Ruminations on the Synod at Whitby

White Whitby by the cliffs of Cleveland where the Christian church in the West went underground, the practice having been called upon to present itself in public for scrutiny by ecclesiastical delegates from the See of Saint Peter in Roma over the seas, and to apologize before the king and queen on behalf of the continuation of the Bronze Age Celtic way with words and the trees of the sacred groves, and the angles used to triangulate the positions of sun and moon...But as the moon had been claimed by Jews and celebrated by Passover in keeping with the periodicity of celestial time, and the rhythm of our women, and the craft and ebbing of tides around the island, it was moon time which went into the unmarked state. For bookkeeping convenience and by authority of the computational technique--complicated that only the ordained could manipulate the figures--sun time was set to rule, with Easter always on Sunday, and never a nod to the moon's fine fixing function. The cocked clock was laid out upon the calendar plane as the Christian West was put in order--a long string on the Black Magic marionettes, all carrying Bodhidharma credentials stamped with Vatican seals.

Transformation of the Celtic genius in the gentle hands of Hilda to whom the geese would bow in obeisance took a form of binding and wrapping, dressing the mummy, swadling the babe. The Kentish court and church controlling the conventions, cities, taxing commerce, setting times, cranking up speed of the Kali Yuga, chased the tranquil Colman back with his sack of meditational secrets to the rock island monastery of Iona. Meanwhile Wilfrid and the Romanoids took their shots to schedule a round of good shows and introduced the Roman method of chanting, from the approved textual versions instead of the heart, by the number and direction of a choirmaster instead of the rhythm of breathing, to the tinkle of metal coins in a collection basket instead of the beehive buzzing of beta waves in the brain. The phonogenetic ground of song and speech was confiscated in the name of consecration, surveyed with the eye of real estate agents, developed by the prefigurations of bulldozers, tares planted in window boxes and rock salt sown in the fields of fruiting ears as Timur-i-leng was later to treat Samarkand.

Thus did the Roman tradition in Britain distinguish itself from the ancient Jewish calendar, seeking to allay the anxiety of association with those who were held to have murdered the Christ when he appeared on this earth in the form of the Teacher at Jerusalem. Within months of the Synod, plague struck. The Sword of Gnosis sunk once more into the obscurity of the soil, the map of its treasure guarded by the Abbess Hilda when the keys were usurped by a Papal control. What else could be done after the new order arrogated unto itself the issuing of licenses for inspiration, commanded charters for communion with God and set a tax upon the text? Hilda's geese had always been free to fly; their homage was given not bonded for investment. Even while the learned hortatory continued in the Establishment's conquest of the happy band with an unbroken chair of transmission from the Good Old Days, out in the fields on the edge of earshot slept shepherds, guarding their flocks, still in tune with the sweet rhythm of the wind, and blowing the srynx of widespread joy. One of the Sufi tenders, yarn spinners, Marsyas men burst forth in song backed by a flute ensemble and invented poetry for the history of English culture.

The Celtic craft had not even to hold back from the ransackers who were only after what could be seen and grasped. Rome claimed the glass of church windows and wine bottles in the monastery cellar, but they only secured the keys and the corks. For the common folk and the peace doves of Columba's flock there remained the light and the wine. The people still had the practice, modeled for them by the monks with Colman who retreated to Lindisfarne and the island dzongs; and they still had what they had always in the mother matrix of their tongue. She now bore, after the raping, a child of divine poetry.

Forthright instruction in the practice of meditation (probably analogous to the six yogas of Tilopa, transmitted to Naropa, to Marpa, to Milarepa, to Void enabling Resonance in the shadow of Vajra Mukut, the Black Crown) could still be sought from those who knew with understanding born of being and seeing being at once. The teachers who held some dignity come from knowing who one's teacher had been, and who had been her or his teacher before her or him, sheltered themselves from the rain of ashes dumped over England and the Islands of the Old Way. Some could still be searched out with resolute endeavor, some masters engaged. The coals glowed for a while in the pages of illuminated manuscripts. However, open space in the marked state shrunk, and the Hounds of Anwwm chased their quarry once again to the death, blotting out even memory of the True Cross in its oscillatory function of sacred and profane, inside/outside, above/below. The badge-bearing gurus and policemen of prayers tightened the glove-hold of dogma. And the singing of Caedmon the shepherd slipped through their fingers just like quicksilver.

Hilda guided the rude fellows in righteousness, Big Heart Mommy, and in the application of the calculus, performing the function of subversion. K'o, moulting; Papageno's feathers fly, polymerized in the gleaming tesserae of music mosaic. Picking up the pieces of the Tablets-shattered, missing mortar on the flat of one's crown, sewing stories from the Bible back into the garment of speech while Rome bound them into the structure of offices--which we know require officers, who then are bound to officiate, behaving officiously, offering services serving offices. Her gleeful Caedmon spilled the bag of Pythagorean beans, let out the cat, did the same trick more than twice. So much for secrecy and control, as the church became a scarcity-economy process, the messenger changed into plain clothes--uniforms became too expensive. In rags and tags the King of Troy once again was heighed along his way, wandering a labyrinthine course set by the sun and paced by the phases of our moon. Only with both could the good king tell where he was all the time inside and with respect to distant stars.

Caedmon gives our language an introduction to the form of the poet, as a namesake Cadmus returned to Thebes (which was called al-WAST in Egypt, not Thebes) with a 15-consonant alphabet, the so-called Dragon's Teeth. These fierce teeth Cadmus planted in the soil around a seven-gated city--one for every center of consciousness in the body, kuklos, chakra--and they came up as the National Guard. Etiokles and Polyneices, warrior brothers of Theban descent then in civil strife balanced it out with each ether's blood, which the thirsty maw of the earth drank up with the sacrifice for payment and Antigone's split devotion for long term interest.

On another wave of culture the 15-consonant alphabet replaced the earlier Cadmean ee-o-gypsy version. So Carmenta, the Walnut Queen, Scarlet lady astride the Great Beast of Babylon, rode into town just as Wotan of the sacred ash tree, his dada hobbyhorse become the Night Mare put to rout the early poets of the alder tree cult in Europe's north. The alder god was Bran who lost the Battle of the Trees when his secret was guessed by compilers of a new notational system. (The old computations could be effected more swiftly and accurately, new complexities of relation could be expressed, the marked state could more faithfully symbolize the changed and changing form of the language as spoken and sung. ) Bran was burnt up, burnt out. Time was up, time ran out. Bran in Greece was called Kronos, Lord of Time, shown as the Grim Reaper "Death" on the 15th (for the consonants, of course!) Major Arcanum of the Tarot pack--which we are to understand also carries the significance of Rebirth in that the sun traditionally shown on the card is rising at dawn, and the little flowers are poking their heads up from the sod in which rot both the bodies of saints and charlatans.

Alder Bran: Aldebaran, the red giant star in the Bull's Eye, Taurus; Hildebrand, Saint Gregory VII, Pope from 1073-85 as Ildebrando, a Benedictine, he squared up the Vatican's noble real estate, brought solvency to the books of finance, took investiture away from laymen and laying away from the invested, a right-hand man of reform, sinking dragon's teeth of written Bull and law into the flesh of the world, making war in the name of justice and morality, setting Rome against the Germans for centuries, and whose claims of ecclesiastical prerogative ended in uniting his enemies against him and accomplishing his material ruin.

A dolphin. Adolf von Hildebrand, bildhauer, Das Problem der Form. BRAN ALDER. the wood of the alder tree burnt to ashes by the magic of the Ash God. Giordano Bruno's ghost in the cloud of smoke, A.D. 1600, with a work on the art of memory still in manuscript. Jordan Brown of Eliot's lay. The Lay of Hildebrand in mixed high and Low German, circa A.D. 800, discovered in a monastery written on the back of another text, in which Father bear, bearing arms, Dietrich of Bern, the armourer, faces his unwitting son in battle, Goya's "Saturn. Eating His Children" in the corner of the basement of Perez Prado's Madrid Salon; he would have eaten Zeus but for a surrogate stone thrown in by the good nursing ladies.

A bear. In the Philological Notebook of Chico Carboneri all the BR words like lumps of anthracite glow in the still smoking fire of the Alder branch burnt brown. BRAN ALDER is seven and ASH is eight. As a female incarnation Brunhilda is encircled by a ring of magical fire for Wagner and Wotan. HILDA ALDER--roast goose and the bleeding tree. If we wish to compose in a truly international language, with a smile to Esperanto, we write in ALGOL, the algorithmic language, which name comes from the short-period variable beta, star of Perseus. Algol is the Ghoul, the Blinking Demon, Satan's Head (Rosh ha Satan in Hebrew). Hipparchos and Pliny see it in the Head Of Medusa, carried by Perseus the Champion in his left hand, dripping wish blood. In China it is a pile of corpses, Tsieh Shih. Ras al Ghul in Arabic is the head of the Mischief Maker popping up in the Thousand Nights and a Night, Mother of Records. Ptolemy knew it as the bright one of those in the Goggon's head. From the Talmud we read Algol as the head of Lilith, Adam's first wife and mother of demon children, a nocturnal vampire from the lower worlds, the Witch of kills in Goethe's Walpurgis Nacht. The original word in Isaiah XXXIV, 14 is rendered by the Authorized Version as "screech owl." Dog Juan warning Querlitos Castyernoodles against the silence of the owl's soft wing-flight, night-hunter power talon, cilia ears, saucer eyes.

Luther's Bible spells it Kobold--but the font of lore on stars, Richard Hinkley Allen, sez that this corresponded to the Scottish Brownie: SCOTTISH BROWNIE indeed, with an international language, a new formal notation, trophy head of the Gorgon, aegis on the shield of Athena given to Perseus as a protective mark on the crane-skin bag in which he brought letters of the alphabet home, around the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, to land at a place called "Mycenae" or place of the mushroom, for there they found the Amanita muscaria growing in the pine needle beds by the sand of the sea shore. As Perseus dove into the ocean to slay the Gorgon, thereby releasing Pegasus and Bellerophon (as documented by John Barth in Chimera), so Gilgamesh before him had to dive into the ocean (perhaps the night sky of the southern latitudes, the domain celestial of Ea, Lord of the Waters) to secure the prize of the sacred herb of immortality. Here it is again folks, the Divine Elixir, the Ling Ch'i, Soma, Amrta, Ambrosia, brought back by the hero, culture-bearer from a perilous voyage to a Stapleton realm where all the stars are made diamond white, not in a coordinate system of space and time. Icarus does not fall into the sea by mistake; it is the most direct path to he sun. The rainwater of Poseidon in the high hills must drain into the ocean to be raised by the energy of the son into fresh clouds--it is from the sea that enlightenment arises (doubly obvious in those states with eastern seaboards the Atlantic coast, Japan, China, Ur on the Persian Gulf, East Africa). Perseus picks up the phonecian secrets of the written form of language, and later a mirror reflection from the right left of the Semitic source occurs. Other changes include the indication of vowels in the marked state, frequently omitted or added as diacriticals in Semitic tradition, as in old Egypt.

At nine o'clock in the evening of the Winter Solstice, when Algol is on the meridian, It is almost exactly on the zenith of New York City. Its light oscillates rapidly about every nine hours, and passes through a cycle of variability every two days, 20 hours, 43 minutes and 55 seconds. Already in the 18th century there was advanced the theory of Algol having a large dark rapidly orbiting companion star. Gilgamesh and his partner, hero and shadow, honcho and sidekick, the Lone (sic!) Ranger and Tonto, estupido the savage self, he who hydes inside the White Front of Doctor Jackal, medicine man, trickster, Muth-Earth-fucker and Grandpa of us all.

Fighting like alder and ash, the winning children are those who synthesize by both/and, retaining the richness of legend and lore while adapting to the higher order of data processing. Many secrets submerge with the drowning of stubborn sanctimony-- others are swiftly stashed in high, locked qualification cabinets. But the ballet of battle of past-time can be shaken out like sand from the blanket of even official stories of encounter and change. Where it is Wotan riding over the Alder God at one time, Zeus cedes power to Apollo the next. Then Hermes steals two cattle from the Mouse King come out into the sun, and Dionysos is held in the grown Messenger's arms. 13th floor elevators.

Kurt von Meier
Circa 1979