Ekwall's The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Place Names p 464, features Teversham just east of Cambridge and Teversal on the western fringe of the ancient extent of Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. Teversham was Teuresham in 1086 which appears to be from Old English *tiefrere or sorceror. Lying so close to the university of Cambridge, when Oxford had a formidable magical reputation, may not be coincidence. It is also curious that it lies just south of the village of Stow cum Quy, because Stow is a common place name associated with holy places.
Teversal was Tevreshalt and Tevershald in 1086 where Anglo-Saxon 'hald' means refuge or stronghold. Caitlin Green discusses these two place names in her blogs, but I would add to her comments that if, as seems likely, this place on the fringe of the ancient forest of Sherwood, means Sorceror's Stronghold, then it may not be isolated by way of a magical name. Just to the south is Huthwaite which was Hodweit in 1199. A.D. Mills A Dictionary of British Place Names suggests this is from Old English hoh, headland or spur of land with thwaite meaning clearing. This may be so, but it is not conclusive by any means. It is equally possible that thwaite, as an Anglicised suffix, is preceded by hod or perhaps hud in British. If it is hud or hut, as is suggested by the later spelling of the name, then it means magic. Hod can be a variant on hood as in Robin Hood, which would be very appropriate for Sherwood Forest. Just as Woden was known as Grimr, the hooded or masked one, Jacob Grimm pointed out that the Welsh magician Gwydion and Woden the magician were cognate. Magic, by its very nature has to be kept hidden from the uninitiated These various strands all point to a Mercurial magical background which might lie behind the name.
Huthwaite is confusedly associated with Hucknall which may have some sort of connection. The village has Herrod's Hill to the north which has the place name Whiteborough adjacent to it, suggesting an ancient earthworks was once sited there. If this was an area in Sherwood Forest with a magical clearing and a sorceror's stronghold, it may reflect far more ancient origins to the Robin Hood legend in this area, especially because Bronze Age burial mounds in Somerset and elsewhere, are ascribed to Robin Hood while there are many ancient earthworks with Woden's name, such as Grims Ditches.
Saturday, 19 September 2015
The magician at Alveley Church Shropshire
Photo by Ian Popple A possibly 16th century stained glass in this beautiful church which lies only half a mile from the Witches Cross, so called in folklore. presumably because witches once danced wildly around this cross, now called the Butter Cross, in order to attain an out of body flying experience. The fact that this saint or holy man (even Jesus?) is in magical pose and barefoot costume in a church, is because in remote rural areas Christianity and Paganism were equally accepted. The term pagan derives from Latin pagus meaning a local country dweller, hence anyone who was devoted to their local cult of pilgrimage to holy well, standing stone, sacred tree or grove and so on. These sites became Christianised but occasionally we find examples where the older pagan cult has survived, as in this case. Alveley lies very close to the River Severn, sacred to the goddess Sabrina. The river here flows more or less from north to south which in the northern hemisphere is especially hallowed because Mother Earth's electro -magnetic energy flows from north to south.
I struggle to make out what this amazing figure is holding. His crossed eyes are interesting, because in magic, crossing the eyes was a passport into an altered state of consciousness where we perceive the world is somewhat different than we normally find it. This figure is small in the original and even harder to view properly in the church itself, so it would be interesting to see what other people make of it.
I struggle to make out what this amazing figure is holding. His crossed eyes are interesting, because in magic, crossing the eyes was a passport into an altered state of consciousness where we perceive the world is somewhat different than we normally find it. This figure is small in the original and even harder to view properly in the church itself, so it would be interesting to see what other people make of it.
Wednesday, 16 September 2015
The School of Birds as a school of wizardry
Everyone is now familiar with the adventures of one Harry Potter, which J.K. Rowling set so dramatically in a school of wizardry.
One could imagine that such a school devoted to magic is as unlikely to exist as the concept that a hidden railway station platform can access such a magical world.
However, that such a magical school or series of schools, did once exist and not that long ago, may come as some surprise to the reader. The evidence for this comes from a variety of sources but it is crucial to realise that the very name: Sgoil nan Eun, The School of Birds, tells us all we need to know as to the nature of such an esoteric college.
Reverend John Campbell published the folk tale 'The School of Birds' in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness Vol XVII 1890-91 pp 58-62 in Gaelic and pp 64-68 in English. It was recorded mostly from John Brown in the Western Isles and is available online in a slightly incorrectly edited transcript of the original by Forgotten Books.
Though it is apparently only a folk tale, don't be fooled by this ! There are certain details in this rendition, which doubtless had several variant versions, which reveal whoever composed this legend was entirely 'au fait' with the Druidical or Bardic corpus as the road to enlightenment.
The Fuller, who is a wool cleaner, teaches his son nothing for seven years, which is exceedingly important because it was in those early years that the shape of existence and the view of the world must be kept in pristine state, without influence which could lend bias to a young enthusiastic mind. The next seven years were spent in a normal school and then he was ready to enter The School of Birds in the third seven years of his life.
A brilliant pupil, the teacher apparently does not want his apprentice to escape and the various shape shifting episodes are clearly so redolent of a similar relationship between Taliesin and and the goddess Ceridwen, that we know that this is an essential format where the apprentice is being tested to their upmost extent, dependent on their survival and rebirth as a full blown magician.
That being said, it is the details concerning the animals and their accoutrements that should point the reader to similar details found in the enchantment tale of Math in the Mabinogion and in the trials Culhwch has to undergo to satisfy the hawthorn tree giant Yspaddaden, or where the fairy maiden is connected with the bridle of a horse; there are innumerable examples. It can also be directly compared with the folk tales of dismemberment of the Shaman or Druid in trance state where only a pile of bones is left which the young maiden accomplice must reassemble but which leaves one particular bone out as lost when the body is put back together again. We may note that British Toad magicians until perhaps the 1950's would extract one particular bone from a toad so that they became his or her Familiars or animal allies. Although I know which bone that is, I am reluctant to pass it on until I am confident that such a candidate for entry into the world of toad lore would not abuse it. Witches used to lick the backs of toads to enter a state of trippy consciousness whereby they could fly, because toads contain bufotenin which is a similar Third Eye stimulator as psilocin or psilocybin and magic mushrooms generally, so that it affects the serotonin in our unseen third optical eye. So called experts would simply explain this as hallucination, but as it is toad or mushroom directed, it is way beyond this simplistic notion. The mind becomes aligned with the natural world of the cosmos and the only hallucination is the notion that our normal world can be as real as the otherworld is illusionry. Training to stimulate the Third Eye without drugs is the eventual aim of the magician and the use of hallucinatory drugs is simply a temporary method to engage with the spirit world before the mind can learn to do it alone.
The School of Birds then, is not simply some abstraction which never existed, it had, even has, substance as a teaching aid alongside numerous tales and legends as to how to enter this magical world and the various rules and engagements that one will find there. Reverend Martin Martin, The Description of the Western Isles 1695, informs us that a Druid and Druidess named the Amazon flourished on the remote isle of St Kilda until the 17th century and the Bardic schools of Druid initiation flourished on the Isle of Skye until the 18th century. Rumours tell of Druid survival from our ancient forebears in NW Wales and in the Pennines and there are several other examples of secret societies that followed similar death and rebirth traditions, from the Freemasons onwards, that we cannot doubt that such ancient practices were constantly handed down over the centuries in one form or another. Some of our greatest forebears; Isaac Newton, Abraham de la Pryme, John Dee, Michael Scott, Roger Bacon and many others, were learned in alchemy and magic from which modern chemistry and physics developed Although Gerald Gardner's witchcraft revival is perhaps partly his own invention, it still retains elements that would have been familiar to magicians of old, such as the focus on the four directions. However, like so many modern revivals, it tends to focus on procedure which is not as useful as the material contained in our mythology, ancient poems like The Battle of the Trees, of incredibly abstruse meaning but yet essential to any advanced practitioner of metaphysics and the use of Ogam, Runes or the simple knowledge of the Lamda in Plato. Indeed, there is so much one can study that is of genuine ancient origin and which can be complimented by the definition in Greek of heka or magic (hence the goddess Hecate), which is a knowledge of the properties of animals, plants and minerals, that one need not stray into the hocus pocus of those who couldn't be bothered to study the genuine article.
Finally, this essay is one of a series I propose to put forward as a means to describe how the ancient ecstatic tradition is still alive in the current age. Unfortunately, most people have been seduced by the so called 'New Age' repertoire of largely bogus quacks pedalling a temporary solution to the modern malaise of the mind and charging shed loads of money to boot. The School of Birds, as presently reconvened, is a revival in ancient tradition. It does involve some hard work and application, but to whoever is interested by the excitement such an ecstatic tradition can generate, it will eventually lead to a reintegration with the cosmological scheme whereby the mind and the universal god or goddess are all one and thereby to enlightenment. The journey may be short or long on this road, but it will never be short of adventure; the more one applies one self to the task, the more it will bear unbelievable fruit and ancient treasure. If you wish to learn more about this School of Birds, then please contact this blog post.
And as the Golden Age draws ever nearer, so the age of materialistic greed will become a distant memory................
One could imagine that such a school devoted to magic is as unlikely to exist as the concept that a hidden railway station platform can access such a magical world.
However, that such a magical school or series of schools, did once exist and not that long ago, may come as some surprise to the reader. The evidence for this comes from a variety of sources but it is crucial to realise that the very name: Sgoil nan Eun, The School of Birds, tells us all we need to know as to the nature of such an esoteric college.
Reverend John Campbell published the folk tale 'The School of Birds' in the Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness Vol XVII 1890-91 pp 58-62 in Gaelic and pp 64-68 in English. It was recorded mostly from John Brown in the Western Isles and is available online in a slightly incorrectly edited transcript of the original by Forgotten Books.
Though it is apparently only a folk tale, don't be fooled by this ! There are certain details in this rendition, which doubtless had several variant versions, which reveal whoever composed this legend was entirely 'au fait' with the Druidical or Bardic corpus as the road to enlightenment.
The Fuller, who is a wool cleaner, teaches his son nothing for seven years, which is exceedingly important because it was in those early years that the shape of existence and the view of the world must be kept in pristine state, without influence which could lend bias to a young enthusiastic mind. The next seven years were spent in a normal school and then he was ready to enter The School of Birds in the third seven years of his life.
A brilliant pupil, the teacher apparently does not want his apprentice to escape and the various shape shifting episodes are clearly so redolent of a similar relationship between Taliesin and and the goddess Ceridwen, that we know that this is an essential format where the apprentice is being tested to their upmost extent, dependent on their survival and rebirth as a full blown magician.
That being said, it is the details concerning the animals and their accoutrements that should point the reader to similar details found in the enchantment tale of Math in the Mabinogion and in the trials Culhwch has to undergo to satisfy the hawthorn tree giant Yspaddaden, or where the fairy maiden is connected with the bridle of a horse; there are innumerable examples. It can also be directly compared with the folk tales of dismemberment of the Shaman or Druid in trance state where only a pile of bones is left which the young maiden accomplice must reassemble but which leaves one particular bone out as lost when the body is put back together again. We may note that British Toad magicians until perhaps the 1950's would extract one particular bone from a toad so that they became his or her Familiars or animal allies. Although I know which bone that is, I am reluctant to pass it on until I am confident that such a candidate for entry into the world of toad lore would not abuse it. Witches used to lick the backs of toads to enter a state of trippy consciousness whereby they could fly, because toads contain bufotenin which is a similar Third Eye stimulator as psilocin or psilocybin and magic mushrooms generally, so that it affects the serotonin in our unseen third optical eye. So called experts would simply explain this as hallucination, but as it is toad or mushroom directed, it is way beyond this simplistic notion. The mind becomes aligned with the natural world of the cosmos and the only hallucination is the notion that our normal world can be as real as the otherworld is illusionry. Training to stimulate the Third Eye without drugs is the eventual aim of the magician and the use of hallucinatory drugs is simply a temporary method to engage with the spirit world before the mind can learn to do it alone.
The School of Birds then, is not simply some abstraction which never existed, it had, even has, substance as a teaching aid alongside numerous tales and legends as to how to enter this magical world and the various rules and engagements that one will find there. Reverend Martin Martin, The Description of the Western Isles 1695, informs us that a Druid and Druidess named the Amazon flourished on the remote isle of St Kilda until the 17th century and the Bardic schools of Druid initiation flourished on the Isle of Skye until the 18th century. Rumours tell of Druid survival from our ancient forebears in NW Wales and in the Pennines and there are several other examples of secret societies that followed similar death and rebirth traditions, from the Freemasons onwards, that we cannot doubt that such ancient practices were constantly handed down over the centuries in one form or another. Some of our greatest forebears; Isaac Newton, Abraham de la Pryme, John Dee, Michael Scott, Roger Bacon and many others, were learned in alchemy and magic from which modern chemistry and physics developed Although Gerald Gardner's witchcraft revival is perhaps partly his own invention, it still retains elements that would have been familiar to magicians of old, such as the focus on the four directions. However, like so many modern revivals, it tends to focus on procedure which is not as useful as the material contained in our mythology, ancient poems like The Battle of the Trees, of incredibly abstruse meaning but yet essential to any advanced practitioner of metaphysics and the use of Ogam, Runes or the simple knowledge of the Lamda in Plato. Indeed, there is so much one can study that is of genuine ancient origin and which can be complimented by the definition in Greek of heka or magic (hence the goddess Hecate), which is a knowledge of the properties of animals, plants and minerals, that one need not stray into the hocus pocus of those who couldn't be bothered to study the genuine article.
Finally, this essay is one of a series I propose to put forward as a means to describe how the ancient ecstatic tradition is still alive in the current age. Unfortunately, most people have been seduced by the so called 'New Age' repertoire of largely bogus quacks pedalling a temporary solution to the modern malaise of the mind and charging shed loads of money to boot. The School of Birds, as presently reconvened, is a revival in ancient tradition. It does involve some hard work and application, but to whoever is interested by the excitement such an ecstatic tradition can generate, it will eventually lead to a reintegration with the cosmological scheme whereby the mind and the universal god or goddess are all one and thereby to enlightenment. The journey may be short or long on this road, but it will never be short of adventure; the more one applies one self to the task, the more it will bear unbelievable fruit and ancient treasure. If you wish to learn more about this School of Birds, then please contact this blog post.
And as the Golden Age draws ever nearer, so the age of materialistic greed will become a distant memory................
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