Myth 6
Presented on: Saturday, August 12, 2006
Presented by: Roger Weir
We come to myth 06 and we're trying to appreciate the deep complexification of experience that the last century has produced, and the difficulty in the 21st century of not forgetting. This is the cover of a book called Hidden Scholars that was put together by a group called Daughters of the Desert, and there were dozens of professional women who wanted to commemorate the women anthropologists of the American Southwest. It was one of the most formative episodes in world history. The key person to this was a German man who got a degree in Physics in Berlin, and then his major professor got an interest in geography and got an expedition to go to Northern Greenland, and the Baffin Island area of Arctic Canada, and so Franz Boas went along, and when he was there it suddenly struck him that there was a peculiar clarity of character to the Eskimos. And so he got quite interested, as a scientist, why are they this way? And as a result, he got more and more interested in the budding science of anthropology and very quickly he became one of the few people in the world who realised that the key to anthropology was studying the native languages. And the native Indian languages of North America, as well as South America, had never been investigated before sufficiently. We mentioned a while back that the only person who initially had the genius, the visionary scope, to understand that American Indian languages were treasure-trove, not seen in the world for at least 10,000 years. And that man was Thomas Jefferson, and as we mentioned in a previous lecture, he had initial grammars and vocabularies of American Indian languages drawn up. Part of the Lewis and Clark expedition was to reconnoitre and to make notations of where the language groups were, and for instance the Mandans of North Dakota were a great surprise to them because they were blue-eyed American Indians, obviously from Viking genes and heritages some 600 before, still there in the genotype. The Mandans no longer exist, and if it hadn't been for Lewis and Clark, and a couple of others like Karl Bodmer, who came over from Germany to do illustrations and George Catlin, we would have had no idea of one of the greatest of the North American tribes, unbelievable tribe.
Boas, in trying to fill in and organise anthropology in New York City, became the curator of the American Museum of Natural History and also, because it was close to Columbia University, he decided that he would try to work out some courses which could be given in anthropology at Columbia. But his first course was given in his apartment, on 82nd Street, and there was a table with a fringe-shaded lamp, and he had three students, and that's how American anthropology began, in 1896. And one of those three students became the greatest American anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, who for 45 years founded the great anthropology department at UC Berkley.
One of the things that's interesting, this is Alfred Kroeber when he first began sitting in with Franz Boas. He already had a degree in English and American Literature and was going to be teaching English and American Literature and was going to be teaching English and American literature. He was a very nice boy.
After twenty years in the field, this is what Alfred Kroeber looked like.
He got matured to an uncanny depth of person by the American Indians, because Kroeber was one of the first to understand that in order to speak a language with someone, you have to be able to feel in that language, not just think in it. You have to feel, and when you feel in a language, what you feel primordially is not the individuality of someone, but you scent the character, you sense the character, and so wisdom of the heart is called sentience, it is the sense of the character in the experience of talking with them, of being with them. And that when the language of sentience carries the feelings, the feelings engender images, and those images do not first occur in the mind; the images occur because someone starts to scratch little lines and make little implements, and the first images are quite interesting. One of the most primordial images in the civilised world occurred very naturally to the Apache and Navajo, and this is in a book by Piny Earl Goddard, late Curator of Ethnology in New York City, Indians of the American Southwest. He was the lover of Gladys Reichard, who we are taking with her Navajo Sand Painting volume. In this, he says:
The Apache and Navajo have several games which are played partly for amusement but largely in the hope of gain. As elsewhere in North America, these games have a semi-religious character. There is a myth which explains their origin and songs and prayers to bring about success in playing.
If you play the game with the mythos of the language chanted in exactly the right way, in that the ritual actions that you do, what will come out of it is like a psychic wind that will carry you to success. So the gain is not racking up points but accumulating a kind of a flow. And if you've ever seen primordial peoples gaming, they're into it as if it were a dance; a dance not of chance, but of doing it exactly right so that you do it exactly right and the other guy missed some little nick and that's why you won, because you had Lady Luck blessing you by gifting you with the flow, and what that flow has is a deep amperage of nature itself is on your side. Nature is on your side in that the actions that you do will emerge rightly out of nature and the mythic experience that you have in doing that develops then a kinetic quality which we call, since it was first identified in the 19th century by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, we call it pragmatic.
The ritual actions are practical, out of which, if they are done right, the practicality of the ritual becomes the pragmatos of the experience, of the mythos. And so the narrative flow of a mythic language, of an oral language, is the pragmatos of the ritual weaving of the practical actions. Most dignity is attached among the Navajo to the hoop and pole game, and there is an illustration here of a hoop and a pole, and where have we run across this? A couple of lectures ago, at the very beginnings of civilisation in Mesopotamia, the sacred items that the king holds are the hoop, the loop, the circle, woven out of the roots of the Hullupu tree, and the pole which is made from the branches of the Hullupu tree, the Hullupu being the date palm, and once you have the rod and the hoop connected by a woven line, a cord, now you have the possibility of architecture, of proportioning, of developing, like a compass and a rule and angling and out of this comes a sense that an architecture is the most primordial of not all of the arts yet, which it will become, but it is the most primordial architecture of the way in which the symbolic structure of the mind will come into its proportionality, its ratios, its ration-ation. Ratio means that one has the sense of proportions, and once you have proportions in a set, if you have two-thirds and two-thirds squared, two-thirds cubed, two-thirds to the forth, two-thirds to the fifth, you now have an ability to have an eight-note octave proportioned by two-thirds powers and you have musical fifths, musical thirds, you have a composition now which is capable of being a symbolic integral of experience, of language, and now we become almost too powerful. And without a furthering of our dimensions, of our education, if we stop there, the mind in its power becomes narcissistic and engenders, as we see all over the world today, a sense of devastating tyranny of the ego, of the fundamentalists, of those who don't go deep enough to get to the elemental but they go only to the fundaments of beliefs that have been glued together and cemented into doctrines that must be obeyed. And those who do not are out. They're excluded. They're the enemy. And we find this all over the world today. This is a very practical and pragmatic learning.
The implements employed are a hoop with incised bands and a string stretched along the diameter in which many knots are tied, and two long poles, the larger ends of which have a number of incised bands. To play it, two men stand side by side at one end of a level stretch of ground. One rolls the hoop down this stretch and both throw the poles after it. If the hoop falls on the butt of one of the poles, a count is made according to the knots of the string or the incised rings which happen to be in contact with the rings cut into the pole. The incised rings are named for the lightening, and the hoop represents a snake. Women are never allowed to witness the playing of this game.
It's very interesting. It's a deep, mystical experience. One of my friends in my Hollywood Boulevard days in the late 1970s was a black South American man who grew up in Guatemala but took the Egyptian occult name Hotep, so everyone on the Boulevard called him Hotep. When he was a boy, his pet was a green snake, very harmless but quite long and very thin, and when he would come back from his little schooling and walk back down the dirt road to his home at the other end of the village, the snake would be there, would grab its tail with its mouth and make itself into a hoop, and he would have this little stick and he would roll this snake all the way back home, and in doing so it awakened in him the ancient archetypal sense that later on, when investigating, he discovered that his ancestry goes all the way back to Nubian Egypt. And when he saw his first Egyptian statues in a museum in New York City, he saw his own facial features back in the 12th Dynasty era of Egypt.
Mythic experience has an indelible quality to it when it is natural. The actions that are done from that have a precision which is impossible without science. Up until science nothing is more accurate than the spontaneous actions that arise immediately emergent from nature, because their emergence is vital, it is vibratory fresh, so that it isn't just that they occur once but they occur thousands of times for any time unit, and so the average would be that many of them hit exactly on.
Classic story about that, I've told several times before. My friend Manly Hall, when he learnt to shoot bow and arrows with the Mojave Indians back in the early 1920s, they stopped him from aiming the arrows. They said, 'No, you shoot from the hip immediately,' and you have to have a synergy of your target, which is not a standing target but a rabbit running, and the bow and the arrow and your motion, and your activity, pragmatically, is in tune with the entire ensemble, so that the experience of your doing this is that you do not miss because you do not aim; it takes a very great marksman to hit a running rabbit if you try to do it by aiming. It's very difficult to do.
This quality of experience is something that J R R Tolkien came upon in his own way. He was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but by the time he was three years old his mother, Mabel, was very unhappy with being in South Africa and she had two sons, Hilary and John Ronald Raul, J R R. And she took the two boys back to Birminghamshire in England, and within a couple of months Tolkien's father died in South Africa. He didn't want to leave, he was too ill. And she spent all those years raising those two boys, and one of the things that helped her was her affiliation with the Catholic Church and various helping agencies around Birmingham, England. And so it was an interesting childhood for Tolkien to have and he was accepted into a very exclusive Catholic Church in that area of England, King Edward's School, and it was run by a priest, Father Morgan, who was very severe, very strict, and because J R R was the oldest son and they had never had a father, Father Morgan especially wanted to be hard on young Tolkien and so when young Tolkien was discovered to have a girlfriend named Edith, he was forbidden to communicate with her. And in fact her family had to move out of Birmingham and go over to Cheltenham, a different English city, and after a while there was almost no contact. Later she would become Tolkien's wife for the rest of his life. They were friends and lovers since they were first adolescents.
One of the things about Tolkien is that he could not get the recommendation from Father Morgan, and thus not from his King Edwards School, and so he was refused scholarship to Oxford, which is very strange because later on Tolkien became perhaps the most famous professor at Oxford for decades! But he was at first refused scholarship and entrance.
Tolkien was very sad when his mother died and he and his brother went to live with an aunt, Beatrice. He pressed himself and pressed himself to try to forget Edith, to be a good student, to be a good Catholic, to make his mark somehow, and for him, like for Franz Boas, the key was languages. And it turned out that Tolkien was one of the great geniuses of languages in the world, and so he began teaching himself to pay attention to languages. Alfred Kroeber also by the time he was ten was making lists of the way verbs cluster together in different languages, and was constantly trying to learn new languages in order to put them in. So all of these individuals were taken up with the magic of language. Boas with the anthropology of language, Kroeber with the cultural implications of language, but Tolkien with the magic of language. He finally got back together with Edith and they got formerly betrothed and just as he did, and got an appointment to be a reader (the lowest level of professorship, at the University of Leeds) the First World War, was sucking up all the young men.
It was a catastrophic event, the most severe condemnation of it in prose is Robert Graves' book about it, the title of it is Goodbye to All That, meaning not only the war but the failed civilisation that produced that war, Goodbye to All That. And of course the greatest devastating document is one of the last great poems of Wilfred Owen, who had he have lived beyond his twenties would have become one of the world's great poets, Gloria est Patria Est (Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori ?), it is beautiful and glorious to die for one's country. Tolkien was sent to the Somme, the Front Line, to the trenches, and in the First World War the trenches spanned from the North Sea all the way to Switzerland, and so one had this line of trenches separated by about the width of a mile or two, and in these trenches the two sides were stuck year after year after year, shelling, making advances, and millions of young men were slaughtered and died, and because it was the first time that the application of great artillery had been used since the American Civil War, which was the first time that artillery was used with that kind of precision, the Civil War claimed over a million American lives. The First World War was about ten times that.
After being there as a commander, a lieutenant in the trenches for the Signal Core, Tolkien was sent home absolutely broken. They diagnosed it at the time as trench fever. He was completely shattered. He went with Edith back to a cottage near Leeds, near the university, and for month after month as he convalesced what began emerging out of him was a book that he called The Book of Lost Tales, and these lots tales bubbled out of the trench fever and The Book of Lost Tales from that time, later on when it became completely finished, was The Silmarillion. And The Silmarillion of course is the foundation upon which is based The Hobbit as the fulcrum and The Lord of the Rings as the great expanse. It's like The Hobbit is this hoop and The Lord of The Rings this immense, enormous measuring rod of the challenge of evil. Mythology has this quality and not just in stories, not just in the narratives but in exactly the way in which a chant of the narrative will convey the feeling, modulation, so that the images roll with the plunge and weave of that language flow, and Tolkien found himself regaining his health. He became a professor at The University of Leeds, and by 1922 the first really close friend to him in a professional, professorial way, E V Gordon came to the University of Leeds, and finally the two of them decided to do an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. You can get the little paper version of it. It also is included in translation in A Tolkien Miscellany, but the original Oxford University Press edition is not a translation, it is the original Middle English, and we showed this last week. They worked on it for three years and when it was published by Oxford University Press in 1925, Tolkien was invited to be a professor at Oxford, where he went, and when he was there, he over the years became perhaps the most famous man, certainly the richest professor, in Oxford eventually .By 1945 he was made Merton Professor of English Language at Oxford, which is one of the high watermarks in the world, and it was about this time that he was finishing The Lord of the Rings and released it, but released it in such a quiet way that when it was first released, because of the success of The Hobbit in 1937 as a children's book, everyone thought The Lord of the Rings was another children's book by Tolkien, nice, harmless, Oxford professor writing books for kids, isn't it nice? Isn't it just charming? And so they were received as if they were like Harry Potter books. I remember the first time of seeing Lord of the Rings when it was still new and original in the hard covers in United States from Houghton Mifflin but in England from Faber, they were printed as if they were children's books, and they had the sense that this was further, larger Hobbit until one got into the experience not of just reading quietly but of reading out loud. You could hear the difference in the tone.
I will try to find a way to play for you, there is a record of classical Greek being read by W B Standford, and he has a selection in there of Homer's Odyssey and a selection in there of Homer's Iliad, among others. The book is The Sound of Greek, published I guess almost 40 years ago now. When you hear The Iliad, it is incredibly sombre and scary. Someone characterised it once, it is as if someone were launching a deadly battle-ship in a deep fog, going out simply to kill all. Whereas the Odyssey has a completely different sound, though it is still a Homeric hexameter, it is pronounced in a different way so that it sounds like somebody's on a playground skipping along and hopping and skipping, and it has that kind of lilt to it so that the mythos of the Odyssey is of a great, enormous, complicated play, whereas the Iliad has the onerous pace of something tragically indelible.
When one reads Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, out loud, even in the translation of Tolkien which is beautifully done, because it's very true to the Middle English, and by someone who is a master of language. Here's how he describes the Green Knight:
All of Green they were made, Both the horse and the rider,
Both garments and man,
A coat tight and close that clung to his sides,
A rich robe above it, all arrayed within
With fur finely trimmed, showing fair fringes,
Of handsome ermine, gay, as his hood was also,
That was lifted from his locks and laid and his shoulders,
And trim hose, tight drawn, of tincture like that clung to his calves,
And clear spurs below of bright gold,
On silk embroidered banded most richly,
Though unshod were his shanks, for shoeless he rode,
And verily all his vesture was of verdor clear,
Both the bars on his belt and bright stones besides,
That were richly arrayed and his array so fair,
Sat on himself and on his saddle upon silk fabrics,
it would be too hard to rehearse,
One half of the trifles and embroidered upon them,
Birds and flies in a gay glory of green,
Ever gold in the midst, the pendants of his patriol,
His proud crupper, his molins and all the metal to say more,
Were enamelled. Even the stirrups that he stood in,
Were stained of the same with the saddle-bows in suit,
The sumptuous skirts were ever glimmered and glinted,
All with green jewels, even the horse that upheld,
In hue were the same.
[Sorry, really don't know how the above should be laid out!]
And now this section, which is one of 101, pivots.
Each one of the 101 sections of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has triple alliteration on every line, and the last five lines are a pivot, like a five quintessential star, and it reads:
I tell a green horse,
Great and thick,
A stallion stiff to quell,
In embroidered bridle quick,
He matched his master well.
This is called in Middle English a bob and wheel. It is very reminiscent of the staff and the hoop. It is a way of saying that the architecture of this mythos is measured and ratioed in such a way that it does not just lay flat as a narrative sequence, but it has a rule that carries within it, so that the images can form an image base but they also, and their chiral magnetic movement describe a propeller-like quality that surrounds the rod so that the rod is like an axel that is the pivot of the forward-dynamis of the mythos. And that when it is read exactly right its indelibility penetrates through by resonance, so that one's very bones receive the energya, the dynamis has no size other than it is infinite but the energeya is cinched by the objective forms of the pragmatic action, into structure, and that's all objectively and existence occur in this universe, and once energy is structured in this way, it is a permanent achievement. Only the movement of the illusion that time now has taken one away from this, but has it taken one away from this? The time has blossomed into the space of the cinched structure and remains there. You're out here in another development of that structure still working its way. And so the pragmatos, in order for it to be sentient, has to have the ability to realise that this actually did happen and is still having an effect, not a simple causality but it has a mysterious amperage that carries one so that now the language, the images and the feelings, in order to find a balance, make symbolic structures in the mind to balance the on-going tenacity of the original existence. It's like in modern cosmology the big bang really happened and still continues to happen because the reverberation of the big bang is everywhere in the universe at 3 degrees above absolute zero, three degrees Kelvin, and it's detectable, and the first time that that was mapped, about 15 years ago now, was startling, because it showed that in the universe it is not a complete pianissimo of distribution. There are energy density waves everywhere in the universe still, because there were modulations even at the precise singularity of the big bang, 14.6 billion years ago.
What this means is that the big bang did not make something but it began the iteration of everything, so that the universe is really vibrant, deeper than the bones, but it is our physical structure based on the bones, spaced spatially by the flesh, and the blood, receives the on-going vibration of what is real. And so a mythos carries the pragmatos of someone who is vibrantly in the process of experiencing within the general wide infinite flow of nature.
When we come back from the break, we'll talk about one of the most indelible things in world history, of why it is that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has a peculiar quality to it that struck Tolkien and produced Lord of the Rings.
Let's take a little break.
Let's come back and have a few words from Gladys Reichard, from The Navajo Medicine Men Sand Paintings. She writes:
In the realm of holy things, holy places must be included, because a supernatural event took place at a particular spot, the local becomes supernatural. The idea that healing herbs, rocks such as crystal and the so-called mirage stone and water from far distant places or places difficult of access have power, is so potent that sometimes mere distance or difficulty is of itself a virtue. The legends constantly indicate that names are charms. For if one knows the name of a danger, it is as good as overcome. So it is with place names, and in many of the myths the chanter takes an examination on localities, in geography as it were, before he is considered capable of performing the chant. The reason for this is that in the sky to which place the holy people retired after instructing man about ritual, the same places exist and the same relationship to one another as existed on the earth in mythological times. Their names in the prayers commemorate the drama where they were originally used, and thus repeat and renew the power they exerted at that time.
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which survived in only one copy in all the world, all the other copies were lost, destroyed, forgotten, thrown away, and this book was preserved in an antiquarian's library, the Cotton Library. Oddly enough its call name is Cotton Nero Ten, Roman numeral ten. It's very peculiar. We do not know the name of the writer, it's anonymous, and there were four manuscripts bound together in one book and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the great choice ones. The second one, Pearl, is also held as one of the great English poems, but Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has a very special place. It started Tolkien off on his entire writing career.
What makes Sir Gawain and the Green Knight so interesting is that it is one of the most clear resonant thresholds in a harmonic that goes back into mysteriousness that's at the very core of the British Royal Mythology. When this was written in the late 1300s, the most conspicuous famous author of that day was Chaucer. And Chaucer was a very special man. He was in charge of buying the king's wine, mostly in Italy. He would go to France for some, but when Chaucer went to Italy as a young man, very dapper, he wore red velvet suits and was very much friend of the royalty and in charge of the king's wine. He was given, as his private residence, the palatial apartments over one of the main gates into London, so that he could look out his windows and see the people of all kinds coming in and out of London, and when he was on the continent, in Italy, he made friends with two of the really great early humanists, who wrote in Italian, not in Latin. One was Petrarch, the first lyric poet since classical antiquity, and the other was Boccaccio, whose tales have been told over and over again ever since.
But the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight chose an epic focus that was like the precise point at which the entire pivot of the Arthurian mythos swirls. The centre of the later Arthurian pivot to that mythos, of course King Arthur and Guinevere are the axel but the spinning of the axel later on is due to Lancelot. Lancelot du Lac, who is from France, from the French connection with Britain, Brittany, and in that way there is a sense that when the first Arthurian stories really come out they're not English but they're French.
Chretien de Toryes in 1165, when he published his great beginnings of these Arthurian stories made him one of the most popular authors of the time. And in competition with him, to bring back Arthur to an English mythos, Gregory/Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a History of the Kings of England and posited that Arthur is not French, he's British, he's archetypally British. And not only is he archetypally British, but he presents very clearly a mystical vibrancy and resonance that goes back to the very origins of British civilisation, goes back to when it became Britain rather than the ancient barbaric Albion that it was before, and that somehow all this is tied together with Christianity.
The author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was enormously learned and he takes it back so that one understands that it isn't just Arthur and Guinevere, but before there was an Arthur, the central figure in the primordial British, Irish, Celtic ethos was Gawain. Gawain is like a sun god. He is a knight that has a very special relationship, in terms of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight he is nephew of King Arthur. He's a son of one of Arthur's sisters. Arthur's mother, Igraine, had two daughters before she was magically put into a haze by Merlin and mistook Uther Pendragon for her husband, and he sired King Arthur on her. And her two daughters, one of them became the archetypal sorceress, Morgan le Fey, the other was the mother of Sir Gawain. But he goes back to the earliest mythos that he is a Celtic sun hero who becomes the essential mythic protagonist for the salvation of Arthur's dignity based on his wife, Guinevere. That is the sacred marriage that the Green Knight comes to insult, to challenge the entire Order of the Round Table, and comes there on Christmas Eve, and it is a Christmas story, a Christ's birthday story, in its initial beginning, but its ending is in the New Year, not on January 1st New Year but on Epiphany, which is generally January 6th, and Epiphany is twelve nights after Christmas, Twelfth Night. And Epiphany is a huge event. In India it's called Diwali. The festival of the lights in India is related to the Greek Epiphany, is related to the Celtic British Epiphany, and this is how this is [51:08 all so].
When Jesus was crucified in 36AD, the man who asked the Roman governor Pontius Pilot, for the body, was Joseph of Arimathea, to take down the body and to entomb it in a fresh tomb on one of the slopes of the Mount of Olives, where Joseph of Arimathea held a tomb plot that had been prepared specially for this occasion. And Joseph of Arimathea was one of the wealthy international traders of the time. Many Jews ran international trading routes like Philo of Alexandria's family. Philo and his brother Alexander had the Jewish trade routes from Egypt through Arabia to India, especially to South India where there were Jewish trading communities. That's why St Thomas was sent to India, to go and speak to those Jews in South India. St Thomas is buried on Thomas Hill in a suburb of Madras. You can go and see it today.
But Joseph of Arimathea had been a hearer of Jesus when he was teaching in Alexandria, among other people, and his business agent, the customs tax collector who was the international expert on these, was Matthew who became St Matthew. And his partner in the trading business was Nicodemus. Now what they traded in especially was tin and you have to have tin to go with copper in order to make brass or bronze, any number of serviceable metal alloys, silver, and so the tin mines were very rare to find and in Sargon of Akkad's day, when they first began to have bronze in the world, the tin mines were in what is today Iran, southern Iran. But southern Iran was off limits to the Roman Jewish world of the times of Jesus, and so the tin was not brought from the ancient sources in Iran; the tin was brought from three other locations in Europe, three peninsular that jut out in a triad into the Atlantic Ocean. The lowest one was is the brunt of Spain, the province of Galicia. The second is the Brittany peninsular of France and the third is the Cornwall/Devon jutting of the tail end of England. And so Joseph of Arimathea's international trading company had these three sites together. The Gallic coast of France, the Galicia coast of Spain and the Devon/Somerset Coast of England. And so when he came to the rest of the plan, the rest of the plan that Jesus had laid out, was to go and spread the word everywhere in the world, and so just as Thomas went to India, the person who went to England was St Matthew along with his wonderful employers, Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Also present there were Lazarus and his sister Martha [55:30 IA] also present there was Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and Cleophas himself. All of these figures are associated with the resurrection of Jesus. And the place that they went was specially prepared and dealt with the king of several tribes at the time, the Cornish area/Devon area tribe was a little bit different from the tribe that is up where today Bristol is, and there was a third tribe that was in the Wiltshire/Devon coast area, and they were called the Belgae, because they were related to the Belgic/Gallish coast of France and they had business dealings there. It's not very far across the English Channel to get to those areas. The place that was decided upon was a hill that was surrounded by low lands, swampish kind of lands, that in heavy rains literally became an island. And later on it was called the Island of Avalon, but the original name for it in ancient Celtic means apples, because the area was supremely fruitful for growing fruit, especially apples, and so it literally means in ancient language, Apple Island.
So all of the resurrection garments, traces of the blood, traces of the sweat, twelve persons who are intimately collected around that event, set up a community that was very much like the Therapeuti community where Jesus had taught for over 20 years, and there were 12 huts that were arranged in a circle with a central banquet hall where once a week on the Sabbath they would gather together to have a meal together and to sing hymns. Not hymns from a text book, hymns that were scared poems that would have been written in their meditations during the week, always fresh language. The sign of a spirit community is that one is able to make a spontaneous sacred hymn. Those who cannot do this are not real.
This was a miniature Therepeuti community in the Somerset area of England, founded the following year in 37 AD. So that all of the resurrection vibration was taken from Jerusalem to that site that became Glastonbury of Glasonbury, you shouldn't pronounce the T in English. Glason really means crystal. It's a crystal in place that records the vibration precisely like early radios were crystals. This was the radio for a cosmic programme, a programme called resurrection. One of the people, Mary, the wife of Cleophas, was the sister of Jesus. And Cleophas, her husband then, was a brother-in-law to Jesus. Joseph of Arimathea's wife, Joanna, was also a sister of Jesus, and they had a son with them, young son, but while they were there at the founding of Glastonbury they had a daughter and so her name was shortened to Anna, which is the most ancient feminine name there is, Inanna, Enheduanna, Anna. And when Anna grew up she married a British king and had a daughter, and that daughter married a British King, actually the original King Lear, and they had a son named Bran, and Bran's sacred voyages to the land of rebirth is one of the classic early Celtic mythos, and I'll bring it next week in a translation made just about the time that Tolkien was growing up, by a man named Alfred Nutt, who was a publisher and an antiquarian and a great friend of Jessie L Weston's whose From Ritual to Romance we read, and also Kuno Meyer who was a German like Franz Boas, only where Boas came to the United States and developed for fifty years things, Kuno Meyer went into Celtic studies and became like Jessie L Weston, one of the founders of the inspiration not only of T S Elliot and all of his writings, including The Wasteland, but of Joyce and all of his writings, because Finnegan's Wake , Finn again is a resurrection, Celtic epic masterpiece in a special cascade language that was characteristic of the way in which a sacred language is seamless.
As soon as Gaius Caesar, named Caligula, was murdered after only four-and-a-half years in power, because he became absolutely insane, viciously insane, and they chose a Caesar who has been the least choice because he stammered and stuttered and had big ears and he was very bookish, and his name was Claudius, and Claudius, in order to get rid of the onus of being literary, homely, stuttering, boyish man, undertook a process that had then begun, and that was to annex Britain as a Roman province, and the reason for this is that Julius Caesar was the first to make a little sachet over to Britain and he found that it was a fabulous, provincial treasure trove but he had his hands full of Germans at the time and by the time he finished with that he had his hands full of Romans. But Augustus Caesar remembered something sacred about Britain and would never allow Romans to do anything but business with Britain. And that superstition was passed on to Tiberius who even in his last mad years, he became as insane as Caligula, or Nero, all of the Caesars became weird, would not invade Britain, and Caligula of course wanted to invade but he was so busy having fun, being completely mad and killing people for no reason whatsoever, someone looked the wrong way at his horse, 'You have offended my Godhood. You're going to pay and every member of your family is going to pay.' When Claudius came in, he went to Britain to regain the manliness of Julius Caesar an thereby put himself into really the Caesar line and his young genius general, who was in charge of conquering southern England, was Vespasian, who would become the first of the Flavian Roman Emperors, replacing the entire Caesar line, about 69 AD. Vespasian was in charge and for a long time people thought that he only went as far as say the Isle of Wight, but unearthed in the last 10 years has been the Roman Legion fortress at Exeter, in the Devon/Cornwall area. Exeter is on the Exe river, and the Exe river curls up to Exmoor and just over the ridge from Exmoor is the Irish Sea, and it's on one of those coves of the Irish Sea that Virginia's Wolf's To the Lighthouse takes place, which we're going to use in the symbols course. You can see I've worked half a century at putting this together so it works! If you read and do it continuously, I guarantee you, not from me, but it works. Exeter also has an estuary, small one, that comes in from the lower reaches, further reaches of the British Channel as it goes out into the Atlantic Ocean, but at Exeter was the second legion, called the Augusta, so it's usually Legio II Augusta, and it was that legion that conquered that whole area of England, and conspicuous for Vespasian was this Jewish, sophisticated monastic group that were centred in Glastonbury. The way in which he focussed this was to make a road that went from Exeter up to Glastonbury and then extended it to Bath, where Jane Austin wrote all of her works, and on up through the Midlands of England to Lincoln. So from Exeter to Lincoln, and it was called the Fosse Way. And the Fosse way came within a couple of miles of Glastonbury. What struck Vespasian then was there was something hugely powerful about this Jewish group, and that the group was not in a synagogue mode but was in a Pythagorean Hellenistic Jewish mode, and he understood that the origin of this was from Alexandria. And so later on, when Vespasian began to have visions of not only becoming the new emperor, but of replacing the Caesar Household completely, a new dynasty, the Flavian dynasty, which he did, he and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, constitute three emperors that make Flavian dynasty, and they thought they were getting away from the curse of the Caesar line. The curse he saw because something mystical had happened vis-à-vis this teacher from Alexandria, who then took his power to Jerusalem, and there was supposed to be crucified and yet lived again, and here was this resurrection community way off in the furthest ends of the earth, in Somerset. And so it began a resonance in him that he wanted to replace that mythos somehow so in 69 AD when there were four emperors, everything fell apart to the extent that no one could hold the throne, it was radioactive, he was the fourth and he was in Alexandria at the time and all of the miracles he had heard about, about Jesus, making the blind see, making the lame walk, he reproduced by his PR machine in Alexandria. He took his own spittle, mixed it with dust, coated a blind man's eyes and he was able to see. A lame man, lame for life, was cured by Vespasian. He took up his couch and he walked away. So the Jesus miracles were adopted by Vespasian and then to cauterise and sear, so that no one would ever again have the energy to carry this through, because he'd already taken over Alexandria, it was never a province of the Roman Empire as a Senatorial Province, it was always the personal property of whoever was emperor. It was an imperial province. What was left was to cover his tracks by destroying Jerusalem, and so his son Titus was the general in charge of destroying Jerusalem the very next year, 70 AD, and the head General of Titus was the nephew of Philo of Alexandria, named Tiberius Caesar Alexander. It's very convoluted and the power that was there was unmanageable. When Titus finally became Emperor he lasted under two years. He couldn't take it. And when his brother Domitian came in, it's a reign that is even worse than that of Nero. It was called The Terror. And Domitian, haunted by the mythos that his father had been haunted by, that his brother had been haunted by, decided that there was going to be a final conquest of Britain, completely and the general put in charge finally to do this was one of the most brilliant military tacticians of the age, his name was Agricola. And Agricola was the father-in-law of the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote The Annals and the histories of the 1st century AD so we know what happened, many of the books have been lost, but enough that we can understand, and he also wrote the Agricola, which is a history of the British conquest. But the Domitian conquest was always to push the Roman fortresses so that they would eventually encroach Northward and progressively go beyond Hadrian's Wall behind the Antonin Wall, into Scotland and time and time again when Agricola was the general in command, he was able to always win victories, snatch them out of defeat. He conquered the big Isle of Anglesey off the Welsh Coast, because the Celts and Brits on Anglesey had lookouts to look for a Roman fleet that was going to come, and instead Agricola had his legion strip off their armour and all other superfluous things and only carry their swords and shields, naked, and swim across the Anglesey and the Brits and Celts were so surprised at this, completely off guard, that the whole Island fell in two days .He was that kind of a leader.
The difficulty was that they were never quite able to conquer the Scots, and after Agricola was called back to Rome, in fine retirement, while Domitian plotted for his death ... Tacitus says of his father-in-law, we do not have absolute proof that he was poisoned but he died within a couple of days of one of his meetings with Domitian, of poisoning.
All this time, the Romans increasingly were untenable because the Scots remembered that the big revolt in 60/61 AD was led by a Scottish woman named Boudicca, and almost threw the Romans out of Britain completely. And so the Scots recovered almost all the ground that Agricola, they overran the forts, they tore down all the embattlements, and so Scotland, all the way down to Southern Scotland, became an area of a rebirth energy against the Romans, against the Roman Empire, and so Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is set where the round table is down in the Somerset/Wiltshire area, Camelot is down in that area, but Sir Gawain, in order to fight the Green Knight, has to ride north into Southern Scotland, where this takes place. And so two resurrection sites in Britain become the vibrating symbols of the whole epic, and what's more, it's set by the descendent who founded Britain, named Brutus, who was a grandson of Aneus, who was at Troy not as a Greek but as a Trojan, and who was the founder of Rome and of the Roman Empire. So that Britain, in a way, goes back and is more ancient even in an honourable way than the Romans and the Roman empire, and with the further development of this esoteric, Hellenistic Christian set that constantly was renewed ... in 52 AD Mary Magdalene died, they don't say died, the classic Greek word for it is comesus, it means going to sleep, because you're going to be resurrected, you don't die but you go to sleep. Her comesus in Ephesus was in 52 AD, which is why Appolus went from Alexandria to attend the comesus. She was interred in a huge sarcophagus that has Celtic swirls in a tidal wave motion on it, in the Cave of the Seven Sleepers, and St John was 27 at the time and also in attendance was St Philip. It was up to St Philip to take the news of the comesus of Mary Magdalene to the Glastonbury community . He went as far as Gaul, that part of France, and Joseph of Arimathea and his son went to meet there and one of the items that was taken by Philip, St Philip, to show there, the lineage was the Grail, which was a silver cup with the lip turned over. It was a property that was held in the family. Mary of Cleophas was Jesus's sister. And that was shown to give the cinch, not to leave the grail there but to show that all of the resurrection items were in place, because the last supper was not a last supper the night before, it was held six days before, and it was not a supper like the last supper because he's going to be killed, but it was a wedding banquet, not a wedding with rings for the world, but a hierogamus, a spiritual wedding between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. And the cup, the grail, is the celebration of that. The grail holds about 2 litres of wine, which is just enough for a serving on a table of twelve.
That's where he was anointed, his hair, with the very expensive perfume, nard is one of the names of it. He was not anointed for death, he was anointed for his wedding. Spiritual wedding. So that the mythos in Britain goes back to the very origins and whenever there were church councils, all the way through the early centuries, the delegates from Britain were always given the seniority because the entire Jerusalem community had been obliviated, they were the first church in Christendom. So when King Arthur finally died in 540 AD, he was buried at the by then, after 500 years, the circle of the 12 contemplative huts that were called monasterium in Latin, monesteria in Greek, they were the contemplative cells, that formed the sacred ring that was at the centre of a whole new wooden church that was built over it. So that the sacred altar-place of the new Glastonbury Cathedral had this as its altar circle perimeter. Later on, in the 1100s, that wooden church would burn to the ground and a new Gothic Glastonbury Cathedral was built that was about 10 times the size of the wooden cathedral that was already 10 times the size of the original circle. Arthur was buried at the south because the approach to it was from the south. The quality of the burial was such that six feet down from the surface was placed a lead cross with the inscription, I'll bring you a photograph next week of that, and it says, 'Here lies King Arthur, King of Britain' etc. and nine more feet below that was the crypt, the coffin where Arthur and Guinevere were buried together. All of this made Glastonbury a huge charismatic mythological attraction, and by the time of the late 1300s when the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was writing this, he was aware that this was a huge spread of a cosmic event whose furthest reaches were India and the Somerset Coast of England, and so he put in here an ancient game. The game is called the exchange of heads. The Green Knight says, 'You have your finest knight, Arthur, cut off my head, and then he will have to come to my castle one year and one day later, and I will there cut off his head.'
Next week we'll talk about the transposed heads, a theme that Thomas Mann used in a little book called The Transposed Heads, a story which he got from Heinrich Zimmer, who included it in The King and the Corpse because it's an ancient yogic story from India, which Zimmer knew because his father was one of the great scholars before him. Here's a very curious thing: once one understands the resonances like tree rings of a mythos, one learns to read exactly and correctly, not by symbols but by the sentience of the tones of the threshold resonant flow, one can feel what is true.
More next week.
End of Recording