Symbolic Forest

You might be wondering, having read yesterday’s post, how I know quite so much about the founders of the Salvation Army. The answer: my mother.

My mother would frequently buy me lots and lots of books, usually from the local library’s “for sale” stack.^* Every so often, though, she would pop down to our local Christian booksellers, housed in an old ice factory near the docks, and buy me something Moral and Improving.

Sometimes these would be factual books about the lives of great Christians, such as, for example, William Booth and Catherine Mumford. More often, though, it would be a children’s novel with a religious theme. They started off just like any other novel, but when it came to the crunch point, the characters would find that only God could save them.

One series I particularly remember was a series of science-fiction stories, set in a far-future solar system where Christianity had been long-banned, but was preserved by a group of secret space-age knights who had been very heavily influenced by the Star Wars movies. Their worlds were dark and gritty; but if the characters’ faith or energy-sword-waving skills didn’t save them, a deus ex machina surely would. Indeed, the whole point of these books was that God definitely is still about the place, and can pop into the story for the occasional bit of divine intervention when needed. The reader can see that God is real, even if only the “good” characters can.

* “Withdrawn from stock, 25p each”

Keyword noise: books, Christian fiction, Christian science fiction, Christianity, improving literature, religion, SF, science fiction.

As it’s April 1st, here is a post containing outright lies. Roughly half of the following statements^* are currently true. Others are completely made up. Guess which are which.

I know it’s already the afternoon, and by tradition April Fools should only be done in the morning. Nevertheless, I don’t care.

1. I have never driven a train.

2. I have had sex with everyone I’ve ever kissed, apart from relatives.

3. Recurring blog character Big Dave doesn’t actually exist – if I’ve done something I want to blog about, but don’t want to admit to it myself, I write a disguised version, gender-swap it as required, and attribute it to “him”.

4. This website is named after a real piece of woodland called “Symbolic Plantation”, a few miles from my house.

5. I have never worked in any field that I actually have qualifications in.

6. I was born in the Far East.

Go on, tell me which ones you think are lies.

* And all of the footnotes.

Keyword noise: April Fools Day, falsehoods, lies, misleading, truth.

There are many things I just don’t understand about people, but this is one I’ve been thinking about lately.

A month or more ago now, I wrote about Big Dave’s Dating Life. In particular, about one particular girl from his darts team, who was constantly tempted to go back to her ex-boyfriend even though he tended to beat her up whenever she visited him. Big Dave’s romantic contribution: a few vigilante-style threats to help persuade him to stop.

Anyway, Big Dave’s wooing proceeded according to plan, with a few dates which got more and more serious as time went on. Until last week, when he was cruelly dumped by text message, because she’d decided to go back to the abusive ex, with still no sign that he really was going to stop the beatings.

No sooner had this happened, then one of the worse gossip-mongers at our branch in Another Part Of The Forest starts telling us that one of her underlings – a woman who I’ll call Antivirus – is on a diet, because she wants to look good for her wedding. Which is, well, news.

I don’t know Antivirus very well, but we do chat to each other on the phone every week or so, and the last I’d heard about her relationship really didn’t sound promising. To put it bluntly, a few months ago it had broken down. Not only was she moving out, but she was moving out secretly. She’d planned to wait until she knew the boyfriend was securely at work, then she rushed in with some friends in a van, so that he’d come home to find her, her kids,^* all her possessions gone. Because she was terrified of how he’d react if she told him she was leaving.

If you ask me, that’s not a good relationship to be in. It’s not the sort of relationship you’re going to want to go back to. But, for some reason, she has. Not only that, but she’s agreed to marry him.

Obviously, I don’t know the details of either of these cases. Maybe there’s a good reason for everything here. Maybe both of these men have turned over a completely new leaf, and are going to be perfect partners from now on. That’s what they’ve probably promised, at any rate. If it was me, though, I wouldn’t be convinced. There are lots of aspects of relationships I don’t understand, but there are some people who really baffle me.

* not his, in case you were wondering.

Keyword noise: abuse, abusive relationships, Big Dave, dating, domestic violence, relationships, romance, violence.

As it’s Sunday, let’s think about religion for a moment. More specifically, let’s think about Norman Kember, the peace activist rescued last week after spending several months as a hostage in Iraq.

The big news story since his release, of course, is that he didn’t seem particularly happy to be freed. His gratitude to the SAS seemed rather forced, and he repeated his anti-war position. And that, in itself, is an admirable thing – I’d respect him much less if he had switched to say: “actually, now, I think the SAS are doing a damn fine job out there.”

Whether he was right or wrong to go out there is something that can be debated for hours, but it isn’t what I want to talk about. I’m more interested in whether he wanted to be rescued or not, and how that might be down to his religion.

There’s no doubt that Kember was deeply religious.^* His behaviour, it seems, is classic for deeply religious people – it’s a case of self-martyrdom. Since the earliest days of Christianity – well, since the days of St Anthony, at least – the devout have flocked to non-deadly varients of martyrdom. St Anthony himself favoured hermeticism, but not all of us, particularly today, could cope with living on our own in the depths of the desert. So, people have found other ways to suffer in the name of Christ,^** particularly by self-denial and “mortification”. Kember accidentally found an excellent modern way to suffer and mortify himself, and serve his favourite political cause along the way: be a hostage. No wonder he didn’t particularly want to be rescued.

* And the two Canadians who were captives along with Kember look, in the pictures shown on the BBC site, to have a bit of a fanatical gleam in their eyes.

** The best-known being the Stylites, probably because they sound rather silly.

Keyword noise: captives, Christianity, fanaticism, freedom, hostage, Iraq, martyrdom, monasticism, Norman Kember, pacifism, peace, religion, war.

(read part one here)

I thought I’d better get around to finishing this post off, because the Tower Of London ravens are in the news again. Now that bird flu has started to make its way into Western Europe, the Ravenmaster is getting ready to move his birds into the top-quality indoor aviary mentioned previously, and the story is making its way into all the papers.^* We can’t have the ravens dying on us; the fate of the country isn’t at stake.

Except, though, that the idea that the fate of the nation depends on the Tower’s ravens is all a big misunderstanding. The myth isn’t about living ravens at all. The real myth is that the fate of the nation depends on the raven god staying at the Tower. Furthermore, according to some, he already left.

The closest we have to the original superstition is in medieval Welsh myth. In Branwen, Daughter of Llyr, part of the Mabinogion, the hero Bran – “Raven” – is mortally wounded in a battle with the Irish. He tells his companions to cut off his head, and bury it on Tower Hill. The head stays alive for 87 years, but eventually the spell is broken, and they do as they were told:

[The followers of Bran] could not rest but journeyed forth with the head towards London. And they buried the head in the White Mount, and when it was buried, this was the third goodly concealment; and it was the third ill-fated disclosure when it was disinterred, insamuch as no invasion from across the sea came to this island while the head was in that concealment.^**

The Iron Age people of Western Europe were big on heads and head cults. Stone heads have been found buried at various archaeological sites, and this passage is the best evidence we have as to why they were buried: they were protective talismans. Clearly, the writers of the Mabinogion believed in their power, too. They have to explain why the Welsh lost control of south-eastern Britain, when the raven god’s head was protecting them from invasion. Answer: the English only managed to invade after the head was removed. The blame for this is placed on King Arthur, who, not being superstitious himself, deliberately dug the head up in the hope of making his armies try harder. It worked, whilst Arthur himself was around; but after his death, Britain fell to the English.^***

So, in short, the Tower Ravens might be a twisted survival of an ancient Welsh myth. The modern version of the story doesn’t appear in print, though, until the late 19th century, well after the Celtic Revival, and well after the Mabinogion had been published in English. Furthermore, the original story is that the promised fall of the nation has already happened; and England is the country that replaced it. If the Tower’s ravens do all leave one day, we English don’t have much to worry about; we are the people they were meant to be protecting the country from in the first place.

* and a lot of people are searching the web and coming here for more information.

** From the Charlotte Guest translation of the Mabinogion available from Project Gutenberg.

*** This part of the story isn’t in the Mabinogion; I’m taking it from Mythology Of The British Isles by Geoffrey Ashe. It’s mentioned in at least one set of Welsh Triads.

Keyword noise: archaeology, castles, Iron Age, King Arthur, London, Mabinogion, mythology, raven god, ravens, Tower Of London, Welsh myth.

When I was still a student, as a researcher, I was always a bit rubbish. I’m one of those people who hoovers up random, unconnected pieces of information like anything; but when it comes to use it I can never remember where it came from. Little factoids are no good unless you can judge how true it is likely to be, and you can’t do that if you don’t know their provenance.

For example: everybody knows that the Tower of London maintains a family of ravens, for there is an ancient legend that states that should they ever leave, the Tower, the monarchy and the nation will fall. Their wings are therefore clipped, to try to lessen the risk of them wandering.^* Everybody knows about the legend, and its ancient origins. Just how ancient is it, though?

There’s an article on the ravens and the current Tower Ravenmaster in the current issue of Fortean Times. It claims that it was Charles II who was first warned that the ravens must never leave the Tower; but that there is no actual evidence for their presence before the end of the 19th century. So, possibly another of those ancient traditions invented by the traditionally-minded Victorians. Possibly not, though. There is another, older myth on a similar theme; but it wasn’t about literal ravens at all. It’s a much, much older myth, and it isn’t even English.

On Sunday, after reading the FT article, I spent a good hour or two reading up about it, and writing a post about it, but accidentally deleted it in a fit of stupidity, by pressing the “reload” shortcut when I meant to type the “open new tab” shortcut. It took an hour or two because, as I said above, I can remember a lot of things, but can’t remember why. So, I spent quite a long time reading the wrong books in search of information I was sure was in there. Bah. I’m going to go and reread them now, so I can go and rewrite.^**

(read part two here)

* and, incidentally, the Tower now has a well-equipped isolation aviary to which they’ll be moved if there’s a bird flu outbreak in Britain.

** and to give me an excuse to break this over-long post up into parts.

Keyword noise: baking, birthday cake, cake, castles, Celtic, Celtic mythology, cooking, English, history, kitchen, London, mythology, oven, ravens, research, researching, Tower Of London, tradition.

Incidentally, those of you who read Friday’s post about Nostradamus interpreter Mario Reading will likely assume that I am a complete non-believer when it comes to prediction, clairvoyance and seeing the future. Well, that isn’t quite true.

I don’t believe that you can ever use the works of Nostradamus to predict the future. I have no idea whether the famous Michel had any sort of clairvoyant skills, but his writing is far too opaque. Noone has ever been right by telling us what Nostradamus has to say about things that haven’t yet happened, although plenty of people have made money out of claiming to do so over the years. I don’t think that Mario Reading is going to be an exception to this

On the other hand, I do very much believe that it’s possible to see into the future. I have had enough experiences, at first hand, to convince myself of this. Some people do see scenes from the future. The problem, the intractable problem, is knowing which ones are real.

* although people have made plenty of money off it.

Keyword noise: clairvoyance, Mario Reading, Nostradamus, prediction, prophecy.

Today, author Mario Reading is in the news. Lucky for Mario Reading, because it gives him a chance to plug advertise his new book, a new translation and interpretation of Nostradamus. It’s the book, in fact, that’s newsworthy. It claims that in a couple of years’ time, someone will try to assassinate George Bush, and if they are successful he will be succeeded by his brother, who will take revenge with terrible results. Reading’s American distributors are rather upset about the prophecy – you’d think he would have seen the fuss coming.^*

Reading himself seems very concerned that people should realise that you can’t blame him for what Nostradamus wrote. Interviewed on More4 News about the death of George Bush, he said:

This is Nostradamus predicting this, not me, I hasten to add.

See, I can spot a possible flaw here right away. I haven’t read his book,^** but there’s a long, proud history of reinterpreting Nostradamus. Most could be summarised as:

This is me predicting this, based on a wild reinterpretation of a rather vague stanza of verse.

Given that many people have gone before him and failed, I’m rather doubtful as to what Reading’s prediction hit rate will be. However, given the timescale here, we don’t have to wait too long. In three years’ time, hopefully I’ll remember writing this. And if nobody’s tried to kill George Bush by then, I’ll try to remember to post an update. A rather sardonic one.

* Sorry, that joke is compulsary in any piece of writing that mentions Nostradamus. If I hadn’t made it, I would have been tied down and spanked.

** Well, obviously: it hasn’t been published yet

Update, three years later: hah, when I wrote this, I almost certainly didn’t realise that the next presidential inauguration ceremony would be three years later to the day.

Keyword noise: books, future, George W Bush, literature, Mario Reading, marketing, news, Nostradamus, prediction, prophecy, prophet, psychic, publicity, reading, television, telly, tv.

If you’re not just a regular reader, but the sort of regular reader who reads all the comments too, then you’ll have noticed that Colleague M dropped by the site the other day to let me know that her sister Lydia had been asking for its address. “I think she’ll be upset,” said M, though, “to find you haven’t written about her for some time.”

Well, I originally wrote about Lydia because of her haunting problems, and as they seem to have gone away recently, I haven’t written about them for a month or so. I forgot to mention, though, that I did have a Plan.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Mother has been heavily into genealogy recently, and as part of that she has subscriptions to all sorts of websites, including ones which let you search 19th-century census data. Lydia’s friendly psychic investigator had told her that her ghosts were from the 19th century.^* Furthermore, she’d also told Lydia their first names. So, my cunning plan was: get The Mother to look up who actually lived in Lydia’s house back then, to see if we had a match. If not, well, censuses are only held once per decade, so it doesn’t necessarily mean the psychic was wrong; but if we did have a match then that would be very impressive.

Unfortunately, the plan fell through, when Mother found that back in those days, the houses in Lydia’s street weren’t actually numbered. Bugger. Given that I only had a couple of first names to go on, she didn’t really fancy trawling through census returns for the whole street. After all, it’s a fairly long street. And, if we did find a match, it wouldn’t really be particularly good evidence anyway, given that we couldn’t firmly link them to Lydia’s house. All-in-all, I was a bit disappointed, which is why I haven’t mentioned it earlier. But I thought I would. Just in case you’re reading, Lydia.

* they couldn’t really be any older if they’d actually lived in her Victorian-built house

Keyword noise: census, Colleague M, genealogy, ghosts, psychic, history, research.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes one little thing seems to be popping up all over the place?

Earlier today, browsing the interweb, I read a short Freaky Trigger item about Uncle, a series of children’s books from the 1960s that I’d never ever heard of before. Which is a shame, because – according to this Economist article about them^* – they sounded to be exactly the sort of children’s books that I’d have loved if I had known about them when they were still in print.

So then, later on, I’m browsing an internet dating site, and reading the profile of an attractive-looking person. And, what do they list among the 100 things they couldn’t live without? The Uncle books, of course.

I’m on the lookout now. The slightest mention of J P Martin’s Uncle books anywhere, and I’m going to jump up and shout: “Aha! A third coincidence!” before running off to my nearest second-hand bookstore^** to search frantically for copies. Because they must be significant somehow. Right?

* I have to say, the Economist isn’t my usual reading.

** As the nearest decent one I can think of quickly is about 40 miles away, this might take a while. I might not run all the way there.

Keyword noise: books, children's books, coincidence, dating, J P Martin, literature, reading, Uncle.