro-American perspective, no duly constituted leaders with whom they could wheel and deal and get down to brass tacks. Indeed, the lack of what whites would regard as a firm political structure meant that there were numerous factions–warriors, elders, women agriculturalists and so on–that they could play off against one another, which made their policy of divide and conquer all the easier.

Land-use differences also reflected different forms of technology. Indians had long since entered the Iron Age and were expert in the use of knives and guns. But they were nearly helpless before the dual threat of the sawmill and the tavern. One robbed them of their forests while the other robbed them of their wits. “Drink no strong water,” one Oneida advised his fellow tribesmen. “It makes you mice for white men, who are cats. Many a meal have they eaten of you.” But the Indians would not, or could not, resist, which is why state politicians were careful to bring along a barrel of rum when negotiating land sales. Land-use practices also shaped notions of law and justice. As a consensus society, Indians were less concerned with holding individuals to account than with smoothing over differences in the interests of social cohesion. If one Indian killed another, it was up to the victim’s family to exact revenge or the other side to make amends by offering gifts and “covering the grave.” Both processes were highly ritualized. One missionary, according to Taylor, recalled seeing “a confronted Iroquois murderer calmly sit down to sing his death song while the avenger smoked a pipe for twenty minutes before plunging a tomahawk into the singer’s skull.” This was strange, certainly, but white notions of justice were in some ways even stranger. In 1791 the Iroquois leader Joseph Brant complained, in reference to an earlier murder, that “if a white man kills an Indian, the Crime is passed by with impunity, but if an Indian kills a white man, he is to be instantly delivered up to Justice.” Federal Indian Commissioner Timothy Pickering noted that it was a maxim along the frontier “never to hang a white man for killing an Indian” and declared that the settlers were “far more savage & revengeful” than the so-called savages themselves. In western Pennsylvania, murders of Native Americans “became so frequent,” according to Taylor, “that, in 1796, the secretary of war established $200 as the standard price for an Indian life.”

While professing Christianity, settlers thus flouted the Golden Rule. As shocking as this was, Taylor notes, Indians would not have liked the criminal justice system any better had it been a model of evenhandedness. Whereas whites believed in a system that was formal and adversarial, Indians preferred one that was up close and personal. Harmony, social reinforcement and traditionalism were the goals, not justice in the modern sense of the word. But however attractive it may now seem, traditionalism had its dark side. Devastated by land losses and alcoholism, Indians in western New York increasingly returned to traditional religious practices after 1800 in an effort to restore a semblance of the old social balance. An Indian prophet named Handsome Lake gained a following by blaming witchcraft for many of the Indians’ woes, and in 1804 an Indian council convicted two local women of dealing in poisonous potions and magic fetishes. The local chief promptly dispatched both by tomahawk. Taylor does not say what happened to the executioner, but it is difficult to know whether prosecuting him would have made things better or worse. Obviously, local officials could not stand by while a self-proclaimed prophet imposed a reign of terror. But preventing him meant interfering with the few remaining structures propping up Indian society. In the name of justice, the result would have been to plunge Indians all the more deeply into alcoholism, superstition and despair.

But there was a way out of this predicament via the construction of a sovereign authority over both settlers and Indians, an authority capable of holding the first group back while easing the second along the path to modernity. The task would not be easy. White racism was ferocious, while the Indians, especially the young males, were hostile to the slightest suggestion of change. They saw agriculture as women’s work and viewed hiring themselves out to work for wages on neighboring farms as the deepest humiliation. Not unlike the European warrior class, they were aristocrats who viewed labor with disdain and believed that hunting and fighting were the only fit occupations for men of their ilk. Attitudes like these may have worked when the Indians had the forest all to themselves, but now that this was no longer the case, they were leading to catastrophe.

The new federal government set out to establish such an authority following ratification of the Constitution in 1788. Pickering, a rock-ribbed Federalist from Massachusetts, was Washington’s choice to head up negotiations with the Iroquois. Among Pickering’s first acts was to prohibit land sales without federal approval. Secretary of War Henry Knox, the prime mover behind the new Indian policy–and who once summed up his attitude toward rapacious state politicians with the words “Smite them, smite them, in the name of God and the people”–moved to place Indians under federal jurisdiction. In 1790 a Federalist-controlled Congress invalidated land purchases without federal approval. In 1793 it passed another law, imposing criminal penalties of $1,000 in fines or a year’s imprisonment for violations.

As impressive as such initiatives were, Federalist policies eventually petered out. In 1795 the Washington Administration backed away from a showdown with New York over land purchases, which were somehow still continuing. The Administration had hoped for greater state cooperation when Federalist John Jay replaced George Clinton as governor in 1795, but Jay deferred to the land grabbers in the state legislature. While a supporter of the new federal government, Jay was also “the proud author,” in Taylor’s words, of New York’s new state Constitution, which provided no authority for blocking an act of the state legislature once it had survived a veto by a special “Council of Revision.” The coup de grâce came when Jefferson and his fellow “Republicans” (soon to be known as Democrats) swept the Federalists from office in the election of 1800. Although historian Sean Wilentz lauds Jefferson’s triumph as a “democratic revolution” in his massive new study The Rise of American Democracy, it was something very different: a victory for states’ rights advocates, Southern slaveholders and their racist-populist allies in the North and West. Taylor notes that the Federalists, despite their faults, were at least “willing (in the short term) to treat Indian sovereignty with some respect.” The Jeffersonians, by contrast, “were eager, wherever possible, to dissolve diplomatic relations and to subject natives to the laws of particular states.” The new President made his views known in 1803: “We presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible, that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them.” The message to his ally Clinton, back in the governorship after a brief Federalist interregnum, was unmistakable: New York could proceed with its expropriatory land policy with federal blessings.

The Divided Ground nicely complements Taylor’s 1995 study William Cooper’s Town, which received both a Pulitzer Prize and a Bancroft. Whereas the first exhaustively examined settler politics and society in frontier New York from the Revolutionary period on, the second turns its gaze on the Indians, whose demise allowed the settlers to flourish. William Cooper’s Town was successful because it was structured as a portrait of Cooper and his family, including his son, James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels helped create the myth of the noble but doomed Indian. The Divided Ground, perhaps because it lacks an equally dramatic focus, seems excessively microcosmic. While presenting us with a wealth of data about Indian land sales, it tells us less of what we would like to know about policy debates at the federal level or of Indian-settler relations elsewhere in the new republic or, indeed, elsewhere in the world. After all, this was not the only spot in which Europeans and aboriginal peoples were encountering one another. The eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries would see many such collisions, in Central and South America, in Australia and the Pacific islands, in Siberia under both the czars and the Soviets, and so on. It would be nice to know if the experience in western New York was exceptionally bad or more or less the rule, but Taylor offers little in the way of context or comparison.

Still, what he does tell us is damning enough. Following their victory over France in the Seven Years’ War (known in these parts as the French and Indian War of 1754-63), the British found themselves masters of what Taylor describes as a “composite” empire in North America consisting of British colonists along the Atlantic seaboard, French settlers along the St. Lawrence, Africans in southern coastal areas and various Indian tribes deeper in the interior. London regarded all of them as so many pawns to be moved about the imperial chessboard. In order to soothe ruffled feathers in Quebec, for instance, the British awarded it control over the entire Ohio Valley in 1774 with little thought as to the effect on neighboring New England. New Englanders were aghast. They coveted the territory themselves and were now astonished to see it in the hands of French Papists. In moving to the New World, they, like other English colonists, had assumed that they retained all the rights of freeborn Englishmen back home. But even though they had been on the winning side of the Seven Years’ War, they now found themselves being treated in the same way as the losers, or even a bit worse.

We are required to recalibrate our view of the revolution that erupted a short time later as a consequence. Rather than a revolt against imperialism, it was a revolt against being denied the full fruits of imperialist victory. Rather than a struggle for equality, it was a struggle by British North Americans for primacy among the various New World elements contending for control. Thus, the Continental Congress maintained immediately after the war that the Indians, having for the most part sided with the British, would have to bow to the dictates of their American conquerors and accept their fate as a defeated people. Siding with the Patriots was no guarantee of fair treatment, as the Oneidas were to discover. The Anglos were in control, which meant that all others would be reduced to drawers of water, hewers of wood. The Federalists strove for something a bit more equitable and civilized, but following Jefferson’s “Revolution of 1800,” the old “conquest theory,” as Taylor calls it, was back in force. Although Taylor does not follow the story line beyond the 1810s, the conquest theory continued right up to the Civil War and, one way or another, has been with us ever since (the war in Iraq being merely the latest example of its externalization). Not only did the Indians pay a terrible price as a result, but so did blacks and other minorities. It is a legacy that no one wants to talk about, at least none of the oligarchs currently in control of the attenuated American Republic, which is why the old myths about freedom-loving patriots continue to hold sway.

___________

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“COVERING THE EARTH WITH DARKNESS”

Three centuries of persecution of the pagans

(Original Source: Vlasis Rassias, Demolish Them! … Published in Greek, Athens 1994)

314 Immediately after its full legalisation, the Christian Church attacks non-Christians. The Council of Ancyra denounces the worship of Goddess Artemis.

324 The emperor Constantine declares Christianity as the only official religion of the Roman Empire. In Dydima, Minor Asia, he sacks the Oracle of the god Apollo and tortures the pagan priests to death. He also evicts all non-Christian peoples from Mount Athos and destroys all the local Hellenic temples.

325 Nicene Council. The godman gets a promotion: ‘Christ is Divine’

326 Constantine, following the instructions of his mother Helen, destroys the temple of the god Asclepius in Aigeai Cilicia and many temples of the goddess Aphrodite in Jerusalem, Aphaca, Mambre, Phoenicia, Baalbek, etc.

330 Constantine steals the treasures and statues of the pagan temples of Greece to decorate Constantinople, the new capital of his Empire.

335 Constantine sacks many pagan temples in Asia Minor and Palestine and orders the execution by crucifixion of “all magicians and soothsayers.” Martyrdom of the neoplatonist philosopher Sopatrus.

341 Constantius II (Flavius Julius Constantius) persecutes “all the soothsayers and the Hellenists.” Many gentile Hellenes are either imprisoned or executed.

346 New large scale persecutions against non-Christian peoples in Constantinople. Banishment of the famous orator Libanius accused as a “magician”.

353 An edict of Constantius orders the death penalty for all kind of worship through sacrifice and “idols”.

354 A new edict orders the closing of all the pagan temples. Some of them are profaned and turned into brothels or gambling rooms.

Execution of pagan priests begins.

A new edict of Constantius orders the destruction of the pagan temples and the execution of all “idolaters”.

First burning of libraries in various cities of the empire.

The first lime factories are organised next to the closed pagan temples. A major part of the holy architecture of the pagans is turned into lime.

357 Constantius outlaws all methods of divination (astrology not excluded).

359 In Skythopolis, Syria, the Christians organise the first death camps for the torture and executions of the arrested non-Christians from all around the empire.

361 to 363 Religious tolerance and restoration of the pagan cults is declared in Constantinople (11th December 361) by the pagan emperor Julian (Flavius Claudius Julianus).

363 Assassination of Julian (26th June).

364 Emperor Jovian orders the burning of the Library of Antioch.

An Imperial edict (11th September) orders the death penalty for all those that worship their ancestral gods or practice divination (“sileat omnibus perpetuo divinandi curiositas”).

Three different edicts (4th February, 9th September, 23rd December) order the confiscation of all properties of the pagan temples and the death penalty for participation in pagan rituals, even private ones.

The Church Council of Laodicea (Phrygia – western Asia Minor) orders that religious observances are to be conducted on Sunday and not on Saturday. Sunday becomes the new Sabbath. The practice of staying at home and resting on Saturday declared sinful and anathema to Christ.

365 An imperial edict from Emperor Valens, a zealous Arian Christian (17th November), forbids pagan officers of the army to command Christian soldiers.

370 Valens orders a tremendous persecution of non-Christian peoples in all the Eastern Empire. In Antioch, among many other non-Christians, the ex-governor Fidustius and the priests Hilarius and Patricius are executed. The philosopher Simonides is burned alive and the philosopher Maximus is decapitated. All the friends of Julian are persecuted (Orebasius, Sallustius, Pegasius etc.).

Tons of books are burnt in the squares of the cities of the Eastern Empire.

372 Valens orders the governor of Minor Asia to exterminate all the Hellenes and all documents of their wisdom.

373 New prohibition of all divination methods is issued. The term “pagan” (pagani, villagers, equivalent to the modern insult, “peasants”) is introduced by the Christians to demean non-believers.

375 The temple of Asclepius in Epidaurus, Greece, is closed down by the Christians.

380 On 27th February Christianity becomes the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire by an edict of the Emperor Flavius Theodosius, requiring that:

“All the various nations which are subject to our clemency and moderation should continue in the profession of that religion which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter.”

The non-Christians are called “loathsome, heretics, stupid and blind”.

In another edict, Theodosius calls “insane” those that do not believe to the Christian God and outlaws all disagreement with the Church dogmas.

Ambrosius, bishop of Milan, begins the destruction of pagan temples of his area. The Christian priests lead the hungry mob against the temple of goddess Demeter in Eleusis and try to lynch the hierophants Nestorius and Priskus. The 95 year old hierophant Nestorius ends the Eleusinian Mysteries and announces “the predominance of mental darkness over the human race.”

381 At the Council of Constantinople the ‘Holy Spirit’ is declared ‘Divine’ (thus sanctioning a triune god). On 2nd May, Theodosius deprives of all their rights any Christians who return to the pagan religion. Throughout the Eastern Empire the pagan temples and libraries are looted or burned down. On 21st December, Theodosius outlaws visits to Hellenic temples.

In Constantinople, the Temple of Aphrodite is turned into a brothel and the temples of the Sun and Artemis to stables.

382 “Hellelujah” (“Glory to Yahweh”) is imposed in the Christian mass.

384 Theodosius orders the Praetorian Prefect Maternus Cynegius, a dedicated Christian, to cooperate with local bishops and destroy the temples of the pagans in Northern Greece and Minor Asia.

385 to 388 Prefect Maternus Cynegius, encouraged by his fanatic wife, and bishop ‘Saint’ Marcellus with his gangs, scour the countryside and sack and destroy hundreds of Hellenic temples, shrines and altars. Among others they destroy the temple of Edessa, the Cabeireion of Imbros, the temple of Zeus in Apamea, the temple of Apollo in Dydima and all the temples of Palmyra.

Thousands of innocent pagans from all sides of the empire suffer martyrdom in the notorious death camps of Skythopolis.

386 Theodosius outlaws the care of the sacked pagan temples.

388 Public talks on religious subjects are outlawed by Theodosius. The old orator Libanius sends his famous epistle “Pro Templis” to Theodosius with the hope that the few remaining Hellenic temples will be respected and spared.

389 to 390 All non-Christian calendars and dating-methods are outlawed. Hordes of fanatic hermits from the desert flood the cities of the Middle East and Egypt and destroy statues, altars, libraries and pagan temples, and lynch the pagans. Theophilus, Patriarch of Alexandria, starts heavy persecutions against non-Christian peoples, turning the temple of Dionysius into a Christian church, burning down the Mithraeum of the city, destroying the temple of Zeus and burlesques the pagan priests before they are killed by stoning. The Christian mob profanes the cult images.

391 On 24th February, a new edict of Theodosius prohibits not only visits to pagan temples but also looking at the vandalised statues. New heavy persecutions occur all around the empire. In Alexandria, Egypt, pagans, led by the philosopher Olympius, revolt and after some street fights they lock themselves inside the fortified temple of the god Serapis (the Serapeion). After a violent siege, the Christians take over the building, demolish it, burn its famous library and profane the cult images.

392 On 8th November, Theodosius outlaws all the non-Christian rituals and names them “superstitions of the gentiles” (gentilicia superstitio). New full scale persecutions are ordered against pagans. The Mysteries of Samothrace are ended and the priests slaughtered. In Cyprus the local bishop “Saint” Epiphanius and “Saint” Tychon destroy almost all the temples of the island and exterminate thousands of non-Christians. The local Mysteries of goddess Aphrodite are ended. Theodosius’s edict declares:

“The ones that won’t obey pater Epiphanius have no right to keep living in that island.”

The pagans revolt against the Emperor and the Church in Petra, Aeropolis, Rafia, Gaza, Baalbek and other cities of the Middle East.

393 The Pythian Games, the Aktia Games and the Olympic Games are outlawed as part of the Hellenic “idolatry”. The Christians sack the temples of Olympia.

395 Two new edicts (22nd July and 7th August) cause new persecutions against pagans. Rufinus, the eunuch Prime Minister of Emperor Flavius Arcadius directs the hordes of baptised Goths (led by Alaric) to the country of the Hellenes. Encouraged by Christian monks the barbarians sack and burn many cities (Dion, Delphi, Megara, Corinth, Pheneos, Argos, Nemea, Lycosoura, Sparta, Messene, Phigaleia, Olympia, etc.), slaughter or enslave innumerable gentile Hellenes and burn down all the temples. Among others, they burn down the Eleusinian Sanctuary and burn alive all its priests (including the hierophant of Mithras Hilarius).

396 On 7th December, a new edict by Arcadius orders that paganism be treated as high Treason. Imprisonment of the few remaining pagan priests and hierophants.

397 “Demolish them!” Flavius Arcadius orders that all the still standing pagan temples be demolished.

398 The 4th Church Council of Carthage prohibits everybody, including Christian bishops, from studying pagan books. Porphyrius, bishop of Gaza, demolishes almost all the pagan temples of his city (except nine of them that remain active).

399 With a new edict (13th July) Flavius Arcadius orders all remaining pagan temples, mainly in the countryside, be immediately demolished.

400 Bishop Nicetas destroys the Oracle of Dionysus in Vesai and baptises all the non-Christians of this area.

401 The Christian mob of Carthage lynches non-Christians and destroys temples and “idols”. In Gaza too, the local bishop “Saint” Porphyrius sends his followers to lynch pagans and to demolish the remaining nine still active temples of the city.

The 15th Council of Chalcedon orders all the Christians that still keep good relations with their non-Christian relatives to be excommunicated (even after their death).

405 John Chrysostom sends hordes of grey-dressed monks armed with clubs and iron bars to destroy the “idols” in all the cities of Palestine.

406 John Chrysostom collects funds from rich Christian women to financially support the demolition of the Hellenic temples. In Ephesus he orders the destruction of the famous temple of Artemis. In Salamis, Cyprus, “Saints” Epiphanius and Eutychius continue the persecutions of the pagans and the total destruction of their temples and sanctuaries.

407 A new edict outlaws once more all the non-Christian acts of worship.

408 The emperor of the Western Empire, Honorius, and the emperor of the Eastern Empire, Arcadius, order all the sculptures of the pagan temples to be either destroyed or to be taken away. Private ownership of pagan sculpture is also outlawed. The local bishops lead new heavy persecutions against the pagans and new book burning. The judges that have pity for the pagans are also persecuted. “Saint” Augustine massacres hundreds of protesting pagans in Calama, Algeria.

409 Another edict orders all methods of divination including astrology to be punished by death.

415 In Alexandria, the Christian mob, urged by the bishop Cyril, attacks a few days before the Judeo-Christian Pascha (Easter) and cuts to pieces the famous and beautiful philosopher Hypatia. The pieces of her body, carried around by the Christian mob through the streets of Alexandria, are finally burned together with her books in a place called Cynaron.

On 30th August, new persecutions start against all the pagan priests of North Africa who end their lives either crucified or burned alive. Emperor Theodosius II expels the Jews from Alexandria.

416 The inquisitor Hypatius, alias “The Sword of God”, exterminates the last pagans of Bithynia. In Constantinople (7th December) all non-Christian army officers, public employees and judges are dismissed.

423 Emperor Theodosius II declares (8th June) that the religion of the pagans is nothing more than “demon worship” and orders all those who persist in practicing it to be punished by imprisonment and torture.

429 The temple of goddess Athena (Parthenon) on the Acropolis of Athens is sacked. The Athenian pagans are persecuted.

431 Council of Ephesus (“Robber Synod”). Promotion for the godman – “Christ is complete God and complete man.”

435 On 14th November, a new edict by Theodosius II orders the death penalty for all “heretics” and pagans of the empire. Only Judaism is considered a legal non-Christian religion.

438 Theodosius II issues an new edict (31st January) against the pagans, incriminating their “idolatry” as the reason of a recent plague!

440 to 450 The Christians demolish all the monuments, altars and temples of Athens, Olympia, and other Greek cities.

book burning

448 Theodosius II orders all non-Christian books to be burned.

450 All the temples of Aphrodisias (the City of the Goddess Aphrodite) are demolished and all its libraries burned down. The city is renamed Stavroupolis (City of the Cross).

451 Council of Chalcedon. New edict by Theodosius II (4th November) emphasises that “idolatry” is punished by death. Assertion of orthodox doctrine over the ‘Monophysites’ – ‘JC has single, divine nature.’

457 to 491 Sporadic persecutions against the pagans of the Eastern Empire. Among others, the physician Jacobus and the philosopher Gessius are executed. Severianus, Herestios, Zosimus, Isidorus and others are tortured and imprisoned. The proselytiser Conon and his followers exterminate the last non-Christians of Imbros Island, Northeast Aegean Sea. The last worshippers of Lavranius Zeus are exterminated in Cyprus.

482 to 488 The majority of the pagans of Minor Asia are exterminated after a desperate revolt against the emperor and the Church.

486 More “underground” pagan priests are discovered, arrested, burlesqued, tortured and executed in Alexandria, Egypt.

full body baptism

515 Baptism becomes obligatory even for those that already say they are Christians.

The emperor of Constantinople, Anastasius, orders the massacre of the pagans in the Arabian city Zoara and the demolition of the temple of local god Theandrites.

523 Emperor Justin I outlaws the Arian heresy and campaigns to suppress Arianism everywhere.

528 Emperor Justinian outlaws the “alternative” Olympian Games of Antioch. He also orders the execution—by fire, crucifixion, tearing to pieces by wild beasts or cutting to pieces by iron nails—of all who practice “sorcery, divination, magic or idolatry” and prohibits all teachings by the pagans (“the ones suffering from the blasphemous insanity of the Hellenes”).

529 Justinian outlaws the Athenian Philosophical Academy and has its property confiscated.

532 The inquisitor Ioannis Asiacus, a fanatical monk, leads a crusade against the pagans of Minor Asia.

542 Justinian allows the inquisitor Ioannis Asiacus to forcibly convert the pagans of Phrygia, Caria and Lydia in Asia Minor. Within 35 years of this crusade, 99 churches and 12 monasteries are built on the sites of demolished pagan temples.

546 Hundreds of pagans are put to death in Constantinople by the inquisitor Ioannis Asiacus.

556 Justinian orders the notorious inquisitor Amantius to go to Antioch, to find, arrest, torture and exterminate the last non-Christians of the city and burn all the private libraries down.

562 Mass arrests, burlesquing, tortures, imprisonments and executions of gentile Hellenes in Athens, Antioch, Palmyra and Constantinople.

578 to 582 The Christians torture and crucify Hellenes all around the Eastern Empire, and exterminate the last non-Christians of Heliopolis (Baalbek).

580 The Christian inquisitors attack a secret temple of Zeus in Antioch. The priest commits suicide, but the rest of the pagans are arrested. All the prisoners, the Vice Governor Anatolius included, are tortured and sent to Constantinople to face trial. Sentenced to death they are thrown to the lions. The wild animals being unwilling to tear them to pieces, they end up crucified. Their dead bodies are dragged in the streets by the Christian mob and afterwards thrown unburied in the dump.

583 New persecutions against the gentile Hellenes by Emperor Maurice.

590 In all the Eastern Empire the Christian accusers “discover” pagan conspiracies. New storm of torture and executions.

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Poetry: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89).

Andromeda

Now Time’s Andromeda on this rock rude,

With not her either beauty’s equal or

Her injury’s, looks off by both horns of shore,

Her flower, her piece of being, doomed dragon’s food.

Time past she has been attempted and pursued

By many blows and banes; but now hears roar

A wilder beast from West than all were, more

Rife in her wrongs, more lawless, and more lewd.

Her Perseus linger and leave her tó her extremes?—

Pillowy air he treads a time and hangs

His thoughts on her, forsaken that she seems,

All while her patience, morselled into pangs,

Mounts; then to alight disarming, no one dreams,

With Gorgon’s gear and barebill, thongs and fangs.

————

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

————

Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves

EARNEST, earthless, equal, attuneable, ‘ vaulty, voluminous, … stupendous

Evening strains to be tíme’s vást, ‘ womb-of-all, home-of-all, hearse-of-all night.

Her fond yellow hornlight wound to the west, ‘ her wild hollow hoarlight hung to the height

Waste; her earliest stars, earl-stars, ‘ stárs principal, overbend us,

Fíre-féaturing heaven. For earth ‘ her being has unbound, her dapple is at an end, as-

tray or aswarm, all throughther, in throngs; ‘ self ín self steedèd and páshed—qúite

Disremembering, dísmémbering ‘ áll now. Heart, you round me right

With: Óur évening is over us; óur night ‘ whélms, whélms, ánd will end us.

Only the beak-leaved boughs dragonish ‘ damask the tool-smooth bleak light; black,

Ever so black on it. Óur tale, O óur oracle! ‘ Lét life, wáned, ah lét life wind

Off hér once skéined stained véined variety ‘ upon, áll on twó spools; párt, pen, páck

Now her áll in twó flocks, twó folds—black, white; ‘ right, wrong; reckon but, reck but, mind

But thése two; wáre of a wórld where bút these ‘ twó tell, each off the óther; of a rack

Where, selfwrung, selfstrung, sheathe- and shelterless, ‘ thóughts agaínst thoughts ín groans grínd.

————–

Moonrise

I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, ‘ in the white and the walk of the morning:

The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe ‘ of a finger-nail held to the candle,

Or paring of paradisaïcal fruit, ‘ lovely in waning but lustreless,

Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, ‘ of dark Maenefa the mountain;

A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, ‘ entangled him, not quit utterly.

This was the prized, the desirable sight, ‘ unsought, presented so easily,

Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, ‘ eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

————–

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

_______

Hopkins was born in Stratford, Essex. He was the eldest of nine children, the son of Catherine and Manley Hopkins, an insurance agent and consul-general for Hawaii based in London. He was educated at Highgate School and then Balliol College, Oxford, where he studied classics. It was at Oxford that he forged the friendship with Robert Bridges which would be of importance in his development as a poet, and posthumous acclaim. He began his time at Oxford as a keen socialiser and prolific poet but he seems to have alarmed himself with this change in his behaviour and became more studious and recorded his sins in his diary. He became a follower of Edward Pusey and a member of the Oxford Movement and in 1866, following the example of John Henry Newman, he converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism. After his graduation in 1867 Newman found him a teaching post but the following year he decided to enter the priesthood, pausing only to visit Switzerland.

Influenced by his father who also wrote poetry, Hopkins wrote poetry while young, winning a prize for his poetry while at grammar school. His decision to become a Jesuit led him to burn much of his early poetry as he felt it incompatible with his vocation. Writing would remain something of a concern for him as he felt that his interest in poetry prevented him from wholly devoting himself to his religion. He continued to write a detailed journal until 1874. Unable to suppress his desire to describe the natural world, he also wrote music, sketched, and for church occasions he wrote some “verses,” as he called them. He would later write sermons and other religious pieces. In 1875 he was moved, once more, to write a lengthy poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland. This work was inspired by the Deutschland, a naval disaster in which 157 people died including five Franciscan nuns who had been leaving Germany due to harsh anti-Catholic laws. The work displays both the religious concerns and some of the unusual meter and rhythms of his subsequent poetry not present in his few remaining early works. It not only depicts the dramatic events and heroic deeds but also tells of the poet’s reconciling the terrible events with God’s higher purpose. The poem was accepted but not printed by a Jesuit publication, and this rejection fueled his ambivalence about his poetry.

Hopkins chose the austere and restrictive life of a Jesuit and was at times gloomy. The brilliant student who had left Oxford with a first class honours degree failed his final theology exam. This failure meant that, although ordained in 1877, Hopkins would not likely progress in the order. Though rigorous and sometimes unpleasant, his life during Jesuit training had at least some stability; the uncertain and varied work after ordination was even harder on his sensibilities. He served in various parishes in England and Scotland and taught at Mount St Mary’s College, Sheffield, and Stonyhurst College, Lancashire. In 1884 he became professor of Greek literature at University College Dublin. His Englishness and his disagreement with the Irish politics of the time, as well as his own small stature (5’2″), unprepossessing nature and own personal oddities meant that he was not a particularly effective teacher. This as well as his isolation in Ireland deepened his gloom and his poems of the time, such as I Wake and Feel the Fell of Dark, reflected this. They came to be known as the “terrible sonnets,” not because of their quality but because according to Hopkins’ friend Canon Dixon, they reached the “terrible crystal,” meaning that they crystallized feeling.

After suffering ill health for several years and bouts of diarrhoea, Hopkins died of typhoid fever in 1889 and was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. (Wikipedia)

(Portrait of Miranda)

———

Sir Frank Dicksee had an uncanny eye for beauty; his works have been favourites of mine for many years. He doesn’t get much mention in the US, but is well loved in Europe.

The Portrait of Miranda (above) is one that truly moves me. I have left the picture quite large for your enjoyment. I love the capturing of spirit and beauty in this portrait. I think I fell in love with her in college. She is just that kinda women, eternally captivating!

Whilst on the beauty trail; I have included a short story from Ireland talking about our close relatives, the fairies. Also, we have 2 poems by William Morris. As usual, I go looking for the arcane, and find it on the off-chance.

I hope all is well in your life, and that the world soon awakes.

Blessings,

Gwyllm

———

On the Grill:

The Links

The Article: FRANK MARTIN AND THE FAIRIES

Poetry: Two Poems by William Morris

The Artist: Sir Frank Dicksee

Francis Bernard Dicksee was born in London on the 27th November 1853, the son of Thomas Francis Dicksee (1819-1895), painter and illustrator, and his wife Eliza nee Bernard. His uncle was John Robert Dicksee (1817-1905), another painter of some note, as was his sister Margaret (1858-1903), and brother Herbert Thomas (1862-1942). The family lived in the Bloomsbury area of London. Young Frank was initially trained in art by his father, before enrolling at the Royal Academy Schools in 1870. Amongst the more notable of visiting lecturers at the time were Frederic Leighton, and Millais. Dicksee was an excellent student, quickly marked out for a promising future, and won many distinctions, and in 1875, the year he first exhibited at the Academy a Gold Medal.

Like many other artists of the nineteenth century, his early career was spent in book and magazine illustration, including the Cornhill magazine. In 1877 the painter exhibited his famous picture “Harmony” at the Academy, where it was a great success, and was bought by the Trustees of The Chantrey Bequest for 350 guineas.

Frank Dicksee’s artistic home remained the Royal Academy throughout his career, and he became ARA in 1881, and was elected a full RA ten years later. “Startled” was his Diploma work. The painter’s art, and taste were totally in sympathy with that of the public, and his career at this time was one of unbroken success. Dicksee’s pictures were often of historical scenes, involving drama, and sentiment. He was a competent portrait painter of men, and a great portrait painter of attractive women – happy was the fashionable lady who was painted by Dicksee!

His wonderful portraits of women had a charm of their own, uniting soft-focus, elegance, charm, warm colours, and excellent drapery painting. In 1927 the artist painted his famous portrait “Elsa, Daughter of William Hall Esq.” This brilliant portrait captures the charming personality of the young sitter, the sheen of her silk evening dress is marvellously painted. This picture was painted in the last year of the artist’s life, and shows no deterioration in his ability.His last portrait of a woman was of Mrs Frank S Pershouse in 1928. Dicksee lived in St John’s Wood, and remained a sophisticated, and elegant bachelor.

I have not heard any comment regarding his sexuality. He was noted for his good manners, and kindness. Rather surprisingly the painter was elected President of the Royal Academy in 1924, succeeding Sir Aston Webb who had retired under the recently-introduced maximum age rule. This appointment was the subject of considerable reservation on the part of more modern artists, many of whom were had little real artistic talent, who thought of the craftsmanship and aesthetic beauty of Dicksee’s work with disdain. In the event it was a brilliant success, with his social graces and integrity more than compensating for what was regarded as the old-fashioned nature of his art.

Dicksee was knighted in 1925, and became KCVO in 1927. He was a Trustee of the British Museum, and the National Portrait Gallery, and was awarded an Honorary Oxford Degree in 1927. He was also the President of the Artists Benevolent Foundation. Sir Frank Dicksee died suddenly on the 17th October 1928. A retrospective exhibition of his works was held at the Royal Academy in 1933. I have, for a considerable time now, been trying to find more information about Dicksee the man, and his career, and happily my latest efforts have met with some success.

___________

The Links:

UFO Casebook

Russia, Anarchist Mayday in Vladivostok

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Rumsfeld’s Latin American Wild West Show

Dolphins ‘know each other’s names’

_____________

(Romeo & Juliet)

_________

FRANK MARTIN AND THE FAIRIES

William Carleton

Martin was a thin, pale man, when I saw him, of a sickly look, and a constitution naturally feeble. His hair was a light auburn, his beard mostly unshaven, and his hands of a singular delicacy and whiteness, owing, I dare say, as much to the soft and easy nature of his employment as to his infirm health. In everything else he was as sensible, sober, and rational as any other man; but on the topic of fairies, the man’s mania was peculiarly strong and immovable. Indeed, I remember that the expression of his eyes was singularly wild and hollow, and his long narrow temples sallow and emaciated.

Now, this man did not lead an unhappy life, nor did the malady he laboured under seem to be productive of either pain or terror to him, although one might be apt to imagine otherwise. On the contrary, he and the fairies maintained the most friendly intimacy, and their dialogues–which I fear were woefully one-sided ones–must have been a source of great pleasure to him, for they were conducted with much mirth and laughter, on his part at least.

“Well, Frank, when did you see the fairies?”

“Whist! there’s two dozen of them in the shop (the weaving shop) this minute. There’s a little ould fellow sittin’ on the top of the sleys, an’ all to be rocked while I’m weavin’. The sorrow’s in them, but they’re the greatest little skamers alive, so they are. See, there’s another of them at my dressin’ noggin. 1 Go out o’ that, you shingawn; or, bad cess to me, if you don’t, but I’ll lave you a mark. Ha! cut, you thief you!”

“Frank, am’t you afeard o’ them?”

“Is it me! Arra, what ud’ I be afeard o’ them for? Sure they have no power over me.”

“And why haven’t they, Frank?”

“Because I was baptised against them.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Why, the priest that christened me was tould by my father, to put in the proper prayer against the fairies–an’ a priest can’t refuse it when he’s asked–an’ he did so. Begorra, it’s well for me that he did–(let the tallow alone, you little glutton–see, theres a weeny thief o’ them aitin’ my tallow)–becaise, you see, it was their intention to make me king o’ the fairies.”

“Is it possible?”

“Devil a lie in it. Sure you may ax them, an’ they’ll tell you.”

“What size are they, Frank?”

“Oh, little wee fellows, with green coats, an’ the purtiest little shoes ever you seen. There’s two of them–both ould acquaintances o’ mine–runnin’ along the yarn-beam. That ould fellow with the bob-wig is called Jim jam, an’ the other chap, with the three-cocked hat, is called Nickey Nick. Nickey plays the pipes. Nickey, give us a tune, or I’ll malivogue you–come now, ‘Lough Erne Shore’. Whist, now–listen!”

The poor fellow, though weaving as fast as he could all the time, yet bestowed every possible mark of attention to the music, and seemed to enjoy it as much as if it had been real.

But who can tell whether that which we look upon as a privation may not after all be a fountain of increased happiness, greater, perhaps, than any which we ourselves enjoy? I forget who the poet is who says–

“Mysterious are thy laws;

The vision’s finer than the view;

Her landscape Nature never drew

So fair as Fancy draws.”

Many a time, when a mere child, not more than six or seven years of age, have I gone as far as Frank’s weaving-shop, in order, with a heart divided between curiosity and fear, to listen to his conversation with the good people. From morning till night his tongue was going almost as incessantly as his shuttle; and it was well known that at night, whenever he awoke out of his sleep, the first thing he did was to put out his hand, and push them, as it were, off his bed.

“Go out o’ this, you thieves, you–go out o’ this now, an’ let me alone. Nickey, is this any time to be playing the pipes, and me wants to sleep? Go off, now–troth if yez do, you’ll see what I’ll give yez tomorrow. Sure I’ll be makin’ new dressin’s; and if yez behave decently, maybe I’ll lave yez the scrapin’ o’ the pot. There now. Och! poor things, they’re dacent crathurs. Sure they’re all gone, barrin’ poor Red-cap, that doesn’t like to lave me.” And then the harmless monomaniac would fall back into what we trust was an innocent slumber.

About this time there was said to have occurred a very remarkable circumstance, which gave poor Frank a vast deal of importance among the neighbours. A man named Frank Thomas, the same in whose house Mickey M’Rorey held the first dance at which I ever saw him, as detailed in a former sketch; this man, I say, had a child sick, but of what complaint I cannot now remember, nor is it of any importance. One of the gables of Thomas’s house was built against, or rather into, a Forth or Rath, called Towny, or properly Tonagh Forth. It was said to be haunted by the fairies, and what gave it a character peculiarly wild in my eyes was, that there were on the southern side of it two or three little green mounds, which were said to be the graves of unchristened children, over which it was considered dangerous and unlucky to pass. At all events, the season was mid-summer; and one evening about dusk, during the illness of the child, the noise of a hand-saw was heard upon the Forth. This was considered rather strange, and, after a little time, a few of those who were assembled at Frank Thomas’s went to see who it could be that was sawing in such a place, or what they could be sawing at so late an hour, for every one knew that nobody in the whole country about them would dare to cut down the few white-thorns that grew upon the Forth. On going to examine, however, judge of their surprise, when, after surrounding and searching the whole place, they could discover no trace of either saw or sawyer. In fact, with the exception of themselves, there was no one, either natural or supernatural, visible. They then returned to the house, and had scarcely sat down, when it was heard again within ten yards of them. Another examination of the premises took place, but with equal success. Now, however, while standing on the Forth, they heard the sawing in a little hollow, about a hundred and fifty yards below them, which was completely exposed to their view. but they could see nobody. A party of them immediately went down to ascertain, if possible, what this singular noise and invisible labour could mean; but on arriving at the spot, they heard the sawing, to which were now added hammering, and the driving of nails upon the Forth above, whilst those who stood on the Forth continued to hear it in the hollow. On comparing notes, they resolved to send down to Billy Nelson’s for Frank Martin a distance of only about eighty or ninety yards. He was soon on the spot, and without a moment’s hesitation solved the enigma.

“‘Tis the fairies,” said he. ‘I see them, and busy crathurs they are.”

“But what are they sawing, Frank?”

‘They are makin’ a child’s coffin,” he replied; “they have the body already made, an’ they’re now nailin’ the lid together.”

That night the child died, and the story goes that on the second evening afterwards, the carpenter who was called upon to make the coffin brought a table out from Thomas’s house to the Forth, as a temporary bench; and, it is said, that the sawing and hammering necessary for the completion of his task were precisely the same which had been heard the evening but one before–neither more nor less. I remember the death of the child myself, and the making of its coffin, but I think the story of the supernatural carpenter was not heard in the village for some months after its interment.

Frank had every appearance of a hypochondriac about him. At the time I saw him, he might be about thirty-four years of age, but I do not think, from the debility of his frame and infirm health, that he has been alive for several years. He was an object of considerable interest and curiosity, and often have I been present when he was pointed out to strangers as “the man that could see the good people”.

____________

(The Mirror)

NEAR AVALON

by

WILLIAM MORRIS

A ship with shields before the sun,

Six maidens round the mast,

A red-gold crown on every one,

A green gown on the last.

The fluttering green banners there

Are wrought with ladies’ heads most fair,

And a portraiture of Guenevere

The middle of each sail doth bear.

A ship with sails before the wind,

And round the helm six knights,

Their heaumes are on, whereby, half blind,

They pass by many sights.

The tatter’d scarlet banners there

Right soon will leave the spear-heads bare.

Those six knights sorrowfully bear

(2 Crowns)

______________

KING ARTHUR’S TOMB

by

WILLIAM MORRIS

Hot August noon: already on that day

Since sunrise through the Wiltshire downs, most sad

Of mouth and eye, he had gone leagues of way;

Ay and by night, till whether good or bad

He was, he knew not, though he knew perchance

That he was Launcelot, the bravest knight

Of all who since the world was, have borne lance,

Or swung their swords in wrong cause or in right.

Nay, he knew nothing now, except that where

The Glastonbury gilded towers shine,

A lady dwelt, whose name was Guenevere;

This he knew also; that some fingers twine,

Not only in a man’s hair, even his heart,

(Making him good or bad I mean,) but in his life,

Skies, earth, men’s looks and deeds, all that has part,

Not being ourselves, in that half-sleep, half-strife,

(Strange sleep, strange strife,) that men call living; so

Was Launcelot most glad when the moon rose,

Because it brought new memories of her. “Lo,

Between the trees a large moon, the wind lows

“Not loud, but as a cow begins to low,

Wishing for strength to make the herdsman hear:

The ripe corn gathereth dew; yea, long ago,

In the old garden life, my Guenevere

“Loved to sit still among the flowers, till night

Had quite come on, hair loosen’d, for she said,

Smiling like heaven, that its fairness might

Draw up the wind sooner to cool her head.

“Now while I ride how quick the moon gets small,

As it did then: I tell myself a tale

That will not last beyond the whitewashed wall,

Thoughts of some joust must help me through the vale,

“Keep this till after: How Sir Gareth ran

A good course that day under my Queen’s eyes,

And how she sway’d laughing at Dinadan.

No. Back again, the other thoughts will rise,

“And yet I think so fast ’twill end right soon:

Verily then I think, that Guenevere,

Made sad by dew and wind, and tree-barred moon,

Did love me more than ever, was more dear

“To me than ever, she would let me lie

And kiss her feet, or, if I sat behind,

Would drop her hand and arm most tenderly,

And touch my mouth. And she would let me wind

“Her hair around my neck, so that it fell

Upon my red robe, strange in the twilight

With many unnamed colours, till the bell

Of her mouth on my cheek sent a delight

“Through all my ways of being; like the stroke

Wherewith God threw all men upon the face

When he took Enoch, and when Enoch woke

With a changed body in the happy place.

“Once, I remember, as I sat beside,

She turn’d a little, and laid back her head,

And slept upon my breast; I almost died

In those night-watches with my love and dread.

“There lily-like she bow’d her head and slept,

And I breathed low, and did not dare to move,

But sat and quiver’d inwardly, thoughts crept,

And frighten’d me with pulses of my Love.

“The stars shone out above the doubtful green

Of her bodice, in the green sky overhead;

Pale in the green sky were the stars I ween,

Because the moon shone like a star she shed

“When she dwelt up in heaven a while ago,

And ruled all things but God: the night went on,

The wind grew cold, and the white moon grew low,

One hand had fallen down, and now lay on

“My cold stiff palm; there were no colours then

For near an hour, and I fell asleep

In spite of all my striving, even when

I held her whose name-letters make me leap.

“I did not sleep long, feeling that in sleep

I did some loved one wrong, so that the sun

Had only just arisen from the deep

Still land of colours, when before me one

“Stood whom I knew, but scarcely dared to touch,

She seemed to have changed so in the night;

Moreover she held scarlet lilies, such

As Maiden Margaret bears upon the light

“Of the great church walls, natheless did I walk

Through the fresh wet woods, and the wheat that morn,

Touching her hair and hand and mouth, and talk

Of love we held, nigh hid among the corn.

“Back to the palace, ere the sun grew high,

We went, and in a cool green room all day

I gazed upon the arras giddily,

Where the wind set the silken kings a-sway.

“I could not hold her hand, or see her face;

For which may God forgive me! but I think,

Howsoever, that she was not in that place.”

These memories Launcelot was quick to drink;

And when these fell, some paces past the wall,

There rose yet others, but they wearied more,

And tasted not so sweet; they did not fall

So soon, but vaguely wrenched his strained heart sore

In shadowy slipping from his grasp: these gone,

A longing followed; if he might but touch

That Guenevere at once! Still night, the lone

Grey horse’s head before him vex’d him much,

In steady nodding over the grey road:

Still night, and night, and night, and emptied heart

Of any stories; what a dismal load

Time grew at last, yea, when the night did part,

And let the sun flame over all, still there

The horse’s grey ears turn’d this way and that,

And still he watch’d them twitching in the glare

Of the morning sun, behind them still he sat,

Quite wearied out with all the wretched night,

Until about the dustiest of the day,

On the last down’s brow he drew his rein in sight

Of the Glastonbury roofs that choke the way.

And he was now quite giddy as before,

When she slept by him, tired out, and her hair

Was mingled with the rushes on the floor,

And he, being tired too, was scarce aware

Of her presence; yet as he sat and gazed,

A shiver ran throughout him, and his breath

Came slower, he seem’d suddenly amazed,

As though he had not heard of Arthur’s death.

This for a moment only, presently

He rode on giddy still, until he reach’d

A place of apple-trees, by the thorn-tree

Wherefrom St. Joseph in the days past preached.

Dazed there he laid his head upon a tomb,

Not knowing it was Arthur’s, at which sight

One of her maidens told her, “He is come,”

And she went forth to meet him; yet a blight

Had settled on her, all her robes were black,

With a long white veil only; she went slow,

As one walks to be slain, her eyes did lack

Half her old glory, yea, alas! the glow

Had left her face and hands; this was because

As she lay last night on her purple bed,

Wishing for morning, grudging every pause

Of the palace clocks, until that Launcelot’s head

Should lie on her breast, with all her golden hair

Each side: when suddenly the thing grew drear,

In morning twilight, when the grey downs bare

Grew into lumps of sin to Guenevere.

At first she said no word, but lay quite still,

Only her mouth was open, and her eyes

Gazed wretchedly about from hill to hill;

As though she asked, not with so much surprise

As tired disgust, what made them stand up there

So cold and grey. After, a spasm took

Her face, and all her frame, she caught her hair,

All her hair, in both hands, terribly she shook,

And rose till she was sitting in the bed,

Set her teeth hard, and shut her eyes and seem’d

As though she would have torn it from her head,

Natheless she dropp’d it, lay down, as she deem’d

It matter’d not whatever she might do:

O Lord Christ! pity on her ghastly face!

Those dismal hours while the cloudless blue

Drew the sun higher: He did give her grace;

Because at last she rose up from her bed,

And put her raiment on, and knelt before

The blessed rood, and with her dry lips said,

Muttering the words against the marble floor:

“Unless you pardon, what shall I do, Lord,

But go to hell? and there see day by day

Foul deed on deed, hear foulest word on word,

For ever and ever, such as on the way

“To Camelot I heard once from a churl,

That curled me up upon my jennet’s neck

With bitter shame; how then, Lord, should I curl

For ages and for ages? dost thou reck

“That I am beautiful, Lord, even as you

And your dear mother? why did I forget

You were so beautiful, and good, and true,

That you loved me so, Guenevere? O yet

“If even I go to hell, I cannot choose

But love you, Christ, yea, though I cannot keep

From loving Launcelot; O Christ! must I lose

My own heart’s love? see, though I cannot weep,

“Yet am I very sorry for my sin;

Moreover, Christ, I cannot bear that hell,

I am most fain to love you, and to win

A place in heaven some time: I cannot tell:

“Speak to me, Christ! I kiss, kiss, kiss your feet;

Ah! now I weep!” The maid said, “By the tomb

He waiteth for you, lady,” coming fleet,

Not knowing what woe filled up all the room.

So Guenevere rose and went to meet him there,

He did not hear her coming, as he lay

On Arthur’s head, till some of her long hair

Brush’d on the new-cut stone: “Well done! to pray

“For Arthur, my dear Lord, the greatest king

That ever lived.” “Guenevere! Guenevere!

Do you not know me, are you gone mad? fling

Your arms and hair about me, lest I fear

“You are not Guenevere, but some other thing.”

“Pray you forgive me, fair lord Launcelot!

I am not mad, but I am sick; they cling,

God’s curses, unto such as I am; not

“Ever again shall we twine arms and lips.”

“Yea, she is mad: thy heavy law, O Lord,

Is very tight about her now, and grips

Her poor heart, so that no right word

“Can reach her mouth; so, Lord, forgive her now,

That she not knowing what she does, being mad,

Kills me in this way: Guenevere, bend low

And kiss me once! for God’s love kiss me! sad

“Though your face is, you look much kinder now;

Yea once, once for the last time kiss me, lest I die.”

“Christ! my hot lips are very near his brow,

Help me to save his soul! Yea, verily,

“Across my husband’s head, fair Launcelot!

Fair serpent mark’d with V upon the head!

This thing we did while yet he was alive,

Why not, O twisting knight, now he is dead?

“Yea, shake! shake now and shiver! if you can

Remember anything for agony,

Pray you remember how when the wind ran

One cool spring evening through fair aspen-tree,

“And elm and oak about the palace there

The king came back from battle, and I stood

To meet him, with my ladies, on the stair,

My face made beautiful with my young blood.”

“Will she lie now, Lord God?” “Remember too,

Wrung heart, how first before the knights there came

A royal bier, hung round with green and blue,

About it shone great tapers with sick flame.

“And thereupon Lucius, the Emperor,

Lay royal-robed, but stone-cold now and dead,

Not able to hold sword or sceptre more,

But not quite grim; because his cloven head

“Bore no marks now of Launcelot’s bitter sword,

Being by embalmers deftly solder’d up;

So still it seem’d the face of a great lord,

Being mended as a craftsman mends a cup.

“Also the heralds sung rejoicingly

To their long trumpets; ‘Fallen under shield,

Here lieth Lucius, King of Italy,

Slain by Lord Launcelot in open field.’

“Thereat the people shouted: ‘Launcelot!’

And through the spears I saw you drawing nigh,

You and Lord Arthur: nay, I saw you not,

But rather Arthur, God would not let die,

“I hoped, these many years; he should grow great,

And in his great arms still encircle me,

Kissing my face, half blinded with the heat

Of king’s love for the queen I used to be.

“Launcelot, Launcelot, why did he take your hand,

When he had kissed me in his kingly way?

Saying: ‘This is the knight whom all the land

Calls Arthur’s banner, sword, and shield to-day;

“‘Cherish him, love.’ Why did your long lips cleave

In such strange way unto my fingers then?

So eagerly glad to kiss, so loath to leave

When you rose up? Why among helmed men

“Could I always tell you by your long strong arms,

And sway like an angel’s in your saddle there?

Why sicken’d I so often with alarms

Over the tilt-yard? Why were you more fair

“Than aspens in the autumn at their best?

Why did you fill all lands with your great fame,

So that Breuse even, as he rode, fear’d lest

At turning of the way your shield should flame?

“Was it nought then, my agony and strife?

When as day passed by day, year after year,

I found I could not live a righteous life!

Didst ever think queens held their truth for dear?

“O, but your lips say: ‘Yea, but she was cold

Sometimes, always uncertain as the spring;

When I was sad she would be overbold,

Longing for kisses. When war-bells did ring,

“‘The back-toll’d bells of noisy Camelot.’”

“Now, Lord God, listen! listen, Guenevere,

Though I am weak just now, I think there’s not

A man who dares to say: ‘You hated her,

“‘And left her moaning while you fought your fill

In the daisied meadows!’ lo you her thin hand,

That on the carven stone can not keep still,

Because she loves me against God’s command,

“Has often been quite wet with tear on tear,

Tears Launcelot keeps somewhere, surely not

In his own heart, perhaps in Heaven, where

He will not be these ages.” “Launcelot!

“Loud lips, wrung heart! I say when the bells rang,

The noisy back-toll’d bells of Camelot,

There were two spots on earth, the thrushes sang

In the lonely gardens where my love was not,

“Where I was almost weeping; I dared not

Weep quite in those days, lest one maid should say,

In tittering whispers: ‘Where is Launcelot

To wipe with some kerchief those tears away?’

“Another answer sharply with brows knit,

And warning hand up, scarcely lower though:

‘You speak too loud, see you, she heareth it,

This tigress fair has claws, as I well know,

“‘As Launcelot knows too, the poor knight! well-a-day!

Why met he not with Iseult from the West,

Or better still, Iseult of Brittany?

Perchance indeed quite ladyless were best.’

“Alas, my maids, you loved not overmuch

Queen Guenevere, uncertain as sunshine

In March; forgive me! for my sin being such,

About my whole life, all my deeds did twine,

“Made me quite wicked; as I found out then,

I think; in the lonely palace where each morn

We went, my maids and I, to say prayers when

They sang mass in the chapel on the lawn.

“And every morn I scarce could pray at all,

For Launcelot’s red-golden hair would play,

Instead of sunlight, on the painted wall,

Mingled with dreams of what the priest did say;

“Grim curses out of Peter and of Paul;

Judging of strange sins in Leviticus;

Another sort of writing on the wall,

Scored deep across the painted heads of us.

“Christ sitting with the woman at the well,

And Mary Magdalen repenting there,

Her dimmed eyes scorch’d and red at sight of hell

So hardly ‘scaped, no gold light on her hair.

“And if the priest said anything that seemed

To touch upon the sin they said we did,

(This in their teeth) they looked as if they deem’d

That I was spying what thoughts might be hid

“Under green-cover’d bosoms, heaving quick

Beneath quick thoughts; while they grew red with shame,

And gazed down at their feet: while I felt sick,

And almost shriek’d if one should call my name.

“The thrushes sang in the lone garden there:

But where you were the birds were scared I trow:

Clanging of arms about pavilions fair,

Mixed with the knights’ laughs; there, as I well know,

“Rode Launcelot, the king of all the band,

And scowling Gauwaine, like the night in day,

And handsome Gareth, with his great white hand

Curl’d round the helm-crest, ere he join’d the fray;

“And merry Dinadan with sharp dark face,

All true knights loved to see; and in the fight

Great Tristram, and though helmed you could trace

In all his bearing the frank noble knight;

“And by him Palomydes, helmet off,

He fought, his face brush’d by his hair,

Red heavy swinging hair; he fear’d a scoff

So overmuch, though what true knight would dare

“To mock that face, fretted with useless care,

And bitter useless striving after love?

O Palomydes, with much honour bear

Beast Glatysaunt upon your shield, above

“Your helm that hides the swinging of your hair,

And think of Iseult, as your sword drives through

Much mail and plate: O God, let me be there

A little time, as I was long ago!

“Because stout Gareth lets his spear fall low,

Gauwaine and Launcelot, and Dinadan

Are helm’d and waiting; let the trumpets go!

Bend over, ladies, to see all you can!

“Clench teeth, dames, yea, clasp hands, for Gareth’s spear

Throws Kay from out his saddle, like a stone

From a castle-window when the foe draws near:

‘Iseult!’ Sir Dinadan rolleth overthrown.

“‘Iseult!’ again: the pieces of each spear

Fly fathoms up, and both the great steeds reel;

‘Tristram for Iseult!’ ‘Iseult!’ and ‘Guenevere!’

The ladies’ names bite verily like steel.

“They bite: bite me, Lord God! I shall go mad,

Or else die kissing him, he is so pale,

He thinks me mad already, O bad! bad!

Let me lie down a little while and wail.”

“No longer so, rise up, I pray you, love,

And slay me really, then we shall be heal’d,

Perchance, in the aftertime by God above.”

“Banner of Arthur, with black-bended shield

“Sinister-wise across the fair gold ground!

Here let me tell you what a knight you are,

O sword and shield of Arthur! you are found

A crooked sword, I think, that leaves a scar

“On the bearer’s arm, so be he thinks it straight,

Twisted Malay’s crease beautiful blue-grey,

Poison’d with sweet fruit; as he found too late,

My husband Arthur, on some bitter day!

“O sickle cutting hemlock the day long!

That the husbandman across his shoulder hangs,

And, going homeward about evensong,

Dies the next morning, struck through by the fangs!

“Banner, and sword, and shield, you dare not die,

Lest you meet Arthur in the other world,

And, knowing who you are, he pass you by,

Taking short turns that he may watch you curl’d,

“Body and face and limbs in agony,

Lest he weep presently and go away,

Saying: ‘I loved him once,’ with a sad sigh,

Now I have slain him, Lord, let me go too, I pray.

[Launcelot falls.

“Alas! alas! I know not what to do,

If I run fast it is perchance that I

May fall and stun myself, much better so,

Never, never again! not even when I die.”

LAUNCELOT, on awaking.

“I stretch’d my hands towards her and fell down,

How long I lay in swoon I cannot tell:

My head and hands were bleeding from the stone,

When I rose up, also I heard a bell.”

(The Magic Crystal)

Nice Weekend, working on The Invisible College, a few more daze…. Weather went from sublime to the rainy, in one day. Pouring now on Sunday night.

Saw my good friend Tom Charlesworth Sunday. Went out for a pint at the local. He is in the process of trying to escape Portland with his wife Cheryl to sunnier climes. We will miss him. We have been friends since 1969. So many stories!

Had a nice time with family, talked to good friends around the place, including Tomas B. back in RI. Hey Tomas!

Put together “The Laughing Show” for Radio Free Earthrites. Still on if you want to catch it, coming off the air Monday night.

Hope your weekend was sweet!

Gwyllm

—-

On The Grill:

The Links

The Quotes

You Never Want to Cross an Elf By Brad Steiger

Poetry: René Char

The Art: George Frederic Watts

George Frederic Watts

1817-1904

A portrait painter and sculptor, George Frederick Watts was born in London, the son of a piano maker. Initially, he wanted to become a sculptor, and at the age of 10 was apprenticed to William Behnes. However, in 1835, at the age of 18, he went to the RA Schools, where he remained for only a short period, and thereafter was mainly self-taught. After he first exhibited The Wounded Heron at the Royal Academy, painting became his main preoccupation. When his picture Caractacus won a £300 prize, he used the money to finance a trip to Italy, where he stayed with friends in Florence. He did not return to England until 1847, when his painting Alfred won the first prize of £500 in a House of Lords competition.

In 1850 Watts visited the home of Valentine Prinsep’s parents in Holland park, supposedly for a three-day visit, but instead he stayed for thirty years. The Prinseps seem to have borne the situation cheerfully, and it no doubt gave them a certain cachet in the Bohemian circles in which they moved, which included such writers and painters as Thackeray, Dickens, Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Fortunately, Watts was a man of frugal habits. Although he had been depressed and unhappy when he had moved in with the Prinseps, Watts blossomed in this strange household, where notable writers and painters were treated with reverence. As a portrait artist, his gallery of eminent Victorians is unsurpassed: included among his sitters were the poets Tennyson, Swinburne and Browning, the artists Millais, Lord Leighton, Walter Crane and Burne-Jones; others were Sir Richard Burton, John Stuart Mill and Garibaldi, to mention only a few. He finally left the Prinseps’ home in 1875 and moved to the Isle of Wight. In 1864 Watts married the actress Ellen Terry, who was only 16, although the marriage was short-lived, and he remarried in 1886 when he moved to Limnerslease, near Guildford. His new wife was Mary Fraser-Tytler, thirty-two year his junior. She was of Scottish descent, growing up in a castle on the shores of Loch Ness, and was an artist in her own right.

Watts was a modest, hard-working artist who twice refused a baronetcy and other honours, including an offer to become president of the Royal Academy, although he did accept the Order of Merit. His work as a sculptor exists in the Cecil Rhodes Memorial, Cape Town. His chief work as a sculptor is the heroic figure of a man on horseback known as Physical Energy, casts of which are on the Cecil Rhodes estate and in Kensington Gardens, London.

The critic G.K. Chesterton said of Watts: “.. more than any other modern man, and much more than politicians who thundered on platforms or financiers who captured continents, [Watts] has sought in the midst of his quiet and hidden life to mirror his age… In the whole range of Watts’ symbolic art, there is scarcely a single example of the ordinary and arbitrary current symbol…. A primeval vagueness and archaism hangs over the all the canvases and cartoons, like frescoes from some prehistoric temple. There is nothing there but the eternal things, day and fire and the sea, and motherhood and the dead.”

Another contemporary admirer, Hugh MacMillan, wrote that Watts “surrounds his ideal forms with a misty or cloudy atmosphere for the purpose of showing that they are visionary or ideal…. His colours, like the colour of the veils of the ancient tabernacle, like the hues of the jewelled walls of the New Jerusalem, are invested with a parabolic significance…. To the commonest hues he gives a tone beyond their ordinary power… Watts is essentially the seer. He thinks in pictures that come before the inward eye spontaneously and assume a definite form almost without any effort of consciousness.”

Watts’ declared aims were clear: to paint pictures that appealed ‘to the intellect and refined emotions rather than the senses’: “I paint ideas, not things. I paint primarily because I have something to say, and since the gift of eloquent language has been denied to me, I use painting; my intention is not so much to paint pictures which shall please the eye, as to suggest great thoughts which shall speak to the imagination and to the heart and arouse all that is best and noblest in humanity.”

Since the revival of interest in Victorian painting, Watts is slowly regaining the recognition and respect he enjoyed in the 19th century. However, in terms of public recognition he is not as well-known as contemporaries like Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. Exhibitions such as the Tate Gallery’s ‘Symbolism in Britain’ have helped renew interest in his work.

_____________

The Links:

‘We Shall Overcome’

Again

Fortune-telling judge couldn’t see it coming

What’s the Story, Morning Glory? / The Washington Post takes another bad drug trip.

_____________

The Quotes:

“We can lick gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming.”

“Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.”

“Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”

“Sanity is a madness put to good use.”

“Seeing a murder on television… can help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any

antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.”

“Fall not in love, therefore; it will stick to your face.”

“Progress isn’t made by early risers. It’s made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.”

“Someone’s boring me. I think it’s me.”

“I know not, sir, whether Bacon wrote the works of Shakespeare, but if he did not it seems to me that he missed the opportunity of his life.”

____________

You Never Want to Cross an Elf By Brad Steiger

For many people today, the image of an elf is firmly established in the characters of either the handsome Legolas Greenleaf or the lovely, ethereal Arwen as depicted in the Peter Jackson film of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ring saga by actors Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler. While the elves in Tolkien’s vision are tall and stately beings, tradition has most often portrayed elves and their fellow citizens from the unseen realm as diminutive, hence, “the wee people.” Small in stature though they may be, elves, the “Hidden Folk,” are not beings with whom to trifle.

Careless or disrespectful humans who trespass on forest glens, rivers, or lakes considered sacred to elves may suffer terrible consequences—even cruel deaths. Entrepreneurs who wish to desecrate land whereon lie fairy circles or mounds in order to build a road or construct a commercial building may find themselves combating an unseen enemy who will accept only their unconditional surrender.

Trouble at the Herring Plant

In 1962, the new owners of a herring-processing plant in Iceland decided to enlarge the work area of the building. According to Icelandic tradition, landowners must not fail to reserve a small area of their property for the Hidden Folk, and a number of the established residents earnestly pointed out to the recent arrivals that any addition to the processing plant would encroach upon the plot of ground that the original owners had respectfully set aside for the elves who lived under the ground.

In a condescending manner, the businessmen explained that they didn’t harbor those old superstitions and neither did their highly qualified construction crew who had modern, unbreakable drill bits and plenty of explosives.

But the bits of the “unbreakable” drills began to shatter, one after another.

An old farmer came forward to repeat the warning that the crew was trespassing on land that belonged to the Hidden Folk.

The workmen laughed when the old man walked away—but the drill bits kept breaking.

Finally, the manager of the plant, although professing disbelief in such nonsense, agreed to the local residents’ recommendation that he consult a local elf seer to establish contact with the Hidden Folk and attempt to make peace with them. The seer informed the manager that there was a very powerful member of the Hidden Folk who had selected the plot near the herring-processing plant as his personal dwelling place. He was not an unreasonable being, however. Elves really do try to get along with humans and compromise whenever they can to avoid violence. If the processing plant really needed the plot for its expansion, the elf seer said, the Hidden One would agree to find another place to live. He asked only for five days without any drilling, so that he could make his arrangements to move.

The manager felt a bit strange bargaining with a being that was invisible—and, as far as he was concerned, imaginary. But he looked over at the pile of broken drill bits and told the seer that the Hidden One had a deal. Work on the site was shut down for five days to give the elf a chance to move. When five days had passed and the workmen resumed drilling, the work went smoothly and efficiently until the addition to the plant was completed. There were no more shattered drill bits.

Because the incident cited above occurred in 1962—practically medieval times in some young people’s minds—many readers will no doubt assume that Icelanders of the 21st century no longer cherish such quaint beliefs. Those readers would be wrong.

In the Boston Herald, December 25, 2005, Ric Bourie wrote that highway engineers and construction crews still regard the Hidden Folk very seriously: “Mischief befalls Icelandic road builders who can’t recognize good elf domain, including breakdowns of heavy equipment and even worker mishaps and injuries. It is said to have happened on more than one job site, enough to take the mythology seriously. Consequently, road planners here consult with an elf expert before routing a road or highway through rock piles that may be elf habitat.”

Bourie interviewed elf seer Erla Stefansdottir, who named elves, gnomes, dwarves, angels, light-fairies, and “the hidden people” as all belonging to classes of what she called elfin beings. Any of the above-named entities, Ms. Stefansdottir said, “…can get quite upset if we ruin their houses or go against their wishes. They get very upset and we have to face the consequences. They can put a spell on us.”

Fairy Mound Disturbed

<img width='272' height='350' border='0' hspace='5' align='left' src='http://www.earthrites.org/turfing2/uploads/1904watts320copy.jpg' alt='' /While some people may be surprised that stereotypically stoic Scandinavians believe in elves and other beings from the hidden world, it seems that the whole world embraces the stereotype of the country folk of Ireland taking their wee people seriously. According to popular leprechaun and elf stories, the Irish know that to disturb the mounds or raths in which they dwell is to invite severe supernatural consequences.

Since ancient times, it seems that the Irish have understood that there are certain areas that the wee ones consider sacrosanct, special to them. Certain mounds, caves, creek areas, and forest clearings have been staked out by the Hidden Ones as their very own, and the wise human, sensitively in touch with the natural environment, knows better than to trespass on such ground.

The trouble at the fairy mound outside the village of Wexford began when workmen from the state electricity board began digging a hole for the erection of a light pole within the parameters of a rath. The villagers warned the workmen that the pole would never stay put, because no self-respecting community of fairy folk could abide a disturbance on their mound.

The big city electrical workmen had a coarse laugh and made uncomplimentary remarks about the level of intelligence of the townsfolk of Wexford. The workmen finished digging the hole to the depth that experience had taught them was adequate, then placed the post within the freshly dug opening and stamped the black earth firmly around its base. The satisfied foreman pronounced for all within earshot to hear that no fairy would move the pole from where it had been anchored.

However, the next morning the pole tilted askew in loose earth.

The villagers shrugged that the wee folk had done it, but the foreman of the crew voiced his suspicions that the fairies had received some help from humans bent on mischief. Glaring his resentment at any villagers who would meet his narrowed, accusative eyes, the foreman ordered his men to reset the pole.

The next morning that particular pole was once again conspicuous in the long line of newly placed electrical posts by its weird tilt in the loose soil at its base. While the other poles in the line stood straight and proud like soldiers on parade, that one woebegone post reeled like a trooper who had had one pint too many.

The foreman had endured enough of such rural humor at his expense. He ordered the crew to dig a hole six feet wide, place the pole precisely in the middle, and pack the earth so firmly around the base that nothing short of an atomic bomb could budge it.

Apparently fairies have their own brand of nuclear fission, for the next morning the intrusive pole had once again been pushed loose of the little people’s rath.

The foreman and his crew from the electricity board finally knew they were licked. Without another word to the grinning villagers, the workmen dug a second hole four feet outside of the fairy mound and dropped the pole in there. And there it stood, untouched, untroubled—exactly where the wee folk permitted it to stand.

The Wee People’s Rock

In The Times, November 21, 2005, Will Pavai and Chris Windle tell how a small colony of wee folk living beneath a rock in St. Fillans, Perthshire, cost developer Marcus Salter, head of Genesis Properties, nearly $40,000 when community pressure forced him to scrap his building plans and start again. A group of his workmen had been about to move a large rock from the center of a field to make way for the new housing development.

According to Salter, one of the residents of St. Fillans came running, shouting that they couldn’t move the rock or they would kill the fairies. At first Salter thought the man was joking. Then came the series of angry telephone calls.

Salter attended a meeting of the community council where he learned that the council was considering lodging a complaint with the planning authority, which was likely “to be the kiss of death for a housing development in a national park.”

Although the Planning Inspectorate has no specific guidelines on how to deal with fairies, a spokesman told Salter that “Planning guidance states that local customs and beliefs must be taken into account when a developer applies for planning permission.”

Salter was forced to redesign the new estate so that the wee people’s rock would be in the center of a small park nicely situated within the new community.

When some friends and I were discussing the recent accounts of wee people activity receiving media attention in late 2005, Patty recalled staying with an Irish family some years ago.

“They owned a large hotel that dated back to before the Easter Rebellion (1916) and had housed lots of IRA activity,” Patty said. “The owner of this place, Mr. Conroy, told me that there are fairy rings all around the area outside of Dublin—especially in St. Kevin’s Bed. There is a story of a truck driver that made fun of the villagers for their superstition about the fairy circles and to prove how stupid he felt they were, he drove his truck through one of them! Then he got out of the truck, laughed at the crowd watching him, and promptly died of a heart attack! Conroy swore that this man was a big fellow in perfect health.”

Patty heard another story while she was in Ireland about some construction workers who wanted to remove a stump near a fairy ring. They felt that since it wasn’t actually in the fairy ring, the coast was clear. They tried to dynamite the stump three or four times and nothing happened. They checked the dynamite, the wiring, and so forth and found nothing wrong. Finally, they all saw a little man dressed in green climb out of the stump and run. Just as he ran off, the stump exploded into a million pieces!

As crazy as this sounds, there was a photographer there from the local newspaper who had heard about all the problems and was going to take a picture of them trying to blow up the stump. He did actually get a picture of the leprechaun. However, Patty was told, it is locked away somewhere in Trinity College.

Patty recalled many conversations with the maid at the hotel where she stayed and she said that she had heard many stories of people who had seen the “wee folks.” And on one thing all the stories agreed, Patty said, “You never want to cross one! Not ever!”

Intelligent Energy

I have concluded in my research that there exist throughout the world pockets of energy in which another order of intelligence abides. And I should make clear that I agree wholeheartedly with elf seer Erla Stefansdottir, who includes elves, gnomes, dwarves, angels, light-fairies, nisse, brownies, skaramooshes, and devas as a single shape-shifting intelligence that we have come to call “The Hidden People.” In some instances, these pockets of intelligent energy may be influenced by human intelligence and manifest in a physical form as a variation on the theme of a human image. In other circumstances, this energy may direct and control—even possess—human beings.

In essence, these “nature spirits” may be the “Elder Race” or “The Old Ones” referred to in so many myths and legends. These vortexes of intelligence may comprise a companion species to our own and may well have maintained a strange kind of symbiotic relationship with us throughout the centuries of mutual evolution.

David Spangler of Findhorn claimed that he was told by such an intelligence that they recognize humankind as a necessary and vital part of the synergistic state of the planet, thus they are essentially benignly concerned with human survival because it bears directly upon the survival of Earth. Spangler’s understanding of humankind’s relationship to these entities is that we were “first cousins,” and that we somehow had a common ancestor.

The elves’ benign nature has been experienced by those men and women who have won their favor. On behalf of such humans, the Hidden Ones can materialize to help a poor farmer harvest a crop and have it in the bins before a storm hits, or they can clean a kitchen in the twinkling of an eye to ease the stress of an exhausted housewife. If they see fit to do so, the elves can guide their favored humans with their ability to divine the future, and they will stand by to assist at the birth of a special couple’s child, whom they will tutor and protect throughout his or her lifetime.

Other researchers, biblically inspired, see the elfin clans as forms assumed by the rebellious angels who were driven out of Heaven during the celestial uprising led by Lucifer. These fallen angels, cast from their heavenly abode, took up new residences in the forests, mountains, and lakes of Earth. They exist in a much-diminished capacity, but still possess more than enough power to be deemed supernatural by the human inhabitants of the planet. These paraphysical beings on occasion take humans as mates, thereby breeding a hybrid species of entities “betwixt Man and Angel.”

Among the more than 30,000 men and women who have returned the Steiger Questionnaire of Mystical, Paranormal, and UFO Experiences, a remarkable 29 percent claim to have seen elves, fairies, or some form of nature spirit. In certain cases, recounted in the questionnaires, such a being may have considered a deserted house or barn its own. Generally, if the elfin entity understands that a human wishes to occupy the dwelling place and if it is treated with respect, it will quietly move out. At most, a token gift of fruits, nuts, or meal would com­pensate the spirit squatter and make it agree to move on to a more natural habitat. However, in some instances, humans have just walked into a particular situation at the wrong moment, and they can experience some trauma before squatting rights are straightened out and understood.

Invisible Assault

Together with the return of her questionnaire, Lorrie Jastrow sent an account of an experience which occurred to her and her fiancé, Karl, shortly before their marriage. They had gone to a movie, then decided to drive out to the tiny house in the country where they would live after they had celebrated their nuptials.

Lorrie thought it was fun to go out there and plan their future. The house was on land that was too wooded to be good farmland, but they intended only to plant a small garden for vegetables. Karl would continue his job in town.

“Our only lights that night were our flashlights. Since we wouldn’t be moving in for another month or so, the landlord had yet to switch on the electricity. He had given us keys to the place, though, and he didn’t mind that we would drive out there to dream about our future life together.”

That night when they walked into the house, Lorrie had an eerie feeling that something was wrong, that they were not alone. “Karl must have felt the same way as I did, because he kept looking over his shoulder, like he expected to catch sight of someone spying on us.

“Then we heard a strange chattering, like some giant squirrel or chipmunk, coming from a dark corner in the room. It suddenly seemed so unreal, unearthly, and a strange coldness passed over my body. I told Karl that I wanted to leave, that I was frightened.”

But before they could move toward the door, Karl suddenly threw his hands up over his head as if he were trying to grab at something behind him. His head seemed pulled back and to one side. His mouth froze in a grimace of pain and fear, and his eyes rolled wildly. He lost his balance, fell to his knees, and then to his side. He rolled madly on the floor, fighting and clawing the air around his neck.

Lorrie stood stunned with fear and bewilderment. Karl managed to struggle to his feet. His eyes bulged, and he gasped fiercely for each breath. Some unseen thing seemed to be strangling him. He gasped that they must run to the car, that Lorrie must drive.

Somehow, they got out of the house with Karl stumbling, staggering as if something heavy and strong were perched atop his shoulders with a death grip about his throat.

“I…can’t get the damned thing off of me!” he gasped.

At last they got to the car. Lorrie got behind the wheel, and Karl told her to drive, fast. He was still trying to pry the invisible thing’s hands from his throat.

Lorrie drove for about two miles down the road—and suddenly there was a blinding flash inside the car. A brilliant ball of light about the size of a basketball shot ahead of their car, then veered sharply to the left and disappeared into a clump of trees.

“I did not stop until we were back in town,” Lorrie said. “Karl lay gasping beside me, his head rolling limply on the back of the seat. He did not speak until we were well inside the city limits, then he said that some inhuman thing had jumped on him from the shadows of the house. He was certain that it could have killed him if it had really wanted to do so.”

Lorrie Jastrow concluded her account by writing that although they returned to their small home in the country with some trepidation, they never again encountered that monstrous, invisible strangler that chattered like a giant rodent. Once the nature spirit had time to calm down and come to terms with the fact that humans were reclaiming the empty house, it moved on to another, more appropriate dwelling. But it certainly did give Karl and Lorrie a piece of its mind before it did so.

Protective Entity

People who leave their vacation homes empty for the major portion of the year also frequently suffer from an elfin spirit developing a proprietary interest in what appears to be vacant property.

Scott Halstead said that he and his family had vacationed in the same cabin in the Northeast for the past 22 years. “We started vacationing in this cabin when Allan was two years old, and we always take the last two weeks in August. And for 22 years, we’ve had to share the cabin with something else.”

Halstead and his wife Lynette made a point to emphasize their contention that although the “something else” sometimes frightened them, their sense of the entity was that it was extremely protective of the cabin and the grounds on which their cabin and others like it had been built.

“The cabin and nine or ten others are situated on a beautiful lake,” Halstead said. “And old Charlie the caretaker knows that there is something kind of spooky going on around there, but he usually just shrugs and says that it doesn’t bother him. It sometimes bothers his dogs, though. He’s got two big German shepherds, and I’ve seen them cower and whine when neither Charlie nor anyone else was near them.”

Lynette said that when their son Allan was around four he would say that he had an invisible friend named Mo-Ko who lived in the woods. “If we were afraid that he might wander off in the woods, he would say, ‘Mo-Ko won’t let me. He says that I have to stay near the cabins.’ Who could complain if his invisible playmate was also a good baby sitter?”

Lynette and Scott agreed that the most dramatic evidence of a guardian spirit looking over the cabin came in 1985 when Allan was 11 and their daughter Tonya was 7.

“Scott and I had gone swimming,” Lynette said. “The kids knew that we would be chilled when we got out of the lake and a fire would feel good to us. Allan had watched his father building a fire for years, so he knew the basics, but he just kept piling on kindling. Tonya tossed newspapers and magazines onto the fire, and pretty soon they had a huge blaze roaring in that fireplace.”

Shivering, clutching towels to their chilled bodies, Scott and Lynette returned to the cabin to see the colonial-style rag rugs in front of the fireplace on fire, the curtains to the side of the chimney ablaze, and another finger of flame moving across scattered newspapers toward the living room carpet.

“There was that moment of panic, when you just kind of scream and shout before your brain kicks in,” Lynette said. “Allan and Tonya were standing against a wall, crying their heads off in fear.”

And then, as weird at it may seem—as strange as it is for Scott and Lynette to attest to it—something started to beat out the flames.

“I’m standing there barefooted and soaked in my swimming suit with a towel wrapped around me,” Scott said. “I don’t even have time to react, really, when I see something snuffing out the fire. More than beating out the flames, it’s like something is smothering it, as if it is covering the fire with a big wet blanket. In minutes, what looked like it would be a major disaster, has become a smoke-filled cabin, a couple of burned and scorched throw rugs, a blitzed curtain, and two crying kids.”

Lynette said that she hugged Allan and Tonya and gave thanks to God “…and to whatever protective spirit looks out for the cabins.”

Over the years Lynette and Scott Halstead said that there were numerous signs to indicate that some spirit entity was protective of the cabin. All of the family said that from time to time they felt someone was watching them. Items would disappear and reappear in bizarre places. And an eerie kind of scratching noise would often be heard issuing from within the walls.

Out of curiosity, they once wrote to the Wagners, a family they knew rented the cabin in July, and asked if they had ever noticed anything “peculiar” during their occupancy.

“Beverly Wagner wrote right back and said, ‘I imagine you’re referring to the invisible live-in maid?’” Lynette laughed at the memory. “The Wagners had noticed some of the same numerous little things that we had, but once when they left a messy table after a party at the cabin, they woke up the next morning to discover that someone or something had stacked the dirty dishes in the sink and cleaned the table top. Jim Wagner jokingly said that it must be elves, so he left a bowl of oatmeal on the front step that night. In the next morning it was gone, but, of course, birds or some critter could have eaten it.”

Scott and Lynette speculated that it could be the spirit of some Native American who cherished the environment around the lake and who kept a vigil over the cabins and their inhabitants, but they added that they had come to believe that the force, the energy, that loved the place so much was something more primeval.

“It’s almost as if nature itself is somehow protective of the few remaining areas that we humans haven’t covered over with concrete and erected shopping malls and gas stations,” Scott said. “Sometimes I would visualize some kind of elf or nature spirit sitting outside near the lake, looking across the beauty of this area toward the city and sighing, ‘What fools these mortals be.’”

Wrestling with Huldefolk

Richard Connors found out that an elf may sometimes envy a human’s possessions and try actively to claim them for his own. Richard said that his family was one a few “token Irish” in a small town in northern Minnesota that had been settled predominantly by immigrants of Scandinavian stock. Ever since Richard could remember, he had heard stories about the family of Hul­de­folk that lived in a cave on Ulmer Sorenson’s property north of town. Teenaged boys would sometimes go out there to test their mettle by throwing rocks into the mouth of the cave and daring the Huldefolk to come out and chase them. Some of the braver teens even walked a few feet inside the cave and shouted their challenges. Later, they told everyone how badly it smelled inside the cave, worse than skunks or civet cats.

Every now and then, someone would breathlessly describe having seen one or more of the Huldefolk moving around in the woods after dark, and it was common knowledge among the kids that those nocturnal raids on farmers’ chicken coops that carried away hens and eggs were the work of hungry Huldefolk, not wily foxes.

Richard’s father told him that the stories about the Hidden Folk had probably been made up by Ulmer Sorenson himself, to discourage kids from plundering apples from his orchard. His father said that their Scandinavian neighbors had their stories about the dark creatures of the forest just as did the Irish with their leprechauns.

Late one afternoon on a warm July day, Richard decided to ignore the “No Trespassing” sign on So­renson’s fence and cut across his orchard to take a shortcut to his girlfriend’s farmhouse. He was walking on a worn deer path when up ahead he could see a short, stocky guy coming toward him. As he drew nearer, Richard saw that the stranger was one ugly character. He had coarse black hair that literally jutted from his skull, deep-set black eyes, and an enormous nose. And when he grinned at Richard, he saw yellowish, jagged teeth that seemed badly in need of a dentist.

Living in a small Minnesota village, Richard was perplexed that he had never before seen the stranger anywhere in town or in school. “He was about five-foot four or so and built like a fire hydrant. He was dressed in a worn bib overall a couple of sizes too large, a torn, dirty work shirt, and his bare feet—at least size 13s—were covered with thick, black hair.”

As they stood facing one another, it became clear from the stranger’s frank stare that he was greatly covetous of Richard’s new jeans and boots. Without speaking a word, the brutish fellow suddenly tackled Richard around his waist and hurled him to the ground.

Richard at that time was five-foot-nine and 180 pounds of solid muscle, captain of the high school wrestling squad, and never one to turn down a tussle. “The ugly little guy was incredibly powerful, and he seemed very surprised when I did a reversal, escaped from his takedown, and flipped him over on his back. I was twisting his hairy arm behind him when this incredible thing happened: I swear to all the saints that he started to grow larger.”

Before Richard’s amazed eyes, his opponent stretched several inches taller and gained about 50 pounds. “And the smell of him became almost overpowering. He stank bad enough when he was a short little bugger, but now he could win a fall by his smell alone. Not being an idiot, I realized that I was up against something beyond my powers of reasoning. This was no ordinary farm boy. Deep in the pit of my stomach, I knew that I would now be fighting for more than my pants and my boots.”

The coarse-haired, foul-smelling stranger now filled out his bib overalls and worn shirt. His black eyes were turning red in color and from deep within the creature’s chest came a low, steady growl.

“Then I knew for certain that the legends about the Hidden Folks in Sorenson’s woods were true,” Richard said. “I turned tail and ran as fast as I could, leaving the thing roaring and screaming behind me. Twice I glanced over my shoulder to see if it was following me, but I didn’t stop running until I got back into town.”

When Richard told his family of his encounter with the creature over dinner that night, his father laughed and said that Ulmer Sorenson often hired temporary field hands from a pool of unemployed lumbermen from up north.

“A lot of those men are pretty rough and tough and a bit short on manners,” his father said. “And they might take a fancy to your new boots and jeans and decide to ‘borrow’ them without your permission. You best not tangle with any of them.”

Richard did not press the issue with his father. “Nor have I ever done so with anyone else,” he said, “but I will always know that there are many kinds of creatures and spirits that exist in the shadows all around us. Maybe they normally live in some other dimension and only occasionally pop into ours. Whoever they may be and whatever their names, I know that the Hidden Folk are real.”

Brad Steiger is a professional writer who deals with the strange and unknown. He lives in Forest City, Iowa.

__________

Poetry of René Char (1907 – 1988 / France)

Forehead of the Rose

Despite the open window in the room of long absence, the odor of the rose is still linked with the breath that was there. Once again we are without previous experience, newcomers, in love. The rose! The field of its ways would dispel even the effrontery of death. No grating stands in the way. Desire is alive, an ache in our vaporous foreheads.

One who walks the earth in its rains has nothing to fear from the thorn in places either finished or unfriendly. But if he stops to commune with himself, woe! Pierced to the quick, he suddenly flies to ashes, an archer reclaimed by beauty.

———-

the lords of maussane

One after the other, they wished to predict a happy future for us,

With an eclipse in their image and all the anguish befitting us!

We disdained this equality,

Answered no to their assiduous words.

We followed the stony way the heart traced for us

Up to the plains of the air and the unique silence.

We made our demanding love bleed,

Our happiness wrestle each pebble.

They say at this moment that, beyond their vision,

The hail terrifies them, more than the snow of the dead!

————

to …

You have been my love for so many years,

My giddiness before so much waiting,

Which nothing can age or cool;

Even that which awaited our death,

Or slowly learned how to fight us,

Even that which is strange to us,

Both my eclipses and my returns.

Closed like a box-wood shutter,

An extreme and compact chance

Is our chain, our mountain-range,

Our compressing splendour and glow.

I say chance, O my hammered one;

Either of us can receive

The mysterious part of the other

While keeping its secret unshed;

And the pain that comes from elsewhere

Finds its separation at last

In the flesh of our unity,

Finds its solar orbit at last

At the centre of our own cloud

Which it rends and starts once more.

As I feel it, I say chance.

You have raised up the mountain-peak

Which my waiting will have to clear

When tomorrow disappears.

———-

The River Sorgue

River which parts too early, in one go, without a companion,

Give to the children of my countryside the face of your passion,

River where the flash of lightning ends and where my home begins,

Which rolls all the way right up to the footsteps of oblivion, the rocky ground of my reason,

River, in you the earth shudders, there is sun, anxiety,

Would that every poor man in his night make his bread of your harvest,

River often punished, river abandoned to its course,

River of apprentices to a callused condition,

There is no wind that does not weaken at the crests of your furrows,

River of the empty spirit, of rags and suspicion,

Of an old misfortune unravelling itself, of the elm, of compassion,

River of eccentrics, of the feverish, of stone cutters,

Of the sun which lets go of its plow to sink to the level of liers

River of those who are better than oneself, river of blossoming fogs,

Of the lamp which quenches the anxiety around its hat,

River of consideration given to dreams, river which rusts iron,

Where the stars are of that shade that they refuse to the sea,

River of powers transmitted and of a scream that enters the water’s mouth

Of the hurricane which bites the vine and announces the new wine

River of a heart never destroyed in this world mad for prison,

Keep us violent and friendly to the horizon’s bees.

————-

Threshhold

When the barriers to people have been moved away, sucked up by that giant flaw, the abandonment of the divine, words in the distance, words which did not want to be lost, tried to resist the exorbitant pressure, there they decided upon the dynasty of their senses.

I ran up to where that diluvienne night issues forth, planted in the shaking dawn, my belt full of seasons, I wait for you, O my friends who are about to arrive. Already I can make you out in the darkness of the horizon. What I wish for your houses is not dried up by my hearth. And my staff of cypress laughs with all its heart for you.

________

René Char, one of the important twentieth-century French poets, was born in 1907 and died in 1988. A controversial figure, he had as many detractors as admirers. He was a pivotal personality in the surrealist movement, and later was a strong cultural force in the French Resistance. “His work,” writes Yves Berger, “is the portrait of a man with will, energy, impatience, an almost animalistic force. Nothing provokes him more than immobility (that is, resignation, or acceptance of the status quo): thus his language, his images of movement. a movement not supple and flowing, but rapid, strong, violent, even brutal.”

Jackson Matthews, in the introduction to Char’s Hypnos Waking, provides this portrait:

He is an abundant man—in size, in vitality, in speech, in silences, in ideas and affections, in seriousness, gaiety, gentleness, violence. The sum of all these is a kind of brooding intensity that seems at any moment free to take any turn. He is exalted and harried by the excessive life in him. He speaks in the rhythms of Provence where he was born, where he grew up, and where he still lives in part. He studied at the lycee in Avignon and at the University in Aix. He was one of the early surrealists.

But it was the war and his experience as the leader of a Maquis group in Provence that have most deeply affected his work—channeled his major themes, furnished the substance and many of the subjects of his later poems. The privation, the hunger, the moral suffering of those years were somehow turned into the passionate economy of his style, his rage to compress everything into aphorisms and short bursts of prose.

Char restores to the poet his mission in our distraught world. This is the major burden of his work. He has faced the difficult conditions of human freedom, and understood the role of the imagination in the life of man. He defends poetry with the passion of Shelly but with more human warmth and wisdom. It is in his humanity, his love, that Char stands above most of his contemporaries. But this love is fatally crossed. For the poet is the visionary leader of man, an absolute figure alone on the frontiers of the possible, ‘there where the sky just went down.’ His task is to bring into being the unhoped-for, the unexpectable. In the high lucidity of his star-crossed love, in the flash of the poem, Char has learned how to hope and how to praise.”

Joshua Cody, with text from The Library.

Todays Entry is so large I have had to break it up in 2 parts, this being part one…

On this entrys’ grill

Daniel Pinchbeck: ’2012 : The Return Of Quetzalcoatl’

A Story: Titlacauan Tempts Quetzalcoatl

Mayan Poetry for Quetzalcoatl

_________

This book seems to be generating some stir:Book of Daniel

Daniel Pinchbeck: ’2012 : The Return Of Quetzalcoatl’ Chapter One

In the popular culture of our secular age, the gods, demigods, fairies, and gnomes of the old mythic realm have returned as extraterrestrials. Our mingled longing for and dread of contact with some unknown consciousness or superior alien race has been reflected in a century’s worth of books, films, television, and radio plays. I grew up on Star Trek, The Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, ET, and 2001, on Ursula K. Le Guin and Kurt Vonnegut and Stanislaw Lem—as an adolescent, I loved the Silver Surfer and Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds. The pleasure of these artifacts was in the possibilities they threw out, like so many sparks. They returned the cosmos to a capacious state of “what-if?” that our mechanistic science seemed to deny. The exploration of fictional worlds is a kind of dreaming while awake; the complex ecosystem of the cultural imagination may also have a protective function. Through such stories, we absorb ideas in sidereal fashion, perhaps readying ourselves, on some subliminal level, for future shock of various stripes, before it arrives.

After I finished my article on the crop circles, the images, and their implicit intent, continued to linger in my mind. I was perplexed by the rectangular Arecibo Response formation, dismissed by current SETI astronomer Seth Shostak as a “nice example of grain graffiti,” unworthy of further investigation. I was equally confounded by the “Face” that had appeared in halftones on the date of my daughter’s birth. Whether accident or synchronicity, this correspondence seemed like a personal invitation to visit what the writer Robert Anton Wilson dubbed “Chapel Perilous,” that vortex where cosmological speculations, coincidences, and paranoia seem to multiply and then collapse, compelling belief or lunacy, wisdom or agnosticism.

Considering the scientific evidence, gathered by Eltjo Haselhof and others, suggesting the phenomenon had some mysterious legitimacy, as well as the many personal accounts I absorbed while doing my research, SETI’s blithe dismissal of the Arecibo Response glyph, a direct response to a message beamed into space by SETI in 1974, seemed flat and unreflective. Shostak insisted that an alien civilization would not communicate in such a manner when they could simply leave an Encyclopedia Galactica on our doorstep. But how could we determine the means that an alien civilization might use to communicate? He was perhaps recalling the Fermi Paradox, which noted that any technologically evolved civilization on a nearby star system should have emitted radio waves during its development that our sensors would have picked up. The physicist Enrico Fermi asked, in the absence of these signals, “Where are they?” But the answer might lie beyond the limits of our present knowledge.

The SETI astronomer pointed out that the original Arecibo greeting was sent out to the M13 star cluster, over twenty thousand light-years away, and it therefore made no sense that it could have been answered already. It seemed equally logical to theorize that whoever—whatever—had crafted the reply knew about the original message as soon as it was sent, that they might have observed activities on our planet for a very long time. But even if one could imagine an advanced species watching the Earth, awaiting the proper moment to reveal itself to us, the Arecibo Response still made little sense. Who was meant to receive the transmission? And what were they—or we—supposed to do with it?

Small, big-headed figures with silicon added to their makeup and an extra strand of DNA, as depicted in the Arecibo Response, suggested the peculiar narrative, or evolving postmodern myth, of the Gray aliens. Over the last decades, the Grays infiltrated the global subconscious, through best-selling books such as Whitley Streiber’s 1987 Communion, the TV miniseries Taken, and T-shirts, plastic figurines, cartoons, and other mass-cult detritus based on accounts of abduction. I had never paid more than a glancing attention to the UFO phenomenon or to alien abduction accounts—it seemed like some hysterical symptom of our cultural malaise, adolescent and turgid, overliteral, and deeply disreputable. The notion that three-and-a-half-foot-tall cardboard-colored aliens made nightly invasions of middle-class bedrooms across the United States and the world to insert rectal probes and take sperm samples did not seem plausible, or the type of behavior one would anticipate from a futuristic civilization.

And yet, much like the surprisingly tangible evidence on crop circles, the accumulated data on UFO sightings and alien abductions reveals jarring levels of complexity and downright weirdness that do not allow for a blanket rejection of the phenomenon. Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of T. E. Lawrence, dedicated the last decades of his life to studying the psychological phenomenon of adbuction by “the visitors,” as Whitley Streiber called them. Considering the data gathered by a 1991 Roper poll, Mack thought it conceivable that as many as three million Americans had undergone an abduction experience. His study of abductees led him to conclude that the phenomenon had validity beyond any psychological mechanism: “There have been numerous psychological studies of these individuals; none has discovered any psychopathology in great degree that could account for the experience.” In many cases, abductees “have been witnessed by their relatives to not be present during that time. They are physically gone, and families become very distressed. . . . One of the things most difficult to accept is that this can actually have a literal factual basis. . . . Abductees may wake up with unexplained cuts, scoop marks, or bleeding noses.” Mack optimistically proposed that these experiences had some sort of therapeutic value.

The narrative of contact between modern culture and the UFOs has developed over a long period, beginning with mass sightings of mysterious “air ships,” like souped-up blimps, in the late nineteenth century. After World War II, accounts of flying saucers became rampant. “Between 1947 and the dawn of the age of abductees in the 1970s, there were at least six major UFO sighting waves,” writes Brenda Denzler in The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit of UFOs. Each wave produced thousands of eyewitness accounts. Sometimes picked up by radar, the UFOs would execute impossible aeronautical feats, hovering, plunging, zigzagging, skipping across water, suddenly disappearing.

On July 8, 1947, the Air Force intelligence office on Roswell Army Base in Roswell, New Mexico, announced the recovery of a crashed “flying disc” in a press release published in the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places. “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday,” the release began. The military retracted the information on the following day, explaining that the disc recovered by two intelligence agents turned out to be, upon further inspection, a weather balloon. Since that time, an entire industry of conspiracy theories has developed—books and films propounding government cover-ups, secret deals made with the aliens, issuing from that peculiar incident, and a few others like it.

During the 1950s, witnesses reported seeing saucers that had landed or crashed, with small, silver-suited humanoids standing around or working on them. Sometimes, these humanoid “aliens” would wave at the bystanders. Abduction accounts began to surface in the 1960s. The first famous report—that of Barney and Betty Hill, an interracial New Hampshire couple, whose abduction memories were recovered through hypnosis and published in Look magazine in 1966—established the template followed by the vast body of the tens of thousands of accounts logged since then. The “salient features,” according to Denzler, include “missing time, physical examination while on board the UFO, a tour of the ship, conversation with the aliens, and the use of hypnotic regression to recover lost memories.”

UFOlogist Jacques Vallee links alien abductions to ancient folktales in which humans trespassed or were cajoled into the realm of the fairy folk. Putting the episodes in the same category as Patrick Harpur’s “daimonic reality,” he sees them belonging to “the domain of the in-between, the unproven, and the unprovable, . . . the country of paradoxes, strangely furnished with material ‘proofs,’ sometimes seemingly unimpeachable, but always ultimately insufficient. . . . This absolutely confusing (and manifestly misleading) aspect . . . may well be the phenomenon’s most basic characteristic.” The visitors usually appear at night when the abductee is sleeping, often paralyzing them and then floating them out of their bed and onto a ship, where rapid, confusing, painful, and often repugnant events transpire.

Once selected, abductees tend to be picked up and tormented by the Grays again and again—and hypnosis often reveals that these contacts go back to early childhood. The visitors communicate telepathically, their tiny mouth slits and large black eyes never moving. They seem lacking in affect—although some abductees find them afraid or sad or amused at certain moments—and are puzzled yet fascinated by human emotional reactions. Their behavior is consistently bizarre and unpleasant, as if their actions represent a kind of mangled syntax, their true intentions concealed or distorted in some way. To take one of many examples, at the end of an abduction, the visitors exhorted one abductee, over and over again, to “eat only cow things.” In another account, a male Gray paraded in front of its victim wearing her high-heeled shoes. Another abductee described a group of “small Grays” (they come in different sizes) gathered around a Christmas gift they had found in her car, opening and clumsily rewrapping it. Their hectic movements and the seemingly senseless operations they perform give the visitors an odd, fugitive quality, somehow out of sync, like figures from an old silent movie.

For the abductees, the most prevalent emotional response is one of extreme terror and violation—although some abductees, in what might be an extradimensional version of Stockholm Syndrome, come to believe in and trust their visitors, overcoming their initial reactions of horror. They convince themselves they are in league with the visitors—or were (or are) Grays in another life. They accept the claims sometimes made by the visitors, that they are here to salvage humanity and the planet from our destructive mania. Abductees often report rapes and procedures where small BB-sized implants are painfully deposited under their skin, deep up their nose or their rectum. In some cases, these implants have been retrieved and analyzed in laboratories—but they are of indeterminate origin and inconclusive proof of anything otherworldly.

In 1981, the abductions were declared an “invisible epidemic” by researcher Budd Hopkins, author of Missing Time. In the 1980s, Hopkins and other researchers noted the prevalence of reports describing the removal of eggs or sperm, and the compiled accounts began to suggest that the Grays were engaged in a massive “hybrid” human-alien breeding program. In dozens of reports, women are abducted, gynecological procedures performed, and then, back in their normal lives, they test positive for pregnancy. A few weeks later, their mysterious pregnancy disappears. Under hypnosis, they would recollect an intervening abduction and the removal of a tiny fetus. In future abductions—as revealed under hypnosis—the women would be shown developing fetuses, babies, or children and told that these were their hybrid offspring. A sordid ambience of accusation and guilt clings to these memories. In several accounts, abductees trying to escape from the tortures or experiments the Grays had designed for them were told by their captors: “Don’t you remember? You agreed to this.” As his captors inserted a needle into his brain, Streiber shouted, “You have no right to do this.” The visitors answered calmly, “We do have a right.”

The abductions have the ambience of intensely lucid nightmares, and some researchers suspect they are hypnagogic, chaotic, or nonlinear events that the experiencers reorganize into a more logical narrative afterward. To a certain extent, hypnotherapists may help shape the abduction narratives through subtle cues. Yet the similarity of encounters reported on different continents, the identical details picked up again and again, in thousands of reports from credible and often reluctant subjects around the world, suggest, at the very least, that something is happening that cannot be reduced to current categories of psychology, or fit into accepted frameworks of meaning. As John Mack noted, “What characterizes the abduction experience is that it is physically real and it enters the physical world, but it is also transpersonal and subjective. It crosses that barrier between the hard-edged physical world and the spirit/transpersonal world.”

Although perfectly willing to concede his experiences could represent something other than alien contact, Whitley Streiber wrote: “If it is an experience of something else, then I warn you: This ‘something else’ is a power within us, maybe some central power of the soul, and we had best try to understand it before it overcomes objective efforts to control it.”

In Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (1995), an intelligent and honestly astonished account of the abduction phenomenon, New Yorker contributor C. D. B. Bryan crafted a physical portrait of the visitors, exploring their many anomalies. “The aliens’ bodies are flat, paunchless. Their chests are not bifurcated; they have no nipples. Nor does the chest swell or diminish with breathing,” he wrote. Culling from reports and his own research, he found, “The lower part of their anatomy does not contain any stomach pouch or genitals; it just comes to an end. . . . The Small Gray’s body appears frail, with thin limbs and no musculature or bone structure.” Some researchers assume they are less like biological organisms than machines, powered in some way we cannot comprehend, as they do not seem to eat, drink, or excrete. Nor do they have a slot for inserting batteries. Incongruous details abound: In Britain, the Grays are associated with the odor of cinnamon; in the United States, their smell is of ammonia, almonds, and lemon.

Bryan’s book offered no coherent thesis to explain the phenomenon. More alarming and pointed in his conclusions than Bryan was David Jacobs in The Threat: Revealing the Secret Alien Agenda (1999). A hypnotherapist and professor of history at Temple University, Jacobs believes that he has, after years of work, distilled a completely logical and entirely horrifying picture of what the Grays are doing and planning—and he is disconsolate over it. He describes the breeding program, including haunting details from abductee accounts.

Captured humans are often brought to play with the children of the visitors, who are described as melancholy and lethargic. The Gray children play with blocks, similar to the blocks used by human children. But the alien blocks do not have letters or numbers on them—instead, they emit different emotions when they are turned. Since they seem to be telepathic, the visitors have no need to learn spelling or counting. The toys seem to indicate, instead, that they are trying to learn how to feel. Could it be that this yearning for affect is one reason the visitors seek human contact? Does it indicate something of their intent?

“I can discern a visible agenda of contact in what is happening,” Streiber wrote in Communion. “Over the past forty or so years their involvement with us has not only been deepening, it has been spreading rapidly through the society. At least, this is how things appear. The truth may be that it is not their involvement that is increasing, but our perception that is becoming sharper.” Even the difficulties of retrieving memories of these experiences could be part of a process in which the visitors are slowly acclimatizing us to their existence, Streiber speculates.

During the encounters uncovered in Jacobs’s hypnotherapy sessions, abductees are often shown images, like propaganda films, of an apocalyptic event—nuclear war or sudden climate change—followed by clips of hybrid human-aliens walking arm in arm across a transformed earth, the sun shining down on them peacefully. The Grays state that their breeding program will repopulate the earth after the approaching cataclysm that makes the planet uninhabitable for our type of life. The alien agenda, Jacobs believes, has three stages—“gradual, accelerated, and sudden.” We are currently in the accelerated phase. Under hypnosis, abductees report being trained to operate the Grays’ saucers, and to help herd masses of people, like frightened sheep, into them, when the moment is right for the “sudden” phase.

Jacobs hypothesizes that the visitors’ frequently nonsensical and bizarre behavior is a way of covering their direct intent. Like cunning cartoon villains, the visitors have used our own propensity for disbelief to render us defenseless to their agenda: the incipient takeover of the earth. One abductee reports, “After The Change, there will be only one form of government: The insectile aliens will be in complete control. There will be no necessity to continue national governments. There will be ‘one system’ and ‘one goal.’” Jacobs ends on a note of dread: “We now know the alarming dimensions of the alien agenda and its goals. . . . I do not think about the future with much hope. When I was a child, I had a future with much hope. . . . Now I fear for the future of my own children.”

I found something wearying—not just foggy but almost smutty—about studying the abduction accounts. Almost from the first moment of pursuing it, it was as if a veil was falling down over my mind and my senses. Whether projections of our own mind or literal entities or both, the Grays call to us from a feverish twilit world of shades of grayness without clear definition. The path to understanding what may or may not be known about them by the government leads to an opaque barrier of reports of unverifiable authenticity, military and CIA panels with names like “Project Grudge,” “The Robertson Panel,” “Project Blue Book,” and “Majestic 12,” a plausible yet unreal history of covert operations, secret underground bases, cattle mutilations, alien crashes, possibly paranoiac accounts of former military personnel, and disinformation campaigns. The endless mass-market books on the subject include, inevitably, black-and-white photographs of disc-shaped objects and blurry streaks that look entirely unconvincing and somehow antiquated—a kind of 1930s idea of what a futuristic technology might look like.

But what if there was a literal truth to David Jacobs’s narrative? Was it possible that the Grays, as horrible as they sounded—as disreputable, somehow, as the entire enterprise seemed—were actually orchestrating an imminent evolutionary shift for the hapless human species?

Reading scores of abduction accounts, I felt a pitiful sense of helplessness against this telepathic, sorcerous, affectless enemy—“the bugs,” as many abductees call them. I thought about my disappointment with the human race, seemingly hurtling toward ecological collapse and nuclear disaster, unable to control our worst impulses. Was this all part of a process, to create the forced conditions for a transformation that would, indeed, be apocalyptic at a very deep level? And if this might be the case, then what would be our best response to “The Threat,” as Jacobs called it? Should we try to resist the visitors? Should we surrender to their morbid mastery? But then, why was there something so laboriously theatrical, tacky, and fraudulent about all of it?

In June 2002, I went with my partner and our baby to the opening of the Documenta11 exhibition, in the West German town of Kassel. As a journalist writing about art, I had always hoped to visit this exhibit, which takes place every five years. I associated Documenta with the hard-core cool of the conceptual art of the early 1970s, with the German conceptual artist Joseph Beuys, known for his neo-shamanic self-mythologizing and iconic displays of iron plates, felt, and fat. Unfortunately, by the time I finally managed to attend, my mind was filled with other, stranger matters.

We stayed at a hotel in the Wilhelmshöhe Bergpark, across the road from the city’s baroque castle. The castle had beautiful gardens, old gnarled trees, and a towering stone monument of Hercules clad in a lion skin at the end of a long reflective pool and fountain. The Brothers Grimm had lived near the park, and their house was a local attraction. During the day, we toured the exhibition halls spread across the city, in old factory buildings, breweries, and railway stations. Organized by Okwui Enwezor, a Nigerian curator, the exhibit was starkly political. It featured numerous Third World artists, and minority artists from the West. Many works addressed the destructive excesses of globalization, allegorically or directly. One film documented the bleak, monotonous lives of South African diamond miners, in bunkers and tunnels deep under the Earth. Sculptures mocked the modernist visions of utopia, parodied colonialism’s slave-driven delusions of grandeur. The exhibit was angry, inspiring—a post-Marxist assault on global imperialism.

In the hypersophisticated ambience of Documenta11’s numerous receptions and parties, standing amidst espresso-drinking aesthetes and stylish art dealers chattering in various Romance languages about museum shows and beach resorts and the latest art world gossip, I found myself thinking incessantly about the abduction saga, the postmodern myth of the visitors. Were these glamorous and well-heeled aesthetes soon to be fodder for an orchestrated alien takeover, doomed to explain Neo-Conceptualism and Post-Pop to short, affectless, hyperdimensional invaders?

One night, after a long day of art-going under the pouring rain in Kassel, I had a vivid dream about the visitors. In the dream, I went with two friends to meet one of the “Gray Alien” commanders in an Upper West Side lobby. The alien resembled a Chinese woman. She wore a red silk dress, had large almond-shaped eyes, and four fingers on each hand. She spoke as if we were going to make some kind of deal.

“It’s going to be great for you when we take over your planet,” she told me. “We can’t wait to help you. We want to show you around the galaxy.” She called for her assistants. They were hunchbacks with bulbous features, resembling medieval trolls. They put my two friends on their backs and gave them piggyback rides. The alien commander pointed upward, where cheap tinsel stars and planets were stuck on the lobby’s domed ceiling. She acted as if this were an impressive sight, and my friends did seem impressed. I was disappointed: Was this all they had to show us?

Confused, I left the lobby and went, alone, to a crowded, seedy nightclub where a long-haired weirdo came up to me with his girlfriend. They were “hybrid” human-aliens. The man laughed and put one of his four fingers deep into my mouth. Immediately, in the dream, I turned around and put my finger just as far into his girlfriend’s mouth. Then we all laughed about this almost obscene exchange.

I awoke from the dream and recalled the details before reaching for my notebook—over the last years, while exploring shamanism, I had developed disciplined habits of dream recollection. Wide awake, I reflected on the dream’s particular seamy, swampy ambience. Before I started to write it down, my partner, in deep sleep, suddenly sat up and leaned toward me. She opened my mouth with one hand. She brought her other hand to my face, and put one of her fingers into my mouth.

Startled, I woke her immediately. But she remembered nothing of it—or what she had been dreaming.

Later, I learned that the area around Kassel—an ancient area similar in some ways to the stone-circle-studded landscape of Wessex in England—is the center of German crop circle activity. Several new formations appeared in local fields on the weekend that we were there.

The doors of Chapel Perilous swung open to welcome me inside.

If you are interested in this book, you can order it here:

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Titlacauan Tempts Quetzalcoatl

Because of the Toltec’s great fortune, other gods became jealous of Quetzalcoatl’s success. However, after a time, the people of this land became slothful. They had so many large fruits and vegetables that they tossed away the smaller ones, in waste. They grew so easily that they had to work less as the land was fertile. Their paradise made them soft.

Three demons decided to ruin this paradise at Tula. They were called Uitzilopichti, Titlacauan, and Tlacauepan.

The demon called Titlacauan decided he would turn himself into a weak, little old man. No one notices an old man. He made himself pitiful and bent over, and he walked with a limp. He decided to travel to Tula to meet Quetzalcoatl, the pure. When he arrived at Tula, it was said that Quetzalcoatl was sick. No one could offer him relief. This set Titlacauan’s mind to plotting a trick.

The old man walked aimlessly around Tula so that people would notice his presence. His long white hair and his pitiful way of walking made the villagers feel sorry for him and many helped him from time to time. One day, one of the temple workers saw the man and asked if he could assist. The old man told him he wished to meet their great leader, Quetzalcoatl.

The man told his lord about the man, but cautioned him about the intent of a stranger. His men thought it could be an evil trap. However, Quetzalcoatl was a good man and wished to help the old man. Upon seeing Quetzalcoatl, the old man called him “grandson” and offered him a healing tonic. A potion he said he made for himself for his weary bones.

Quetzalcoatl offered the man his hospitality, but refused his potion. Quetzalcoatl then said he was tired and wished to rest. The old man again told him that his potion was miraculously soothing and intoxicating.

Quetzalcoatl refused it again, saying that he needed to keep his mind clear.

The old man tried to tempt Quetzalcoatl by saying: “There is another old man who can testify to the greatness of this elixir. He gave me his formula. You can be strong like you were in your youth. You can get it from him if you like. He lives in Tollan.”

“I have done poorly since I have saved this for you alone, I can make more and restore myself, but I thought that you would appreciate its power. Let me know and I will give its secret to your people, ” the old man promised. Quetzalcoatl said he was too weak to travel.

The old man told Quetzalcoatl a few days later: “Drink this potion and be of good cheer! You look very sick, this will help you feel better.”

Again Quetzalcoatl refused.

The old man/Titlacauan was getting angry now. Why can’t I get him to drink this? he thought. I have used every form of flattery and sympathy on this man. Then he had a new idea. The old man then asked: “Why don’t you just take a sip? If you don’t like it I will understand and I won’t bother you again.”

Quetzalcoatl didn’t want to insult the man anymore, so he took a sip, just to get him off the idea.

“Hmmm,” Quetzalcoatl smiled, “This is very pleasant.” With that he downed the rest of the brew. Quetzalcoatl then felt relieved of his ailment. He felt no pain.

The old man said he had more of the tonic in his knapsack. He again, offered it to Quetzalcoatl saying: “It will give your body strength, it won’t hurt you, it can only help.”

After drinking the second batch of the elixir, Quetzalcoatl felt very odd. The liquid was soothingly warm and medicinal tasting. A feeling he never had felt before. Then he noticed his balance and vision were altered.

“What was that elixir made of?” Quetzalcoatl questioned.

The old man gave a toothy grin and said it was made from a local cactus juice.

Quetzalcoatl began to weep, now realizing that he had been tricked by the devil. “Why did you trick me?”

The old man told Quetzalcoatl that this was a white wine that fermented in the teometl plant. Titlacauan plotted to give the formula to the entire village.

You see intoxicating drinks were only for sacred occasions, and vision quests, not for everyday. Old men and women were the only ones that were allowed intoxicating drinks for the pain of aging. To drink frivously was frowned upon.

Quetzalcoatl was ashamed. Titlacauan was happy. Now the people of Tula would learn to crave intoxicating drink, which was disguised as a rejuvenator.***

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Poetry for Quetzalcoatl

Yucatan Mayan Prophecy

Eat, eat while there is bread,

Drink, drink, while there is water;

A day comes when dust shall darken the air,

When a blight shall wither the land,

When a cloud shall arise,

When a mountain shall be lifted up,

When a strong man shall seize the city,

When ruin shall fall upon all things,

When the tender leaf shall be destroyed,

When eyes shall be closed in death;

When there shall be three signs on a tree,

Father, son, and grandson hanging dead on the same tree;

When the battle flag shall be raised,

And the people scattered abroad in the forests.

…from the Books of Chilam Balam (sacred book of the Yucatan Maya).

———

I think people have a very narrow conception of what is possible with reality, that we’re surrounded by the howling abyss of the unknowable and nobody knows what’s out there.

Terence McKenna

(Ayahuasca Dream – Roberto Venosa)

—————–

Well this is certainly a day for info!

Gwyllm

On The Grill

The Links

Ayahuasca and Human Destiny – Dennis McKenna

The Sacred Hymns of Pachacutec – Ancient Inca Poetry pt2

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The Links:

Subtly Simpsons

Playground pentagram to go: Architect, officials say design wasn’t tied to the occult

Hail Xenu!

The battle over certainty

Scientists make water run uphill

Procession of the Species in Olympia Washington…

____________

(Thanks to Roberto Venosa for this)

Ayahuasca and Human Destiny – Dennis J. McKenna, Ph.D.

My good friend and colleague, Dr. Charles Grob, has extended a kind invitation to submit a contribution to this special edition of the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, devoted to the topic of ayahuasca, for which he has been selected as guest editor. I’m pleased to be asked and happy to respond, particularly since I have collaborated for many years with Dr. Grob and other colleagues who are represented here, on various aspects of the scientific study of ayahuasca. For most of the last 33 years, ayahuasca has been one of the major preoccupations of my life.

In that time, I have written extensively on the botany, chemistry, and pharmacology of ayahuasca, on its potential therapeutic uses, and on the need for more, and more rigorous, scientific and clinical investigations of this remarkable plant decoction. Working with colleagues such as Dr. Grob, my good friends Jace Callaway and Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna in Finland, my mentor Dr. Neil Towers, my late and beloved brother Terence, Dr. Glaucus de Souza Brito, and others, to investigate the myriad mysteries of ayahuasca, has been as rich and rewarding an experience as any scientist could ever hope for.

Partly as a result of our collective efforts, over the last few decades ayahuasca has become one of the most thoroughly studied of the traditional shamanic plant hallucinogens. We now have a firm understanding of the plant species that are utilized in its preparation, including the diverse pharmacopoeia of ayahuasca admixture plants, a shamanic technology unto itself that begs additional investigation. We understand the chemistry of the active constituents of its primary botanical components, and have better insight into its remarkable synergistic pharmacology.

We have identified potential therapeutic applications for ayahuasca and the role that it may some day find in healing the physical and spiritual wounds of individuals, if it is ever afforded its rightful place in medical practice. Ethnographically, my colleagues and I have made contributions to an understanding of the central role that ayahuasca already has in the context of Amazonian shamanism and ethnomedicine. We have described, and written about, its status as a window into the sacred cosmology of magic, witchcraft, transcendent experience, and healing that permeates and defines the practices of Mestizo ethnomedicine.

The visionary paintings of Peruvian shaman and artist Pablo Amaringo, brought so beautifully to the attention of the world by Dr. Luis Eduardo Luna, has helped to make that tradition accessible to many who would otherwise have seen it (if they were aware of it at all) as alien, exotic, and incomprehensible. To an extent, our work has shed some small light on the more contemporary role of ayahuasca as the sacramental vehicle of syncretic religious movements that originated in Brasil and now are reaching out globally, if incrementally, to embrace a sick and wounded world that desperately yearns for the healing that this mind/body/spirit medicine can offer.

The story of ayahuasca, and our evolving understanding of its place in the world, and of its significance for medicine, pharmacology, ethnobotany, and shamanic studies, is far from over, and in fact, it may have just begun. I would like to believe that is the case. But for the purposes of this contribution, rather than submit yet another dense and lengthy review on the botany, chemistry, pharmacology, &c., of ayahuasca, I have chosen to adopt a broader perspective, and to indulge in some reflections, and speculations on the past and future of ayahuasca of the sort that a scientist, probably mercifully, rarely shares with his colleagues or the larger world.

To those readers who may wish for my more usual nuts-and-bolts approach to the subject, I call attention to my recent review in the journal Pharmacology and Therapeutics (McKenna, 2004). In addition, a complete list of all of “my” publications on ayahuasca is appended to the end of this article; and I use the term “my” advisedly because these publications represent the work and creativity of many people with whom I’ve been privileged to collaborate over the years. They would not exist without them.

On a personal level, ayahuasca has been for me both a scientific and professional continuing carrot, and a plant teacher and guide of incomparable wisdom, compassion, and intelligence. My earliest encounters with ayahuasca were experiential; only later did it become an object of scientific curiosity, sparked in part by a desire to understand the mechanism, the machineries, that might underlie the profound experiences that it elicited.

As a young man just getting started in the field of ethnopharmacology, ayahuasca seemed to me more than worthy of a lifetime of scientific study; and so it has proven to be. Pursuing an understanding of ayahuasca has led to many exotic places that I would never have visited otherwise, from the jungles of the Amazon Basin to the laboratory complexes of the National Institute of Mental Health and Stanford; it has led to the formation of warm friendships and fruitful collaborations with many colleagues who have shared my curiosity about the mysteries of this curious plant complex.

These collaborations, and more importantly, these friendships, continue, as does the quest for understanding. Though there have been detours along the way, always, and inevitably, they have led back to the central quest. Often, after the fact, I have seen how those apparent detours were not so far off the path after all, as they supplied some insight, some skill, or some experience, that in hindsight proved necessary to the furtherance of the quest.

Just as ayahuasca has been for me personally something of a Holy Grail, as it has been for many others, I have the intuition that it may have a similar role with respect to our entire species. Anyone who is personally experienced with ayahuasca is aware that it has much to teach us; there is incredible wisdom and intelligence there. And to my mind, one of the most profound and humbling lessons that ayahuasca teaches – one that we thick-headed humans have the hardest time grasping – is the realization that “you monkeys only think you’re running things.”

Though I state it humorously, here and in other talks and writings, it is nonetheless a profound insight on which may depend the very survival of our species, and our planet. Humans are good at nothing if not hubris, arrogance, and self-delusion. We assume that we dominate nature; that we are somehow separate from, and superior to, nature, even as we set about busily undermining and wrecking the very homeostatic global mechanisms that have kept our earth stable and hospitable to life for the last four and a half billion years. We devastate the rainforests of the world; we are responsible for the greatest loss of habitat and the greatest decimation of species since the asteroid impacts of the Permian-Triassic boundary, 250 million years ago; we rip the guts out of the earth and burn them, spewing toxic chemicals into the atmosphere; at the same time we slash and burn the woody forests that may be the only hope for sequestration of the carbon dioxide that is rapidly building to dangerous and possibly uncontrollable levels. For the first time in the history of our species, and indeed of our planet, we are forced to confront the possibility that thoughtless and unsustainable human activity may be posing a real threat to our species’ survival, and possibly the survival of all life on the planet.

And suddenly, and literally, “out of the Amazon,” one of the most impacted parts of our wounded planet, ayahuasca emerges as an emissary of trans-species sentience, to bring this lesson: You monkeys only think you’re running things. In a wider sense, the import of this lesson is that we need to wake up to what is happening to us and to the planet. We need to get with the program, people. We have become spiritually bereft and have been seduced by the delusion that we are somehow important in the scheme of things. We are not.

Our spiritual institutions have devolved into hollow shells, perverted to the agendas of rapacious governments and fanatic fundamentalisms, no longer capable of providing balm to the wounded spirit of our species; and as the world goes up in flames we benumb ourselves with consumerism and mindless entertainment, the decadent distractions of gadgets and gewgaws, the frantic but ultimately meaningless pursuits of a civilization that has lost its compass. And at this cusp in human history, there emerges a gentle emissary, the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not to be the master of nature, but its stewards, Our destiny, if we are to survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.

I find it both ironic, and hopeful, that within the last 150 years, and particularly in the last half of the 20th century, ayahuasca has begun to assert its presence into human awareness on a global scale. For millennia it was known only to indigenous peoples who have long since understood and integrated what it has to teach us. In the 19th century it first came to the attention of a wider world as an object of curiosity in the reports of Richard Spruce and other intrepid explorers of the primordial rainforests of South America; in the mid-20th century Schultes and others continued to explore this discovery and began to focus the lens of science on the specifics of its botany, chemistry, and pharmacology (and, while necessary, this narrow scrutiny perhaps overlooked some of the larger implications of this ancient symbiosis with humanity). At the same time, ayahuasca escaped from its indigenous habitat and made its influence felt among certain non-indigenous people, representatives of “greater” civilization.

To these few men and women, ayahuasca provided revelations, and they in turn responded (in the way that humans so often do when confronted with a profound mystery) by founding religious sects with a messianic mission; in this case, a mission of hope, a message to the rest of the world that despite its simplicity was far ahead of its time: that we must learn to become the stewards of nature, and by fostering, encouraging, and sustaining the fecundity and diversity of nature, by celebrating and honoring our place as biological beings, as part of the web of life, we may learn to become nurturers of each other. A message quite different, and quite anathema, to the anti-biological obsessions of most of the major world “religions” with their preoccupation with death and suffering and their insistence on the suppression of all spontaneity and joy.

Such a message is perceived as a great threat by entrenched religious and political power structures, and indeed, it is. It is a threat to the continued rape of nature and oppression of peoples that is the foundation of their power. Evidence that they understand this threat and take it seriously is reflected by the unstinting and brutal efforts that “civilized” ecclesiastical, judicial, and political authorities have made to prohibit, demonize, and exterminate the shamanic use of ayahuasca and other sacred plants ever since the Inquisition and even earlier.

But the story is not yet over. Within the last 30 years, ayahuasca, clever little plant intelligence that it is, has escaped from its ancestral home in the Amazon and has found haven in other parts of the world. With the assistance of human helpers who heard the message and heeded it, ayahuasca sent its tendrils forth to encircle the world. It has found new homes, and new friends, in nearly every part of the world where temperatures are warm and where the ancient connections to plant-spirit still thrive, from the islands of Hawaii to the rainforests of South Africa, from gardens in Florida to greenhouses in Japan. The forces of death and dominance have been outwitted; it has escaped them, outrun them.

There is now no way that ayahuasca can ever be eliminated from the earth, short of toxifying the entire planet (which, unfortunately, the death culture is working assiduously to accomplish). Even if the Amazon itself is leveled for cattle pasture or burned for charcoal, ayahuasca, at least, will survive, and will continue to engage in its dialog with humanity. And encouragingly, more and more people are listening.

It may be too late. I have no illusions about this. Given that the curtain is now being rung down on the drunken misadventure that we call human history, the death culture will inevitably become even more brutal and insane, flailing ever more violently as it sinks beneath the quick sands of time. Indeed, it is already happening; all you have to do is turn on the nightly news.

Will ayahuasca survive? I have no doubt that ayahuasca will survive on this planet as long as the planet remains able to sustain life. The human time frame is measured in years, sometimes centuries, rarely, in millennia. Mere blinks when measured against the evolutionary time scales of planetary life, the scale on which ayahuasca wields its influence. It will be here long after the governments, religions, and political power structures that seem today so permanent and so menacing have dissolved into dust. It will be here long after our ephemeral species has been reduced to anomalous sediment in the fossil record. The real question is, will we be here long enough to hear its message, to integrate what it is trying to tell us, and to change in response, before it is too late?

Ayahuasca has the same message for us now that it has always had, since the beginning of its symbiotic relationship with humanity. Are we willing to listen? Only time will tell.

+++++++++++++++

McKenna, Dennis J. (2004) Clinical investigations of the therapeutic potential of Ayahuasca: Rationale and regulatory challenges. Pharmacology and Therapeutics. 102:111-129.

Dennis J. McKenna (1999) Ayahuasca: an ethnopharmacologic history. In: R. Metzner, (ed) Ayahuasca: Hallucinogens, Consciousness, and the Spirit of Nature. Thunder’s Mouth Press, New York.

Callaway, J. C., D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, L. P. Raymon, R.E. Poland, E. N. Andrade, E. O. Andrade, D. C. Mash (1999) Pharmacokinetics of Hoasca alkaloids in Healthy Humans. Journal of Ethnopharmacology. 65:243-256.

McKenna, DJ, JC Callaway, CS Grob (1999). The scientific investigation of ayahuasca: A review of past and current research. Heffter Review of Psychedelic Research 1:

Callaway, J. C., L. P. Raymon, W. L. Hearn, D. J. McKenna, C. S. Grob, G. S. Brito, D. C. Mash (1996) Quantitation of N,N-dimethyltryptamine and harmala alkaloids in human plasma after oral dosing with Ayahuasca. Journal of Analytical Toxicology 20: 492-497

C. S. Grob, D. J. McKenna, J. C. Callaway, G. S. Brito, E. S. Neves, G. Oberlender, O. L. Saide, E. Labigalini, C. Tacla, C. T. Miranda, R. J. Strassman, K. B. Boone (1996) Human pharmacology of hoasca, a plant hallucinogen used in ritual context in Brasil: Journal of Nervous &amp; Mental Disease. 184:86-94. McKenna, DJ (1996)

James C. Callaway, M. M. Airaksinen, Dennis J. McKenna, Glacus S. Brito, &amp; Charles S. Grob (1994) Platelet serotonin uptake sites increased in drinkers of ayahuasca. Psychopharmacology 116: 385-387

Dennis J. McKenna, L. E. Luna, &amp; G. H. N. Towers, (1995) Biodynamic constituents in Ayahuasca admixture plants: an uninvestigated folk pharmacopoeia. In: von Reis, S., and R. E. Schultes (eds). Ethnobotany: Evolution of a Discipline. Dioscorides Press, Portland

Dennis J. McKenna, &amp; G. H. N. Towers, (1985) On the comparative ethnopharmacology of the Malpighiaceous and Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 17:35-39.

Dennis J. McKenna, &amp; G. H. N. Towers, (1984), Biochemistry and pharmacology of tryptamine and ß-carboline derivatives: A minireview. J. Psychoactive Drugs, 16:347-358.

Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, &amp; F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants: Tryptamine and ß-carboline constituents of Ayahuasca. J. of Ethnopharmacology 10:195-223.

Dennis J. McKenna, G. H. N. Towers, &amp; F. S. Abbott (1984) Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in South American hallucinogenic plants Pt. II: Constituents of orally active Myristicaceous hallucinogens. J. of Ethnopharmacology 12:179-211.

Dennis J. McKenna &amp; G. H. N. Towers (1981) Ultra-violet mediated cytotoxic activity of ß-carboline alkaloids. Phytochemistry 20:1001-1004

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The Sacred Hymns of Pachacutec – Ancient Inca Poetry pt2

O Lord

fortunate, happy, victorious Wiracocha,

merciful and compassionate toward the people:

Before you stand your servants and the poor

to whom you have given life and put in their places:

Let them be happy and blessed

with their children and descendants;

let them not fall into veiled dangers

along the lonely road;

let them live many years

without weakening or loss,

let them eat, let them drink.

———

O, my Lord,

my Creator, origin of all,

diligent worker

who infuses life and order into all,

saying, “Let them eat,

let them drink in this world:”

Increase the potatoes and corn,

all the foods

of those to whom you have given life,

whom you have established.

You who orders,

who fulfills what you have decreed,

let them increase.

So the people do not suffer and,

not suffering, believe in you.

Let it not frost

let it not hail,

preserve all things in peace.

———–

Prayer to the Sun

Lord Wiracocha,

Who says

“Let there be day, let there be night!”

Who says,

“Let there be dawn, let it grow light!”

Who makes the Sun, your son,

move happy and blessed each day,

so that man whom you have made has light:

My Wiracocha,

shine on your Inca people,

illuminate your servants,

whom you have shepherded,

let them live

happy and blessed

preserve them

in peace,

free of sickness, free of pain.

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Have a wonderful weekend…