Under the spell of Sulis (5)
I have added one video clip to Part 3 and two video clips to Part 4
The Poison Path and Fatal Fronds
While I was in England, M. was Web-searching and turned up the Duchess of Northumberland’s “poison garden,” which I would like to see today. Part of a much larger garden complex that is under construction but still attracting busloads of garden-loving Brits, it has gotten a lot of press.
In a recent article, The Guardian, <sarcasm > official organ of the nanny state </sarcasm>, gets hyperbolic about the terribly dangerous plants. Protect the children! Fence off the catnip!
“Evil-looking flowers,” Caroline? Imagine a potato flower. Imagine it pale yellow with dark brown veins. OK? A plant can be a traditional entheogen without being “evil-looking.” Ah well, she has to promote the product.
Of course, people visit exhibition gardens to get ideas. If, for instance, the duchess gets official approval to grow coca (and being a young, media-savvy duchess she might well get it), others might well think, “I could plant some of that between the rhododendrons.”
LEFT: “Evil-looking” henbane blossom.
Who knows what else adventurous British gardeners might be tempted to try growing.
I have long assumed that some very discreet growers in mild North American climates have brought Mama Coca north of the Mexican border. How useful for that long hike in the Sierra Nevada! Unlike refined cocaine, the natural plant has been used for centuries, it has nutritional value, etc.–all this is in the writing of ethnobotanists like the late Richard Schultes or Wade Davis.
(I owe the phrase “poison path” to Dale Pendell.)
Under the Spell of Sulis-4
At today’s exchange rate, it costs US $16.38 to tour the excavated ruins of the Roman baths that give Bath its name. I paid the entry fee twice, last Sunday and last Monday. It was worth it.
Full of tourists as it is, the place still has a presence. Celtic British holy site, Roman temple-baths complex, Dark Ages ruin, medieval hospital for “leprosy” (whatever they meant by that term back then–any skin disease, apparently), 18th-century fashionable watering hole . . . layers on layers. And underneath it all the sacred spring still flows, 13 liters per second, or 250,000 gallons per day, however you wish to measure it.
LEFT: Diorama of a Roman priest with two visitors to the temple-baths complex. The temple of Minerva Sulis is in the background.
I had stayed at the White Hart Inn with seven friends; six returned to their homes in the UK after the conference, leaving just Doug Ezzy and me (the “rude colonials”), so we found new lodgings nearby at No. 3 Caroline Buildings and stayed on. After a “full English breakfast” on Sunday the 27th of June (a meal that seems always to include baked beans–I had forgotten that), we walked to the site of the baths.
They give you one of those audio guide receivers to listen to, as many museums do. Its soundtrack is a little too fond of Roman trumpet blasts, but they also include, for instance, the screamed Latin curse of a woman throwing a scrap of lead with a curse written on it into the sacred spring. Folks used to do that a lot, along with their votive offerings.
By the time I arrived at the dedicatory altars (placed in the sanctuary in fulfillment of someone’s vow) and the tombstones, I was there. I don’t mean some big reincarnational flashback; I’ve had those (maybe), and this was not the same. But I half-lost track of Doug, and the clusters of tourists were in the background. Here, underground as the site now is, I was ready to do it all: to cast my offerings into the water (still done), pay honor to Minerva Sulis (yes), and then submerge myself (sorry, not permitted). Only a clandestine dip of fingers, in defiance of the posted notice (not sanitary!).
Instead, the nearest thing is to go upstairs into the 18th-century Pump Room and to pay 50 pence (90 cents) to a man in wig and knee britches who decorously passes you a glass tumbler full of the water, tasting of rust and sulfur, and drink it down, down, down.
Not enough. Doug and I left to have a quick pint of the local Blackthorn cider with Alan Richardson and his lady friend, Margaret–Alan’s new biography of the magician William Gray, The Old Sod, was recently published by Ignotus Press. And Doug went on to continue his interview of British teen witches for a study that he is conducting together with Helen Berger. And I was up the next morning and back to the Roman baths.
I let the audio receiver hang from its cord, instead just walking the ancient pavements, listening, looking, feeling. And taking pictures. Maybe taking pictures is a votive act itself, sometimes–perhaps there is a paper there or at least a couple of paragraphs. No doubt, had the Empire lasted, the priests of Sulis would be selling disposable cameras at a stall in the temple courtyard–or they would have leased the concession to someone else to do it. Pagan religions, after all, delight in the tangible. The relic, the souvenir–that is one of the Pagan substrata that underly the so-called world religions. We want to experience the gods with all our senses, so a soak would have been nice too. Instead, you get the T-shirts and the Aquae Sulis bath products in the museum shop. Oh well, it’s a handsome T-shirt.
This 3.1 MB video clip pans across the Roman pool (facing east), showing the 19th-century terrace above the pool with Victorian statuary, various tourists, and a glimpse of the abbey in the background.
This 1.4 MB video clip pans from the opposite side, looking down into the entrance to the West Baths.
And then on to Bristol, for a too-short, 24-hour visit with Ronald Hutton, and then bus-bus-airplane-airplane-Jeep and home.
Under the Spell of Sulis-3
Part 1 Part 2
RIGHT: Indigenous Avon skipper
The first evening of the consciousness conference ended with a cruise into the English rain forest, in the company of indigenous shamans. Our boat moved at a stately 5 knots or so down the dark and shimmering Avon, away from the town and into a green tunnel: the sinister Salix, the ghostly Umbellifereae. Techno/world music thumped in the main saloon in the indigenous dusk until, by a deserted mission station at the water’s edge, our indigenous pilot swung the bow around, we returned through the ancient Weston lock, and glided back from the green tunnel into the stone walls of dreaming Bath.
In this video clip, the rain-forest cruise is leaving Bath, heading down the River Avon. Watch your head.
Now here is a ‘Pagan survival’
Is Alexander the Great’s body actually in Venice? In the current issue of History Today, historian Andrew Chugg makes the case that the mummified body of “St. Mark” treasured in Venice might actually be that of the world-conqueror Alexander (356-323 BCE). (Article available online, registration required.) It’s all timed for the movie, of course.
Under the Spell of Sulis-2
But before I could visit the temple of Minerva Sulis, there was the conference to attend. I arrived midway through the first day, 24 June, considerably jet-lagged, after a journey on two airplanes, two trains, and my feet.
Arriving at The Forum, a 1930s movie palace now home of the Bath City Church, I was a little perplexed by the church’s name on the marquee. But the building looked right, and once inside, I knew.
For that weekend, the stage was decorated with potted Salvia divinorum, San Pedro cactus, morning glory, and other interesting plants–not quite the BCC style, I’m sure. But they fit with an auditorium full of psychonauts, astrologers, Pagans, and (mostly Pagan) academics.
We presenters really had only 20 minutes out of the allotted 30, once you subtract the introduction and the question-and-answer period. Some people (like me) still wrote out papers with citations, such for our own security, while knowing that we would have to condense them drastically.
My list of people whom I knew of but had never met included the grand couple of psychoactive chemistry, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, as well as two outstanding astrologers, Robert Hand from the US and Liz Greene from England, not to mention the two German ethnobotanists, Christian Raetsch and Claudia Mueller-Ebeling.
More to come. Meanwhile, some views of Bath.
Under the Spell of Sulis-1
Back from England, I am planning several blog posts as I edit the photos and video clips to go with them.
Left: the base of a column that once helped to support a high, vaulted roof over the main swimming pool in the Roman baths, rebuilt in the 2nd century CE., when the town was known as Aquae Sulis, the waters of the goddess Minerva Sulis.
I spent four days in Bath, the town that grew up around the only significant hot springs in England, which have been a site of worship, therapy, and pleasure-seeking for centuries–and under Roman rule, visitors could have combined all three in a way never since equaled.
To get a feel for Bath, you might imagine what Santa Fe, New Mexico, might have been like if the center of town included the hot springs from Ojo Caliente or Jemez. Like Santa Fe, Bath is clogged with tourists, every third business is a restaurant, and you probably want a fat bank account to live there, and yet, underneath, its energy is flowing.
For me, a bonus to visiting Bath and the nearby port city of Bristol is that when making hotel reservations, etc., I never had to spell out my surname. Everyone was familiar with it.
More soon. . .
The Anglo-Saxons had a word for it
And the word was utfus, meaning outbound or eager to be on the way. Most students of Old English (e.g., me in Prof. Harper’s class years ago) encounter it in Beowulf, at the ship-burial of Scyld, forebear of Hrothgar, whose mead hall, Heorot, will be invaded by the savage monster, Grendel. (I suspect that the Old English letters thorn and edth will not display for everyone.)
Þr æt hyðe stod hringedstefna,
In the roadstead rocked a ring-dight vessel,
isig ond utfus, aæþelinges fær.
ice-flecked, outbound, atheling’s barge:
Aledon þa leofne þeoden,
there laid they down their darling lord
beaga bryttan, on bearm scipes,
on the breast of the boat, the breaker-of-rings,
mærne be mæste. þr wæs madma fela
by the mast the mighty one. Many a treasure
of feorwegum, frætwa, gelæded;
fetched from far was freighted with him.
I feel utfus now, ready for a quick trip across the Atlantic. Blogging will resume in early July on my return.
Pagan Studies audio files
The organizers of this year’s ASANAS conference on new religious movements have put several presentations online as MP3 files, including talks by Graham Harvey, and Leuan Jones. Visit the download page if you have a high-speed Web connection: these files range from 18-30 megabytes in size.
Stonehenge still rockin’
The BBC marks the solstice with a recap of the tumultous history of public festivals at Stonehenge since the 1970s.
In the 1980s, Prime Minister Thatcher took a hard line (doesn’t it sound like John Ashcroft today?):
“Mrs Thatcher would later tell the Commons she was ‘only too delighted to do anything we can to make life difficult for hippy convoys’, adding that “if the present law is inadequate we will have to introduce fresh law’.”