Tag: myth

Beltane Fire

dinner fire

Just the second BBQ of the year but on a very special evening as Spring turns to Summer. Clearing away a shed load of the detritus from the old year.

Spring lamb Kebabs to die for … a glorious feast culturally appro­priated from the wide fertile crescent and cooked on an American BBQ in a Cornish field … whatever … it was nommy.

fire

With the stars above our heads, in a beautiful clear sky, and the earth beneath our feet, faces burning in the heat of the flames and the wind in our hair … and, very much, life bursting, bustling, snuffling all around us.

We even carefully, hurriedly, anxiously, carried the burning embers inside to rekindle our home fire … and it caught.

Moving on.

 

Redux

Gaza Sphinx
click to enlarge

Because the premise is a lie … was always. Because family feuds are worse, civil wars not and because antisemitism is not exclusive when it comes to who the semites are … because Trump is, Netanyahu is … not …

And so people die. And live without hope … and now less … if that’s possible.

And not to aesthetisise anyone else’s pain, and not to ignore the ancient greek’s misogyny … why is this shit still going on … I’m not naive, just sad and angry.

Dozmary Pool

dozmary pool
click to enlarge

So … this is an SSSI inside an AONB, both bottomless and very shallow, romantic and in fact rather dull, dark and mysterious and glittering and pretty but it’s been here a while and acquired its fair share of legends over the years.
This is where Arthur received Excalibur from the lady of the lake (she was very short appar­ently) and ultimately where Sir Bedivere returned it, demanding compens­ation for emotional distress, after it proved unfit for purpose at the battle of Camlann.

Oh well.

I forgot to add this to the rather heavy image dump today. This is actually where we had lunch on Sunday, on Bodmin but not actually on the top of Bodmin.

Behold Baphomet

piggy baphomet
click to enlarge

Presiding over the Samhain Sabat, Baphomet the Piggy Banker. Sinister little fucker.
With sincere apologies to Eliphas Levi, oh and Goya for that matter … please don’t drop in for dinner tomorrow … then again, might be fun.

So you’ve conflated an Ikea piggy bank and a demon idol? … I guess you just had to be there.

The Beast of Penwith

beast of penwith

Been away for a while.
But this is not a diary and it doesn’t matter.

Woah, I gorn native … seein’ things an’ all.

Driving home in the wee small hours, fast along familiar, dark, deserted narrow lanes … and stone cold sober too — I was the des … and suddenly … in a bright bounding wave, caught in the headlights but wisely focused on escape, something crosses our path and leaps out of this world into the woods.

I will swear it was as big as a dog. It was a sort of golden honey colour and rough haired with a great rudder of a tail like a fox. Then fox it was … pale in the lights and yet … It had a blunt face, no snout, a domed head, no prominent ears, sunken eyes … it looked like …

Well, we both saw it and our descrip­tions matched … and no doubt fed and focused each other’s. We’ve been here a long time and I grew up somewhere very similar — we’re not at all alienated from the natural world. We’ve both got a scientific, practical, down-to-earth take on that world and even we see things in the night.

Lamassu

winged bull
click to enlarge

The archetypal protective deity of the home for the Assyrians.

Crucified first by the allies of the “West” and now by both our proxies and IS …

What is it about “orient­alism”? We’re, appar­ently, seduced by the cultural grandeur of these great civil­isa­tions, surely, largely because we see ourselves as their imperial successors … in brutality?

Nation­alism is an ugly tool but it can be one source of dignity and cultural nutrition … it can tell stories which mean we can all contribute threads to the rich tapestry of human culture.
I have a heritage that stretches back millennia, you are just scum … and so the deep and complex patrimony of Palestine is bombed and bulldozed by the Israelis while they are almost obsessed with archae­ology that strengthens their own tenuous roots, the Americans crush and oblit­erate the world’s heritage at Ur and Babylon and oversee the looting of Iraq’s antiquities … just one facet of that imperial hypocrisy I suppose — they are barbarians when they cut off a man’s head, we are fighting for peas and mocracy when we raze Fallujah, Netanyahu is defending the weak when he blows the heads of Palestinian children …

They are all playing to the gallery.