Human Kindness Grows Tentacles—Learning new Migrant ways in CultchaShock of Moving Home—
HUMAN KINDNESS GROWS TENTACLES LEARNING NEW MIGRANT WAYS IN CULTCHASHOCK OF MOVING HOME
MONTHLY FIRST WEDNESDAY EMERGENCE FROM SUBTERRANEAN/SUB-PACIFIC CINDER-CONE TUNNEL for INSECURE WRITERS, FLYAWAY SUPERSCRIBES & WORD-ADDICTS OF ALL AGES
Driving on Right… Thinking on Left
Catherine Zeta Jones‘s experience—a Welsh-born (Sept. 1969 barely a Millennial) star of Glamorgan, S.Wales, then London, Paris, New York and LAX with her hit Chicago (2002, also Renée Zellwegger & Richard Gere) brought her full attention world-wide. Working with and eventually marrying Michael Douglas was a clincher in Hollywood, but she swears her daily quickies to local supermarket or even regular swing-by her hair stylist still cause her palpitations.
You think she’s kidding? Driving on or off the freeway in downtown Los Angeles—or even a leisurely stop off for fries in demure Beverly Hills is not automatic. It causes her to do her “British click-click” as she switches her brain to remember to drive on the right.
It’s no joke.
Back home, on sweet-perfumed winding hedge-lined roads of Tiger Bay rural South Glamorgan—home to Welsh stars Shirley Bassey & Tom Jones, we Boomers, pre-Boomers—Crazee-Oldie Land Girl Diggie Chickies use bicycles, maybe a pony, a horse or two if we’re fortunate, and we DRIVE ON THE LEFT.
This remarkable observation may have escaped the attention of the Greater American continent or in fact most of the Western World and including Oz/NZ & Indonesia; but interestingly NOT Japan. This curious anomaly results in a parking lot in downtown Hilo, Big Island, HI where traffic travels left: entry & exit look left. This teensy weensy change in direction caused chaos on entry to the Suisan marina and dock parking lot—built by Japanese contractor—for the official government-funded multi-glitter rocket-boosted star-filled sky over Hawai’i’s downtown Bayshore—the municipal fireworks display last Monday night, July 4th. Please allow the 4th to be with you. Blatant crib. Sorry Star Wars.
It boomed and popped (superb right-brain chaos thinking) for a prescribed Government-funded fully loaded Fireworks Display lasting precisely 90 minutes. Then all the vehicles drove on the LEFT to get back out on the Highway. Thank you Queen Liliuokalani (last queen) for having us on your shoreline.
I empathize deeply with Catherine—wondergirl to beat all exports from pre-Celtic mystical Wales. I don’t live in SoCal or even get to do a little shopping on Rodeo Drive (long time ago)—no longer desire. But growing up in Scotland, having 30-year offspring period; then zoom All Change—CulchaShock USA here we come. Neither American husband understood. They drove on the right: always; no problem. But neither got it that it was not automatic for me. There’s not a day I don’t forget to remember which side of the street to look out for traffic on: Boom she-bang. Give that woman a ticket.
Olde Times Always There—iGens Tackle Retro-Book-Learning
But there’s hope for us Oldtimers—call us what you will—WWII Land Girls—who wore the dizziest snaz headscarf routine to keep unruly hair out of the pail while milking the cow—or planting kale & cabbage.
May not be quite old enuff to be a Land Girl, but my parents had friends who were and the ethos stuck.
Armed with bucket and spade, sometimes water hose or mechanic’s toolkit, Brit lady volunteers pretty well ran everything behind the scenes, vide HM Queen bottom left, on visit to War Museum to see her khaki wartime volunteer uniform.
Even our language is different. Lingo changes generationally—each new gen a new word. Only now they’re called memes. Don’t ask me. I’m not a millennial. Nor am I an IGen, GenZ or even a Boomer. Ahem. I was born before the Julian calendar change. Well, not quite that old. But…
Onward and upward: pix top above mostly the gorgeous and forever timeless-no-age-looking Zeta-Jones in triplicate counter-clockwise from top left 1. Butterfly nebula to get us thinking aerial thoughts on transformation and transfiguration in this new world 2.&3. trailer for and Catherine’s seminal scene from Chicago starring Richard Gere & Renée Zellwegger 4. July 2022 reconciliation-family reunion of husband Michael Douglas’s estranged son, courtesy selfless Catherine <3. 5. Semi-serious break from Silly Season distractions: Wild boar—contested entrant into human race for environmental regeneration unpopular with some new rewilding charitable institutions; carved stone rooftile found embedded in Chesters fort, Northumberland, part of Hadrian’s Wall abandoned before Roman exit A.D. 420. Sacred wild boar was not only emblem of the 20th Legion Deva Victrix, but important enough for legionaries to hack away at Gordon territorial boar coat of arms in Aberdeenshire [Deva also ancient pre-Celtic name for River Dee—goddess’s victory over sacred water]?
Aberdeenshire is coincidentally target of summertime exit from London heat to pleasures of Scottish country dancing, highland pony trekking, forest rewilding and—later—Braemar Gathering attended by Her Majesty. Formerly part of her holiday from metropolitan demands after she views Windsor Horse Show [fave animal after corgis] & Windsor Royals Polo Match. Unable now to ride because of spinal pain, at age 96, she deputized grandson HRH Prince William to swing his polo stallion around like he’s a professional, good at animal recognition/communication and care. There are plenty horses waiting for them in Balmoral, after touchdown in Scots capital, Edinburgh, to “receive the keys to the kingdom”; a short tree-planting session and (private) passenger train ride later & she will reach Outlander territory allowing rain, wind, trees, river Dee and peace to enfold. She may even get some personal catchup time for reading (and planting more trees) with the children. Lonach Gathering, Strathdon gathers friends of mountain, sky and earth together as the Clans march through the Glen to the sound of the pipes.
Without libraries, what are we? We have no past, no future
Ray Bradbury
Probably most famous of all, the Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt, holding scrolls in its Mouseion—an Academy dedicated to the nine Muses held papyrus scrolls from Nineveh, Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon 605 B.C.; Sumerian, Assyrian, Mesopotamian papyrus records brought into port in ships of Hellenic origin. This aura of cultural academia was created as a royal initiative on impetus of author-historian Ptolemy I Soter c. 320 B.C. with his son, c.240 B.C Ptolemy II Philadelphus, after the death of Alexander the Great, 323 B.C. when the empire collapsed, dividing into three. The Library was built in the Brucheion (Royal Quarter, below l.) as part of the Mouseion building which included living quarters dining facilities and tax-free academic lifestyle for a dozen teachers. Sacred ‘temple’ for an estimated 400,000 scrolls held by royal command the main purpose of the Ptolemaic campus of buildings was to show off the wealth of Egypt, with research as a lesser goal. Library contents were created strategically for the benefit of their royal ruler, with the Chief Librarian appointed as personal tutor to the king’s son Intent was if scholars were completely freed from all the burdens of everyday life they could devote more time to research and intellectual pursuits. Historian Strabo called the group of scholars who lived at the Mouseion a σύνοδος (synodos, “community”). As early as 283 B.C. they may have numbered between thirty and fifty learned men.
The *Place of the Cure of the Soul*
Μουσεῖον τῆς Ἀλεξανδρείας original Mouseion Academy sacred to Goddesses of the Arts, Nine Muses, was established as major part of Ptolemaic plan: academic tax-free community learning institution, shared dining-living quarters, garden walk, botanical zoo, teaching classrooms, lecture hall, a dozen academics including a Head Librarian. Ptolemy II Philadelphus son on father-historian Ptolemy I Soter’s advice, provided a learning environment, lecture halls, shared dining, reading room, meeting rooms, gardens, creating a model for the modern university campus.[32] A hall contained shelves for the collections of papyrus scrolls known as bibliothekai (βιβλιοθῆκαι). An inscription above shelves read: “The place of the cure of the soul.”
You Have to be Both Sexist & Racist to Remember WWII
Perfectionist in personal appearance, HM’s superb timing @QueensCanopy est. 2022 her charity of choice encouraging tree-planting by spade & rake aka WWII WRAC female-backup force technique! Monarch’s war uniform held London Military Museum
Alternate aphorism from Brit Land Girls as reaction to learning of American G.I.s’ rural station as uniformed migrant gum-chewing baggy-pants-wearing khaki bois drinking at the local: “Them Yanks—over-weight, over-sexed and over here”
Remembering to Remember or Forgetting Writing Cues, Deadlines
July stand by! It’s traditionally hurricane season in Bahamas and Antilles—but it’s Silly Season in the Press Office—this grateful not-so-young pre-Boomer still breathing & counting the sacred numbers, despite current trending political Brit. Downing Street news. No.10 Cat is more clued in on that story.
Much more relevant to the wondrous miracle of being present—of hauling oneself by one’s bootstraps out of our Cinder Cone Cave of Writerly Solitude to Face the World for one first Wednesday per month: think NaNo & IWSG who both have summer projects on the slow burner.
Smell Burning? It’s a cloud of leftover dynamite, gunpowder smoke from July 4 Independence Day Weekend+Monday fireworks-to-die-for, sparkler* heaven for Oldie Americans, rocket shower gems for toddlers. All cats indoors, however. Drive ‘wrong way’ down Bayshore & Banyan.
Watch yer feet for S.Korean Enhypen-clone #redsnapper bangers—all the rage.
*p.s. On anti-glitter sparkler campaign, I washed some of my shiny (sixties’) Mendocino abalone shells and resulting glitter scattered on the carpet as I dried them was verrrry sparkling!
Light Beings Call (Writing) Hideaway Hotline by Sacred Numbers
They say home is where the heart is; Deepak Chopra says breath is life; Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh would say breathe in I have arrived—breathe out I am home, Peek out cave take in-breath; write blog post blog tune into madness of human lot. On exhale, the pundits say, we put the world to rights. Happy 4th or as #roaring ‘twenties star Groucho Marx said “plenny mo’ numbers”. Happy scribing. ©2022 Marian Youngblood
Placenames: Hidden Gems Strewn Along Drove-Roads to our Past
PLACENAMES: HIDDEN GEMS STREWN ALONG DROVE-ROADS TO PAST
MONTHLY FIRST WEDNESDAY EMERGENCE FROM OUR (INSECURE) WRITERS’ CAVE TO GLIMPSE THE LIGHT
Northumbrian Venerable Bede, left, 7thC monk at Jarrow’s church of St. Peter and St. Paul, pulled north England and Pictish east Scotland up to the level of Rome by building stone kirks, ‘educating the unlearned’ populace.
Language is a dialect with an Army, a Navy and a Monarch
Simon Taylor, PhD, ‘Pictish Placenames’
Eastern Scotland holds Secret Language Key to the Past
When Bede wrote his glorious Ecclesiastical history of the English people—Historia Gentis Anglorum Ecclesiastica—before he died in 736, most of the landmass he was addressing still lived a rural pastoral life with belief in nature spirits, Celtic deities and giving gifts to the Earth in thanks for sustenance through the year.
An English education custom which continues to this day is sending boys to boarding school at an early age—in the Noughties girls go, too. Sometime around 680, a small seven-year old Bede was enrolled at Monkwearmounth and spent the next fifty years learning Church history. As an adult, he wrote 40 books—including his De Natura Rerum—a 7thC guide to the Universe—along with hundreds of pamphlets to enlighten ‘unlearned’ Britons in the ways of Rome. As Irish churches and Iona calculated by a different calendar—one year King and Queen of Anglian Northumberland held Easter on separate Sundays. Bede encouraged closer alignment with up-to-date Rome.
He succeeded.
King Nechtan Orders ‘Fite’ Peterkirks for Roman Easter in N & E Scotland
During Bede’s own simple monastic life, he was able to witness Pictish King Nechtan write to Jarrow asking for stonemasons to help build stone kirks ‘in the manner of Rome’. When work began on ‘Fite Kirks’ (rather than ‘black hoos’ hovels), Nechtan thanked his resident monks (from Iona, i.e. antiquated) and asked them to leave. Bede recorded in his own lifetime the lives of Nechtan, Adamnan, Columba and the rise of Christianity.
Throughout Pictland, new monasteries were set up, sometimes—as at Turriff—on the foundations of the old, where Celtic observance was replaced by the ‘new’ Roman calculation and, for monks, their hair cut in the tonsure of a crown. Others, like Rosemarkie and Tarbet may well have been completely new foundations. Curitan (Boniface) of Rosemarkie was a strong supporter of Adamnan (abbot of Iona and Columba’s biographer) at the 697 council held at court. He continued to support Nechtan’s initiative.
Maelrubai (‘Maree’) had founded the huge settlement at Applecross in Wester Ross, dying there in 722 at the age of 80. His influence was widespread, did not conflict with the royal strategy, and stretched east to Keith, where his Summareve’s Fair was [and is still – Keith Show] held annually.
Status and wealth were directly related.
The larger the citadel, the more land it controlled; but it had the burden of producing more to feed its dependents. Food had to be grown in abundance to stock a royal town (urbs or civitas, Bede, (HE I1). For a small dun crops could be grown locally. Whereas in a larger province, centred on a major fortress, a higher proportion would be tithed and collected as tribute from widespread tenantry.
‘He held his household . . . Sometyme at Edinburgh, sometyme at Striveline, In Scotlande, at Perthe and Dunbrytain, At Dunbar, Dunfrise, and St. John’s Toune, All worthy knights more than a legion, At Donydoure also in Murith region’ Jhon Hardyng, 1465 describing wealth of Pictish nation and royal residences
Scots and Irish Gaelic travelling monks used ogham etched into sacred stones as a means to teach locals Christianity. Fish shape design incised in rocks at parish boundaries held the message from Gk ICTHYS (L. piscis) which would be understood by the locals as salmon was sacred beast in Pictish pantheon
ICTHYS Jesu Christos son of God Gk. ΙΧΘΥΣ
Brandsbutt on old Inverurie ‘marches’, now in housing estate; Aboyne Formaston ogham flanks ClassII cross slab; Afforsk simple cross-inscribed boulder in ancient Caledonian forest on parish boundary of the Garioch and Monymusk—itself an early monastery with ClassII cross stone.housing Columba’s ‘Monymusk Reliquary’
‘At the present time there are five languages here [in
Britain], just as the divine law is written in five books …
These are namely the languages of the English, of the
British, of the Gaels, of the Picts as well as of the Latins;
through the study of the scriptures Latin is in general
use among them all’ Bede Historia Gentis Anglorum
Writing in Latin, which he learned from age 7, gave him unlimited access to church history. It also elevated him to stardom.
In 1022 a monk carried Bede’s remains from Jarrow to Durham cathedral, where he was interred as a saint next to Cuthbert. Durham is considered the greatest Anglian cathedral.
Britain’s Four Languages—and Latin
Celtic linguistic roots surface in all four British languages: pronunciation being the dividing line between Q-Celtic [West Coast, Glasgow, Eire and Isle of Man Manx] and P-Celtic sounding Breton, Cornish, Pictish and Welsh or Brittonic. e.g. Latin piscis, fish above, is Gaelic iasg ‘fish’. Latin pater, becomes Gaelic athair ‘father’.
P-Celtic pen ‘head’ becomes Q-Celtic ceann—sometimes ‘borrowed back’ into P-Celtic. Aberdeenshire has Kintore and Kincardine: combines caen + carden=rich grassland, pasture enclosure. Pit or pett is well-known for denoting a place of Pictish importance, a regional division, an enclosed place owned by Picts, usually high status. Pitcaple in the Garioch was royal stables: Pit-capull place of the horse. Many Scots Gaelic names borrowed into Pictish survive in rural steadings, ancient kirkyards and wild sheep-devoured meadows.
Original Uu sound of Celtic in Uurguist (Pictish king) translates Fergus in Scots Gaelic. St Fergus of Dyce Aberdeen (pic below of his ‘teaching slab’) represented his king, stonekirk-building Nechtan, at a Council in Rome in 721, to relate his nation’s conversion to Roman Christianity.
Royal Forests, Cold Mountain Passes & Gleaming Fields
Among Pictish beauties still giving their names and meaning to the landscape—rare in Britain south of the Border—are Aber ‘river or burn mouth’ as in Aberdeen, Arbroath, Aberfeldy; Cet, a wood (Keith family name ruled from Caithness to Angus); Cuper a confluence, Cupar in Fife; Mig bog, marsh, perhaps peat bogs, Migvie ABD;, Migmar ABD, Meigle Gowrie PER & Strathmiglo FIF. Pert wood, grove as in Perth. Interestingly Perth in Welsh means wood, copse, hedge brake or bush. Strath, Pictish broad valley like Welsh/Brittonic ystrad. Strathearn lush valley of Earn, see below.
Some names contain Pictish loan-words attested as common nouns in Scots Gaelic, e.g.bad (‘spot, clump’), dail, (‘haugh, water-meadow’), monadh (‘hill, hill-range, muir’), preas (‘bush’), pòr(‘seed, grain, crops’); and obsolete pett. The Slug—difficult climb alternative road over the Mounth from Crathes to Dunnottar comes from sluig (v.) ‘to
swallow, devour’ slugan m. ‘gullet, or whirlpool..Yet on a totally different tack, the Slug connects 2royal strongholds.
Royal Ownership Dictated by Fertile Valleys
It is thought by linguistic scholars that the Mounth—1500ft.mountain ridge denoting E-W geological fault dividing ‘lowland’ from ‘highland’ Scotland—is pure Pictish, as Irish-Gaelic Annals of Ulster list ‘Dub Tholargg rex Pictorum citra Monoth 782,’ King Dub Talorc gives family name Duff, surviving landowners in Aberdeenshire.
Fetter names contain Gaelic foithir usually translated as a slope, a terraced ravine. Multiple locations, however, include a remarkable number of high-status names in former Pictland: both N & S: Dunottar, Fetterangus,
Fettercairn, Fetteresso, Fetternear, Forteviot, Kineddar, Kingedward – all medieval parishes. foithir is made up of two Gaelic elements: fo ‘under’ and tìr ‘land’. The Welsh/Brittonic cognate is godir ‘region, district, lowland, slope’.
Dr Taylor suggests that behind this foithir in many eastern placenames is Pictish *uotir, which may have referred to some kind of high status/royal administrative district within Pictish domain. Probably not fuar=cold as in freezing Balfour (cold place!) equivalent of Cinrighmonadh=old name for religious pinnacle St.Andrew’s where kings were buried. ‘Head of the mountain of kings’. Birse, brass describes ‘gleaming’ cornfields, i.e.rich pasture = contented tenantry.
*It is quite synchronous that HRH Prince William is traditionally called Earl of Strathearn when he treads North of the Border, It was, after all, the highest pinnacle of royaldom any mormaer coiuld reach. The regal hub, as it were.
I believe Dr Taylor has hit jackpot on his connection of P. uotir as a high-status arondissement ruling body district, considering much of Scotland still remembers feu duty, tenantry and ownership of land by ruling classes.
Now that makes complete sense in high status and royal Pictish strongholds such as Forteviot, Fuor-triu (nom., acc. For-trenn) ‘Kingdom’ of Forgue, Aberdeenshire (kingdoms included Fife Fib, Forgue, ‘Regality of the Garioch
Surviving Ten Centuries of English Domination
While a surprising amount of anti-English rhetoric survives since our Scots barons signed their Declaration of Independence (1320), there are quite a few who (Cornish, Manx are being revived, the Doric is still spoken among loons & quines o’ the NorthEast) working to an all-indigenous culture. Much new research brightens the horizon.
That’s the Light we cave-dwelling scribes look for when we emerge from our [deeply-immersed-intuitive Muse-driven internal space into the sparkle of a New Dawn—ever hopeful—a new vibrant Earth full of its own history, totems and tautology—aka longwindedness. Us writers can’t help it. It came with the package.
p.s.incidentally, our Muse this month is Deva, Celtic goddess of the River. Aber-Deva: patroness of Aberdeen. She’s a star! ©2021 Marian Youngblood
In August/Lammas Heat, our Thoughts Turn to Water
IN AUGUST/LAMMAS HEAT, OUR THOUGHTS TURN TO WATER
Finding Respite in the Hottest Summer Yet
Mother Orca carrying her dead baby for over a week, slows her progress south with the herd
Monthly Hideaway for Insecure Writers and Others in need of a Cool Corner
This August seems hotter than most.
U.S. East Coast tropical storms began early. Now, with forest fires in California barely under control, homes and businesses are being evacuated from Redding, in Shasta-Trinity Forest’s Carr Fire, with volunteer fire crews being flown in from other states to combat its ‘tornado’ effect of flares spreading. It now covers 115,000 acres, 20% contained.
That’s twice as much acreage as last month’s Yosemite fire. Mendocino continues to battle its own Complex-Elk forest fires to the south. Emergency evacuation and road closure information here.
With all the burning going on, it is natural to turn to water, both metaphorically and literally. For the heroic firemen, a reliable source—river run-off, brackish or waste water—will work, as back-up for their ‘controlled burn’. The Carr fire is nevertheless not expected to be 100% controlled until at least mid-August. Our prayers go to Shasta and Trinity Counties. And to the 4,151 firemen there now, saving lives.
Cooling Contrast with Liquid Refreshment
To cool tempers and change our perspective a little, Washington Whale Museum in Friday Harbor, WA have been tracking/caring for a small pod of the last Southern Resident Orca in the wild. Numbering just 75, the group’s first baby to be born in three years just died. Mama Orca, above, has continued to carry her child, balancing the inert body on her snout and pushing it through the water. The pod are sensitive to her grief—the Museum record them grieving with her—which slows their progress in their brief migration.
Orca—the black-and-white so-called ‘killer’ whale is not much bigger than a dolphin. Their diet is a little more carniverous than their cousin the Humpback whale—plankton preferred, hence the name. Like dolphin, they are great mimics, playful in human company, some say boat-friendly.
16-yr old Orca Wiki with her calf born in captivity in French Aquacenter can say hello, goodbye & count to 5
In contrast, researchers at a French Marine Aquacenter are stretching the Orca’s fondness for communication in teaching their whale companions how to speak.
English, mostly.
Wiki, seen left with her calf, can say ‘Hello’, ‘Amy’, ‘goodbye’ and count from one to five.
Chesterton Windmill Crop Circle formation in Warwickshire shows musical/vibrational notation
Prelude to the Heat of Summer
Among the IWSGers here who (sometimes) emerge from our beloved (writing) cave, at our Ninja Cap’n Alex‘s call, I cannot resist a partial—if exoplanetary—explanation for such summer extremes:
July assembled a full moon in total eclipse for many parts of the world (except U.S.A.) and the auspicious heliacal rising of Sirius—worshipped and calculated to the millisecond by ancient Egyptian timekeepers—occurred within days of each other.
Unlike the parched West Coast U.S.A, in ancient times, Sirius foretold the rising of the Nile, providing much-needed water to abundant crops in the Egyptian delta. Eclipses, as we know, predict change.
Crop Circling PostScript
A ‘vibrational’ crop circle—noted for sound anomalies and making people’s wifi malfunction—also appeared on July 26th 2018 near a windmill in Warwickshire, creating woven nests in the wheat like little safety/comfort zones. Past crop circles with windmills have clearly encouraged human reuse of such traditional water/wind power.
Just a reminder from our interstellar relatives.
Let’s try to enjoy the heat. Or at least let us be grateful for the H2O.
©2018 Marian Youngblood
August Musical Express: Insecure Jazz-Jamboree to Nirvana
MONTHLY INSECURE WRITERS’ MIRACLE MANIFESTATION CORNER or
Sounding One’s Own Trumpet
Glorious summer skies: our parent Milky Way galaxy, colliding slowly with Andromeda, fires off Perseid meteor showers every August
What in the world is happening? you may ask.
Is it a bird, a plane, a super cloud?
No, Batman. It’s called ignoring/misleading public/human condition, in the final horse race to the political gate.
Bread and Circuses—Fodder for U.S. ‘uninformed’ Masses
U.S. adds four new Parks to conservation list, as last glacial ice melts in Glacier National Park
Political press liken both parties’ cavalier attitude to the American Constitution to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Do American politicians still remotely believe the public is listening to their rhetoric?
We in Ninja Cap’n.Alex‘s IWSGers stalwart group of writers know when it’s time to throw in the towel—allow Nature to take over the reins.. After all, we are INSECURE. And it’s summer—festival season. This is no time for intellectual—or intellect-less mind games. Carpe diem—seize the (day) moment. Time to look to the skies and aim heavenward—or hole up and w-r-i-t-e—or even go into permanent meditational mode: achieve mental freedom of Nirvana—or something even more (insecurely) celestial.
What Did You Do in the War, Daddy
What did you do in the War, Daddy? Jeb Bush worldview
Every Gun made
Every Warship launched
Every Rocket fired
signifies a Theft from the Hungry not fed, the Cold not clothed, and the Homeless left unhoused
Dwight D.Eisenhower, U.S. President 1953-61
Analogies with the Roman Colisseum are not totally inappropriate, in 2015-2016 election fever. The so-called uninformed public is now—courtesy of the Internet and the Cloud—hugely well-informed. Where gladiators and gore, pythons and phalluses were customary fodder for ignorant pre-Christian masses, two thousand years down the line, we’d hope we might have learned a little sophistry in leading humanity along a more enlightened path.
Music—Food of Love—Live Transmission
Music heals and regenerates human cells. With recent research confirming what Galileo discovered about acoustics, when he devised the first western scale.
Summer music festivals, it seems, are not just mindless, letting off steam—they are, since the times of Lughnasadh, Bacchanalia, Lupercalia and Saturnalia, an essential release mechanism for the human psyche from the shackles of (cold, winter, drudgery) ‘responsibility’.
Trumpet High-notes Only a Dog Could Hear
Three nights live music under Douglas Fir canopy
As a bandleader, his virtuoso arrangements and seminal trumpet playing earned him the moniker Satchelmouth. Among other predominately black musicians like Duke Ellington and fellow horn player Cat Anderson, we have him to thank for freedom expressed through music, preserved for posterity in this digital age. Louis and Cat were reputed to reach high notes only a dog could hear.
Tribute bands to those former icons—including Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, the Beatles—provide substitute Nirvana for live festival attendees. And August is jamboree month in the Pacific Northwest.
If Burning Man in Nevada isn’t your style, maybe you should go for down-home 31st Annual Reggae-on-the-River in Mendocino; or Oregon’s Jamboree.
Whatever your summer addiction—in this group, it HAS to be writing-related—even the hardest taskmaster will allow you a little time off. Thanks, Taskmaster Alex.
#IamWriting.
©2015 Marian Youngblood
September Blues? Consider Poor Mother Earth
INSECURE WRITERS’ SUPPORT GROUP CORNER
Thanks to our (non-mutant) Ninja Capn. Alex, I make a seasonal appearance as last rays of summer flash, to say hi to my fellow IWSGers, but also to share the pathos of impending equinoctial changes: seasonal, earth-related, celestial and beyond—
Ancient Lughnasadh Festival of Light
I try to celebrate the end of summer, lasting—as all Druid-lore-lovers know—from mid-July to September equinox, plumbing sacred depths of fire festival season centered on:
Lammas Day, August 1st, the Glorious Twelfth.*
Mud-slides: par for course @T-in-the-Park
Yet I feel pathos and sadness engulfing a season’s end, a dying earth. Our Mother Earth, especially, has suffered much this year.
Burning Man festival of light, Nevada desert
I know this doesn’t sound remotely like a writing moan—as our monthly corner is supposed to be—but there is a connection:
Harvest—Dying—Resurrection—Metamorphosis
Ancient Lammas, Lughnasadh primal fire festival of the god Lugh, [‘Light’] is known across the indigenous cultural spectrum as First Harvest, Harvest Home, a time to STOP, give thanks and celebrate with offerings—bread from our table. Rejoicing in Mother Earth’s bounty, we share and celebrate her fruitfulness with good food and friends. Traditionally, harvest tables were decked with red, gold, orange, yellow, bronze, citrine, gray, and green: colors now associated with wild dress-couture-masquerade extravaganzas—particularly in U.S.
Corn dollies have been replaced by macho/Ninja? [!!] sickles, scythes, iMax giant scimitars, over fresh veggies & fruits, bread, and sun-wheels. But drumbeat rhythm focuses joy, seeps between the volcanic cracks into the Earth, honoring her cross-cultural daughters of Lugh: Freya, Demeter, Ceres, Pandora et al.—goddesses of fruitfulness,carers of the Earth thru her seasons. In this sense she (Earth Mother) and Hathor are one and the same: primeval Eve, Brittonic Bride, Norse Auohumla, great cow-giant goddess, and ancestor of the Norse gods. She is also Gaia, Sumerian Antu: who became Ishtar, goddess of love and procreation.
Mutant Ninja Turtles, 2014-style
Now is time to enjoy drinking, eating fresh food, indulging our hedonist within— dancing, expressing joy, getting back to our roots—being oneself.
For a light-deprived northerner, I am grateful for long days of warmth, time in the garden, maybe occasionally, I think about writing…lol. But I digress.
The Caravanserai Headed East
In current Western culture, Burning Man takes precedence. Trailers are rented at great expense, shared rides go East thru the Nevada desert, to pitch camp in an awesome congregation of festival-goers—almost medieval in ethos—with singing, dancing, beating and celebrating the earth, the sun, and being alive— through music, masque, dance and new connections, made over five days.
Leeds-Reading morphs to 4-day festival, à la Burning Man
Black Rock, NV, 2014 artwork DC
But, because Forties Field oil pipeline runs under the tarmac, Scots (financial and) Government agencies started yelling ‘health&safety’, so 2014 was its swan song. T-in-the-Park 2015 will migrate to the former boarding school of Strathallan, twenty miles West in Perthshire.
Sunday morning at the ephemeral Cathedral, Black Rock Nevada-ending 2014 Burning Man
Leeds-Reading DeafHavana & Bill Bailey
Americans wowed by Nevada desert’s five-day Burning Man festival have yet to experience the booze-quotient of a Brit music venue: comparisons of liters/pints of beer drunk at Glastonbury vs. Leeds/Reading shock American/Canadian drinkers who, by law, have to put tankard to lip behind closed doors. Ah, the contrast.
As Britain closes for the summer, the American continent opens. Festivals ripple like musical arpeggios across barren, dry (over-watered) southern states, Austin, Dallas, Nashville. As the earth gets hotter—most of continental U.S. is in grill-bbq grip of unrelenting heat, forest fires, drought.
Here is not the place to bring up city water demands from rural salmon spawning hinterland—Eel, Van Duzen, Klamath, Trinity and Navarro— but we all know Earth is shrieking for us to slow down, take a look at what we are doing to our Pale Blue Dot, called home, and stop.
One could liken it to an Apocalypse scenario. But our Ninja Cap’n knowzzzz all about that.
Thank you Alex, always for providing a corner for a moan, a shared frisson and love for Sci-Fi, and a window on tomorrow’s world—and for letting me in under the wire—late. 🙂
©2014Marian Youngblood
500 Days till 12:XII:TWELVE: Crop Circle prophecies
500 Days until 12:XII:TWELVE
'Angel' crop circle Barbury Castle, July 2, 2011: dimensional wormhole or Mayan 13-moon calendar? Images courtesy CircleChasers & Nardeep Pujji
According to several ancient cultures, we are entering a new phase in human development, human consciousness, earth-consciousness, union with the Divine.
Astrology was to the ancestral mind a gift from the future, the heavenly bodies’ allowing the human race a glimpse of time’s far shore, a beacon through uncharted waters –literally steering the human vessel by the stars. And –however skeptical you may be– all ancient cultures had their oracle, allowed themselves to be guided by astrological readings based on ever-changing celestial movement and planetary alignments and collisions.
Many have become dissociated from the daily rhythms of the Earth, forget to look nightly at the stars and their feelings seem divorced from reality –whatever that is. The thought of one’s emotions actively being influenced by the electromagnetic and orbital changes of planets in the solar system — let alone the distant stars — is often ridiculed as being naïve, even ignorant.
Solstitial full moonrise, stone circle Northeast Scotland Midwinter 2004, photo Marian Youngblood
The calendar of the ancient Maya has become significant in recent times as a wayshower to help us navigate through the choppy waters of group consciousness. In Mayan calculation, their ancient Long Count calendar — a measure of Man’s rising to meet the gods — is beginning to wind down. We are approaching the End Times, the Moment of Cosmic All-change, the point on the ecliptic where the Sun (and the Earth in orbit around it) comes into conjunction with the center of our Galaxy at 11:11 on December solstice 2012.
There are 500 days from Lammas this year to the 10-day prelude to solstitial union with galactic center: on 12:12:12 we shall either have completed planetary ascension or we will know our work has been in vain. I prefer to think we shall complete the program — that we as a species are destined to rise to the challenge facing us.
New Age philosophy and astrology support a path to ascension required of its vision-keepers, lightworkers (through meditation and right living) as a process of uniting these two conflicting polarities, emphasizing the need to bring harmony to the male-female yin-yang, left and right brain hemispheres which must operate before the Earth may return to a balanced state of wholeness and oneness.
Life spiral: 2011 crop circle at Avebury Trusloe July 13th (left) & neolithic carved rock, Argyll c. 3000BC
The serpent, symbolic of Life, seen in the snaking of equinox sunset light down the pyramid of Chichen Itza, is common to many archaic worlds: medical science’s caduceus, Hermes the messenger to the gods, and the Garden of Eden would not be the same without him.
According to the ancient Maya, he rises through the world Ages, culminating with the flowering of human consciousness — NOW. To the Maya in their Long Count calendar, the Cosmos consists of Nine Underworlds or levels of development that complete in 2012. So important to their cosmological measurements were the numbers Nine (levels), Twenty (days, katun) and Thirteen (moons) that these powerful digits were expressed in their most significant monument construction. Mayan pyramids all have nine tiers or platforms.
The twenty-year (katun)cycle is intrinsic in all their calculation.
The longest tun-based time cycle was called the hablatun, each totalling 460,800.000,000 days = 1.26 billion years. Thirteen hablatuns made up the first Underworld (the initial creation cycle, beginning 3114BC) giving a total duration of 13 x 1.26 MM days or 16.4 billion years. This time period of 16.4 billion years is very close to current scientific estimates for the formation of matter from light at the birth of creation, or the ‘Big Bang’.
Each of the nine levels represented a different Underworld — expressed horizontally in the pyramids’ construction. Just as the levels of the pyramids are seen to become progressively smaller as they tier towards the top, so too the amount of time in each Underworld becomes shorter in duration as they progress hierarchically through the calculation.
It is interesting in a lunar calendrical context that this weekend –July 31-August 1– marks the Leo New Moon: a powerful coming-together of celestial forces following on from the Mayan Day-out-of-time, Monday 25 July 2011. And on August 1st we, the human race, walk through the dimensional wormhole and enter the Fifth Day of the Ninth and final Underworld of the Mayan Longcount.
This coincides with Lammas, Celtic quarter day, fire festival of the ancient Britons which was celebrated at the height of Nature’s season of bounty, the middle of the fruiting year when Earth empties her cornucopia into the laps of an unsuspecting world. As the midpoint (in all calendars ancient and modern) between summer solstice, June 21st, and autumn equinox, Septmember 23rd, Lammas —Lughnasad, the festival of light god, Lugh, revered in indigenous harvesting communities in the Old World– marks the point in the celestial sphere where the Sun culminates, arriving at 15 Leo on August 7th, a week from now.
Ancient Brittonic communities marked Lammas as the most joyous of all fire festivals, often feasting and dancing, sharing and giving for three weeks before LAMMAS and three weeks after. During the Neolithic, stone circles were used for such fire festivals, the central floor marked by successive generations of fire-burning, heavily pounding feet which revellers flattened like a remarkably sophisticated dance arena.
Video of West Woodhay Down, Inkpen crop circle July 29th 2011,
thanks to Shumnyabai (Joan Wheaton): Divine Serpent with Neptunian forked tongue and rattler tail reflecting Maya god Kukulkan (Quetzalcoatl), the divine feathered serpent who gives life.
Miniature tufted crop circle appeared in pristine East Field, Alton Barnes on the morning of July 26, 2011, after a night of torrential rain, photo courtesy Bert Janssen
We should use it.
HUMANITY HEALING alert
Humanity Healing Community acts as one of the new world’s wayshowers in suggesting that the arrival of the Lammas/New Moon/Fifth Day is even more potent because as a point in consciousness — it encourages us to choose actively how we want our new world to be.
Roundway(2) pine cone crop circle, July 25, 2011. The human pineal gland is massively affected by sunlight, goes into catatonia if deprived of light
‘What do you Want?
The Universe is asking and waiting for your answer.
The cosmic force of Creation needs you to focus the lens, to get clear on your vision, your dreams, your intent. You can take a giant step forward with whatever you want this weekend when three energetic gateways converge.
There is both an opportunity and a responsibility in this.’
Humanity Healing: A call to focus
Thoughts, intent, actions, emotions are intensified — go quantum — at a time like this. The energetic portal is more than an opportunity given us by our overlighting Presence — Humanity’s Oversoul — it is an instruction. We can each make a difference, add a contribution to the fate of the human race.
This may sound rather dramatic. Actually, it is. This is a time, unprecedented in human history. On the esoteric level, we are told we asked to come and to be here –incarnate– at this time. On the psychic level, we are sensing a coming-together of many traditions, a meeting of minds from many populations and backgrounds. Many spiritual leaders of the world’s diverse faiths are encouraging us –willing us to take the plunge.
Planetary transformation. It’s what Carl Sagan would have called our stepping up to take on the mantle of a Level I civilization. He and Kardashev would have been proud.
Prophecies of indigenous people everywhere point to the times we are going through now as a period of intense purification, a transition from our current cycle to whatever comes next.
Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation; Chief of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs, Iroquois Confederacy
“So then, what is the message I bring to you today? Is it our common future? It seems to me that we are living in a time of prophecy, a time of definitions and decisions. We are the generation with the responsibilities and the option to choose the the path of life for the future of our children, or the life and path which defies the Laws of Regeneration. Even though you and I are in different boats –you in your boat and we in our canoe — we share the same River of Life: what befalls me, befalls you. And downstream, downstream in this River of Life, our children will pay for our selfishness, for our greed, and for our lack of vision.
“500 years ago, you came to our pristine lands of great forests, rolling plains, crystal clear lakes and streams and rivers. And we have suffered in your quest for God, for Glory, for Gold. But, we have survived. Can we survive another 500 years of ‘sustainable development?’ I don’t think so. Not in the definitions they put ‘sustainable’ in today. I don’t think so. So, reality and the natural law will prevail: The Law of the Seed and Regeneration.
“We can still alter our course. It is NOT too late. We still have options. We need the courage to change our values to the regeneration of our families, the life that surrounds us. Given this opportunity, we can raise ourselves. We must join hands with the rest of Creation and speak of Common Sense, Responsibility, Brotherhood, and PEACE. We must understand that The Law *is* the Seed and only as True Partners can we survive.”
Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan of the Onondaga Nation, and a Chief of the Onondaga Nation Council of Chiefs
All the Prophets said this moment would come. The Hopi say we are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the Bird Tribes, circling and massing, congregating for our shared flight through cyberspace, to reach consciousness, nay, communion with that all-pervasive force of the Universe, call it what you will. We have five hundred days to go. So, are we ready?
Coincidental with the 500-day look ahead, Father Time is presenting us with a seven-day energy window in present time for us to focus our intent. From Ramadan/new moon through Mayan 5 I’x (Gregorian August 3rd,2011 –this week) until August 5th–still to come– we would do well to use this cosmic energetic helper: 5 I’X was to the Maya symbolic of the Force of the Universe and the day of commemoration of the World.
As a springboard from which we step off and project ourselves into the new, Culture has not prepared us for what comes next. No avid scanning of ancient texts, no guru, no world leader, no reincarnation of the Spirit of Delphi or channeled message from Arcturus can prepare us any better than we can ourselves for what may greet us on the other side of this Portal in contemporary Time.
The Human Race has reached the Finish Line. We have to step forward and claim our prize, some call it our birthright, gird our loins and step into the blue yonder.
The energy window is OPEN. Let’s fly together.
What a trip.
©2011 Marian Youngblood
Hathor Blessing: Crop Circle Finale & Farewell
Salutation to Hathor, goddess of love, music and beauty and Lady of the Stars, whose ritual Menat necklace represents the Souls of the blessed ones
The formation’s simple lines and clear message to crop circle followers may be overlooked among a plethora of dimensional designs which have dominated the 2010 crop circle season.
Linking its unadorned but glorious glittering shape to a Menat necklace — the symbol of primeval mother goddess Hathor in both the Old and New Kingdoms of ancient Egypt — is not difficult. A ritual curving jewelled shoal of splendour, its form is emblazoned in our collective memory, even as a northern species, derived from classical and prehistoric civilization of Europe and the Mideast.
She is the world’s most ancient goddess, embodiment of the planet Earth herself. It is she who cradles the sun each night as he sinks in the west.
Even the current fashion in heavy female neckware harks back to that classical curve: row upon row of minute turquoise beadwork and beauty created to invoke delight in a child, desire and pleasure in a model on the catwalk.
In present-day Wiltshire, we may not admit to being familiar with Egyptian hieroglyphics, hieratic script or deathmasks and tomb-paintings of the earliest dynasties (Great Pyramid of Khufu, 2589 – 2566 BC). But we have dormant memory banks, our bodies contain suppressed genetic code which probably remembers such a time, can ‘feel’ the weight of such a beautiful collar round our necks, desire the touch of such a ritual necklace.
It belonged to the Earth’s primeval goddess, Hathor: bringer of love, abundance, joy, fertility and regeneration.
As a swan song for the Wiltshire crop circle season of 2010, it seems a fitting statement to place at the height of English summer, when crops of wheat, barley, maize and even oats glorify in eight-hour days of beating sunrays pounding health and vitality into their stems and cells, literally seconds on the cosmic clock before the combine harvesters slice through life, growth and celestial graffiti.
Judging by a pronounced extra-terrestrial bent to this season‘s creations — despite a fairly good supporting cast of ‘plankers’ (man-made designs) — and with Science now firmly convinced of genuine CC enhancement in grain nutrient value and crop size by ET’s ‘light treatment’, I fervently hope someone is buying up Wiltshire wheat to bake into ‘DNA-enhanced’ bread, or wonder-pasta for our general wellbeing!
While there have been many man-made attempts this summer to emulate the light-bent nodes of superluminary crop circles, the Beckhampton message from the goddess appears to be genuine.
But, back to symbolism. Why Hathor? Why choose to imprint English fields — and thereby all of croppiedom — with a blessing from an ancient goddess who ruled heaven and earth before most of the western world could write?
Hathor, Earth-Mother Cow-Goddess bestowed bounty
Hathor, frequently seen as Egyptian Cow Goddess whose horns ‘held the Sun’, is probably Earth’s most ancient female deity. She encompassed so many different qualities and roles that it’s near impossible to list them all. She has been known as Sky Goddess, Sun Goddess, Moon Goddess and Goddess of the West. She was known as goddess of Moisture, and of Fertility, Agriculture and Motherhood; Goddess of the Underworld, Mistress of the Necropolis and, in her role as Protectress of the City of the Dead at Thebes, she became Goddess of the Dead.
Amenhotep III's ritual Menat necklace of bronze, faience, stone, glass and turquoise was gifted by goddess Hathor to pharaoh to engender his rebirth; courtesy Metropolitan Museum of New York
The Menat Necklace was a ritual object first seen adorning the neck of the goddess and later used in ritual ceremonies to Hathor. The bejeweled necklace had many strands which ended in a counterpiece that, when originally worn as a collar, would hang down the back of the neck. In later use it had a ceremonial purpose and was wafted and waved as an amulet over the devoted to convey a blessing from the Goddess. The Menat symbolized fertility, and some sources see its offering a mystical union between the Goddess and her followers.
Are we earthlings now ‘followers’ of the wise goddess? Do we rate a heavenly blessing from the most high?
All summer long we’ve been expecting a message from God. Finally, as the year turns to autumn, we get a blessing from Goddess.
Much like the goddess Ishtar, Hathor’s attributes were a complex combination of the sacred feminine, death and the afterlife. It was she who bore bodies of the dead to the Underworld, she who actually took ownership of them. In this role Hathor became Queen of the Underworld.
Sun blessing embedded in a Wiltshire crop circle: Hathor regalia ends the 2010 season
When she governed in her principal place of worship at Dendera, Hathor’s role as Goddess of Fertility, Women and Childbirth was venerated specifically. Her temple there was filled with incense, intoxication and pleasure. At her other temple in Thebes, however, Hathor changed into her robes as Goddess of the Dead, known as ‘Lady of the West.’ In Thebes she cradled in her arms the sun god Ra, as he descended below the horizon in the west.
Goddess Hathor wearing the Menat, holding her sacred Sistrum (rattle)
Eventually, in a later period, when Hathor’s role began to change, Isis/Osiris (Serapis) cults gained popularity in Egypt and then spread through the Roman empire and Greece. Because of her fertile and life-bringing nature, Hathor was considered capable of reviving the dead; she welcomed them to the Underworld, dispensed water to them from the branches of a sycamore tree, and offered them food. In various New Kingdom tombs at Thebes Hathor is depicted embracing the dead.
In pre-dynastic times, and certainly in the early dynasties, Hathor is seen as the cow-consort of the Bull of Amenti, the original deity of the Necropolis. As queen or ‘Lady of the West’, her mortuary title as Protectress of the Necropolis valley on the west bank of the Nile, in her role as protector she not only oversaw where the sun (Ra) went down, but this choice location for later kingdoms’ burial tombs.
Amazingly Hathor, one of the world’s greatest goddesses, was worshipped for a longer period than Christianity or Islam have reigned. Hathor’s religion of joy and celebration dominated for over 3,000 years. It continued strong throughout Egypt, and through both Greek and Roman empires, where it spread and became assimilated.
Her cult was in its heyday when the first great pyramids were built and used as sacred pharaonic tombs, and lasted until pyramids were no longer used for that purpose, by which time royal patrons continued under her protection on the west bank of the Nile in the great Necropolis Valley of the Kings.
She is the equivalent in Nordic, Celtic and Anglian territories of the Old Goddess of the pagans. She perpetuated in popular speech, in rituals of hearth and earth, in festival custom with its cargo of symbol and myth. She was seen as the source of life, power and wisdom. People prayed to her for wellbeing, abundance, protection, and healing. They invoked her during birth, and the dead returned to her and moved in her retinue.
They say that the Old Goddess, Crone who rode the winds, caused rain and snow and hail on earth, and that she revealed omens of weather and death and other momentous things to come.
In this sense she and Hathor are one and the same: primeval Eve, Brittonic Bride, Norse Auohumla, the great cow-giant goddess, true ancestor of the Norse gods. She is also Gaia, Sumerian Antu (who later ‘became’ Ishtar, goddess of love and procreation).
Apex of inspirational 'Hathor crop circle' at Northdowns, Beckhampton, Wiltshire, photo courtesy Bert Janssen
The superstition held today of Friday the 13th being unlucky may stem from the betrayal of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13th 1307 (Old calendar) when their monastic military order in France was arrested en masse by King Philip. The Spanish, however, hold Tuesday as their unlucky day; so the suggestion is a tentative one. Perhaps ET used the date merely to get our attention. It’s a familiar technique he’s employed over the years to combine crop images and Calendar.
An alternate explanation occurs: in later European tradition Friday was observed as ‘holy day of the goddess’, beginning with its eve on Thursday night. In that sense she is Norse goddess Freyja. The dark of the year was sacred to Old Goddess. On winter solstice nights, she was said to fly over the land with her spirit hosts. Tradition added that shamanic witches rode in her wake on the great pagan festivals, along with the ancestral dead.
Reverting to the Hathor connection, one ancient tale is retold of a group of goddesses, bearing cow horns and playing tambourines who went by the name the Seven Hathors. These Hathors were able to foretell a child’s destiny; similar in many ways to the weaving of the Tapestry of Life by the Fates, the Norns or the Disir. The Hathors were more than clairvoyants who could see into the future. They were questioners of the soul as it made its way to the Land of the West. In addition to knowing a child’s destiny, the Seven Hathors could foretell the exact hour of his death.
Egyptian mythology held that a person’s destiny was decided by the hour of his death and therefore his fortune, or lack of it, stayed with him throughout his life. The Hathors were known to have extreme powers, and were able to replace a prince, born with a bad fortune, with a child born with a good one. In this way they had the ability to protect both the Dynasty and the nation. The Seven Hathors are presently receiving some attention through the works of musician and psychic channeler, Tom Kenyon. When Hathor’s ‘old’ attributes became overshadowed by those of Isis and new kingdom beliefs, the Hathors were sent into the sky. There they have become identified with the Pleiades.
In more northern latitudes, reverence was paid for centuries to the Old Goddess in planting and harvesting, baking, spinning and weaving. The fateful Spinner was worshipped as Holle or Perchta by the Germans, as Mari by the Basques, and as Laima by Lithuanians and Latvians. She appears as Befana in northern Italy and as a myriad faery goddesses in France, Spain, and Celtic countries (Brittonic Bride). In Serbia she is Srecha; in Russia Mokosh, Kostroma or the apocryphal Saint Paraska.
Corn dollies embody ancient goddess Mother Earth
When farmers, and those who worked the land, were less dependent on technology to produce our food, Mother Earth and nature played a much more important role in the annual cycle of life. In particular, the harvest of cereal crops was a major event in the calendar.
We are now three weeks into ancient Lammas, the traditional harvest season.
In pre-industrial times a summertime ‘Lord of the Harvest’ would be given the responsibility of planning the harvest and marshalling the workforce, and when harvest was finally done they would celebrate with a ‘Harvest Home’ feast.
Corn Dolly made from the last (Clyack) cut sheaf, held sacred through winter, a blessing of Earth's bounty
Straw from this last sheaf was woven or plaited into the complex shapes of corn dollies, as cornucopiae, horns of plenty, horse shoes, knots, fans and lanterns. Ultimately, shape depended on local tradition, but in every case a symbolic ‘dolly’ graced the top table at the end-of-harvest feast and was then carefully guarded over the winter months. When spring crops were sown, the dolly re-emerged to be carried round the fields to pray that Nature and corn goddess delivered up another good crop.
In Wiltshire they’ve already started the harvest. Even in my native Aberdeenshire winter barley is going under the combine. Three weeks into Lammas (which pivots round August 1st), harvest is in full swing.
Our consciousness these days has become less aware of such natural cycles of food-cultivating-and-cutting; we are lulled into ignorance of the provenance of our daily bread. Perhaps it is this lulling that the crop circle presence wants to jerk us out of: to rekindle in us an appreciation — even reverence — for Earth’s bounty and her unconditional gifts of life and nourishment. More significant may be the appearance of a ritual symbol in the crop to help us understand our civilization’s most ancient ancestral traditions which show respect for (Earth’s) sacred creator gods.
Hathor was probably civilization’s earliest goddess. Her blessing showered on us now from above, five thousand years after the zenith of her devoted following, emblazoned in golden grain for our delectation and visual appreciation (aerial photographs superbly provided by Frank Laumen and Bert Janssen, thank you guys); it sparks our earliest memories of civilization. Are we being given a futuristic jab in the arm, to trigger our DNA? or to learn to appreciate more fully what our ancestors understood?
Our senses are being stroked, honed, we are receiving her gifts again. Not only was she goddess of birth and death, she was goddess of REBIRTH.
It’s just possible she has returned in essence now to show us that — at the end of the 2010 season of remarkable cosmic signs — our species is poised on the brink of rebirth: that we humankind are jointly headed for regeneration.
Dare we hope? As we come together as a race, as we feel joy in our rebirth, may we also see a faint promise of Hathor’s greatest gift? Immortality?
Fire Festivals & Persistence of Pasche
Carnival in Rio before Lent
‘First come Candlemas
Syne the New Meen
The niest Tiseday efter that
Is Festern’s E’en.
That Meen oot
An’ anither at its hicht
The niest Sunday efter that
Is aye Pasche richt.’
Ancient Scots Easter calculation. Anon.
The Calendar according to the Moon was regular as clockwork. It was reliable, you could see it in the sky and you could set your life rhythms by it. The old Scots rhyme above spoken slowly will make sense even to the least son of the soil of Ultima Thule. But non-Scots may need a little help in translation.
Festern’s E’en – as Hallowe’en – was an ancient calendar fire festival celebrated, like all pre-Christian revelry, at night. And, like Hallowe’en, it still is. Only we call it by another name: Carnival.
Translated simply, it is the evening before the ‘Feast/Festival’. With a capital F, this celebration was one of the greatest fire festivals in the Celtic Year. When it became absorbed into the Christian calendar, its importance and significance to the populace was so great, that it was deemed necessary to give it a place of prominence second only to Christmas. As such it has remained. The festival that precedes Easter is throughout the world celebrated with fire and puppetry,processional and masqued balls, dance and music and food and drink.
If you ask a South American about Carnival, ‘Carnaval’ in Portuguese, he will tell you they prepare for it all year round. In some cultures it has become almost more important than Christmas – a reversion to type, backtracking to pre-Christian times.
In Brazil, it makes complete sense to hold Carnaval precisely on its February moon date in the ancient calendar because in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires it is full-blown summer. By contrast, German Fasching, held similarly in February, is pretty chilly dancing in the noctural streets of northern Hamburg!
Terence Young's 'Thunderball' James Bond in 1965
Carnival used to be held in the Bahamas in February too, when spring is at its height and the casuarinas blow carefree along Nassau Beach. But in the summer of 1965, Chubby Broccoli and Sean Connery made a James Bond film set on Paradise Island and commissioned the Carnival Committee to stage an ‘extra’ Carnival, so they could weave festive fiery scenes into ‘Thunderball’; since then Bahamian Carnival has been a summertime festival.
London's Notting Hill Carnival
But originally, before the Gregorian calendar took over calculation and reckoning by the moon in 1582, Carnival was high festive season in that ancient stream of festivities used by Man to celebrate the return of the Light to a dark winter world.
Candlemas, as I’ve mentioned before, is the first glimpse of light waxing and adding grace to the darkest days of winter. On February 2nd – or Bride’s Day, before solar months took over as calendrical norm – the measure of light from the heavens increases to such a degree that birds begin to mate, petals on spring flowers open and the Earth softens its frozen grip.
In lunar terms, the first New Moon of the second month (Gregorian) was celebrated in every northern hemisphere culture planet-wide from prehistoric times. From Buddhist to Inuit culture the return of light to nurture the earth’s crucial growing plants was a calendar custom worth celebrating.
When Christian calendar calculators were devising Roman Church high and holy days, they took care to incorporate these ancient fire rites as an integral part of Christian culture and ‘lore’. it did not do to lose a single ‘soul’ in the transition from a pre-Christian to a Christian world.
And, as it was a long-standing tradition for local people to mark ancient quarter days – the solstices and the equinoxes – with festivals of fire, it seemed right that they should transit unaltered into the Christian calendar: marked instead with candlelight inside church buildings.
Christmas was chosen at the time of (northern) winter solstice when the ‘ignorant’ (pagan) desperately needed to celebrate the return of ‘light to the world’. Christ was called the ‘Light of the World’. The Son of the Sun.
Midsummer was fully taken up with a light celebration of its own – in northern latitudes the longest days of the year brought bountiful harvest and genuine thanksgiving by a rural population for the gifts of the earth continuously provided from midsummer through to Lammas, an August ‘cross-quarter’ day. No Church overlay was necessary; nevertheless Roman Catholicism superimposed the feast of John the Baptist on midsummer’s day and frowned heavily on pagan corn dollies and such Celtic fripperies perpetuated by an agricultural society.
The Equinoxes, however, required more serious contemplation.
Most rural (so-called ignorant) converts were aware of the movement of both sun and moon. While that may appear to us today to be rather sophisticated intellectual knowledge, it was commonplace then to note changing seasons, hours of light and dark and the phases of the moon. When equinox arrived it was – in the human mind at least – a miracle that every place on earth had exactly the same number of hours of light and dark for one earth period of 24 hours. The sun rose at 6 and set at 6 on every man, woman, child and beast on earth. The phenomenon was in itself worth celebrating. In astronomical terms, the event occurs precisely at the moment the Sun (traveling along the ecliptic) appears to cross the celestial equator, and while ancient Man may not have known that added sophistication, his life was changed by its occurrence twice in every year. In addition, he celebrated the spring (cross-quarter) festivals of Wesak, Beltane, May Day, along with any events providing an excuse for Morris and maypole dancing, The Church allowed these to continue, so long as the requisite saints were also remembered and offerings given.
While Archangel Michael was given dominion over autumnal equinox, Easter was chosen as a fitting ‘high’ celebration to take over the vernal equinoctial light-and-dark balance.
What put a spanner in the works was that – late in the seventh century – when two contemporary Christian systems were running alongside in mutual cooperation, the internal systems within the Celtic and Roman Churches came to a clash; an impasse.
Venerable Bede's 'Ecclesiastical History of the English People'
While the Synod changed lives, split families and royal houses, even intra-kingdom alliances, thereafter church festivities centred on Easter were standardized throughout the land and celebrated in accordance with Roman custom.
Easter remained the highest festival of the Christian church until the Scots Reformation when (after 1660) presbyterian austerity superimposed simplicity, reduced dogma and a return to ‘speaking to God’ directly.
For the rest of the British Isles, however, and for descendants and dependents the world over, Easter remains one of the great festivals of the Christian calendar.
Curiously, for a celebration washed, ironed and folded so neatly by successive synthesized systems – prehistoric, early-historic, pre-Christian, Celtic and Roman Christian – Easter emerges as a supreme highlight in the Church year.
Its one concession to its pagan past is that is remains to this day a date fixed according to the Moon.
And, in order not to offend other faiths which, like Anglian Eanfled, might take offence at the bulldozing approach (e.g. Spanish Inquisition, Salem witch trials), there is a built-in mechanism of calculation which ensures that Easter and Passover never collide and that the Christian High Festival should never occur BEFORE equinox.
Mardi Gras in New Orleans, bead capital of the world
The modern gesture to Pancake or Shrove or Fat Tuesday (Festern’s E’en) is not lost on marketers for supermarket chains who do a roaring trade in maple syrup and readymix batter. It’s the ‘stock up while the going’s good’ mentality, because the body must endure the subsequent fast of Lent for a regulation 40 days. Once more the Roman Church succeeded in condensing multiple events in Christ’s life into one festival: this fast represents the period of time He spent without food while meditating in the desert.
Nowadays, nobody questions that its immediate successor in the calendar is representational of His death and resurrection, when historically the two events happened years apart. Once again, ancient symbolism is used to gloss over detail.
‘First arrives Candlemas (Feast of Bride); Then the New Moon
The following Tuesday will be ‘Fastnacht’/Fasching or Shrove Tuesday
Allow that ‘moon’ to wax and wane
And watch till the next moon is full
The Sunday thereafter will be Easter Day.’
translation by Scots descendant, non-AnonIt worked for King Oswiu in 664. I can assure you, the calculation works still!
©2010 Marian Youngblood
Crop Circles and Ancient Lammastide
CROP CIRCLES AND ANCIENT LAMMASTIDE
A Crop Circle Reverie Ten Years On…
Overhead 360º view from within the simple swirled crop circle of August 24, 1995 at Culsalmond, Aberdeenshire
Crop circles are not new. The phenomenon is centuries-old, embedded in folklore in South Africa and China, achieving sparse comment from English academics in the 1600s; noted in police records and farming journals in 1890; by military and ‘classified’ sources through the 1950s and ’60s.
It was not until 1980, however, that the general populace began to notice them. Since 1990 size and intricacy have developed, mimicking computer fractals, fourth dimensional reality, esoterica known only to quantum physicists. Nearly 30 years after that Thatcherite time, discussion favours excitement over fear, anticipation rather than suppression, belief more than ridicule. The appearance of upwards of 10,000 reported ‘genuine’ crop circles in twenty-nine countries worldwide has brought the subject into the mainstream. It has become ‘cool’ to talk about what they might mean.
In the English countryside since 2005, designs have become so complex, it is natural to speak of codes and mathematical sequences and quantum physics and astronomical numbers. As simple ellipses expanded into trailing solar flares, hypercubes, calendrical geometry and astrophysical complexity, we became mesmerized by beauty in the summer landscape, breathless with anticipation of what would come next.
In 2009 the pick of the crop finished at the end of August. Fields in September were conspicuous by their absence.
They’ve got us where they want us: on the edge of our seats.
In a lull between September’s close and next year’s crop of never-before-seen designs, what have we learned? Why are we being gifted such inspiration?
What associative ideas do they generate? What emotions do they trigger? Where do they mostly appear?
Crop Circles as Seasonal Meditation and Earth Connection
White Horse and star guidance sextant crop circle, Alton Barnes solstice 2009
Many delving, however briefly, into this phenomenon would associate the random appearance of crop circles with that other kind of circle: the ancient and sacred stone circle. That the majority of designs in England has focused on the hallowed precincts of great sacred sites like Avebury and Sillbury Hill, Wiltshire, Rollright Stones, Oxfordshire and within sight of ancient burial mounds of Hampshire is no coincidence. The same is true for appearances near ancient ancestral sites in other countries: Holland, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Latvia; even the Serpent Mound, east of Cincinnati, Ohio. In all this exotica, it is easy to miss one particular circle of great simplicity but infinite importance in the farmland of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, which appeared at the end of Lammas, 1995.*
A little patience and we can find a context, a common link.
First off, like the siting of ancient stone circles, crop circle placement is not random.
Dowsers, diviners, engineers, television cameramen and aircraft pilots can all attest to electromagnetic anomalies occurring in cleared agricultural land where Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers placed their mounds, erected their trilithons, buried their dead. Feng shui proponents, who detect minute variations in electrical body pulses, have commented on the extraordinary fluctuations of energy contained within the relatively small area concentrated on Wiltshire’s sacred sites; Alton Barnes, with its twin village Alton Priors, rank high on the electromagnetic scale. It is not surprising, therefore, that this select valley houses not only the prehistoric White Horse, but was home to Milk Hill swallow configuration (2008) and multiple coded designs in 2009: whirling dolphins, star tetrahedron and the sextant (star navigational instrument) created in three stages; contemporary appearances at Alton Priors include – in perfect timing – the exquisite eight/infinity symbol of 08/08/08 (August 8, 2008) and the swallow with coded tail of June 2009.
-
- Woven corn dolly centre at Sillbury Hill crop circle August 3, 2009
-
- Woven centre, reminiscent of ancient corn dolly craft, Sillbury Hill August 2009
-
- White Horse and Star Guidance sextant Crop Circle, Alton Barnes, Wiltshire
-
- Overhead 360º view from within the simple swirled crop circle of August 24, 1995 at Culsalmond, Aberdeenshire
-
- Annual horse fair and Travelling People’s Market, Aikey Brae, Buchan
Moving the Magnetic Matrix
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to watch your compass needle fluctuate wildly at Yatesbury, Wiltshire; a newly-charged car battery die on the edge of a field at Sillbury Hill, near Avebury or your camera spontaneously recharge in the centre of a newly-laid crop design at Alton Barnes. These magnetic phenomena are commonplace to students of ‘leyline’ energy meridians, with which the Wiltshire basin and Cotswold range are filled. But it is significant that Yatesbury was home to the dragonfly glyph of June 3rd and Phoenix of June 12th 2009. Sillbury Hill has always deviated instruments; its great chalk mound resisting man’s excavations to discover its secret; but it opened its fields to decoration of extraordinary complexity on August 3rd, 2009 when plain swirled circles were found to contain at their centres the intricately woven patterns reminiscent of the medieval corn-dolly craft.
According to a representative of the British Feng Shui Society, an area of Britain ranking second only to the Avebury-Yatesbury-Windmill Hill energy vortex is the largely forgotten agricultural plain of Scotland–lying between the 56th and 57thN parallel–in the counties of Angus, Aberdeenshire and Banff. World attention has focused on names like Bishops Cannings, the Roundway, and Chiselden. But how many have heard of Sunhoney, Easter Aquhorthies, Culsalmond or Old Rayne?
Among the excitement of first circles decorating Wiltshire and Oxfordshire in the 1990s, the contemporaneous appearance of a single swirled design in wheat in Aberdeenshire was overlooked. Yet their locations–within ancient sacred landscape, in proximity to prehistoric ritual sites of previously huge importance to a country population–and the time of year in which they appeared have a common link.
Reconnecting us to our Primeval Earth Calendar
In ancient times, the Celtic calendar revolved round the farming year: birds start to nest at Candlemas (February 2nd), Vernal Equinox fields are prepared for sowing; Beltane (May 1st) held a huge fire festival celebrating the seeded land; fire festivals were perpetuated ritually and with deliberate intent, until well after the Reformation. Only then did Church and State combine to desecrate such ritual, relegating it to the realm of pagan superstition (pagan = L. paganus = country-dweller), implication: simple country folk knew no better. Midsummer solstice was a time of rejoicing for the bounty beginning to appear in fruit and crops; Lammas (August 1st) marked the onset of harvest, usually over by autumnal equinox; and the Celtic Year ended and began anew with the festival of Hallowe’en/All Hallows Day. Christmas was superimposed on the earlier festival of winter solstice, when the land was in almost total darkness, with farming people praying for the return of the Light.
In an abundance of festivals, the greatest for agricultural and rural families was that of Lammas. While its pivotal date was August 1st, the festival coincided in a good summer with the actual harvesting of grain. In most communities it began three weeks before and continued until three weeks after that date–ending around August 24th. Through the medieval centuries, every community in the Land had a Lammas fair dedicated to the local patron saint, a Horse Fair, a fair to compete, display wares, buy and sell food, fruit and harvested bounty.
Annual horse fair and Travelling People's Market, Aikey Brae, Buchan
The stance at Jericho on the Hill of St Sairs has dissolved into the sod of the Glens of Foudland, like the tiny chapel to St Sair which used to mark the spot. Even after such fairs were officially banned in 1660, St Sairs was going strong in 1722. Horses were being traded in 1917 on the hill. Change in farm practices and two wars were its undoing.
What is significant, however, is not that great stallions used to parade these hallowed slopes, but that St Sairs happened within a sacred enclave of ancestral ritual circles, burial mounds and avenues just like Avebury and Sillbury Hill. The Culsalmond recumbent stone circle lies buried among the gravestones of the ruinous pre-Reformation kirk; Neolithic carved stone balls were found on the farms of Jericho, St Sairs and Waulkmill, within a sacred avenue flanked by three stone circles and two burial mounds. Bronze Age urns from Colpy and Upper Jericho have, along with charred body parts and Neolithic carved stone ladles, found their way into museums in Aberdeenshire, Edinburgh and London. More than one hundred flint arrowheads and several hundred flint implements have disappeared from this ancient place–and the archaeological record.
It was here on the last day of Lammas 1995 that a crop circle sent a reminder—a simple swirled design in wheat—to trigger in this ancient landscape a memory of connection to its agricultural past and, perhaps, if we are listening, the key to our communal future.
©2009 Marian Youngblood
Lammas 2019 Update
Crop circles continue to amaze a wider world audience, with drone footage clearly making life easier on farmers, with fewer footprints to inflict crop damage.
Attracting an increase in human interpreters, crop designs seem to have elevated messages to the psychic/intuitive level — viz. the computer chip program crop circle at Chualar, Salinas, CA appearance of December 30, 2013.
The Windmill Coincidence
For the last thirty years crop circles have appeared, mostly in Wiltshire and the Chalk Downs of Salisbury and English southern uplands, but not exclusively so. Dutch crop circles have (happily) besieged windmills, man-made canals and tulip fields. Frequent Downs designs have appeared close to functioning windmills, highlighting ancient ways of life—but wait.
In just the last decade it has become clear to us that the harnessing of water and windpower is more urgent than we have ever known.
In hindsight, is it mere coincidence that the solitary Aberdeenshire crop circle of Lammas 1995, top, appeared on the Colpy-Culsalmond farming estate responsible for the pioneer (and largest) private wind-farm to power the North of Scotland, until the official opening (by Prince Charles) this week of the Beatrice Offshore Wind Complex, off Wick (Sutherland)?
Crop Circle Creators have been telling us all along. We just weren’t listening.
©2019 Marian Youngblood
The Stellar Perspective- U.S. Memorial Day Means Different Strokes for Different Folks
- Hokole’a Hawai’ian-built Canoe to Circumnavigate Pacific— 47,000 Miles over Next Four Years
- Time to Tempt Humans to Act like Telosians—Delving Deep Within to Discover our Origins As Star-People
- Canticle for a lost Nation—Pictish Roots Surface in Stone, Royal Forests & Names
- The Janus Effect—Riding into the New on an Old Horse
- Boudicca: Great Queen of the Iceni
- 2020 Backward Take on 2012: Stargate Portal to Final Quarter
- Volcanic Surprise: Take your Toys and Go Home
- 11:11:11 Spark in the Park~ Collective Ascension
- Silver People on the Shoreline Let Us Be
Solar & Geomagnetic field indicator (NOAA)
From n3kl.orgSolar X-rays:
Geomagnetic Field:
- Derilea’s Dream: Pictish essentials
- The Glory that Was Sail
- Guest Blog from the Granite Past to a Future Historian
- Boudicca: Great Queen of the Iceni
- The Sueno’s Stone Cover-up
- Maiden Stone of Bennachie
- Bibliography: The Church in Pictland
- Warlord centres of Pictland:glimpses into a lost history
- Gaels progress through Pictland via the Church
- Hello world!
Shakeout prepared
Picosecond Pulse Ripples Gold on Glass
Vibrational sound in picoseconds
Recent Comments
Marian’s SHASTA:Critical Mass
Earth speaks wolves listen—a New Age tale
bumpy ride ahead
‘Phantom’s Child’
Nano 2011 win
SHASTA: backstory
Circlemakers
Enceladus 2017
Enchantment
ShakeOut preparedness
Bourtie Kirk: 800 Years
Geometry code
- Devorguilablog: view from Pictish Citadel
- Pictish Power Centre discovered at Rhynie: stronghold in Aberdeenshire heartland
- Black Glen Cailleach/Bodach Stones threatened
- PICTISH KINGLISTS and the PICTISH CHRONICLE
- Nechtan’s Pictish Nation: 8thC Strongholds of the new religion
- Pictish inheritance in an ancient land
- Canticle for a lost Nation
- Canticle III: Nechtan of Derley
- Devorguila’s lineage: where did it go?
cosmic consciousness
Youngblood Blog 