The days of the Cultural Inquisition are numbered. If you are a collector, metal detectorist, dealer or independent researcher you have less to worry about than you might have believed a couple of days ago.
Last night, I was looking at my weekly digest from academia.edu when I saw the title of the paper I'm now using for this blog entry title. whenever I see anything with the words "cultural" and "heritage" in it, I'm never hopeful.
The paper was uploaded by the archaeologist Neil Asher Silberman who had presented a paper at the above named conference in Nara, Japan (his Between Past and Present: Archaeology, Ideology, and Nationalism in the Modern Middle East is in my library). This, at least, was a plus. As I started to read what he had uploaded, I thought, "Actually, this is not so bad so far". By the time I got to the end, the sun had started to appear from behind the clouds, birds were singing, and I almost fancied that I heard a distant choir... .
Although using different terms, what is presented is exactly what I had been stressing in this blog about cultural frames, mediation, and focusing on actual cultural groups (including collectors etc.) instead of nations posing as such.
It is always exciting to spot a new fashion trend just from the first couple of showings, and Arky Fashions comes up with a new line only every few decades. The last one (the "ritual" line), was certainly getting rather tired out, and people had been laughing about it for some time. It evoked memories of bell-bottoms and platform shoes. There was an official launch of the new style some time ago at the "Frome-hoard" show, together with an announcement that it would go on tour. but I thought it better to wait for more news from the trenches, after all, some things can be hyped as a new trend, but you are never quite sure until you see what the other designers start to do.
The first indication that the trend had caught hold was at the "Borough Hill" showing, but the report had only mentioned one example, and that was only accessories, so I was not sure that it really could be announced as a trend instead of just un hommage. A subsequent report, however, has not only confirmed my suspicion, but has revealed that, in addition to the accessories, there was an example of a "human sacrifice". This certainly raises the importance of the style from the prêt à porter of the chariot fittings to the haute couture of the smashed skull. "Ritual", after all, is so ordinaire ― brushing our teeth, or having our morning coffee are examples of rituals. I wonder, though, if some would see the skull simply as a funerary custom. Perhaps it had been gathered from an excarnation. The quern stone is unusual, but brooches are commonly used in graves. Some of the examples still held on to the "ritual" fashion, perhaps as a transition to the sexier "offering".
What has not been released yet is the identity of the god in question, but I think I know: it is the Arky "god of funding and hype". The Greeks knew him as Hermes. He was often shown grasping his little bag of funds. He was also psychopomp, and would lead the supplicant to the afterlife of tenure, In addition, he was the god of thieves. He unites, in the broader mythological sphere, with the north American Raven and Coyote as Trickster. One encounters him frequently.
I make it a point to avoid coming into contact with the news media in all of its forms unless I am looking for something in particular. But, inevitably, someone tells me something or I inadvertently catch a snippet of news while I'm turning on the TV for the dog.
Just about every blogger who does not like people collecting antiquities and coins is linking to news reports where the police are confiscating objects that are either "priceless", or "valued at... (some thousands). Whenever you actually get to see what they are talking about, it turns out to be worthless fakes or bits and pieces valued at $287.50. From the commentaries, I understand that it is only the reports where things are pictured that are ever labelled as false, though I don't really understand what the point of not illustrating authentic reports would be. Either all news reporters are phenomenally unlucky, or a very high percentage of reports of looting or smuggling are equally spurious.
Of course, all of these objects are said to be "archaeologically important". Again, why are the only archaeologically important objects being taken from the sites by people who know nothing about them, while the archaeologists, who are supposed to know about this stuff are hardly finding anything important at all?
Then, when important discoveries are made, why does the press then report, "Experts say..." and proceed to give a completely daft explanation?
I named my domain writer2001, back in '97 to reflect, not the movie "2001 a space... ", but because 2001 would be the first year of the new millennium. I wanted it to sound forward-looking.
I really try to avoid the news, it upsets me when I see suffering, evil, and declining intelligence.
A house is the commonest image found in dreams. It represents the self. So why did I have many dreams about the same mansion starting long after I had left it? You might think that any dream about a mansion had to be about material wealth. That's the problem with trying to interpret signs and symbols in isolation. Once other details are taken into consideration you would discover that the mansion, of course, had many rooms and that gives us the reason: There are many aspects of myself, and many different interests. I was told that the mansion had fifty two rooms. Another estimate of the same house gave a few less. I don't know which, if either, was right, but there are fifty two weeks in a year and thinking about that can direct the unconscious mind to myths about the cycle of the year; to cycles in general. All of the dreams about the inside of the house started in the kitchen, a room that is strongly associated with starting our day. We make our morning coffee in the kitchen; we might have breakfast in the kitchen; everybody in the house congregates in the kitchen each morning. In my dreams, only the general shape and the idea of it being that kitchen is revealed. There was nothing specific to the actual kitchen ― the dreams did not reveal any of the real furniture, only the idea of a kitchen table and chairs etc. In the dreams, all of the other rooms had no counterpart in reality. They were created for the dream. No person appeared in the dream version of the house, either, save for the idea in one or two of the dreams that people were present (when needed for the symbology). There is no importance to the order of the dreams, either, which is just as well as I cannot remember the order apart from the last dream ― where all is finally revealed. I placed the other dreams in their "proper" order, in the way we build a story, not randomly as they might have been as clues.
I have arranged the dreams in what I now consider the best order. The dream images are written in bolded brown and the commentary in black.
I leave the kitchen and walk down along hallway with doors to other rooms. Some of the rooms are simply furnished as one might find in a furnished suite, but no one lives in them. In one room, I open a closet and find several drawers, all are empty save for the bottom one where I find a number of 16th to 18th century European silver coins: thalers, half thalers and the like. They are all of different countries, unfamiliar to me, and so heavily worn as to be likely worth only the price of the silver. I feel lucky and am amused and somewhat puzzled by their variety.
When I was at school, I collected coins. For about a year, these were all English with a few Roman. Later, I became interested in Greek only, but I did have a few common Celtic coins among them (numismatically, Celtic coins are part of the larger Greek series). Had I not started collecting coins as a child, I would have had no later interest in many different subjects that now occupy my life. After the dream I purchased a very worn Charles II crown and always kept it in my pocket as a "lucky coin". I bought it as scrap silver. The morning that my wife died, I was, of course, devastated, but many things had to be done. The palliative care nurse had woken me about half an hour after Carrie's death. After I had pulled myself together a little, I woke my daughter. After I escorted her body to the funeral director's vehicle, I arranged for the hospital bed and other medical equipment to be picked up. We wanted to be away from the house for a while and my daughter also wanted to buy a nice chest for some of her mother's things that she wanted to keep. Her boyfriend arranged for us to attend a Shakespeare play he was starring in that evening to prevent us just sitting alone at home. I was pleased by this. After we had left the house to find a chest, I realized that my lucky coin was not in my pocket. I found it late that night: it had fallen on the closet floor of my bedroom when I had undressed for bed the night before my wife died.
I leave the kitchen by the same route as in the last dream and walk up some stairs to a floor in the mansion I had never seen before. It leads to a room about the size of a department store floor. There are various couches, chairs and coffee tabled dotted here and there in groups. They all look like cheap Ikea furniture or cast-off's. They are all mismatched. As I move much deeper into the room I see a few people resting in chairs or walking in my direction. There are various unmarked doors including the one that led to the stairs. The end of the room opens out into a shopping mall which progressively has more shops, offices and people. I realize, that although my door is unlocked, very few people would enter my house. There is no need for locks. Those few that did enter would be welcome. There is no real barrier between myself and the world, but most people do not find me. Those that do are welcomed.
I leave the kitchen in the opposite direction, there are some people following behind me as I open a door to see a staircase leading down to a large tunnel carved out of solid rock. The floor is only slightly rough, as are the walls and the flat ceiling. The tunnel is illuminated by a hidden light at its entrance but it gets darker ahead and vanishes into blackness in the distance. There are sounds in the distance but I cannot identify them. A feeling of greater and greater dread fills us as we walk down the tunnel. We turn back and leave that place. The tunnel is inspired by the Dolese Mansion legend of a tunnel leading to the house behind the mansion. In the dream, it represents the unconscious, exploration, and knowledge but also mystery and death.
I want to show some people the tunnel and explore it deeper, but its entrance is half way up a mountain. It is late and the snow is too deep. Some other time, perhaps. The mansion was nowhere. Sometimes, things can get too difficult, or the timing is just bad. There's always another day. I'm in a hilly part of a town. Lots of trees, nice houses. I see the mansion behind a few trees, and remember it from long ago. I wonder what is happening there now, but the tunnel beckons and its just around the bend. Time passes. other things become more important. I change.
Someone wants me to bring them something from the end of the tunnel. I have done that many times and I know the way. I never even bother to open my eyes, the route is so familiar and I know exactly where the object is just by feel alone. This time, though, I decide to open my eyes just out of curiosity to see what else is in that room at the end of the tunnel. I see the room change rapidly, the walls are painted, then have wallpaper, then there is paint again. the furniture gets old and is replaced with new furniture and it too gets old and is replaced. Things are constantly being rearranged. It is all very rapid. I know what this dream means, but it is up to you to interpret it ― or not.
I visit the room at the end of the tunnel again, but I keep my eyes open for the whole journey. Nothing changes when I arrive, but I do see that there is a short passage that goes around a corner. There is a sort of veranda there, of stone. On the veranda is a horse trough also made of the same stone which is the stone of the tunnel, itself. There is water in it and a fish is lying in the water. I see its gills moving slowly. I look out over the low wall of the veranda to see a very ordinary landscape just before dawn. There are trees, a river, some buildings. There is nothing unusual about it. It could be anywhere. This was the last dream, and it puzzled me for many years. Now I understand it and it enters the mythic world. A trough or manger can be for water or fodder, when you swaddle a baby, it is too prevent the baby from thrashing around. This is done so that the baby might feel more secure. It is believed that such babies grow up to be better adjusted and confident. We swaddled our own daughter as a baby. It seems to have worked. That, in the Christian Nativity, the manger is considered to have been for food "breaks" the mythic continuum. Life emerged from water. In the "cradle of civilization" long ago, this water was called "The deep".
Finally, here's a favourite song from my favourite group that I feel expresses some of what lies behind this dream cycle:
Most of my stay in Oklahoma City was a later extension of my work at Pearl Cross, a west-end London antique shop specializing in jewellery, silver and clocks. I identified the family silver which was mostly the usual sorts of things, save for a little waiter by Peter, Ann, and William Bateman of about 1800 which Mrs. Dolese allowed me to display in my bedroom. We went to an antique auction with one of the official restorers licensed to repair any damages to the porcelain swans given by Nixon to Mao Zedong. The man was amazing: he spotted a replaced arm on one porcelain figurine, the fact of which was hotly disputed by the auctioneer who dragged over an ultraviolet light to prove his point. Red-faced, he then dragged it away again when it justified the restorer's claim. I spotted a clock by Napoleon's clockmaker and advised bidding on it, but it was in a plain wooden case and my advice was ignored. It went for twenty dollars. I grumbled.
We went to a trade show in north Dallas, but there was a mix-up with my room reservation at the motel near the show (and no vacancies available anywhere nearby, either) so I had to "rough it" for one night in a sumptuous room at the Fairmont Hotel downtown. The room had a foyer displaying a huge bouquet of cut flowers. I had arranged to meet up with a musician acquaintance at a now-defunct club in Dallas called "Paul Revere's Spirit of '76". I think I made some joke about "the British are coming". Francis played the mellotron, and with the drummer on the kettle-drums, that night, the two of them did the theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was indistinguishable from the original. I think Francis had gone into serious debt to purchase that instrument. Earlier, in 1969, I was visiting a friend's place in the Hollywood Hills and he took me to his friend Paul Beaver's sound studio in LA to see the Moog and other equipment. The mellotron left all of that behind in the dust. I've known a lot of musicians, but I don't play anything, myself. I don't even sing (I tell people that is my gift to the world of music).
Among other memorable events in Oklahoma City, was meeting the part-time cleaning lady at the Dolese Mansion. She was a very old African-American woman, who walked with canes and had pure white hair. She had once been tossed around by a tornado and lived to tell about it. I think I recall the family saying that she had claimed to be seventy-five for as long as anyone could remember. Her mother had been a slave. She took no guff, but called me "Massa John" whenever she kicked me out my room to clean. I mentioned to people that I had never seen a tornado but would like to. They looked at me as if I was crazy. One night I got to hear a tornado go by. It had taken off the roof of a church two blocks away. They really do sound like a very loud freight train. I had opened my windows a crack, but I could still hear the glass straining against being pulled outward. I revised my opinions of tornadoes!
Some time before Christmas, the wife of a prominent and elderly lawyer was in the shop. To call her a "trophy wife" would be an understatement. She had eyes you could get lost in. I was showing her a Beswick tiger. She gazed into my own eyes and said "I like lean, hungry, things". I think I had to grab the counter for support. Some time later, I took the young kids of the family for a bike ride to the zoo. She happened to be there and walked over to say hello. Her husband, with his obviously-dyed black hair rushed over to join us as fast as his rickety legs could carry him. Young Patrick mimicked the attitude of some horned-creature, and it met his challenge by butting the fence. It was a fun day.
Having an English accent, I was quite a novelty down there and girls were always telling me to "say something". I went on a date one night, and the girl told me she had to stop somewhere before we went to dinner, and would I mind? I said "No problem". It was an evening service at her church. Now, if you are, or have ever been a twenty-three year old heterosexual male, you can imagine the sort of rethinking that went on in my head at that point. There was a jewellery store owner who spoke of hiring me. I told him that I thought it would be difficult for me to move down there. He said that his lawyers could take care of all of that for me and he spoke about getting me a house and a maid.
But I had been living an abandoned phase of my life and was starting to become sullen. After I had returned, in 1969, to Calgary from LA where I was being trained as a counsellor, a friend and I had spoken some words into Peter Lougheed's ear about the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta. He had known nothing of it. We later spoke with his research assistant after Peter had invited us to Edmonton. He set to work, and it was repealed in the very same year I had left for Oklahoma City. I don't much like politicians, but Peter Lougheed is a glowing exception, and for many more reasons than just that one. Huge settlements were given and the province apologized to the victims. Incidentally, and many years later, one of its victims who knew me offered Carrie and I the job of ghost-writing her biography. She had a lot of money, but did not want to pay us. I gave her one of my looks and declined. UNESCO was founded with the belief in eugenics and a single world government. I don't much like UNESCO, and for many more reasons than just those. People can turn a blind eye to that which, otherwise, serves their personal interests. I don't much like cowards, either.
G. my good friend Monte's mother, phoned me at the house. "Are you ready to come home?", she said, as soon as I had picked up the phone. I arrived back in Calgary, checked into the Wales Hotel where Monte and his sister were also staying and then followed all manner of adventures for many years, some of which I cannot speak. At one point, I read Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game and something clicked in my unconscious. It was as if the secrets of the universe were open to me for a split second, but not long enough for me to understand. Later, I acquired another mentor and good friend, Bill Blackburn, a Yale graduate Ph.D., and he introduced me to the works of Joseph Campbell and to Colin Wilson's Outsider. Later, I found C. G. Jung, and it was after that when the first house dream occurred. We will get into those dreams, tomorrow.
"My patient, being a scientist of today, was more than once seized by panic when he realized how much he was gripped by such thoughts. He was afraid of becoming insane, whereas the man of two thousand years ago would have welcomed such dreams and rejoiced in the hope of a magical rebirth and renewal of life."
C. G. Jung, Dogma and Natural Symbols
Goya's title of this print is frequently misunderstood. He had written of it: “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.” What a fertile quote that is. I can see it foreshadowing my own obsession with that, perhaps, unattainable balance between Mythos and Logos that could bring peace to the world. Thank you again, Emilio Valli, for the inspiration. It speaks too, to Jungian individuation and the fruitful relationship the "old man" had with Wolfgang Pauli, "the conscience of physics".
I was reading Dogma and Natural Symbols the day before yesterday and thinking that it might make the basis for a post about dreams. I was unsure, though, of what direction that should take: should I treat it like any other post; should I present it as a Gnostic text but with a little explanation? Perhaps I should find a balance in this, too. I still don't know. By the end of this series, though, we will find out.
The title says "My house", but it is a house that has entered my dreams, and which is based on a real house. I don't have a house. I live in a small suite with a coyote hybrid (coydog) and sometimes wonder where the next week's meals will come from. This is in keeping with the life of the private scholar as outlined by Robert Burton (1577-1640) in The Anatomy of Melancholy. I have been wealthy and I have been poor. Poor is best. It gives one time to think.
It was late in 1972 to early 1973 that I was staying at the Dolese Mansion in Oklahoma City. If you follow the link you can see the picture and read about it. Had you been walking by the house one weekend day at the time, you might have caught a glimpse of me reading Orwell's 1984 on the window seat behind the top floor window on the left. That was my bedroom at the time. During the week I worked at Pamela's antique/gift shop. Ironically, I have a terrible sense of personal chronology, but I remember that General Ne Win had phoned the house and told Ardith Dolese that Madam Ne Win had passed away some time earlier, so I was able to look up that date. I don't really live in a single, linear, sort of time. Carrie wanted me to write an autobiography, but I told her that my life lacked theatrical continuity. I have had too many "hats". Mrs. Dolese had bullied the general once, in London, to see a doctor when he was ill, and he credited that action as saving his life. Pamela Dolese, Ardith's daughter, became his god-daughter. If you read the linked article about the house you will learn about the local legend of the tunnel. That legend also became part of my dreams and is very important. The dreams, by the way, had nothing at all to do with the family or my time there. They had contacted a very deep part of my unconscious. There was only one dream, in fact, that contained an image of the interior of the real house. But you will have to wait until Monday for the dream-cycles. Believe me, it will be worth the wait. It is a shame that the family does not still own the house, but I suppose that after the kids moved out it was just too big for two, and any staff. Estimates vary, but Pamela told me there were 52 rooms at the time.
I had met Pamela in Calgary at my 23rd birthday party. Jim, who was a friend of my friend Rob had brought her there after visiting the office I worked at where I happened to be doing something that day (it was a Saturday). He was looking for Rob, and had just flown in from Seattle. I invited him to the party because Rob was going to be there. She eventually married Jim. I think she made a good choice. More on Monday.
For decades, I have told people that what you think you are seeing on a Celtic coin might well be something very different. I have even seen an academic paper saying that Halley's comet was depicted on some Armorican coins (it is really an abstracted four-string lyre symbol).
Fragments of objects, too, are imagined to be fragments of different objects: a Georgian broken spigot handle from a barrel has been imagined to be a fragment of a Hallstatt sword chape. The owner of the object seen here had noticed one of my Celtic sword pommels and had seen the resemblance in the style of the head. It looks like a Celtic head with its limed hair doesn't it? The reverse design is also similar to a device seen below the chariot on early Cunobelin staters. Previously, he had wondered about some sort of "Kilroy was here" wartime trench art, but the fabric had looked like a much older coin. He noticed that it bore a slight resemblance to a type of medieval coin depicting a hand on the obverse (Hand-heller) but the weight was very wrong. Had it been altered? Was it some strange variation? Still, it seems to have been hammered around the edges, and that is not usual for coins. It was mystery and he sent me the image to see if I could make it out. It was like no Celtic coin I had seen.
I forwarded the image to Robert Kokotailo of Calgary Coin Gallery, and Robert knew right away that this strange edge always appeared on a certain series of Medieval coins. He told me that he had a book in his shop which listed them. As I was going to be meeting him at the shop later, he said that I could check for it in that book (a German book on Medieval Polish coins). Sure enough, I found it within a minute of opening the book. It took me longer to find the book, though! The coin is of a Bishop of Prague and is very rare.
Even if its find spot had been recorded the identification would have been no easier without considerable knowledge, and Robert really knows his Medieval coins. Funnily, it might have even emphasized a Celtic connection.
Certain archaeo-bloggers who constantly criticize collectors and dealers are always very nasty. There have been times when even relatives and friends of dealers and collectors have been the victims of their ire. The person who owns this coin holds an important position and did not want his name associated with it for fear of being bullied. That could have brought trouble to even his organization. He did not want to have to deal with such evil people. I could certainly understand that. I do not have a Facebook page for the very same reason. I would not want to see my daughter or my friends harassed. I have been ignored by people whom I have asked about the find spots of certain Celtic objects because they have wondered if I was such a person attempting to trap them. So this coin has no recorded provenance because of the existence of such people. There is a little irony here, and more than one sort of "faux amis". So be aware, and do not get taken in by such people's lies.
A neighbour and her daughter were called away for a few days on a sudden family matter, and she asked me if I could take care of her cat and her parrot and collect the mail, etc. I had done the same a couple of years ago. This involved me stopping by twice a day to feed and water them; to play with the cat a bit and to try to achieve some sort of détente with the parrot.
The other day, I was attending to the parrot when the following events took place over about two seconds:
The phone rang.
I wondered why there was a phone in the parrot's room.
I could not see a phone.
I realized that the sound was coming from the parrot.
After directing a friend to the pomo-generator, I noticed that its author has recently constructed a poetry machine generated with samples of adolescent poetry (shudder). My late wife, Carin Perron (Carrie to her friends) was a great poet. Now, of course, every spouse or parent says such things, but I do not exaggerate: she placed in the top three in the Bournemouth International Festival three years in a row in blind judging. The last year she won top place and all three of the prominent British poets who judged the entries then sent her copies of their books in appreciation. She decided that would be a good time to stop entering. She submitted far fewer poems for publication than most poets, but some of her poems appeared in prestigious journals of English literature. Her poem about Anne Morrow Lindbergh was read to its subject by a close friend when Anne was lying on her death bed (it was one of the winning poems). I intend to publish her complete works someday, even though her MS for the same was left unfinished.
"Mona" fantasy preparatory drawing
by Carin Perron
I will tell you how we first met, as it is pertinent to the topic. I had been acting in an experimental theatre piece produced by Charles Porlier called The Black Castle. It combined Gothic horror with audience participation and a set which was like a carnival haunted house on steroids. The audience were taken by the castle's tour-guide through a state of the art set with special effects and a number of professional actors. It was immensely popular and was held over for a second month. Charles is a prosthetic makeup genius and later worked on Robin Williams' Jumanjii. After helping to build sets and a few days in a minor role, I was promoted to one of the two actors playing the tour guide. The other tour guide was Scott McClelland who is the epitome of the traditional carny and showman. I did quite well and one night Charles came to the dressing room to tell me to go outside and greet my fans who were waiting to see just me. The line-up stretched down the block. Scott and I had very different styles, competed with each other, but became great friends. I modeled my own character "Trelawney" after a combination of Robert Newton's Long John Silver and Gregory Peck's Ahab. I was a method actor and often found it difficult to get out of the role after the performance.
It was Scott's birthday party. As Scott was rather younger, most of the guests were quite young too, but his parents were also there. I kept noticing this girl who kept smiling at me but said nothing. She was younger than me, but older than Scott. I found it rather strange. I imagined that she was a younger friend of Scott's parents but she looked European and I thought that perhaps she did not speak English. After a while, she did approach me when I was in the kitchen to apologize for staring at me. She said "I thought you were a person whom I had been writing poems about for a few years". Sometimes, you make an involuntary movement. I took a sudden step backwards and bumped into the fridge. Desperate to show that she was not some sort of lunatic, Carrie then started talking about the technicalities of writing poetry and told me that she had been a teacher at Scott's high school. After the party, we went to an all night coffee shop and talked until dawn.
She wrote little about our family life, or herself for that matter, always wanting to look externally, but here's the poem she did write about our family. As per her wishes, I read it at her memorial service. She passed away after a three year battle with terminal breast cancer:
Domestic Epiphanies
It just doesn't get any
better than this,
this slice of heavenly pie-in-the-sky, neatly
cut
and lowered on noiseless and well-oiled wheels,
and I feel luckier than I
deserve, relishing these homey times,
some quiet, some full of
bustle, when the ordinary slips smoothly,
imperceptibly, into
transcendent, crystalline moments—
in the twinkling of an eye,
and I sit quietly and
watch from a distance,
and relive, in these wondrous tableaux, my
childhood—
the way I always wanted it to be,
and I marvel at how little
it takes
to set each perfect scene:
Three spoons in their
communal plate,
three girls at the table, eagerly stand,
hungrily
waiting for the first smooth hot mounds
of
freshly-made pease porridge...
Or, my daughter, calling
me to come and feel
her loose tooth, almost-but-not-quite ready to
come out;
Later, after secret
bustlings,
she ushers us to a low table set for two:
on a
square of black felt, white coral ribbed like mushroom-gills,
a
dried rose, two brandy glasses of milk—and in the dazzling sun,
a
candle, just for show.
Or, going to bed, and
Daisy, a kitten now half-grown,
curls up beside me, warm and soft
and purring low,
looking up with lucid, intelligent eyes...
Or, with old friends in
winter-time, among the comfort
of mulled wine, laughter, and slow
conversation;
Or, just sitting sleepily,
Saturday morning, at the smooth white
kitchen table, eating
oatmeal, warm and sweet and milky,
and my husband turns on the
radio,
and we listen to old songs on Max Ferguson,
eating the porridge, so
wonderfully haunting and warm,
as it lies quietly in pools of cool
milk,
and my daughter pronounces it delicious,
which it is, and
I want it all to last,
and it does. The leftover
dribble of milk on a saucer
is converged on by cats, sleek and
gray and black and white,
and I float back to my own
warm bowl,
wondering when this is all going to end,
but it doesn't end;
and I wonder if it's all
this simple,
if Mona Lisa was simply happy at home,
with a good
man, good children,
a lovely bright kitchen, and in back,
a
quiet garden waiting for her;
Was she just happy to sit
in the slanting, golden afternoon light,
and be painted, her plump
hands shiny and smooth from making bread
and scrubbing tiles and
folding sheets, fully content to just exist,
like a lovely thing,
resting palm upon wrist, doing nothing
but sitting and not-quite
smiling?
Did she feel lucky, too;
was she glad of this special golden quiet,
knowing that nothing
out there was any less happy than this;
knowing she had only to
get up, and smooth out the folds
of her dark, simple dress, and
walk down the long, sunny streets
towards home?
No matter; for there she
sits, with that look of confounding content—
and I am she, a
woman as pleased in her skin as a cat,
just happy to be where I
sit, or happy to get up and smooth down my skirt
and walk the
bright road towards home—
When the news of the latest (predominantly Coriosolite) Jersey coin hoard reached me, I knew that someone would be contacting me. I know more about Coriosolite coinage and its cultural connections than anyone in the world. I reclassified them over a period of about ten years and my book on the subject was published by Archaeopress at Oxford in 2002 as part of their British Archaeological Reports (International Series). My first publication on the subject was in the Annual Bulletin of the Société Jersiaise in 1992 and was about some coins from a hoard found very close to the latest find. That article had been requested by Douglas Corbel of the Société Jersiaise. So I was not sure if I was going to be contacted by the Société, by the Jersey Museum, by a numismatist, or by an archaeologist who specialized in Celtic numismatics. When that contact came, it was from a surprising source: a forensic scientist. I could not have been more delighted.
Trefor Jones is a British forensic scientist who started out as a science teacher but later in life got a degree in forensic science and became a crime scene investigator (CSI). He is currently working on his M.Sc at the high tech Cranfield University and has picked this hoard's materials issues as the subject of his degree. I had always thought of archaeological research as being (ideally) like investigating a "cold case" where all of the witnesses were long dead. Sadly, though, that ideal is not always met. The problem with archaeology is its "theory-ladeness" while numismatics does not really have theories, only methods, and the best numismatists also create methods that are tailored to the subject they are investigating. It is virtually impossible to teach numismatics as a university subject to any great level of competence without having university courses spanning twenty years or so. It epitomizes interdisciplinary studies. Theory also leads to deductive reasoning but science is inductive reasoning. This is what Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" did, deduction being a common misconception. Criminal investigation can include attention to just about every science short of theoretical physics ― the end result being a theory (who did what).
In April, Trefor emailed me to say that he had come across my research and the expert system that I had built to identify Coriosolite staters (that expert system had been one of the subjects included in a Ph.D thesis on artificial intelligence at Hofstra University and I had given some aid to its author in the nineties). He asked me for some further direction and later, having other reasons to visit Canada, decided to make a side trip to Calgary so that we could discuss his plans. As he was going to be staying just a couple of blocks from my friend Robert Kokotailo's coin shop, I thought it would be a good plan to meet him there and I thought, too, that Robert would also be able to contribute much especially about the coins' manufacturing process. Robert has a hypothesis about how the coins of my Series Y were struck that I feel has great merit, but it has yet to be tested. As a professional numismatist for many decades, Robert has studied and handled countless thousands of ancient coins and his knowledge goes beyond encyclopedic.
So, in early May, I set out to meet Trefor at Robert's shop. On the way downtown, I was wondering about Trefor's project. I already knew that the Jersey Museum had authorized his XRF analysis of some of the hoard coins and that Katherine Gruel had previously used Neutron Activation Analysis for just over eighty coins in a mainland hoard but its focus was the alloy and did not include some important impurities like Ni and Co which would have revealed if any British metal had been used in the composition (there were Coriosolite connections to the Durotriges metal refining at Hengistbury, Dorset at a slightly later date but pre-50 BC connections were less clear). That British fingerprint was not found by Peter Northover in his XRF analysis of seven Coriosolite coins, but as it seems that the alloys were prepared in small batches and also used some scrap metal, so few specimens would not eliminate the possibility. I imagined that Trefor might get to analyze about a hundred or so coins, but as I had expanded the previous classification of six classes to three series covering fifteen design groups, I was worried that the available samples might be too few in number to expand our knowledge that much. When I met Trefor, this was my first question. He told me that he would be starting with a thousand coins, and could get another thousand if necessary. My jaw dropped and I told him that those numbers were unprecedented. He had also showed me a number of "paper virtual coins" he had prepared from Rybot's drawn die reconstructions. This is exactly what I had done when I first started working on the coins in the mid eighties. I took this as good omen.
The shop started to get busier and with Robert unable to remain part of the discussion, Trefor and I headed over to the Ship and Anchor on Calgary's trendy 17th Avenue for lunch. Over lunch, I mentioned my use of clustering patterns as opposed to using averages and what it had revealed to me saying that, with such a large sample available, it could verify what I had seen. Trefor rightly pointed out that it might also negate this idea too. I told him that this would not bother me and related a story about when I was working, long ago, in the short-lived numismatic laboratory at the Nickle Arts Museum at the university of Calgary. I had found a curious depression on an ancient Greek coin with some tiny crystals at its centre. Upon analysis these were found to be zirconium and I came up with a rather elaborate theory about how they got there. The following day, however, my theory got exploded. The other two people in the lab expressed their sympathy, but my reaction was to say that I thought it was all wonderful: I had built a model that was internally consistent yet absolutely wrong. It was a "Eureka moment" for me. It had reminded me a bit of Niels Bohr's resolution of the Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky paradox in the book I had been reading at that time.
That's the difference between pure research and academic empire-building; in the latter, it's always best to be right, but it is only with the former that being wrong can carry research forward. You do everything you can to get the result and leave no stone unturned. If you are then proven wrong, you get to add more material to your arsenal and you are off and running again. The poor saps who are only interested in being right might be left only with a dog-eared copy of a lecture to occupy their time before they are put out to pasture. Rightness can be an elusive goal in Celtic numismatics, that's why all of the late greats have been amateurs from Sir John Evans, through Commander Mack to Derek Allen and Henry Mossop.
Last week, Trefor emailed to say that all of the preparations have been made and now we are just waiting for the coins. If you allow it, this sort of research can lead you into unexpected areas and it is always best to follow where it leads you. I think that Trefor will be doing doctoral level research in this project and discovering new things and I hope that the M.Sc can be leveraged into a Ph.D, but I have no idea about how such things work. I left school at fifteen so it's all a "black-box" to me. One thing for sure: he's at the right university.
The subject matter is typical of the Eleusinian Mysteries, however, Philip II is known to have been connected with the lesser-known Samothracian Mysteries where the same deities were referenced. Unlike the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Samothracian were open to non-Greek speaking people and this might signify that Philip II spoke the sparsely recorded ancient Macedonian language or was honoring his ancestors who did.
Although some reports are identifying the figure of Hermes in the mosaic in his role as psychopomp, his role in the abduction of Persephone was as a messenger for Zeus to both Hades and Persephone's mother, Demeter about freeing Persephone. (Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Demeter's nature and deeds)
While it seems more than likely that the Amphipolis tomb was originally built for Alexander the Great, he was not buried there (taken to Alexandria) and it still remains to be seen if the tomb is occupied by another person, or was used as a cenotaph.
They are at it again. As soon as there is any armed-conflict, revolution, or terrorist activity anywhere in the world, the nationalist "cultural-property" terrorists and bottom-feeders, smelling flowers and hearing bird-song are all too eager to jump on the same band-wagon. "Illicit Trade Funds Terrorists" says the New York Times headline. The hard core terrorists kill and destroy property, while the soft core terrorists ride on their backs. They are working in unison. The real purpose of terrorism is to create dissent, hatred against certain groups or just general fear among the population. I was taught that by an RCMP Security Services (former Canadian domestic intelligence) agent after I had volunteered as an operative to help disband a newly-formed terrorist group.
This round revolves around ISIS whose iconoclasm seems somewhat at odds with the claims that they are profiting by removing artifacts from the danger zone into western collections where they will be preserved. Of course, the preservation of objects means nothing to any of the soft-core terrorists or their unthinking followers. Always, it is the destruction of sites that is mostly criticized. The typical response is parroted in one comment in the Times article by a "Casual Observer" with: "When antiquities are removed from the locations where the originated they become expensive decorative objects with almost all of their historical usefulness lost forever. ..." This fallacy was pounced upon at once by Bruce Leimsidor who nailed it so perfectly that I did a Google search for his name. I was not at all surprised to see Dr. Leimsidor's impressive credentials but was rather surprised, and pleased, to note that he is not a lobbyist and appears not to be a stake-holder in these matters. One does not reach such a station in life by being any mental slouch. He also, obviously, knows quite a bit about conflicts and refugees.
While the hard core ISIS terrorist despises religious idolatry, and the soft core "cultural-property" terrorist despises anyone who even likes antiquities, they do share an idolatry of ideology.
But it is not just "cultural property" that is given as a source of funding and we hear about human trafficking, extortion, and so on. I have learned, though, that the instigators of such conflicts cover their tracks rather well and actively direct blame elsewhere. Personally, I think that oil money is the most likely or major source of funding. There is no quick-fix solution to that, but we really should be doing much more to lessen our dependency on fossil fuels for political as well as environmental reasons.
If we are to lament about the current situation in the Middle East we should lament about the loss of lives and such religious intolerance first (Muslims around the world are also victimized by these events). The destruction of monuments is bad, but their ruins will at least reveal the hatred and insanity of our time to future generations. Perhaps they will be more intelligent than us. I sure hope so.
Typical for such "historical mystery" shows is dialogue like: "Could it be that... and if so, does this mean that..." The first part of such a statement might be called a hypothesis, but add the second part and it all becomes media hype. Also, whenever an expert needs to be consulted about some detail, everyone boards a plane and flies across the Atlantic to talk with the person. Have they never heard of email or the phone?
One thing is certain, the treasure, whatever it might be, has not been found. I can't imagine that such a report would have been suppressed so as not to be a spoiler for the particular episode that shows the discovery. Can we hope, at least, to know what the treasure really is (if it does exist)? I guess we have to tune in to find out.
The chariot fittings appear to have come from at least two different vehicles and might have been collected over a period of time by the person who occupied the house nearby. It seems that whenever someone died, their grain storage pit was emptied of its usual contents, but sometimes other items were were placed in it as part of the funerary customs. There have been some unusual finds in such storage pits, like a raven with its wings pinned open (presumably the owner of the pit had died in battle), or a cow's head facing upward upon which garbage had later been piled (perhaps the owner had died from illness).
The linchpin and lipped terret are similar to what to have been found at Kirkburn (which might explain the date given as the famous sword from that site was old when buried)) and the strap junction and toggle-like mount have the same leaf patterns as is on a later (AD) strap junction in my collection and a slightly earlier strap junction from Arundel Park (dated ca. 50 BC - 50 AD.
Archaeologically excavated objects such as these are extremely rare. Most similar finds in Britain are strays, often found far from their place of manufacture. Perhaps the owner of the fittings had been a groom and had been given various bits and pieces by a grateful patron, but we can only speculate about such matters. Chariot fittings appear to have been made in "design suites" and not so mismatched.
In Greece, Isis became associated with Demeter and Aphrodite. The coin on the right is from Perinthos in Thrace dating from the mid 3rd to the early 2nd centuries BC and shows the jugate busts of Serapis and Isis. The coin below is from the same city during the first century AD and has the headdress of Isis on the reverse. The subject of the Gundestrup cauldron plate I showed yesterday is Demeter's discovery of Persephone in Hades and how the dead will live again just as life returns to the earth in the spring .
Livy is well-known for inventing all sorts of stories about Roman heroism in his history, but perhaps the strangest story of all is how a crow came to help a Roman champion fight a Celtic warrior. You can read the story in one of my earlier posts.
The corvidae family include crows, ravens, magpies and blue jays. You encounter members of this family almost everywhere, they are more intelligent than your cat or dog and besides their cawing warning cries, they seem to have a language (softly spoken) that they usually only share among themselves. They are mythological tricksters to the west-coast Indians, a role reserved by the coyote on the plains. In the ancient Celtic world, they are associated with the battlefield and death.
I am focusing on one of their appearances on the Gundestrup cauldron (illustrated below). For myths other than those I will include here, see the two-part article: The Raven and Crow of the Celts. For an account of their intelligence and interactions with us, see: Corvids: The Birds Who Think Like Humans, or watch the Nova presentation: A Murder of Crows.
Gundestrup cauldron plate showing corvids with outstretched
wings on each side of the female figure
On the central female figure of this Gundestrup cauldron plate, one arm is placed across her chest while the other is raised high and a small bird is perched on the hand. As with most of the animals on the cauldron the exact species is difficult to identify. The tail is distinctive, though, and its fanned out appearance could mean that the bird is a dove. This accords well with one of the myths concerning Persephone: when she was taken to Hades, her mother Demeter was distraught and searched everywhere for her. Persephone was a fertility goddess and her absence meant that everything was dying. Of course this is a seasonal myth and Persephone’s stay in the Underworld indicates winter. At that point there was no indication that she would ever return and that would mean the death of everything. Like Noah’s bird looking for dry land, Demeter sent a dove, and the dove found Persephone in her dark cave in Hades. There was an agreement reached with the ruler of Hades that Persephone would spend half of her time on earth and so life was saved from destruction. She thus becomes the goddess of rebirth. In the light of this explanation, the two figures lying across her chest on the cauldron can easily be explained. It is almost as if she cradles the fallen man and the dog although the figure of the man appears over her arm. She can give back life to man and beast alike.
There are two figures positioned near the raised arm of the goddess: a smaller version, perhaps, of herself is seated on her shoulder. The small figure has her hair arranged in pig tails and wears a torc, just like the central figure. One arm of this figure rests over her abdomen: a gesture of pregnancy. Above this newly pregnant female, a hound or wolf flees in the opposite direction, its tail between its legs.
A female figure stands on the other side of the goddess, arranging her hair, perhaps as a sign that she is about to embark on her journey back to the world, perhaps just to indicate her status as queen of Hades, or perhaps part of a myth now lost to us. There is distant connection, in this scene, to a Greek telling of the myth of Isis: she was searching for her son Osiris who had been entrapped, by his evil brother Set, inside a sacrcophagus that was cast into the Nile. When it came ashore in Byblos, Phoenicia, a sweet-smelling tamarisk grew around it. The divine king and queen of that place had the tree carved into a column for their palace. Isis, in disguise, waited by the well in Byblos until the queen’s handmaids arrived. Befriending them, Isis offered to braid their hair. As she did so she breathed a wonderful scent upon them. The queen, on discovering where this scent came from, took Isis into her palace and made her the wet-nurse of her child. Isis gave the child, instead, her finger to suck on. Each night she placed the baby in the fire, so that the flames would burn away all that was mortal. Isis, in the form of a swallow, flew around the column that contained her son, and sang in lamentation. The queen, on discovering this bizarre scene one night, at once rescued the baby from the flames, thus preventing his immortality. Isis returned to her normal form and revealed who she really was. She asked the queen for the column and when her wish was granted she removed the sarcophagus that was embedded in it. Falling upon the sarcophagus, she let out such a cry that the unfortunate baby died from hearing the sound. Isis left by boat with the sarcophagus to return to Egypt, and came ashore one night in the Nile delta. Set happened to be hunting a boar, and came across the sarcophagus. He tore Osiris’ body into fourteen pieces and scattered the pieces far and wide. With some help from other deities, and again in her bird form, Isis managed to find all of Osiris parts save for his phallus, that had been eaten by a fish, and Osiris body was turned into a mummy. Isis fanned the mummified body with her wings and it came to life. From that time on, Osiris became the immortal ruler of the dead, and the dead became “the Osiris”.
The version of the story of Isis given here comes to us from Plutarch, who is 1st to 2nd century A.D. Egyptian versions omits the journey to Byblos, and has Osiris wash up in the Nile delta after being cast into the river. It would be a mistake to merely attribute the addition to the time of Plutarch: Egypt and Byblos had ties dating back to the Old Kingdom. Byblos was in Canaan -- the Greeks called it Phoenicia and everyone knows the wide trading contacts enjoyed by the Phoenicians. Egypt had long imported cedar from that area and a current runs from the Nile delta right to Byblos. An early Greek version of the Byblos part of the Isis myth comes to us from the Homeric hymn to Demeter. The stories are very similar, but in the hymn to Demeter the goddess is searching for her daughter Persephone, and these events take place in Eleusis and are part of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
To return to the cauldron panel: above the goddess, on each side of her head is a bird with wings spread wide. Their bodies face forward but their heads are turned toward each other. This posture is very similar to more recent depictions of heraldic eagles and their curved beaks lead some to suggest that it is the eagle that is depicted here. As a bird of Zeus, this could fit with his position of authority for what happens on earth but considering the context, I am sure that it is ravens or crows that are depicted. The beaks are neither raven nor eagle-like, but perhaps closer to the former, and the feet do not display the large talons associated with eagle. Furthermore, an Iron Age pit excavated in England had the skeleton of a raven at the bottom with its wings pinned in this very position. Another pit had the skull of a cow at the bottom and we could assume that both of these were sacrifices. The pits had formerly been used for grain storage, but appeared, afterward, to have been used only for refuse. Perhaps the former owner had died and his grain was divided among his heirs.
The overall meaning of the panel is that the goddess depicted spans two worlds: she inhabits the Underworld but she brings new life to the world above. She is a fertility goddess, but brings new life from death. We should not be too surprised at the many syncretistic threads illustrated by the panel. The prototype myths are both widespread and lost in the mists of time.
Tomorrow, a Thracian Isis and a tall tale from Livy concludes the article.
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