“Oh man!
Look at those cavemen go
It's the freakiest show.”

~ David Bowie ~Life on Mars~ 

So there you have it. Ereshkigal and Nergal’s tale isn’t just a nice little story that happens to fit in with the Martian theme. There was a point to telling it. There are so many things I could pull out of it but I’m trying very hard to limit myself for your sake if nothing else.  I’m almost entirely certain that if there is anything at all to the mysteries of Montsegur and there is a possibility of moving between the worlds which overlap there then the key to the treasure, and the treasure  are, the Thee Book of Seven Seals. I don’t mean in any literal sense, although you never can tell with bees, but …well I’ll not explain because it can’t be explained: you’ll either get it or you won’t.

You might have noticed the similarities between Nergal and Isaiah’s Lucifer, the Islamic Iblis, or any number of fallen gods or angels. The similarities are not important, but the differences are. 

Much of the mythology surrounding gods who have their god-hood revoked and are kicked out of heaven are not about gods at all. They’re stories about the failings of human rulers. Kings were always surrogate gods who hypothetically sat in the heavenly court as sons of the supreme god on behalf of their people and their land. Back in the dim and distant past the right to rule would have depended on you being somehow chosen by the goddess and able to ascend to heaven and return with the necessary wisdom to rule on earth. It’s a shamanic thing. Government based on mysticism didn’t compete well with government based on being the biggest, baddest, bastard, but when wealth, and military power became the deciding factors the trappings and symbolism of the old system were retained. A failure on earth was a failure in heaven and you needed a mythological basis to back that up, so these are relatively modern myths. There is an older way of interpreting them and I think that the story of Ereshkigal and Nergal is a shining example of that way of thinking. Isaiah’s Lucifer is brought down “to the grave, to the sides of the pit”, to the underworld, the land of the dead, the place where the Great Lady rules. 

In the context of a shamanic sacral king he would be returning from the heavens to take his rightful place with his mum/wife who may well have been his mum/wife but was also the land, and his people (alive and dead). He’s also the lightning strike; the sky-seed/serpent who impregnates the earth and brings life. That’s why Lotan, the  seven headed (count them) serpent that is kicked out of heaven in Canaanite myth is both the enemy and the “associate” of the mother goddess. 

As Rahab the serpent winds its way through Judaeo-Christian beliefs as whore, demon, and ultimately mother of the messianic line.  It’s all a matter of when the myth was interpreted as to who exactly the serpent represents. It has been suggested (in something I read ages ago and can’t find) that this was a challenge/insult to the solar or sky deity in that it implied that he was seen as inferior to the earth goddess and was being abandoned in favour of her. History has a tendency to run contrary to that particular theory though and I think the story is more likely to show a balancing of above and below. It’s very clear that our ancestors knew a lot about what was going on in the night sky. The amount of astronomical information encoded in the myth of Ereshkigal and Nergal is phenomenal. It wasn’t all about the sky though, even when it was. I began to understand a little when I spent an afternoon stuck in the earth. At that point though it was pretty much just in theory, even though I was sort of doing it in practice. I still hadn’t worked it out entirely when I re-visited the Cave of the Cow, or when I was in the Cave of the Hermit, or even in Niaux cave. I worked it out later when I had all those things spinning around in my head and sat down to watch The Secret Glory and heard Christian Koenig say that if Otto Rahn had learned anything at all he’d learned it in the caves. That’s when it all fell into place.

The Cave of the Cow was a home. Whatever had happened to me there had been about joining a tribe. It was about home and family. Every year for a thousand years when the summer ended people came to that place to live for the next eight months. It’s not a big cave and you’re never far from the entrance, or far from the light. Even in the deepest part of the cave there were always fires. The people who came to La Vache also had semi-permanent buildings. They didn’t just live in a cave. From the amount of rubbish they left behind it seems that La Vache was primarily used for cooking and working. A thousand years of habitation had left it over a foot deep in old bones, broken tools, and discarded household items. It was a practical space. It was everyday life. It was a cow kind of place. 

On the morning before we went to Montsegur we went to the cave at the other side of the valley. It’s called Niaux. It was not a cow kind of place and it was not about everyday life. In stark contrast to the thousands of bones and artefacts at La Vache the only thing that indicates that anyone was ever there is some paint on the walls deep in the heart of the earth. The first thing that struck me, and it struck Kt even harder, was that this was not a place to be visited on a whim. What we were there to see were the cave paintings and getting to them was suspiciously tricky.  We had certain advantages over those who’d made the journey thousands of years earlier. We had an artificial entrance that knocked a little time off the journey. We also had electric lights, and torches, and the occasional handrail. It was a long walk. The people who lived at La Vache had a longer walk. Their only light source would have been a big chunk of rock with a dip carved into it, filled with slowly burning reindeer fat.  They would have been able to see no more than a couple of feet in any direction. Every direction, including down to the floor, which was damp, slippy, and far from even. They didn’t have handrails and they were carrying a big lump of rock in one hand so they could see where they were going. I got to see one of the “lamps” in La Vache; they were sturdy. I wouldn’t have wanted to carry one that distance. It made me wonder if they hadn’t carried them unlit in a bag and gone in blind. To have gone all that way by feel in pitch darkness would perhaps have been easier in some ways, but why go all that way at all. There were perfectly good painting surfaces much closer to the cave entrance, and they were all completely bare. 

After a considerable amount of walking through really quite big caves we came to our destination. It was marked by something which was called a “panel of signs”. I’d seen one of them before in my attempts to recreate my visionary visit to La Vache, although there isn’t one at La Vache. I’d called it the noughts and crosses board, and in that other world any attempts to pass beyond it failed because a huge bad tempered minotaur barred my way. I had no idea why at the time and was a little annoyed by the inconvenience, but I was amused when I found out the name of the Cave of the Cow. What I did know was that it was an entrance to other times and other places. Here in the real world it marked the entrance to another world, another space, and another time. Beyond the panel of signs there were paintings. Where the paintings came to an end there was another panel.  They were covered in strange symbols and geometrical whatnots which unsurprisingly have pretty much defied attempts at interpretation.  What they did do is mark the gates of the underworld. One of the most prominent and repeated symbols on the panel we saw was called a claviform, because it allegedly looks like a key. Every animal painting in Niaux is in black. The only colour used is red and it is only used in symbols not in the pictures themselves. The claviforms were painted in red. I suspect it was the same red that you would have got from Richard Stanley’s bleeding rock, or from the Pyrenean Grail. It was used sparingly and it was used significantly. 

I’ve read various theories about what the claviform means, from a stylised moon on a stick with possible calendrical associations, to a shaman’s drum. I thought they looked pretty much like the less abstract representations of the female form produced by the same culture. I managed to find someone else on the interweb who saw the same thing and produced some rather helpful illustrations to prove my point. 

So if the claviforms are a woman then their redness makes her a rather important one. My guess is that she was the local equivalent of Ereshkigal and this was where she hung out. The entire cave system felt somewhat special. I had the feeling that we were intruding somewhere that we were just not worthy enough to be. Beyond the panel of signs it was something else. 

Our time with the paintings was limited and carefully controlled. We had to leave our torches behind and slowly shuffle through the darkness behind our guide. Each time we came to a stop she would briefly turn on her own torch and we would see a different painting before a slow uncertain shuffle to the next. We had just twenty minutes in total and much of the time was in the dark. We saw as many of the paintings as was possible in the time available but I could have stared at each one for an eternity.

Each one painted by a different artist and each one full of life and magic. No photograph can do them justice. They need to be viewed in the flickering light of a fat lamp to see them as they should be seen, they are not flat still images; they breathe. We got a feel of that when our guide momentarily used a torch with a softer light. Even that was mesmerising. 

From our guide in La Vache we’d learned what the people who painted them were eating. Mostly they ate small animals such as hare and partridge, they fished and they caught the occasional ibex. It’s from the ibex bones that we know when they stayed in the caves. The age of the ibex when it was eaten can be worked out from the bones and the gaps between the ages at which they were killed shows that no one was hunting them during the summer. 

Raindeer were also important as a source of leather, building and craft materials, and fuel for the fat lamps. The paintings in Niaux are obviously not hunting scenes. They aren’t pictures of food. Carved into the personal belongings of the people who lived at La Vache were all manner of creatures. In addition to the lion I love so much, there are wolves and bears, and fish, and strange birds.  In Niaux the paintings are mostly bison and horses, with the occasional deer and ibex thrown in. We know they didn’t eat horses or bison, or if they did then they ate the bones as well. These animals were important to them for other reasons, but what I wondered most about was why this place was so important to them. What drove them to go all that way into the earth before they even thought about picking up a paintbrush? It wasn’t the lack of light because they could have had complete darkness nearly an hour’s walk earlier if that was what they were after.  It has been suggested that the places that were painted were picked because they had spectacular acoustics and were really good for a bit of a sing-song. The acoustics in the Salon Noir where most of the paintings were done were pretty impressive, but they were probably just as good anywhere else in the caves. As I’d learned from the Cave of the Hermit that if these chaps were not singing in there at least a bit, then they were missing out, and we know they had musical instruments because they left some at La Vache. There is something to the argument that music was important in what ever it was they were doing down there, but it is a little like saying that church choirs sing in churches because they have good acoustics.  What everyone does agree on is that the artists that painted these walls had a shamanic thing going on. From the number of painting and the length of time the caves were in use I’d guess at one artist painting one painting in each generation. This was a very special place and although I’d not swap the experience for anything, I really don’t think I had any right to be there. Kt’s theory, which from personal experience does have much to recommend it, is that they didn’t pick that particular part of that particular cave system at all. They were led there by something, they had a guide. Perhaps that is what they were painting. If I’d stayed by the river bank that afternoon in July 2007 and continued to watch the deer that didn’t move perhaps it would have led me to Niaux and I’d have painted that. Perhaps one day I will, but I think I’d be happier painting a big old cow.

Anyway…this is what I think they were doing in the dark. I can’t be 100% certain but this is an educated guess based on what I know and what I gnow. If you set aside for a moment any potentially supernatural goings and the significance they would have placed on their experiences then our shamanic friends went for the light show. It is highly likely they were taking some kind of hallucinogen. I suspect it was either a local mushroom or one they imported from the place they spent the rest of the year. I also suspect they may have used the reindeer that were so important to their way of life to magically transform said mushrooms into something more user friendly. That they stopped coming to the area when the reindeer moved further north is quite telling. 

My own experiments with recreational fungi in the days when I was young and foolish and easily led turned out to be pretty unsuccessful. If anything they just gave me less control over something that comes far too naturally to me, and they made me feel like crap afterwards. I didn’t have the benefit of  training or many generations of tribal knowledge at my disposal , and I also didn’t have the faintest idea what I was doing so that probably didn’t help. Under the correct circumstances I’m reliably informed these things can be very beneficial and mimic or enhance any natural ability to see things that aren’t generally visible. 

So for a start they were tripping their tits off on reindeer piss, which would be interesting enough in broad daylight, although I actually think they visited the caves at night. If you add to that the effects of being in the pitch darkness for any length of time then it begins to get even more impressive. Those of us who got to sit in the Cave of the Hermit for twentyish minutes all started to be able to “see” in the darkness. Even if it was down to sensory deprivation the feeling that we were not alone in the dark, and for me at least the figures I saw down there would have gone a long way towards convincing me that I had entered the world of the dead and was communing with my ancestors. The addition of music and the acoustic properties of these caves only added to that. It would have been unthinkable that they didn’t also make use of the silence too. It’s a weird silence, because it isn’t silent. When you remove the noise of the everyday you hear the sounds beneath, the sound of the earth, the creaking of the rocks, the gurgle of subterranean streams, the sound of your own heart beating, your breath as it enters and leaves you. The tiny sounds that are usually buried in cacophony are given space. It’s very easy in these moments to slip into and out of yourself, to loose your edges and become part of the environment. The inner and outer worlds become the same place. What happened to me in my visionary visit to La Vache was just an extreme version of that, but it isn’t too hard to recreate under more normal circumstances, practice helps, and I’m sure reindeer pee doesn’t do any harm.

It differs from what I call “going upstairs”. It isn’t a case of leaving your body and going somewhere else it’s more that you stay where you are and everything comes to you. I instinctively feel that upstairs is a male thing and downstairs is female and with a few exceptions it seems that people with a lot of time and geography between them have felt much the same. You learn a lot in those moments. The bright lights and excitement of upstairs can be revelatory but to share the dreams of the earth is something else. It’s worth being kicked out of heaven for.

 It’s starting to build up into a pretty impressive experience so far and we haven’t yet finished with the rational explanations. Back in the mid eighties scientists working deep underground trying to track the predicted decay of protons didn’t manage to track the predicted decay of protons but accidentally discovered something else. There detecting equipment had been specially put several hundred metres underground to shield them from cosmic radiation, but it spectacularly failed to do this and what they did detect was the decay of incoming cosmic rays from the constellation of Cygnus thee Swan.

 They called these particles cygnets, obviously because they were ducklings. If you’re sitting in a dark cave deep underground then via the miracle of Cherenkov radiation disintegrating cygnet particles are experienced as flashes of blue or white light as they pass through your eyeballs. I’m sure it’s very cool even if you haven’t achieved an altered state of consciousness. 

The number of cygnets producing in-eye firework effects changes depending on whether Cygnus is visible in the heavens or not. As above,  so below. 

 That the people who visited these caves linked the pretty lights they saw there with the big duck/pigeon in the sky is almost entirely certain. I would be deeply surprised if they didn’t arrange their underground activities accordingly. 

Cygnus was important to these people. It played a major role in a northern death cult that was popular in most of the top bit of the world at the time. 

Vestiges of those beliefs are still part of our cultures and religions today. By a peculiar coincidence part three of this blog came about because I was expecting to hear the first migrating geese of the year at any time. 

I actually heard them last Saturday and it made me all goosebumpy.  I’ll get on to part three (which will most likely involve Nergal as the patron saint of doggies, plenty of giants, terrible weather, and a penis that might not be, but probably is), but first a quick reminder about where we’re going.

One thing I  learned at Niaux, which I’d wondered about in La Vache, was where did these people go to and come from when they weren’t hanging round in that particular valley. I didn’t get to know the full answer, and at some point I need to find out if anyone does know that. According to the guide book I picked up though, they came from the north east through the mountain passes, which would take them right by Montsegur where the earliest signs of human habitation date back 80,000 years. After what I saw on Montsegur and later in the Museum of Prehistory. I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that the people from La Vache didn’t just pass by the pog … they visited.

“No one can blame you
For walking away
Too much rejection
No love injection 
Life can be easy
It's not always swell
Don't tell me truth hurts, little girl
'Cause it hurts like hell
But down in the underground
You'll find someone true
Down in the underground…”

~David Bowie ~Underground~ 

I mentioned Ereshkigal in passing the last blog. She was the sister of the Mesopotamian Venus, and she ruled the world of the dead. Her name translates roughly as Great-Lady-Under-Ground, which isn’t surprising because that’s exactly what she was. My own “underground” experience in the Cave of the Cow put me in mind of her and also the story of Tannhauser. 

Tannhauser was a (possibly fictional) Minnesinger; the German equivalent of the Troubadours of Occitania. He reputedly spent a year in the subterranean court of Venus deep within her holy mountain. The poetry attributed to him is dated (at it’s earliest) to the year that Montsegur fell. Setting aside the obvious symbolism of the hidden cave of Venus, because that’s not very Cathar at all (or is it?), legend also has it that  Esclarmonde d’Alion turned into a dove and passed alive into the solid rock of the mountain, which closed around her.

 The dove in question had it’s origins in the ancient near east. It was sacred to all those subtle variations on the Mother Goddess, Queen of Heaven, Mother Earth, and Lady of the Sea that have come to us from that part of the world. The Comforter of the Cathars has a long and interesting history as the goddess of their ancestors. The Romans, of course, held the dove as sacred to Venus. They stole the idea from the Phoenicians whose mountain sanctuary to Astarte at Eryx in Sicily had really impressed them.  The dove goes back a long way. Above ground you’ll find her hovering over the Ocean of Chaos at the dawn of time laying her lunar egg. Beneath the earth you’ll find her as a pigeon on a stick. So I’m not the slightest bit surprised that Esclarmonde would turn into one, or that she would retreat to the underworld of Occitania, whose caves are full of hidden knowledge and holy artefacts. We’re going underground to see what a Mesopotamian death goddess has to do with the Book of the Seven Seals, a saint from Montpellier, and some cave paintings I saw on my holidays. The answer is of course ….Mars.

 


..

The Babylonians associated Nergal, their god of war and plague, with the planet Mars. Once upon a time he may have been a solar deity, but these things change. He was associated with high summer the season of death in the Mesopotamian agricultural cycle when temperatures regularly hit 110 down town. That may not seem particularly relevant now, but it is. I should probably also mention that he’s sometimes a lion; sometimes two.

He ended up ruling the underworld as the lover of Ereshkigal. The story of how that came about is worth telling in full.

There’s a party in heaven and Ereshkigal is barred. It’s not that she’s done anything wrong, and although the other gods are a little wary of thee Dark Queen of the Underworld they wouldn’t begrudge her a bit of a boogie and a sausage on a stick. The problem is that she’s stuck in the underworld babysitting the dead. If she leaves all hell will break out…literally. 

In order to get round this little problem Anu, King of the Gods and Ereshkigal’s daddy, decides that he will arrange take-away. He sends his messenger down the stairway to heaven to knock on the gates of the underworld.  The messenger is a little nervous because it is the underworld and on the whole visitors don’t come back.  He knocks on the gate and the gate keeper gives his blessing. Each of the seven sealed gates is opened and he finds himself in Ereshkigal’s throne room. He kneels down in front of the throne and kisses the floor before standing up all stiff and straight to deliver his message about the doggy bag that waits for her in heaven. 

Ereshkigal summons her servant Namtar the god of fate and sends him up to heaven to fetch and carry on her behalf. Namtar makes the journey up the stairs to heaven and walks in. It’s one of those moments. Mid-party all the gods stop what they’re doing and silently kneel down before the emissary of the Great Lady from downstairs. The gods are not stupid …except for one.  Nergal carries on oblivious to the new arrival despite Ea silently nodding and winking at him to indicate that he should follow the example of the other gods. You don’t mess with the Lady downstairs and you don’t mess with Fate. It isn’t healthy.

Namtar returns to the underworld with a bit of cake wrapped in a paper serviette and hands it to Ereshkigal. He happens to mention what went on up in heaven and Ereshkigal nearly chokes on a bit of icing. She looks at Namtar, her gaze cold and steady, and she speaks, her words cold and steady, “ That god who showed you no respect in heaven will come to me here in the underworld.” Ereshkigal never gets mad, she gets even. Like ice cream revenge is sweet and best served cold. If there’s one thing Ereshkigal likes more than cake it’s cake…and ice-cream.

.. 

Back in heaven Nergal has been told by the King of the Gods that he needs to apologise to Ereshkigal in person, and is getting a good talking to from Ea the god of wisdom.

“What did you think you were playing at? You didn’t show any respect for Namtar, who is not only thee god of fate but messenger for the Queen of the Underworld; with whom we do not mess. I nodded and winked at you and you ignored me. You are most certainly going down my son.”

Nergal was not the most popular of gods. Who wants to hang out with Mr War and Plague? He’d developed a fuck-you attitude, and a very bad temper. Down in Babylon he was known as The Furious One, and The Raging King. His answer to Ea was, “I will go my own way.”

Ea points out that he will be going his own way and that way is straight down from heaven to the grave and the depths of the pit, because pride always goes before a fall. Ea also gives him some good advice on underworld etiquette. “When you find yourself in the underworld”, Ea tells him, “ Do not sit on the comfy chair, do not eat the bacon butties, do not drink the beer, and most importantly do not under any circumstances shag the Dark Queen, no matter how hot and flossy she may be. If you do any of these things you will be stuck in the land of the dead for ever”     

Nergal sets off for the underworld. The place from which nobody returns, the place of dust and darkness, where the people wear feathers and cry like doves. He goes his own way but even he has to knock on the Goddess’s door. The gate keeper doesn’t give his blessing. He keeps the god waiting and goes to tell his mistress she has a visitor. 

“A god at the gate?” smiles Ereshkigal, her smile cold and steady, “Be a dear Namtar and go see which god it is.”

Namtar goes to the gate to see who it is and then goes all the way back to Ereshkigal’s throne room to let her know that the god in question is the god who failed to show him any respect when he was in heaven. 

“Oh, that god,” smiles Ereshkigal, “That god you should bring here to me.”

Namtar returns to the gate and this time he lets in a very pale looking Nergal. Fate leads Nergal through the first gate, the second gate, the third gate, the fourth gate, the fifth gate, the sixth gate, and through the seventh gate.  In the throne room of Ereshkigal he kneels and kisses the floor, as everyone did. Then he stands up stiff and straight, as everyone did, and mumbles something about having been sent by the sky god Anu.

“Is that so?” smiles Ereshkigal her smile as steady as her gaze and as chilling as her voice.

“In that case you better sit on the comfy chair. Would you like a beer or a bacon butty while I have a quick bath?”

Nergal declines her offers and waits for her to return from her bath. After an age of standing up stiff and straight, avoiding the lure of the comfy chair, and trying not to think about how hungry and thirsty he is, Ereshkigal returns slightly damp and wearing next to nothing. 

Nergal gives in, despite having taken Ea’s warning to heart; he hadn’t expected the icy Queen of the Underworld to be quite that hot and flossy. For six days they lie together passionately and do what men and women do. Ereshkigal knew that after seven days he would be hers forever, trapped in a word of dust and darkness from which there was no return. Her plan was so cunning it would only take the addition of a tail for people to confuse it with a weasel. That was the plan at least. In reality things were not going well. She hadn’t counted on Nergal being the god of her dreams. ....

“I’ll not be a minute,” Nergal whispers softly as he disentangles himself from her embrace and makes his way to the door. He knew that after seven days he would be hers forever, trapped in a word of dust and darkness from which there was no return.  He tells the gate keeper that Ereshkigal has given him an important message to deliver to Anu back in heaven. Then he legs it.

In heaven the gods are a little surprised to see him. The Land of No Return wasn’t usually a place you came back from. It was pretty well known for not being returned from, which was how it had come to be known as The Land of No Return in the first place. Still they’re happy to see Nergal: as happy as anyone ever is to see Mr War and Plague anyway. Ea was less happy because he realised that this could not end well. He knew that Ereshkigal would have noticed Nergal wasn’t with her. 

“You should probably take off your distinctive hat and try and keep a low profile. Try to be a little less furious and raging,” says Ea, sprinkling Nergal with a little water of life to counteract the dust of the underworld and keep him in the land of the living.

Meanwhile back in the underworld, Ereshkigal is devastated. She sits on the floor in front of her throne her face soaked with tears. The underworld had always been a cold and lonely place but now it was unbearable. She hadn’t asked for this job, but she was good at it. She’s always been clear-headed, cool, calm, and collected. She had spent her life with the dead in a world that was…well…dead. Now she knew what she’d been missing and in her cold, steady, way she was angry and heartbroken, and for once in her life she was confused.

 She sends her servant Namtar back to heaven with a message.

Namtar makes the long journey up the staircase to heaven and knocks on the gate.  

“Why are you here?” ask the gods, as if they didn’t know.

“I have a message from Ereshkigal,” says the god of Fate.” Ereshkigal says that she never knew the delights of girlhood. The god you sent her delighted her. Now she can’t even trust her own judgement. If you do not send Nergal back to delight her some more, she will return the dead. The dead will outnumber the living and they will devour them.  So that’s your choice chaps: Nergal comes back with me, or my mistress releases the zombie apocalypse and the dead get a bit bitey.”

“Come in then, “the gods smile nervously,” feel free to take a look around and take Nergal back with you.”

Namtar enters heaven and keeps an eye out for Nergal’s distinctive hat, but he can’t see him anywhere, and eventually returns to the underworld empty handed to report to his mistress.

“I did not see Nergal in heaven, but I did see a new god He was a god without a hat sitting with the other gods and looking not in the slightest bit furious or raging.”

“That,” says his heartbroken mistress,” will have been Nergal. I suspect Ea has sprinkled him with the water of life to wash off the dust of death. Go back to heaven and bring me back the god with no hat.”

Back in heaven Nergal is having a heart to heart with Ea.

“I’m sort of getting used to this not being quite so furious all the time. Ereshkigal is so good at it. She’s always calm and cool, as well as being hot and flossy. If only I hadn’t been quite so stupid when Fate came knocking then perhaps she wouldn’t want to kill me and keep me in the land of the dead for ever.”

“Perhaps I can help you,” says Ea, but he’s interrupted by Fate knocking rather loudly at the gate of heaven.

“I’m here for the god with no hat”, they hear Namtar saying to the gods at the gate.

“Great!” says Nergal.

“No. It’s alright,” says Ea,” I was just about to tell you about my cunning plan. Go back to the underworld and take these seven spirits with you. If you leave one at each gate you’ll be able to get into the throne room, defeat Ereshkigal, and escape back to heaven in time for tea.”  

Nergal has no time to loose so he runs furiously down to the underworld. He smashes through the first gate, the second gate, the third gate, the fourth gate, the fifth gate, the sixth gate, and the seventh gate. Full of rage he bursts into the throne room grabs Ereshkigal by the hair, and then he stops. He looks into Ereshkigal’s cold, clear eyes and he really doesn’t know what to do.

He’s fallen in love with the Queen of the Underworld and she wants to kill him. It’s enough to make anyone a little angry with Fate. 

“Will you marry me?” says Ereshkigal ever so calmly,” You could be my husband and Fate could serve us and you could sit on the comfy chair and do the judging of the dead. I’m sure you know loads about death what with all your previous experience with war and plague.”

Nergal is overwhelmed and burst into tears. He falls into Ereshkigal’s arms and sobs,” I thought you wanted to keep me prisoner in the land of the dead.”

“Now why would I wish that on anyone else?,” smiles Ereshkigal.

Seven days later there’s a knock on the gate of the underworld. Ereshkigal disentangles herself from Nergal’s embrace and gets out of bed to answer the door. 

“I have a message from Anu, the king of the gods,” says a voice on the other side of the gate.

“And what would that be?” asks Ereshkigal.

“ That god we sent you…

…you can keep him.” 

“So I can,” smiles Ereshkigal, and she does.

I’ve ascribed this particular blog to Venus but it bleeds out into the territory of several other Planetary Rulers. Venus is etched deep into our understanding of the world.

 We’ve ascribed so many meanings to that a tiny spark of light drowned out by the rising sun. Before Saturn was handed his scythe she had taught us the time to reap and the time to sow. 

Her dance with the Sun became our new calendar when we’d forgotten how to hear the Voice of the Moon. Men would come to wear the dance steps as a symbol of their imagined power over nature; a symbol we found hidden in the heart of the apple when we fell from heaven. 

She was the mother and lover of those who would stand above their fellow men to determine who would eat and who would serve. They spoke in her name, and so they became her. There was Evening and there was Morning, the first day. 

In the land between the rivers she dances with the Sun and she waits beneath the Earth as Ishtar and Ereshkigal. 

Ishtar imprisoned in a pit for three days stripped of her coat of many colours, stripped of the influence of all seven planets; dead to the world. She is the earth seek her in the earth.

 Beyond the Black Horizon  Sekhmet and Hathor are the original scarlet women their robes drenched in the blood of the scapegoat. The Lioness echoes Virgin Anat as she wades in the blood of kings; the little girl that no man can control. Long before Josiah’s new priesthood sold her to Babylon she was domesticated in Egypt. Even as Hathor with her big brown eyes and lovely udders she was more than a handful.

 Something had to be done. Sekhmet got drunk and woke up as Isis the dutiful wife and mother.

 With the Goddess safely out of the way the boys who bore her name could do as they liked. 

Fingers in ears, they shouted “La la! Can’t hear you!” to drown out the voice of their Mother, which despite all our progress was still at heart the Voice of the Moon.

They became little demiurges, redecorating reality to their own tastes; tin pot generals declaring Dream War. Isaiah’s Morning Star who Otto Rahn admires so much is not the shining son of the Goddess he should be. It’s not his pride that is the problem. Ascending to the heights to become like the Most High wasn’t the issue. That was part of the job description. The reason he’s kicked out of heaven is really quite simple. He couldn’t do the job. He was “the man who made the world a desert, who overthrew its cities and would not let his captives go home.” He reminds me of Otto’s boss. The point Isaiah is making is not that Lucifer is some evil supernatural being, but that any ruler on earth should be Lucifer, and the chap he’s talking about didn’t live up to the title. He was a rebel, but he was a rebel against the natural order and the end result of that is always that the crops fail and the people suffer. The king and the land are one: sons and lovers of Venus and the Earth. 

Anyway on with the story.

Some of this I’ve told before in various forms, but I’ll begin at the beginning in case you weren’t paying attention. Much of the time I wasn’t paying attention and didn’t realise it was all the same story. Going on for ten years ago I started to become vaguely aware of the presence of a certain entity. I believed, and am still fairly certain, that he was some kind of ancestral guardian connected to Kt’s family. As time went by and I became part of that family (in a very real and legally binding way) his presence became more noticeable. I’d catch glimpses of him from time to time, usually when things were going the shape of the pear, and usually hanging round outside the house playing with the cats.

I’m almost entirely certain that he was at least partly responsible for getting us out of Leeds and guiding us to our current home. After the move he started to show up more regularly and began to make it increasingly clear that he wanted a word with me. Initially I was reluctant but he’s kind of persuasive and he had help from my friends. The tipping point was a dream in which I joined a bunch of hairy-arsed blokes with spears singing round a bonfire. In one of those moments where the walls between dream and reality become windows I awoke to find them momentarily standing round my bed looking as weirded out as I felt. Not long after I sat down with my still nameless new friend and asked if he wouldn’t mind awfully letting me know who he was and  what the chuff he wanted. The answer I got didn’t exactly clear things up. It involved being dragged through time and space to an undisclosed location in a river valley at the foot of some mountains. I think I started further back than I needed to be and moved forward in time but it may have been the other way round. I sat on the steeper side of the valley above the river, watching it narrow and widen and change its course as the seasons span past in a dizzying blur. It was like one of those time lapse nature documentaries. In the moments when things slowed down enough for me to focus the river was visited by deer of various sorts, huge cows, ponies, and weird little goaty things I didn’t recognise at the time, all moving around at super fast speed, except for one white deer which remained still and fixed throughout. It was entrancing, strangely peaceful, and really very cold most of the time. 

When things finally settled down. I climbed into the mountains. I knew where I was going, but I didn’t know how. Eventually I came to a cave and walked inside. I made my way towards the centre of the main chamber and the earth took me. The rock turned to mud and back to rock with me inside. I did what any normal person would do under the circumstances and panicked. Not that it did any good. I lost track of where I ended and the earth began. Then I lost track of me entirely. For what seemed like an eternity I was the rock. When I looked back on things later that day I thought I’d blacked out. In the months that followed I’d have the occasional flash back and knew that I hadn’t. The nearest I can come to explaining it is that I was filled with information. Everything was in my head, or my head was in everything. Every so often bits come back and something new makes sense but for now at least I don’t have conscious access to any of it. I have tried but it’s like trying to listen to every conversation in a crowd, and it never comes to anything.

Suddenly I could move again and discovered I couldn’t breathe mud. The feeling of panic returned rather quickly at that point but as I reached up someone got hold of my arm and dragged me out. I was caked head to toe in pale grey mud. I coughed and spluttered, and did my best to clear enough mud from round my eyes to see. My feline friend was standing beside me looking smug and then he was gone. I ran back down into the valley with a certain amount of momentum but before I reached the river I was back home.

I spent most of the rest of that afternoon trying to pin down geology and flora and fauna with Kt I wanted to know if I’d been anywhere real and if so where it was and when it was. Our initial guess was that it was probably Germany or Austria  around the end of the last ice age. Finding a picture of the  Hohlenstein Stadel Löwenmensch pretty much convinced me at the time. He’s about 32,000 years old and was carved from a mammoth bone. He looked a little familiar and I suspect there’s a very good reason for that.

 Towards the very end of last year when it looked like we’d probably be going to Montsegur we started to check out the region properly on the interweb. The pictures reminded me very much of the place I’d been that afternoon 18 months previously. I put it down to coincidence but I was begining to have doubts about the Germanic angle. When I realised there were going to be caves, and caves that had been inhabited in prehistoric times, I had a little niggle at the back of my mind that perhaps I might have been in France. Either way I was going to have oportnity to test the theory, so I let it lie.

We visited a lot of Caves. La Grotte de la Vache was our second. The first was an underground boat trip along la Riviere Souterraine de Labouiche, which was lots of fun but nothing more.

La Vache we came across almost at random. We'd seen signs for several caves close by but it was the cheapest to visit and didn't need an advanced booking. It was also called the Cave of the Cow which would have sold it to me anyway. 

 As we drove towards it the sense of déjà vu was gobsmacking. Once we set off walking up the mountain it was like I was walking twice at once;in dream and reality. I knew the way off by heart. I really wanted to stand in the place I'd started off in my vision of 07/07/07 and take a picture but things had changed a bit in the intervening millennia and civilization had got in the way.

 I got a couple of nearly but not quite shots but I knew where I was. It really felt like home. 

The guide was a mad old French woman who'd been drinking with extreme prejudice. We first met  her on the path up to the mountain which she blocked for 10 minutes while she shouted at a very sheepish looking bloke. So we were mildly traumatised when we got to the cave and she turned up a couple of minutes later to unlock the gates. There was just us and a German couple so she agreed to show us round in English (which was very helpful). We got the standard tour which scared the German’s off and we then had her to ourselves. Once they were gone she was a different person. It slowly dawned on us over the holiday that Germans were not popular and people were much nicer to us when they found out we were English. The row with the man on the path was about him wanting to cut down trees so he could get to the rock face to climb it. At which point we very much sided with our guide. The combination of Kt’s sympathetic outrage against the climber and the fact that we made as much attempt as possible to communicate in French helped loads and we managed to get a lot of additional information as a consequence. She had a healthy disrespect for the authorities and shared much about the lack of funding for the archaeologists. The cave isn’t one of the popular touristy ones, which is a little mad considering how significant it is historically. We also got a lesson in prehistoric hunting techniques based on her own knowledge of poaching the same animals when she, “was younger”. She gave the impression that she meant last week. 

Going in, and for much of the two or three hours we spent in what was not a very big cave, I had the most alarming butterflies in my stomach. I stood on the spot where I’d sunk into the earth and looked up to see a bloke with a lion’s head, all thoothy smiles and told you so eyes, standing in the cave mouth. 

I try to be as sane and rational about these things as is possible under the circumstances. We need to control and confine our world to make it manageable if we stop to think too hard about the immensity of the unknown we’d not be able to function on a day to day level. 

Most of our efforts involve giving things names, reducing them to generalisations, and comparing patterns. Its pretty much what science or maths do and for some reason we think that it gives us something that is more “real” than when we do it the old fashioned way with stories, symbols, or poetry.

 There is a level on which we just gnow things. Certain combinations of ideas, images, sounds, and symbols unlock a store of understanding which is beyond our individual selves. 

Some of these “keys” will cause nods and smiles of recognition in a handful of people, while some of them are ancient and powerful and smash through the fragile fences between races, religions, or cultures. 

“ Shapes of angels 
The night cast, 
Lie dead but dreaming 
In my past. 
And they're here, 
They want to meet you. 
They want to play with you. 
So take the dream.  “

I don’t doubt the existence of discarnate (or differently-carnate) entities. The portion of the human race that has not generally accepted their existence is limited pretty much to us and now. It’s not because we are more advanced, we’re just more focused in our world view. We see some things better because we choose to ignore others. The level to which my experience of this “other” world is subjective is debateable. The level to which any experience is subjective is debateable. 

We gather information and we process and interpret it before projecting it back out onto the world around us. We are not objective beings. We each create the world we inhabit, or we allow others to create it for us. We also create some of its inhabitants. There are things walking around out there that started off as ideas…or did the ideas start off as them? I don’t suppose it matters in the long run. Perhaps my feline friend looks the way I think he does because I instinctively expect him to. Perhaps he’d be Mr Stay Puft under different circumstances. I think he looks like that because he’s been expected to look like that by a lot of people for a very long time. There is certain fluidity to his appearance. What he actually is and what he has been moulded into are not necessarily mutually exclusive but it’s a chicken and egg thing. He takes on a form that has appeared repeatedly in human history,  and in human imagination. It really is ancient and pretty near universal. There are many reasons why, and many different interpretations of the symbolism of that form.

He’s many things to many people. I once asked if he was the angel Ariel and he said “Sometimes”. 

I thought at the time he was being vague but he was actually being as precise as possible under the circumstances. Its one of the few things he’s ever said outright. The other two being that I must remember the tower and the moon, and that there’s an eclipse coming during which a significant battle in the Dream War will take place. Mostly he sticks to show rather than tell. I wanted to know where he came from, who he was, and I think that is what he showed me. When he showed up grinning at me from the cave entrance I’d not seen him since the previous October, the next time I saw him he was very different. 

The cave has a twin, a mirror image on the other side of the valley.

 The same people used it during the same period of time, but they used it for very different purposes. Last Autumn I put a lot of effort into revisiting my experiences in the cave with varying levels of success. I returned many times to a dream version of La Grotte de la Vache. It wasn’t the same one I visited back on 07/07/07 or the one I visited in June. It was a little more flexible, more symbolic, and far more subjective. I still learned a lot though; mostly about myself. Some details from the dream cave turned up in La Vache, and others turned up in the cave across the valley. I had to be there for them to make sense. I’ll need to make the next blog a bit of a prehistory history lesson so that they’ll make sense to you. It’s necessary preparation because soon we’ll be making a journey that the people from La Vache almost certainly made each year. It’s a journey to the Mountain of the Moon; the Mountain of  Safety.

I went with the planetary rulers/seven seals/menorah theme for these blogs without having any idea if, or how, they would fit. While seven-fold patterns have been a little prominent in my life of late, to be honest the whole blog-theme thing is entirely down to one phrase that became lodged in my head when the afterglow of Montsegur met the comedown of Rennes-le-Chateau. The phrase in question was, “Luna begets Mercury.” I’ve been mulling it over ever since and I’m still getting new things from those three little words. I’ll tell you more about that later in the story, after I’ve introduced you to Luna. She shines like a mirror reflecting.

So there I am with two weeks full of adventure and oddness and nothing to hang them on but the Moon and Mercury. I knew I could get our friend Venus in there without any trouble because all this really began in her mountain hideaway. When I started thinking about Mirepoix and realised it was the City of the Sun, I ran with the theme without any clear idea of where I was going. I’m a lot more familiar with Sol, Luna, and Venus, than with any of their transpersonal chums, so I had to read up a bit.
 

“…I lay caged and chained within.
Today my view - strangely
increased - it is beyond compare,
but nothing became easier,
I'm still struggling to be free.
A thousand different things
dare to appear before my eyes
now, they come and leave
untouched, because still I cannot see.
In true darkness there's
no choice than to discover
the uselessness of eyes,
giving birth from their own despair.
Here eyes can nothing but
decay and if I fail and do
identify myself with them
then their destiny I'll share...

 So very unreasonable
had been my fear. How could
I ever believe that I might
be losing you when forever
we're connected and you
are part of me. It's your
omnipresence that defines
the way in which I do
exist, forcefully leading
me back to where I do belong.
Opening my eyes to see
the true essence of my
being, by dissolving
the distractions of the
outer world.

 In the loneliness
of the pain you bring the
isolation of my soul guarantees
the maintenance of the only
thing that I know,

 My natural and obvious differency.
Beloved old friend and life-time
companion without you to
nothing I would fall. Your
power pervades me and lies
me low, but as the same time
a new strength is born in
my soul.
In a universe of change
and continuous movement
I am counting on you
since I know you shall last.
Being my darkness and
the basis of splendor
light-giving background
as most fertile past. You
trance-formation source
of understanding you are
the power that is pulling
me down. Whenever
lightness seeks to carry
me away you connect
me safely to the ground.
You chill of my winter,
eternal Saturn-sphere,
petrified and frozen
with a logic cold as ice.”

~To a Loyal Friend~ Sopor Aeternus

Being quite partial to Sopor Aeternus I couldn’t resist looking at Saturn next.

Saturn is the kind of teacher you really don’t like at the time, and appreciate later when you realise what you’ve learned. Mythologically he’s interesting and it seems that, as with many myths, there is an astrological basis to his story. In many ways it’s the Nephilim myth from a different angle. Saturn was the ruler of the Golden Age. As Chronos, he and his wife Rhea equate to El and Athirat. They were the mother and father of all gods…or at least of all gods who came after them. El is not Jack, he isn’t even JACK. We don’t know JACK. As Chronos he’s the only one who would help his mother out. He listened to Gaia even when her husband, Ouranos, didn’t. You really don’t want to ignore Gaia or you’ll come to a sticky end. Chronos restricted Ouranos’ creative powers by taking a scythe to his nads.
 

The King is dead! Long live the king!  They all live happily ever after is followed by once upon a time. The harvest has been gathered in and soon we’ll be planting beans again. Chronos is god of the Golden Age, god of time, god of agriculture, and Father Christmas.

 

 When he was in charge things were going really rather well. Pain, death, disease and hunger were things of the future and people were made of mud. It’s called autochthonous birth and meant that the earth was literally their mother. Just like Adam who took his mother’s name. Adam’s name was mud even before the fall.

All good things come to an end and Chronos knew that, despite things appearing to be to the contrary, he didn’t actually have all the time in the world. All our days are numbers and he’d been told that all of this had happened before and all of it would happen again. He took precautionary measures and made sure that the patter of tiny feet would not be followed by the sound of a scythe whistling towards his wedding tackle by swallowing his children at birth.

 

 
His wife and sister, Rhea, was her mother’s daughter. In many ways she was her mother too. Like Athirat and her variants she had a magic rock. They’re very popular. You’d be amazed how many people have one.
 
Magic rocks change everything.

Rhea manages to persuade Chronos that the magic rock is her latest child and while he’s nibbling on that she sneaks off to give birth to Zeus.
 
 

Zeus grows up to be big and strong and after a prolonged power struggle has his dad and all the other giants safely shackled away in the Underworld. You can’t keep a good god down though and before long he’s Lord of the Underworld. There are too many ideas packed into this little story to go into in depth but amongst other things it seems to be based on something that happened in the sky. It’s really not part of the story I want to tell but it is very interesting so I’m keeping it in, and it’s a good bridge between Saturn as a deity, Saturn as a big rock in the sky, and Saturn as a metaphor or pattern.
 

According to Epigenese of Byzantium, who studied astronomy with thee Chaldeans some time in the second century BC, the planet Saturn exerts the greatest influence upon all the movements of celestial bodies. It also appears to have done something a little odd back in the dim and distant past. Possibly something that was seen by our ancestors as the end of the Golden Age. It seems that Saturn was once very bright indeed. Babylonian texts seem to imply that Saturn dominated the night sky and competed with the sun during the day. Then it went away, during a period of unprecedented storm and flood. Obviously a planet can’t have wandered out of our solar system, but for whatever reason it couldn’t be seen for some time and was considered to have gone for good. In Mesopotamia Saturn was Nirig, also known as Enu-restu the Primeval Lord, and happened to be the owner of certain rocks with which he determined fate. He was endowed with the terrible glory of the gods and was feared as the raging Bull of storm and flood. The Romans remembered this peculiar celestial event as Jupiter driving Saturn away and assuming his place in the sky.

 

The Greeks had Zeus overpowering his father, driving him from his heavenly throne and putting him in chains.

 

I’m fairly certain the Egyptians were getting at something similar with some aspects of Osiris. Like Saturn he was deposed, and in his case dismembered. He was gone forever but came back as God of the Underworld and his son became ruler in his stead. Not surprisingly he’s associated with brilliant light and with floods. There may be more to all those vegetation gods that die and get better than meets the eye. Saturn too is a god of agriculture; a Roman Tammuz if you like. Tammuz also shone with a brilliant light, died in a raging storm and flood, spent some time in the underworld, and came back with green fingers.  I hate to bring it up but there may be more than a little Cain and Able about the whole thing. 

 Anyway I digress….as I tend to do. We’ll get back to the subject in hand.

Saturn, as I mentioned, is a teacher. You’re never going to get “Change your life for the better in three easy lessons” from Saturn. It’s a long, slow, slog requiring patience and discipline, and lots of going back to check you didn’t miss anything.

 

Saturn is law and order, hierarchy, conformity, and lots of other things I’m not very good with. As my wife loves to point out with great regularity, I do have the patience of a mayfly.

 Saturn restricts us like the children in his belly, or the Titans chained up in Tartarus. He makes us stop and take stock of where time is taking us, reminding us of our weaknesses and correcting each one before letting us take another step. There are no shortcuts, we have at least one lifetime of learning ahead of us and if we stop before it’s over we’ve failed. If we keep on going the eventual rewards are worth any amount of blood, sweat, and tears.

With all those things in mind there is only really one story from our time in France to tell. It’s a tale of fear, confinement, and hard won lessons in the depths of the underworld.

“Oh Saturn, come ... devour me, safe in your Darkness I long to sleep. I'll make my heart a sword of steel, I will not doubt, will never feel. All petrified I shall not fear ... (... though petrified I'm breathing fear). Oh Saturn, come ... devour me, safe in your Darkness all shall be sealed!”

~And Bringer of Sadness~ Sopor Aeternus

Some of you will have read Scarlett Amaris‘s version of this so it won’t be all that new. I’m doing this from memory so there may be minor variations and so a compare and contrast with Scarlett’s version may give you a more rounded view.

This is the first of several cave stories. Chronologically it comes somewhere in the middle but it was a very different cave experience from the others, in a different time and space. Thematically it has to come first.

Our guide on this occasion was Christian Koenig who you may remember from Secret Glory. He was the bloke with the pan pipes who was described as "museum curator". He now lives in the house that belonged to Otto's mentor the mildly dubious Antonin Gadal. He has horses and kittens and makes a good cup of cinnamon tea. We liked him very much and one of my regrets on returning home was that I didn’t get much time to actually talk to him. Still there’s always next time. We were introduced to him by Miss Scarlett and Mr Stanley on the Wednesday after we arrived and he offered to take us to a cave that Richard and Scarlett hadn't been to and also to the Bethlehem Cave. I was kind of keen on seeing Bethlehem because I have been led to believe that there may be something about the place which relates to my own experiences with a certain rock throwing goddess.

We didn't get to see the Bethlehem Cave for political reasons. There was a notice on a post halfway up the mountain which I didn't get to read, but was reliably informed  advised that the Mayor wouldn’t look too kindly on visitors to the Bethlehem Cave on the grounds that he was a fascist. We still had the other cave to see though- Thee Cave of the Hermit.

 Christian does vague very well, and very deliberately. He suddenly looses his ability to understand English or understand your French if you ask a question he isn't willing to answer. We were told the cave would involve a small amount of crawling on hands and knees and any other volunteered information regarding it was a little nebulous. Getting there involved climbing up a mountain with something that claimed to be a path but may have been lying. We made our way through the trees and undergrowth, and climbed through a very large fence clearly designed to prevent us from being on the other side of it. The climb wasn’t all that bad and we got to the cave relatively quickly.
 

 
 When we got past the main entrance it soon became clear that we would need to climb through a tiny little hole at ground level to enter the main cave.

 

 
At that point Kt opted to stay outside and wait for us. I was in two minds about it myself as confined spaces are not something I enjoy. I went in last on the grounds that if people larger than me could get through then so could I. It set my mind at ease enough to take the plunge. The tunnel opened up into a reasonable sized chamber and I assumed that that was it and we had arrived at our destination. Just as I was thinking that it was very pretty, and hadn’t been so bad after all,   Christian had disappeared into a dark corner and when we found him he introduced us to another tiny hole which we needed to go through. One more couldn't hurt but I wasn't overly happy. In the next chamber Christian again disappeared after brushing off any questions about the quantity of further tiny holes and the distances involved. He started moving a pile of rocks to create enough space (allegedly) for us to go down another tunnel which was described as being about 3m. It was at least twice that and very, very, tight indeed. I doubt anyone got through without loosing a little skin. Having examined the knees of my leathers, once the mud had washed off, I’m glad that I was wearing them. Christian’s removal of the pile of rocks had created the new fear that the whole thing might collapse on me at any minute which just added to the excitement. Later it turned out they'd been placed there deliberately to hide the entrance/stop us getting wet, but we didn't know that. Adrenaline levels were a little high, shall we say. Then we came to another chamber with some graffiti from the 60s and prior. We saw much older graffiti in some of the other caves, but it was still strange to see those little echoes from the past.

 Finally we came to the bit we'd been warned about.
 
 

It was a reasonably short crawl on hands and knees which by this point was a relief. Questions regarding our destination and expected time of arrival were still falling on deaf ears.

 Then there was another tiny hole. This one was really very small indeed but it was a sort of archway only about 6 inches deep that opened up into a huge cave so the fear factor wasn't too great on that one. We came out into the most amazing collection of caves. They were really very beautiful.
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

The pictures really don't capture the scale properly and there was so much more than I can show you.

 As my heart beat started to slow down I became aware that we were not alone in there. At the time I was happy to dismiss the orbs that show up on the pictures as being dust caught in the flash.
 
 

After later events on Montsegur I'm less certain about their causes, but whatever they were the caves were rather densely populated by something. I got the impression of small groups of people watching us. I couldn't focus on anything solid, which is unlike me, but they were human shaped blurs in varying sizes. Nothing too small so if there were kiddies then they were in their teens at least. I don't really do ghosts so I'm happier to put it down to temporal anomalies than to dead people hanging around (not that there's much difference if you look too closely). They were certainly people, which is a bit of a novelty for me, and they did feel as if they were alive somewhere or somewhen else. Pretty much everyone at least felt something. Christian kept his mouth shut but I think he knew far more about what was going on than we did. After a while walking round mesmerized with our mouths open we all came together in the largest cave and found Christian sitting on a rock.
 
 

He suggested that we turn the lamps off and sit and meditate in silence for about 40 minutes. Scarlett and Richard talked him down to 20 minutes despite his claim to have seen a Cathar Perfect once after half an hour (I'm still not sure if he was winding them up). I was grateful for the reduction in quiet time because I was very aware that we'd been gone a long time and ..Kt.. was sitting outside with no idea if we were still alive. We were actually gone about 2 and a half hours so I think he got his 40 minutes (at least) anyway. Once the lights were out time was impossible to measure. It wasn't silent. There were lots of sounds; the dripping of water, and the settling of the mountain (which was a bit worrying), strange groans and bellows, creaks and gurgles, echoed around us in the darkness. Then the darkness started to clear. Everything seemed to glow with a faint orange light. Comparing notes later it was something that we'd all experienced in slightly different ways.
 
 

Perhaps it was down to our eyes trying to fill in the lack of information with guesswork, but I'm not too sure. Even in the pitch black before the glowing began I could feel the cave slowly filling up with other people. At the end of his allotted time (still without the lights) Christian began to sing in Occitan. He's got an impressive voice and the way the cave acoustics worked he was harmonising with his own echoes. As he sang the orange light got much brighter and I could see the assembled crowd of onlookers at the front of the cave. They were almost certainly joining in but it was impossible to work out if all the sound was coming from Christian or not.

When the song came to an end Christian turned on his lamp and we turned on ours and unfolded ourselves from what ever position we’d ended up in. The audience also retreated but did not depart entirely. Despite my earlier frustrations with Christian’s vagueness it had become apparent that there was no vagueness. Everything was deliberate and worked towards the overall effect. The build up of fear, and the physical struggle to just get in there, the emergence into a strange and beautiful hidden world and the excitement and bustle of that, and then encountering yet another strange and hidden world in the stillness of the dark. When I came round I felt as though I’d had a weeks sleep. It was similar to being in an isolation tank but much more intense. We came as close to running back to the surface as was possible in the cramped circumstances.
 

 
It was like a weird twist on sex where the orgasm and the afterglow coincided and went on for hours. I was still quietly buzzing away the next day. As I said when I got back to Kt, it was worth any amount of tight squeezy death. I’d not like to put my finger on exactly what happened, but it was a necessary preparation for the trip to Montsegur.

“What orbit of the planets has put you and me in this place, at this moment? Where time takes a breath, and we dance on the edge of our dreams?”

It’s hard to know where to start with this. A blow by blow account of two weeks of my life would take considerably longer than two weeks to write and nearly that long to read. Even if I cut out the dull parts we would be here for a while, because dull moments were a little scarce. The other problem I have is that language was never really designed to deal with some of what I want to relate. It needs to be filmed…in7D.

So you’ll need to forgive me if this is not very linear and some of the action happens off screen and between the lines. You had to be there…which is why I was.

I had to be there.

I’d like to say I was invited, but that would imply I could have declined. I did raise the odd objection at first, but each excuse was countered and each obstacle removed in ways that made it clear that my presence was demanded rather than requested. Strange things were most certainly afoot at the Circle K.

Strange is relative. I have all new definitions of strange now.

“Come out in the sunshine
It’s gonna rain sometime
It won’t get better but it might never get worse”

-Sunshine- Carter USM

I’ll begin in Mirepoix but it isn’t the beginning.
 

Mirepoix itself is less than a thousand years old. The name first appears in a charter granted to the inhabitants by Raymond Rodger the Count of Foix. 



For those of you who might be wondering; Raymond Rodger was Esclarmonde de Foix’s brother. His sister and his wife were probably behind the rebuilding and fortification of Montsegur.

  Despite Mirepoix also being newly fortified just in time for the war it was captured quite early on in the Albigensian Crusade by the lovely Simon de Montfort and given to his lieutenant Guy de Levis. The existing ruling family had strong links to Catharism and found themselves suddenly homeless. Which was actually a much better result than they probably hoped for.

Raymond Rodger died early in 1233 and depending on which book you read he’d either just recaptured Mirepoix or was in the process of doing so. I’d like to think he got it back before he died but either way it was close. It also didn’t last. Most of what can be seen in Mirepoix today, including the Cathédrale Saint-Maurice de Mirepoix, was built by Guy de Levis’ son.

Before Mirepoix was Mirepoix it was called Beli Cartha, The City of Light. It was dedicated to the Iberian Celtic god Belenos.
 

 
Belenos was Belisenna’s other half. He was the sun to her moon. Otto Rahn equates him to Apollo which is fair, and via Apollyon to Lucifer which is bollocks. Otto’s grasp of Semitic mythology is a bit rubbish, but you’d kind of expect that from a member of the SS. The interaction between Sun, Moon, and Venus as they move from culture to culture, and from age to age, is very complex and there is a case for equating the solar imagery of the Greeks and Celts with Middle Eastern venus imagery, but it isn’t the one that Otto makes. Otto speaks from ignorance and prejudice and that is never a good starting point.

 This is the first seal; the central seal which must be broken first to illuminate the other six.
 


 

So back in the 21^st Century I was warming to Mirepoix. It’s barely changed in seven hundred years and certainly not got much bigger. It reminded me of all the better bits of York condensed into one small town. 

 

When I’m fabulously wealthy and need to furnish my castle in the woods I shall visit Mirepoix market with a very big lorry. I’ll probably pick up a few hundred books and the gorgeous brown leather flying helmet that would have taken me over the weight allowance for the flight home while I’m there.
 
 

 We worked our way round a market crammed with wondrous things until we came to the cathedral. It wasn’t particularly big and imposing, and from the outside the most charitable adjective I could come up with would be, “drab”.
 

 

 Inside was a different story.  I’m used to the scrubbed stonework of English cathedrals, so it was something of a shock to catch a glimpse of what we might still have if we’d bypassed the reformation and Henry had been able to keep it in his pants. I used to think of Catholicism as a dead religion; one of those strange pagan cults that emerged during the death throws of Rome; a ghost dance for the evil empire. Where it did survive it was quickly assimilated into whatever religion had preceded it and the names changed to protect the innocent. My investigations into the Dream War against the Cathari made it clear that Rome had endured and adapted. More recently it’s been poking me with its ancient bloodstained fingers and reminding me that it’s still a force to be reckoned with. Rex now hides behind a more subtle and acceptable face, especially since that thing with Hitler backfired so badly, but he isn’t beyond dragging out some old favourites to keep people fearful and compliant.

I stood in the doorway for a moment a little gobsmacked.
 

 

 

Almost every surface was decorated. Some of it was quite beautiful, some of it was a little over the top for my taste and some of it was just plain weird.
 

 
Some of the weirdness is apparently standard issue. I’d only been in a Catholic church once before, but I saw a fair few while I was in Occitania and had the chance to spot recurring themes.

As I passed a statue of St Maurice I felt a chill that wasn’t entirely down to having moved from the baking heat outside into the cool of an old stone building. Something was aware of our presence.
 
 

I made my way slowly to the front taking in the décor and checking it for esoteric symbolism. It’s my usual approach to cathedrals. They tend to be elaborate puzzle boxes assembled over centuries by any number of groups and individuals with a message to get across or a secret to hide.

 

Kt has Dolchenite tendencies and objects to ostentatious displays of wealth in ecclesiastical buildings, but I’m willing to compromise if art or occult secrets are involved.

 Kt ,despite her moral objections, had run off with the camera to take pictures of the painted walls and stained glass, so about three quarters round I turned back to find her and show her the things I’d been looking at. As I retraced my steps the sense of being watched became more and more intense. I’d mentioned a few things I wanted pictures of and Kt got on with photographing them. It was quite dark and you weren’t allowed to use flash so there were a few failed attempts and things took longer than I was comfortable with. I really wanted to get out of there and back into the sunlight as soon as humanly possible. As I opened my mouth to say we should leave the pictures and get out I felt cold dry hands close around my neck from behind. I saw nothing, which I’m really rather glad about.

I started to shout to Kt but no sound would come out. I wasn’t going to leave her there in case whatever it was shifted its attention to her so I did my best to gesture that we had to go NOW! I’d given up trying to speak and was concentrating with very little success on breathing. Thankfully as we got closer to the door my assailant began to loose its grip and it didn’t join us in the sunshine. A wave of heat and light hit me as I took a not inconsiderable number of very deep breaths before checking to see if I could speak again. My neck was a little tender for the rest of the afternoon, but other than that all was well again.

Despite sounding a tad melodramatic it really wasn’t that big a deal. It had been a while, but in my late teens and early twenties I had a number of violent encounters with the supernatural. The reason it doesn’t happen much these days is that I’ve learned how to defend myself and I try not to provoke anything unnecessarily. “Don’t mess” has been rule number one for a long time. I was caught off guard, and while it was annoying, I’m glad it happened when it did because it meant I was more prepared a week later when the big guns came out.  Whatever we’d disturbed in the cathedral was not really that much of a threat. For a start it didn’t appear to be able to leave the building or even get too close to the doorway. I think it too was caught off guard. It didn’t expect to be noticed and was probably more frightened than I was. It also went for the easiest target. A week earlier I’d been hit in the throat whilst fencing. It hurt like hell at the time and while it hadn’t given me any trouble for a little over five days I think our friend was either exploiting some damage already done or using the memory of the pain to best effect.

It was unsettling but I was more angry with myself than anything. I was very close to going back in and kicking its arse but I referred to rule number one. For now “strange” was operating within familiar parameters. I moved up to mauve alert (just in case) and we wandered off into the sunshine to buy vegetables, and not flying helmets, large copper pans, or antique clogs.
 

 

“While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.”

~H.G. Wells ~

I promised you the end of the world. People have been promising that for a long time now and every time it fails to materialise.

 
Remember Papa Nicetas, the Bogomil bishop of Constantinople, with thee Book of the Seven Seals tucked under his arm? That seems like a good place to end this journey.

The Book of the Seven Seals appears in chapter five of John’s Book of Revelation. In the previous chapter John has been looking up and noticed that someone has left the door of Heaven open. Presumably this was so the cat could come in and out and God didn’t have to keep getting up.

 
 Before he knows what’s going on he’s been whooshed up through the door and is standing in a version of the Holy of Holies from Solomon’s Temple…only with furniture that has a tendency to come alive in a disconcerting manner.

There’s a bloke on a big throne. On each side of the throne stands a Zoon and in front of the throne is a big lamp stand with seven lamps on it. Around all this are twenty four smaller thrones that belong to twenty four blokes in robes and crowns. The twenty four blokes and the zoa spend all their time worshipping the bloke on the big throne.

Twenty four, seven, and four, are sort of important. 

The bloke on the big throne has in his hand Thee Book of the Seven Seals. Unfortunately no one is available to open the seals and John gets upset about that and has a good cry. While he’s dabbing his eyes with his hanky one of the twenty four blokes taps him on the shoulder and points out that it’ll all be alright in the end because the big lamp has turned into a zombie lamb. 

  

Lamby trots up to the throne, despite looking as though he’s had a nasty accident, and takes the scroll off the bloke who has it. At this point the zoa and the twenty four blokes get on their knees and worship the lamb instead of the bloke on the throne.

It sounds completely mad, but it actually makes a lot of sense. John has not been eating the bit of cheese he found under the fridge, he’s describing a ritual that even for him (going on for two thousand years ago) was last performed in the very dim and distant past. The purpose of the ritual was to turn a man into a god.

 

 Once upon a time it wasn’t a ritual, it was just something people did, but as is the way with these things eventually the symbol replaced the substance and it’s being explained with the use of furniture and farm animals.

I’ll start off with the lamp stand in its pre-farm animal form. I’ve still not made up my mind which of the many options available the seals represent, or why, but the seven lamps go some way to explaining. By the time the Phoenicians were designing Temples in Jerusalem the lamp stand was called a menorah and was a stylized golden almond tree with seven branches each topped by a lamp.



 The archaic Semitic name is for almond tree was “amygdale”, which survives in its modern botanical name “Amygdalus
communis”.

 

It means Great Mother and the tree is closely linked with Asherah and Athirat ,who were identified with the Phrygian Cybele, and eventually ended up in Rome in 204 BCE as Mater Magna.

There are a couple of other almond related biblical references that I found mildly surprising, but probably shouldn’t have. Another name for the tree was Luz and Arabic for almond is still Luz. Luz, the Canaanite “City of the Almond” which was later renamed Bethel, was where Jacob found the magic rock that later fell into the hands of the Iberian Celts. How creepy is that!
According to a Jewish legend a deathless paradise can be reached by going though a hole in an almond tree. The Hebrews regarded the almond as a symbol of watchfulness and promise because it’s the first fruit tree to flower. 

  

 They called it the hastener, or the watcher, and it was linked by Jeremiah to the watchfulness of Yahweh who had seven eyes that were also the seven planets of the ancient world. Moses’ brother had a staff made of almond that allegedly grew new buds. I’m missing out the almonds association with the vesica piscis, but hopefully you’re reading between the lines anyway and have already counted 153 fish.

 

The Menorah was 18 hand widths high. If you do the maths 18 = Living One.

So almondyness is easily explainable. Now we need to worry about the more pressing issue of it having seven branches, because there are seven seals on the book in question, and our lamp stand in lamb form is the only thing that can open them.

  

I heard a rumour that seven was associated with Athena. It’s a matter of debate whether the Hebrews borrowed it for Asherah or the Greeks borrowed it for Athena or they both made it up independently or borrowed from someone else, but they were hanging out with each other about the time that they had the idea. Either way they should probably get back to their weaving.  

Philo of Alexandria, who as I mentioned previously was thinking along similar lines to John, said that, “everyone knows about the planetary symbolism of the menorah.” It seems that quite a few people did, including Josephus who also mentions it, so it probably wasn’t all that secret. Philo combines tree of life imagery with a model of the solar system as he understood it.

 

The branches would have been arranged in this order (I think):

The Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn.

The lamp in the centre was called the “Servant” lamp and used to give light to all the others. The word for servant used is Shamash who is also the Babylonian/Assyrian sun god. He happens to be a son of the moon too.

 

The Canaanites worshipped him as a her and called her Shapash. She was the daughter of El and Asherah , bore the title “Torch of the Gods” and acted as both a judge and saviour of humankind. The arms of the menorah were referred to as reeds, which makes sense of Isaiah’s description of the Servant as a bruised reed and a dimly burning wick. As I mentioned many a yonk ago in the blogs about the two goats I think Isaiah’s Servant Songs contain material that was probably the spoken part of Temple rituals. Finding this out has convinced me.

 You can take all this in many directions and if you felt the urge to get out the Zohar and play with that other tree of life (it’s the same one folks) you could probably get a lot more out of the symbolism, or what was later done with it.
 

For now I’m happy to be able to say that the lamp was all seven traditional planets combined into one, (and by extension the eyes of Yahweh)

 

and the image of jealousy with different vowels.

 

The central lamp was the sun, and the king, and the king’s heavenly equivalent, who several notable prophets and visionaries saw in something approaching a human form. He also had the combined powers of all the other six …somehow.

 

At the crucial moment in John’s vision there is a lamb where the lamp was. In apocalyptic literature when you get an animal it means you’ve actually got a human being. If you’ve got a human being then you’re dealing with a god or at the very least an angel. So the lamb is a human being. From the state he’s in then he’s also the Servant that Isaiah mentioned a lot.

 

He’s the goats from the day of atonement …both of them because there is only one goat and that’s the point. Just in case you weren’t sure who he was, he has his daddy’s eyes (all seven of them) and seven horns or beams of light. The light thing is something else that you could get carried away with because it would seem Mr Newton (being a good alchemist) knew his stuff.  H e also takes after his mum in all her almondy goodness.  He’s still human though. At least he is until he has the scroll handed to him. Once he’s got that suddenly everyone is worshipping him. With the scroll he gets four names which I suspect belong to the zoa and combine to give the name of the bloke on the throne that they stand around. He becomes worthy to take the scroll and open the seals. Presuming that Revelation (or material that ended up in it) was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, “worthy” could also mean someone who has conquered or is pure. My guess is that we’ve come in just after the initiation ritual in which he defeats the seven planetary rulers in a variation on the Gnostic game of beat the Archon, and this is probably symbolic of becoming a balanced person who reflects their influences equally.


 

 Isaiah’s Servant is “made wise” by this process. His appearance is changed in a way that probably indicates that he has become divine. It gives him special powers. One is Azazel’s ability to absorb and neutralise sin and the other is the ability to know the future.  There’s a passage in Isaiah that gives you the criteria for working out if someone is a god or not and it goes like this:

“Tell us the former things, what they are, that we may consider them, that we may know their outcome;  or declare to us the things to come. Tell us what is to come hereafter, that we may know that you are gods; do good, or do harm, that we may be dismayed and terrified.”

The ability to see time from the outside and know the past and future was the main qualification. If you couldn’t do that then you’d probably better get your coat.

 Josiah’s version of the Hebrew religion was ever so slightly opposed to anyone being “made wise”. Their story in Genesis suggested that the desire for wisdom was the cause of all our problems and should be avoided at all costs. They were willing to admit that there were “secret things” but only God needed to know them. They didn’t want anyone worrying about who would go up to heaven and bring back knowledge. That was the kind of thing that talking snakes might suggest to you did, and then you’d end up with your eyes opened, and no good would come of it. Even when things like Ezekiel’s visions found their way into the final version of the Old Testament there was a ban on reading them. It seems likely that the Deuteronomists had something in mind that was very close to the situation in Revelation (and elsewhere) ,where there were people going up to heaven and coming back with scrolls full of secret knowledge, and they were really quite worried about it.

 

The scroll thing turns up in a few places. John eventually got his own copy later in the story, just as Daniel and Ezekiel had and presumably every king of Israel and a few other places. No doubt some of these people had the real thing. They actually had the experience themselves. There were certainly people passing on their experiences and teaching other people how to do it. Some of them most likely wrote things down. I’m pretty sure John did, and see no reason why Nicetas couldn’t have got hold of a copy.

For the main part though I think it was probably symbolic. Not everyone who was supposed to be king could be guaranteed to have the necessary skills to do it for real.  What I suspect happened back on earth during the mundane equivalent of what John says he saw was that the king was handed an actual scroll by the chief priest. It has been suggested that what it contained was a short history of time, possibly even written by someone who’d seen it all at once, and some useful instructions on kingly stuff. Perhaps it was some kind of Grand Grimoire, but I think it unlikely.

There are two other possibilities regarding thee book and its seven seals.

It may have been seen as a sort of title deed (or a marriage licence) to the earth. The other is that it contained details of a way of understanding the physical world in which form is given and maintained by sealing its idea. You create the seals and you create our perception of the world if not its actuality. If you know how to break them you can start again and remake things in another way.

Papa Nicetas’ book (if he had a book) could have been one or all of these things, or it could just have been Revelations or John's gospel with a few minor variations. There’s nothing to say he left a copy behind when he went back home either. If he did pass on either an actual book or an oral tradition concerning “secret things”, then I suspect he passed it on to Esclarmonde senior. If the Cathars smuggled a treasure out of Montsegur then that’s very possibly what it was, because it certainly wasn’t a big bag of gold and silver. Whether it was something which died when the last head it was stored in became a skull, or lies rotten and useless in a cave somewhere, who can say. I’d like to think Life will find a way.   

Daughter of ægis-bearing Jove, divine,
Propitious to thy votaries’ prayer incline;
From thy great father’s fount supremely bright,
Like fire resounding, leaping into light.
Shield-bearing goddess, hear, to whom belong
A manly mind, and power to tame the strong!
Oh, sprung from matchless might, with joyful mind
Accept this hymn; benevolent and kind!
The holy gates of Wisdom, by thy hand
Are wide unfolded; and the daring band
Of earth-born giants, that in impious fight
Strove with thy fire, were vanquished by thy might.

-Hymn to Minerva-

..

 A reasonable literal translation of the Greek of the opening lines of John’s Gospel reads like this:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was moving in the direction of God, and God was what the Word was. It was with God in the beginning. All things happened through it, and not one thing that has happened, happened without it. Within it there was Life, and the Life was the light of the world. And in the darkness the light is shining, and the darkness never got hold of it.”

I’ve taken one  liberty, in that “the light of the world” should really be read as “the light of humanity” but often isn’t. It’s an understandable liberty in context though because the light of the world is Esclarmonde.

The light in question is “phos” which is a fiery kind of light.  Another thing that struck home was the word “Life”. I can’t say I’d ever noticed and certainly not understood the significance of that. Life in the Greek is Zoë, who we met earlier as Eve and Athirat and the Iberian Celtic Astarte.

Throwing in Esclarmonde and Belissena puts the passage in a bit of a new light (nay pun intended) but there’s more. Knowing what the beginning meant to John takes us back to a cube.

It’s a box with some quite remarkable contents.

“In the beginning…”, is the same “beginning” in which God created the heavens and the earth  according to Genesis. John’s concept of time is the same as that held by the religion that Josiah tried so hard to stamp out. It isn’t linear, and neither is it cyclic. It’s based on the idea that there is a box hidden within time as we perceive it. In the box there is no time and no matter, and all time and all matter come from it. Everything is one thing and happens simultaneously. In Solomon’s Temple (which represented the physical world) the box was played by the Holy of Holies. It was the hidden centre from which all creation emanated. It was also the most important bit of this Phoenician designed god-making machine.

Esoteric Islam (yes there are Shiite Gnostics) applies the same idea to the Ka’abah. That cube too is the house of God, the centre of the world containing all of creation within its veil. Its day one of creation before time and space and matter exist and it’s always there hidden within those things.

 If you remember, I mentioned that Josiah’s reformers had re-written the creation story, amongst other things. They’re very quiet about day one, because their Holy of Holies was an empty box and they knew that the Holy of Holies was Day One and the Beginning and they didn’t want anyone to start asking questions about what it contained.

 Two things that are definitely missing are the Goddess and the Host of Heaven her seventy or seventy two kids depending on who did the counting. Josiah removed from the Temple something called the Image of Jealousy which provokes jealousy. Ezekiel saw it in the inner court of the Temple and mentioned that it was where the Shekinah was. 

 Hebrew was written without the vowels which makes it kind of fun and difficult at the same time. The reader is supposed to put the vowels back in as they read it and work out what they are depending on the context. If you read the right vowels into the Image of Jealousy that provokes jealousy you get the image of the Creatrix who gives Life. Incidentally this was one of the titles that the Ugaritic people gave to Athirat.

 The reformers also broke down the houses of the male prostitutes in the Temple. If you play the vowels game with that one you get the houses of the Holy Ones, otherwise known as the Host of Heaven. Josiah’s new Yahweh of Hosts not only lost his “wife” he didn’t actually have any hosts either.

 So Genesis doesn’t mention them (except sort of accidentally, a bit) but they’re very important in other accounts of the creation. What we do get with Genesis is that God created in the beginning and there was a fluttery Spirit of God  doing a bit of fluttering over the deep.

The word for Spirit is feminine and the word for God is plural. The word translated as created is a word which is only ever used to describe something which is a uniquely divine activity. If you look for things that were “created” just in the Old Testament (and not even taking into account anything apocryphal or pseudographical) you come across something rather interesting, particularly in the light of Cathar beliefs about who made the material world. This “creation” thingy didn’t stretch as far as the making of plants and animals or any of the other important bits of the visible material world, except for us. It was for producing supernatural beings, abstract principles that were also probably supernatural beings, and people. If you read between the lines a bit, and include a lot of other material I won’t bore you with, you get the impression that what actually happened (or more accurately IS happening) in the Beginning is the creation of something which contains within itself/herself/himself all life.

It isn’t a time it’s a state hidden within the visible material world. According to Philo of Alexandria (who it seems very likely influenced John’s thinking quite a bit) the beginning should not be interpreted in any kind of chronological sense because time began either simultaneously with matter or after it. He calls what was created on Day One the Word which he equated with Wisdom and thought of as a sort of idea of the universe, or a blueprint for life. John’s Word is not in the light. He/She/It (and the Greek does give those options) is the container of light and life that was in the box with God.

According to Jewish traditions, which were trying to cope with being two entirely different religions going by the same name, the angelic host were created on the second or the fifth day, or any day other than day one. The main reason for this is that they were really very worried that someone might get the idea that there had been anyone else involved with the process of creation who wasn’t Yahweh.  Ironically when the prophet Isaiah has Yahweh say, “Who was with me?” when the heaven and earth were made, he was probably expecting the response, “It was your Mrs.”

Unfortunately we don’t know a huge amount about what this “creation” process actually involved on a mythic level. It produced the gods, we know that much. Genesis carelessly leaves in a reference to divine parenthood with the phrase “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”  The heavens and earth in question being personified as gods (or living ideas of what heaven and earth will be) and the generations bit literally referring to them being born.

The rest is missing and all that turns up in other versions of the story is a list of the various gods or angels that were born, which is really annoying because it would explain what it was that was supposed to happen in the Holy of Holies that turned a man into an angel/king/messiah. The religious festival that I expect celebrated such things was replaced by Passover, which the reformers invented almost out of nowhere. Originally it seems likely that the “birth” of the anointed king was celebrated in the spring just as his death was celebrated in autumn. We’re missing an important bit. If it was written down we’ve lost it and if it was remembered it was remembered by people long since dead.   

I’ve spent a long time trying to fill in the gap because it’s also at the heart of the Nephilim myths.  What we do have to go on is that we live in the same world and experience the same “weird shit” and while the language and the pictures we use to explain it may change were talking about the same things.

With that in mind …

....

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
bought and sold
and bought again
the dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
the signs were sent:
the birth betrayed
the marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
of every government -
signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
with that lawless crowd
while the killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
a thundercloud
and they're going to hear from me.

You can add up the parts
but you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
there is no drum
Every heart, every heart
to love will come
but like a refugee.

 Anthem – Leonard Cohen -

.. ..

It’s really tricky to work out exactly what the Cathars believed. The same is true of the Druids, the Hebrew religion before Josiah came along, much of early Christianity and Gnosticism, and a very long list of other “lost” religions that on the surface would appear entirely unconnected.

This is mostly because what was written down was destroyed and what was carefully preserved in oral traditions was carefully preserved in the heads of people who came to a sticky end. Victims of the Dream War.

I’m not saying that all these people were absolutely correct in their assessment of the nature of reality. What they had in common was that they were awkward buggers (some of them in one, or other, or both of the literal senses). They knew what the Emperor was wearing and were not prepared to keep quiet about it. They were dangerous because they could have pulled back the curtain to reveal that the Wizard was not what he seemed. It’s not something that old Rex is keen to encourage. Old Rex is a jealous god.

It’s hard to know what these people believed because in many cases we only have Rex’s word for it. We can know for certain that the Cathars worshipped the Devil in the form of a cat at their orgies, the first Christians were baby-eating, motherfucking, atheists, and the Druids were savage cannibals so stupid they hadn’t worked out how to get dressed of a morning.

 Amongst the more obvious lies are the little ones. Some of them are not even intentional. When one group of people views the culture and beliefs of another they judge by their own standards and the distortions that come with that can be pretty impressive.

So I wouldn’t bet my hat on anything we know about the Cathars being gospel (so to speak) but we can make the odd educated guess.

In Cologne in 1143 there appeared as if from nowhere an organised group of “heretics” who regarded themselves as “not of this world”, and as being the true Apostolic Church. They claimed to have adherents throughout the world and even amongst Catholic clergy and monks, having existed in secret since the time of the martyrs.

They divided themselves into three groups. You started off as a Listener and if you liked what you heard you could be promoted to Believer through a ritual laying on of hands. After a probationary period as a Believer you could choose to join the elect by being baptised “in fire and spirit”, even if you were a woman. They condemned marriage except between virgins (and you had to stay that way) and they were vegans, who blessed what they did eat with the words of the Lord’s Prayer. It doesn’t sound much fun, and to be honest any god that wanted me to give up cheese and sex would be off to a bad start.

.. ..

 Obviously the Catholic Church responded in the only way possible to this threat and set light to them all. Unfortunately this kind of thing was spreading and before long reports were reaching the Pope that a new heresy seemed to have “overflowed various regions of France.” This was a heresy “so varied and manifold that it seemed impossible to characterise under a single name.” Suddenly it was rampant and despite not breeding like rabbits there were similar groups popping up all over Europe.

....

Obviously these ideas had not appeared from nowhere. Hildegard Von Bingen thought that they were the result of Satan having been released upon the earth after a thousand years of imprisonment. Ironically they’d been spread by the Catholic Church in its efforts to hold back the forces of Islam, or excavate King Solomon’s stables in search of treasure (depending on your point of view). The ideas were coming from Constantinople and they were spread to various bits of Europe by returning Crusaders and merchants. According to Inquisitor Aselm of Alessandria Catharism was brought to France by Crusaders who “went to Constantinople to conquer the land”. They returned as preachers and were so successful that before long Provence needed four heretical bishops. Similar things were going on in most of the rest of Europe with less success. In England preachers got as far as Oxford before being beaten and left to die of cold. They didn’t send any more.....

.. ..

 In the Languedoc things were different. As I said last time, it was almost as if they were genetically engineered to take to this kind of thing. By the end of twelfth century the “new” religion had made itself at home. It was a happy home; tolerant, cosmopolitan, and prosperous. The Cathars had secured the favour of not just the rural aristocracy but the bigger political players. The Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonn, the Count of Foix, and the Count of Toulouse, were, if not enthusiastic converts, at least willing to let things lie even within their own families.  It wasn’t just your run of the mill dualist heretics that were allowed to go spreading their terrible vegetarian lies either. The Jews were getting off rather lightly too and some of these Jews weren’t just any Jews. Since Josiah had altered the Hebrew religion so fundamentally there had been those who had been quietly undoing his good work and going back to the old ways. Some of them hadn’t had any choice. They’d been excluded from the new religion, but they weren’t particularly upset about it and despite everything had a pretty good stab at preserving some of what would otherwise have been lost. They resurfaced at various times and in various places with the odd modification or cultural gloss. The Essenes, the Merkabah Mystics, obscure and less obscure Gnostics sects, and very briefly (before it went in an entirely other direction) Christianity held on to elements of something much older. Some ideas misplaced in the thickets of Arabia found their way back with the Crusaders too, but the particular resurfacing amongst the Provencal Jewry was the Kabbalah. In 1176 the Provencal Kabbalist school produced the first classic of medieval Kabbalah, the Sefer Bahir. It has been suggested that the Cathars and the Kabbalists of Provence were chatting to one another, but no one has proved it conclusively.

So, because you measure a circle beginning anywhere I’m beginning with a couple of things that to me seem particularly relevant to the material. Others have and will come to the same place from different directions, and I find that reassuring. The Cathars were allegedly rather keen on John’s Gospel (particularly the beginning of it) and (if you think it’s the same chap which is debateable but possible) his book of Revelation. They may have had a different version of John’s Gospel, and there was certainly more than one floating about.  By the late 1160’s Catharism was getting really very organised indeed. They shipped in a bishop of Constantinople called Nicetas.

 Papa Nicetas was a powerful chap. He was the big (non-dairy) cheese of dualist Christianity and he set about putting into place the administrative structures of the Cathar Church. He appointed new bishops, reappointed existing ones, set the borders of the dioceses, and welcomed the Good People of the Languedoc to the larger family of the trans-national dualist Church. I’m not keen on him, mostly because before he turned up the Cathars of the region were heretical even by heretical standards so I’m naturally more inclined to be on their side. I’ll not go into detail because it’s complicated but Nicetas “clarified” their theology from moderate monarchian dualism to hardcore absolute dualism. Very basically, it means that he said good and evil were separate and equal opposites that existed before and apart from anything else.

I’m beginning to go a little off topic so we’ll get back on track. Papa Nicetas had with him a book which some say was a lost Gospel of John and others say was thee Book of the Seven Seals as featured in the Book of Revelation.

It’ll come into play again later but for now it shall simple serve as an indication that the Cathars were supposedly big fans of John and that’s why I’ll be throwing him into the mix when I try and disentangle some of the “weird shit” that has happened to me over the last few years.

This isn’t the thing I promised about god-making machines, time travel, and other dimensions. This is just a bit of extra explanation which was probably necessary before going there.
 

Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians?

For I am the wisdom of the Greeks

and the knowledge of the barbarians.

I am the judgement of the Greeks and of the barbarians.

I am the one whose image is great in Egypt

and the one who has no image among the barbarians.

I am the one who has been hated everywhere

and who has been loved everywhere.

I am the one whom they call Life,

and you have called Death.

I am the one whom they call Law,

and you have called Lawlessness.

~Thunder Perfect Mind~

 ..

Back in 1933 a book by a bloke called Otto Rahn was published. In it he tells the story of our medieval French dream-war from a particularly interesting angle. He uses the 13^th century Arthurian epic Parsifal to untangle what he saw as a battle between the Church of Rome and the Church of Love(of the distinctly non-groiny variety). I like Otto because he thinks like I do and doesn’t always make the distinction between myth and history, because sometimes there isn’t one. He introduces something to the story which is out of place and perfectly at home all at once. That something is the Holy Grail, a stone from the stars. We’ll come back to it later.

Another thing he mentions is that many of the major players on the loosing side, “claimed to be descended from the moon goddess Belissena, the Celt Iberian Astarte”, and that the site of the Cathar fortress of Montsegur had once been occupied by Belissena’s sanctuary.

 Otto’s work does have its flaws. Some of what he wrote is a little off the mark, but much of that can be put down to advances in archaeology since he wrote it. He also comes across as a bit of a Nazi at times, but he did go on to work for the SS so it’s not deeply surprising that his thinking is a little coloured at times. I trust him on this one though. Sources mundane and otherwise had already hinted very heavily that there was a lunar aspect to the mysteries of Montsegur. What really made me sit up and take notice of what Otto had to say was this:

“On their shields were a fish, the moon, and a tower- the emblems of the moon goddess, the sun god, and the power of the knights.”

The tower and the moon.

 Bear in mind that I read this about a month after I wrote the beanstalk blog and over six months after I was first told to remember that phrase by a big kitty. I shouldn’t have been surprised I suppose but I always am when these things happen. Suddenly I was very interested in Belissena and it didn’t take me too long to find out why.

I combed the indexes of just about every relevant book I have and found precisely nothing. So I Googled and found the quote from Otto’s book, a couple of references made by a certain film director you may have heard of, and some stuff in languages I couldn’t even recognise never mind read. No one, it seems, has heard of Belissena. She’d still be a mystery if it wasn’t for Otto mentioning she was the Iberian-Celtic Astarte. At that point a lot of things fell into place. The Cathars were regarded as heretics by Rome, but as far as they were concerned they were authentically Christian. What was the connection with the dethroned pagan deity of their ancestors?

The other thing (which had been bugging me for a long time now) is why a small collection of seemingly disparate feminine divinities had been moving heaven and earth over a considerable period of time to push me and others towards Montsegur and what that had to do with Esclaremond the Bastard who (it is claimed) entered alive into the Kingdom of Heaven? 

The Occitanian people are monglrels, but aren’t we all. Their ancestors are a very interesting mix. It’s almost as though they were genetically engineered to be heretics.

Lets start with the Iberian Celts, who’s “Astarte” was the mother to the Lords of Montsegur. They were already a mix of Celts, Persians, and Medes. What do you get if you cross a Zoroastrian with a Druid? We shall see.

 If you’ve been reading my blogs for ages you may remember that Mil and his Egyptian wife Scota the legendary ancestors of the Celts first settled in Spain. The throne from which Mil ruled the Iberian Celts contained a certain stone from the stars which Scota had stolen from her friend Moses. Yes that Moses; the one who would later be appropriated by Josiah to act as figurehead for the cult of his scoundrel god. I’m sure that Josiah wouldn’t have been comfortable with Moses having a magic rock, especially if he knew where Moses had got it and what it did. The rock in question had formally been housed at a temple in a place called Bethel. Moses’s ancestor Jacob (who went on to become the man in the moon and guardian of one of the four sides of the cube) used it to open the gate to the Kingdom of Heaven.

This is what Josiah did to the temple at Bethel:

“Even the altar at Bethel, the high place made by Jeroboam son of Nebat, who had caused Israel to sin—even that altar and high place he demolished. He burned the high place and ground it to powder, and burned the Asherah pole also. Then Josiah looked around, and when he saw the tombs that were there on the hillside, he had the bones removed from them and burned on the altar to defile it, in accordance with the word of the Lord proclaimed by the man of God who foretold these things.”   

Josiah’s religious zeal covers a political motive. Bethel means literally El’s house. It’s usually translated as God’s house but it’s nice to be clear which god you’re dealing with. It rivalled the JerusalemTemple as a centre of worship (which was the reason Jeroboam had chosen it) and more importantly the priests who served there were not from the same family as the ones who were backing Josiah’s reforms.

Let’s go back to Astarte and things may become a little clearer. Astarte was a Phoenician goddess.

 Phoenicians, like the Hebrews, and the Moabites and a collection of other “ites” come under the general heading of Canaanites. They spoke pretty much the same language and their cultures and religions were minor variations on a theme.

Astarte was the sister and wife of El. She had a bit of a lunar thing going on and was also identified with Venus but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I should probably throw in about now that she once found a magic rock that had fallen from the sky which was kept in the city of Tyre, and in the town of Aphek her sister (who was sometimes the same person) was worshipped in the form of a meteorite that had fallen into a lake. Did I mention that the Phoenicians were part of the genetic and cultural mix of the Iberian Celts?

You probably guessed that anyway.

When Moses’s ancestor found the stone from the stars at El’s house it seems very likely it was something that belonged to El’s wife. According to the story when Jacob comes round after his experiences with the loft ladder of the gods he says, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of El; this is the gate of heaven.”

In the porch of the church of Mary Magdalene at Rennes le Chateau (not a million miles from Montsegur) are two half-finished sentences from the bible, in Latin. One of them says, “Terribilis est locus iste”. It’s usually translated, “This is a terrible place.” I prefer “awesome” because it’s closer to the meaning of the Hebrew original and it sounds a bit ninja turtle. You know the end of the sentence.

 The other quote is from Matthew’s gospel and translates as, “My house is a house of prayer”. The missing bit of that quote being, “but you have made it a den of thieves.”

I don’t believe most of the hype surrounding Rennes le Chateau. Something odd was going on there but I very much doubt it was what most people seem to think it was. Those two half finished quotes though, they made me ponder. Someone had a sense of humour and knew the score.

Let’s get back to Belissena and her many pseudonyms. The non-Phoenician but still Canaanite people of Ugarit called her Athirat. She was the wife and sister of El and the mother of all gods. It might help if we look at what some of her many names and titles meant. It’s an enlightening list. In addition to Mother of all Gods, she was the Great Lady of the Sea, Wisdom, Mistress of the Gods, The Goddess (in the same way that El means The God), The One Who Tramples the Waters, Holiness, Lion Lady, Snake Lady, The Great Lady Life. You’ll probably recognise an anglicised version of the last one. We call her Eve – Mother of the Living. She got about a bit (geographically speaking) because she’s been around a bit (chronologically speaking). To the Egyptians she was Hathor and Sekhmet, and later they tried to domesticate her as ..Isis... It’s hard to pin her down much earlier than Stone Age Anatolia but she’s older than that. There she was the Mountain Mother and they exported her to Greece as Cybele. Eventually she reached Montsegur as the Celtic Belissena, the Holy Spirit of the Cathars, and the Arthurian Lady of the Lake.

For now I want to go back to Josiah’s reforms because, not only will it give us a bit more insight into the way the war has been fought before, it will eventually lead us to the Book of the Seven Seals which will crop up unexpectedly later in the story. I’ll try and keep this brief.

Both the winners and the losers in Josiah’s dream war had a myth regarding the fall of man. Josiah’s version is in Genesis tacked on to the end of a rather mutilated and heavily edited account of the creation of the world which misses out anything that was important to the losers. It isn’t about something that happened back in some mythical golden age, it’s about what Josiah did.  The Great Lady of Life is there in her temple with her tree and her snake on a stick. Josiah carefully removed her image, her tree, and her snake on a stick from Solomon’s Temple, along with a few other things which the author of Revelation carefully sneaked back in hundreds of years later. What Eve was offering was life and wisdom, because she was Life and Wisdom. What Josiah’s pals were trying to get across was that she is at best a bit of a retard and at worst an evil scheming bitch .She is replaceable and she is replaced. Josiah’s shiny new laws all hand written by Moses were the replacement. They say so explicitly. The laws and decrees of Moses were to be their Wisdom. Eve and anyone who listened to her was kicked out of Eden just as she had been evicted from the temple.

The losing side told a different story. They said that evil angels who had abandoned Wisdom and made up their own rules caused the fall of mankind by teaching us what was basically a load of old bollocks. For “angels” read “priests”. As far as they were concerned the writers of the second law had transgressed the first law, changed the ordinances, and broken the everlasting covenant. When the Babylonians flattened Josiah’s Wisdom-free edition of Solomon’s Temple there were some people who would have been thinking, “Told you so!”  Solomon’s Temple had been built to a Phoenician design (I forgot to mention that bit). It was a machine for taking a man and making him like the gods. Which was what Josiah was so against. That kind of thing could get you kicked out of Eden. He’d taken out some of the important bits of the machine and others had been hurriedly hidden by people who didn’t want them falling into the wrong hands. When a second temple was built using Babylonian cash it didn’t work. It didn’t open the gate anymore, which was pretty much how the people in charge wanted it. No one needed to enter alive into the Kingdom of Heaven because they had a book of rules, and that was much easier to control. Direct access to divinity is very messy and dangerous.

 The losers remembered how Josiah had called their lass a slapper and got their own back. They referred to what had been the Virgin Daughter of Zion as Babylon’s Whore. It seems fair.

That’s all for now. Next time I’ll look at god-making machines, time travel, and other dimensions. Eventually I’ll get back to France via the end of the world.   

“I felt a shiver in the heat-haze and the waiting time is over
Strange tongues on the airwaves as the voices call from distant lands
I saw which was the winning side but still I joined the other
And I'm in love with every strange unfolding day
As the storm begins to break cover
So let the whirlwind blow through the ice, the melting snows
Across the freezing skies and the tiny lights below
And so we shutter up the doorways as the ripples move towards us
For a moment stop breathing - She wakes and stirs beneath our feet
The Order try to stand their ground, while every battlefront is shifting
They still believe that they can hold the reins
But then they've got no sense of history”

Whirlwind - New Model Army

One of my more endearing personality traits is that I am an awkward bugger (although not necessarily in either of the literal senses). Partly because, if I’ve learned anything from history it is that the winners do not usually win because they are in someway right or superior. They win because they’re just bigger bastards. So in any fight, ideological or physical, I’ll instinctively back the losers on the grounds that they’re more likely to be right. The only real drawback to this way of thinking is that there are never just two sides to a story and nothing is ever completely black and white. This tends to mean that I’m often forced to be for and against the same thing depending on circumstance. Did I mention I’m an awkward bugger? It also means I find it much easier to get my head round duality than dualism.

The last four years of my life have been … peculiar … even by my standards. Luckily the last four months have been considerably quieter when it comes to what my wife calls “weird shit”. It’s given me chance to catch my breath and try and make some kind of sense of it all because I have a nagging feeling I’ve not seen anything yet. Most of the story so far can be found in the rather densely packed and deliberately opaque Jack and the Beanstalk blog I did a couple of months ago. This is different. I shall try to be as clear and straight forward as I can, because what I’m trying to do is explain things to myself. There are things I know but I can’t show the working out for them. This is me trying to back-engineer the working out from the answer. I’m afraid it’s going to have to be serialised. Mostly due to time constraints, but partly because I know people can only fit so much in their heads at once.Me especially.

We’re in Toulouse in 1247. It’s Lent…so about now, only seven hundred and sixty two years ago. A bloke called Peter Garcias mentions to his relative Guilhem (who happens to be a Franciscan monk) that the Church of Rome was a “harlot who gives poison”; the law of Moses was stupidity and the “god who gave that law was a scoundrel.”

Peter was stupid, suicidally stupid to have said what he said, but I’m inclined to agree with him to a certain extent, and this is why.

Thirty eight years earlier at dawn on July 22^nd an army under the command of Arnaud Amaury managed to get inside the city of Beziers. By noon the inhabitants were dead. The city’s usual population was around ten thousand, but this doesn’t take into account huge numbers of refugees, from the smoking ruins of surrounding villages and farms, who had taken shelter there. In his report to Pope Innocent III, Arnaud Amaury proudly confirmed that ,”Neither age, nor sex nor status had been spared.” Of the many thousands who died that day a little over two hundred of them had shared the beliefs of Peter Garcias. The Catholics called them Cathars or Pure Ones, which was supposed to be insulting. The rest were, at least nominally, orthodox Catholics who died because they’d refused to give them up. It was one event in a long and bloody crusade to wipe out a group of people who on the surface would appear to have been a bunch of harmless vegetarians who weren’t too keen on the Pope. Genocide seems a bit over the top under the circumstances. Except this was a dream-war, a war for control of perception, and ultimately a war for control of reality. It’s been going on for a while and it is far from over. More importantly it was a war in which the Powers That Be discovered that paranoia was a more effective weapon than horror. They could achieve more with less. The bending of minds and the breaking of bodies and spirits, did not take huge armies.

 It started quietly. Until 1252 the Church of Rome did not officially torture anyone. Pope Innocent IV moved the goal posts almost imperceptibly to allow torture under the strictest of conditions. It became permissible only when absolutely necessary for the good of society. Clergy were not to be present, life or limb were not to be imperilled, and no blood was to be drawn. This is more than two hundred years before the Spanish Inquisition. Back then no one would have expected that.

You may have guessed by now which side I’m on, but while I was reading up on the suppression of heresy in Southern France in the middle ages I had a horrible sense of déjà vu. Despite the fact that the thing it reminded me of happened much longer ago and much further away, it brought it closer to home. Not content with the massacring, the torture, and the setting light to people who were still alive, there was a great deal of digging up of dead heretics and setting light to them. This is the small detail that jogged my memory, and should go some way towards explaining my agreement with Peter’s comments about a scoundrel god.

Its 622BC and we’re in the Kingdom of Judah. You’ll be amazed how relevant this actually is but it may take a while until I get to the point. King Josiah is 18 years old. He’s already been king for ten years so it seems particularly likely that since he was pushed into the limelight at the age of eight there had been … lets just say … a power behind the throne.  According to one version of events during some restoration work on Solomon’s Temple certain documents came to light which led to Josiah instigating a bit of a reform of the national religion. That’s one story. There is another version that suggests the restoration work was carried out after all the reforms and just before Josiah died. Both of them are in the Bible. The discovery of the afore-mentioned documents certainly raises a lot of questions either way. Were they the cause of the reformation or part of it? Were they genuinely found, hidden away and forgotten for centuries, were they planted, and more importantly what did they say?

At the time the world was falling apart. The superpower of the day was Assyria and their Empire was disintegrating rather rapidly. The Medes were giving the Assyrians a good kicking, the Babylonians were making a pretty good stab at gaining political independence, and even the Egyptians couldn’t do a lot to help out. Josiah took advantage, became an independent state and expanded his powerbase and borders while no one was paying attention. The reforms he carried out fit neatly into that plan. There were a series of social and legal reforms supposedly introduced to relieve the problem of poverty and curb the power of the king that went along side his religious reforms. The end result of all this forward thinking was that power was very effectively centralised in Jerusalem and more specifically it was almost all in the hands of the lovely people who were now in charge of the Jerusalem Temple. These were the people who had suggested that an eight year old would make a great king. So to be fair perhaps Josiah was little more than a pawn, but he condoned and participated in events as horrific as those in Southern France all those centuries later. The weird thing is that his crusade against heresy wasn’t. It was a war against orthodoxy. It might have been explained away as a return to pure tradition untainted by foreign pagan influences, but what he actually did was swap the religion of his ancestors for that of a scoundrel god. Any opposition was removed, priests were butchered on their own altars, sacred sites were desecrated, and a lot of dead people were dug up and set light to. The epic scale on which these things took place is hard to get your head round.

When I was a kid I was told that Josiah was a good man, and I was told this by good people who genuinely believed it. That’s how total his victory was, and how much power his scoundrel god still has in the modern world.

What was “found” in the Temple was the Law of Moses. If there was a Moses, and I’m pretty sure there was at least one, I’m also sure he would have been very pissed off about having his name attached to it. It was called Deuteronomy which means the second law. No one ever questions what happened to the first one.

So that’s most of the history out of the way. Next there’s a bit of theology.

In the meantime and because there weren't any pictures ...these are some lambs I saw yesterday.

....

First blog of the year, so I’ll ease you in gently (as the actress said to the bishop). The next two are likely to be long esoteric meanderings into the twilight zone and beyond, but for now there are more mundane things to witter on about.

I‘ve been a bit distracted over the last month, and a lot distracted over the last two weeks. Its probably been a blessing for you all that I was incommunicado. If it wasn’t for divine intervention I’d be buried under the flagstones in the back yard.

As most of you know I finished the exams for the Business Law section of my Credit Management qualifications on Wednesday afternoon. I may have done bearably, but it wasn’t a fun process.

 Partly because theoretically it puts me eighteen months away from being able to get a halfway decent day job. For many people that wouldn’t be a trauma but for me it’s very close to an admission of defeat. I got a temporary job in an office ten years ago. I needed to get some cash together in a hurry because takings from my business had dropped to a rather worrying level, and I needed a rethink and change of direction if I was going to be able to eat on a regular basis. Ten years and several jobs later and I’ve just been promoted to Senior Credit Controller, which not only makes me sound old but is beginning to smack of having a career.

Mostly because I had to learn things that just make me angry. Our justice system is stupid, childish, petty and most of all unjust. I blame William the Bastard ...and indirectly the Romans. No surprises there then!

Eventually I reached the stage where I was unable to read any statement issued by a judge without imagining a fat, warty, red-faced man laughing as he turned orphans out into the snow to starve.

Anyway …that’s in the past now and I have a whole new year to look forward to. I also have a very long list of things to make and do. About half of it is left over from last year because I spent nearly four months working on one sculpture and I hadn’t expected that to happen. She is very lovely though.

I’m currently investigating the very latest in exciting moulding and casting materials, so all the stuff I spent last year making (and you’ve not seen much of) is not far from seeing the light of day. Kt is also getting me a rather nice camera for my birthday which should help.

The big news for the year is that we’re off to France for a couple of weeks.

Its big news for me because I should get a few answers. A lot of very weird things have happened over the last four years. They’ve been little pieces of a vast and particularly difficult mystikal jigsaw which unfortunately didn’t have a picture on the box. I recently acquired the picture that should have been on the box. That’ll be the next blog. I also now know which pieces I’m missing and that they’re all things I need to physically be there for. Most of them, rather fortuitously, seem to have gathered themselves together in a clump in the very place we’ll be visiting.

I’m excited in a way which is probably illegal in certain parts of the world. To crown it all I’ll have the opportunity to meet the goddess of the mountain top on her home ground. Hopefully she’ll be in and receiving visitors.

So that’s that. I’m playing out tonight with those of my chums within travelling distance (wish some of the more distant ones could be there) but other than that I’m back now. I shall endeavour to catch up with some of you individually during the week.

I’ll finish off with a little intro to the first “proper” blog of 2009.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the bigger picture because you’re too close to it.

As the late, and most certainly great, Douglas Adams said:
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." 

Every year I paint a Christmas card for my friends, and the relatives I like. Its a challenge to come up with something more heretical than the year before that will still pass without much comment as ...well ...a Christmas card.

I was going to just sneak it into a photo-folder,but myspace shrinks it too much and does weird things with the colours. I had to make it smaller and lower the resolution for photobucket because it's huge and rather detailed which takes up a lot of computeryness (that's a technical term) but at least there aren't any nipples to worry about. 

Below is the first part of an article which appeared in "The Colliery Manager, and Journal of Mining Engineering" published in London on June 21st 1889. The chap its about was my great, great ,great uncle Patrick who was one of the first generation of my family to be born in England. It does read a little like a certain Monty Python sketch in places but I thought I'd let you read it because its really interesting. I may do part two if anyone is interested, because I'm typing it all out anyway so it's an easy blog.

Our first acquaintance with Mr. Mehers was in connection with the formation of the National Association of Colliery Managers. Mr. Mehers is well known to many of our readers who have never seen him as the treasurer of this Association. It is because of his position as one of the most active officers of the Association that we thought the present a suitable time to give some particulars of his career.

It is only right that colliery managers who are located in districts away from either of the centres of the active work of the National Association should know as much as possible of the gentlemen to whom they are indebted for the foundation of the Association, ad who are still devoting their time and energies to make it a success. It is of no disparagement to any other member of the executive to say that few men could have taken greater interest in any voluntary work than Mr. Mehers has always manifested on behalf of the National Association and its Lancashire branch.

Mr. Mehers was born at Halshaw Moor, near Bolton, Lancashire on March 15th 1841. Unfortunately for him his early education was very scant indeed. It can hardly be called a education, as he merely attended a school kept by an old lady in the neighbourhood. Even this advantage was not long enjoyed, as, when only nine years of age; he began working in a coal mine as a helper to the drawer at one of Messers. Andrew Knowles & Sons' pits at Little Lever. The conditions of labour were very different then to what they are now. Haulage was in its primitive state, the boxes having to be pulled along the roadway on sleds. Each drawer – and young Mehers was one- had a belt fastened round the waist, to which was attached a short chain with which he had to drag the boxes into the main haulage road, where they were loaded on a wagon and thus conveyed to the shaft. After being thus employed for rather more than a year, his father moved to Aspull, near Wigan, where Patrick at once obtained employment in the Cannel pits, belonging to Mr.John Johnson. The haulage in that district was done principally by trams and baskets. After a short training under Mr. Johnson's manager, he was appointed a drawer himself. The roads were low, crooked, and narrow, so that only boys could do the tramming, and the greater portion of the roadway was ankle deep in ochery water. The working day then began at half-past four in the morning and ended at six or seven o'clock at night.

It gives us some idea of the labour that had then to be performed, for small pay, when we find that poor young Mehers had to draw twenty-four baskets 450 yards each way, making 900 yards for each basket, and this, too, not on hard, well-levelled roads, but along crooked, low, wet passages, for the sum of one shilling per day. Underground discipline, such as we understand, was then unknown and the conditios of colliers and drawers was a most hopeless one. Education amongst them was seldom talked about, and in many instances was not considered requisite. A collier who could write his name was a rarity, and if he could in addition write a few lines on paper, he was regarded by his fellows as a marvellous man, and deserving of something better than underground drudgery. Facilities for obtaining even the very rudiments of knowledge there were none.

Young Mehers had learnt enough to desire to learn more. He could read, and therefore read everything that came in his way. This was perhaps not a difficult matter, as the books within his reach were doubtless but few.

When he commenced to work in the mine he could just read a little in what was called Reading made Easy.  As a lad, ad even as a poor lad, too, he had a strong taste for reading, and the few –they must have been very few- pence he received, either as pocket money or gifts, were spent in the purchase of books, and thus he at once fostered and improved his taste for knowledge.

He continued to work as a drawer until he was seventeen years of age, whe he commenced as an assistant collier, and by the time he was nineteen, he felt proud to be considered a full-fledged one.

Mr. Mehers was, as we have said, always fond of reading as a means of obtaining information, and he unceasingly practiced it with that object; but when he was about twenty-two years of age he appears to have been deeply impressed with the importance of education. He could read fluently, but could do very little in the way of either writing or arithmetic, and was so completely ignorant of the later as to be unable to do even a simple addition. Fortunately, as he then considered it, a night school was just at that time opened in the neighbourhood. He was one of the first to join, and regularly attended two nights a week. He here learnt the importance of being able to write, a little, and of a little knowledge of arithmetic and grammar. He set himself the task of studying for two and a half hours each night these three subjects. This, we are informed; he zealously carried out, notwithstanding the irksome and fatiguing nature of his daily work. In 1866 he obtained an appointment as pitman at the Wigan Coal and Iron Companies collieries. His duties were very miscellaneous, and included the general repairs of the pit shafts, tubbing, guides and conductors, removing, fixing and repairing the pumps used in draining the mines, etc. Under this firm he had ample opportunities of acquiring a large and varied experience in the use of all kinds of modern machinery and appliances in operation at one of the largest colliery properties in the world. It is not, therefore, surprising that during the four years he held this post the store of knowledge he obtained was very great.

At the beginning of 1869 he suggested to a number of young men, colliers, who, like himself were anxious to improve their minds, the great advantages likely to be derived by forming themselves into a society for mutual instruction.

The idea was favourably received, and at once acted upon. Mr. Mehers applied for, and obtained permission for members of the little band to meet weekly in a local school-room, and they called themselves the "Aspull Mutual Improvement Society." At each meeting one of the members read a paper on some subject of interest, and this was freely discussed by those present, and either approved or disapproved according to the opinions of the others. I this way the knowledge possessed by one member was communicated to his fellows in the society, and those whose knowledge on any particular subject was erroneous or imperfect had it corrected or completed. Mr. Mehers was appointed secretary, and delivered the opening address- his subject being "The Principles of Conduct that are best calculated to Elevate the Working Classes." Those who know Mr. Mehers now will quite believe that he was the very life of the society.  He has himself admitted that he owes much of his advancement in life to this little band of self helpers. He says their meetings not only afforded him ample opportunity of expressing his own views on different subjects, but also of listening to the opinions of others.

Here it was that his first efforts at public speaking were made, and, while he may now be ranked as a speaker and a lecturer of no mean order, he no doubt would admit that he owes his proficiency in this respect largely to this society. 

As an evidence of the great usefulness of this humbly originated society we are able to say that at least four (there may, perhaps, be others) of its original members have obtained, by examination, certificates of competency as colliery managers and are either now holding, or have held, positions as managers at large collieries, and four are members of the National Association of Colliery Managers.

We, and we think the mining community generally, have reason to be proud of these gentlemen – none the less gentlemen because they have raised themselves principally by their mutual assistance from the lowest position in the mine to the chief control of it.